The moment Butterstone had lost contact it was already too late.
“Almost certainly poison of some kind,” Ronan said. “But I’ll need to do a full analysis to be sure. No one touch anything with bare skin. On no account breathe unfiltered air or ingest anything we haven’t brought with us ourselves.”
“Can we do anything?” Cara asked.
“Look for signs of life in the town. See if anyone has escaped this.”
“No one has come running from that direction,” Ben said. “I’d say that was a bad sign. Let’s move out into the town.”
With Gwala’s mercs taking point and the psi-techs ranged behind them, they headed for the town center. Built on a circular plan, four wide avenues converged on a central area that had been laid out as a social space with shops, a couple of taverns, a hotel for incomers, and beds of flowers that sparkled like jewels in the afternoon sun.
Behind the plaza were neat houses, little boxes typical of colonies everywhere, but a little farther out, people had started to build bigger, less utilitarian houses in the yellow stone that had given the planet its name.
There were a few bodies in the street, but most of them were in the houses.
Cara opened up a channel to Ronan. *More bodies, Ronan. No one left alive, at least no one we’ve found yet.*
*I need to carry out a few more tests, but my best guess is a poisoned water supply. Possibly a super-concentrated arsenic derivative. I’d say everyone I’ve seen so far died about twenty-four hours ago, give or take. The poison is easily detectable in water, but only if you’re looking for it.*
Cara opened up the communication so everyone could hear Ronan’s warning. *Don’t mess with the water.*
“Hey, over here,” Hilde called. “Manny’s found something.”
Ben turned.
Gwala had a bundle in his arms and he was carrying it as if it would break.
“I found a baby,” Gwala said. “In its cot with its dead mother right there next to it.”
“Manny are you crying?” Hilde said.
“I got some dust in my eye.”
“Sure you did.” She bent over to look.
“Poor little thing is all floppy and weak,” Gwala said. “Dehydration, I guess. Luckily, it didn’t get fed with contaminated water.”
“Ronan has baby formula in the emergency supplies,” Ben said.
“Maybe it was breast-fed,” Hilde said. “That’s why it survived. There, little thing, we’ll take you to Uncle Ronan for a checkup and a nice drink of formula.”
She held her arms out for the baby, but Gwala wouldn’t let go. He walked off in the direction of the landing field.
“It almost feels like a triumph, doesn’t it?” Cara said.
Ben shuddered. “One survivor out of a colony of five or six thousand people isn’t much of a triumph. Let’s see if we can find the water treatment plant and trace this to its source. Cara, Hilde, you’re with me. You, too, Dingle.” He picked one of the Psi-Mechs, a thickset woman with a satchel of bots slung over her shoulder. “The rest of you continue the house-to-house search. Maybe there are more babies, or folks who didn’t drink the water.”
“There’s not much town, but where do we find a water pumping station?” Dingle asked.
Ben pointed at the edge of the built-up area, to a concrete bunker with air vent pipes. “That looks like an underground reservoir to me.”
In the middle of the long side was a concrete doorway and a medonite door, hanging off its hinges.
“This looks like the place.” Ben drew his sidearm and stepped inside, blinking as his helm adjusted to night vision in the darkened corridor. There were steps going down and the distinct swish-swish of running water. Hilde covered the rear. Behind Ben, Cara drew her own weapon and clicked off the safety.
Ro Dingle, behind Cara flipped open her satchel. “Should I send a bot down, Boss?” she asked in a soft voice.
“Yes, do that.” No sense in taking stupid risks even though it did look as if this whole place was a ghost town.
Ro sent down a couple of small spider bots, one on the stair and one clinging to the side wall close to the ceiling. Her eyes had that faraway look of one who’s seeing something else entirely. “Two bodies, Boss,” she said. “It doesn’t look pretty down there. Some kind of fight. No sign of life now.”
Ben didn’t holster his sidearm, but he ran down the stairs without checking around corners. He heard footsteps behind him, keeping up.
In the deep chamber below, the sound of fast-flowing water blotted out everything else. He felt Cara make a four-way connection between them all. Water flowed in, gushing through a narrow channel into a well. Presumably the town’s water pipes flowed out, hidden below the churning surface of the water. On the concrete apron at the foot of the stair lay two bodies, one sprawled in death, the other curled into a fetal position. There was blood—more than one person could afford to lose.
Ben checked the sprawled corpse. It was a woman, maybe fifty years old, dressed in clothing that had once been a smart business suit, not at all the kind of thing that Butterstone’s colonists wore. The front of her suit was soaked in blood from a gut wound.
*This one’s still alive,* Cara called and brought Ronan in on the communication. *Ronan, it looks like a knife wound to the chest. There’s a lot of blood. The knife’s still in.*
*Don’t touch it, I’m on my way.*
Ben came to stand over Cara. The man was barely conscious. Dressed in basic coveralls, very much like colony clothing, he looked like the tech who should have been looking after this place.
