“Brilliant.” Joshua tossed down the last of his brandy and called the barmaid over. “That would work, wouldn’t it?”
“It did work.”
“No, not really. You see, your hypothesis is based on one assumption. Tragically false.”
Syrinx picked up the second glass of wine. “What’s that?”
“That I’m an ace astrogrator.”
“I think you are.”
“Right, so on a normal commercial run I would use this alleged skill of mine to shave hours off the journey time, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“So I would have used this skill to get here, to Norfolk, wouldn’t I? I mean, I brought a cargo to trade, I’m not going to waste time, money, and fuel getting it here, now am I?”
“No.”
“Right, so first of all ask the captain on the good ship Pestravka when and where I emerged in the Norfolk system. Then you can go and check my departure time from Lalonde, and work out how long it took me. Tell me after that if you think I’m a good astrogrator.” He gave her an annoying toothsome smile.
Thanks to Oenone , she was instantly aware of Lalonde’s spacial location; how long it ought to take an Adamist starship of Lady Macbeth ’s class and performance to make the trip. “How long did it take you?” she asked in resignation.
“Six and a half days.”
It shouldn’t have taken them that long, Oenone said.
Syrinx said nothing. She simply couldn’t bring herself to believe he was innocent. His whole attitude spelt complicity.
“Ah, here’s Ashly now.” Joshua stood and waved at the pilot. “And simply because you committed an extraordinarily rude faux pas don’t think you have to pay for the drinks to make up for it. They’re on me, I insist.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to mutual understanding and future friendship.”
Chapter 17
The Coogan ’s battered prow was riding heavily over the steep wavelets the Zamjan tributary sent rushing down its length towards the Juliffe. Lori could feel the length of the light trader boat exaggerating each pitch as they drove against the current. After four and a half days nothing about the Coogan bothered her any more; it creaked continually, the engines produced a vibration felt throughout every timber, it was hot, dark, airless, and cramped. But enforced routine had made it all inconsequential. Besides, she spent a lot of time lying inertly on her cot, reviewing the images the eagles Abraham and Catlin provided her.
Right now the birds were six kilometres ahead of Coogan , gliding five hundred metres above the water, with just the occasional indolent flick of a wing needed to maintain their flight. The jungle on either side of the swollen river was choked with mist from the rain that had just fallen, swan-white wisps clinging to the glistening green trees like some kind of animate creeper. There was no understanding the jungle’s immensity, Lori thought. The sights she saw through the eagles brought home how little impression the settlers had made on the Juliffe basin in twenty-five years. The timorous villages huddled along the riverbanks were a sorry example of the human condition. Microscopic parasites upon the jungle biota rather than bold challengers out to subdue a world.
Abraham saw a ragged line of smoke staining the sky ahead. A village cooking pit, judging by the shape and colour: she’d certainly had enough practice over the last few days to recognize one. She consulted her bitek processor block, and the visualization of the Zamjan eclipsed the image from the eagles. A vast four-hundred-kilometre river in its own right, the broad tributary was the one which the Quallheim emptied into. Inertial guidance coordinates flicked round. The village was called Oconto, founded three years ago. They had an asset planted there, a man by the name of Quentin Montrose.
Lori,darcy called, I think there’s another one, you’d better come and have a look.
The visualization withdrew into the bitek processor. I’m on my way.she opened her eyes, and looked out through the nearest slit in the side of the rickety cabin wall. All she could see was the grizzled water being lashed by the squall. Warm droplets ran along the inside of the roof, defying gravity before they plopped down on the cots where she and Darcy had spread their sleeping-bags. There was more room now a third of the logs had been fed into the insatiable hopper, but she still had to squirm out through the Buchannans’ cabin and the galley.
