DAY 3
When the sun rose, the dawn chorus erupted.
Sorcha woke with a crick in her neck. She disentangled herself from Helms’s naked embrace, astonished at the penetrating and ceaseless sound of his snoring. She crawled out of the AmRover and saw dawn speckling the Flesh-Webs and making the tree trunks glow as they absorbed the sun’s energy.
She wore no body armour, and the cold air shocked her skin. She could smell bacon. She rubbed her arms, warming herself, basking in the alienness of this planet, and tried not to breathe, because that was just wasted effort.
She wondered what had made her go to Helms’s cabin the previous night. Someone was bound to have seen her; and the twelve people who shared the AmRover with them would surely have heard the sounds of their frantic and passionate late-night love-making.
But Sorcha didn’t care. She was now the most senior Soldier on the planet, so no one could discipline her for an infraction of the fraternisation rules. Earth held no authority over her any more; and she really had needed that fuck.
It was more than just a fuck, admittedly. For it was good, and warm, and comforting, after a day of terror and horror, to spend a night sleeping next to another human being. Even if Helms was just a Scientist, and not a Soldier; and even though he, bizarrely in this day and age, snored.
And now she felt fresh, and alive, and awake. The deaths of the previous day were now just a distant memory. Those who had died were dead and gone. She wasted no energy brooding on them.
Sorcha did wonder, though, about precisely why Juno had turned rogue. Her fellow Soldiers had shared their judicious speculations on the matter the previous night; and the Scientists, as you’d expect, had a myriad explanations, some of quite staggering and paranoid complexity.
But her guess was that they would never know the truth. The Galactic Corporation was constantly subject to power struggles, and even at the best of times was by no means a rational entity. And Sorcha herself had participated in many wholly unneccessary massacres, many caused by the incompetence of bureaucrats who ordered the destruction of entire societies because of administrative errors. So it wouldn’t surprise her if she and the other humans on New Amazon had been the victim of an utterly futile and indeed erroneous mass-execution order.
It was, she honestly felt, a damned shame. She was willing to die a Glorious death for the Galactic Corporation; why should that option be taken away from her?
She walked, cold and literally breathless, out into the jungle, until she reached a clearing where there was no tree canopy above. She stared and stared upwards, at the vast blue sky and speeding clouds, and tried to find Juno. But there was nothing. No bright dot. No Juno in orbit above them.
And that meant no Quantum Beacon, no way for Earth to communicate with them. She would never again receive orders from her commanding officers, or from the Galactic Corporation.
Sorcha knew she should be appalled at the destruction of the Mother Ship, and the loss of her command structure.
But, strangely, she was not.
From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal
June 24th
Last night, I dreamed that I was a Gryphon, flying high above the planet of New Amazon, able to see every living thing. I can see the crawling creeping writhing animals in the undergrowth and the insects and the bugs and the flying insects that can suck the sap out of trees or pierce body armour with their eerily sharp antennae-claws. I can see the Big Beasts — Godzillas, Land Krakens, Juggernauts — I can see the Tree Creatures, the Two-Tails and the Leapers and the Tarzans, I can see the canopy of trees stretching as far as the eye can see, and I can see all the creatures of the air, Gryphons like myself and Serpent-Birds and Bat-Beasts, and I can see where they nest and I fly onwards and onwards until I reach the Ocean of Trees, the vast mangrove swamp that crowds the watery ocean and turns it into wetland not sea, and I can see it all, I know the name of every single creature even though there are millions upon millions of them, but when I wake I can only remember a handful of the names.
Yet even so, I remember, oh so vividly, what it was like to be a Gryphon, flying high, above my planet.
Anyway. That was my dream.
Today we have been given strict survival duties, with no time for scientific work. But I hope to recommence writing this diary in a few days.
Professor Helms was having breakfast with William and Mary Beebe.
Helms had been networking since dawn. He had spoken to every member of his Science team, and to all the surviving Techies, and to every Soldier, and he had heard their concerns and their conspiracy theories, and allowed them to feel he was quietly and confidently in charge.
The prevailing theory among the Scientists was that the days of scientific exploration were now over; the CSO had decided that planets should be terraformed without bothering to study and catalogue the native flora and fauna. This explained why Juno had turned against them — because of course the Scientists would have fought such a plan tooth and nail. Simpler just to kill them all, so that Juno could instruct the four Satellites to begin terraforming.
