<> In case anything happens and we don’t get back, that way they’ll have some record—but she tried not to think that. She ordered her communication block to open a channel to the naval ELINT satellite. The unit had a bitek processor, so the conversation wouldn’t be audible.
<> she told the navy commander.
<> Kelven Solanki asked.
<>
<>
<> She wormed her way forward through the tangle of long grass and creepers, avoiding the bushes. Darcy was a metre to her left. It had been a long time since her last fieldcraft training session, she was moderately pleased by how little noise she was making.
<> Darcy said. <>
<>
Lori pressed the twigs of a low-hanging branch to the ground, and slithered over them. There was the trunk of a large mayope four metres ahead, its roots sloping up out of the soil. Light from the fires fluoresced the bark to a lurid topaz.
The list of sheriffs streamed into her mind; facts, figures, and profiles, most importantly the holograms. Mirages of seventy men shimmered over the vapid low-light image of Ozark. Lori reached the mayope trunk and looked out over the lines of seedy cabins, trying to match the visual patterns in her mind with what she could see.
<> Darcy said. His mind indicated one of the men squatting in a circle of people around a fire. Some kind of animal carcass was roasting above the flames.
<> Lori indicated.
They swiftly located a further twelve sheriffs at various fires.
<> she said.
<> Kelven Solanki asked.
<> Darcy said. <>
The bitek processor in Lori’s back-up communication block reported a power loss in the unit’s electron-matrix crystal. She automatically ordered the reserve crystal to be brought on line, the thought was virtually subconscious.
<> Lori said. <>
<> The mimetic governor circuitry on Darcy’s chameleon suit indicated a databus glitch in his right leg; alternative channels were brought on line by the master processor.
<> Lori evinced a five-room building standing apart from the others. It was a hundred and twenty metres from the edge of the jungle, but the intervening ground was mostly allotments, providing as much cover as the trees. She took an image enhancer out of a pouch on her waist, and brought it up to her eyes. <>
Darcy’s chemical/biological agent detector shut down. <> he said in consternation. <>
Darcy felt his affinity link with his maser carbine’s controlling processor vanish. When he looked at the gun its LCD display panel was dead. <>
<>
He twisted round to see five people standing in a semicircle right-behind them. One woman, four men. All of them with strange placid smiles; dressed like settlers in denim trousers and cotton shirts, the men with thick beards. Even with shock paralysing his nerves he retained enough presence of mind to glance at his own arm. Infrared showed him a faint pink outline, but low-light simply revealed long blades of grass. The chameleon circuitry was still functional.
“Shit!” <> The hardware units he wore round his waist were all failing in rapid succession, affinity filling his mind with processor caution warnings. They started to wink out. There was no reply from Kelven Solanki.
“You must be the pair Laton called,” one of the men said. He looked from Lori to Darcy. “You can get up now.”
The power supply to Lori’s chameleon suit ebbed to nothing, and the fabric reverted to its natural dull grey. She rolled to one side and stood in one smooth motion. Implant glands were feeding a gutsy brew of hormones into her blood supply, hyping her muscles. She dropped both her maser carbine and the image enhancer, freeing her hands. Five wouldn’t be a problem. “Where do you come from?” she asked. “I’m talking to you that’s in charge of them. Is your origin in your memory?”
“You’re an atheist,” the woman replied. “It would be kinder to spare you the answer.”
<> Darcy said.
Lori stepped forwards, turning, arms and legs moving fast. Left ankle swinging into the man’s kneecap with her full bodyweight behind it—satisfying crackle of breaking bone; right hand chopping the woman’s larynx, slamming her Adam’s apple into her vertebrae. Darcy was wreaking similar mayhem on his targets. Lori spun round on one foot, left leg kicking out again, back arching supplely, and her boot’s toecap caught a man just below and behind his ear, splitting his skull.
Hands gripped at her arms from behind. Lori yelped in shock. Nobody should be there. But reflexes took over, a fast back-kick which connected with a thigh, and she completed the turn with her arms locking into a defensive posture in time to see the woman staggering back. She blinked in incomprehension. The woman had blood pouring out of her mouth, her throat was severely disfigured from the first blow. As she watched, the skin inflated out, Adam’s apple reappearing. The gush of blood stopped.
<>
The two men Darcy had knocked over were regaining their feet. One had a shattered shin bone, its jagged end protruding from the flesh just below his knee; he stood on it and walked forwards.
<> Darcy ordered. The first of the men was reaching for him, the side of his face caved in where Darcy’s boot had impacted, eyeball mashed in its socket, shedding tears of syrupy yellow fluid, but still smiling. He deliberately stepped inside the groping embrace, bringing his hands up, fingers wide, and clamping his palms on either side of the man’s head. The long cords of eel-derived electroplaque cells buried in his forearms discharged through organic conductors that emerged from his fingertips in the form of tiny warts. The man’s head was crowned with a blinding flare of purple-white static accompanied by a gunshot crack as the full two-thousand-volt charge slammed into his brain.
