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.