Gail was sitting at the table on one of the special stools that could take her weight. Packets of freeze-dried food were strewn across the greasy wood in front of her. “What would you like tonight?” she asked as Lori hurried past.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“That’s typically thoughtless. How am I supposed to prepare an adequate meal for people who won’t help? It would serve all of you right if I was to do nothing but boiled rice. Then you’d all moan and complain, I’d be given no peace at all.”
Lori gave her a grimace-smile and ducked through the hatch out onto the deck. The fat woman disgusted her, not just her size, but her manner. Gail Buchannan surely represented the antithesis of Edenism, everything her culture strove to distance themselves from in human nature.
Rain was pelting down on the little wheel-house’s solar-cell roof. Darcy and Len Buchannan were inside, hunched against the drops which came streaking in through the open sides. Lori dashed the four metres round to the door, drenching her loose grey jacket in the process.
“It’ll be over in a minute,” Darcy said. Up ahead, the end of the steel rainclouds was visible as a bright haze band surmounting the river and jungle.
“Where’s the boat?” she asked, screwing her eyes against the stinging rain.
“There.” Len raised a hand from the wheel and pointed ahead.
It was one of the big paddle-boats used to take colonists upriver, slicing imperiously through the water towards them. It didn’t pitch about like the Coogan , its greater mass kept it level as the wavelets broke against its side and stern. Smoke streamed almost horizontally from its twin stacks.
“Dangerous fast, that is,” Len said. “Specially for these waters. Plenty of foltwine about; catch a bundle of that in the paddle and she’ll do her bearings a ton of damage. And we’re heading into the snowlily season now as well, they’re as bad as foltwine when they stick together.”
Lori nodded briefly in understanding. Len had pointed out the thin grasslike leaves multiplying along the shallow waters near the shores, fist-sized pods just beginning to rise above the surface. Snowlilies bloomed twice every Lalonde year. They looked beautiful, but they caused havoc with the boats.
In fact Len Buchannan had opened up considerably once the trip started. He still didn’t like the idea of Lori and Darcy steering his precious boat, but had grudgingly come to admit they could manage it almost as well as himself. He seemed to enjoy having someone to talk to other than his wife; he and Gail hadn’t shared ten words since they cast off from Durringham. His conversation was mostly about river lore and the way Lalonde was developing, he had no interest in the Confederation. Some of the information was useful to her when she took the wheel. He seemed surprised by the way she remembered it all. The only time he’d gone sullen on her was when she told him her age, he thought it was some kind of poor-taste joke; she looked about half as old as he did.
The three of them watched the paddle-boat race past. Len turned the wheel a couple of points, giving it a wide passage. Darcy switched his retinal implants up to full resolution and studied the deck. There were about thirty-five people milling about on the foredeck; farmer-types, the men with thick beards, women with sun-ripened faces, all in clothes made from local cloth. They paid very little attention to the Coogan , apparently intent on the river ahead.
Len shook his head, a mystified expression in place. “That ain’t right. The Broadmoor ought to be in a convoy, three or more. That’s the way them paddlers always travel. Captain didn’t call us on the radio neither.” He tapped the short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector. “Boats always talk out here, ain’t so much traffic as you can ign
ore each other.”
“And those weren’t colonists on the deck,” Darcy said.
The Coogan pitched up hard as the prow reached the first of the deep furrows of water which the wayward Broadmoor produced in its wake.
“Not going downriver, no,” Len said.
“Refugees?” Lori suggested.
“Possibly,” Darcy said. “But if the situation is that bad, why weren’t there more of them?” He replayed the memory of the paddle-boat. It was the third they had encountered in twenty hours; the other two had steamed past in the dark. The attitude of the people on deck bothered him. They just stood there, not talking, not clustered together the way people usually did for companionship. They even seemed immune to the rain.
Are you thinking the same as me?lori asked. She conjured up an image of the reptile people from Laton’s call, and superimposed them on the deck of the Broadmoor—rain running off their green skin without wetting it.
Yes,he said. It’s possible. Probable, in fact. Some kind of sequestration is obviously involved. And those people on board weren’t behaving normally.
