9

One thing Princess Kirsten had always insisted on after ascending to the throne of the Principality of Ombey was keeping breakfast a family affair. Crises could come and go, but giving the children quality time was sacrosanct.

Burley Palace, where she ruled from, was situated at the top of a gently sloping hill in the middle of Ombey’s capital, Atherstone. Its pre-eminent location gave the royal apartments at the rear of the sprawling stone edifice a grand view over the parks, gardens, and elegant residential buildings which made up the city’s eastern districts. Away in the distance was the haze-blurred line of deeper blue that was the ocean.

Atherstone was only fifteen degrees south of the equator, putting it firmly in the tropical climate belt, but the early morning breeze coming in off the ocean kept the temperature bearable until about ten o’clock. So Kirsten had the servants set the table on the broad, red-tiled balcony outside her bedroom, where she could sit amid the yellow and pink flowers of the aboriginal tolla vines that choked the back of the palace, and have a leisurely hour with her husband and three natural-born children.

Zandra, Emmeline, and Benedict were aged seven, five, and three respectively, the only naturally conceived children she and Edward had produced. Their first five offspring had been gestated in exowombs after the zygotes had been carefully geneered to the latest physiological pinnacle which the Kulu geneticists had achieved. It was the Saldana family way; incorporating the freshest advances into each new generation, or at least that part of it destined to actually hold high office. Always the elder children, following the old Earth European aristocratic tradition.

Kirsten’s first five children would probably live for around two hundred years, whereas she herself and the natural-born three could only hope for about a hundred and eighty years. She had been sixty-six in 2608, when she was crowned in Atherstone Cathedral, two months after her brother Alastair II had assumed the throne on Kulu. As the ninth child, she had always been destined (barring an accident among her older brothers and sister) to rule Ombey, the newest principality.

Like all her nine exowomb siblings, and the five natural-born children of her mother and father, she was tall and physically robust; geneering gave her dark red hair and an oval face with well-rounded cheeks—and of course a thin nose with a tip that curved down.

But geneering could only provide the physical stamina necessary for the stresses resulting in a century of wielding the supreme authority vested in a reigning monarch. She had been in training for the intellectual challenge from birth; first loaded up with the theory, endless politics and economics and management didactic courses, then five years at Nova Kong University learning how to apply them. After serving a twelve-year naval commission (compulsory for all senior Saldanas) she was given divisional management positions in the Kulu Corporation, the massive kingdom-wide utilities, transport, engineering, energy, and mining conglomerate founded by Richard Saldana when he settled Kulu (and still owned solely by the king), graduating up to junior cabinet posts. It was career designed with the sole intent of giving her unrivalled experience on the nature and use of power for when she came to the throne.

Only the siblings of the reigning monarch ruled the Kingdom’s principalities on his behalf, keeping the family in direct command. The hierarchy was long established and extraordinarily successful in binding together nine star systems which were physically spread over hundreds of light-years. The only time it had ever come near to failure was when Crown Prince Michael germinated Tranquillity; and the Saldana family would never let anything like that happen again.

Kirsten came out onto the balcony the morning after the Ekwan’s arrival feeling distinctly edgy. Time Universe had been triumphantly broadcasting its Laton exclusive since yesterday evening. She had given the news programmes a quick scan after she woke, and the deluge hadn’t yet abated. Speculation over the Ekwan and Guyana’s code two alert was red hot. For the first time since her coronation she found herself considering censorship as an option for calming the mounting media hysteria. Certainly there would have to be some sort of official statement before the day was over.

She pushed up the voluminous sleeves of her rising robe and looked out over the superb lawns with their mixture of terrestrial and xenoc flower-beds, and the artificial lakes graced by black swans. The sky was a deep indigo, without any cloud. Another gorgeous, balmy day; if not in paradise, then as close as she would ever see. But the sunshine panorama left her unmoved. Laton was a name which carried too many adolescent fear-images with it. Her political instinct was telling her this wasn’t a crisis that would blow over in the night. Not this one.

That same political instinct which had kept the Saldana family securely on their various thrones for four hundred years.

The children’s nanny brought her excitable charges out of the nursery, and Kirsten managed to smile and kiss them all and make a fuss. Edward lifted little Benedict into his lap, while she seated Emmeline next to her own chair. Zandra sat at her place and reached eagerly for the jug of dorze juice.

“Grace first,” Kirsten admonished.

“Oh, Mummy!”

“Grace.”

Zandra sighed woundedly, clasped her hands together and moved her lips. “Now can I eat?”

“Yes, but don’t bolt it.” She signalled one of the four attendant footmen to bring her own tea and toast.

Edward was feeding Benedict slim slices of bread along with his boiled egg. “Is the news still all Laton?” he asked over Emmeline’s head.

“Yes,” Kirsten said.

He pulled a sympathetic face, and dangled another bread soldier in front of a cheerful Benedict.

They had been married forty years. A good marriage by any reasonable standards, let alone an institution as odd as a royal marriage. Edward was old money, titled as well, and an ex-navy officer who had served with some distinction. He was also geneered, which was a big plus; the court liked matches with the same range of life expectancy—it made things tidy. They hadn’t quite been pushed into it by the family, but the pressure had been there for someone like him. All the senior Saldanas displayed for public consumption the Christian monogamy ideal. Divorce was, of course, out of the question. Alastair was head of Kulu’s Church, Defender of the Faith throughout the Kingdom. Royalty didn’t break the commandments, not publicly.

However, she and Edward enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect, and trust, and even considerable fondness. Maybe love had been there too at the start of it, forty years ago. But what they had now was enough to carry them through the next century together without bitterness and regret. Which was an achievement in itself. When she thought of her brother Claude’s marriage . . .

“Mummy’s thinking again,” Emmeline announced loudly.

Kirsten grinned. “Thinking what to do with you.”

“What?” Emmeline squealed.

“Depends what you’ve done wrong.”

“Nothing! Ask Nanny, I’ve been good. All day.”

“She pinched Rosy Oldamere’s swimming towel yesterday,” Zandra said. Emmeline burst into giggles. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

“It was so funny. Miss Eastree had to lend Rosy hers, she was shivering all over.”

“Her skin was turning blue,” Emmeline said proudly.

“Who’s Laton?” Zandra asked.

“A bad man,” Edward said. “Is he on Ombey?”

“No,” Kirsten said. “Now eat your rice chips.”

Her neural nanonics gave a silent chime, which warned her from the start it was going to be bad news; her equerry would never allow a datavised message through unless it was serious, not at breakfast. She accessed the Defence and Security Council datapackage.

“Trouble,” she said resentfully.

Edward glanced over as she rose.

“I’ll help get them ready for day club,” he said.

“Thanks.” He was a good man.

She walked through the private apartments and emerged into the wide marbled corridor which led to the cabinet offices, drawing startled looks and hurried bows from staff who were in early. She was still dressed in her turquoise and grey rising robe.

The official reception room was a decagonal chamber with a vaulting roof that dripped chandeliers. A horizontal sheet of sunlight was pouring in through a ring of azure windows halfway up the walls. Pillars were inlaid with gold and platinum under a lofriction gloss which kept the metal permanently agleam. Holoprints of impossibly violent stellar events alternated with oil paintings around the walls. There were no modern dreamphase or mood-effusion works; the Saldanas always favoured antiquity for the intimation of timeless dignity it gave.

Three people were waiting for her in the middle of the black tushkwood tile floor. Sylvester Geray was at their head; her equerry, a thirty-six-year-old captain wearing his Royal Kulu Navy dress uniform. Hopelessly formal, she always thought, but he hadn’t put a foot wrong since he took up the post three months after her coronation.

The other two, both wearing civilian suits, were a less welcome sight. Roche Skark, the director of the ESA office on Ombey, smiled politely at his princess and inclined his head. Despite geneering, he was a rotund man, in his eighties, and twenty centimetres shorter than Kirsten. He had held his post for thirteen years, dealing with threats and perceived threats throughout the sector with pragmatism and a judicious application of abstruse pressure on the people who counted. Foreign governments might grumble endlessly about the ESA and its influence and meddling in local internal politics, but there was never any solid proof of involvement. Roche Skark didn’t make the kind of elementary mistakes which could lead to the diplomatic embarrassment of his sovereign.

Jannike Dermot, on the other hand, was quite the opposite of the demure ESA director. The fifty-year-old woman wore a flamboyant yellow and purple cord stripe suit of some expensive silk-analogue fabric, with her blonde hair arranged in a thick, sweep-back style. It was the kind of consummate power dressing favoured by corporate executives, and she looked the part. However, her business was strictly the grubbier side of the human condition: she was the chief of the Internal Security Agency on Ombey, responsible for the discreet maintenance of civil order throughout the principality. Unlike its more covertly active sister agency, the ISA was mostly concerned with vetting politicians and mounting observations on subversives or anyone else foolish enough to question the Saldana family’s right to rule. Ninety-five per cent of its work was performed by monitor programs; fieldwork by operatives was kept to a minimum. Also within its province was the removal of citizens deemed to be enemies of the state; which—contrary to popular myth—was actually a reasonably benign affair. Only people who advocated and practised violence were physically eliminated, most were simply and quietly deported to a Confederation penal planet from which there was never any return.

Quite where the boundaries of the respective agencies’ operational fields were drawn tended to become a little blurred at times, especially in the asteroid settlements or the activities of foreign embassy personnel. Kirsten, who chaired Ombey’s Defence and Security Council, often found herself arbitrating such disputes between the two. It always privately amused her that despite the nature of their work the agencies were both basically unrepentant empire-building bureaucracies.

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Sylvester Geray said. “The matter was deemed urgent.”

“Naturally,” Kirsten said. She datavised a code at one set of high double doors, and gestured for them to follow. “Let’s get on with it.”

The doors opened into her private office. It was a tastefully furnished room in white and powder blue, though lacking in the ostentation of the formal State Office next door where she received diplomats and politicians. French windows looked out into a tiny walled garden where fountains played in a couple of small ornamental ponds. Glass-fronted cabinets and bookshelves stood around the walls, heavy with exquisite gifts from visitors and institutions who enjoyed her patronage. A malachite bust of Alastair II sat on a pedestal in an alcove behind her desk (Allie looking over her shoulder, as always). A classic Saldana face, broadly handsome, with a gravity the sculptor had captured perfectly. She remembered her brother practising that sombre poise in the mirror when he was a teenager.

The doors swung shut and Kirsten datavised a codelock at them. The processor in her desk confirmed the study was now physically and electronically secure.

“The datapackage said there has been a new development in the Ekwan case,” she said as she sat in her high-backed chair behind the desk.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jannike Dermot said. “Unfortunately there has.”

Kirsten waved a hand for them to sit. “I didn’t think it would be good news.”

“I’d like to bring in Admiral Farquar,” Sylvester Geray said.

“Of course.” Kirsten datavised the processor for a security level one sensenviron conference and closed her eyes.

The illusion was of a curving featureless white chamber with a central oval table; Kirsten sat at the head, with Roche Skark and Pascoe Farquar on one side, and Jannike Dermot and Sylvester Geray on the other. Interesting that the computer should be programmed to seat the two agency directors opposite each other, she thought.

“I would like to formally request a system-wide code two defence alert,” the Admiral said as his opening gambit.

Kirsten hadn’t been expecting that. “You believe Laton will attack us?” she asked mildly. Only she could issue a code two alert, which allowed the military to supersede all civil administration, and requisition whatever personnel and materials it required. Basically it was a declaration of martial law. (A code one alert was a full declaration of war, which only Alastair could proclaim.)

“It’s a little more complicated than that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My staff have been reviewing the whole Lalonde-Laton situation. Now this reporter Graeme Nicholson has confirmed Laton was present on the planet, we have to begin to consider other factors, specifically this energy virus which the Edenists reported.”

“I find it quite significant they wanted their findings to be known,” Roche Skark said. “In fact they actually requested that we should be told. Which is an unusual step given the Kingdom’s standard relationship with Edenism. They obviously considered the threat dangerous enough to exceed any political differences. And considering what happened to our G66 troops in Lalonde’s jungle I believe they were totally justified.”

“Our analysis of both Jenny Harris’s jungle mission and subsequent events on Lalonde suggests that the energy virus and this prevalent sequestration are the same thing,” said the Admiral. “What we are dealing with is an invisible force that can take over human thought processes and bestow an extremely advanced energy manipulation ability. Sophisticated enough to act as an electronic warfare field, and construct those white fireballs out of what appears to be thin air.”