The Soldiers, however, refused to believe that the CSO would have kept such a plan secret from them. After all, had they been so ordered, the Soldiers would have been entirely happy to slaughter all the Scientists.
So the Soldiers preferred the theory that a computer virus had made Juno deranged; although some feared there had been a coup on Earth, which would mean the CSO had been replaced by someone even more lunatic.
Helms listened carefully to all the theories, but at the end of the day, as he carefully pointed out, they would never know the truth of what had happened. So it was better, really, just to look to the future.
The Beebes, however, had a different question to pose to him, as Helms poured three black coffees and stiffened at the aroma of pure caffeine.
“May I ask,” William Beebe said.
“Indeed,” added Mary Beebe, and allowed a pause to build.
“What?” hinted Helms
“How?” said William.
“How what?”
“How — well, you know.” William shrugged, and let his subtext fill the air.
“How did I know this would happen?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t,” Helms said.
“You had an antimatter bomb ready to blow up Juno,” Mary pointed out.
Helms nodded, and made a self-deprecating face. “Simple contingency planning,” he said. “You never know when —”
“You might need an antimatter bomb?” said William sceptically.
“It’s happened before,” Helms asserted. “Scientific expeditions have been wiped out.”
“When? Where?”
“I wasn’t aware of that!”
“That’s because it was covered up,” Helms explained.
“Then how do you know?”
“I was there. On Asgard. It happened there.”
“I thought that particular expedition was wiped out by a meteorite.”
“That was the cover story. In fact, the Mother Ship computer went rogue and fired a torpedo at the base. Earth Gamers. It’s the curse of our civilisation. I was able to escape on a shuttle, but many of my dear friends died that day. So I vowed — never again.”
“So,” concluded William, “you have saved us. Or at least, many of us.”
“Indeed,” Helms admitted.
“I suppose we should say thank you,” Mary snorted.
“No need.”
“Thank you,” said William, fulsomely.
“You’re very welcome,” Helms said, touched.
“And what do we do now?” Mary accused. “How do we get home?”
“We don’t,” Helms told her. “There’s no way home, ever.”
“Then,” she said, looking around, not disapprovingly, “this is home.”
“We could do worse,” said William, smiling at the prospect.
Hugo had found a dead Two-Tail, and was skinning it with some delight. The meat was inedible to humans of course; but the autopsy was yielding some fascinating results.
The Soldiers, meanwhile, were practising their kata in a jungle clearing. Sorcha was watching them, approvingly, as they dipped and lunged and breathed long inaudible breaths preceding killer punch and kick combinations of blinding speed.
Helms sidled up to her, and indicated he wanted a private chat.
And so Sorcha and Helms moved out of earshot of the Soldiers, under the shade of a vast Aldiss tree. Helms looked at her, and smiled mischievously, remembering last night’s coupling.
Sorcha just stared at him coldly.
“I’ve had a few notions —” he began.
“Professor, I’m not interested.”
Helms blinked, and smiled his humble smile. “Ah, right, fair point,” he said, his politeness laced with irony.
“I don’t need advice from —”
“Sorcha please,” he said mildly. “Is this really necessary? We’re all in this together and —”
“Major.”
He blinked again.
“Beg pardon?”
“You will address me as ‘Major’, or as ‘sir’.”
Helms grinned. “You’ll be asking me to salute you next.”
Sorcha saw no humour in that. Helms felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach.
“I’m sorry. Whatever you say, Major,” he said smoothly, and was suddenly consumed with rage at his own words. “Oh for fuck’s sake —”
“Don’t you —”
“After all we’ve —”
Sorcha touched Helms’s eyes with her fingertips. He realised the threat: she could blind him in an instant.
And she would, he knew it.
She really would!
“Consider,” he told her, calmly, “your situation. There is no Earth. There is no Galactic Corporation. Do we really need these displays of military bravura?”
She patted his eyes with her fingertips and he saw stars.
“Fuck!”
“Just a warning.”
“That hurt.”
“It will hurt less when your eyes pop out, that’s what shock does to you,” she said sweetly. “But trust me, in a few days’ time, the empty sockets will sting like fuck.”
“Sorcha! Please! Why the hell can’t we just —”
Sorcha took her hand away. Her stance changed. It was a kata stance, a state of total awareness and relaxation, preceding a deadly strike. Helms knew he had two choices: capitulate just in time, or just a few moments too late.
