The Night's Dawn Trilogy (137 page)

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.