“I reviewed parts of the jungle mission,” Kirsten said. “The physical strength those people had was phenomenal. Are you suggesting anyone who is infected will acquire similar capabilities?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How is the energy virus transmitted?”

“We don’t know,” the Admiral admitted. “Though we do consider the fact that Laton called it a virus to be significant. The very nature of the term virus, whether employed in the biological or software sense, implies a pattern that can reproduce itself within its host, usually at an exponential rate. But again, I’m not sure. We really are working in the dark on this one, putting together appraisals from observed data. There has to be a priority to discover its exact nature.”

“We can find out relatively easily,” Jannike Dermot said. “The answer is in Gerald Skibbow’s memory—how he was infected and sequestrated, how the energy virus behaves, what its limits are. I consider him to be the key to alleviating our lack of knowledge.”

“Has he recovered yet?” Kirsten asked.

“No. The doctors say he is suffering from a case of profound trauma; it’s touch and go if he ever will recover his full intellectual faculties. I want him to undergo a personality debrief.”

“Is that wise, in his state?”

The ISA director showed no emotion. “Medically, no, not making him relive the events. But a debrief will provide us with the information we require.”

It was a responsibility Kirsten could have done without; Skibbow was somebody’s child, probably had children of his own. For a moment she thought of Benedict sitting in Edward’s lap. “Proceed,” she said, trying to match the ISA director’s impersonality.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“The report from Lalonde said it was Laton himself who warned the Edenists of this energy virus? He claimed he was being attacked by it.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Admiral Farquar said. “Which is what makes our current problem even more acute.”

“You think he was telling the truth, that it is a xenoc incursion?”

“Under the circumstances, I have to give it strong consideration. Which is why I want a code two alert. It will give me the resources to defend the Ombey system should they back up the virus with a physical invasion.”

Kirsten felt her palms tingle, that earlier unsettling notion that this wasn’t just an ordinary crisis was abruptly resumed. “What do you mean: back up the virus?”

The Admiral flicked a glance at Roche Skark. “It is a possibility that the Ekwan brought it to Ombey,” he said.

“Oh, dear God. Do you have any proof?”

“We are ninety per cent convinced Gerald Skibbow has been purged, although none of the science team can offer an explanation as to how that happened. However, in their haste to get him here, the Lalonde Embassy’s Intelligence team may have overlooked the fact that some of their own people were carrying it. After all, Graeme Nicholson’s report confirms that Laton—presumably a sequestrated Laton—was in Durringham the day they left. We have to assume the virus was also present in the city’s population at that time.”

“When the Admiral’s staff informed me of this probability, my Guyana operatives immediately tried to round up the Ekwan’s crew and all the embassy staff,” the ISA director said. “Three embassy people were unaccounted for: Angeline Gallagher, Jacob Tremarco, and Savion Kerwin. We subsequently found that all three took a spaceplane down to Ombey as soon as the code three restrictions were lifted. We know they landed at Pasto Spaceport seven hours ago. The spaceplane which brought them down suffered from several systems failures and processor glitches during the flight.”

“Ekwan’s flight from Lalonde was one long list of malfunctions. But since it docked at Guyana its systems have functioned smoothly,” the Admiral said.

“And the spaceplane?” Kirsten asked, guessing.

“When my people arrived at the spaceport it was in the line company’s engineering hangar,” Jannike Dermot said. “The maintenance crews couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.”

“And there was some difficulty with the zero-tau pod when Gerald Skibbow was put in it,” Roche Skark added. “The implication is that this energy virus isn’t quite under control, it interferes with nearby electronic equipment on a permanent basis.”

“So what you’re telling me is that they’re down here,” Kirsten said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the ISA director acknowledged. “I’m afraid we have to assume they are. We’re hunting them, of course. I’ve already alerted the police.”

“What about the others who were on board the Ekwan?”

“As far as we can tell, they have not been infected.”

“Exactly how do you tell?”

“Those that have neural nanonics can use them. We thought that if the energy virus does have an unrestrained capacity to interfere with circuitry then implants would be the first to suffer a loss of efficiency.”

“Good idea,” she said.

“The rest of Ekwan’s complement of colonists are being brought into close proximity with delicate electronics. So far none of the processor arrays have been affected, but we’re repeating the procedure every few hours just to be sure.”

“What about people the three from the embassy came into contact with while they were in Guyana?”

“We have reviewed the spaceport crews,” the Admiral said. “And we’re drawing up a schedule now to run the entire asteroid population through these assessments. Including myself, no exceptions.”

“I see.”

“Will you declare a code two alert, ma’am?”

“I would point out that a code two alert will allow me to quarantine the Xingun continent,” Jannike Dermot said. “It is unlikely that Gallagher, Tremarco and Kerwin have left yet. I can shut down all air transport to and from the rest of Ombey. I can also order all road traffic to be suspended, though it may prove difficult to enforce in practice. We might get lucky and trap them in Pasto City itself.”

Kirsten summoned up the emergency statutes file from a memory cell and began to review it. Her neural nanonics started to chart a course of action, balancing necessity against the chaos that would come with an attempt to suspend all Ombey’s civil and industrial activities. “Without direct evidence of a physical threat I cannot issue a code two alert,” she said. “However, I am declaring a code three alert, and a biohazard isolation order for the orbiting asteroids. I want them insulated from each other, from the planet, and from incoming starships. Our orbital facilities are essential to our defence, and I agree that they must be safeguarded against the carriers of this virus. Admiral Farquar, you are to order and enforce a complete quarantine as of now. All civil spacecraft in transit to return to their port of origin.

“Your primary military task is the defence of Ombey and the orbital asteroids with their associated strategic-defence systems. A code three alert will give you the authority to mobilize our resident naval reserve forces; although if it is to mean anything the quarantine order must apply equally to the fleet. Crews will have to be rearranged to ensure that personnel from different asteroid bases are not mixed together. The navy’s secondary role will be guarding against further risk of infiltration within the star system as a whole. That means all incoming starships to be refused docking permission.

“As to Xingu, I agree that it should be segregated from the rest of the planet. Sylvester, you are to inform the Xingun continental parliament’s speaker that there is now a state of civil emergency in existence. Shut down its air transport links now. And I do mean now, all planes in the air to return to their departure airport. Admiral, if any refuse to comply you are ordered to shoot them out of the sky. Use the low-orbit strategic-defence platforms.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kirsten watched Sylvester Geray’s image freeze as he started to datavise her orders into the secure government communication net. “Roche, do you believe the embassy three are going to try and spread the virus among our population?”

“Their actions so far indicate that is their main goal, yes, ma’am.”

“So it’s not just them we’re looking for, we’re going to have to round up anyone they came into contact with?”

“Yes, ma’am. Speed in this instance is going to be essential; the faster they are caught, the fewer possible contamination cases we will have to worry about. It’s an exponential problem again. If they go free for too long then it may well escalate beyond our ability to contain, as it did on Lalonde.”

“Jannike, do the police on Xingu have sufficient resources to track them down?”

“I believe so, ma’am,” the ISA director said.

“May I suggest we use someone more familiar with people who have been sequestrated by the virus?” Roche Skark said smoothly. “I’m sure the civil authorities are capable, Jannike, but I feel hands-on experience will be of immense benefit in this instance. Someone who is perfectly aware of the urgency, and knows how to react should things turn ugly. And judging by Lalonde that may well happen.”

The ISA director stared at him levelly. “One of your agents, you mean?”

“It is a logical appointment. I recommend Ralph Hiltch is sent to Xingu to oversee the search.”

“Him? The man who didn’t even know Laton was on Lalonde, the greatest criminal psychopath the Confederation has ever known!”

“I feel that’s slightly unfair, Madam Director. The Confederation and the Edenists believed Laton was dead after the navy destroyed his blackhawks. How many corpses are you currently investigating?”

“Enough,” Kirsten said. “That will do, both of you. In this situation I think every resource has to be deployed without prejudice; I’d like to believe we can deal with this incident better than a stage one colony planet. That was a good suggestion, Roche; have Ralph Hiltch sent to Pasto immediately. He is to liaise with the civil authorities there, with a brief to advise and assist with the capture of the embassy personnel and identification of anyone else who has been sequestrated.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll inform him at once.”

“I just hope he can contain them,” she said, allowing her deeper worries to surface momentarily. “If not, he could be facing a one-way trip.”

The cloudband which lay over the Quallheim was a muddy rouge colour when seen from the underside, streaked with long rusty gold ridges as though it was reflecting the twilight rays of a sinking sun. It grew ever broader, the frayed edges stirring and flexing in disquiet as it swam out lazily over the sweltering jungle.

Kelly, casually accustomed to the enormousness of Tranquillity, was dumbfounded by its size. To the west and east there was no visible end, the band could encircle the world for all those sitting in the hovercraft knew. Straight ahead, to the north, there might have been a hairline of blue sky above the black treetops. Amarisk was slipping gently into a deep luminous cavern.

Thunder, strident bass rumbles that echoed strangely, taking a long time to fade, had been audible for the last twenty minutes as the two hovercraft eased their way towards the Quallheim over the buoyant mass of snowlilies coating the unnamed tributary. There was no sign of any lightning.

The hovercraft slipped under the tempestuous lip of cloud, and red-tinged darkness tightened around them like a noose. With the morning sun high in the sky, the transition into shadow was abrupt, leaving none of the scout team in any doubt of the change. Kelly couldn’t help a shiver inside her armour even though the suit kept her skin temperature at a comfortable constant.

Reza’s communication block reported it had lost the geosynchronous communication-satellite’s beacon. They were cut off from Smith, Joshua, and the navy squadron.

Trees lining the bank became dark and sullen, even the flowers which eternally sprouted from the vines lost their perky glimmer. Snowlilies were the rancid colour of drying blood. High overhead large flocks of birds were embarking on their first ever migration, flapping and gliding towards the brightness sleeting down beyond the cloud.

“The cloud stretches across the heavens like the Devil’s own wedding veil. It is the coming of an immortal penumbra as Lalonde is eclipsed by a force before which nature trembles in fear. The planet is being forcibly wedded to a dark lord, and the prospect of cold alien offspring issuing forth is one which gnaws menacingly at the team’s fragile spirit.”

“Please!” Sal Yong protested loudly. “I want to eat sometime today.” The big combat-adept mercenary was sitting on the bench ahead of Kelly, shoulders slewed so the front of his rounded, dull-gloss head was aligned on her.

“Sorry,” she said. She hadn’t been aware she was talking out loud. “This is crazy, you know. We should be running the opposite way.”

“Life is crazy, Kell. Don’t let that stop you from enjoying it.” He swung his doughty shoulders back.

“The problem is, I’d like to go on enjoying it, preferably for decades.”

“Then why come here?” Ariadne asked. She was sitting next to Sal Yong, steering the hovercraft with a small joystick.

“Born stupid, I guess.”

“I’ve been with Reza for a decade now,” the female ranger scout said. “I’ve seen atrocities and violence even your scoop-happy company would never show for public consumption. We’ve always made it home. He’s the best combat scout team leader you’ll ever meet.”

“On a normal mission, yes. But this bloody thing—” Her arm rose to take in the cloud and gloomy jungle with an extravagant sweep. “Look at it, for Christ’s sake. Do you really think a couple of well-placed maser blasts from orbit are going to knock it out? We need the whole Confederation Navy armed with every gram of antimatter they’ve ever confiscated.”

“Still got to have somewhere to shoot that antimatter down at,” Sal Yong said. “The navy would have to send the marines in if we weren’t already here shovelling shit. Think of the money we’re saving the Confederation taxpayer.”

Beside Kelly, Theo broke into a high-pitched chuckle. He even sounds like a monkey, she thought.

“Regular marines couldn’t handle this,” Ariadne said cheerfully, guiding the hovercraft round a rock. “You’d need the Trafalgar Greenjackets. Special-forces types, boosted like us.”

“Bunch of knuckle shufflers, all theory and drills,” Sal Yong said witheringly. The two of them started arguing over the merits of various regiments.

Kelly gave up. She just couldn’t get through to them. Perhaps that was what made mercenaries so different, so fascinating. It wasn’t just the physical supplement boosting, it was the attitude. They really didn’t care about the odds, staking their life time and again. That would make a good follow-up story back at Tranquillity; interview some ex-mercs, find out why they had quit. She loaded a note in her neural nanonics. The pretence of normality. Keep the mind busy so it doesn’t have time to brood.