If boats are carrying the sequestrated downriver, it would mean that the posse on the Swithland have been circumvented.
I never expected them to be anything other than a token, and a rather pathetic one at that. If this is a xenoc invasion, then obviously they will want to subdue the entire planet. The Juliffe tributaries are the only feasible transport routes. Naturally they would use the riverboats.
I can’t believe that anyone with the technology to cross interstellar space would then be reduced to using wooden boats to get about on a planet.
Human settlers do.darcy projected an ironic moue.
Yes, colonists who can’t afford anything better, but a military conquest force?
Point taken. But there’s an awful lot about this situation we don’t understand. For a start, why invade Lalonde?
True. But to return to the immediate, if we’ve already penetrated the incursion front, do we need to go on?
I don’t know. We need information.
We have an asset in the next village. I suggest we stop there and see what he knows.
Good idea. And Solanki will have to be informed about the aberrant river traffic.
Lori left Darcy to feed the furnace hopper and made her way back to the space in the cabin they shared. She pulled her backpack from under the cot and retrieved the palm-sized slate-grey communication block from among her clothes. It took a couple of seconds for the Confederation Navy’s ELINT satellite to lock on to the scrambled channel. Kelven Solanki’s tired-looking face appeared on the front of the slim rectangular unit.
“We may have a problem,” she said.
“One more won’t make any difference.”
“This one might. We believe the presence Laton warned us of is spreading itself downriver on the boats. In other words, it can’t be confined by the posse.”
“Bloody hell. Candace Elford decided last night that Kristo County has also been taken over, that’s halfway down the Zamjan from the mouth of the Quallheim. And after reviewing the satellite images, I have to concur. She’s reinforcing the posse by BK133. They have a new landing point, Ozark, in Mayhew County, fifty kilometres short of Kristo. The BK133s are lifting in men and weapons right now. The Swithland should reach them early tomorrow, they can’t be far ahead of you.”
“We’re approaching Oconto village right now.”
“About thirty kilometres, then. What are you going to do?”
“We haven’t decided yet. We’ll need to go ashore whatever the outcome.”
“Well, be careful, this is turning out to be even bigger than my worst-case scenarios.”
“We don’t intend to jeopardize ourselves.”
“Good. Your message flek was dispatched to your embassy on Avon, along with mine to the First Admiral, and one from Ralph Hiltch to his embassy. Rexrew sent one to the LDC office as well.”
“Thank you. Let’s hope the Confederation Navy responds swiftly.”
“Yes. I think you should know, Hiltch and I have dispatched a combined scout team upriver. If you want to wait in Oconto for them to arrive, you’re more than welcome to join them. They’re making good time, I estimate they should be with you in a couple of days at the most. And my marines are carrying a fair amount of fire-power.”
“We’ll retain it as an option. Though Darcy and I don’t believe fire-power is going to be an overwhelming factor in this case. Judging by what we gleaned from Laton, and what we’ve observed on the paddle-boats, it appears wide-scale sequestration is playing a major part in the invasion.”
“Dear Christ!”
She smiled at his expletive. Why did Adamists always appeal to their deities? It wasn’t something she understood. If there was an omnipotent god, why did he make life so full of pain? “You might find a prudent course of action is to review river traffic out of the affected areas over the last ten days.”
“Are you saying they’ve already reached Durringham?”
“It is more than likely, I’m afraid. We are almost at Kristo, and we’re travelling against the current on a decidedly third-rate boat.”
“I see what you mean, if they left Aberdale right at the start they could have been here a week ago.”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“All right, thanks for the warning. I’ll pull some people in and start analysing the boats that have come down out of the Zamjan. Hell, this is just what the city needs on top of everything else.”
“How are things in Durringham?”
