Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

“Me?”

“You.” Colin watched the protest form and die unvoiced on the younger man’s lips. “I want at least four thousand general troops to re-establish order in Durringham and the immediate counties. And I also want teams of combat scouts for the Quallheim Counties. They are going to have to be the best, because they are going to be assigned the search and destroy mission in the deep jungle. Once they locate the invader’s home base they can zero it for the starships’ weapons. We can pound it from orbit.”

“What sort of armaments are we looking for on these starships?” Terrance asked guardedly.

“Masers, X-ray lasers, particle beams, thermal inducers, kinetic harpoons, and atmospheric penetration nukes—straight fusion, I don’t want any radioactives clogging the environment.” He caught the aide’s eye. “And no antimatter, not under any circumstances.”

Terrance gave a cautious grin. “Thank you.”

“What ships have we got available in orbit right now?”

“That was something I was going to mention,” Terrance said. “The Yaku left its parking orbit this evening. It jumped outsystem.”

“So?”

“Firstly, it was a cargo ship, and only fifty per cent of its cargo had been unloaded. And cargo is the one thing we are still bringing down to the spaceport. It had no reason to leave. Secondly, it had no permission to leave. There was no prior contact with our Civil Flight Control Office. The only reason I found out it had left was because Kelven Solanki got in touch with me to query it. When I checked with flight control to ask why they hadn’t informed us about it, they didn’t even know Yaku had lifted from parking orbit. It turns out someone had erased the traffic-monitor satellite data from the spaceport computer.”

“Why?” Candace asked. “It’s not as if we have anything that could prevent them from leaving.”

“No,” Colin said slowly. “But we could have asked another ship to track it. Without the monitor satellite data we don’t know its jump coordinate, we don’t know where it went.”

“Solanki will have a copy,” Terrance said. “Ralph Hiltch too, I suspect. If he was pressed.”

“That’s all we need, another bloody puzzle,” Colin said. “See what you can find out,” he told Candace.

“Yes, sir.”

“Back to the original question. What other ships are available?”

Terrance consulted his neural nanonics. “There are eight left in orbit; three cargo ships, the rest colonist-carriers. And we’re due for another two colonist-carriers this week, as well as a Tyrathca merchant ship sometime before the end of the month to check on their farmers.”

“Don’t remind me,” Colin said sorely.

“I think the Gemal would be the best bet. That only has forty Ivets left in zero-tau. They can be transferred to the Tachad or the Martijn , both of them have spare zero-tau pods. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

“Get onto it tonight,” Colin said. “And, Candace, that means the spaceport has to be defended at all costs. We have to be able get those troops down in the McBoeings. There’s nowhere else for them to land. The scouts can use VTOLs to take them direct to the Quallheim Counties, but the rest will have to use the McBoeings.”

“Yes, sir, I am aware of that.”

“Good, start organizing for it, then. Terrance, I want you back here in ten days. Give me one month, and I’ll have these bastards begging me for surrender terms.”

The gaussgun’s fragmentation round hit the man full in his chest, and penetrated to a depth of ten centimetres, already starting to crater the flesh, impact shock pulverizing the entire mass of organs held within his rib cage to mucilaginous jelly. Then it exploded, silicone shrapnel reducing the entire body to a spherical cascade of scarlet cells.

Will Danza grunted in acute satisfaction. “Try rebuilding yourself out of that, my xenoc friend,” he told the slippery red leaves.

The hostiles were impervious to almost any major injury. The little ESA team had found that out long ago. Gaping lacerations, severed limbs—they barely slowed the hostiles down as they emerged from the thick bushes to harass the party. Wounds closed up, bones knitted in seconds. Lieutenant Je

Twice in the last three kilometres Je

“Hey!” Dean yelled. “Get back here!”

Je

“Mine,” she called. Her blue TIP carbine targeting graphic centred on a tree five metres ahead of the ru

The three of them trotted over where he lay sprawled in the crushed muddy vines.

“What happened?” Je

Dean held up the zipcuff. It was unbroken. “I saw a hostile,” he said. “I only turned away for a second.”

“OK,” Je

Gerald Skibbow laughed. “You don’t have that much time available, Madame bitch.”

She straightened up. Her spine creaked and groaned as if she was a hundred and fifty. She felt older. The fire was crackling loudly in the surrounding bushes, flames inhibited by the green twigs.

It was another four kilometres back to the Isakore , and the jungle was becoming progressively thicker. Vines here wrapped the trees like major arteries, creating a solid hurdle of verdant mesh between the trunks. Visibility was down to less than twenty-five metres, and that was with enhanced senses.

We’re not going to make it, she realized.

They’d been expending gaussgun ammunition at a heavy rate ever since they set off. They had to, nothing else worked against the hostiles. Even the two TIP carbines were down to forty per cent of their power reserve. “Get him up,” she ordered curtly.

Will clamped an arm round Gerald Skibbow’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet.

White fire burst out of the ground around Je

Will and Dean started firing their gaussguns at random into the blank impassive jungle in the vain hope of hitting a hostile. EE projectiles mashed the nearby trees. Shreds of sappy vegetation whirred through the air, forming a loose curtain behind which vivid explosions boomed.

The viscid beads of white fire evaporated as they reached Je