Lightning struck twenty metres behind her, sending her sprawling. Reza was sitting behind the second hovercraft’s control panel, hand playing over the switches. The impeller fans began to spin, forcing air into the skirt. It began to rise slowly upwards; Sewell and Sal Yong stood on either side of it, their gaussrifles blasting away at unseen targets.

Kelly started to crawl. The first of the white fireballs shot out of the trees, curving round to drop on the hovercraft. Lightning flashed down again. A mayope tree toppled over with a sepulchral splintering. It crashed down ten metres behind her, one of the upper boughs coming down straight on top of her legs. Her armour stiffened, and her bent knees were pushed sharply into the yielding loam.

“Wait!” Kelly begged in a rasp. “For fuck’s sake, you shitheads. Wait!”

The hovercraft’s skirt was fully inflated, twigs and leaves were thrown out from under the thick rubbery fabric. Sewell hopped over the gunwale.

“Jesus God, I can’t move. Help me!” Her vision contracted to a tunnel with the hovercraft at the far end.

“Help me!”

Sewell was standing in the middle of the hovercraft. One of his gaussrifles turned towards her. Leaves and small branches rustled and slithered like serpents over her legs, she could feel them coiling round her calves. Then Sewell fired. The explosions sent her cartwheeling over the ground. She slammed into something hard. It grated along the side of her armour suit. Moving. Hovercraft! Her hands scrabbled with animal passion against it. And she was being lifted effortlessly into the air. Rationality ended there and she kicked and flailed against the air. “No! No! No!”

“Easy there, Kell, I’ve got you.”

Her world spun round as the big mercenary dumped her unceremoniously on the floor of the hovercraft. She gagged, limbs juddering as the neural nanonics stopped sending out compulsive overrides. After a minute she began to sob, the quivering muscle motions starting deep in her belly and emerging through her mouth.

“You made it,” Sal Yong said later. How much later Kelly didn’t know, her mind was furred with tranquillizers, thoughts slow. She tried to sit up, and winced at the bands of pain tightening around her ribs. A medical diagram unfolded inside her skull. Her body’s decay in unwelcome detail.

“The tree!” she barked hoarsely.

“We got it,” Sewell said. “Shitfire, but that was weird.”

“You were going to leave me!” Panic set her skin crawling. Blue lights flashed silently around the physiological display. More tranquillizers.

“You’re going to have to learn to keep up, Kell,” Reza said in his normal level tones. “We’re on a combat mission. I told you when we started, I can’t spare anyone for baby-sitting duties.”

“Yes.” She flopped back down. “So you did. I’m sorry.” I simply didn’t realize you were serious, that you would leave a fellow human being behind, to face . . . that.

“Hey, you did all right,” Sal Yong said. “Lotsa people would have screwed up, they had all that shit thrown at them.”

“Oh, thanks.”

There were mechanical clunks from somewhere behind her as Sewell detached his gaussrifles. “Let’s see about getting that armour off you, Kell. You look like you could do with some field aid.” She felt him touch the suit’s seal catch, and then humid sticky air was sliding over her skin. Her helmet came off, and she blinked dizzily.

Sewell was sitting on a bench above her, holding a couple of medical nanonic packages. Kelly avoided looking at her ribs; the physiological display was bad enough.

“Looks like I’m not the only one,” she said, smiling bravely. His artificial skin was pitted with small deep blackened craters where the white fire had struck, including a long score on the side of his glossy head. Blood and fluid dribbled out of the cracks each time he moved. “Or are you going to say they’re just flesh wounds?”

“Nothing critical.”

“Oh, crap, I’m drowning in macho culture.”

“You can put your gun down now, Kell.”

The nine-millimetre pistol was still in her hand, fingers solidified round its grip. She gave it a bewildered stare. “Right. Good idea.”

He tilted her gently on her right side, then peeled the covering off the nanonic package. It moulded itself to her left side, curving round to cover her from her navel to her spine. The colours of her physiological display changed, reds diluting to amber, as it began knitting itself to her wound.

“Where are we going?” she asked. The hovercraft was moving faster than it had before. Humidity was making her sweat all over, the smell of vegetation was rank, itching her throat. Lying half-naked racing through a xenoc jungle being chased by monsters and cut off from any hope of rescue. She knew she ought to be reduced virtually to hysterics, yet really it was almost funny. You wanted a tough assignment, my girl.

“Aberdale,” Reza said. “According to the LDC’s chief sheriff, that’s where the first reported trouble started.”

“Of course,” Kelly answered. There was a strange kind of strength on the far side of utter despair, she found, or maybe it was just the tranquillizers.

“Kell?”

She closed her leaden eyelids. “Yes.”

“Why did you shoot the baby?”

“You don’t want to know.”

The navy squadron closed on Lalonde at seven gees, crews prone on their acceleration couches with faces screwed up against the lead-weighted air which lay on top of them. When they were seventeen thousand kilometres out, the fusion flames died away and the starships rotated a hundred and eighty degrees in a virtuoso display of synchronization, ion thrusters crowning them in a triumphant blue haze. The Arikara and the Shukyo released twenty combat communication-relay satellites, streaking away at ten gees to englobe the planet. Then the warships began to decelerate.

As the merciless gee force returned to Arikara ’s bridge Meredith Saldana accessed the tactical display. The voidhawks had performed small swallow manoeuvres, taking them to within two and a half thousand kilometres of the planet and curving into orbit ahead of the Adamist warships to which such short-range precision jumps were impossible. But the mercenary fleet was leading the bitek starships a merry dance. Three blackhawks were racing away from Lalonde, striving for the magic two thousand kilometre altitude where they would be outside the influence of the planet’s gravitational field, allowing them to swallow away. Voidhawks were in pursuit. Four of the nine combat-capable independent traders were also under acceleration. Two of them, Datura and Cereus , were heading on a vector straight towards the squadron at two and a half gees. They wouldn’t respond to any warning calls from the Arikara , nor Terrance Smith.

“Haria, Gakkai , go to defensive engagement status, please,” Meredith datavised. The situation display showed him the two frigates end their deceleration burn, flip over, and accelerate ahead of the rest of the squadron.

“What is the state of the remaining mercenary ships?” the Admiral enquired.

“Smith claims the starships remaining in orbit are obeying his orders, and therefore haven’t been hijacked,” said Lieutenant Franz Grese, the squadron Intelligence officer.

“What do you think?”

“I think Commander Solanki was right, and we’d better be very careful, Admiral.”

“Agreed. Commander Kroeber, we’ll send a marine squad into the Gemal first. If we can verify that Smith himself hasn’t been hijacked or sequestrated it may just make our job that bit easier.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The tactical situation warned him the Datura and Cereus were launching combat wasps. Meredith observed in astonishment as each of them released a salvo of thirty-five; according to the accompanying identification codes the starships were small vehicles, forty to forty-five metres in diameter. They couldn’t have held back any reserves—what absurd tactics. The drone armaments began to accelerate from their launch craft at twenty gees.