The hovercraft arrived at the Quallheim itself after another forty minutes. It was four or five times the width of the tributary, over two hundred and fifty metres broad. Both banks were overrun with tall trees that leant over the river at sharp angles, plunging aerial roots and thick vines into the water. Snowlilies lay three deep on the surface, moving at an infinitesimal pace. Where the tributary emptied into the Quallheim they formed a mushy metre-high dune on top of the water.

Now the scout team headed upriver, keeping close to the northern bank and the paltry cover of the trees. Reza seemed more concerned about lying exposed to the cloud than proximity to possible hostiles on the land. With nothing but the lightly furrowed carpet of snowlilies opening out like an empty ten-lane motorway ahead, the hovercraft began to pick up speed.

It was dark on the river, under the centre of the cloudband, an occultation which made all the team switch to infrared vision. The trees blocked any sight of the natural sunlight beyond it. Thunder was a constant companion, booms slithering up and down the river like the backwash of some vast creature burrowing its way through the vermilion vapour above. Big insects, similar to terrestrial dragonflies but without wings, skipped across the snowlilies, only to be hurled tumbling by the wind of the hovercraft’s passage. Vennals, burning with a pink-blue radiance of charcoal embers, hung in the branches of the trees, watching the small convoy rush past with wide, soft eyes.

Towards the middle of the morning, Reza stood up and signalled the second hovercraft towards the northern bank where there was a break in the trees. Ariadne rode the craft up the lush grass to a halt next to its twin. Fenton and Ryall were already bounding off into the undergrowth.

“I didn’t want to datavise,” Reza said when they all gathered round. “And from now on we’ll operate a policy of minimal electronic emission. Ariadne, have you detected any broadcasts from the invaders?”

“Not yet. I’ve had our ELINT blocks scanning since we landed. The electromagnetic spectrum is clean. If they’re communicating it’s either by ultra-tight beam, or fibre optics.”

“They could be using affinity, or an analogue,” Pat said.

“In that case, you can forget homing in on them,” she said. “Nobody can intercept that kind of transmission.”

“What about the blackhawks?” Jalal asked. “Could they detect it?”

“No good,” Pat said. “They can’t even detect the bond between me and Octan, let alone some xenoc variant.”

“Never mind,” Reza said. “The Quallheim Counties were the origin of the invasion. There has to be a large base station around here somewhere. We’ll find it. In the meantime, there is a village called Pamiers a couple of kilometres ahead. Pat says Octan has located it.”

“That’s right,” Pat Halrahan said. “He’s circling it now, at a reasonable distance. The whole place is illuminated with white light, yet there is no break in the cloud overhead. There are houses there as well, about thirty or forty proper stone buildings alongside the wood shacks the colonists build.”

“Smith said there were buildings like that in villages the observation satellites did manage to view,” Reza said.

“Yeah, but I can’t see where they came from,” Pat said. “There are no roads at all, no way to bring the stone in.”

“Air or river,” Sewell suggested.

“Invade a planet then airlift in stone houses for the population?” Pat said. “Come on, this is weird, but not insane. Besides, there is no sign of any construction activity. The grass and paths haven’t been churned up. And they should have been, the houses have only been here a fortnight at most.”

“They could be something like our programmed silicon,” Kelly said, and rapped a gloved knuckle on the hard gunwale behind her. “Assembled in minutes, and easily airlifted in.”

“They look substantial,” Pat said with vague unease. “I know that’s not an objective opinion, but that’s the way it feels. They’re solid.”

“How many people?” Reza asked.

“Twenty or twenty-five walking about. There must be more inside.”

“OK, this is our first real chance to obtain serious Intelligence data as to what’s going on down here,” Reza said. “We’re going to deactivate the hovercraft and cut through the jungle around the back of Pamiers. After we’ve reached the river again and set up a retreat option, I’ll take Sewell and Ariadne with me into the village, while the rest of you provide us with some cover. Assume anyone you meet is hostile and sequestrated. Any questions?”

“I’d like to come into Pamiers with you,” Kelly said. “Your decision,” Reza said indifferently. “Any real questions?”

“What information are we looking for?” Ariadne asked.

“Intent and capability,” Reza said. “Also physical disposition of their forces, if we can get it.”

Hackles raised inside her armour, Kelly let the team shove a couple of hovercraft electron matrices into her pack before they all set off again. Reza didn’t want them to walk in single file, for fear of ambush; instead they fanned out through the trees with chameleon circuits on, avoiding animal paths. There was a method of trekking through the raw jungle, Kelly learnt, and for her it was always walking where Jalal walked. He seemed to instinctively find the easiest way around trees and thick undergrowth, avoiding having to force his way against the clawing branches and heavy loam. So she kept her helmet sensors focused on the low-power UV pin-point light at the nape of his neck, and bullied her legs to keep up.

It took them fifty minutes to skirt the village and wind up back at the river. Sewell and Jalal set to activating the hovercraft at the top of a short slope above the water. Kelly dumped her pack into the locker at the rear of the second craft, and felt as though she could fly without the extra weight. With equipment stowed, the team fitted their weapons, checked power and projectile magazines, and set off back towards Pamiers.

Reza found the first corpse two hundred metres short of the village clearing. It was Ryall who smelt it for him, a sharp tang of dead flesh which even the jungle’s muggy air couldn’t disguise. He sent the hound veering off towards it. Ryall promptly smelt another corpse, causing Reza to hurriedly damped down his reception of the hound’s olfactory sense.

It was a child, about five or six, he guessed. Ryall had found it sitting huddled up at the foot of a mayope tree. Age was hard to determine; there wasn’t a lot left, so he had to go by size. Insects and humidity had accelerated the decomposition, though it was strange no animal had disturbed it. According to his didactic memory, sayce were supposed to be fairly brutal carnivores.

He led Sewell, Kelly, and Ariadne through the trees to the body, and dispatched Ryall to the second.

“It’s a girl,” Ariadne said after examining the remains. She held up a nondescript length of filthy, dripping-wet fabric. “This is a skirt.”

Reza wasn’t going to argue. “How did she die?” he asked.

“There are no broken bones, no sign of violence. Judging by the way she’s curled up between the roots I’d say she crawled here to die. Poisoned? Starving? No way of knowing now.”

“Scared of the invaders,” Reza said thoughtfully. “They probably didn’t bother to sequestrate the children.”

“You mean the adults just ignored her?” Kelly asked in disgust.

“Ignored her, or drove her away. A child like this wouldn’t walk around in the jungle by herself. The village had been established long enough for her to pick up basic jungle lore.”

Ryall trotted up to the second corpse, emitting a warm feeling of satisfaction as his muzzle touched the putrefying flesh. Reza picked up the sense of accomplishment and expanded the affinity band allowing himself to see through the hound’s enhanced retinas. “It’s another kid,” he told them. “A bit older, there’s a baby in its arms.” Ryall could scent more decaying meat in the humid air, three or four blends, all subtly different. Closer to the river, Fenton had picked up a further series of traces. “My God,” Reza growled in a dismayed whisper. “They’re everywhere, all around.”

A village like Pamiers would start off with a population of about five hundred. Say two hundred families, and they’ve been here a couple of years. That would mean about a hundred and fifty children.

He stood, scanning the jungle. Slender yellow target graphics slid up over the black and red image in an uncomplicated, unprogrammed reflex. He wanted to shoot something dead. His neural nanonics ordered a slight endocrine effusion, stabilizing the sudden hormonal surge.

“Come on, she can’t help us any more,” he said, and began pushing briskly through the bushes and vines towards the village. He turned his chameleon circuit off, and after a few paces the others followed suit.

Pamiers followed the standard configuration of settlements along the Juliffe’s tributaries. A semicircular clearing chopped out of the jungle along the side of the river. Crude single-storey houses clustered together in no particular order at the centre, along with larger barns, a church, a meeting hall, an Ivet compound. Wooden jetties ventured ten or fifteen metres into the water, with a few fishing skiffs tied up. Fields and plots ringed the outside, a surfeit of crops pushing out of rich black loam.

However, Pamiers’ layout was all that remained recognizable as the four of them stepped out of the trees.

“Where is this light coming from?” Kelly asked, looking round in surprised confusion. As Pat had reported, the village bathed luxuriantly in a bright pool of sunlight, and yellow pollen was thick in the air. She scanned the cloud overhead, but there was no break. Thunder, muted while they were in the trees, rolled insistently around them once more.

Ariadne walked on a few paces, activating her full implant sensor suite as well as the specialist blocks clipped to her belt. She turned a complete circle, sampling the environment. “It’s omnidirectional. We’re not even leaving shadows. See?”

“Like an AV projection,” Reza said.

“Yes and no. The spectrum matches Lalonde’s sun.”

“Let’s go see what those new houses are made of,” he said.

Pamiers’ fields had been left untended. Terrestrial plants were fighting a fierce battle for light and height with the vines that had surged out of the jungle to reclaim their native territory. Fruit was hanging in mouldy white clusters.

Yet inside the ring of fields, the grass around the houses was short and tidy, studded with what looked suspiciously like terrestrial daisies. When he had studied the sheriff’s satellite images on the flight from Tranquillity Reza had seen the way the village clearings were worn down and streaked with muddy runnels. Grass and weeds grew in patchy clumps. But this was an even, verdant carpet that matched Tranquillity’s parkland for vitality.

Stranger still were the houses.

Apart from three burnt-out ruins, the original wooden shacks had been left standing, their planks bleached a pale grey, shuttered windows open to the weather, bark slates slipping and curling, solar-cell panels flapping loosely. They were uninhabited, that was obvious at a glance. Mosses, tufts of grass, and green moulds were tucked into corners and flourishing promisingly. But jammed at random between the creaky cabins were the new structures. None of them was the same, with architectural styles ranging across centuries—a beautiful two-storey Tudor cottage, an Alpine lodge, a Californian millionaire’s cinderblock ranch, a circular black landcoral turret, a marble and silverglass pyramid, a marquee which resembled a cross between a Bedouin tent and a medieval European pavilion, complete with heraldic pennants fluttering on tall poles.

“Having some trouble with my blocks,” Ariadne said. “Several malfunctions. Guido and communications are right out.”

“If it begins to affect the weapons we’ll pull back,” Reza cautioned. “Keep running diagnostic programs.”

They cleared the fields and started to walk over the grass. Ahead of them a woman in a long blue polka-dot dress was pushing a waist-high gloss-black trolley that had a white parasol above it, and huge spindly wheels with chrome wire spokes. Whatever it was, it was impossibly primitive. Reza loaded the image’s pixel pattern into his neural nanonics with an order to run a comparison search program through his encyclopaedia. Three seconds later the program reported it was a European/North American style pram circa 1910–50.

He walked over to the woman, who was humming softly. She had a long face that was crudely painted in so much make-up it was almost a clown’s mask, with dark brown hair worn in a severe bun, encased by a net. She smiled up happily at the four members of the team, as though their weapons and equipment and boosted form were of no consequence.

That simpleton smile was the last straw for Reza, whose nerves were already stretched painfully thin. Either she was retarded, or this whole village was an incredibly warped trap. He activated his short-range precision sensors, and scanned her in both electromagnetic and magnetic spectrums, then linked the return into a fire-command protocol. Any change in her composition (such as an implant switching on or a neural nanonics transmission) and his forearm rifle would slam five EE rounds into her. The rest of his sensors were put into a track-while-scan mode, allowing his neural nanonics to keep tabs on the other villagers he could see walking about among the buildings behind her. He had to use four backup units, several principal sensors had packed up altogether. The overall resolution was way down on the clarity he was used to.

“What the fucking hell’s going on here?” he demanded.

“I have my baby again,” she said in a lilting tone. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”

“I asked you a question. And you will now answer.”

“Do as he says,” Kelly said hastily. “Please.”

The woman turned to her. “Don’t worry, my dear. You can’t hurt me. Not now, not any more. Would you like to see my baby? I thought I’d lost him. I lost so many back then. It was horrible, all those dead babies. The midwives tried to stop me seeing them; but I looked just the same. They were all perfect, so beautiful, my babies. An evil life it was.” She bent forwards over the pram and lifted out a squirming bundle draped in lacy white cloth. The baby cooed as she held it out.

