Brendon couldn’t keep his attention away from the red cloud. He was piloting the spaceplane from the Villeneuve’s Revenge , taking the six-strong mercenary scout team down to their designated drop zone a hundred kilometres east of Durringham. The cloud had been visible to the forward sensors when they were still six hundred kilometres offshore. From there it hadn’t been so bad, a colossal meteorological marvel. Now though, up close, the sheer size was intimidating him badly. The thought that some entity had constructed it, deliberately built a lightway of water vapour in the sky, was acutely disconcerting. It hung twenty kilometres off the starboard wing, inert and immutable. Far ahead he could just see the first fork as it split to follow one of the tributaries. That more than anything betrayed its artificiality, the fact that it had intent.

As the spaceplane eased down level with it he could see the land underneath. Unbroken jungle, but dark, tinted a deep maroon.

“It’s blocking a lot of light under there,” said Chas Paske, the mercenary team’s leader.

“Oui,” Brendon agreed, without looking round. “The computer estimates it’s about eight metres thick at the edge, getting thicker deeper in, though,” he reported. “Probably three or four hundred metres at the centre, over the river itself.”

“What about the electronic warfare field?”

“It’s there all right, I’m having some trouble with the flight control processors, and the communication channel is suffering from interference, the bit rate is way down.”

“As long as we can transmit the coordinates for the starships to bombard,” Chas Paske said. “That’s all we need.”

“Oui. Landing in three minutes.”

The spaceplane was approaching the natural clearing they had chosen. Brendon checked with the blackhawks, which were still supervising the observation. He was assured there was no human activity within at least two kilometres of the clearing.

Qualtook and baby giganteas ringed their allocated landing site. Inside them, burnt and broken stumps were still visible through the mantle of vines, evidence of the fire which had raged decades ago. The spaceplane nosed its way cautiously over the edge of the trees, as if afraid of what it might find. Birds took to the air in dismay at the huge predator shape and the clarion squealing it emitted. A radar pulse slashed across the ground, slicing straight through the vine leaves to uncover the extent of the stumps. Landing struts unfolded from the fuselage, and after a minute of jostling to avoid the more hazardous protrusions it settled gently on the ground, compressor nozzles blasting dusty fountains of dead leaves and twigs into the air.

Even as silence stole back into the clearing the outer airlock hatch was opening. Chas Paske led his team out. Five disc-shaped aerovettes swooped into the sky, rim-mounted sensors probing the encircling jungle for motion or infrared signatures.

The mercenaries began to unload their equipment from the open belly holds. They were all boosted, their appearance way outside the human norm. Chas Paske was bigger than any cosmonik, his synthetic skin the colour of weather-worn stone. He didn’t bother with clothes other than weapon belts and equipment straps.

“Hurry it up,” Brendon said. “The jamming is getting worse, I can hardly get a signal through to the satellites.”

Pods and cases began to accumulate on the battered carpet of vines. Chas was hauling down a portable zero-tau pod containing an affinity-bonded eagle when an aerovette datavised him that there was a movement among the trees. He picked up a gaussrifle. The aerovette was hovering a metre over the trees, providing him an image of heads bobbing about through the undergrowth. Nine of them, making no attempt to hide.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice shouted.

The mercenaries were fanning out, positioning the aerovettes to provide maximum coverage.

“The blackhawks said there was no one here,” Chas Paske said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“It’s the optical distortion,” Brendon replied. “It’s worse than we thought.”

The woman emerged into the clearing. She shouted again and waved. More people came out of the trees behind her, women and a couple of boys in their early teens. All of them in dirty clothes.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said as she hurried over to Chas. “We waited and waited. It’s terrible back there.”

“Hold it,” Chas said.

She didn’t hear him, or ignored him. Looking down to pick her way over thick tangles of vines. “Take us away. Up to the starships, anywhere. But get us off this planet.”

“Who the hell are you? Where do you come from?” At the back of his mind Chas thought how odd it was that his appearance didn’t affect her. People normally showed at least some doubt when they saw his size and shape. This woman didn’t.

His neural nanonics cautioned him that the gaussrifle’s targeting processor was malfunctioning. “Stop,” he bellowed when she was six metres away. “We can’t take any chances; you may have been sequestrated. Now, where are you from?”

She jerked to a halt at the volume he poured into his voice. “We’re from the village,” she said, slightly breathless. “There’s a whole group of them devils back there.”

“Where?”

The woman took another pace forward and pointed over her shoulder. “There.” Another step. “Please, you must help us.” Her haggard face was imploring.

All five aerovettes fell out of the sky. The ground below Chas Paske’s feet began to split open with a wet tearing sound, revealing a long fissure from which bright white light shone upwards. Neural nanonics overrode all natural human feelings of panic, enforcing a smooth threat response from his body. He jumped aside, landing beside the smiling woman. She hit him.

Terrance Smith had lost contact with three of the eleven spaceplanes which had landed, and the remaining three in the air were approaching the Quallheim Counties. The observation satellites were unable to provide much information on the fate of those that had been silenced, the images they produced of the drop zones were decaying by the minute. None of them had crashed, though, the blackout had come after they landed. Encouraged by his tactics program, which estimated forty per cent losses at the first landing attempt, Terrance assumed the worst, and contacted the last three spaceplanes.

“Change your principal drop zone to one of the back-ups,” he ordered. “I want you to land at least a hundred and fifty kilometres from the red cloud.”

“It’s moving!” Oliver Llewelyn shouted as Terrance was receiving acknowledgements from the pilots.

“What is?”

“The red cloud.”

Terrance opened a channel to the processor array which was correlating the observation satellite images. Whorls and curlicues were rippling along the edges of the red bands, flat streamers, kilometres long, were shooting out horizontally, like solar prominences. The eerie symmetry of the velvet-textured clouds was rupturing, their albedo fluctuating as vast serpentine shadows skated erratically from side to side.

“It knows we’re here,” Oliver Llewelyn said. “We’ve agitated it.”

For one brutally nasty second Terrance Smith had the idea that the massive formation of forking cloud bands was alive, a gas-giant entity that had migrated across interplanetary space from Murora. Damn it, the thing did resemble the kind of convoluted storm braids which curled and clashed in week-long hostilities among the hydrogen and frozen ammonia crystals of gas-giant atmospheres. “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Something is deliberately causing those disturbances. This may be our best chance yet to discover how they shape that thing. Get onto the blackhawk captains, I want every sensor we have available focused on it. There has to be some kind of energy modulation going on down there. Something has to register on some spectrum we’re covering.”