The light snuffed out, and the man fell flat on his face.
The other four assailants began to howl. Lori had heard a dog lamenting the death of its master once; their voices had that same bitter resentful grieving. She realized some of her hardware units were coming back on-line, the disruption effect was abating. Her chameleon suit circuitry sent psychedelic scarlet and green fireworks zipping over the fabric.
“Kelven!” she shouted desperately.
Alone in his darkened office a thousand kilometres away Kelven Solanki jerked to attention behind his desk as her static-jarred voice crashed into his neural nanonics.
“Kelven, he was right, Laton was right, there is some kind of energy field involved. It interfaces with matter somehow, controls it. You can beat it with electricity. Sometimes. Hell, she’s getting up again.”
Darcy’s voice broke in. “Run! Now!”
“Don’t let them gang up on you, Kelven. They’re powerful when they group together. It’s got to be xenocs.”
“Shit, the whole village is swarming after us,” Darcy called.
Static roared along the satellite link like a rogue binary blitzkrieg, making Kelven wince.
“Kelven, you must quarantine . . .” Lori never finished, her signal drowning below the deluge of rampaging whines and hisses. Then the racket ended.
TRANSPONDER SIGNAL DISCONTINUED, the computer printed neatly on Kelven’s desk screen.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come up here, didn’t I?” Gail Buchannan said. “Plain as day, I said no, I said you can’t trust Edenists. But you wouldn’t listen. Oh no. They just waved their fancy credit disk in front of your eyes, and you rolled over like a wet puppy. It’s worse than when she was on board.”
Sitting on the other side of the galley’s table, Len covered his eyes with his hands. The diatribes didn’t bother him much now, he had learnt to filter them out years ago. Perhaps it was one of the reasons they had stayed together so long, not from attraction, simply because they ignored each other ninety per cent of the time. He had taken to thinking about such things recently, since Marie had left.
“Is there any coffee left?” he asked.
Gail never even glanced up from her knitting needles. “In the pot. You’re as lazy as she was.”
“Marie wasn’t lazy.” He got up and walked over to the electric hotplate where the coffee-pot was resting.
“Oh, it’s Marie now, is it? I bet you can’t name ten of the others we ferried downriver.”
He poured half a mug of coffee and sat back down. “Neither can you.”
She actually stopped knitting. “Lennie, for God’s sake, none of them had this effect on you. Look at what’s happened to us, to the boat. What was so special about her? There must have been over a hundred brides in that bunk of yours down the years.”
Len glanced up in surprise. With her bloated features rendering her face almost expressionless it was difficult to know what went on behind his wife’s eyes, but he could tell how confused she was. He dropped his gaze to the steaming mug, and blew on it absently. “I don’t know.”
Gail grunted, and resumed her knitting.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” he said. “It’s late, and we ought to stay awake in shifts.”
“If you hadn’t been so eager to come here we wouldn’t have to mess our routine up.”
Arguing just wasn’t worth the effort. “Well, we’re here now. I’ll keep watch until midmorning.”
“Those damn Ivets. I hope Rexrew has every one of them shot.”
The lighting panel screwed into the galley’s ceiling began to dim. Len gave it a puzzled glance; all the boat’s electrical systems ran off the big electron-matrix crystals in the engine-room, and they were always kept fully charged. If nothing else, he did keep the boat’s machinery in good order. Point of honour, that was.
Someone stepped onto the Coogan ’s deck between the wheel-house and the long cabin. It was only the slightest sound, but Len and Gail both looked up sharply, meeting each other’s gaze.
A young-looking teenage lad walked into the galley. Len saw he was wearing a sheriff’s beige-coloured jungle jacket, the name Yuri Wilken printed on the left breast. Darcy had told him about the invaders using sequestration techniques. At the time he’d listened cynically; now he was prepared to believe utterly. There was a vicious wound on the lad’s throat, long scars of red tender skin all knotted up. A huge ribbon of dried blood ran down the front of his sleeveless shirt. He wore the kind of dazed expression belonging to the very drunk.
“Get off my boat,” Len growled.