“Major Molloy,” he said hastily, gabbling like a fool, “I’d, um, very much, um appreciate your guidance on what we should, ah, do next.” He realised his voice was shrill, and hated himself for it.
And Sorcha smiled. She was dominating him now, with her body, with her eyes, with her authority.
“I’ll let you know that in due course.”
“Good, good. That’s great. That’s — well. Great.”
“But remember this: military law will remain in force, even though we have lost contact with Earth.”
“I would expect nothing less, um, Major,” he sycophanted.
“There is only one way we can survive,” she said generously, “and that is if you unquestioningly heed my authority. Are you prepared to do that, Professor?”
“Yes! Yes, of course,” said Helms, with a shit-eating smile.
“Good.”
There was a jagged pause.
“So, as I was saying, what’s your plan, Major?” Helms asked. And though his tone was courteous, his intellectual contempt for her shone through.
“We go back to Xabar and rebuild the city, using the raw materials in the underground bunkers outside the city walls. The city is gone but the bunkers are vast and well fortified. So we can —”
“No.”
“We go back. We need —”
“No! There’ll be boobytraps. Robot-mode DRs with orders to kill us.”
“— raw materials and supplies and energy batteries, all of which are to be found in the bunkers, and yes, there will be some combat, but —”
“We’re not doing it.”
“Professor,” said Sorcha, warningly.
“It’s folly, I won’t allow it.”
“I have given my orders, now you must —”
“What are you going to do, clap me in irons? Or do that stupid eye trick again?” And suddenly, it became clear that he did not fear her after all; for Richard Helms did not fear anyone.
“We return to Xabar!” Sorcha roared.
“Hmm? Yes? That’s your plan?” Helms taunted. “What about the Depot?”
Sorcha was floored.
“What Depot?”
“What the fuck,” said Ben Kirkham sourly, staring past the Soldiers to watch the Major and the Professor, lost in debate, occasionally touching each other, “are those two love birds up to?”
“I think it’s sweet,” David Go said.
Ben swivelled and fixed the hapless Go with his fiercest patronising glare.
“It speaks!” he sneered.
“Yes, I speak. In fact —” said David Go calmly, and to his horror Ben Kirkham turned and walked away as he was halfway through a sentence.
Tonii was lost in the kata. He moved with grace and speed and his body sang.
Hugo cut open the Two-Tail’s cranium and peered inside at the complex whorls and patterns of its brain.
“It’s beautiful,” he muttered to himself.
Sheena listened to the jungle.
Her eyes were healing well. There was no infection. But also, no chance of getting replacement eyes.
She was blind, and so she listened to the jungle. Intently, remorselessly, carefully. Until she heard so much that she could visualise it, creating images out of sounds.
And her helmet could see for her. It whispered instructions. It told her who was near her, told her to step right, or step left. She could fly, with the help of her helmet’s whispering. She could walk, thanks to her helmet.
But would she ever again be able to see?
Major Sorcha Molloy addressed the assembled team of Scientists, flanked by her body-armoured Soldiers.
“As the senior ranking Soldier, I am now Commander of the military forces,” she explained, “and hence also leader of the scientific expedition. Professor Helms will be my civilian second in command, in a purely advisory capacity.”
“We’re not being told what to do by the military,” protested Ben.
Twenty Soldiers locked and loaded in unison.
“Maybe we are,” conceded Ben.
“My Warriors will ensure your safety. But all the science team will have responsibilities assigned to them. Doctors William and Mary Beebe, you’re in charge of supplies and team morale. Dr Ben Kirkham, you will maintain the equipment, making sure the plasma guns are fully charged at all times. Mia Nightingale, you’re my liaison between the Soldiers and the science geeks. Four of the five AmRovers will each carry a team of ten, with a minimum of three Soldiers in each team, AmRover 1 will carry a team of nine, including Professor Helms, with myself and two others in the Flyer. Each Scientist will be supplied with a plasma cannon and a plasma pistol, and each team will have a proportionate share of the flash grenades and mortars.”
“You’ve really thought this out in detail, haven’t you?” said Hugo, wryly.
“We have five Amazon Rovers, one Flyer, and a Scooter. Who brought the Scooter?”