A vicious tingling erupted across Darcy’s hands as some of the current leaked through the subcutaneous insulation. But the effect on the man was like nothing Darcy had ever seen before. The discharge should have felled him instantly, nothing living could withstand that much electricity.
Instead he lurched backwards clutching at his mangled head, emitting a soprano keening. His skin began to glow, shining brighter and brighter.
The shirt and jeans flamed briefly
, falling away from the incandescent body as blackened petals. Darcy shielded his eyes with his hand. There was no heat, he realized, with a light so bright he ought to feel a scorch wave breaking across his chameleon suit. The man had become translucent now, so powerful was the surge of photons, revealing bones and veins and organs as deep scarlet and purple shadows. Their solidity dissolved, as if they were different coloured gases caught in a hurricane. He managed one last wretched wail as his body gave a massive epileptic spasm.
The light snuffed out, and the man fell flat on his face.
The other four assailants began to howl. Lori had heard a dog lamenting the death of its master once; their voices had that same bitter resentful grieving. She realized some of her hardware units were coming back on-line, the disruption effect was abating. Her chameleon suit circuitry sent psychedelic scarlet and green fireworks zipping over the fabric.
“Kelven!” she shouted desperately.
Alone in his darkened office a thousand kilometres away Kelven Solanki jerked to attention behind his desk as her static-jarred voice crashed into his neural nanonics.
“Kelven, he was right, Laton was right, there is some kind of energy field involved. It interfaces with matter somehow, controls it. You can beat it with electricity. Sometimes. Hell, she’s getting up again.”
Darcy’s voice broke in. “Run! Now!”
“Don’t let them gang up on you, Kelven. They’re powerful when they group together. It’s got to be xenocs.”
“Shit, the whole village is swarming after us,” Darcy called.
Static roared along the satellite link like a rogue binary blitzkrieg, making Kelven wince.
“Kelven, you must quarantine ...” Lori never finished, her signal drowning below the deluge of rampaging whines and hisses. Then the racket ended.
TRANSPONDER SIGNAL DISCONTINUED, the computer printed neatly on Kelven’s desk screen.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come up here, didn’t I?” Gail Buchannan said. “Plain as day, I said no, I said you can’t trust Edenists. But you wouldn’t listen. Oh no. They just waved their fancy credit disk in front of your eyes, and you rolled over like a wet puppy. It’s worse than when she was on board.”
Sitting on the other side of the galley’s table, Len covered his eyes with his hands. The diatribes didn’t bother him much now, he had learnt to filter them out years ago. Perhaps it was one of the reasons they had stayed together so long, not from attraction, simply because they ignored each other ninety per cent of the time. He had taken to thinking about such things recently, since Marie had left.
“Is there any coffee left?” he asked.
Gail never even glanced up from her knitting needles. “In the pot. You’re as lazy as she was.”
“Marie wasn’t lazy.” He got up and walked over to the electric hotplate where the coffee-pot was resting.
“Oh, it’s Marie now, is it? I bet you can’t name ten of the others we ferried downriver.”
He poured half a mug of coffee and sat back down. “Neither can you.”
She actually stopped knitting. “Lennie, for God’s sake, none of them had this effect on you. Look at what’s happened to us, to the boat. What was so special about her? There must have been over a hundred brides in that bunk of yours down the years.”
Len glanced up in surprise. With her bloated features rendering her face almost expressionless it was difficult to know what went on behind his wife’s eyes, but he could tell how confused she was. He dropped his gaze to the steaming mug, and blew on it absently. “I don’t know.”
Gail grunted, and resumed her knitting.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” he said. “It’s late, and we ought to stay awake in shifts.”
“If you hadn’t been so eager to come here we wouldn’t have to mess our routine up.”
Arguing just wasn’t worth the effort. “Well, we’re here now. I’ll keep watch until midmorning.”
“Those damn Ivets. I hope Rexrew has every one of them shot.”
The lighting panel screwed into the galley’s ceiling began to dim. Len gave it a puzzled glance; all the boat’s electrical systems ran off the big electron-matrix crystals in the engine-room, and they were always kept fully charged. If nothing else, he did keep the boat’s machinery in good order. Point of honour, that was.
Someone stepped onto the Coogan’s deck between the wheel-house and the long cabin. It was only the slightest sound, but Len and Gail both looked up sharply, meeting each other’s gaze.