Yuri Wilken parted his mouth in a parody of a smile. Liquid rasps emerged as he tried to speak. The lighting panel was flashing on and off at high frequency.
Len stood up and calmly walked over to the long counter fitted along the starboard wall.
“Sit,” Yuri grated. His hand closed on Gail’s shoulder. There was a sizzling sound, and her dress strap ignited, sending licks of yellow flame curling round his fingers. His skin remained completely unblemished.
Gail let out an anguished groan at the pain, her mouth yawning open. Wisps of blue smoke were rising from below Yuri’s hand as her skin was roasted. “Sit or she’s dead.”
Len opened the top drawer next to the fridge, and pulled out the 9mm, semi-automatic pistol he kept for emergencies. He never had trusted lasers and magnetic rifles, not exposed to the Juliffe’s corrosive humidity. If anyone came aboard looking for trouble after a deal went sour, or a village got worked up about prices, he wanted something that would be guaranteed to work first time.
He flicked the safety catch off, and swung the heavy blue-black gun around to point at Yuri.
“No,” the lad’s malaised voice croaked. He brought his hands up in front of his face, cowering back.
Len fired. The first bullet caught Yuri on his shoulder, spinning him round and pushing him into the wall. Yuri snarled, furious eyes glaring at him. The second was aimed at Yuri’s heart. It hit his sternum and the planks behind him were splashed with crimson as two of his ribs were blown apart. He began to slide down the wall, breath hissing through feral teeth. The lighting panel jumped up to its full brightness.
Len watched with numb dismay as the shoulder wound closed up. Yuri squirmed round, trying to regain his feet with slow tenacity. He grinned evilly. The grip on the pistol was growing alarmingly warm inside Len’s hand.
“Kill him, Lennie!” Gail shouted. “Kill, kill!”
Feeling preternaturally calm, Len took aim at the lad’s head and squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The first punched Yuri’s nose into his skull, ripping through his brain. He sucked air in, warbling frantically. Blood and gore slurped out of the hole. The second shot caught the right side of his temple, driving splinters of bone into the wood behind like a flight of Stone Age darts. His feet began to drum on the deck.
Len was seeing it through a cold mist. The punished, mutilated body just refused to give up. He yelled a wordless curse, finger tugging back again and again.
The pistol was clicking uselessly, its magazine empty. He blinked, trying to pull the world back into focus. Yuri had finally fallen still, there was very little left of his head. Len turned aside, grasping the side of the basin for support as a flush of nausea travelled through him. Gail was whimpering softly, a hand stroking the terrible blisters and long blackened burn marks that mottled her shoulder.
He went over and cradled her head with a tenderness he hadn’t shown in years.
“Get us out of here,” she pleaded. “Please, Lennie.”
“Darcy and Lori . . .”
“Us, Lennie. Get us out of here. You don’t think they’re going to live through tonight, do you?”
He licked his lips, making up his mind. “No.” He brought her the first aid kit and applied a small anaesthetic patch to her shoulder. She let out a blissful little sigh as it discharged.
“You go start the engines,” she said. “I’ll see to this. I’ve never held you back
yet.” She started to rummage through the kit box, hunting for a medical nanonic package.
Len went out onto the deck and untied the silicon-fibre cables mooring the Coogan , slinging the ends over the side. They were expensive, and hard to come by, but it would take another quarter of an hour if he went stumbling round the banks coiling them all up properly.
The furnace was quite cool, but the electron-matrix crystals had enough power to take Coogan an easy seventy kilometres downstream before they were drained. He started the motors, shoving the trader boat out from under the lacework awning of cut branches veiling it from casual eyes. As if there were any of those left on the river, he mused.
Getting underway was a miraculous morale booster. Alone on the lively Zamjan amid the first tinges of dawn’s grey light he could almost believe they were trading again. Simple times, watching the wheel-house’s basic instrumentation, and enjoying the prospect of milking another batch of dumb dreamers at the next village. He even managed to keep his mind from the macabre corpse in the galley.
