Into the Maelstrom - eARC

by David Drake

  Unfortunately that research embargo also meant that people were still suffering incurable effects from the bioweapon legacy, but that was considered to be a price worth paying.

  Allenson’s train of thought reminded him of his last conversation with Todd. His brother had scared him to the core by showing that their Fourth Civilization was just as vulnerable as all the others. They thought they could beat the odds and reject the night but then, so had their predecessors.

  The Fourth wasn’t stuck on a single world like the Third. However, the Home Worlds occupied such a tiny region of realspace when judged by astronomical distances. Just one supernova in the wrong place or some other hitherto unknown disaster and it would be back to banging the rocks together. Assuming there was anyone left to care.

  Civilization must expand or die and the only realistic road for the Fourth Civilization was across the worldless Bight and into the Hinterlands. The Hinterland colonies had to grow and become self-sufficient for mankind’s sake in case something happened to their parent worlds. That was why he had to go to Paxton and listen to boring speeches from self-important people even though the thought made him want to throw up.

  Allenson looked at the hologram again. The artist had made the picture from the vantage of a bridge over a wide waterway. Figures rendered indistinct by the gloom walked away from the artist towards the distant lights of the city. They strode purposefully along a laser-straight stabilized road surface. Why were they all walking in the same direction?

  These shadow-people had been real flesh and blood. They lived and dreamed, bred children, buried loved ones, wept and laughed. They hoped and planned but all that they built was dust.

  He clenched his fist. It was not going to happen to his world or to his people. He wouldn’t let it.

  Allenson knelt at the base of one of the large fleshy-lobed yellow-ochre plants that served Pentire demesne in lieu of a compound fence. He got as close as he could without risk of contact. He could just see fine hairs sticking out of the brown nodules spotted across the plant. The hairs caused stings as painful as they were bloody dangerous. They injected a complex toxic biochemical mix containing lysosomic enzymes. These rapidly broke down the polymeric macromolecules that made up animal tissue.

  Gunja plants were native to Rafe, one of the recent Hinterland colonies. Allenson had initially imported them with some success until an outbreak of spotfly caterpillars devastated the crop. A specimen crawled up the stem of the plant as he watched. It humped its purple and orange striped body as it climbed.

  Spotflys were herbivores native to Manzanita. They laid their eggs in the mouths of carnivorous plants where they were protected against predators. Gunja plant venom and the hydrolases in Manzanita carnivorous plant s were apparently close enough in chemical composition to confer immunity on the caterpillars. To spotflies, a gunja plant fence was a well-stocked larder.

  A peeling section of bark on the plant stem waved gently in the breeze near the caterpillar. An oddity, as the air was as still as a cat watching a mouse hole. Not that the caterpillar cared, being incapable of noting anomalies in cause and effect. The caterpillar had the excuse of a tiny brain consisting of a sliver of nervous tissue. Human beings could claim no such excuse but many still shared the caterpillar’s issues with cause and effect.

  A pincer on an extending arm like an angle-poise lamp shot out from under the bark peel. The sharp tip impaled the caterpillar. The insect wriggled and twisted in a fruitless attempt to escape but was lifted off the stem. The bark peel raised itself on four stubby legs. It retreated backwards deeper into the vegetation, dragging its lunch after it.

  Allenson’s estate manager clapped his hands together excitedly.

  “See, I told you it was working.”

  “It seems you were right, Frederick,” Allenson said.

  “I thought the heavy armor on mealy bugs gave them an even chance of surviving even gunja plant stings.”

  “Yes, my only concern now is that we have imported an exotic species. We need to keep a close eye on developments in case something unexpected unravels.”

  “Like at Frempton?” the manager asked.

  “Exactly like at Frempton,” Allenson replied.

  “The Frempton disaster was something of a one off,” the manager said, frowning. “But I take the point.”

  Frempton was a colony farther up the Stream. Its economy had depended heavily on a cash crop of a popular recreational narcotic exported back to Brasilia. Some local entrepreneur imported a goat strain and released it into the wild to provide sport as Frempton lacked anything worth hunting. Unfortunately the goats ignored the bushes provided for their sustenance and took a liking to the cash crop instead. The goats weren’t even good sport for hunters as they tended to lie around stoned most of the time after feeding.