“That was Ashley,” said Tonii Newton.
“Our objective is to create a new base camp at the Weapons and Provisions Depot, map reference B453. Do you have that?” said Sorcha.
There was a baffled silence.
“What Depot?”
“There is no Depot.”
Ben checked the map reference on his helmet display. “It’s jungle there. It’s never even been reconnoitred. This Depot doesn’t exist,” said Ben.
“Just here,” said Helms, pointing at his own virtual screen.
“We don’t have a Weapons and Provisions Depot!” Ben complained. “If I say it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, actually, it does,” said Helms, with a shy smile, as he quietly asserted his authority over the meeting. “It just doesn’t exist on the computer record.”
Sorcha stayed deadpan, allowing everyone to believe she’d known about the Depot all along.
All eyes were on Helms. He tapped the grid reference on his virtual screen. A map of the jungle appeared and floated in mid-air. On it a building was clearly marked, partially underground, concealed from the air by the Canopy. And it was vast.
“Why would you build a thing like that?” asked Ben, savagely. “And not tell anyone?”
“Just a little trick,” Helms said, waving down his virtual screen, “that I learned when I was a university bursar. Some things are best kept hidden away from official scrutiny.”
Ben was shaken. He glared at Helms with unconcealed hate at having being publicly proved wrong.
“What’s at this Depot?” asked Mia.
“Guns, grenades, spare body armour, a generator, food synthesisers and biomass, 10,000 BBs, helicopters, a space shuttle.”
“Ye gods,” said Hugo.
“Why don’t we just go back?” William reasoned. “To Xabar. There may be stuff we can salvage from the bunkers.”
“No, that’s a stupid idea,” said Sorcha firmly.
“There may be DRs who survived the blast,” Helms explained diplomatically. “And their little robot brains will still be obeying their last given order, namely, to eliminate us, violently. We have to keep out of their way. It’s a big jungle. So long as they don’t find us, we’re safe.”
“And pray remind me,” said Hugo, “why all this happened in the first place. Why the blazes would Juno want to kill us?”
Helms fixed him with an intent stare. “I wish I knew,” he said with burning intensity. “But I don’t.”
They all pondered on this a moment.
“So there you go,” Helms concluded crisply. “Now, to business. Let’s begin our march.”
Gloria Baker was on point duty, and she had big dreams.
She was low-hovering in her body armour beside AmRover 1, as they made their way through the jungle to the Depot. Behind them drove the other four AmRovers; and at the back of the convoy was the three-person Flyer, with torpedoes primed and ready to use against any beasts pursuing them.
Gloria’s big dreams included becoming an acclaimed Scientist, discoverer of a vast number of new species and inventor of a new biological synthesis that explained the vagaries of alien evolution. She also dreamed of being a hero, a fighter against injustice, and a campaigner for human rights.
She also dreamed of being Professor Helms’s lover. He was a calm, impressive, strangely attractive man, a little arrogant perhaps, and rather too skinny for her taste, but his intelligence blazed from him. She’d love to be with a man like that, to mellow and exhilarate and inspire him.
Gloria had big dreams, and wonderful dreams they were, but then she walk-hovered over a patch of swamp and even though she was five feet in the air the swamp water leaped up and sucked at her and ripped off her legs, body armour and all. Swamp marsh filled her body armour and she died with methane stench in her nostrils. Her body was slurped back down into the swamp and vanished.
“One man down, Professor,” said Gloria’s best friend John. “Swamp got her.”
“Why wasn’t she hovering?”
“She was.”
“Then hover higher.”
The four remaining members of the Point Team hovered higher, and continued to plasma-blast their way through the suppurating animal flesh of the Webs.
Helms absorbed the news. Another member of the team dead. Gloria Baker, biochemist and naturalist. He didn’t remember her. Or was she the one who . . . ? No, no. That wasn’t her.
Helms cursed himself. He had a terrible memory for names and faces — species yes, but people no. So he took a look at her photograph on his virtual screen, and yes, he knew her now! The redhead with the loud laugh, the one who used to stare at him strangely sometimes, he didn’t know why.
Helms read Gloria’s biog; and wished he’d got to know her better.
Mia was editing her footage.
She liked to edit three or four versions of the same sequence, in different styles, and sometimes even different genres. For the Godzilla Day, she had a wealth of material to draw upon — from the cameras in the AmRovers, the body-armour cams of all concerned, plus her own panoramas and master shots on the 3D cam.
