Reality Dysfunction — Expansion

“Yes, sir.”

The spaceplane twisted again.

Great swaths of maser radiation poured out of the unblemished sky around the small shallow river. Hundreds of birds dropped to the ground or splashed into the water, charred feathers smoking; vennals tumbled from the trees, limbs still twitching; sayce howled briefly as their hides wizened and cracked, then died as their brains broke apart from the intense heat; danderil nibbling at the vegetation collapsed, their long elegant legs buckling as their viscera boiled. The verdant emerald leaves of the trees and vines turned a darker, bruised shade of green. Flowers shrivelled up. Berries and fruit burst open in puffs of steam.

The spaceplane came down fast and level. It actually landed in the river, undercarriage struts crushing the stony bed, nose jutting over the grassy bank. Steam and spray erupted from the water as it was struck by the compressor jets, sending a large circular wave sloshing outwards over the bank.

Sewell and Jalal were first out, the two big combat-adept mercenaries didn’t wait for the aluminium airlock stairs to extend. They jumped down into the lathery water, covering the quiet wilting trees with their gaussrifles, and sprinted ashore. The half-metre depth didn’t even slow them down.

Reza released a couple of aerovettes, ordering them to scan the immediate jungle. The stealthed, disc- shaped aerial combat robots were a metre and a half wide, their central section a curving mesh-grid to protect the wide-cord contra-rotating fans in the middle. Five infrared lasers were mounted around their rim, along with a broad passive-sensor array. They hummed softly and slipped through the air, climbing up to traverse the top of the nearby trees.

Pat Halahan and Theo Connal were second to emerge, following the first two mercenaries ashore. Theo Connal had a short body, one and a half metres tall, boosted for jungle roving. His skin was the same tough chameleon envelope as Reza and Pat, but his legs and arms were disproportionately long. Both feet were equipped with fingers instead of toes. He walked with an apeish stoop. Even his bald head portrayed simian characteristics, with a tiny button nose, squashed circle mouth, and slanted eyes, heavily lidded.

He activated the chameleon circuit when he landed in the water, and scrambled up the shallow incline of the bank. Only a faint mauve optical shimmer betrayed his silhouette. As soon as he reached a tree he seemed to embrace it, then levitated, spiralling round the trunk. At which point the spaceplane sensors lost him, even the infrared.

“My God,” Kelly said. She had wondered why Reza had included someone as basically harmless-looking as Theo on the team. A small buzz of excitement began in her belly. This kind of flawless professionalism was darkly enticing; it was easy to see how combat missions became so narcotic.

Another pair of aerovettes skimmed off over the trees. Sal Yong and Ariadne, the second ranger, came down the airlock steps. Ariadne was the only other female on the team, although her gender was obscured like all the others. There was very little difference between her and Pat, maybe lacking just a few centimetres in height, and her sensor band was broader.

“Now or never, Kelly,” Reza said.

“Oh, now,” she said, and stood up. “Definitely.” The visor of her shell-helmet slid down. Collins had given her carte blanche on selecting her equipment back in Tranquillity, so she had asked for Reza’s advice and bought what he suggested. After all, it was in his own interest not to have a liability tramping through the jungle with the scout team. “Keep it simple, and make it the best,” he’d said. “You’re not combat trained, so all you have to do is keep up with us and stay undetected.”

“I can load combat programs into my neural nanonics,” she’d offered generously.

Reza simply laughed.

She had wound up with a one-piece suit of rubbery body-armour, produced in the New Californian system, that would protect her from a modest level of attack from both projectile and energy beam weapons. Reza had taken her to an armourer who serviced mercenary equipment, and had a chameleon layer added.

More aerovettes whirred overhead as she hurried down the airlock steps into the river. Steam hung in the air. She was glad of the shell-helmet’s air filters, cremated birds bobbed around her ankles.

Pat Halahan and Jalal were unloading the gear from the forward cargo hold.

“Help them,” Reza ordered Kelly. He was wading through the shallows, carrying some composite containers. A nylon harness held a black metallic sphere about twenty centimetres in diameter to his right side, just above his equipment belt. Kelly wondered what it was, her neural nanonics couldn’t identify it, there were no visible features to assist the search and comparison program. None of the other mercenaries had one. She knew this wasn’t the time to ask.

The spaceplane’s steps were already folding back into the fuselage. She set to, stacking the metal cases and composite containers on the muddy grass of the bank.

Reza and Pat carried a trunk-sized zero-tau pod ashore. The black negating surface evaporated to reveal a white plastic cylinder. It split open, and a mahogany-coloured geneered hound lumbered out. Kelly thought its fangs could probably cut through her armour suit.

Reza knelt down beside the big beast and ruffled its head fondly with his hand. “Hello, Fenton. How are you, boy?”

Fenton yawned, pink tongue hanging limply between his front fangs.

“Go have a look round for me. Go on.”

Reza patted his hindquarters as he rose. Fenton swung his neolithic head round to give his master a slightly maligning look, but trotted off obediently into the undergrowth.

Kelly had been standing perfectly still. “He’s well trained,” she said vaguely.

“He’s well bonded,” Reza replied. “I have affinity neuron symbionts fitted.”

“Ah.”

Pat and Jalal were wading ashore with a second zero-tau pod.

“Adieux ,” Ashly datavised.

The spaceplane lifted with a brassy shriek. Vigorous geysers of water sprouted under the compressor nozzles, splashing up against the carbotanium fuselage. Then it was above the trees, undercarriage folding up, and the geysers withering away to white-foam ripples.

Kelly tracked her shell-helmet sensors round the forbidding wall of water-basted jungle. Oh, crap, I’m committed now.

She watched the spaceplane pitch up nearly to the vertical and accelerate away into the eastern sky at high speed. Her neural nanonics said they had landed less than three minutes ago.

The explosion was large enough for the Gemal ’s ordinary sensor clusters to pick it up as the starship fell into the planet’s umbra, leaving Amarisk behind. For the vastly more sensitive observation satellites in low orbit it registered as a savage multi-spectrum glare, overloading some scanners.

Terrance Smith’s neural nanonics informed him it was the spaceplane from the blackhawk Cyanea , which had been landing a scout team in the Quallheim Counties. It had been on the ground when the blast happened. “What the hell did that?” he demanded.

“No idea,” Oliver Llewelyn replied.

“Shit. It was over seventy kilometres from the nearest piece of red cloud. Did the scout team get clear?”

“No response from any of their personal communicator blocks,” one of the bridge’s communication officers reported.

“Bugger.” His neural nanonics’ strategic display showed him the remaining four spaceplanes climbing into orbit. Seven more had already docked with their parent starships. Two were manoeuvring for a rendezvous.

“Do you want to divert a spaceplane for a rescue?” Oliver asked.

“Not without confirmation that someone is alive down there. It was a hell of an explosion. The electron matrices must have shorted out.”

“Neat trick if you can do it,” Oliver said. “They have a lot of safeguards built in.”

“Do you suppose that electronic warfare—”

“Sir, message from the Villeneuve’s Revenge ,” the communications officer said. “Captain Duchamp says the invaders have boarded his ship.”