“What about biological contamination?”
“No data. We haven’t attempted to sample it.”
“Make that your priority,” Terrance said. “I have to know if it’s safe to send the combat scout teams down.”
On its following pass, the
Both of them pitched up to present their heatshield bellies to the atmosphere, curving down towards the surface as they aerobraked. Once they had fallen below subsonic velocity, airscoop intake ramps hinged back near the nose, and their compressor engines whirred into silent life. A preprogrammed flight plan sent them swooping over the first fringes of the red cloud, fifteen kilometres to the south-east of Durringham. Encrypted data pulsed up to the newly established bracelet of communication satellites.
The air was remarkably clear, with humidity thirty per cent down on Lalonde’s average. Terrance Smith accessed the raw image from a camera in the nose of one probe. It looked as though it was flying over the surface of a red dwarf star. A red dwarf with an azure atmosphere. The cloud, or haze—whatever—was completely uniform, as though, finally, an electromagnetic wavefront had come to rest and achieved mass, then someone had polished it into a ruby surface. There was nothing to focus on, no perspective, no constituent particles or spores; its intensity was mechanically constant. An optically impenetrable layer floating two kilometres above the ground. Thickness unknown. Temperature unknown. Radiating entirely in the bottom end of the red spectrum.
“No real clouds anywhere above it,” Joshua murmured. Like most of the fleet’s crews he had accessed the datavise from the atmospheric probes. Something had bothered him about that lack; ironically, more than the buoyant red blanket itself. “Amarisk always had clouds.”
Sarha quickly ran a review of the images the fleet had recorded on their approach, watching the cloud formations. “Oh my Lord, they split,” she said disbelievingly. “About a hundred kilometres offshore the clouds split like they’ve hit something.” She ran the time-lapse record for them, letting the tumbling clouds sweep through their neural nanonics’ visualization. Great billowing bands of cumulus and stratocumulus charged across the ocean towards Amarisk’s western shoreline, only to branch and diverge, raging away to the north and south of the Juliffe’s mouth.
“Jesus. What would it take to do that? Not even Kulu tries to manipulate its climate.” Joshua switched back to a real-time view from
“Yes, we’ve seen it,” Terrance Smith said. “It has to be tied in with the red cloud cover. Obviously the invaders have a highly sophisticated method of energy manipulation.”
“No shit? The point is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Destroy the focal mechanism.”
“Jesus, you can’t mean that. This fleet can’t possibly go into orbit now. With that kind of power available they’ll be able to smash us as soon as we’re within range. Hell, they can probably pull us down from orbit. You’ll have to abort the mission.”
“It’s ground based, Calvert, we’re sure of that. It can’t be anywhere else. The blackhawks can sense the mass of anything larger than a tennis ball in orbit, you can’t disguise mass from their distortion fields. All we have to do is send in the combat scout teams to locate the invader’s bases. That’s what we planned on doing all along. You knew that when you signed on. Once we find the enemy, the starships can bombard them from orbit. That’s what you’re here for, Calvert. Nobody promised you an easy ride. Now hold formation.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He looked round the bridge to make sure everyone shared his dismay. They did. “What do you want to do? At five gees I can get us to a suitable jump coordinate in twelve minutes—mark.”
Melvyn looked thoroughly disgusted. “That bloody Smith. His naval programs must have been written by the most gung-ho admiral in the galaxy. I say jump.”
“Smith has a point,” Warlow rumbled.
Joshua glanced over at the big cosmonik in surprise. Of everyone, Warlow had been the least eager to come.
“There is nothing hostile in orbit,” the bass voice proclaimed.
“It can chop up a bloody cyclone,” Ashly shouted.
“The red cloud is atmospheric. Whatever generates it affects lower atmospheric weather. It is planet based, centred on Amarisk. The blackhawks have not been destroyed. Can we really desert the fleet at this juncture? Suppose Smith and the others do liberate Lalonde? What then?”
Jesus, he’s right, Joshua thought. You knew you were committed after you took the contract. But . . . Instinct. That bloody obstinate, indefinable mental itch he suffered from—and trusted. Instinct told him to run. Run now, and run fast.
“All right,” he said. “We stay with them, for now. But at the first—and I really mean
“Thank God somebody’s got some sense,” Melvyn murmured.
“Sarha, I want a constant monitor of all the observation satellite data from now on. Any other shit-loopy atmospheric happenings pop up and I want to be informed immediately.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Also, Melvyn, set up a real-time review program of the grav-detector satellite’s data. I don’t intend us to be dependent on the
“Gotcha, Joshua,” Melvyn sang.
“Dahybi, nodes to be charged to maximum capacity until further notice. I want to be able to jump within thirty seconds.”
“They aren’t designed for long-term readiness—”
“They’ll last for five days in that state. It’ll be settled one way or another by then. And I have the money for maintenance.”
Dahybi shrugged his shoulders against the couch webbing. “Yes, sir.”
Joshua tried to relax his body, but eventually gave up and ordered his neural nanonics to send overrides into his muscles. As they began to slacken he accessed the fleet’s command communication channels again, and started to format a program which would warn him if one of the ships dropped out of the network unexpectedly. It wasn’t much, but it might be worth a couple of seconds.
The atmospheric probes began to lose height, sliding down towards the surface of the red cloud. “Systems are functioning perfectly,” the flight’s controlling officer reported. “There’s no sign of the electronic warfare effect.” She flew them to within five metres of the top, then levelled them out. There was no reaction from the serene red plain. “Air analysis is negative. Whatever holds the boundary together seems to be impermeable. None of it is drifting upwards.”
“Send the probes in,” Terrance ordered.
The first probe eased its way towards the surface, observed by cameras on the second. As it touched the top of the layer a fan of red haze jetted up behind it, arcing with slow smoothness, like powder-fine dust in low gravity.
“It is a solid!” Terrance exclaimed. “I knew it.”
“Nothing registering, sir, no particles. Only water vapour, humidity rising sharply.”
The probe sank deeper, vanishing from its twin’s view. Its data transmission began to fissure.
“High static charge building up over the fuselage,” the control officer reported. “I’m losing it.”
The probe’s datavise dissolved into garbage, then cut off. Terrance Smith ordered the second one down. They didn’t learn anything new. Contact was lost twenty-five seconds after it ploughed into the cloud.
“Static-charged vapour,” Terrance said in confusion. “Is that all?”
Oliver Llewelyn cancelled the datavise from