  By the time Fremptoners grasped the scale of the problem the goats were past culling. The genius involved then imported an exotic predator to control the goats. The predator was so-so about dining on stoned goats but developed a voracious appetite for a native predator that fed on the rat infestations. Wherever humans colonize you sooner or later get rats.

  The resulting overpopulation of starving rats broke into the fleek enclosures to steal their eggs, spreading a variety of diseases. The bird populations, ever susceptible to disease, were decimated. The narcotic crop duly rotted in the fields because there were no fleeks for the harvest.

  Biological control might be elegant in theory but had a propensity to spin out of control in practice.

  Frederick Elberg, the Pentire estate manager, was one of Trina’s second cousins who had fallen on hard times. When the bank foreclosed on his plantation, Trina put his name forward to Allenson.

  Allenson had not considered employing an estate manager. When he did consider it he found the idea distinctly unwelcome. But although Pentire was a legacy from his brother Allenson had inherited little in the way of capital. His development and expansion of the estate was funded by Trina’s family money so he felt obligated to fall in with her wishes. He rather hoped that her cousin would stay out of his way and drink himself quietly to death somewhere. Incompetence coupled with indolence was generally harmless compared to energetic bungling.

  Elberg tuned out to be both energetic and competent, which was something of a shock. In Allenson’s experience such paragons were rare as fleek’s teeth. Dynamic proficiency took some getting used to. He had come to increasingly rely on Elberg to oversee his ideas for improving the estate. Indeed, he would be a lot less happy about traveling to Nortania without knowing Elberg would be here to watch over the demesne.

  Nevertheless, he needed to reassure himself with one last tour of his small empire in the estate manager’s company just to make sure that Elberg was on top of matters. They rode on a four-wheel-drive electric scooter. Currently the transmission powered only three wheels which made steering challenging, especially on slopes.

  Allenson stopped outside the fleek enclosures to examine the beasts through the windows. Fleeks were birdlike organisms about the size and bulk of an ape. They came from a world that had never evolved mammals so birds filled all the mammalian ecological niches. Colored feathers covered their bodies, forming patterns of metallic blue and green. Non-flyers, they possessed only vestigial wings and ran on long sturdy legs with a backward-facing knee joint.

  A heavy beak mounted on a flexible muscular neck had evolved to probe the ground. Buried eggs made up their natural diet in the wild. This life style required good forward vision and a high degree of dexterity so the beaks made excellent manipulatory appendages. Fleeks were not sentient. Their mental development more or less equaled that of a chimp but their bird-type brains memorized and repeated complex behavioral patterns much more proficiently than any mammal of similar intellect.

  In short they made acceptable agricultural workers for routine repetitive tasks like weeding or harvesting. Specialized agricultural automatons were more efficient. However, they were expensive and i
n short supply in the colonies. The ones that washed up on the far shores of the Bight tended to be reconditioned models with appalling break-down rates. Royman Destry had experimented with importing equipment to assemble robots on his demesne. It had not been a success. The reliability rate of the manufacturing system proved as bad as the imported automatons.

  Human labor for such tasks was wasteful. The sort of indentured servants that ended up as agricultural workers had to be constantly supervised to get any work out of them at all. Fleeks filled the gap. Their one big advantage over automatons was that they could be bred to make more fleeks.

  But what blessings the good fairy gave with one hand the bad fairy buggered up with the other. Fleeks were inbred to the point of dangerous biological fragility so highly infectious and lethal diseases raged through their flocks. Death rates of ninety per cent plus were not uncommon.

  “You have the fleeks silod behind tight firewalls?” Allenson asked.

  “Each flock is kept within an air-filtered enclosure. No two flocks are ever used on the same land. Each flock has its own gangmaster and feeders who do not share equipment. No one gets in or out without going through the antibiotic sprays.”

  Elberg listed the points on the fingers of his hand as he reassured Allenson.

  “I can’t guarantee an infectious agent won’t be windblown from another demesne onto a flock working in the fields, you understand Allenson, but everything possible is in place to limit an outbreak to a single flock.”

  “I know it is, Elberg.” Allenson patted the man’s shoulder. “But fleek plague gives me nightmares. I have seen crops rotting in the fields because of it.”

  The tour ended at a small field where Allenson was trying a new cultivar of rosehip berries grafted onto the roots of a wild bramblelike plant from the Hinterlands. He cupped a small cluster of flowers gently in one hand and noted that berries were already forming.

