The Night's Dawn Trilogy (126 page)

“My God,” Parker Higgens said. “The similarities are startling.”

“Similarities, hell,” Kempster half-shouted. “That fucker’s come back!” The director flinched at the astronomer’s coarse anger.
“We can’t be sure.”

“I’m sorry, Parker, but I cannot in all sincerity consider this to be a coincidence,” Ione told him.

“I concur,” Lieria said.

“The Confederation, specifically the First Admiral, must be informed immediately,” Ione said. “That goes without question.
The navy must understand that they are not facing Laton himself but something far more serious. Parker, you will act as my
representative in this matter; you have both the authority and knowledge necessary to convey the severity of this reality
dysfunction to the First Admiral.”

He looked shocked at first, then bowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Oski, prepare copies of every Laymil memory we have. The rest of you put down what observations you can for the navy staff,
whatever you think may help. Tranquillity is recalling one of the patrol blackhawks now, it will be ready to leave for Avon
in an hour. I will ask the Confederation Navy office to provide an officer to escort you, Parker, so you had better get ready.
Time is important here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ione Saldana, I also request a blackhawk to convey one of my colleagues home to Jobis,
Lieria said.
I judge these events to be of sufficient portent to warrant informing my race.

Yes, of course.
She was aware of Tranquillity summoning a second armed blackhawk back to the dockingledges even as she acknowledged the Kiint’s
request. All the remaining resident blackhawks would have to be conscripted for patrol duties now, she thought tersely, probably
the independent traders too. Then a stray thought struck.
Lieria, did the Kiint ever hear the skyhavens’ starsong?

Yes.

The finality of the tone stopped Ione from enquiring further. But only for now, she promised herself. I’ve had enough of this
mystic superiority crap they keep peddling. “Kempster, that red mist over Unimeron’s southern continent, was that a part of
the reality dysfunction, do you think? There’s no mention of it being present on Lalonde.”

“Its nature would suggest so,” Kempster said. “I can’t see that it’s a natural phenomenon, not even on that planet. Possibly
a secondary effect, a by-product of the interaction with Unimeron’s life essence, but definitely connected. Wouldn’t you agree,
lad?”

Renato Vella had been lost in deep contemplation ever since he accessed Dr Gilmore’s report. Now he nodded briefly. “Yes,
it is likely.”

“Something on your mind?” the old astronomer asked, his cheerfulness reasserting itself.

“I was just thinking. They could build living space structures that completely encircled their world, yet this reality dysfunction
still defeated them. Their spaceholms were so frightened of it they committed suicide rather than submit. What do you think
is going to happen to us when we confront it?”

“Jesus, what’s all that red gunk in the air? I don’t remember that from the last time we were here. It’s almost as if it’s
glowing. The bloody stuff’s covering the whole of the Juliffe tributary network, look.” Joshua abandoned the
Lady Mac
’s sensor input and turned to Melvyn Ducharme on the acceleration couch next to his.

“Don’t look at me, I’m just a simple fusion engineer. I don’t know anything about meteorology. Try the mercs, they’re all
planet-bred.”

“Humm,” Joshua mused. Relations between the
Lady Mac
’s crew and the mercenary scout team they were carrying hadn’t been exactly optimal during the voyage. Both sides kept pretty
much to themselves, with Kelly Tirrel acting as diplomatic go-between—when she was out of the free-fall sex cage. That girl
had certainly lived up to her side of the bargain, he thought contentedly.

“Anybody care to hazard a guess?” he called.

The rest of the crew on the bridge accessed the images, but no one volunteered an opinion.

Amarisk was slowly turning round into their line of sight as they closed on the planet. Nearly half of the continent was already
in daylight. From where they were, still a hundred thousand kilometres out, the Juliffe and most of its tributaries were smothered
in a nebulous red haze. At first inspection it had looked as though some unique refraction effect was making the water gleam
a bright burgundy. But once the
Lady Mac
’s long-range optical sensors were focused on Lalonde, that notion had quickly been dispelled. The effect was caused by thousands
of long narrow cloud bands in the air above the surface of the water, clinging to the tributary network’s multiple fork pattern
with startling accuracy. Although, Joshua realized, the bands were much broader than the actual rivers themselves; where the
first band started, just inland from the mouth of the Juliffe, it was almost seventy kilometres across.