“Where have you come from?” Reza asked. “Are you the sequestration program?”

“I have my life back. I have my baby back. That’s what I am.”

Ariadne stepped forward. “I’m going to get a sample from one of those buildings.”

“Right,” Reza said. “Sewell, go with her.”

The two of them walked round the woman and started off towards the nearest house, a whitewashed Spanish hacienda.

The baby let out a long gurgle, smiling blithely, feet kicking inside the wrap. “Isn’t he just adorable,” the woman said. She tickled his face with a finger.

“One more time,” Reza said. “What are you?”

“I am me. What else could I be?”

“And that?” He pointed to the cloud.

“That is part of us. Our will.”

“Us? Who is us?”

“Those who have returned.”

“Returned from where?”

She rocked the baby against her chest, not even looking up. “From hell.”

“She’s either nuts, or she’s lying,” Reza said.

“She’s been sequestrated,” Kelly said. “You won’t get anything out of her.”

“So sure of yourselves,” the woman said. She gave Kelly a sly look as she cuddled the baby. “So stupid. Your starships have been fighting among themselves. Did you know that?”

Reza’s neural nanonics’ optical-monitor program reported more people were appearing from the houses. “What do you know about it?”

“We know what we feel, the pain and the iron fire. Their souls weeping in the beyond.”

“Can we check?” Kelly asked urgently.

“Not from here.”

The woman laughed, a nervous cackle. “There aren’t many left to check, my dear. You won’t hear from them again. We’re taking this planet away, right away. Somewhere safe, where the ships can never come to find us. It will become paradise, you know. And my baby will be with me always.”

Reza regarded her with a chill of foreboding. “Yes, you are a part of this,” he said quietly. The yellow target graphics locked on to her torso. “What is happening here?”

“We are come, and we are not going to leave. Soon the whole world will be hiding from the sky. From heaven. And we shall live on in peace for ever.”

“There will be more of this red cloud?”

The woman slowly tilted her head back until she was staring straight up. Her mouth fell open as though in wonder. “I see no clouds.” She started to laugh wildly.

Reza saw Ariadne had reached the hacienda. The ranger scout was bending over, scraping at the wall with some kind of tool. Sewell was standing behind her, the long gaussrifle barrels he had plugged into his lower elbow sockets swivelling from side to side in an automatic sweep pattern.

“Ariadne,” Reza bellowed. “Get back here. We’re leaving now.”

The woman’s laughter chopped off. “No, you’re not.” She dropped the baby.

It was Reza’s infrared sensors which caught the change. A wave of heat emerged right across her body and started to flow like a film of liquid, rushing along her arms as she brought them up, becoming denser, hotter.

His left forearm’s gaussgun fired five electron explosive rounds just as a white light ignited around her hands. There was three metres between them. Impact velocity alone would have been enough to tear her body apart, with the EEs detonating as well there was nothing left for the last three rounds to hit.

Kelly’s armour hardened protectively as the blast wave slammed into her. Then she screamed as a jet of spumescent gore slopped across the front of the paralysed fabric.

“Sewell, zero the area!” Reza shouted.

The twin heavy-calibre gaussrifles the big combat-adept mercenary carried began to blaze, squirting out a barrage of EE projectiles. Emerald-green laser beams emerging from Reza and Ariadne snapped on and off, traversing the clearing in a strobe waltz as their lighter weapons picked off targets.

Kelly’s armour unlocked. She fell to her knees, centimetres from the baby. Her hand went out instinctively, twitching the blood-soaked lace aside to see if it was still alive.

There was a vennal inside the wrap. The little xenoc creature had been distorted, its vulpine skull swollen and moulded into a more globular shape, scales melded together and stretched. They were losing their distinctive blue-green pigmentation, fading to pale pink. Its forepaws had become chubby, tiny human hands scrabbled feebly at the air. Squeals of terror emerged from its toothless mouth.

Her neural nanonics were unable to quell her stomach spasm in time. An emergency program triggered the shell-helmet’s quick-release seal, and the visor sprang open. She vomited onto the neatly mown grass.

Sewell ran backwards across the grass, making almost as much speed as he could travelling forward. An autonomic locomotion program took care of that, guiding his feet round possible obstacles, leaving his conscious thoughts free to assist with target selection.

The first fire sequence had ripped into the houses, smashing them apart in plumes of ionic flame and smoke. Even Sewell, who was aiming for maximum destruction, was surprised by the devastating effect the rifles inflicted. As soon as the first EE projectile hit the buildings their bright colours switched off, leaving behind a neutral grey. The rifles laid down a comprehensive fire pattern. Walls and roofs buckled and collapsed, sending out billowing clouds of thick dust, support timbers splintered then seemed to crumble. Within seconds the whole area had been reduced to pulverized rubble. The old shacks bent and bowed before the pressure blasts; they were far sturdier than the new houses. Several keeled over, wood twisting and shrieking. Slate-tile roofs somersaulted, intact walls slewed through the air rippling like giant mantas.

Sewell switched to the people, concentrating on coordinates where the target-allocation program had located individuals. The feed tubes from his backpack magazine hummed smoothly as they supplied the gaussrifles with fresh ammunition. There had been eighteen people visible to his sensors before Reza’s shouted order. He pumped airburst shrapnel rounds after them as they dived for cover amid the shattered houses.

Infrared sensors showed him eccentric waves of heat shimmering amid the expanding dust. White fire, like an earthbound comet, streaked towards him. Boosted muscles flung him aside. The gaussrifles swung round to the origin, compensating for his dive. EE projectiles pummelled the area.

“Up, you bitch!” Reza yelled at Kelly. “Back to the hovercraft.”

She rolled over, seeing a fermenting red cloudscape sky lit by green lasers and white fireballs. Fear and hatred fired her limbs and she jerked to her feet. The houses were a flattened circle belching smoke and dust. White fire raged in a spiral maelstrom above them, slinging out splinters that arced overhead. Trees fell and fire bloomed where they struck the wall of jungle. Sewell and Ariadne were charging towards her, both firing back into the rubble.

Kelly took three paces towards the trees then stopped. She pulled her nine-millimetre automatic pistol from her holster in one smooth movement. The gun’s familiarization and targeting program went into primary mode, and she fired two bullets into the mutated vennal. Then she sprinted after Reza, neural nanonics releasing a torrent of adrenalin and amphetamines into her bloodstream.

Pain stabbed into the back of Ariadne’s left thigh as the fireball struck her. Neural nanonics erected an analgesic block straight away. Compensator programs shifted her balance, favouring her right leg, activating those left thigh muscles which remained functional. Valves in the veins and arteries of her pelvis and knee sealed, limiting the blood loss. Her speed was barely reduced. She caught up with Kelly just as a fireball hit the reporter in the side of her ribs.

Kelly’s armour gleamed an all-over ruby as it tried to disperse the energy. A circle of the suit flared as it 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. They’re not going to help me!

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 Arikara and the Shukyo released twenty combat communication-relay satellites, streaking away at ten gees to englobe the planet. Then the warships began to decelerate.

As the merciless gee force returned to Arikara’s bridge Meredith Saldana accessed the tactical display. The voidhawks had performed small swallow manoeuvres, taking them to within two and a half thousand kilometres of the planet and curving into orbit ahead of the Adamist warships to which such short-range precision jumps were impossible. But the mercenary fleet was leading the bitek starships a merry dance. Three blackhawks were racing away from Lalonde, striving for the magic two thousand kilometre altitude where they would be outside the influence of the planet’s gravitational field, allowing them to swallow away. Voidhawks were in pursuit. Four of the nine combat-capable independent traders were also under acceleration. Two of them, Datura and Cereus, were heading on a vector straight towards the squadron at two and a half gees. They wouldn’t respond to any warning calls from the Arikara, nor Terrance Smith.

“Haria, Gakkai, go to defensive engagement status, please,” Meredith datavised. The situation display showed him the two frigates end their deceleration burn, flip over, and accelerate ahead of the rest of the squadron.

“What is the state of the remaining mercenary ships?” the Admiral enquired.

“Smith claims the starships remaining in orbit are obeying his orders, and therefore haven’t been hijacked,” said Lieutenant Franz Grese, the squadron Intelligence officer.

“What do you think?”

“I think Commander Solanki was right, and we’d better be very careful, Admiral.”

“Agreed. Commander Kroeber, we’ll send a marine squad into the Gemal first. If we can verify that Smith himself hasn’t been hijacked or sequestrated it may just make our job that bit easier.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The tactical situation warned him the Datura and Cereus were launching combat wasps. Meredith observed in astonishment as each of them released a salvo of thirty-five; according to the accompanying identification codes the starships were small vehicles, forty to forty-five metres in diameter. They couldn’t have held back any reserves—what absurd tactics. The drone armaments began to accelerate from their launch craft at twenty gees.

“No antimatter, Admiral,” datavised Second Lieutenant Clark Lowie, the Arikara’s weapons officer. “Fusion drives only.”

That’s something, Meredith thought. “What’s their storage capacity?”

“Best estimate would be forty combat wasps maximum, Admiral.”

“So they haven’t left any for their own defence?”

“Looks that way, sir.”

Haria and Gakkai launched a counter salvo; eighty combat wasps leaping ahead to intercept the incoming hostiles at twenty-seven gees. Purple, red, and green vector lines sprang up in Meredith’s mind, as if someone was performing laser acupuncture right across his skull. The combat wasps started to squirt megawatt electronic warfare pulses at each other. Active and kinetic submunitions began to scatter. Two disc-shaped swarms formed, five hundred kilometres across, alive with deceitful impulses and infrared signatures. Electron beams flashed out, perfectly straight lightning bolts glaring against the starfield. The first explosions flared. Kiloton nuclear devices were detonated on each side. Smaller explosions followed as combat wasps blew apart under the prodigious energy impact.

A second, smaller, salvo was launched by the frigates, compensating for the loss.

“Admiral, the Myoho reports the blackhawk it’s chasing is about to swallow outsystem,” Lieutenant Rhoecus called. “Request permission to follow.”

“Granted. Follow and interdict; it is not to come into contact with inhabited Confederation territory.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A vast circle of space burst into pyrotechnic oblivion as the two antagonistic combat wasp swarms collided, as though a giant wormhole had been torn open into the heart of a nearby star. The annular plasma storm eddied violently, radiating down through the visible spectrum in seconds until only nebulous violet mists were left.

Arikara’s sensor clusters struggled to burn through the conflagration and present an accurate representation of events through the tactical situation display. Some submunitions from both sides had survived. Now they were accelerating towards their intended targets. All four combatant ships began high-gee evasive manoeuvres.

Myoho and its blackhawk disappeared from the display. Granth and Ilex both fired a volley of combat wasps at their respective prey.

Haria’s masers began to fire as the remaining submunitions closed on it. Small vivid explosions peppered nearby space. Rail guns thumped out a stream of steel spheres which formed a last-ditch kinetic umbrella. Eight surviving submunitions drones detected it, three of them were gamma-pulse lasers. A second before they struck the umbrella they fired.

Large oval sections of the frigate’s hull turned cherry red under the radiation assault. Molecular-binding generators maxed out as they fought to keep the monobonded silicon’s structure intact. The energy-dispersal web below the silicon struggled to absorb and redistribute the intense influx. All the sensor clusters either melted or had their electronics burnt out by the gamma-ray deluge. Replacement clusters rose immediately; but the starship was blind for a period of three seconds.

In that time the remaining five submunitions hit the kinetic umbrella. They disintegrated instantly, but hypervelocity fragments kept coming. With the sensors unable to see them and direct the frigate’s close-range weapons they struck the hull and vaporized. The binding generators, already heavily stressed, couldn’t handle the additional loading. There were half a dozen localized punctures. Fists of plasma punched inwards. Internal systems melted and fused as they were exposed. Fuel tanks ripped open sending hundred-metre fountains of vaporizing deuterium shooting out.

“Bellah, assist, please,” Commander Kroeber ordered. “Rescue and recovery.” The stricken frigate’s emergency beacon was howling across the distress bands. The life-support capsules should have easily withstood the strike. Even as he requested more information from the computer the sensor image showed him ion thrusters firing to slow the frigate’s wayward tumble.

