“You’re right,” she said.
“They’re still there,” Will pronounced.
“What?!” Dean said. “You’ve cracked. Nothing could survive that kind of barrage, not even an army assault mechanoid. We blasted those bastards to hell.”
“I’m telling you; they’re still out there,” Will insisted. He sounded nervous. Not like him at all.
His edginess crept in through the comfortable insulation of Jenny’s suit. Listening to him she was half convinced herself. “If someone survived, that’s good,” she said. “I still want that captive for Hiltch. Let’s move out. We’d have to investigate anyway. And we can’t stay here waiting for them to regroup.”
They quickly distributed the remaining ammunition and power cells from their packs, along with basic survival gear. Each of them kept their TIP carbine; Will and Dean shouldered the gaussguns without a word of protest.
Jenny led off at a fast trot across the smouldering remnants of jungle, towards the area they had bombarded with the gaussguns. She felt terribly exposed. The fire had died down, it had nothing left to burn. Away in the distance they could see a few sporadic flames licking at bushes and knots of creeper. They were in the middle of a clearing nearly a kilometre across, the only segment of colour. Everything was black, the remnants of creepers underfoot, tapering ten-metre spikes of trees devoured by natural flames (as opposed to the white stuff the hostiles threw at them), cooked vennals that lay scattered everywhere, other smaller animals, a savagely contorted corpse of one of the horses, even the air was leaden with a seam of fine dusky motes.
She datavised her communication block to open a scrambled channel to Murphy Hewlett. To her surprise, he responded straight away.
“God, Jenny, what’s happened? We couldn’t raise you, then we saw that bloody great fire-fight. Are you all OK?”
“We’re in one piece, but we lost the horses. I think we did some damage to the hostiles.”
“Some damage?”
“Yeah. Murphy, watch out for a kind of white fire. So far they’ve only used it to set the vegetation alight, but our sensors can’t pick up how they direct the bloody stuff. It just comes at you out of nowhere. But they hit you with an electronic warfare field first. My advice is that if your electronics start to go, then lay down a scorch pattern immediately. Flush them away.”
“Christ. What the hell are we up against? First that paddle-boat illusion, now undetectable weapons.”
“I don’t know. Not yet, but I’m going to find out.” She was surprised at her own determination.
“Do you need assistance? It’s a long walk back to the boat.”
“Negative. I don’t think we should join up. Two groups still have a better chance to achieve our objective than one, nothing has changed that.”
“OK, but we’re here if it gets too tough.”
“Thanks. Listen, Murphy, I’m not aiming to stay in this jungle after dark. Hell, we can’t even see them coming at us in the daytime.”
“Now that sounds like the first piece of sensible advice you’ve given today.”
She referred to her neural nanonics. “There are another seven hours of daylight left. I suggest we try and rendezvous back at the Isakore in six hours from now. If we haven’t captured a hostile, or found out what the hell is going down around here, we can review the situation then.”
“I concur.”
“Jenny,” Dean called with soft urgency.
“Call you back,” she told Murphy.
They had reached the edge of the barrage zone. Not even the tree stumps had survived here. Craters overlapped, producing a crumpled landscape of unstable cones and holes; crooked brown roots poked up into the sky from most of the denuded soil slopes. Long strands of steam, like airborne worms, wound slowly around the crumbling protrusions, sliding into the holes to pool at the bottom.
Over on the far side she watched three men emerging from the craters, scrambling sluggishly for solid ground. They helped each other along, wriggling on their bellies when the slippery loam proved impossible to stand on.
Jenny watched their progress in the same kind of bewildered daze which had engulfed her as the fantastical paddle-steamer sailed down the river.
The men reached level ground sixty metres away from the ESA team, and stood up. Two were recognizable colonist types: dungarees, thick cotton work shirts, and woolly beards. The third was dressed in some kind of antique khaki uniform: baggy trousers, calves bound up by strips of yellowish cloth; a brown leather belt round his waist sporting a polished pistol holster; a hemispherical metal hat with a five-centimetre rim.
They couldn’t possibly have survived, Jenny found herself thinking, yet here they were. For one wild second she wondered if the electronic warfare field had won, and was feeding the hallucination directly into her neural nanonics.
The two groups stared at each other for over half a minute.
Jenny’s electronic warfare block reported a build-up of static in the short-range datavise band. It broke the spell. “OK, let’s go get them,” she said.
They started to circle round the edge of the barrage zone. The three men watched them silently.
“Do you want all three?” Will asked.
“No, just one. The soldier must be equipped with the most powerful systems if he can create that kind of chameleon effect. I’d like him if we can manage it.”
“I thought chameleon suits were supposed to blend in,” Dean muttered.
“I’m not even sure we’re seeing men,” Will added. “Maybe the xenocs are disguising themselves. Remember the paddle-steamer.”
Jenny ordered her suit’s laser rangefinder to scan the soldier; its return should reveal the true outline to an accuracy of less than half a millimetre. The blue beam stabbed out from the side of her shell-helmet. But instead of sweeping the soldier, it broke apart a couple of metres in front of him, forming a turquoise haze. After a second the rangefinder module shut down. Her neural nanonics reported the whole unit was inoperative.
“Did you see that?” she asked. They had covered about a third of the distance round the barrage zone.
“I saw it,” Will said brusquely. “It’s a xenoc. Why else would it want to hide its shape?”
The distortion in the datavise band began to increase. Jenny saw the soldier start to unbuckle his holster.
“Stop!” she commanded, her voice booming out of the communication block’s external speaker. “The three of you are under arrest. Put your hands on your head, and don’t move.”
All three men turned fractionally, focusing on her. Her neural nanonics began to report malfunctions in half of her suit’s electronics.
“Screw it! We must break them up, even three of them are too powerful. Will, one round EE, five metres in front of them.”
“That’s too close,” Dean said tensely as Will brought the gaussgun to bear. “You’ll kill them.”
“They survived the first barrage,” Jenny said tonelessly. Will fired. A fountain of loam spurted up into the air, accompanied by a bright blue-white sphere of flame. The blast-wave flattened some of the nearby piles of soil.
Jenny’s neural nanonics reported the electronics coming back on-line. The loam subsided, revealing the three men standing firm. A faint whistle was insinuating itself into the datavise band; her neural nanonics couldn’t filter it out.
“One metre,” she snapped. “Fire.”
The explosion sent them spinning, tottering about for balance. One fell to his knees. For the first time there was a reaction; one of the two farmer-types started snarling and shouting. His face above the beard was black, whether from loam or a flashburn she couldn’t tell.
“Keep firing, keep them apart,” Jenny called to Will. “Come on, run.”
Explosions bloomed around the three men. Will was using the gaussgun the way riot police employed a water cannon, harrying the men as they tried to come together. Blasts that would rip a human to pieces barely affected them, at the most they tumbled backwards to sprawl on the ground. He was tempted to land a round straight on one, just to see what it would do. They scared him.