“They’re in! They’re in the fucking ship. Codelock all the hatches now. Now, God damn it!”
The schematic’s coloured lines were vanishing one by one. Erick stared wildly at the floor, as if he could see what was happening through the metal decking. Then the lounge lights went out.
“Five minutes until we land at our new drop zone, and the tension in the cabin is really starting to bite,” Kelly Tirrel subvocalized into a neural nanonics memory cell. “We know something has happened to at least five other spaceplanes. What everyone is now asking themselves is, will the extra distance protect us? Do the invaders only operate below their protective covering of red cloud?”
She accessed the spaceplane’s sensors to observe the magnificent, monstrous spectacle again. Thousand-kilometre-long bands of glowing red nothingness suspended in the air. Astounding. This far inland they were slim and complex, interwoven like the web of a drunken spider above the convoluted tributaries. When she had seen them from orbit, calm and regular, they had intimidated her; up close and churning like this they were just plain frightening.
Coiling belts were edge-on with the starboard wing, growing larger as they spun through the sky towards the spaceplane. It was an excellent image, a little bit too realistic for peace of mind. But then the spaceplane’s sensor array was all military-grade. Long streamlined recesses on both sides of the fuselage belly were now holding tapering cylindrical weapons pods—maser cannons providing a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree cover, an electronic warfare suite, and a stealth envelope. They weren’t quite an assault fighter, but neither were they a sitting duck like some of the spaceplanes.
Typical that Joshua would have a multi-role spaceplane. No! Thank God Joshua had a multi-role spaceplane.
Forty minutes into the descent, and already she missed him. You’re so weak, she swore at herself.
Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud.
The seven mercenaries had discussed that appearance ad nauseam the whole way in from the emergence point. Reza Malin, the team’s leader, had seemed almost excited by the prospect of venturing below it. Such adverse circumstances were a challenge, he said. Something new.
She had taken time to get to know all of them reasonably well. So she knew what Reza said wasn’t simple bravado. He had been a Confederation Navy Marine at one time. An officer, she guessed; he wasn’t very forthcoming about that period of his life, nor subsequent contracts as a marshal on various stage one colony planets. But he must have been good at the second oldest profession, money in large quantities had paid for a considerable number of physical enhancements and alterations. Now he was one of the elite. Like a cosmonik, blurring the line between machine and human. The kind of hyper-boosted composite the mundane troops stored in zero-tau on the
Reza Malin retained a basic humanoid shape, although he was now two metres tall, and proportionally broad. His skin was artificial, a tough neutral grey-blue impact-resistant composite with a built-in chameleon layer. He didn’t bother with clothes any more, and there were no genitalia (rather, no external genitalia, Kelly recorded faithfully). Cybernetic six-finger claws replaced his natural hands. Both forearms were wide, with integral small- calibre gaussrifles, his skeleton rigged to absorb recoil. Like Warlow, his face was incapable of expression. Black glass bubble-shields covered both eyes; the nose was now a flat circular intake which could filter chemical and biological agents. The back and sides of his bald skull were studded with a row of five sensor implants, smooth centimetre-wide ulcerlike bulges.
Despite the lack of expression, she learned a lot from his voice, which was still natural. Reza wasn’t easily flustered. That and a civilized competence, the way the other six followed his orders without question, gave her more confidence than she would otherwise have had in the scouting mission. In the final analysis, she realized, she trusted him with her life.
The spaceplane banked sharply. Kelly was aware of Ashly Hanson focusing the optical sensors on a small river three kilometres below. The silvery water had a curious speckling of white dots.
“What does he think he’s doing?” Pat Halahan asked. The team’s second in command was sitting in the seat next to her. A ranger-scout, as he described himself, slimmer and smaller than Reza, but with the same blue- grey skin, and powerful adipose legs. Each forearm had twin wrists, one for ordinary hands, one a power data socket for plug-ins—weapons or sensors. His senses were all enhanced, with a raised rim of flesh running from the corner of his eyes right around the back of his skull.
“Hey, what’s happening, Ashly?” he called out. Electronic warfare was a thought all the mercenaries were sharing.
“I’m going to land us here,” Ashly said.
“Any particular reason?” Reza Malin asked with quiet authoritativeness. “The surveyed back-up landing site is another seventy kilometres south-east.”
“Listen, anyone who can create that damn cloud can intercept our communications without even trying. They’ll have every site Terrance Smith ever reviewed marked in a big red circle that says ‘hit this’.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Smart man,” Pat Halahan muttered to Kelly. “I wish we’d had him on the Camelot operation. Lost a lot of good people because the general hired too many virgins.”
“Go ahead,” Reza said.
“Thank you,” Ashly sang back. The spaceplane dived steeply, spiralling at an angle which sent Kelly’s stomach pressing up against her collar bones. “Are you quite sure you want to land?” the pilot asked. “You ask me, we’re in way over our heads. Terrance Smith couldn’t organize a gang-bang in a brothel.”
“If Smith is going to beat the invaders, the starships have to know where to hit them,” Reza said. “For that you need us. We always go in at the shit end. It’s what we’re good at.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Don’t worry about us. Ultra-tech never works well in jungle terrain, nature is just too damn messy. And I don’t think I’ve seen many jungles worse than this one. They can probably swat us with some energy blast, even lob a baby-nuke on us if they’re feeling particularly bitchy. But they’ve got to find us first. And rooting us out of that forest wilderness is going to be tricky, I’ll make bloody sure of that. You just make sure you and young Joshua stay intact to pick us up afterwards.”
“If I’m alive, I’ll pick you up.”
“Good, I’ll hold you to that.”
The spaceplane’s yaw angle reversed as it performed an abrupt roll. Kelly clung to the armrests with white knuckles as the webbing shifted its hold around her body. This wasn’t a clean aerodynamic dive, it was a death plummet.
“How you doing, Kell?” Sewell shouted, sounding hugely amused. Sewell was one of the team’s three combat-adept types, and looked it. Standing two metres thirty, his leathery skin matt-black, and woven through with a web of energy absorption/dispersal fibres. His head was virtually globular, a glossy shell that protected his sensors, sitting on a short neck. Trunklike upper arms supported dual elbows; he had attached heavy-calibre gaussrifles to the top joints.
Chuckles went round the cabin. Kelly realized her eyes were tight shut, and forced herself to open them. The spaceplane was shaking.
“You should eat, take your mind off it,” Sewell crowed. “I’ve got some big gooey slices of strawberry creamcake in my pack. Want some?”
“When you were boosted, the doctors wired your neural nanonics to your liver,” she said. “It was one fuck of a lot smarter than your brain, bollockhead.”
Sewell laughed.
A judder ran through the cabin as the wings began to sweep out.
“Irradiate the drop zone, Ashly, please,” Reza said.
“Affirmative.”
“There might be civilians down there,” protested Sal Yong, another of the combat-adepts.
“Doubt it,” Ashly said. “The nearest village is fifty kilometres away.”
“We’re not on a Red Cross mission, Sal,” Reza said.
