Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  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.

  Myoho and its blackhawk disappeared from the display. Granth and Ilex both fired a volley of combat wasps at their respective prey.

  Haria ’s masers began to fire as the remaining submunitions closed on it. Small vivid explosions peppered nearby space. Rail guns thumped out a stream of steel spheres which formed a last-ditch kinetic umbrella. Eight surviving submunitions drones detected it, three of them were gamma-pulse lasers. A second before they struck the umbrella they fired.

  Large oval sections of the frigate’s hull turned cherry red under the radiation assault. Molecular-binding generators maxed out as they fought to keep the monobonded silicon’s structure intact. The energy-dispersal web below the silicon struggled to absorb and redistribute the intense influx. All the sensor clusters either melted or had their electronics burnt out by the gamma-ray deluge. Replacement clusters rose immediately; but the starship was blind for a period of three seconds.

  In that time the remaining five submunitions hit the kinetic umbrella. They disintegrated instantly, but hypervelocity fragments kept coming. With the sensors unable to see them and direct the frigate’s close-range weapons they struck the hull and vaporized. The binding generators, already heavily stressed, couldn’t handle the additional loading. There were half a dozen localized punctures. Fists of plasma punched inwards. Internal systems melted and fused as they were exposed. Fuel tanks ripped open sending hundred-metre fountains of vaporizing deuterium shooting out.

  “Bellah , assist, please,” Commander Kroeber ordered. “Rescue and recovery.” The stricken frigate’s emergency beacon was howling across the distress bands. The life-support capsules should have easily withstood the strike. Even as he requested more information from the computer the sensor image showed him ion thrusters firing to slow the frigate’s wayward tumble.

  With all of their combat-wasp stocks exhausted in the first salvo, Datura and Cereus were left with only short-range masers to defend themselves against the assault from the frigates’ drones. The electronic warfare barrage was unrelenting as the drones closed at twenty gees, defeating the starships’ sensors. The two mercenary starships exploded within seconds of each other.

  A cheer went round the Arikara ’s bridge. Meredith felt like joining in.

  “Admiral, another blackhawk is leaving orbit,” Lieutenant Rhoecus said.

  Meredith cursed, he really couldn’t spare another voidhawk. A quick check on the tactical display revealed little information, the blackhawk was on the other side of Lalonde from the squadron. “Which is the nearest voidhawk?”

  “The Acacia , Admiral.”

  “Can they hit it with combat wasps?”

  “They have a launch window, but estimate only a thirty per cent chance of success.”

  “Tell them to launch, but remain in orbit.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Bellah reports survivors from the Haria have been detected, Admiral,” Commander Kroeber said. “They’re matching velocities.”

  “Good. Hinnels, has there been any reaction from the Juliffe cloud bands?”

  “Nothing specific, sir. But they’ve been growing wider at a constant rate, the area they’re covering has increased by one and a half per cent since we arrived. It adds up to a respectable volume.”

  Another combat-wasp battle raged high above Lalonde’s terminator as the drones from the Granth encountered defences fired by their prey. Then the blackhawk vanished down a wormhole interstice. Three seconds later Granth followed.

  “Damn,” Meredith muttered.

  But the Ilex was having better luck. Its combat-wasp salvo had forced the blackhawk it was chasing to flee back down towards the planet.

  The Admiral requested a channel to the Gemal . “We shall be boarding you first, Smith. Any resistance and the marines will shoot to kill, understood?”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Terrance Smith replied.

  “Have you received any updates from the teams you landed?”

  “Not yet. I expect most of them were sequestrated,” he added gloomily.

  “Tough. I want you to broadcast a message that their mission is over. We will pick up any survivors if at all possible. But none of them is to attempt to penetrate under the cloud, no hunting of enemy bases. This is now a Confederation Navy problem. I don’t want the invaders antagonized unduly.” Not while my squadron is so close to that bloody cloud, he finished silently. It was the sheer quantity of power involved again. Frightening. And the berserk way the hijacked ships were behaving didn’t help.

  “I’m not sure I can guarantee that, Admiral,” Smith said.

  “Why not?”

  “I issued the team leaders with kiloton nukes. It would give them a fall-back in case the starships were unable to provide strike power. I was worried the captains might balk at bombarding a planetary surface.”

  If it hadn’t been for the fierce gee force Meredith would have put his head in his hands. “Smith, if you get out of this with your life, it won’t be on my account.”

  “Well, fuck you!” Terrance Smith yelled. “You Saldana bastard, why do you think I had to hire these people in the first place? It’s because Lalonde is too poor to rate decent navy protection. Where were you when the invaders landed? You would never have come to help us put down that first insurrection, because it didn’t affect your precious financial interests. Money, that’s what you shits respect. What the hell would you know about ordinary people suffering? You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth that’s so big it’s sticking out through your arse. The only reason you’re here now is because you’re frightened the invasion might spread to worlds you own, that it might hit your credit balance. I’m doing what I can for my people.”

  “And that includes nuking them, does it?” Meredith asked. He’d b
een subject to anti-Saldana bigotry for so long now the insults never even registered. “They’re sequestrated, you cretin, they don’t even know they’re your people any more. This invasion isn’t going to be beaten by brute force. Now, you will broadcast that message, make the mercenary teams turn back.”

  The tactical display sounded an alarm. A broad fan of curving purple vector lines were rising high over Wyman, Lalonde’s small arctic continent. Someone behind the planet had launched a salvo of fifty-five combat wasps.

  “My God,” Meredith muttered. “Lowie, what are they aimed at?”

  “Unclear, Admiral. There is no single target, it’s a rogue salvo. But from the vectors I’d say they were seeking to engage anything in the thousand-kilometre orbit . . . Bloody hell.”

  A second salvo, of equal size, was curving round the south pole.

  “Jesus, that’s a neat pincer movement,” Joshua said. At some ridiculous private level he was delighted he didn’t need any intervention from his neural nanonics to remain calm. He felt his mind function with that same cool reserve which had manifested itself back in the Ruin Ring when Neeves and Sipika appeared.

  This is me, what I am: a starship captain.

  The Lady Mac ’s three fusion drives came on almost without conscious thought. “Stand by for combat gees,” he warned.

  “How many?” Sarha asked nervously.

  “How high is up?”

  Other starships were getting under way, retracting their thermo-dump panels. Three of them launched combat wasps in a defensive cluster formation.

  “Remain in orbit,” Smith ordered over the command net. “The navy squadron will provide us with protective cover from the salvo.”

  “Like bollocks they will,” Joshua said. The squadron was still four minutes from orbital injection. A sensor scan revealed blackhawks and voidhawks alike racing up for a higher altitude; the slower Adamist starships were following, with three exceptions, Gemal one of them.

  The gee force in Lady Mac ’s bridge passed five gees. Ashly groaned in dismay. “My bones can’t take this.”