She had taken time to get to know all of them reasonably well. So she knew what Reza said wasn’t simple bravado. He had been a Confederation Navy Marine at one time. An officer, she guessed; he wasn’t very forthcoming about that period of his life, nor subsequent contracts as a marshal on various stage one colony planets. But he must have been good at the second oldest profession, money in large quantities had paid for a considerable number of physical enhancements and alterations. Now he was one of the elite. Like a cosmonik, blurring the line between machine and human. The kind of hyper-boosted composite the mundane troops stored in zero-tau on the Gemal aspired to become.

Reza Malin retained a basic humanoid shape, although he was now two metres tall, and proportionally broad. His skin was artificial, a tough neutral grey-blue impact-resistant composite with a built-in chameleon layer. He didn’t bother with clothes any more, and there were no genitalia (rather, no external genitalia, Kelly recorded faithfully). Cybernetic six-finger claws replaced his natural hands. Both forearms were wide, with integral small-calibre gaussrifles, his skeleton rigged to absorb recoil. Like Warlow, his face was incapable of expression. Black glass bubble-shields covered both eyes; the nose was now a flat circular intake which could filter chemical and biological agents. The back and sides of his bald skull were studded with a row of five sensor implants, smooth centimetre-wide ulcerlike bulges.

Despite the lack of expression, she learned a lot from his voice, which was still natural. Reza wasn’t easily flustered. That and a civilized competence, the way the other six followed his orders without question, gave her more confidence than she would otherwise have had in the scouting mission. In the final analysis, she realized, she trusted him with her life.

The spaceplane banked sharply. Kelly was aware of Ashly Hanson focusing the optical sensors on a small river three kilometres below. The silvery water had a curious speckling of white dots.

“What does he think he’s doing?” Pat Halahan asked. The team’s second in command was sitting in the seat next to her. A ranger-scout, as he described himself, slimmer and smaller than Reza, but with the same blue-grey skin, and powerful adipose legs. Each forearm had twin wrists, one for ordinary hands, one a power data socket for plug-ins—weapons or sensors. His senses were all enhanced, with a raised rim of flesh running from the corner of his eyes right around the back of his skull.

“Hey, what’s happening, Ashly?” he called out. Electronic warfare was a thought all the mercenaries were sharing.

“I’m going to land us here,” Ashly said.

“Any particular reason?” Reza Malin asked with quiet authoritativeness. “The surveyed back-up landing site is another seventy kilometres south-east.”

“Listen, anyone who can create that damn cloud can intercept our communications without even trying. They’ll have every site Terrance Smith ever reviewed marked in a big red circle that says ‘hit this’.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Smart man,” Pat Halahan muttered to Kelly. “I wish we’d had him on the Camelot operation. Lost a lot of good people because the general hired too many virgins.”

“Go ahead,” Reza said.

“Thank you,” Ashly sang back. The spaceplane dived steeply, spiralling at an angle which sent Kelly’s stomach pressing up against her collar bones. “Are you quite sure you want to land?” the pilot asked. “You ask me, we’re in way over our heads. Terrance Smith couldn’t organize a gang-bang in a brothel.”

“If Smith is going to beat the invaders, the starships have to know where to hit them,” Reza said. “For that you need us. We always go in at the shit end. It’s what we’re good at.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Don’t worry about us. Ultra-tech never works well in jungle terrain, nature is just too damn messy. And I don’t think I’ve seen many jungles worse than this one. They can probably swat us with some energy blast, even lob a baby-nuke on us if they’re feeling particularly bitchy. But they’ve got to find us first. And rooting us out of that forest wilderness is going to be tricky, I’ll make bloody sure of that. You just make sure you and young Joshua stay intact to pick us up afterwards.”

“If I’m alive, I’ll pick you up.”

“Good, I’ll hold you to that.”

The spaceplane’s yaw angle reversed as it performed an abrupt roll. Kelly clung to the armrests with white knuckles as the webbing shifted its hold around her body. This wasn’t a clean aerodynamic dive, it was a death plummet.

“How you doing, Kell?” Sewell shouted, sounding hugely amused. Sewell was one of the team’s three combat-adept types, and looked it. Standing two metres thirty, his leathery skin matt-black, and woven through with a web of energy absorption/dispersal fibres. His head was virtually globular, a glossy shell that protected his sensors, sitting on a short neck. Trunklike upper arms supported dual elbows; he had attached heavy-calibre gaussrifles to the top joints.

Chuckles went round the cabin. Kelly realized her eyes were tight shut, and forced herself to open them. The spaceplane was shaking.

“You should eat, take your mind off it,” Sewell crowed. “I’ve got some big gooey slices of strawberry creamcake in my pack. Want some?”

“When you were boosted, the doctors wired your neural nanonics to your liver,” she said. “It was one fuck of a lot smarter than your brain, bollockhead.”

Sewell laughed.

A judder ran through the cabin as the wings began to sweep out.

“Irradiate the drop zone, Ashly, please,” Reza said.

“Affirmative.”

“There might be civilians down there,” protested Sal Yong, another of the combat-adepts.

“Doubt it,” Ashly said. “The nearest village is fifty kilometres away.”

“We’re not on a Red Cross mission, Sal,” Reza said.

“Yes, sir.”

The spaceplane twisted again.

Great swaths of maser radiation poured out of the unblemished sky around the small shallow river. Hundreds of birds dropped to the ground or splashed into the water, charred feathers smoking; vennals tumbled from the trees, limbs still twitching; sayce howled briefly as their hides wizened and cracked, then died as their brains broke apart from the intense heat; danderil nibbling at the vegetation collapsed, their long elegant legs buckling as their viscera boiled. The verdant emerald leaves of the trees and vines turned a darker, bruised shade of green. Flowers shrivelled up. Berries and fruit burst open in puffs of steam.

The spaceplane came down fast and level. It actually landed in the river, undercarriage struts crushing the stony bed, nose jutting over the grassy bank. Steam and spray erupted from the water as it was struck by the compressor jets, sending a large circular wave sloshing outwards over the bank.

Sewell and Jalal were first out, the two big combat-adept mercenaries didn’t wait for the aluminium airlock stairs to extend. They jumped down into the lathery water, covering the quiet wilting trees with their gaussrifles, and sprinted ashore. The half-metre depth didn’t even slow them down.

Reza released a couple of aerovettes, ordering them to scan the immediate jungle. The stealthed, disc-shaped aerial combat robots were a metre and a half wide, their central section a curving mesh-grid to protect the wide-cord contra-rotating fans in the middle. Five infrared lasers were mounted around their rim, along with a broad passive-sensor array. They hummed softly and slipped through the air, climbing up to traverse the top of the nearby trees.

Pat Halahan and Theo Connal were second to emerge, following the first two mercenaries ashore. Theo Connal had a short body, one and a half metres tall, boosted for jungle roving. His skin was the same tough chameleon envelope as Reza and Pat, but his legs and arms were disproportionately long. Both feet were equipped with fingers instead of toes. He walked with an apeish stoop. Even his bald head portrayed simian characteristics, with a tiny button nose, squashed circle mouth, and slanted eyes, heavily lidded.