*He’s a deadhead,* Cara said. *I already checked. His coverall says his name’s Denton.*
Denton’s fingers spasmed. Cara took his hand. “It’s okay. The doctor’s on his way. We’ve got you now.”
His lips moved. Ben thought he said, “Water,” but his voice was so soft and low that it was lost in the noise echoing in the chamber.
Denton’s eyes flickered toward the prone body and his lips twitched. Ben bent his head to catch the words. “She put something in the water. I . . . I had to . . .”
“It’s okay. We know.” No use telling the man he was too late.
Ronan and his crew arrived. Ben surrendered Denton to their care and took another look at the woman. She looked like anything but a mass murderer.
*Ronan can you spare someone to take this body into custody? I want to know who she was and where she came from. I’ll bet she’s not one of the colonists. Maybe she’s one of the refugees. If she is, she’s the only obvious one we’ve found so far.*
Though it looked as though they’d found the source of the poison, there was still going to be a long cleanup operation. Ben straightened up and gave Cara’s hand a quick squeeze. *You doing okay?*
*About as okay as possible in the circumstances.*
They headed into the center of town together.
Cara was bone-weary. She’d been doing the heavy lifting on comms, and when not required for that had taken her turn identifying and bagging bodies. The cleanup operation on Butterstone took the best part of a week. They brought in extra hands to cover it and set up a couple of mortuary tents in the central plaza and a small temporary hospital on the edge of town.
There were survivors, but not many. Three babies, presumably breast-fed, had been saved by their mother’s choice of nutrition. A drunk found in the backroom of a tavern, sleeping off a massive binge was all right except for a hangover to end all hangovers. Predictably, he knew nothing about the tragedy and couldn’t take it in when told.
In the small hospital, there was a woman in a coma and a man who’d had stomach surgery who was receiving all his fluids via intravenous drip. Luckily, the machine looking after him hadn’t run its complete cycle, so his recovery was progressing normally, or as normally as it could when he’d lost his entire famil
y.
They’d found eleven agri-engineers out in the far fields working on the machinery, apparently in the middle of a two-day shift. They all thought the comms array had gone down again, a not uncommon occurrence and normally nothing to worry about.
The poisoner struck in the early evening when people were dining late, or drawing water for a last cup of tea before bed, or taking a shower or cleaning their teeth. The poison hadn’t acted instantly, so it was likely the first few people to feel ill had taken meds with a glass of water and then taken to their beds to sleep it off—except, of course, death had caught up with them while they slept.
Ronan had worked out that the time of death for most people had come between midnight and three in the morning. A few had been later and had obviously witnessed the disaster, but not knowing the cause, had ingested water that was still contaminated.
Ben had called for a specialist team to clean up the water supply, but the poison had already flushed through the system and gone on to present problems to the waste disposal engineers and to the ecosystem surrounding the sewage and drainage.
The survivors, without exception, didn’t want to stay on Butterstone, but there was fertile land and infrastructure, so maybe there was a potential home for new colonists.
Roger Denton had the constitution of an elephant. After six hours in surgery and a couple of days of continuous observation, he’d recovered enough to speak. His story wasn’t wildly different from the few words he’d gasped out when they’d found him. He’d seen someone breaking into the water pumping station, but only found the refugee woman after she’d dropped something into the well. She’d gone for him with surprising strength and agility for someone who looked like a middle-aged businesswoman, but he’d grappled with her and cut her badly with her own knife before she’d stuck him between the ribs with it. She’d bled out, but the knife itself had plugged Denton’s wound and saved his life.
He didn’t have family, but he’d lost most of his friends. A couple of the farm mechanics came to visit him daily. Cara understood they spent their afternoons talking in low voices and crying together.
Chapter Thirty-Two
DNA
ON CROSSWAYS, CARA SPENT A GRUELING DAY alongside every long-range Telepath they could muster, contacting the colonies of the Protectorate and warning them not to allow ships claiming to be refugees to land under any circumstances. Worryingly, two more colonies from the Crossways Protectorate had gone dark. Garrick had sent out ships to check on them, but it was too early to expect to hear anything.
By the time she’d had a quick snack and crawled into bed beside the heavily sleeping Ben, Cara was exhausted to the point of unconsciousness. The bed swallowed her and that was the last she knew.
There was no time between sleeping and waking. First, she was asleep, then she was awake, but she couldn’t tell how much time elapsed between one state and the next.
She opened her eyes and knew only blackness. Was she blind? She raised one hand to touch her eyes. Soft eyelashes brushed against her fingers. Yes, her eyes were open. Her heart pounded. The darkness was all around her, suffocating her, drawing out of her all that made her real. Unmaking her, but filling her with unbounded yet terrifying joy.
“Cara?”
The voice made her flinch. It took her a moment to identify it and to tie it to the warm body lying beside her.
“Ben?”
“Who else might it be?”
“Sorry . . . I was dreaming and then I wasn’t, but the dream is . . . Can we have some light?”
At the word, light, a dim glow illuminated the area around the bed. She put her hand to her chest and could feel her heart pounding.
