melted. The fire lingered round the rent, chewing at the exposed skin. She stumbled and fell, rolling on the damp loam of an overgrown strawberry patch, beating wildly at the flame with her gauntlets.
“Keep going,” Ariadne shouted. Her targeting program located another figure moving through the thinning dust cloud. The TIP pistol plugged into her wrist socket fired a burst of energy at it.
The entire left side of Kelly’s ribs had gone numb, frightening her at a deeper level than programs or chemicals could relieve. None of the mercenaries were slowing down.
Kelly ordered her neural nanonics to override her trembling muscles and scrambled to her feet. Her integral medical program was signalling for attention. She ignored it and ran on. The clearing’s sourceless sunlight went out, plunging her back into the stark red and black landscape of the infrared image.
It took her eight minutes to reach the hovercraft. Eight minutes of furiously punching vines out of her way and skidding on mud while the three mercenaries hurled out a barrage of fire through the jungle to cover their retreat. Eight minutes of white fireballs twisting and swerving round trunks, pursuing the team with the tenacity of smart seeker missiles. Of thunder roaring overhead and flinging down stupendous lightning bolts that rocked the ground. Sudden impossible gusts of wind rising from nowhere to slap her around like a lightweight doll. Of neural nanonic programs and endocrine implant effusions assuming more and more control of her body as its natural functions faltered under the unrelenting demands of her flight.
One hovercraft was already rushing down the slope into the snowlily-congested river when she arrived at the little glade.
“Bastards!” she yelled weakly.
Lightning struck twenty metres behind her, sending her sprawling. Reza was sitting behind the second hovercraft’s control panel, hand playing over the switches. The impeller fans began to spin, forcing air into the skirt. It began to rise slowly upwards; Sewell and Sal Yong stood on either side of it, their gaussrifles blasting away at unseen targets.
Kelly started to crawl. The first of the white fireballs shot out of the trees, curving round to drop on the hovercraft. Lightning flashed down again. A mayope tree toppled over with a sepulchral splintering. It crashed down ten metres behind her, one of the upper boughs coming down straight on top of her legs. Her armour stiffened, and her bent knees were pushed sharply into the yielding loam.
“Wait!” Kelly begged in a rasp. “For fuck’s sake, you shitheads. Wait!”
The hovercraft’s skirt was fully inflated, twigs and leaves were thrown out from under the thick rubbery fabric. Sewell hopped over the gunwale.
“Jesus God, I can’t move. Help me!” Her vision contracted to a tunnel with the hovercraft at the far end.
“Help me!”
Sewell was standing in the middle of the hovercraft. One of his gaussrifles turned towards her. Leaves and small branches rustled and slithered like serpents over her legs, she could feel them coiling round her calves. Then Sewell fired. The explosions sent her cartwheeling over the ground. She slammed into something hard. It grated along the side of her armour suit. Moving. Hovercraft! Her hands scrabbled with animal passion against it. And she was being lifted effortlessly into the air. Rationality ended there and she kicked and flailed against the air. “No! No! No!”
“Easy there, Kell, I’ve got you.”
Her world spun round as the big mercenary dumped her unceremoniously on the floor of the hovercraft. She gagged, limbs juddering as the neural nanonics stopped sending out compulsive overrides. After a minute she began to sob, the quivering muscle motions starting deep in her belly and emerging through her mouth.
“You made it,” Sal Yong said later. How much later Kelly didn’t know, her mind was furred with tranquillizers, thoughts slow. She tried to sit up, and winced at the bands of pain tightening around her ribs. A medical diagram unfolded inside her skull. Her body’s decay in unwelcome detail.
“The tree!” she barked hoarsely.
“We got it,” Sewell said. “Shitfire, but that was weird.”
“You were going to leave me!” Panic set her skin crawling. Blue lights flashed silently around the physiological display. More tranquillizers.
“You’re going to have to learn to keep up, Kell,” Reza said in his normal level tones. “We’re on a combat mission. I told you when we started, I can’t spare anyone for baby-sitting duties.”
“Yes.” She flopped back down. “So you did. I’m sorry.” I simply didn’t realize you were serious, that you would leave a fellow human being behind, to face . . . that.
“Hey, you did all right,” Sal Yong said. “Lotsa people would have screwed up, they had all that shit thrown at them.”
“Oh, thanks.”
There were mechanical clunks from somewhere behind her as Sewell detached his gaussrifles. “Let’s see about getting that armour off you, Kell. You look like you could do with some field aid.” She felt him touch the suit’s seal catch, and then humid sticky air was sliding over her skin. Her helmet came off, and she blinked dizzily.
Sewell was sitting on a bench above her, holding a couple of medical nanonic packages. Kelly avoided looking at her ribs; the physiological display was bad enough.
“Looks like I’m not the only one,” she said, smiling bravely. His artificial skin was pitted with small deep blackened craters where the white fire had struck, including a long score on the side of his glossy head. Blood and fluid dribbled out of the cracks each time he moved. “Or are you going to say they’re just flesh wounds?”
“Nothing critical.”
“Oh, crap, I’m drowning in macho culture.”
“You can put your gun down now, Kell.”
The nine-millimetre pistol was still in her hand, fingers solidified round its grip. She gave it a bewildered stare. “Right. Good idea.”
He tilted her gently on her right side, then peeled the covering off the nanonic package. It moulded itself to her left side, curving round to cover her from her navel to her spine. The colours of her physiological display changed, reds diluting to amber, as it began knitting itself to her wound.
“Where are we going?” she asked. The hovercraft was moving faster than it had before. Humidity was making her sweat all over, the smell of vegetation was rank, itching her throat. Lying half-naked racing through a xenoc jungle being chased by monsters and cut off from any hope of rescue. She knew she ought to be reduced virtually to hysterics, yet really it was almost funny. You wanted a tough assignment, my girl.
“Aberdale,” Reza said. “According to the LDC’s chief sheriff, that’s where the first reported trouble started.”
“Of course,” Kelly answered. There was a strange kind of strength on the far side of utter despair, she found, or maybe it was just the tranquillizers.
“Kell?”
She closed her leaden eyelids. “Yes.”
“Why did you shoot the baby?”
“You don’t want to know.”
The navy squadron closed on Lalonde at seven gees, crews prone on their acceleration couches with faces screwed up against the lead-weighted air which lay on top of them. When they were seventeen thousand kilometres out, the fusion flames died away and the starships rotated a hundred and eighty degrees in a virtuoso display of synchronization, ion thrusters crowning them in a triumphant blue haze. The
As the merciless gee force returned to