These were movies you could walk into and fly around. You just needed a pair of goggles or a retinal implant and a wireless MI in your brain, which everyone had these days. And the experience would then begin: flying through the jungles of New Amazon like a Soldier or a Scientist; zooming in to become the size of an insect and inhabiting a microscopic realm; then zooming out to see what was happening from the air and from space; even seeing the whole scene from the point of view of the Godzilla or the Cerberus.
The entire day’s adventure was rendered into a perfect replica of the experience of being on the planet, with total interactivity. But this was just one piece in the overall jigsaw; the eventual movie would offer experiencers a chance to be on New Amazon for hours or days or months or even years. You could hunt Godzillas, or be a Godzilla, or you could be a Gryphon, or any one of the other New Amazon creatures. You could even be a hard-ass female Soldier and fuck the Professor in charge of the expedition (though for legal reasons, an actor-simulacrum was used to double for Professor Helms in all his scenes).
Or, if you were not a nerd or a geek or a wonk, you could buy a package-download that allowed you a more varied smorgasbord experience of thousands of different planets. You would tank up with drugs or alcohol, set the control to shuffle, and spend an hour, or a night, or a week, inhabiting all the alien ecospheres of known space. You could be a Heebie-Jeebie, a Sparkler, a flame beast or a Godzilla; you could rape the native women on Cambria; or fuck the sexy hominids on Gazillion.
There was a wealth of low-grade alien ecosphere material available, much of it concerned with killing and dissection and fornication with sentient beings. Mia, however, worked at the top end of the market; she created works of art, and works of science. But even she couldn’t afford to turn up her nose at occasional snippets of snuff and torture. It added spice to the curry, she felt.
But Mia was first and last an artist: a visual genius, in the view of many pundits; a documentary film-maker of exceptional experience and talent. And the New Amazon footage was, she firmly believed, some of her best work to date.
Her worry was, who would see this now? Juno was gone, the link to Earth destroyed. They were trapped on this planet for the rest of their lives.
So who the hell was going to want to watch her movies?
Helms was still reviewing, via his virtual screen, the lists of those killed at Xabar, after Juno’s attack. Hundreds. The names blurred, and so many were strangers to him. He remembered her, and him. And him. But he’d never seen her before, or him, or him, or him, or her, or him. Or — no, in fact, damn it all, that was Bill Jones, he was one of Helms’s closest friends . . .
He forced himself to read the biogs and look at their faces. He even read summaries of some of their academic papers, to get a flavour of the lost lives.
Sergeant Anderson was spooked by the scale of their defeat at Xabar.
There were only twenty Soldiers left, plus Major Molloy as Commanding Officer, out of a force of 195. It was hard to believe that so many had gone to Glory. And Anderson kept making silly mental mistakes — thinking, I must talk to Fletcher or Walker about such and such, momentarily forgetting that Fletcher and Walker, and so many others, were all dead.
But he was glad that Commander Martin was dead — Anderson had despised the man’s mealy-mouthed intellectualism. However, he considered Major Molloy to be a competent and credible commanding officer. She was decisive and ruthless and had proved time and again that she wasn’t afraid to die.
But it was a shame that one of the freaks had survived. Sergeant Maria Laxton was dead, they’d not be seeing her beautiful blue eyes and taut male–female body again. But Private Tonii Newton was still with them, looking like a man, sounding like a man, but with female curves and breasts and a fanny and an appalling tendency to colour-coordinate whilst off duty.
That freak was a . . . a freak! An abomination, an affront to the gods of nature. The very sight of him made Anderson want to puke.
Although, Anderson had to grudgingly admit, he was a damned fine Soldier.
The convoy inched its way through the gloomy jungle. “Birds” flew in the sky above them, “insects” hovered in the air creating a strange miasma. And, disconcertingly, they had to drive through a “jellyfish” colony, a vast flock of tens of thousands of translucent lighter-than-air creatures, that sucked juice from the Flesh-Webs and, when replete, drifted up to the clouds and shat red pus.
Thus, before long, they were travelling through a Dante’s Inferno of ghost-like beings in a world where the air itself was red.
“What are you working on, Professor?” William Beebe asked Professor Helms.