With all of their combat-wasp stocks exhausted in the first salvo, Datura and Cereus were left with only short-range masers to defend themselves against the assault from the frigates’ drones. The electronic warfare barrage was unrelenting as the drones closed at twenty gees, defeating the starships’ sensors. The two mercenary starships exploded within seconds of each other.

A cheer went round the Arikara’s bridge. Meredith felt like joining in.

“Admiral, another blackhawk is leaving orbit,” Lieutenant Rhoecus said.

Meredith cursed, he really couldn’t spare another voidhawk. A quick check on the tactical display revealed little information, the blackhawk was on the other side of Lalonde from the squadron. “Which is the nearest voidhawk?”

“The Acacia, Admiral.”

“Can they hit it with combat wasps?”

“They have a launch window, but estimate only a thirty per cent chance of success.”

“Tell them to launch, but remain in orbit.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Bellah reports survivors from the Haria have been detected, Admiral,” Commander Kroeber said. “They’re matching velocities.”

“Good. Hinnels, has there been any reaction from the Juliffe cloud bands?”

“Nothing specific, sir. But they’ve been growing wider at a constant rate, the area they’re covering has increased by one and a half per cent since we arrived. It adds up to a respectable volume.”

Another combat-wasp battle raged high above Lalonde’s terminator as the drones from the Granth encountered defences fired by their prey. Then the blackhawk vanished down a wormhole interstice. Three seconds later Granth followed.

“Damn,” Meredith muttered.

But the Ilex was having better luck. Its combat-wasp salvo had forced the blackhawk it was chasing to flee back down towards the planet.

The Admiral requested a channel to the Gemal. “We shall be boarding you first, Smith. Any resistance and the marines will shoot to kill, understood?”

“Yes, Admiral,” Terrance Smith replied.

“Have you received any updates from the teams you landed?”

“Not yet. I expect most of them were sequestrated,” he added gloomily.

“Tough. I want you to broadcast a message that their mission is over. We will pick up any survivors if at all possible. But none of them is to attempt to penetrate under the cloud, no hunting of enemy bases. This is now a Confederation Navy problem. I don’t want the invaders antagonized unduly.” Not while my squadron is so close to that bloody cloud, he finished silently. It was the sheer quantity of power involved again. Frightening. And the berserk way the hijacked ships were behaving didn’t help.

“I’m not sure I can guarantee that, Admiral,” Smith said.

“Why not?”

“I issued the team leaders with kiloton nukes. It would give them a fall-back in case the starships were unable to provide strike power. I was worried the captains might balk at bombarding a planetary surface.”

If it hadn’t been for the fierce gee force Meredith would have put his head in his hands. “Smith, if you get out of this with your life, it won’t be on my account.”

“Well, fuck you!” Terrance Smith yelled. “You Saldana bastard, why do you think I had to hire these people in the first place? It’s because Lalonde is too poor to rate decent navy protection. Where were you when the invaders landed? You would never have come to help us put down that first insurrection, because it didn’t affect your precious financial interests. Money, that’s what you shits respect. What the hell would you know about ordinary people suffering? You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth that’s so big it’s sticking out through your arse. The only reason you’re here now is because you’re frightened the invasion might spread to worlds you own, that it might hit your credit balance. I’m doing what I can for my people.”

“And that includes nuking them, does it?” Meredith asked. He’d been subject to anti-Saldana bigotry for so long now the insults never even registered. “They’re sequestrated, you cretin, they don’t even know they’re your people any more. This invasion isn’t going to be beaten by brute force. Now, you will broadcast that message, make the mercenary teams turn back.”

The tactical display sounded an alarm. A broad fan of curving purple vector lines were rising high over Wyman, Lalonde’s small arctic continent. Someone behind the planet had launched a salvo of fifty-five combat wasps.

“My God,” Meredith muttered. “Lowie, what are they aimed at?”

“Unclear, Admiral. There is no single target, it’s a rogue salvo. But from the vectors I’d say they were seeking to engage anything in the thousand-kilometre orbit . . . Bloody hell.”

A second salvo, of equal size, was curving round the south pole.

“Jesus, that’s a neat pincer movement,” Joshua said. At some ridiculous private level he was delighted he didn’t need any intervention from his neural nanonics to remain calm. He felt his mind function with that same cool reserve which had manifested itself back in the Ruin Ring when Neeves and Sipika appeared.

This is me, what I am: a starship captain.

The Lady Mac’s three fusion drives came on almost without conscious thought. “Stand by for combat gees,” he warned.

“How many?” Sarha asked nervously.

“How high is up?”

Other starships were getting under way, retracting their thermo-dump panels. Three of them launched combat wasps in a defensive cluster formation.

“Remain in orbit,” Smith ordered over the command net. “The navy squadron will provide us with protective cover from the salvo.”

“Like bollocks they will,” Joshua said. The squadron was still four minutes from orbital injection. A sensor scan revealed blackhawks and voidhawks alike racing up for a higher altitude; the slower Adamist starships were following, with three exceptions, Gemal one of them.

The gee force in Lady Mac’s bridge passed five gees. Ashly groaned in dismay. “My bones can’t take this.”

“You’re younger than me,” Warlow countered.

“I’m more human, too.”

“Wimp.”

“Castrated mechanoid.”

Sarha suddenly noticed the trajectory Joshua had loaded into the flight computer. “Joshua! Where the hell are you taking us?”

Lady Mac was rising above the equatorial plane at seven gees, decreasing altitude at the same time.

“We’re going under them.”

“This trajectory is going to graze the atmosphere!”

He watched more of the mercenary starships launching combat wasps. “I know.” It had been an instinctive manoeuvre, opposing every tactic program in the flight computer’s memory core; they all said altitude was the key in orbital combat situations, giving you more room to manoeuvre, more flexibility. Everyone else in the little mercenary fleet was clinging to that doctrine, escaping from Lalonde with fusion drives operating way out on the limit. “Dad was always telling me about this one,” he said in what he hoped was a confident manner. “He always used it in a scrape. Lady Mac’s still about, isn’t she?”

“Your bloody father isn’t!” Sarha had to datavise, she couldn’t expel enough air from her lungs to talk. The acceleration had reached nine gees. She hadn’t known even Lady Mac could produce that kind of drive level. Every internal membrane supplement had turned rock hard. An arterial implant at the base of her neck was injecting oxygen into her bloodstream, making sure her brain didn’t starve. She couldn’t ever remember having to use it before. Joshua Calvert, we are not a bloody combat wasp!

“Look, it’s very simple,” he explained, trying to sort out the logic in his own mind. As usual, rationality was trailing well behind impetuosity. “Combat wasps are designed for deep-space operations. They can’t operate in the atmosphere.”

“We are designed for deep-space operations!”

“Yes, but we’re spherical.”

Sarha couldn’t snarl, she would have dislocated her jaw bone; but she managed to grate her teeth together.

Lady Macbeth flew over the Sarell continent in forty-five seconds, arching down sharply towards the brown and yellow volcanic deserts. She was three hundred kilometres in altitude when she passed over the northern coastline; the north pole was two and a half thousand kilometres ahead. Seven hundred kilometres above, and four thousand kilometres ahead, the combat wasp salvo spotted her. Six of them abruptly altered course and dived down.

“Here they come,” Joshua said. He fired eight of Lady Mac’s combat wasps, programming them for a tight defence-shield formation. The drones leapt upwards at twenty gees, scattering submunitions almost immediately.

Aft sensors showed the starships in orbit behind and above were releasing more and more combat wasps. Even the Gemal was breaking out of its thousand-kilometre orbit, the old colonist-carrier could only make one and a half gees. And there was no escort, Joshua saw sadly. Far away to the east, barely above the horizon, there was a volley of explosions followed by the unmistakable larger smeared detonation of a starship. Wonder who that was? It didn’t seem to matter much, only that it wasn’t him.

“Melvyn, keep monitoring the grav-detector satellite data. I want to know if any ships start jumping outsystem, and if possible where to.”

“I’m on it, Joshua.”

“Dahybi, I can’t believe the voidhawks can keep jamming our nodes with all this going on, the second they slip I want to know.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The sensors showed Joshua the attacking combat wasps releasing their submunitions. Particle beams lanced out from both swarms. “OK, everybody, here we go.” He shot an order directly into the drive deflector coils, and Lady Mac lurched downwards.

Meredith Saldana caught the crazy flight vector developing and datavised a request into the tactical situation computer for confirmation. The vector was recomputed and verified. Half of the squadron’s frigates would be unable to produce a nine-gee thrust. “Who’s that idiot?” he asked in reflex.

“Lady Macbeth, sir,” Lieutenant Franz Grese said. “None of the others have triple-fusion drives.”

“Well, if they all suicide on us I shall be a very happy man.”

It wasn’t looking good. He had already changed the squadron’s operational orbit from one thousand kilometres to two thousand three hundred, which would give them a superior look-down shoot-down position—but only if the mercenary ships stayed put. Injection was in ninety seconds. Combat wasps were being launched at a prodigious rate from the mercenary fleet. Intelligence and tactics programs couldn’t say which were defensive and who was attacking whom. Each of his squadron’s ships had launched a defence cluster salvo.

One of the voidhawks exploded with appalling savagery, and the victorious blackhawk skirted its roiling debris plume to vanish into a wormhole interstice.

“Who?” he asked Rhoecus.

“Ericra, but they saw the combat-wasp barrage approaching. Ilex has their memory patterns safe.”

Even now, after all the truths he had seen in his cosmopolitan life, Meredith felt the old twang of prejudice. Upon death, souls departed this life for ever. It was the Christian way. They were not to be ensnared in a mockery of God’s living creatures.

You can leave the Kingdom, he acknowledged jadedly, but it never leaves you.

Go in peace, he prayed silently for the dead Edenists. Wherever you roam.

On a more pertinent level he was down to six voidhawks.

“Combat wasps have locked on to the Gemal, sir,” Clarke Lowie reported.

The gee force on the bridge was reducing rapidly as the Arikara slid into orbit.

Thank Christ for small mercies, Meredith thought. “Commander Kroeber, squadron to engage all combat wasps launched by the mercenary fleet. We’ll sort out who’s friendly and who isn’t when events become a little less immediate.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Arikara trembled as a salvo was fired.

“Issue a blanket order for all mercenary starships to cease acceleration and evasive manoeuvres as soon as the combat wasps have been cleared. Failure to comply will result in naval fire.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

When the Lady Mac reached one hundred kilometres’ altitude Joshua withdrew all but five sensor clusters. Wyman’s fjord-etched coastline was directly below. Three hundred kilometres overhead, the two combat-wasp swarms were firing a fusillade of kinetic missiles and coherent radiation at each other. They clashed at a closing speed of over seventy kilometres per second. A patch of sky burst into pure white atomic fury, bringing a transient dawn to the arctic continent’s month-long night underneath.

Eleven submunitions broke through to descend on the Lady Macbeth with cybernetic mayhem in their silicon brains. Two of them were one-shot gamma pulsers. They tracked the hurtling starship as it buffeted its way through the upper atmosphere, then discharged the energy in their electron matrices with one swift burst. The resulting gamma-ray beam lasted for a quarter of a second.

A sheath of ions had already built up around the Lady Macbeth’s hull, a tangerine florescence that radiated away from the forward fuselage in hypersonic ripples. But they were swiftly lost against the incandescent streams of energized helium emerging from the fusion tubes. The stratosphere reeled from the unrestrained tumult of the starship’s passage. Her exhaust stretched out over a hundred and fifty kilometres behind her, evanescing into titanic electrical storms which lashed the sharp icy steppes seventy-five kilometres below with a vigour that threatened to split the glaciers open to the bedrock. Insubstantial green and scarlet borealis spectres cavorted over the ice-encrusted continent in a display which rivalled the bands over the Juliffe in scale.

“Breakthrough!” Warlow cried.

Systems schematics filled Joshua’s mind, laced with red symbols. The hull’s molecular-binding generators, already labouring with the burden imposed by the ion sheath, had overloaded in half a dozen places as the gamma pulses drilled into the monobonded silicon.

He switched back to the flight management display. The thrust from one of the fusion tubes was reducing. “Any physical violation?” The thought of needles of blazing atmospheric gases searing in over the delicate modules and tanks at this velocity was terrifying. Neural nanonics effused an adrenalin antidote into his bloodstream.

“Negative, it’s all energy seepage. But there’s some heavy component damage. Losing power from generator two, and I’ve got cryogenic leakages.”

