Reality Dysfunction — Expansion

“The blackhawks say there is no magnetic flux, only the standard planetary magnetic field,” Terrance corrected automatically. “Was there any sign of biological activity?” he asked the flight control officer on the Cyanea.

“No, sir,” she said. “No chemicals present either. Just water.”

“Then why is it glowing?”

“I don’t know, sir. There must be a light-source of some kind deeper inside, where the probes can’t reach.”

“What are you going to do?” Oliver Llewelyn asked.

“It’s a screen, a canopy; they’re covering up whatever they’re doing below. It’s not a weapon.”

“It might only be a screen. But it’s beyond our ability to create. You can’t commit your forces against a total unknown, and certainly not one of that magnitude. Standard military doctrine.”

“There are over twenty million people down there, including my friends. I can’t leave without at least making one attempt to find out what’s going on. Standard military doctrine is to scout first. That’s what we’ll do.” He drew a breath, entering the newly formatted data from the probes into his neural nanonics and letting the tactics program draw up a minimum-risk strategy for physical evaluation of the planetary situation. “The combat scout teams go in as originally planned, although they land well clear of the red cloud. But I’m altering the search emphasis. Three teams into the Quallheim Counties to find the invader’s landing site and base; that section of the mission hasn’t changed. Then nine teams are to be distributed along the rest of the Juliffe tributaries to appraise the overall status of the population and engage targets of opportunity. And I want the last two teams to investigate Durringham’s spaceport; they now have two objectives. One, find out if the McBoeing spaceplanes are still available to effect a landing for the general troops we’re carrying in the Gemal . Secondly, I want them to access the records in the flight control centre and find out where the starships went. And why.”

“Suppose they didn’t go anywhere?” Oliver Llewelyn said. “Suppose Captain Calvert is right, and your invaders can just reach up and obliterate ships in orbit?”

“Then where is the wreckage? The blackhawks have catalogued every chunk of matter above the planet, there’s nothing incongruous this side of Rennison’s orbit.”

Oliver Llewelyn showed him a morbid grin. “Lying in the jungle below that red cloud.”

Terrance was becoming annoyed with the captain’s constant cavils. “They were unarmed civil ships, we’re not. And that makes a big difference.” He put his head back down on the couch’s cushioning, closed his eyes, and began to datavise the revised landing orders through the secure combat communication channels.

The fleet decelerated into a one-thousand-kilometre orbit, individual ships taking up different inclinations so that Amarisk was always covered by three of them. Repeated sweeps by the swarm of observation satellites had revealed no new information on ground conditions below the red cloud. The six blackhawks rose up from their initial seven-hundred-kilometre orbit to join the rest of the starships, their crews quietly pleased at the extra distance between them and the uncanny aerial portent.

After one final orbit, alert for any attack from the invaders, the mercenary scout teams clambered into the waiting spaceplanes, and Terrance Smith gave the final go ahead to land. As each starship crossed into the umbra its spaceplane undocked and performed a retro-burn which pushed it onto an atmosphere interception trajectory. They reached the mesosphere nine thousand kilometres west of Amarisk and aerobraked over the nightside ocean, sending a multitude of hypersonic booms crashing down over the waves.

Brendon couldn’t keep his attention away from the red cloud. He was piloting the spaceplane from the Villeneuve’s Revenge , taking the six-strong mercenary scout team down to their designated drop zone a hundred kilometres east of Durringham. The cloud had been visible to the forward sensors when they were still six hundred kilometres offshore. From there it hadn’t been so bad, a colossal meteorological marvel. Now though, up close, the sheer size was intimidating him badly. The thought that some entity had constructed it, deliberately built a lightway of water vapour in the sky, was acutely disconcerting. It hung twenty kilometres off the starboard wing, inert and immutable. Far ahead he could just see the first fork as it split to follow one of the tributaries. That more than anything betrayed its artificiality, the fact that it had intent.

As the spaceplane eased down level with it he could see the land underneath. Unbroken jungle, but dark, tinted a deep maroon.

“It’s blocking a lot of light under there,” said Chas Paske, the mercenary team’s leader.

“Oui,” Brendon agreed, without looking round. “The computer estimates it’s about eight metres thick at the edge, getting thicker deeper in, though,” he reported. “Probably three or four hundred metres at the centre, over the river itself.”

“What about the electronic warfare field?”

“It’s there all right, I’m having some trouble with the flight control processors, and the communication channel is suffering from interference, the bit rate is way down.”

“As long as we can transmit the coordinates for the starships to bombard,” Chas Paske said. “That’s all we need.”

“Oui. Landing in three minutes.”

The spaceplane was approaching the natural clearing they had chosen. Brendon checked with the blackhawks, which were still supervising the observation. He was assured there was no human activity within at least two kilometres of the clearing.

Qualtook and baby giganteas ringed their allocated landing site. Inside them, burnt and broken stumps were still visible through the mantle of vines, evidence of the fire which had raged decades ago. The spaceplane nosed its way cautiously over the edge of the trees, as if afraid of what it might find. Birds took to the air in dismay at the huge predator shape and the clarion squealing it emitted. A radar pulse slashed across the ground, slicing straight through the vine leaves to uncover the extent of the stumps. Landing struts unfolded from the fuselage, and after a minute of jostling to avoid the more hazardous protrusions it settled gently on the ground, compressor nozzles blasting dusty fountains of dead leaves and twigs into the air.

Even as silence stole back into the clearing the outer airlock hatch was opening. Chas Paske led his team out. Five disc-shaped aerovettes swooped into the sky, rim-mounted sensors probing the encircling jungle for motion or infrared signatures.

The mercenaries began to unload their equipment from the open belly holds. They were all boosted, their appearance way outside the human norm. Chas Paske was bigger than any cosmonik, his synthetic skin the colour of weather-worn stone. He didn’t bother with clothes other than weapon belts and equipment straps.

“Hurry it up,” Brendon said. “The jamming is getting worse, I can hardly get a signal through to the satellites.”

Pods and cases began to accumulate on the battered carpet of vines. Chas was hauling down a portable zero-tau pod containing an affinity-bonded eagle when an aerovette datavised him that there was a movement among the trees. He picked up a gaussrifle. The aerovette was hovering a metre over the trees, providing him an image of heads bobbing about through the undergrowth. Nine of them, making no attempt to hide.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice shouted.

The mercenaries were fanning out, positioning the aerovettes to provide maximum coverage.

“The blackhawks said there was no one here,” Chas Paske said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“It’s the optical distortion,” Brendon replied. “It’s worse than we thought.”

The woman emerged into the clearing. She shouted again and waved. More people came out of the trees behind her, women and a couple of boys in their early teens. All of them in dirty clothes.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said as she hurried over to Chas. “We waited and waited. It’s terrible back there.”

“Hold it,” Chas said.

She didn’t hear him, or ignored him. Looking down to pick her way over thick tangles of vines. “Take us away. Up to the starships, anywhere. But get us off this planet.”

“Who the hell are you? Where do you come from?” At the back of his mind Chas thought how odd it was that his appearance didn’t affect her. People normally showed at least some doubt when they saw his size and shape. This woman didn’t.

His neural nanonics cautioned him that the gaussrifle’s targeting processor was malfunctioning. “Stop,” he