“I’ve never seen anything like it on any planet,” Ashly said flatly. “Weird stuff; and it is glowing, Joshua. You can see
it stretching beyond the terminator, all the way to the coast.”

“Blood,” Melvyn intoned solemnly. “The river’s awash with blood, and it’s starting to evaporate.”

“Shut it,” Sarha snapped. The idea was too close to the thoughts bubbling round in her own mind. “That’s not funny.”

“Do you think it’s hostile?” Dahybi asked. “Something of Laton’s?”

“I suppose it must be connected with him,” Joshua admitted uneasily. “But even if it is hostile, it can’t harm us at this
distance. It’s strictly lower atmosphere stuff. Which means it may be a hazard for the merc scouts, though. Sarha, tell them
to access the image, please.” They were less likely to insult a woman.

A grumbling Sarha requested a channel to the lounge in capsule C where the seven mercenary scouts and Kelly Tirrel were lying
on acceleration couches as the
Lady Mac
accelerated in towards Lalonde. There was a gruff acknowledgment from her AV pillar, and Joshua grinned in private.

The flight computer alerted him that a coded signal was being transmitted from the
Gemal
. “We’ve detected an unknown atmospheric phenomenon above Amarisk,” Terrance Smith said pedantically.

“Yeah, those red clouds sticking to the tributaries,” Joshua answered. “We see it too. What do you want us to do about it?”

“Nothing yet. As far as we can make out it is simply polluted cloud, presumably coming from the river itself. If a sensor
sweep shows it to be radioactive then we will reassess the landing situation. But until then, proceed as ordered.”

“Aye, aye, Commodore,” Joshua grunted when the channel was closed.

“Polluted cloud,” Melvyn said in contempt.

“Biological warfare,” Ashly suggested in a grieved tone. “Not nice. Typical of Laton, mark you. But definitely not nice.”

“I wonder if it’s his famed proteanic virus?” Dahybi said.

“Doubt it, that was microscopic. And it didn’t glow in the dark, either. I’d say it has to be radioactive dust.”

“Then why isn’t the wind moving it?” Sarha asked. “And how did it form in the first place?”

“We’ll find out in due course,” Warlow said with his usual pessimism. “Why hurry the process?”

“True enough,” Joshua agreed.

The
Lady Mac
was heading in towards the planet at a steady one gee. As soon as each ship in the little fleet had emerged from its final
jump into the Lalonde system, it had accelerated away from the coordinate, the whole fleet spreading out radially at five
gees to avoid presenting an easy target grouping. Now they were holding a roughly circular formation twenty thousand kilometres
wide, with
Gemal
and the cargo ships at the centre.

The six blackhawks were already decelerating into low orbit above Lalonde to perform a preliminary threat assessment. Bloody
show-offs, Joshua thought.
Lady Mac
could easily match their six gee manoeuvres if she wasn’t encumbered with escort duties.

Even with naval tactics programs running in primary mode, Terrance Smith was ever cautious. The lack of any response from
Durringham was extremely bad news, although admittedly half anticipated. What had triggered the fleet commander’s paranoia
was the total absence of any orbital activity. The colonist-carrier starships had gone, along with the cargo ships. The inter-orbit
craft from Kenyon were circling inertly in a five-hundred-kilometre equatorial parking orbit, all systems powered down—even
their navigation beacons, which was contrary to every CAB regulation in the flek. Of the sheriff’s office’s ageing observation
satellite there was no trace. Only the geosynchronous communication platform and civil spaceflight traffic monitoring satellites
remained active, their onboard processors sending out monotonously regular signals. He lacked the transponder interrogation
code to see if the navy ELINT satellites were functional.

After a quick appraisal, Smith had ordered a descent into a thousand-kilometre orbit. His fleet moved in, the combat-capable
starships dumping small satellites in their wake to form an extensive high-orbit gravitonic-distortion-detector network. If
any starship emerged within five hundred thousand kilometres of the planet, the satellites would spot it.

The blackhawks released a quintet of military-grade communication satellites as they raced towards the planet. Ion engines
pushed the comsats into geostationary orbit, positioning them to give complete coverage of the planet, with overlapping reception
footprints covering Amarisk in its entirety.

