“Here, Madeleine. Erick, you wonderful crazy Anglo . You got them, do you hear me? You got them!”

“Mesh the infuser with his carotid.”

“It was magnificent. Pull one little lever and all of them, baboom , dead.”

“Shit. Desmond, slap a nanonic package on that stump, the epithelium membrane isn’t strong enough, he’s leaking plasma everywhere.”

“His lungs are filling up too, they must be ruptured. Up the oxidization factor. His brain is still showing electrical activity.”

“It is? Oh, thank God.”

“Erick, don’t try and datavise. We’ve got you. We won’t let you go.”

“Do you want to put him in zero-tau?”

“Hell, yes. We’re days from a decent hospital. Just let me try and get him stabilized first.”

“Erick, my dear one, don’t you worry about a thing. For this I will buy you the best, the greatest, clone body in Tranquillity. I swear. Whatever the cost.”

“Shut up , Captain. He’s in enough shock as it is. Erick, I’m going to put you back under. But don’t worry, everything is going to be just fine.”

The last of the six aerovettes stopped transmitting. Reza Malin upped his cranial audio receptors to full sensitivity, trying to hear the noise of the little vehicle’s impact. The sounds of the jungle invaded his brain—insect chirps, animal warbles, leaves crackling—filtered and reduced by discrimination programs. He counted to ten, but there was no crash.

“We’re on our own now,” he said. The aerovettes had been sent off to the west at a fast walking pace as a decoy, giving the scout team time to melt away into the jungle. He had guessed the invaders could track anything electronic; as Ashly said, if they could create the cloudbands, they could do almost anything. They weren’t invincible though, the fact that the team had landed was proof of that. But they were definitely going to provide a formidable challenge. Possibly the greatest Reza would ever face. He liked that idea.

His two hounds, Fenton and Ryall, were slinking through the undergrowth two hundred metres ahead of the scout team, sniffing out people. So far the jungle had been deserted. Pat Halahan’s affinity-bonded harpy eagle, Octan, was skimming the treetops, retinal implants alert for the slightest motion below the fluttering leaves. The animals provided a coverage almost as good as the aerovettes.

The team was following a danderil track, heading roughly north-east towards its operational target, the Quallheim Counties. Sal Yong was leading, brushing through the dense vines with barely a sound. With his chameleon circuit activated it looked as though a heavy miniature breeze was whirling along the track. The other six followed quickly (Theo was up overhead somewhere), all of them loaded down with packs, even Kelly. He was pleased to see she was keeping up. If she didn’t, it would be a maser pulse through her brain, which would upset some of the team. But he wasn’t having a liability of a reporter holding them back. He wondered if she realized that, if it lent a note of urgency to her steps. Probably. She was smart enough, and her bureau chief would certainly have known the deal. So would Joshua, for all his youth, wise beyond his years.

Fenton arrived at a river, and peered out of the bushes lining the steep bank. Reza requested a chart from his inertial-guidance block, and confirmed their position.

“Pat, there’s a river one eighty metres ahead, it leads into the Quallheim eventually. Send Octan along it to check for any boat traffic.”

“Right.” The voice seemed to emerge from a small qualtook tree.

“Are we going to use it?” Ariadne asked, a clump of knotted tinnus vines.

“Yes, providing Octan says nobody else is. It’s narrow enough, good tree cover. We can cut a day off our time.” He called silently to his hounds, and ordered them to cut back behind the team, covering their rear.

They reached the river three minutes later, and stood at the top of the four-metre bank.

“What is that stuff?” Jalal asked.

The water was clotted with free-floating fleshy leaves, pure white discs a couple of metres in diameter, a tiny purple star in their centre. Each had an upturned rim of a few centimetres, natural coracles. They bobbed and spun and sailed calmly along with the current, undulating with the swell. Some overlapped, some collided and rebounded, but they all kept moving along. Upstream or downstream, whichever way the team looked, the river was smothered in them.

Kelly smiled inside her shell-helmet as the daylight dream of her Lalonde didactic course came slithering into her conscious thoughts. “They’re snowlilies,” she said. “Quite something, aren’t they? Apparently they all bloom at the same time then drift downstream to drop their kernel. It really screws up the Juliffe basin for boat traffic while they’re in season.” She tracked her retinal implants along the river. It was all going into a neural nanonics memory cell, scenes of Lalonde. Capturing the substance of a place was always important, it gave the report that little edge, adding to reality.

“They’re a bloody nuisance,” Reza said curtly. “Sewell, Jalal, activate the hovercraft; Pat, Ariadne, point guard.”

The two combat-adepts unslung the big packs they were carrying, and took out the programmed silicon craft, cylinders sixty centimetres long, fifteen wide. They slithered down the bank to the water’s edge.

Kelly focused on the sky downstream. At full magnification the northern horizon was stained a pale red. “It’s close,” she said.

“An hour away,” Reza said. “Maybe two. This river winds a crooked course.”

Sewell shoved a couple of snowlilies aside and dropped his cylinder into the clear patch of water. The hovercraft began to take shape, its gossamer-thin silicon membrane unfolding in a strict sequence, following the pattern built into its molecules. A flat boat-shaped hull was activated first, five metres long, fifteen centimetres thick. Water was pumped into its honeycomb structure, ballast to prevent it from blowing away. The gunwales started to rise up.

Theo Connal dropped lightly to the ground beside Kelly. She gave a slight start as he turned off his chameleon circuit.

“Anything interesting?” Reza asked.

“The cloud is still shifting about. But it’s slower now.”

“Figures, the spaceplanes have gone.”

“All the birds are flying away from it.”

“Don’t blame ’em,” Pat said.

Kelly’s communication block reported that a signal was being beamed down from the geostationary satellites, coded for their team. It was a very powerful broadcast, completely non-directional.

“Kelly, Reza, don’t respond to this,” Joshua said. “It looks like our communications are wide open to the invaders, which is why I’m transmitting on a wide footprint, a directional beam will pinpoint you for them. OK, situation update; we’ve got big problems up here. Several spaceplanes were taken over while they were on the ground, the invaders are now busy hijacking starships, but nobody can tell which ones. You know Ashly wasn’t sequestrated, so that means you should be able to trust me. But don’t take orders from anyone else, especially don’t broadcast your location. Problem two, a navy squadron has just arrived and shut down the strike mission. Jesus, it’s a total fucking shambles in orbit right now. Some of the hijacked ships are trying to run for a jump coordinate, I’ve got voidhawks blocking the Lady Mac ’s patterning nodes, and two of my fellow combat-capable trader starships are heading up to intercept the navy squadron.

“Your best bet is to turn round from that cloud and just keep going, out into the hinterlands somewhere. There’s no point in trying to locate the invader’s bases any more. I’ll do my best to pick you up in a day or two, if this cockup gets sorted by then. Stay alive, that’s all you have to worry about now. I’ll keep you informed when I can. Out.”