“Compensate, then, just keep us functional. We’ll be through the atmosphere in another twenty seconds.”

Sarha was already datavising a comprehensive list of instructions into the flight computer, closing pipes and tanks, isolating damaged sub-components, pumping vaporized coolant fluid from the malfunctioning generator into emergency dump stores. Warlow began to help her, prioritizing the power circuits.

“Three nodes are out, Joshua,” Dahybi reported.

“Irrelevant.” He took the starship down to sixty kilometres.

The nine remaining kinetic missile drones followed. They were, as Joshua said, intended for deep space operation: basically a sensor cluster riding on top of fuel tanks and a drive unit. There was no streamlining, no outer fuselage; in a vacuum there was no need for such refinements. All they had to do was collide with their victim, mass and velocity would obey Newton’s equations and combine to complete the task. But now they were flying through the mesosphere, a medium implacably alien and hostile. Ionization started to accumulate around their blunt circular sensor heads as the gas thickened, turning to long tongues of violet and yellow flame which licked back along the body. Sensors burnt away in seconds, exposing the guidance electronics to the radiant incoming molecules. Blinded, crippled, subject to intolerable heat and friction pressures, the kinetic drones detonated in garish starburst splendour twenty kilometres above the Lady Macbeth.

The Arikara’s tactical situation display showed their vectors wink out almost simultaneously. “Very smart,” Meredith said grudgingly. It took a hell of a nerve to pilot a starship like that—nerve and egomaniacal self-confidence. I doubt I would have that much gumption.

“Stand by. Evasive manoeuvring,” Commander Kroeber said.

And Meredith had no more time to reflect on the singular antics of Joshua Calvert. Punishing gravity returned abruptly to the flagship’s bridge. A third salvo of combat wasps leaped out of their launch-tubes.

Lady Macbeth soared out of the mesosphere, throwing off her dangerous cloak of glowing molecules. Behind her, Wyman’s ice-fields glimmered under eerie showers of ethereal light. Combat-sensor clusters rose out of their hull recesses on short stalks, their golden-lensed optical scanners searching round.

“We’re in the clear. Thank you, sweet Jesus.” Joshua reduced the thrust from the fusion drives until it was a merely uncomfortable three gees. Their trajectory was taking them straight away from the planet at a high inclination. There were no combat wasps within four thousand kilometres. I knew the old girl could do it. “Told you so,” he sang at the top of his voice.

“Awesome,” Ashly said, and meant it.

On the couch next to Joshua, Melvyn shook his head in dazed admiration despite the gee force.

“Thanks, Joshua,” Sarha said gently.

“My pleasure. Now, damage assessments please. Dahybi, can we jump?”

“I’ll need time to run more diagnostics. But even if we can jump it isn’t going to be far. Those three nodes were physically wrecked by the gamma pulses. Our energy patterns will have to be recalculated. Ideally, we need to replace the nodes first.”

“We’re only carrying two spares. I’m not made of money. Dad always jumped with nodes damaged and—”

“Don’t,” Sarha pleaded. “Just for once, Joshua. Let’s deal with the present, OK?”

“Somebody’s jumped outsystem,” Melvyn said. “The grav-detector satellites registered at least two distortions while we were performing our dodo impersonation, I think there may have been a wormhole interstice opened as well. I can’t tell for sure, half of the satellites have dropped out.”

“There is no jamming from the voidhawks any more,” Dahybi said.

“OK, great. Warlow, Sarha, how are our systems coping?”

“Number two generator’s out,” Warlow said. “I’ve shut it down. It took the main strike from the gamma rays. Lucky really, most of the energy was absorbed by its casing. We’ll have to dump it when we dock, it’s got a half-life longer than some geological eras now.”

“And I’d like you to stop using the number one fusion-drive tube,” Sarha said. “The injection ionizers are damaged. Other than that, nothing serious, we’ve got some leaks and some component glitches. But none of the life-support capsules were breached, and our environmental-maintenance equipment is fully functional.”

“Got another jumper,” Melvyn called out.”

Joshua reduced thrust to one gee, cutting drive tube one altogether, then accessed the sensors. “Jesus, will you look at that?”

Lalonde had acquired its own ring, gloriously radiant stripes of fusion fire twining together to form a platinum amulet of immense complexity. Over five hundred combat wasps were in flight, and thousands of submunitions wove convoluted trajectories. Starships initiated high-gee evasive manoeuvres. Nuclear explosions blossomed.

The Lady Macbeth’s magnetic and electromagnetic sensors were recording impulses nearly off the scale. It was a radiative inferno.

“Two more wormhole interstices opening,” Melvyn said. “Our bitek comrades are leaving in droves.”

“I think we’ll join them,” Joshua said. Just for once in her life, Sarha might be right, he conceded. It was the now which counted. Lady Mac was already two thousand kilometres in altitude, and rising steeply from the pole; he shifted their inclination again, carrying them further north of the ecliptic and away from the conflict raging above the planet’s equatorial zones. Another three thousand kilometres and they would be out of the influence of Lalonde’s gravity field, and free to jump. He made a mental note to travel an additional five hundred klicks—no point in stressing the nodes, given their state. About a hundred seconds at their current acceleration. “Dahybi, how is the patterning coming?”

“Reprogramming. Another two minutes. You really don’t want to rush me with this one, Joshua.”

“Fine, the further we are from the gravity field the better.”

“What about the mercs?” Ashly said. It wasn’t loud, but his level voice carried the bridge easily.

Joshua banished the display showing him possible jump coordinates. He turned his head and glared at the pilot. Why was there always one awkward bastard? “We can’t! Jesus, they’re killing each other back there.”

“I promised them, Joshua. If they were alive I said I would go down and pick them up. And you said something similar in your message.”

“We’ll come back.”

“Not in this ship, not in a week. If we dock at a port, it’ll take a month to refit. That’s without any hassle from the navy. They won’t be alive in two days, not down there.”

“The navy said they’d pick up any survivors.”

“You mean that same navy which right now is shooting at our former colleagues?”

“Jesus!”

“There isn’t going to be a combat wasp left in thirty minutes,” the pilot said reasonably. “Not at the rate they’re expending them. All we have to do is sit tight for a couple of hours out here.”

Instinct pushed Joshua, repelled him from Lalonde and the red cloud bands. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ashly, but no. This is too big for us.” The coordinate display flipped up in his mind.

Ashly looked desperately round the bridge for an ally. His eyes found Sarha’s guilty expression.

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Joshua?”

“Now what!”

“We should jump to Murora.”

“Where?” His almanac file produced the answer, Murora was the largest gas giant in the Lalonde system. “Oh.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “There’s even an Edenist station in orbit to supervise their new habitat’s growth. We can dock there and replace the failed nodes with our spares. Then we can jump back here in a day or so and do a fast fly-by. If we get an answer from the mercs, and the navy doesn’t shoot us on sight, Ashly can go down to pick them up. If not, we just head straight back to Tranquillity.”

“Dahybi, what do you think?” Joshua asked curtly. Most of his anger was directed at himself; he should have thought of Murora as an alternative destination.

“Gets my vote,” the node specialist said. “I really don’t want to try an interstellar jump unless we absolutely have to.”

“Anybody else object? No? OK, nice idea, Sarha.” For the third time, the jump coordinate display appeared in his mind. He computed a vector to align the Lady Mac on the gas giant, eight hundred and fifty-seven million kilometres distant.

Ashly blew Sarha a kiss across the bridge. She grinned back.

Lady Macbeth’s two remaining fusion drives powered down. Ion thrusters matched her course to the Murora jump coordinate with tiny nudges. Joshua fired a last coded message at the geostationary communications satellites, then the dish antenna and various sensor clusters started to sink down into their jump recesses.

“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.

“I’ve programmed in the new patterns. Look at it this way, if they don’t work, we’ll never know.”

“Fucking wonderful.” He ordered the flight computer to initiate the jump.

Two kinetic missiles hammered into the frigate Neanthe, almost severing it in half. When the venting deuterium and glowing debris cleared, Arikara’s sensors observed Neanthe’s four life-support capsules spinning rapidly. Still intact. Kinetic missiles found two of them while a one-shot pulser discharged eighty kilometres away, stabbing another with a beam of coherent gamma radiation.

Admiral Saldana clenched his teeth in helpless fury. The battle had rapidly escalated out of all control, or even sanity. All the mercenary ships had fired salvos of combat wasps, there was simply no way of telling which were programmed to attack ships (or which ships) and which were for defence.

The tactical situation computer estimated over six hundred had now been launched. But communications were poor even with the dedicated satellites, and sensor data was degraded by the vast amount of electronic warfare signals emitted by everybody’s combat wasps. One of the bridge ratings had said they’d be better off with a periscope.

When it came, the explosion was intense enough to outshine the combined photonic output of the six hundred-plus fusion drives whirling round above Lalonde. An unblemished radiation nimbus expanded outwards at a quarter of the speed of light, engulfing starships, combat wasps, submunitions, and observation satellites with complete dispassion; hiding their own detonation behind a shell of scintillating molecules. When it was five hundred kilometres in diameter it began to thin, swirling with secondary colours like a solar soap bubble. It was three thousand kilometres ahead of the Arikara, yet it was potent enough to burn out every one of the sensors which the flagship had orientated on that sector of space.

“What the hell was that?” Meredith asked. The fear was there again, as always. Antimatter.

Seven gees slammed him down in his couch as the starship accelerated away from the planet and the dwindling explosion.

Clark Lowie and Rhys Hinnels reviewed the patchy tactical situation data leading up to the explosion. “It was one of their starships which imploded, sir,” Clarke Lowie said after a minute’s consultation. “The patterning nodes were activated.”

“But it was only three thousand kilometres above Lalonde.”

“Yes, sir. They must have known that. But they took out the Shukyo and the Bellah. I’d say it was deliberate.”

“Suicide?”

“Looks that way, sir.”

Five ships. He had lost five ships, and God knows how much damage inflicted on the rest of them. Mission elapsed time was twenty-three minutes, and most of that had been spent flying into orbit from the emergence point.

“Commander Kroeber, withdraw all squadron ships from orbit immediately. Tell them to rendezvous at the jump coordinate for Cadiz.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A direct repudiation of the First Admiral’s orders, but there was no mission left, not any more. And he could save some crews by retreating now. He had that satisfaction, for himself.

The gravity plane shifted slightly as the Arikara came round onto its new vector, then reduced to five gees. Another salvo of combat wasps was fired as enemy drones curved round to intercept them.

Madness. Utter madness.

The river was one of the multitude of smaller unnamed tributaries that covered the south-western region of the colossal Juliffe basin. Its roots were the streams wandering round the long knolls which made up the land away to the south of Durringham, merging and splitting a dozen times until finally becoming a single steadfast river two hundred kilometres from the Juliffe itself.

At the time the spaceplanes brought down the mercenary scout teams there was still a respectable current running through it, the deflected rains hadn’t yet begun to affect the flow of water. In any case, the lakes and swamps which accounted for a third of its length formed a considerable reservoir, capable of sustaining the level for months.

The snowlilies, too, were relatively unaffected. The only difference the red cloud made was to extend the period it took for the aquatic leaves to ripen and break free of their stems. But where it ran through the thickest jungle that made up the majority of the Juliffe basin, the snowlilies seemed almost as numerous as always. Certainly they managed to cover the river’s thirty-metre width, even if they weren’t layered two or three deep as they had been in previous seasons.

Where the tributary ran through a quiet section of deepest jungle, one of the snowlilies five metres from the bank bulged up near the centre, then tore. A fist with grey water-resistant artificial skin punched through and began to widen the tear. Chas Paske broke the surface, and looked round.

The banks on either side of him were steep walls made from the knotted roots of cherry oak trees. Tall trunks straddled the summit, their white bark stained magenta from the light filtering through the tenebrous canopy far overhead. As far as the combat-boosted mercenary could see there was nobody around. He struck out for the shore.

His left thigh had been badly damaged by the white fire flung by the women who’d ambushed them. It was one reason for diving into the river as his team fled from the spaceplane’s landing zone. Nothing else seemed to extinguish the vile stuff.

Their shrill, delighted laughter had reverberated through the trees as the mercenaries crashed through the undergrowth. If he had just been granted another minute to unload their gear, establish a perimeter defence formation, the outcome would have been so very different. They had enjoyed it, those vixen women, that was the terrifying part of it, calling happily to each other as the mercenaries ran in panic. It was a game to them, exhilarating sport.