The words scrolled down the virtual screen, security-coded so that only Helms could see them:
Gregory, Richard. 34. Xenobiologist. Interests: Science, reading, being with my wife. Married to Helen Gregory.
Gregory, Helen. 44. Xenobiologist. Interests: Science, fencing, being with my husband Richard.
Hopkins, Michael, 232. Geologist. Interests: Running, swimming, poetry.
Jenson, Angela, 132. Soldier. Interests: Getting to know my grandchildren.
And more, and more, and more.
“It’s nothing,” said Helms. “Nothing. Just —” He broke off, distressed.
William stared at him, puzzled.
“Have we met?” the dark-haired woman next to Sorcha in the Flyer said.
“I’m Major Sorcha Molloy. Commander of the Military Forces.”
“Yes, I know,” the dark-haired woman said patiently. “I’m Margaret. Margaret Lamarr.”
“You’re the climatologist?”
“I am.”
“What have you found out about New Amazon?” Sorcha asked curtly.
Margaret blinked. “Um, we’re still working on the oxygen question. With so much plant-life, why so little oxygen?”
“Since photosynthesis is clearly operating.”
“We think the Ocean-Aldiss-Tree sucks in oxygen. But we don’t know how.”
“We’ll change all that,” said Sorcha casually, and Margaret flinched.
“When we terraform, you mean?” she said acidly.
“Well, that is the object of the exercise.”
“The object of the exercise,” said Margaret, precisely, “is, or rather was, no damn it, is, to study this alien planet. And to catalogue all of its species, in the minutest detail.”
“Before we kill them all,” said Sorcha.
“Before we kill them all,” Margaret repeated, bitterly.
“Incoming xenohostiles,” said Ben over the MI-radio.
“Brace yourself,” the pilot, McKenley, told the two women as the Juggernauts lumbered into view.
“Wait!” Margaret had her camera out and was filming. She started talking into the camera mike: “Two adults and a child, I think. These specimens are larger than those previously observed. Juggernautus rufus, the red-scaled beast. Note the absence of eyes. We think the skin on the head is a large retina, the head is a huge eyeball. Zooming in now.”
The Juggernauts were getting closer.
“Fire when you’re ready,” McKenley urged Sorcha.
“Doing ultrasound scan,” said Margaret, calmly.
The Juggernauts were getting closer.
“Remember, those creatures can leap,” said Ben over the MI-radio, and one of the Juggernauts leaped high, high enough to reach the front of the convoy. But as it leaped, Sorcha fired the craft’s plasma cannon and ripped an opening in its torso, then incinerated its head and carried on firing as the two other Juggernauts plunged into the jungle, only to be pursued by a constant hail of plasma fire. McKenley sent the Flyer swooping after them as Sorcha laced the creatures with red cutting fire. Heads fell off, the bodies were ripped open, Butterfly-Birds flew up into the air then turned and attacked the Flyer with savage beaks. Margaret triggered the sonic boom switch and the creatures were stunned and dazed, and Sorcha could pick them off one by one.
All the xenohostiles were dead, and McKenley turned the Flyer around.
“Let me get a close-up of the corpse,” Margaret pleaded.
“We need to rejoin the convoy,” Sorcha said sternly. She could never understand these Scientists; they had no fucking sense of urgency.
The Flyer resumed its position at the arse-end of the convoy.
Behind them Sorcha could see a trail of gore and blood and a mewling, squeaking, crawling creature which, she later discovered, was the baby Juggernaut’s brain.
“Here it is!” a voice called out.
“My God,” said Hugo Baal, in awe, as the convoy slowly came to a halt. Before them loomed a vast and green and impossible mountain.
“OK, people, you know what to do,” said Sorcha in the flyer, over the MI-radio link.
The Flesh-Webs had died away, to be replaced by the Jungle-Wall, a sheer mass of compacted vegetation. The wall soared up from the ground to the canopy, then burst through the canopy itself to form an organic barrier that nestled against the stratosphere, well above the height at which AmRovers could comfortably fly. And it snaked an awesome course across the mainland, moving slowly over time, as billions of six-headed insectoid creatures — Six-Heads — wove this wall-web out of their own barely digested excrement.
It was an awesome wonder of nature; shit turned into landscape.