A young-looking teenage lad walked into the galley. Len saw he was wearing a sheriff’s beige-coloured jungle jacket, the name Yuri Wilken printed on the left breast. Darcy had told him about the invaders using sequestration techniques. At the time he’d listened cynically; now he was prepared to believe utterly. There was a vicious wound on the lad’s throat, long scars of red tender skin all knotted up. A huge ribbon of dried blood ran down the front of his sleeveless shirt. He wore the kind of dazed expression belonging to the very drunk.
“Get off my boat,” Len growled.
Yuri Wilken parted his mouth in a parody of a smile. Liquid rasps emerged as he tried to speak. The lighting panel was flashing on and off at high frequency.
Len stood up and calmly walked over to the long counter fitted along the starboard wall.
“Sit,” Yuri grated. His hand closed on Gail’s shoulder. There was a sizzling sound, and her dress strap ignited, sending licks of yellow flame curling round his fingers. His skin remained completely unblemished.
Gail let out an anguished groan at the pain, her mouth yawning open.
Wisps of blue smoke were rising from below Yuri’s hand as her skin was roasted. “Sit or she’s dead.”
Len opened the top drawer next to the fridge, and pulled out the 9mm, semi-automatic pistol he kept for emergencies. He never had trusted lasers and magnetic rifles, not exposed to the Juliffe’s corrosive humidity. If anyone came aboard looking for trouble after a deal went sour, or a village got worked up about prices, he wanted something that would be guaranteed to work first time.
He flicked the safety catch off, and swung the heavy blue-black gun around to point at Yuri.
“No,” the lad’s malaised voice croaked. He brought his hands up in front of his face, cowering back.
Len fired. The first bullet caught Yuri on his shoulder, spinning him round and pushing him into the wall. Yuri snarled, furious eyes glaring at him. The second was aimed at Yuri’s heart. It hit his sternum and the planks behind him were splashed with crimson as two of his ribs were blown apart. He began to slide down the wall, breath hissing through feral teeth. The lighting panel jumped up to its full brightness.
Len watched with numb dismay as the shoulder wound closed up. Yuri squirmed round, trying to regain his feet with slow tenacity. He grinned evilly. The grip on the pistol was growing alarmingly warm inside Len’s hand.
“Kill him, Lennie!” Gail shouted. “Kill, kill!”
Feeling preternaturally calm, Len took aim at the lad’s head and squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The first punched Yuri’s nose into his skull, ripping through his brain. He sucked air in, warbling frantically. Blood and gore slurped out of the hole. The second shot caught the right side of his temple, driving splinters of bone into the wood behind like a flight of Stone Age darts. His feet began to drum on the deck.
Len was seeing it through a cold mist. The punished, mutilated body just refused to give up. He yelled a wordless curse, finger tugging back again and again.
The pistol was clicking uselessly, its magazine empty. He blinked, trying to pull the world back into focus. Yuri had finally fallen still, there was very little left of his head. Len turned aside, grasping the side of the basin for support as a flush of nausea travelled through him. Gail was whimpering softly, a hand stroking the terrible blisters and long blackened burn marks that mottled her shoulder.
He went over and cradled her head with a tenderness he hadn’t shown in years.
; “Get us out of here,” she pleaded. “Please, Lennie.”
“Darcy and Lori ...”
“Us, Lennie. Get us out of here. You don’t think they’re going to live through tonight, do you?”
He licked his lips, making up his mind. “No.” He brought her the first aid kit and applied a small anaesthetic patch to her shoulder. She let out a blissful little sigh as it discharged.
“You go start the engines,” she said. “I’ll see to this. I’ve never held you back yet.” She started to rummage through the kit box, hunting for a medical nanonic package.
Len went out onto the deck and untied the silicon-fibre cables mooring the Coogan, slinging the ends over the side. They were expensive, and hard to come by, but it would take another quarter of an hour if he went stumbling round the banks coiling them all up properly.
The furnace was quite cool, but the electron-matrix crystals had enough power to take Coogan an easy seventy kilometres downstream before they were drained. He started the motors, shoving the trader boat out from under the lacework awning of cut branches veiling it from casual eyes. As if there were any of those left on the river, he mused.
Getting underway was a miraculous morale booster. Alone on the lively Zamjan amid the first tinges of dawn’s grey light he could almost believe they were trading again. Simple times, watching the wheel-house’s basic instrumentation, and enjoying the prospect of milking another batch of dumb dreamers at the next village. He even managed to keep his mind from the macabre corpse in the galley.
They had gone six kilometres almost due west, helped by the broad river’s swift current, when Len saw two dark smudges on the water up ahead.
Swithland and Hycel were steaming towards him. A great cleft had been made in the Swithland’s prow, and the superstructure was leaning over at a hellish angle; but neither seemed to be affecting her speed.
The short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector let out a bleep, then the general contact band came on. “Hoi there, Captain Buchannan, this is the Hycel. Reduce speed and prepare to come alongside.”