“Bollocks,” Yuri said.
The girls caught sight of them and shrieked with delight, smiling and waving.
Yuri shouldered his laser rifle, grinning deliriously at the seven pairs of wet breasts bouncing about.
“Bloody hell,” Mansing muttered.
Yuri pushed past him, and scuttled down the slope into the stream. The girls cheered.
“Nooo.”
“Yuri,” Mansing gestured ineffectually.
He turned round, face illuminated with delight. “What? We’ve got to find out where their village is, haven’t we? That’s our assignment, scout the terrain.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” He couldn’t keep his eyes from the naiads sporting about.
Yuri was plunging on, legs sending up a wave of spray.
“Nooo,” Randolf bayed urgently. “Baddd. Peeeople baddd.”
Mansing watched the girls whooping encouragement to Yuri as the lad ploughed through the water towards them. “Oh, to hell with dignity,” he said under his breath, and splashed down into the stream.
The first girl Yuri reached was about nineteen, with scarlet flowers tucked into her wet hair. She smiled radiantly up at him, hands holding his. “I’m Polly,” she laughed.
“All right!” Yuri cried. The water only came halfway up her thighs; she really was completely naked. “I’m Yuri.”
She kissed him, damp body pressing against his sleeveless shirt, leaving a dark imprint. When she broke off another girl slipped a garland of the orange vine flowers round his neck. “And I’m Samantha,” she said.
“You gonna kiss me too?”
She twined her arms round his neck, tongue slipping hungrily into his mouth. Other girls were circling round, scooping up handfuls of spray and showering them. Yuri was in the midst of a warm silver rain with raw ecstasy pounding down his nerves. Here in the middle of nowhere, paradise had come to Lalonde. The droplets fell in slow motion, tinkling sweetly as they went. He felt hands slip the rifle strap from his shoulder, more hands pulled at his shirt buttons. His trousers were undone, and his penis stroked lovingly.
Samantha took a pace back looking at him in adoration. She cupped her breasts, lifting them up towards him. “Now, Yuri,” she pleaded. “Take me now.”
Yuri pulled her roughly against him, his soaking trousers tangling round his knees. He heard an alarmed shout that was cut off. Three of the girls had pushed Mansing under the water, his legs were thrashing above the surface. The girls were laughing hysterically, muscles straining with the effort of keeping him down.
“Hey—” Yuri said. He couldn’t move because of his stupid trousers.
“Yuri,” Samantha called.
He turned back to her. She was opening her mouth wider than he would have believed physically possible. Long bands of muscle writhed around her chin as if fat worms were tunnelling through her veins. Her cheeks started to split, beginning at the corners of her mouth and tearing back towards her ears. Blood leapt out of the wounds in regular beats, and she was still hinging her jaw apart.
Yuri stared for one petrified second then let loose a guttural roar of fright that reverberated round the impassive sentinel trees. His bladder gave out.
Samantha’s grisly head darted forward, carmine teeth clamping solidly round his throat, her blood spraying against his skin.
“Randolf—” he yelled. Then her teeth tore into his throat, and his own blood burst out of his carotid artery to flood his gullet, quashing any further sounds.
Randolf howled in rage as his master fell into the water with Samantha riding him down. But one of the other girls looked straight at him and hissed in warning, flecks of saliva spitting out between her bared teeth. The sayce turned tail and sprinted back into the jungle.
“Power’s going. Losing height. Losing height!” The BK133 pilot’s frantic voice boomed out of the command centre’s AV pillars.
Every sheriff in the room stared at the tactical communication station.
“We’re going down!”
The carrier wave hissed for another couple of seconds, then fell silent. “God Almighty,” Candace Elford whispered. She was sitting at her desk at the end of the rectangular room. Like most of the capital’s civic buildings, the sheriff’s headquarters was made of wood. It sat in its own square fortified enclosure a couple of hundred metres from the governor’s dumper, a simplistic design that any pre-twentieth-century soldier would have felt at home in. The command centre itself formed one side of the parade ground, a long single-storey building with four grey composite spheres housing the satellite uplinks spaced along the apex of the roof. Inside, plain wooden benches ran around the walls, supporting an impressive array of modern desktop processor consoles operated by sheriffs seated in composite chairs. On the wall opposite Candace Elford’s desk a big projection screen displayed a street map of Durringham (as far as it was possible to map that conglomeration of erratic alleyways and private passages). Conditioners hummed unobtrusively to keep the temperature down. The atmosphere of technological efficiency was spoilt slightly by the fans of yellow-grey fungus growing out of the skirting-board underneath the benches.
“Contact lost,” Mitch Verkaik, the sheriff sitting at the tactical communication station reported, stone faced.
Candace turned to the small team she had assigned to monitor the posse’s progress. “What about the sheriffs on the ground? Did they see it come down?”
Jan Routley was operating the satellite link to the Swithland survivors; she loaded an order into her console. “There is no response from any communicator on the Swithland or the Hycel . I can’t even raise a transponder identity code.”
Candace studied the situation display projected by her own console’s AV pillar, more out of habit than anything else. She knew they were all waiting for her to rap out orders, smooth and confident, producing instant perfect solutions like an ambulatory computer. It wasn’t going to happen. The last week had been a complete nightmare. They couldn’t contact anyone in the Quallheim Counties or Willow West any more, and communications with villages along the Zamjan were patchy. The reinforcement flights to Ozark were a stopgap at best; privately she had intended that the fresh men and weapons would simply safeguard an evacuation of settlers down the river. She had long since abandoned the idea of restoring order to the Quallheim Counties, confinement was her best hope. Now it looked like Ozark was inside the affected zone. Seventy men and almost a quarter of her armoury.
“Call the second BK133 back to Durringham right away,” she said shortly. “If the invaders can bring down one, they can bring down another.” And at least ten sheriffs with their heavy-duty weapons would be saved. They might need them badly in the weeks to come. It was pretty obvious the invaders were intent on complete domination of the planet.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mitch Verkaik turned back to his console.
“How long before the observation satellite makes a pass over the paddle-boats?” Candace asked.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jan Routley answered.
“Program it for an infrared overscan fifty kilometres either side of its orbital track, see if it can locate the downed BK133. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot.” She rested her chin in her hands, staring blankly at her desktop processor. Protecting Durringham was her priority now, she decided. They must hold on to the city until the LDC sent a combat force capable of regaining the countryside. She was convinced they were faced with an invasion, the hour-long briefing she’d had with Kelven Solanki that morning had put paid to any final doubts. Kelven was badly worried, which wasn’t like him at all.
Candace hadn’t told her staff what Kelven had said to her, about the possible use of sequestration and river-boats that might have already brought a preliminary platoon of invaders to Durringham. It didn’t bear thinking about. There were three chairs conspicuously empty in the command centre today; even the sheriffs were reverting to a self-protective mentality. She couldn’t blame them; most had a family in the city, and none had signed on to fight a well-organized military force. But she’d agreed to cooperate with the Confederation Navy office in reviewing satellite image records of river traffic for the last fortnight.