“None too good, actually. Everyone’s starting to hoard food, so prices are going through the roof. Candace Elford is deputizing young men left, right, and centre. There’s a lot of unrest among the residents about what’s happening upriver. She’s afraid it’s going to spiral out of control. Then on Wednesday the transient colonists decided to hold a peaceful rally outside the Governor’s dumper demanding new gear to replace what was stolen, and extra land in compensation for the upset. I could see it from my window. Rexrew refused to talk to them. Too scared they’d lynch him, I should think. It was that sort of mood. Things got a bit rough, and they clashed with the sheriffs. Quite a lot of casualties on both sides. Some idiot let a sayce loose. The power cables from the dumper’s fusion generator were torn down. So there was no electricity in the precinct for two days, and of course that includes the main hospital. Guess what happened to its back-up power supply.”
“It failed?”
“Yeah. Someone had been flogging off the electron-matrix crystals to use in power bikes. There was only about twenty per cent capacity left.”
“Sounds like there’s not much to choose between your position and mine.”
Kelven Solanki gave her a measured stare. “Oh, I think there is.”
Oconto was a typical Lalonde village: a roughly square clearing shorn straight into the jungle, with the official Land Allocation Office marker as its pivot; cabins with trim vegetable gardens clustered at the nucleus, while broader fields made up the periphery. The normally black mayope planks of the buildings were turning a lighter grey from years of exposure to the sun and heat and rain, hardening and cracking, like driftwood on a tropical shore. Pigs squealed in their pens, while cows munched contentedly at their silage in circular stockades. A line of over thirty goats were tethered to stakes around the border of the jungle, chomping away at the creepers which edged in towards the fields.
The village had done well for itself during the three years since its founding. The communal buildings like the hall and church were well maintained; the council had organized the construction of a low, earth-covered lodge to smoke fish in. Major paths were scattered with wood flakes to stem the mud. There was even a football pitch marked out. Three jetties stuck out of the gently sloped bank into the Zamjan’s insipid water; two of them responsible for mooring the village’s small number of fishing boats.
When the Coogan nosed up to the main central jetty Darcy and
Lori were relieved to see a considerable number of people working the fields. Oconto hadn’t succumbed yet. Several shouts went up as the trader boat was spotted. Men came running, all of them carrying guns.
It took a quarter of an hour to convince the nervous reception committee that they posed no threat, and for a few minutes at the start Darcy thought they were going to be shot out of hand. Len and Gail Buchannan were well known (though not terribly popular), which acted in their favour. The Coogan was travelling upriver, heading towards the rebel counties, not bringing people down from them. And finally, Lori and Darcy themselves, with their synthetic fabric clothes and expensive hardware units, were accepted as some kind of official team. With what mandate was never asked.
“You gotta understand, people round here are getting mighty trigger happy since last Tuesday,” Geoffrey Tunnard said. He was Oconto’s acting leader, a lean fifty-year-old with curly white hair, wearing much-patched colourless dungarees. Now he was satisfied the Coogan wasn’t bringing revolution and destruction, and his laser rifle was slung over his beefy shoulder again, he was happy to talk.
“What happened last Tuesday?” Darcy asked.
“The Ivets.” Geoffrey Tunnard spat over the side of the jetty. “We heard there’d been trouble up Willow West way, so we shoved ours in a pen. They’ve been good workers since we arrived. But there’s no point in taking chances, right?”
“Right,” Darcy agreed diplomatically.
“But on Monday we had some people visit, claimed they were from Waldersy village, up in Kristo County. They said the Ivets were all rebelling in the Quallheim Counties and Willow West, killing the men and raping the women. Said plenty of younger colonists had joined them, too. They was nothing but a vigilante group, you could see that, all hyped up they were, on a high. I reckoned they’d been smoking some canus; that’ll send you tripping if you dry the leaves right. Trouble they were, just wanted to kill our Ivets. We wouldn’t have it. A man can’t kill another in cold blood, not just on someone else’s say so. We sent them on downriver. Then blow me if they didn’t creep back that night. And you know what?”
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