Fenton and Ryall padded tirelessly through the jungle on the southern bank, skirting Aberdale by a wide margin. Jungle sounds filled their ears in the short gaps between the red cloud’s perpetual thunder peals. The organic perfume of a hundred different flowers and ripening vine fruits trickled through the muggy air, a vital living counterpoint to the stink of dead children.
Reza nudged the hounds further south, away from the now-foreign village, from the smell of the small decaying bodies, its voodoo fence, away from the terrible price Lalonde’s populace had paid under the invaders’ regime. Narrow leaves, mottled with fungal furs, parted round the hounds’ muzzles. Chilly distaste and shame—almost inevitably, shame—wormed its trenchant way into their minds along the affinity bond; they shared their master’s susceptibilities, becoming as keen as he to leave the heartbreaker calamity behind.
New scents rode the air: sap dripping from snapped vine strands, crushed leaves, loam ruffled by footprints and wheel tracks. The hounds raced ahead, guided by primal senses. People had been this way recently. Some, but not many.
Reza saw a path through the jungle. An old animal track running north–south, enlarged some time ago—branches cut back by fission blades, bushes hacked away—only to fall into disuse again. Almost, but not quite. Somebody still used it. Someone had used it less than two hours ago.
Nerves and instinct fired now, Fenton and Ryall loped through the moist grass towards the south. After two kilometres they found a scent trail branching off into the jungle. One person, male. His clothes smearing the leaves with sweat and cotton.
“Pat, bring Octan back. I think we’ve got our man.”
Reza kept the snatch mission simple. The team activated their hovercraft again when they were back on the Quallheim east of Aberdale and started searching for a tributary fork on the south bank. According to the map stored in his guidance block there was a modest river which ran south through the jungle, coming from the mountains on the far side of the savannah. It took them five minutes to find it, and the hovercraft nosed over the clot of snowlilies guarding its mouth. Plaited tree boughs formed an arched screen overhead.
“After the snatch we’ll keep going up this river and out onto the savannah,” Reza said when they had left the Quallheim behind. “I want to get him and us out from under this bloody cloud as quickly as possible. We should be able to access the communication satellites as well once we’re clear of it. That way if we can extract any useful information it can be delivered straight up to Terrance Smith.”
If Smith is still up there, Kelly thought. She couldn’t forget what the woman in Pamiers had said about the starships fighting. But Joshua had promised to stay and pick them up. She gave a cynical little sniff. Oh yes, the Confederation’s Mr. Dependable himself.
“You all right?” Ariadne asked, raising her voice above the steady propeller whine and the rambling thunder booms.
“My analgesic blocks are holding,” Kelly said. “It was just the size of the burn which shocked me.” She resisted the urge to scratch the medical nanonic packages.
“Adds a bit of spice to the recording, a bit of drama,” Ariadne said. “Speaking of which, you’re not going to blow us out, are you? I mean, we are the good guys.”
“Yeah. You’re the good guys.”
“Great, always wanted to be a sensevise star.”
Kelly accessed her Lalonde sensevise report memory cell file and turned her head until Ariadne was in the centre of her vision field (wishing the combat-boosted could produce some halfway decent facial expressions). “What did you learn from the sample you took from the houses?”
“Nowt. It was dust, that’s all. Literally, dry loam.”
“So these ornamental buildings are just an illusion?”
“Half and half. It isn’t a complete fiction; they’ve moulded the loam into the shape you see and cloaked it with an optical illusion. It’s similar to our chameleon circuit, really.”
“How do they do that?”
“No idea. The closest human technology can come is the molecular-binding generators starships use to strengthen their hulls. But they’re expensive, and use up a lot of power. Be cheaper to build a house, or use programmed silicon like you suggested. Then again”—she tilted her head back to focus her sensors on the cloudband above the trees—“logic doesn’t seem to be playing a large part in life on Lalonde right now.”
The hovercraft eased in against the crumbling loam bank. Ryall was standing among the qualtook trees above the water, waiting for them. Reza jumped ashore and ruffled the big hound’s head. It pressed against his side in complete devotion.
“Jalal and Ariadne, with me,” Reza said. “The rest of you stay here and keep the hovercraft ready. Pat, monitor us through Octan. If we blow the snatch, I suggest you keep heading south. There’s a Tyrathca farming settlement on the other side of the savannah. It’s as good a place as any to hide out. This snatch is our last stab at completing the mission. Don’t waste yourselves trying to gather further Intelligence, and don’t attempt a rescue. Got that?”
“Yes, sir,” Pat said.
Jalal and Ariadne joined Reza on the top of the bank. The big combat-adept mercenary had plugged a gaussrifle into one elbow socket and a TIP rifle into the other; power cables and feed tubes looped round into his backpack.
“Kelly?” Reza asked ingenuously. “Not wanting to come with us this time?”
“It took eight generations of cousins marrying to produce you,” she told him.
The three mercenaries on the bank activated their chameleon circuits. Laughter floated down to the hovercraft out of unbroken jungle.
Fenton watched the little clearing from under the sloping lower branches of an infant gigantea. The light here wasn’t the pure solar white of the villages, but the universal redness had veered into a pale pink shade. A log cabin had been built in the centre, not the kind of frame and plank arrangement favoured by the colonists but a rugged affair that could have come straight from some Alpine meadow. A stone chimney-stack formed almost all of one side, smoke wound drowsily upwards. A lot of trouble had been taken to transform the clearing; undergrowth had been trimmed back, animal hides were stretched drying over frames, timber had been cut and stacked, a vegetable plot planted.
The man who had done it was a well-built thirty-five-year-old with inflamed ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check cotton shirt and mud-caked black denim jeans. He was working at a sturdy table outside his front door, sawing up wood with old-fashioned manual tools. A half-completed rocking chair stood on the ground behind him.
Fenton moved forwards surreptitiously out of the shaggy gigantea’s shade, but keeping to the cover provided by bushes and smaller trees ringing the clearing. Between thunder broadsides he could hear the regular stifled ripping sound as the man planed a piece of wood on the table. Then the sound stopped and his shoulders stiffened.
Reza wouldn’t have thought it possible. The man was a good fifty metres away, with his back to the hound, and the thunder was unrelenting. Even his enhanced senses would have difficulty picking out Fenton under such circumstances. He and the other two mercenaries were still four hundred metres away. Nothing else for it . . . Fenton cantered eagerly into the clearing.
The man looked round, bushy eyebrows rising. “What’s this, then? My, you’re a roguish looking brute.” He clicked his fingers, and Fenton trotted up to him. “Ah, you’ll not be on your own, then. That’s a shame, a crying shame. For all of us. Your master won’t be far behind, I’ll warrant. Will you? Came down on the spaceplanes this morning no doubt, didn’t you? That must have been a trip and a half. Aye, well, I’ll not be finishing my chair this afternoon then.” He sat down on a bench beside the table, and started to change, his shirt losing colour, hair fading, thinning, stature diminishing.