Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

Lady Macbeth was passing over Amarisk’s western coast, a hundred kilometres north of Durringham, when Reza detonated the nuke. The sensors caught its initial flash, a concussion of photons turning the grey clouds momentarily translucent.

“Jesus Christ,” Joshua gasped. He datavised the flight computer for a secure communication channel to the spaceplane. “Ashly, did you see that?”

“I saw it, Joshua. The spaceplane sensors registered an emp pulse equivalent to about a kiloton blast.”

“Are your electronics OK?”

“Yes. Couple of processor drop-outs, but the back-ups are on line.”

“It’s them. It has to be.”

“Joshua!” Sarha called. “Look at the cloud.”

He accessed the sensor image again. A four hundred metre circle of the cloud looked as if it was on fire below the surface. As he watched it rose up into a lofty ignescent fleuron. The tip burst open. A ragged beam of rose-gold light shone through.

Lady Mac ’s flight computer datavised a priority signal from one of the communication satellites direct into Joshua’s neural nanonics.

“Joshua?” Kelly called. “This is Reza’s team calling Lady Mac . Joshua, are you up there?”

Tactical graphics immediately overlaid the optical sensor image, pinpointing her communications block to within fifteen centimetres. Close to the blast point, very close. “I’m here, Kelly.”

“Oh, Christ, Joshua! Help us. Now!”

“Spaceplane’s on its way. What’s your situation, have you got the children?”

“Yes, damn it. They’re with us, all of them. But we’re being chased to hell and back by the fucking Knights of the Round Table. You’ve got to get us out of here.”

Vast strips of rank grey cloud were peeling back from the centre of the blast. Joshua could see down onto the savannah. It was a poor angle, but a vivid amber fireball was ascending from the centre of a calcinated wasteland.

“Go,” Joshua datavised to Ashly. “Go go go.”

Reza stood on top of the gully, bracing himself against the baked wind driving out from the blast. A mushroom cloud was roiling upwards from the cemetery of the homestead, alive with gruesome internal energy surges. It had gouged a wide crater, uneven curving sides spouting runnels of capricious magma.

He brought a series of filter programs on-line, and scanned the savannah. A firestorm was raging for two kilometres around the crater. Pixels from the section of ground where the marching pikemen had been were amplified. He studied the resulting matrix of square lenses. There were no remnants, not even pyres; none of them had survived. He tracked back. Knights and horses had been hurled indiscriminately across the smouldering grass two and a half kilometres away. Encased in that metal armour human bodies should have first been triturated by the blast wave then fried by the infrared radiation.

He watched one silver figure struggle to its knees, then use a broadsword shoved into the ground to clamber to its feet.

Ye Gods, what will kill them?

A horse kicked its legs and rolled over, surging upwards. It trotted obediently over to its fallen rider. Slowly but surely the entire band was remounting.

Reza jumped back into the gully. Children were being packed back into the hovercraft.

“Joshua’s here,” Kelly yelled over the trumpeting wind. Her tear-stained face framed a radiant smile. “ Lady Mac ’s in orbit. The spaceplane’s on its way. We’re safe, we’re out of here!”

“How long?”

“Ashly says about ten minutes.”

Not enough, Reza thought. The knights will be here by then, they’ll hit the spaceplane with their white fire, if they don’t just switch off its circuitry with that black magic. “Kelly, you and Theo take off south. The rest of you, with me. We’re going to arrange a small delay.”

“No, Reza!” Kelly implored. “You can’t, not now. It’s over. Ashly will get here.”

“That was an order, Kelly. We’ll catch up with you when we’ve finished off these mounted pricks.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Hey, Kell, stop fretting,” Sewell said. “You’ve got the wrong attitude for this game. Win some or lose some, who cares, you’ve just gotta have fun playing.” He laughed and vaulted up to the top of the gully.

Horst made the sign of the cross to Reza. “Bless you, my son. May the Lord watch over you.”

“Get in the bloody hovercraft, Father, take the kids somewhere they can have a life. Theo, blast some grass, get them clear.”

“Yes, boss.” The jungle-rover mercenary fed power into the impellers even as Horst was scrambling on board. With the skirt bouncing against the gully wall the hovercraft turned in a tight curve and sped back up the scree.

Reza joined his team on the top of the bank. Out on the savannah the knights were mustering into a V-shaped battle phalanx.

“Move out,” Reza said. There was a strange kind of glee running loose in his mind. Now we’ll show you babykillers what happens when you face a real enemy, one that can fight back. See how you like that.

The six mercenaries started to march over the grass towards the waiting knights.

Sunlight and rain poured down on the hovercraft, surrounding them with a fantastic exhibition of rainbows. The clouds were breaking up, losing their supernatural cohesion. They were just ordinary rain-clouds again.

The rain sprayed against Kelly’s face as she battled the hovercraft’s inertia against the wind and damp cloying grass. Speed tossed them about like a dinghy on a storm-swollen sea.

“How big are the children?” Joshua asked.

“Small, they’re mostly under ten.”

“Ashly will probably have to make two trips. He can bring the children up first then come back for you and the mercenaries.”

She tried to laugh, but all that emerged was a gullet-rasping cough. “No, Joshua, there’s only going to be one flight. Reza’s team won’t be coming. Just the children, and me and the priest if the spaceplane can handle our mass.”

“The way you diet to keep your image, you’re into negative mass, Kelly. I’ll tell Ashly.”

She heard the first fusillade of EE projectiles exploding behind her.

Sewell and Jalal stood four metres apart, facing the apex of the charging knights. The reverberant thud of the horses galloping over the savannah rose above the hot squalls spinning off from the chthonic maelstrom of the blast’s epicentre.

“I make that forty-nine,” Jalal said.

“The lead is mine, you take the right flank.”

“Sure thing.”

The knights lowered their lances, spurring on their horses. Sewell waited until his rangefinder put the lead knight a hundred and twenty metres away, and fired both heavy-calibre gaussrifles plugged into his elbow sockets. Feed tubes from his backpack hummed efficiently. He laid down three fragmentation rounds over the knight’s plumed helmet, and followed it up with twenty-five EE shells into the ground ahead of the left flank.

Jalal was laying down a similar fire pattern across the right flank, his two gaussrifles traversing the line, guided by a targeting program. Pamiers had shown that the possessed were capable of defending themselves against almost anything short of a direct hit by an EE round; he was going for the horses. Kill the mounts, chop the legs out from under them, slow them down. More fragmentation bursts saturated the air. The knights were veiled by smoke, fountains of soil, and riotous static webs.

Streaks of white fire ripped out of the carnage. Sewell and Jalal leaped aside. Four knights sped towards them out of the furore. Sewell spun round as he hit the ground, white fire was gnawing into his left leg. His targeting program locked on to the first knight; one of his gaussrifles was responding sluggishly, the other fired ten EE rounds. The knight and his horse vanished inside a tangled screen of rampaging electrons. Gore spat outwards.