They weren’t people as he understood. Chase Paske was neither a superstitious nor religious man. But he knew that whatever evil had befallen Lalonde had nothing to do with Laton, nor was it going to be solved by Terrance Smith and his rag-tag forces.

He reached the bank and started to climb. The roots were atrociously slippery, his left leg dangled uselessly, and his arms and back were badly burnt, debilitating the boosted muscles. It was a slow process, but by jamming his elbows and right knee into crannies he could lever and pull himself upwards.

The women, it appeared, hadn’t understood the feats a boosted metabolism was capable of. He could survive for an easy four hours underwater without taking a breath. A useful trait when chemical and biological agents were being used.

Chas scrambled up the last couple of metres to the top of the woody bank, and rolled into the lee of a crooked trunk. Only then did he start to review the bad news his neural nanonics medical program was supplying.

The shallow flesh burns he could ignore for now—although they would need treating eventually. Almost half of his outer thigh had been burnt away, and the dull glint of his silicolithium femur was visible through the minced and charred muscle tissue. Nothing short of a total rebuild was going to get his leg functioning again. He started picking long white worm-analogues from the lairs they were burrowing into the naked wound.

He didn’t even have his pack with him when the women attacked. There was only his personal equipment belt. Which was better than nothing, he thought phlegmatically. It contained two small neural nanonic packages, which he wrapped round the top of his thigh like an old-fashioned bandage. They didn’t cover half the length of the wound, but they would stop poisoned blood and aboriginal bacteria from getting into the rest of his circulatory system. The remainder of it was going to fester, he realized grimly.

Taking stock, he had a first aid kit, a laser pistol with two spare power magazines, a small fission-blade knife, a hydrocarbon analyser to tell him which vegetation contained toxins his metabolism couldn’t filter, a palm-sized thermal inducer, and five EE grenades. He also had his guido block, a biological/chemical agent detector block, and an electronic warfare detector block. No communications block, though, which was a blow; he couldn’t check in with Terrance Smith to request evacuation, or even find out if any other members of his team had survived.

Finally there was the kiloton fusion nuke strapped to his side in its harness. A black carbotanium sphere twenty centimetres in diameter, thoroughly innocuous looking.

Chas did nothing for five minutes while he thought about his situation; then he began to cut strips of wood from the cherry oaks to form a splint and a crutch.

Hidden behind its event horizon, the singularity came into being two hundred and twenty thousand kilometres above Murora, its intense mass density bending the course of nearby photons and elementary particles in tight curves. It took six milliseconds to expand from its initial subatomic size out to fifty-seven metres in diameter. As it reached its full physical dimensions the internal stresses creating the event horizon ceased to exist.

Lady Macbeth fell in towards the gas giant, ion thrusters squirting out long spokes of cold blue fire to halt the slight spin caused by venting coolant gases. Thermo-dump panels stretched wide to glow a smoky cardinal red as they disposed of the excess thermal energy acquired during the starship’s frantic flight through Lalonde’s polar atmosphere. Sensor clusters swept the local environment for hazards while star trackers fixed their exact position.

Joshua exhaled loudly, allowing his relief to show. “Well done, Dahybi. That was good work under pressure.”

“I’ve been in worse situations.”

He refused to rise to the bait. “Sarha, have you locked down those malfunctioning systems yet?”

“We’re getting there,” she said blandly. “Give me another five minutes.”

“Sure.” After the harsh acceleration of Lalonde orbit, free fall was superbly relaxing. Now, if she’d just give him a massage . . .

“That was one hell of a scrap back there,” Melvyn said.

“We’re well out of it,” Warlow rumbled.

“Feel sorry for the scout teams, trapped on a planet full of people who behave like that.” Melvyn stopped and winced, then gave Joshua a cautious glance.

“She knew what she was going down to,” Joshua said. “And I meant what I said about going back to check.”

“Reza Malin knew what he was about,” Ashly said. “She’ll be safe enough with him.”

“Right.” The flight computer datavised an alarm into Joshua’s neural nanonics. He accessed the sensor array.

Murora’s storm bands were smears of green and blue, mottled with the usual white ammonia cyclones. A thick whorl of ochre and bronze rings extended from the cloud tops out to a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres, broken by two major divisions. The gas giant boasted thirty-seven natural satellites, from a quartet of hundred-kilometre ring-shepherds up to five moons over two thousand kilometres in diameter; the largest, M-XI, named Keddie, had a thick nitrogen methane atmosphere.

Aethra had been germinated in a two hundred thousand kilometre orbit, far enough outside the fringes of the ring to mitigate any danger of collision from stray particles. The seed had been brought to the system in 2602 and attached to a suitable mineral-rich asteroid; it would take thirty years to mature into a structure capable of supporting a human population, and another twenty years to reach its full forty-five-kilometre length. After nine years of untroubled development it was already three and a half kilometres long.

In the same orbit, but trailing five hundred kilometres behind the young habitat, was the supervisory station, occupied by fifty staff (it had accommodation for a thousand). The Edenists didn’t use bitek for such a small habitational environment; it was a carbotanium wheel seven hundred and fifty metres in diameter, eighty metres wide, containing three long gardens separated by blocks of richly appointed apartments. Its hub was linked to a large non-rotating cylindrical port, grossly under-used, but built in anticipation of the traffic which would start to arrive once the habitat reached its median size and He₃ cloud-scoop mining began in Murora’s atmosphere. During the interim there were just two inter-orbit vessels docked, which the station staff used to commute to Aethra on their inspection tours.

Lady Macbeth had emerged forty thousand kilometres away from the solitary Edenist outpost, a jump accuracy Joshua was entirely satisfied with considering the conditions. Her sensors focused on the station in time to see it break apart. The rim had been sliced open in several places, allowing the atmosphere to jet out. Small thrusters were still firing in a useless attempt to halt the ominous wobble which had developed. Optical sensors revealed trees, bushes, and oscillating slicks of water rushing out of the long gashes.

“Like the Ruin Ring,” Joshua whispered painfully.

Small circular spots on the carbotanium shell glowed crimson. The tough metal was visibly undulating as the structure’s seesaw fluctuations increased. Then one of the cryogenic fuel-storage tanks in the non-rotating port exploded, which triggered another two or three tanks. It was hard to tell the exact number, the entire station was obscured by the white vapour billowing out.

As the cloud dispersed large sections of the wheel tumbled out of the darkening centre.

A hundred kilometres away, two fusion drives burnt hotly against the icy starscape, heading for the immature habitat. One of the ships was emitting a steady beat of microwaves from its transponder.

“They’re here already,” Melvyn said. “Bloody hell. They must have jumped before we did.”

“That is the Maranta’s transponder code,” Warlow said without any notable inflection. “Why would Wolfgang leave it transmitting?”

“Because he’s not the captain any more,” Ashly said. “Look at the vectors. Neither of them is maintaining a steady thrust. Their drives are unstable.”

“They’re going to kill the habitat, aren’t they?” Sarha said. “Just like Laton did all those years ago. Those bastards! It can’t hurt them, it can’t hurt anybody. What kind of sequestration is this?”

“A bad one,” Warlow grumbled at an almost subliminal volume. “Very bad.”

“I’m picking up lifeboat beacons,” Melvyn said with a rush of excitement. “Two of them. Somebody escaped.”

Joshua, who had felt eager triumph at their successful jump to Murora and anger at the station’s violation, was left empty, leaving his mind in an almost emotion-free state. His crew was looking at him. Waiting. Dad never mentioned this part of captaining a ship.

“Melvyn, Sarha; recalibrate the injection ionizers for the number one fusion tube. Whatever thrust we can get, please. I’m going to need it. Ashly, Warlow, get down to the airlock deck. We won’t have much time to bring them on board, make sure they come through as fast as possible.”

Warlow’s couch webbing peeled back immediately. The cosmonik and the pilot went through the floor hatch as though they were in a race.

“Dahybi, recharge the nodes. I’ll jump outsystem as soon as we have them on board.” If we get them on board.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Stand by for combat gees. Again!”

On the other side of hugely complex schematic diagrams, Sarha smiled knowingly at the hard-used martyred tone.

Lady Macbeth’s fusion drives ignited, driving the ship towards the twirling wreckage of the station. Thermo-dump panels hurried back into their recesses as the gee force climbed. The starship’s sensors tracked the two fusion drives forty thousand kilometres ahead. Joshua was wondering how long it would take for them to spot the rescue attempt. If they use the sensors the way they do the fusion drives they may never see us. Maranta was only accelerating at half a gee.

Melvyn and Sarha finished their work on fusion tube number one, and gave him control, warning it wouldn’t last for long. Joshua brought Lady Mac up to five gees, and held her there.

“They’re launching combat wasps,” Dahybi said.

Joshua observed the flight computer plotting purple vector lines. “That’s odd.” The six combat wasps were flying around Aethra, forming a loose ring. Their drives went off when they were two hundred kilometres from the habitat, coasting past it. Submunitions burst out from two, and accelerated towards the slowly rotating cylinder.

“Kinetic missiles,” Joshua said. “What the hell are they doing?”

Bright orange explosions rippled across the rust-red polyp surface.

“Injuring it,” Sarha said with terse determination. “That kind of assault won’t destroy it, but they’ll inflict a lot of harm. Almost as if they’re deliberately mutilating it.”

“Injuring it?” Dahybi asked. The normally composed node specialist was openly incredulous. “What for? People injure. Animals injure. Not habitats. You can’t hurt them like you can a mammal.”

“That’s what they’re doing,” Sarha insisted.

“It does look that way,” Joshua said.

The Maranta’s drive came on again, followed a few seconds later by the second ship.

“They’ve seen us,” Joshua said. It had taken eight minutes, which was appallingly sloppy detection work. Lady Mac was over halfway towards the lifeboats. Less than twenty thousand kilometres away now. The other ships were barely five hundred kilometres distant from the squealing beacons. “This is where it gets interesting.” He launched eight combat wasps and upped the Lady Mac’s acceleration to seven gees. The drones shot ahead at twenty-five gees. An answering salvo of twelve emerged from the two starships.

“Shit,” Joshua exclaimed. “They’re running for Aethra.”

“Clever,” Melvyn said. “We can’t use the nukes when they’re close to it.”

“No, but I can still use the gamma pulsers for offence.” He fired off a string of coded instructions to the combat wasps. “And it may give us the time we need to pick up the lifeboats. None of their combat wasps are targeting them.” He thought for a moment. “Sarha, broadcast a tight-beam warning to the lifeboats. Tell them to deactivate their beacons now. Anyone warped enough to maim a habitat won’t think twice about snuffing refugees.”

The first combat-wasp conflict took place five thousand kilometres from Aethra, a ragged rosette of plasma sprawling across six hundred kilometres. Joshua watched several attackers come through unscathed and launched another salvo of five drones, programming three to form a defence-shield formation. The bridge’s gravity plane shifted sharply as he initiated an evasion manoeuvre.

The children were crying with their voices and minds. Gaura broadcast a soothing harmonic in the general affinity band, adding to the compulsion of the other adults. What I need, he thought, is someone to calm me.

The lifeboat was a sturdy cylinder ten metres long and four wide. It had no propulsion system apart from the solid-fuel booster to fire it clear of any conceivable emergency, and reaction thrusters to hold it stable while the refugees waited for rescue. Like all the systems on the station it was spacious and well equipped. There were eight seats, lockers with enough food for a fortnight, and a month-long oxygen supply. For Edenists, even disasters would be inconvenient rather than dangerous.

Such arrogance, he cursed inside the confines of his own skull, such stupid blind faith in our technological prowess.

Right now there were fourteen adults and five children crammed inside. There hadn’t been time for them to reach another lifeboat. With a hubris which hindsight revealed to be quite monstrous, the disasters which the designers anticipated had all been natural. Even a meteorite strike would leave most of the wheel intact, and evacuation would be a calm rational process.

What had never been even a theoretical contingency was insane Adamist starships slicing the station apart with lasers.

It had all happened so fast. Now little Gatje and Haykal hugged Tiya, their mother, faces distraught as she kept them anchored. The air was too hot, it stank of vomit. Aethra couldn’t hide its torment over the kinetic missile attack that bit deep into its shell from the young impressionable minds. Candre’s death convulsions as she went through explosive decompression was still causing wintry shivers along Gaura’s spine. The combined psychological stresses of the last fifteen minutes was going to leave a trauma scar that would take a long time to heal even for the well-balanced psyche of an Edenist.

