Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

“We can help you,” silver voices whispered in chorus.

“What?” she asked, disorientated. She sat on the lumpy ground to take the strain off her legs. Her trembling muscles had been about to dump her there anyway.

“You all right, Je

“Did you say something?”

“Yes, are you OK?”

“I . . .” I’m hearing things. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“First thing you have to do is get a medical nanonic package on those legs. I think there’s enough,” he said, uncertainty clouding his voice.

Je

“We ain’t going to leave you,” Will said hotly.

She gri

“What then?” Will demanded.

Je

“I think I can see why,” Dean said. He pointed at the treetops. “Smoke, and plenty of it. South of here. Some distance by the look of it. They must have laid down a sweep-scorch pattern. They got troubles, too.”

Je

“Right.” Will fired six EE rounds into the jungle then hurriedly detached his backpack and tossed it over. He was back watching the abused trees before it reached her.

She ordered her communications block to open a cha

“Will, Dean, open a cha

The communication block reported the cha

“What’s happening?” Ralph Hiltch asked.

“Trouble—” Je

“OK, Je

“No problem,” Will said. He sounded indecently cheerful.

“Are you secure where you are?” Ralph asked.

“Our security situation wouldn’t change if we moved,” Je

“OK, I’ve got your coordinates. Use your TIP carbines to scorch a clearing at least fifty metres across. I’ll need it for a landing-zone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m on my way.”

Je

The captain of the Ekwan was a middle-aged woman in a blue ship-suit, with the kind of robust, lanky figure that suggested she was from a space-adapted geneered family. The AV projector showed her floating ten centimetres above the acceleration couch in her compact cabin. “How did you know we were leaving orbit?” she asked. Her voice was slightly distorted by a curious whistle that was coming through the relay from the LDC’s geosynchronous communication platform.

Graeme Nicholson smiled thinly at her puzzled tone. He diverted his eyes from the projection for a second. On the other side of Durringham spaceport’s flight control centre Langly Bradburn rolled his eyes and turned back to his monitor console.

“I have a contact in the Kulu Embassy,” Graeme said, returning to the projection.

“This isn’t a commercial flight,” the captain said, a fair amount of resentment bubbling into her voice.

“I know.” Graeme had heard of the Kulu Ambassador throwing his authority around and virtually commandeering the Kulu-registered colonist-carrier. A situation which became even more interesting when he discovered from Langly that it was Cathal Fitzgerald who was in orbit making sure the captain did as she was told. Cathal Fitzgerald was one of Ralph Hiltch’s people. And now, as Graeme looked through the flight control centre’s window, he could see a queue of people standing on the nearby hangar apron, shoulders angled against the rain as they embarked on a passenger McBoeing BDA-9008. The entire embassy staff and dependants. “But it is only one memory flek,” he said wi

“I haven’t been told where we’re going yet.”

“We have offices in every Confederation system. And it would be a personal favour,” Graeme emphasized.

There was a pause as the captain worked out that she would receive the entire carriage fee herself. “Very well, Mr. Nicholson. Give it to the McBoeing pilot, I’ll meet him when he docks.”

“Thank you, Captain, pleasure doing business with you.”

“I thought you sent a flek out with the Gemal this morning?” Langly observed as Graeme switched off the metre-high projection pillar.

“I did, old boy. Just covering my back.”

“Are people really going to be interested in a riot on Lalonde? Nobody even knows this planet even exists.”

“They will. Oh, indeed they will.”

Rain slammed against the little spaceplane’s fuselage as it dived out through the bottom of the clouds. It made a fast rattling sound against the tough silicolithium-composite skin. Individual drops burst into streaks of steam, vaporized by the friction heat of the craft’s Mach five velocity.

Looking over the pilot’s shoulder Ralph Hiltch saw the jungle blurring past below. It was grey-green, sprinkled by flexuous strands of mist. Up ahead was a broad band of brighter grey where the clouds ended, and getting broader.

“Ninety seconds,” Kieron Syson, the pilot, shouted over the noise.

A loud metallic whirring filled the small cabin as the wings began to swing forward. The spaceplane pitched up at a sharp angle, and the noise of the rain impacts increased until talking was impossible. Deceleration hit three gees, forcing Ralph back into one of the cabin’s six plastic seats.

Sunlight burst into the cabin with a fast rainbow flash. The sound of the rain vanished. They levelled out as their speed dropped to subsonic.

“We’ll need a complete structure fatigue check after this,” Kieron Syson complained. “Nobody flies supersonic through rain, half the leading edges have abraded down to their safety margins.”