They had gone six kilometres almost due west, helped by the broad river’s swift current, when Len saw two dark smudges on the water up ahead. Swithland and Hycel were steaming towards him. A great cleft had been made in the Swithland ’s prow, and the superstructure was leaning over at a hellish angle; but neither seemed to be affecting her speed.
The short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector let out a bleep, then the general contact band came on. “Hoi there, Captain Buchannan, this is the Hycel . Reduce speed and prepare to come alongside.”
Len ignored it. He steered a couple of degrees to starboard. The two paddle-boats altered course to match. Blocking him.
“Come on, Buchannan, what do you hope to gain? That pitiful little boat can’t out-race us. One way or the other, you’re coming on board. Now heave to.”
Len thought of the burns the lad had inflicted with his bare hand, the flickering lighting panel. It was all way beyond anything he could hope to understand or resolve. There was no going back to life as it had been, not now. And in the main it had been a good life.
He increased the power to the motors, and held the course steady, aiming for the Hycel ’s growing prow. With a bit of luck Gail would never know.
He was still standing resolutely behind the Coogan ’s wheel when the two boats collided. The Hycel with its greater bulk and stalwart hull rode the impact easily, smashing the flimsy Coogan apart like so much kindling, and sucking the debris below its hull in a riot of bubbles.
Various chunks of wood and plastic bobbed about in the paddle-boat’s wake, spinning in the turbulent water. Thick black oil patches welled up among them. The current slowly pushed the scraps of wreckage downriver, dispersing them over a wide area. Within quarter of an hour there was no evidence left to illustrate the trader boat’s demise.
Swithland and Hycel continued on their way upriver without slowing.
Chapter 18
Joshua Calvert was surprised to find himself enjoying the train journey. He had almost expected to see a nineteenth-century steam engine pumping out clouds of white smoke and clanking pistons spinning iron wheels. Reality was a sleek eight-wheel tractor unit with magnetic axle-motors powered from electron matrices, pulling six coaches.
The Kavanaghs had provided him with a first-class ticket, so he sat in a private compartment with his feet up on the opposite seat, watching the sprawling forests and picturesque hamlets go past. Dahybi Yadev sat next to him, eyelids blinking heavily as a mild stimulant program trickled through his neural nanonics. In the end they had decided that Ashly Hanson should remain behind to operate the Lady Mac ’s MSV as the crew emptied the mayope from her cargo holds. Dahybi had volunteered to take his place quickly enough, and as the nodes had been glitch free on the trip to Norfolk, Joshua had agreed. The rest of the crew had been detailed to maintenance duty. Sarha had sulked at the prospect, she’d been looking forward to an extended leave exploring the gentle planet.
The train compartment’s PA came on to announce they were pulling in to Colsterworth Station. Joshua stretched his limbs, and loaded a formal etiquette program into his neural nanonics. He had found it in Lady Mac ’s memory cores; his father must have visited the planet at some time, though he had never mentioned it. The program might well turn out to be a saviour, country-dwelling Norfolk was supposed to be even more stuffy than swinging cosmopolitan Boston. Pursing his lips at the prospect, Joshua shook Dahybi Yadev’s shoulder. “Come on, cancel the program. We’ve arrived.”
Dahybi’s face lost its narcotic expression, and he squinted out of the window. “This is it?”
“This is it.”
“It looks like a field with a couple of houses in it.”
“Don’t yell that kind of comment about, for God’s sake. Here.” He datavised a copy of the etiquette program over. “Keep that in primary mode. We don’t want to annoy our benefactor.”
Dahybi ran through some of the social jurisprudence listed in the program. “Bloody hell, I think Lady Mac fell through a time warp to get here.”
Joshua rang for the steward to carry their cases. The etiquette program said the man should be tipped five per cent of the ticket price, or a shilling, whichever was the larger sum.
Colsterworth Station consisted of two stone platforms, covered with broad wooden canopies supported by ornate wrought-iron pillars. The waiting-room and ticket office were built from red brick, and a row of metal brackets along the front wall were used to hold big hanging baskets full of bright flowering plants. Appearance was a priority to the stationmaster; the scarlet and cream paintwork was kept gleaming the whole year round, brasswork was polished, and his staff were always smartly turned out.