Twenty thousand kilometres out from Lalonde, the blackhawks split into two groups and swept into a seven-hundred-kilometre
orbit at differing inclinations. Each of them released a batch of fifteen observation satellites, football-sized globes that
decelerated further, lowering themselves into a two-hundred-kilometre orbit; their parallel tracks provided a detailed coverage
sweep over a thousand kilometres wide. The blackhawks themselves, with their powerful sensor blisters augmented by electronic
scanner pods, were integrated into the effort to reconnoitre Durringham and the Juliffe tributary basin. The intention was
to compile a comprehensive survey with a resolution below ten centimetres for the mercenary scouts to use.

“It’s virtually impossible,” Idzerda, the captain of the blackhawk
Cyanea
, told Terrance Smith after the first pass. “That red cloud is completely opaque, except for the edges where it thins out,
and even there the images we’re receiving of the land below are heavily distorted. I’m not even sure cloud is the word for
it. It doesn’t move like cloud should. It’s almost as if a film of electrophorescent cells has been solidified into the air.
Spectrographic analysis is useless with that light it emits. One thing we have noticed; we ran a comparison with the old cartography
memory from the sheriff’s observation satellite which you supplied. The cloud is brightest over towns and villages. Durringham
shines like there’s a star buried under there. There is no way of telling what is going on below it. The only villages we
can even see are the ones furthest up the tributaries where the glow peters out. And they are wrong.”

“Wrong?” Terrance Smith asked.

“Yes. They’re the most recently settled, the most primitive ones, right?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve seen stone houses, gardens, domelike structures, metalled roads, heck, even windmills. None of it was there on the
old images you gave us, and they were only recorded a month ago.”

“That can’t possibly be correct,” Terrance said.

“I know that. So either the whole lot are holograms, or it’s an illusion loaded directly into the observation satellite processors
by this electronic warfare gimmick you warned us about. Although we can’t see how it disrupts the black-hawks’ optical sensors
as well. The people who put up that cloud have got some startlingly potent projection techniques. But why bother? That’s what
we don’t understand. What’s the point of these illusions?”

“What about power emission centres?” Terrance Smith asked. “It must take a lot of energy to generate a covering layer like
that red cloud.”

“We haven’t found any. Even with their electronic jamming we should be able to spot the flux patterns from a medium-sized
fusion generator. But we haven’t.”

“Can you locate the jamming source?” “No, sorry, it’s very diffuse. But it’s definitely ground based. It only affects us and
the satellites when we’re over Amarisk.”

“Is the red cloud radioactive?”

“No. We’re fairly sure of that. No alpha, beta, or gamma emission.”

“What about biological contamination?”

“No data. We haven’t attempted to sample it.”

“Make that your priority,” Terrance said. “I have to know if it’s safe to send the combat scout teams down.”

On its following pass, the
Cyanea
released two atmospheric probes. The vehicles were modified versions of the marque used by planet-survey missions, three-metre
deltawing robots with the central cylindrical fuselage crammed full of biological sampling and analysis equipment.

Both of them pitched up to present their heatshield bellies to the atmosphere, curving down towards the surface as they aerobraked.
Once they had fallen below subsonic velocity, airscoop intake ramps hinged back near the nose, and their compressor engines
whirred into silent life. A preprogrammed flight plan sent them swooping over the first fringes of the red cloud, fifteen
kilometres to the south-east of Durringham. Encrypted data pulsed up to the newly established bracelet of communication satellites.

The air was remarkably clear, with humidity thirty per cent down on Lalonde’s average. Terrance Smith accessed the raw image
from a camera in the nose of one probe. It looked as though it was flying over the surface of a red dwarf star. A red dwarf
with an azure atmosphere. The cloud, or haze—whatever—was completely uniform, as though, finally, an electromagnetic wavefront
had come to rest and achieved mass, then someone had polished it into a ruby surface. There was nothing to focus on, no perspective,
no constituent particles or spores; its intensity was mechanically constant. An optically impenetrable layer floating two
kilometres above the ground. Thickness unknown. Temperature unknown. Radiating entirely in the bottom end of the red spectrum.
“No real clouds anywhere above it,” Joshua murmured. Like most of the fleet’s crews he had accessed the datavise from the
atmospheric probes. Something had bothered him about that lack; ironically, more than the buoyant red blanket itself. “Amarisk
always had clouds.”