Reality Dysfunction — Expansion

“You’ll wait?” Roland Frampton asked eagerly.

“You were very good to me when I started out. So I think I can wait a couple of days.”

Roland’s hand sliced through the air, he ended up making a fist just above the table. Determination visibly returned his old spark. “Right, I’ll have a Jovian Bank draft for you in thirty hours. I won’t forget this, Joshua. And one day I want to be told how you did it.”

“Maybe.”

Roland drained his glass in one gulp and stood up.

“Thirty hours.”

“Fine. If I’m not about, give it to one of the crew. I expect they’ll still be here.”

Joshua watched the old man weave a path through the excited crowd.

“That was decent of you,” Barrington said. “You could have made instant money going to a big commercial distribution chain.”

Joshua flashed him a smile, and they touched glasses. “Like I said, he gave me a break when I needed it.”

“Roland Frampton doesn’t need a break. He thought he was doing you a favour agreeing to buy your cargo. First-time captains on the Norfolk run are lucky if they make two hundred cases.”

“Yeah, so I heard.”

“Now you come back with a cargo worth five times as much as his business. You going to tell us how you did it?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t think so. I don’t know what you’ve got, young Joshua. But by God, I wish I had shares in you.”

He finished his glass and treated Barrington to an iniquitous smile. He handed over the small bottle of Norfolk Tears. “Here, with compliments.”

“Aren’t you staying? It’s your party.”

He looked round. Warlow was at the centre of a cluster of girls, all of them giggling as one sat on the crook of his outstretched arm, her legs swinging well off the floor. Ashly was slumped in a booth, also surrounded by girls, one of them feeding him dainty pieces of white seafood from a plate. He couldn’t even spot the others. “No,” he said. “I have a date.”

“She must be quite something.”

“They are.”

The Isakore was still anchored where they had left it, prow wedged up on the slippery bank, hull secure against casual observation by a huge cherry oak tree which overhung the river, lower branches trailing in the water.

Lieutenant Murphy Hewlett let out what could well have been a whimper of relief when its shape registered. His retinal implants were switched to infrared now the sun had set. The fishing boat was a salmon-pink outline distorted by the darker burgundy flecks of the cherry oak leaves, as if it was hidden behind a solidified waterfall.

He hadn’t really expected it to be there. Not a quantifiable end, not to this mission. His mates treated his name as a joke back in the barracks. Murphy’s law: if anything can go wrong, it will. And it had, this time as no other.

They had been under attack for five hours solid now. White fireballs that came stabbing out of the trees without warning. Figures that lurked half seen in the jungle, keeping pace, never giving them a moment’s rest. Figures that weren’t always human. Seven times they’d fallen back to using the TIP carbines for a sweep-scorch pattern, hacking at the jungle with blades of invisible energy, then tramping on through the smouldering vine roots and cloying ash.

All four of them were wounded to some extent. Nothing seemed to extinguish the white fire once it hit flesh. Murphy was limping badly, his right knee enclosed by a medical nanonic package, his left hand was completely useless, he wasn’t even sure if the package could save his fingers. But Murphy was most worried about Niels Regehr; the lad had taken a fireball straight in the face. He had no eyes nor nose left, only the armour suit sensors enabled him to see where he was going now, datavising their images directly into his neural nanonics. But even the neural nanonics pain blocks and a constant infusion of endocrines couldn’t prevent him from suffering bouts of hallucination and disorientation. He kept shouting for them to go away and leave him alone, holding one-sided conversations, even quoting from prayers.

Murphy had detailed him to escort their prisoner; he could just about manage that. She said her name was Jacqueline Couteur, a middle-aged woman, small, overweight, with greying hair, dressed in jeans and a thick cotton shirt. She could punch harder than any of the supplement-boosted marines (Louis Beith had a broken arm to prove it), she had more stamina than them, and she could work that electronic warfare trick on their suit blocks if she wasn’t being prodded with one of their heavy-calibre Bradfield chemical-projectile rifles.

They had captured her ten minutes after their last contact with Jenny Harris. That was when they’d let the horses go. The animals were panicking as balls of white fire arched down out of the sky, a deceitfully majestic display of borealis rockets.

Something made a slithering sound in the red and black jungle off to Murphy’s right. Garrett Tucci fired his Bradfield, slamming explosive bullets into the vegetation. Murphy caught the swiftest glimpse of a luminous red figure scurrying away; it was either a man with a warm cloak spread wide, or else a giant bat standing on its hind legs.

“Bloody implants are shot,” he muttered under his breath. He checked his TIP carbine’s power reserve. He was down to the last heavy-duty power cell: twelve per cent. “Niels, Garrett, take the prisoner onto the boat and get the motor going. Louis, you and I are laying down a sweep-scorch. It might give us the time we need.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

Murphy felt an immense pride in the tiny squad. Nobody could have done better, they were the best, the very best. And they were his.

He drew a breath, and brought the TIP carbine up again. Niels was shoving his Bradfield’s muzzle into the small of Jacqueline Couteur’s back, urging her towards the boat. Murphy suddenly realized she could see as well as them in the dark. It didn’t matter now. One of the day’s smaller mysteries.

His TIP carbine fired, nozzle aimed by his neural nanonics. Flames rose before him, leaping from tree to tree, incinerating the twigs, biting deeply into the larger branches. Vines flared and sparkled like fused electrical cables, swinging in short arcs before falling to the ground and writhing ferociously as they spat and hissed. A solid breaker of heat rolled around him, shunted into the ground by his suit’s dispersal layer. Smoke rose from his feet. The medical nanonic package around his knee datavised a heat-overload warning into his neural nanonics.

“Come on, Lieutenant!” Garrett shouted.

Through the heavy crackling of the flames Murphy could hear the familiar chugging sound of the Isakore ’s motor. The suit’s rear optical sensors showed him the boat backing out from under the cherry oak, water boiling ferociously around its stern.

“Go,” Murphy told Louis Beith.

They turned and raced for the Isakore . Murphy could just targeting graphics circling his back.

We’ll never make it, not out of this.

Flames were rising thirty metres into the night behind them. Isakore was completely free of the cherry oak. Niels was leaning over the gunwale, holding out a hand. The green-tinted medical nanonic package leaching to his face looked like some massive and grotesque wart.

Water splashed around his boots. Once he nearly slipped on the mud and tangled snowlily fronds. But then he was clinging to the side of the wooden boat, hauling himself up onto the deck.

“Holy shit, we made it!” He was laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming out of his eyes. “We actually bloody made it.” He pulled his shell-helmet off, and lay on his back, looking at the fire. A stretch of jungle four hundred metres long was in flames, hurling orange sparks into the black sky far above.

The impenetrable water of the Zamjan shimmered with long orange reflections. Garrett was turning the boat, aiming the prow downriver.