“Oh, I thought . . . Never mind.” She bit back what she’d been going to say because it sounded mad.
“You thought what?”
“That the darkness was somehow solid and that I was inside it. I must have been dreaming.”
“If you were dreaming, so was I.”
“You mean?”
“I was in the shuttlecraft and the Nimbus was creeping toward me. Kitty Keely was there, then she let go and the Nimbus smothered her. Then there was only darkness. Being inside it. Trapped. Helpless. Yet at the same time exhilarating. Like the biggest drug buzz ever.”
“I’m sorry. I must be projecting. That was my dream, except I wasn’t seeing it from my own point of view, I was seeing it from Garrick’s.”
“Did I give the dream to you, or did you give it to me?”
“Neither. I think we both got it from the same source. Do you ever get these dreams when you’re not on Crossways?”
“I have lots of dreams.” Ben’s words almost choked him. “Most of them not good.”
“But this one, in particular, where you’re Garrick?”
He nodded.
“Have you ever had it while you were off-station, or while Garrick was?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think you’re projecting it. I think Garrick is.”
“Garrick hasn’t got an implant.”
“Maybe he doesn’t need one. The three of us were within a whisker of the Nimbus together. We may be attuned to each other. We need to see Garrick.”
“To what end? To politely ask him not to send his dreams to us because we already have enough of our own? Ask him to wear a tinfoil hat?”
“A tinfoil hat. Yes, perfect!”
“What?”
“Ask him to wear a damper. He’s a deadhead. He’s probably never even considered it might be necessary. Maybe he’s getting dreams from us. This might work both ways.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“We need to see Garrick.”
“First thing in the morning.”
Seeing Garrick dropped to the bottom of Ben’s priority list when the reports came in that the two colonies that had lost contact were both dead, in the worst possible way.
“Your Telepaths need to spread this news.” Ben handed Cara a dataslide and she docked it with her handpad.
“It looks like another long day,” she said.
The reports were fairly succinct and didn’t dwell on the carnage, but Ben’s imagination supplied what the reports missed out. The colonies were both small, concentrated into single settlements, and there were few survivors. One was agricultural, the other an isolated mining operation, importing subsistence goods and exporting gold, diamonds, and a modest amount of platinum.
The mining operation had not had the resources to support three hundred refugees but had agreed to let the vessel land on hearing they had technical problems and only needed to stay for as long as it took them to effect repairs.
Both attacks took place at approximately the same time.
“Two refugee ships, both telling the same story,” Ben said. “Bigger than the ship that landed on Butterstone, so there are at least three ships. Who the hell is responsible for this?”
“The megacorps, trying to lay it at our door,” Cara said without hesitation. “They don’t care about a few small colonies, but they do care about discrediting us and splitting the Crossways Protectorate apart. What good is a protectorate if it doesn’t protect?”
“You might have a point.” Ben shrugged. “But I’m not sure.”
“Crowder was willing to wipe out the colony on Olyanda to get at the platinum.”
Ben nodded. “He was, but . . .”
“You’re not going to defend Crowder, surely?”
“Oh, he’s as guilty as sin over the whole Olyanda thing, and trying to get the megacorps to pound Crossways to dust. There was profit in that, profit for the Trust and promotion for Crowder, but chewing up colonies for nothing more than publicity—I don’t think that’s his style.”
“He was willing to wipe out ten thousand on Olyanda and a million people here on Crossways. You
think he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a few thousand on an isolated colony?”
“I think his reasoning is twisted, but I think he’d draw the line at that. There’s no immediate profit in it. Besides New Canada was one of his colonies. I set it up, but it was his project.”
“So not the Trust. Alphacorp, maybe? Or maybe several megacorps acting together. After all, they lost significant face, not to mention crews and ships when they took a poke at Crossways and failed.”
“Could be. I wish I knew.”
Ronan had taken DNA samples from the refugee woman on Butterstone, and they’d run them through every available database without finding her. Cara had checked the personnel files of the megacorps involved in the Crossways attack, but there was nothing.
“There must be a database somewhere that this woman is on,” Cara said, as her last possibility came up blank. They were working in the captain’s cabin on Solar Wind.
“Did the crack for the Trust’s colony database work?” Ben asked. They’d had J.P. Lister use his extensive talents on finding a backdoor into the system. Although he claimed the job was beneath him, he’d not only cracked the Trust’s settler database, but those of all the megacorps.
“It worked, but we drew a blank on all of them.” Cara chewed her lower lip. “The only one I haven’t checked is the Monitor database and while I guess J.P. might be able to crack it, I doubt he could do so without someone noticing.”
“Well, I have an idea,” Ben said. “Could you link me with Jess Jessop?”
Cara found Jessop easily and linked Ben with him.
*I’m happy to tip you off about something,* Ben said, *if you’re happy to keep it under your hat for now.*
*Tell me and I’ll decide.*
*You’ve had a couple of colonies go dark, settlers killed. Am I right? I’m being blamed for one of them, but you know that’s not my style.*
*Go on,* Jess said.
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