The convoy bunched up. AmRover nestled against AmRover, and Sorcha’s Flyer bumped up against the last Rover in the convoy. The Point Teams all rejoined their vehicles. Helms returned to his cabin and took control on his virtual screen. The plasma cannons in the first two AmRovers, including Helms’s Rover, were charged from the Bostock batteries. Helms waited a full minute to allow his people to psych themselves up. Then he gave the signal and the AmRovers rolled forward.
The plasma cannons fired sheer bursts of energy and ripped a huge and perfectly circular hole in the Jungle-Wall. Flames and billowing smoke darkened the air outside the AmRovers and millions of Six-Heads scurried out of their protective nests and massed dangerously. When the hole was a circle a hundred metres in diameter, Helms gave the order and the lead truck accelerated. The cannons kept firing, the wall kept burning and the convoy crashed into the opening and inched its way through the growing hole. The Six-Heads swarmed over the AmRovers and the Flyer, blotting out their windscreens, striving to find a crack that would allow them to attack the attackers of their vegetal home. But the hardglass and toughmetal held, and the AmRovers crawled forward and crunched insects under their treads as the convoy plunged deeper and deeper into the hole in the Jungle-Wall, until all light was gone and the convoy was lost inside the insect-woven mass.
Once, a plasma cannon’s pillar of fire wavered, and died, and it was instantly replaced by a backup cannon. And the hole grew, as plasma burned through vegetable iron. But the fire spread with painful slowness and the tunnel in which they were wedged was blocked with acrid black smoke. And meanwhile, at the back of the convoy, the wall was growing back, as the Six-Heads began weaving their web again. Before long the entrance to the hole would be filled and the smoke would be trapped inside. If the AmRovers were too slow, or the wall didn’t burn fast enough, the webs would be woven around the vehicles themselves, leaving them caged and doomed inside the Jungle-Wall.
Helms hated the darkness that filled the glass windscreens of the AmRover cockpit. The vehicle rolled and bucked and toppled forward, the plasma cannons fired into nothing and nowhere, and Helms had to trust to experience to support his belief that a hole was in fact being burned into their jungle prison. The cab of the AmRover was airtight but Helms could vividly imagine the acrid fumes outside and visualise the billions of Six-Heads swarming over the AmRovers and the Flyer, all the while shitting out their viscous green and purple glue.
“Are you OK, Sorcha?” he said over his MI-radio link.
“Are we slowing down?”
“We’re slowing down.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I have my foot on the accelerator.”
“Are the plasma cannons working?”
“The control lights are on. I can’t see what’s actually happening out there.”
“Are you sure we’re still moving?”
“The speed dial says we are, just about.”
“I can’t feel myself moving.”
“That’s an illusion. No visual clues.”
“Maybe we’re not moving. Maybe we’re stuck. Maybe these fucking creatures are sealing us in.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know that, though, not for certain.”
“I don’t know that, no, not for certain,” he conceded.
The world had vanished, sensation had vanished. All Helms had were his instruments to tell him they were slowing down, and that the plasma guns were still firing. He checked the dials again. Only one bar’s worth of charge left. He switched to Recharge and the circuit failed. Damn!
The guns kept firing, relentlessly, releasing enough plasma energy to warm a city. If they carried on much longer firing at this rate, they’d run out of power. And if they ran out of power, they would not be able to blast any more hole.
Helms felt like a rat in a pipe that was sealed at both ends.
Sweat was dripping from his chin, it was drizzling down his throat, under his body armour. He had to force himself to breathe. He wondered if the air was getting staler.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep for two seconds and woke with a start of horror. How could that have happened? How could he have slept?
“We’re through,” said Mulligan, who was monitoring the ship’s sensors, but Helms kept the plasma cannon on Fire. He set the hull to Heat, to burn off the Six-Heads, and eventually, when he was as sure as he could be without a visual reference that he was in the open air, he spun the AmRover around in a three-point turn and stopped.
“We’re through,” said AmRover Number 9, as it followed behind him.
“Through,” said AmRover Number 1.
“Through,” said AmRover number 7.
“Through,” said Ben, in AmRover 3.
“We’re through,” said Sorcha in the Flyer.
Acid jets fired out from vents in each of the vehicles and sprayed over the hulls, and after about thirty minutes the windscreens and clear walls were free of insects and the world returned. It was a sunny day. The sunlight burned Helms’s eyes.
“How long did that last?” he asked.
“Five hours.”
“Let’s carry on.”