And it was all his fault. As station chief he should have taken precautions. He had known about the civil strife on Lalonde. Yet he had done nothing.

It is not your fault, Aethra said softly into his mind. Who could have anticipated this?

I should have.

From the information you had, this was not predictable.

I had enough data from Ilex. It was chaos on the planet when they left.

These starships did not come from Lalonde. They are mercenaries, recruited elsewhere.

I could still have done something. Put people into apartments closer to the lifeboats. Something! How are Candre and the others?

I have them. But now is not a good time to begin raising my consciousness to multiplicity status.

No. And you? How are you?

I was angry, frightened. Now I feel sorrow. It is a sad universe where such wanton acts can take place.

I’m sorry we brought you into existence. You have done nothing to deserve this.

I am glad I live. And I may yet continue to live. None of the craters is more than twenty metres deep. I have lost a lot of nutrient fluid though, and my mineral-digestion organs have been damaged from the shockwaves.

Gaura’s hand squeezed the grab hoop he was holding. Fury and helplessness were alien to him, but he felt them now with a daunting strength. The physical damage can be repaired. It will be repaired, never doubt that. Not as long as one Edenist remains alive.

Thank you, Gaura. You are a fine supervisor. I am privileged to have you and your staff attend the dawn of my intellect. And one day Gatje and Haykal shall run around in my park. I will enjoy their laughter.

A solid beam of intolerable white light stabbed into the lifeboat through its one small, heavily shielded port. Space was being devastated by another hail of fusion explosions. The children started crying again.

Through Aethra’s much-degraded perception he saw the long white fusion exhaust of the third Adamist starship decelerating towards them. With its tremendous velocity it had to be a warship, but there had been no contact apart from the curt woman telling them to switch off the beacon. Who were they? Who were the other two? Why had they attacked Aethra?

Not knowing was difficult for an Edenist.

You will soon be safe, Aethra said. It widened its broadcast to include the Edenists on both lifeboats. All of you will be safe.

Gaura met his wife’s frightened stubborn eyes. I love you, he said for her alone.

The blast light was fading. He looked out of the port, his mind welcoming inquisitive contacts, showing the children their solidly real rescuer approaching.

Whoever the pilot was, he was coming very close. And moving far too fast.

Space directly outside the lifeboat was filled with the brilliant fusion exhaust. Gaura flinched, jerking back from the port. It’s going to hit!

There were screams behind him. Then the exhaust vanished, and a huge spherical starship was a hundred metres away, small sensor clusters sticking out of its dark silicon hull like metallized insect antenna. Its equatorial ion thrusters exhaled fountains of sparkling blue ions, halting its minute drift.

Bloody hell! It was a collective sentiment from the adults.

The starship rolled towards the lifeboat as though there was a solid surface below it. And its extended airlock tube was suddenly coming round to clang against the hatch.

Gaura took a moment to recover his poise. A voidhawk would be very hard put to match that display of precision manoeuvring.

The lifeboat’s bitek processors reported the short-range inter-ship channel was picking up a transmission.

“You people in the lifeboat, as soon as the hatch opens we want you through the tube and into the lounge,” commanded the female voice they’d heard earlier. “Make it fast! We’re running out of combat wasps and we’ve got to pick your friends up as well.”

The hatch seal popped and it swung back. Little Gatje squealed in alarm as one of the biggest cosmoniks Gaura had ever seen floated in the airlock tube.

It’s all right, he told his dismayed daughter. He’s a . . . friend. Really.

Gatje clutched at the fabric of her mother’s suit. Promise, Daddy?

“Shift your bastard arses through here now!” Warlow bellowed.

The children gulped into fearful silence.

Gaura couldn’t help it, after all the horror they’d been through to be greeted by such utter normality, he started to laugh. I promise.

“Oh, Jesus, they’ve cracked it,” Joshua told the three crew-members left on the bridge when Lady Mac rendezvoused with the second lifeboat. Another combat wasp was curving round over Aethra’s bulk, accelerating sharply. “I knew they’d work out the numbers game eventually.” He fired a salvo of three drones in defence. It was a terrible ratio. One which the Lady Mac could only ever lose. Three defenders was an absolute minimum to guarantee an attacker didn’t get through. If he could just have flown evasive manoeuvres, or attacked, or been able to run, the numbers would have shifted back towards something near favourable.

“Jesus!” The fourth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. He had to launch another three from Lady Mac’s diminishing reserves.

“Fifteen left,” Sarha said with morbid cheerfulness. The starship’s maser cannons fired at a kinetic missile that was sixty kilometres away. Five nuclear-tipped submunitions exploded perilously close to Aethra, reducing the latest attacking combat wasp to its subatomic constituents.

“Did you have to tell us that?” Melvyn said laboriously.

“You mean you didn’t know?”

“Yes. But I could always hope I was wrong.”

Joshua accessed a camera on the airlock deck. Warlow had anchored himself to a stikpad beside the airlock tube. He was grabbing people as they came out and slinging them into the chamber. Ashly and one of the Edenist men were on a stikpad below the ceiling hatch, catching then shoving the human projectiles up into the lounge above.

“How many more to come, Warlow?” Joshua datavised.

“Six. That makes forty-one in total.”

“Wonderful. Stand by for combat acceleration the second the airlock seals.” He sounded the audio warning so the Edenists would know. The flight computer showed his plot of an open-ended vector heading away from Murora. At eight gees they could outrun the other starships easily, and jump outsystem. That kind of prolonged acceleration would be tough on the Edenists (no sinecure for the crew, either), but it was one hell of a lot better than staying here.

“Joshua, Gaura has asked me to say some of the children are very young, they can’t possibly survive high gees,” Warlow datavised. “Their bones aren’t strong enough.”

“Jesus shit! Kids? How old? How many gees?”

“One girl was about three. There were a couple of five-year-olds as well.”

“Fuck it!”

“What is it?” Sarha asked, real concern darkening her sea-green eyes for the first time since they’d entered the Lalonde system.

“We’re not going to make it.”

The fifth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. Seven of the Lady Mac’s submunition drones detonated their nuclear explosives in immediate response. Joshua launched two more.

“Even if we jump without an alignment trajectory, from here, it’ll take us fifteen seconds to retract the sensors and prime the nodes,” he said. “We’ll be blind for ten seconds. It’s not long enough.”

“So run,” Sarha said. “Fire every last combat wasp at them and go. Lady Mac can make eight gees even with tube one down. Maranta can’t make more than four gees. We can get clear.”

“That vector’s already loaded. But we’ve got kids on board. Shit! Shit! Shit!” He saw the last Edenist being yanked out of the airlock tube by Warlow. The flight computer was shutting the hatch before his feet were fully clear.

Do something, and do it now, Joshua Calvert, he told himself. Because you’re going to be dead in twenty seconds if you don’t.

His mind ordered the flight computer to start the fusion tube ignition sequence.

Another whole two seconds to think in.

There was nothing in the tactics programs, even Dad had never dug himself a hole this deep in the shit.

Can’t run, can’t fight, can’t jump out, can’t hide . . .

“Oh yes I can!” he whooped.

The fusion drives came on, and the Lady Mac accelerated down the vector plot that sprang from Joshua’s mind even as the idea unrolled. Three gees, heading straight in towards the gas giant.

“Joshua!” Dahybi complained. “We can’t jump if you take us inward.”

“Shut up.”

Dahybi settled back and started into a recital of a scripture he remembered from his youth. “Yes, Captain.”

“Warlow, activate the three zero-tau pods we’ve got in capsule C, and cram the children in. You’ve got four minutes maximum before we start accelerating properly.”

“Right, Joshua.”

The sensors reported that four combat wasps were pursuing them. Joshua fired an answering salvo of five. He could hear Dahybi muttering something that sounded like a prayer, it had the right dirge-like resonance.

“They’re coming after us,” Melvyn said a minute later.

Maranta and its cohort were accelerating away from Aethra.

“That’s the Gramine,” Sarha said after studying the image. “Look at the angle its drive is deflected through. There isn’t another starship that can do that. Wissler was always boasting about their combat agility.”

“Just wonderful, Sarha, thanks,” Joshua proclaimed. “You got any other morale boosters for us?”

Warlow climbed the ladder into the lounge deck, boosted muscles lifting him easily against the heavy gravity. Carbon composite rungs creaked in dismay under his tripled weight. There were Edenists packed solid across the lounge floor, none of the acceleration couches had been activated—not that there were enough anyway. They didn’t have neural nanonics, the cosmonik realized. And because of it their children whimpered and snivelled in wretched distress without any cushioning below them.

He walked over to the smallest girl, who was lying wide-eyed and terribly pale beside her mother. “I’m putting her into zero-tau,” he announced shortly, and bent down. He had plugged a pair of cargo-handling arms into his elbow sockets before coming up the ladder, they had wide metal manipulator forks which would act as a good cradle. The girl started crying again. “There will be none of this acceleration in the pod. Explain to her. She must not squirm when I pick her up. Her spine will break.”

Be brave, Tiya told her daughter. He will take you to a safe place where you won’t hurt so.

He’s horrible, Gatje replied as the metal prongs slid underneath her.

You will be all right, Gaura said, reinforcing the pacific mental subliminal Tiya was radiating.

Warlow took care to keep Gatje’s spine level, supporting her head with one set of forks while the other three arms were positioned under her torso and legs. He lifted gingerly.

“Can I help?” Gaura asked, levering himself onto his elbows. His neck felt as though it was being slowly compressed in a hydraulic vice.

“No. You are too weak.” Warlow clumped out of the lounge, an outlandish faerie-legend figure walking amongst the prone hurting bodies with a grace completely at variance with his cumbersome appearance.

There were seven children under ten years old. It took him nearly five minutes to shift them from the lounge to the zero-tau pods. His neural nanonics monitored their flight on a secondary level. The attacking starships were matching Lady Mac’s three-gee acceleration. Combat-wasp submunitions produced a continual astral fire of plasma between them.

Lady Mac swept over the fringes of the ring, two thousand kilometres above the ecliptic as Warlow lowered the last child into the zero-tau pod.

“Thank Christ for that,” Joshua said when the pod was enveloped by the black field. “OK, people, stand by for high acceleration.”

Lady Mac’s thrust increased to seven gees, tormenting the Edenists in the lounge still further. For all the stamina of their geneered bodies they had never been supplemented to withstand the onerous burden of combat spaceflight.

Maranta and Gramine began to fall behind. Sensors showed three more combat wasps eating up the distance.

“Jesus, how many of the fucking things have they got left?” Joshua asked as he launched four of the Lady Mac’s remaining six drones in response.

“I estimate ten,” Melvyn datavised. “Possibly more.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua angled the Lady Mac down sharply towards the rings.

The slow moving pack of dusty ice chunks reflected an unaccustomed radiance as the three starships streaked past. After millennia of stasis, stirred only by the slow heartbeat of the gas giant’s magnetosphere, the ring’s micrometre dust was becoming aroused by the backwash of electromagnetic pulses from the fusion bombs exploding above it. Dark snowflake-crystal patterns rippled elegantly over its surface. The temperature rose by several fractions of a degree, breaking up the unique and fantastically delicate valency bonds between disparate atoms which free fall and frigidity had established. Behind the starships, the rings quivered like a choppy sea before the storm was unleashed.

Those on board the Lady Macbeth able to receive the sensor images watched with numbed fascination as the ring particles grew larger, changing from a grainy mist to a solid plain of drifting mud-yellow boulders. It took up half of the image; they were close enough now to make it seem like the floor of the universe.

The penultimate combat wasp darted out of the Lady Macbeth’s launch-tubes. Submunitions ejected almost at once, scattering like a shoal of startled fish. A hundred kilometres behind her, twenty-seven fusion bombs arrayed in an ammonite maculation detonated simultaneously, throwing up a temporary visual and electronic barrier. She turned, unseen by her pursuers, triple drive exhausts scoring vast arcs across the stars. Then the three barbs of superenergized helium were searing into the ice and rock of the ring. No physical structure was capable of withstanding that starcore temperature. The agitated surface cratered and geysered as though a depth charge had been set off far below.

Lady Macbeth dived straight into the rings, decelerating at eleven gees.