Such persistence had paid off handsomely today. He was standing next to the heir to Cricklade herself, Louise Kavanagh, who had remarked how nice it all looked.
The morning train from Boston pulled in slowly, and the stationmaster checked his watch. “Thirty seconds late.”
Louise Kavanagh inclined her head graciously at the stout little man. On her other side William Elphinstone shuffled his feet impatiently. She silently prayed for him not to make a complete mess of things. He was so impetuous at times, and he looked totally out of place in his grey suit; field working clothes were much more apposite on him.
For herself, she’d carefully chosen a pale lavender dress with puff sleeves to wear. Nanny had helped to pleat her hair into an elaborate weave at the back of her head which ended in a long pony-tail. Hopefully the combination would give her a suitably dignified appearance.
The train halted, its first three coaches taking up the entire length of the platform. Doors banged open noisily, and passengers started to climb down. She straightened her back to get a better look at the people emerging from the first-class coach.
“There they are,” William Elphinstone said.
Louise wasn’t entirely sure what she’d been expecting, although she was pretty sure in her own mind that starship captains were wise, serious, and mature responsible men, perhaps a bit like her father (except without the temper). Who else would be entrusted with such a fearsome responsibility? What a captain did not look like, even in her most fantastical dreams, was a young man with strong regular features, six foot tall, wearing a smart, exotically stylish uniform that emphasized his powerful build. But there was the silver star on his shoulder, plain for all the world to see.
Louise swallowed hard, tried to remember the words she was supposed to say, and stepped forwards with a polite smile in place. “Captain Calvert, I’m Louise Kavanagh; my father apologizes for not being here to greet you in person, but the estate is very busy right now and requires his full attention. So I’d like to welcome you to Cricklade myself, and hope you enjoy your stay.” Which was almost what she’d rehearsed, but there was something about enjoying his train journey which had been missed out. Oh, well . . .
Joshua took her hand in an emphatic grip. “That’s very kind of you, Louise.
And I must say I consider myself most fortunate that your father is so occupied, because there simply cannot be a nicer way of being welcomed to Cricklade than by a young lady as beautiful as yourself.”
Louise knew her cheeks would be colouring, and wanted to turn and hide. What a juvenile reaction. He was only being polite. But so utterly charming. And he sounded sincere. Could he really think that about her? Her discipline had gone all to pieces. “Hello,” she said to Dahybi Yadev. Which was so dreadfully gauche. Her blush deepened. She realized Joshua was still holding her hand.
“My starflight engineering officer,” Joshua said, with a slight bow.
Louise recovered, and introduced William Elphinstone as an estate manager, not mentioning he was only a trainee. Which he should have been grateful for, but she got the distinct impression he wasn’t terribly impressed with the starship captain.
“We have a carriage laid on to take you to the manor,” William said. He signalled to the driver to take Joshua’s bags from the steward.
“That’s really most thoughtful of you,” Joshua told Louise.
Dimples appeared in her cheeks. “This way.” She gestured to the platform exit.
Joshua thought the waiting carriage looked like an oversized pram fitted with modern lightweight wheels. But the two black horses moved it along at a fair clip, and the ride over the rutted track was comfortably smooth. There hadn’t been much to Colsterworth, it was a rural market town with very few industries; the countryside economy revolved around the farms. Its houses were mostly built from locally quarried stone with a bluish tinge. Doors and windows were almost always arched.
When they rode down the busy High Street, pedestrians nudged one another and glanced over as the carriage went by. At first Joshua thought they were looking at him and Dahybi, but then he realized it was Louise who drew their attention.
Outside Colsterworth the rolling countryside was a patchwork of small fields separated by immaculately layered hedges. Streams wound down through the gentle valleys, while spinneys clung to the rounded heights and deeper folds. The wheat and barley had already been harvested, he saw. Plenty of haystacks were dotted about, steeply sloping tops netted against the expected winter winds. Tractors were ploughing the stubble back into the rich red soil before drilling the second crop. There would be just enough time for the stalks to ripen before the long autumn and winter seasons began.
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