  “These will be ripe for harvesting in a week or two,” Allenson said wistfully. “I shall probably still be on Nortania listening to endless prevarication.”

  “Not to worry, I shall keep an eye on them for you,” Elberg said reassuringly.

  Allenson nodded assent.

  “Of course, it’s just that I would have liked to observe the process.”

  Allenson glanced surreptitiously at the power gauge on his datapad. They were moving against an unexpected Continuum current. That shouldn’t have been a problem. His carriage had been fully charged before leaving Manzanita. It theoretically had power to spare to reach their first port of call, Syma. Now he was beginning to become concerned.

  His personal carriage was entirely self-powered and designed for longer hops through the Continuum than Trina’s conveyance. It did away with the need for a chauffeur and was navigated entirely by automatics controlled from the passenger compartment. He bought the machine from Synclare of Brasilia. Its specs were impressive but the workmanship was shoddy and it never seemed to hold a charge properly. Perhaps the energy converters were malfunctioning. Whatever the reason, it never achieved the advertised speed or range.

  He checked their route in case he had to displace to another closer colony. There were one or two possibilities but they were all backwaters. It was doubtful that they would have the technology to refuel the batteries. He would have been content to dump the carriage and continue on by one-man frame but he was carrying passengers. There was also the matter of his gravitas. Important delegates arrived by carriage. They did not pedal in on a frame.

  To his way of thinking, the method of arrival shouldn’t matter but he accepted that he was out of step with his contemporaries on this. It was one of those inexplicable facts of life—like why the man had to apologize after a row with his wife irrespective of fault or the relative merits of their arguments.

  Todd noticed his concern and turned to engage the other passenger in conversation to distract him from what Allenson was doing. Such matters were an important part of an aide’s duties. In this case Allenson thought Todd’s intervention superfluous. Renald Buller was not the sort of man who noticed anything except that which was immediately important to Renald Buller.

  “I understand you have had a fair amount of military experience, Colonel Buller?” Todd asked encouragingly.

  Buller puffed up like an amphibious tetrapod trying to attract a mate.

  “Not a fair amount, young man—considerable, considerable military experience.”

  Buller jabbed a finger aggressively in Todd’s direction to punctuate his word, looking like a child poking holes in a pudding.

  “And not marching around in pretty uniforms either like you young fops from the so-called better families. I mean real combat experience—up at the sharp end.”

  Todd smiled. “I heard you were attached to the 12th, sir, but were fortunate to miss the Chernokovsky disaster in the Hinterland.”

  Brigadier Chernokovsky had led two battalions of light infantry, the 12th and the 51st, on an expedition to eject the Terrans from Larissa. The expedition was ambushed and cut to pieces with all the senior officers killed. Allenson had managed to extract the survivors of the 51st and get them home but the 12th were wiped out to a man.

  Allenson glared at Todd. It was not politic to raise the Larissa debacle with members of the Brasilian military, not even ex-members like Buller. Fortunately, the man was too thick skinned to notice the implied slight.

  “Had I been there we would have seen a very different outcome young man, I can tell you. A professional soldier to provide leadership instead of a ragbag of chinless wonders and colonial amateurs makes all the difference,” Buller said complacently.

  He then seemed to recollect Allenson’s involvement and held a hand palm up.

  “No insult to you, Allenson. Sure you did your best. Not your fault you were out of your depth.”

  “One tried,” Allenson replied dryly.

  “What engagements have you seen, Colonel,” Todd asked quickly, changing the subject.

  “Stormed the Terran colony at Genran with the 103rd. Lost a leg and was out of it for the remainder of the Colonial Wars while it regrew. Then fought with the 103rd when we put some backbone into the Piwis in their revolt against Frankistan. Got a field promotion to lieutenant colonel.”

  The state of Frankistan occupied the primary continent of Hiwa, one of the less important Home Worlds, which had always enjoyed a close relationship with Terra. Piwi was a collection of islands in the Hiwa world ocean that at various times was part of Frankistan or independent. Mostly it occupied some confused political status of semi-dependence. Brasilia found it useful to aid the Piwi’s revolt as a tangential way of eroding Terra’s authority in the Home Worlds without actually declaring war. It was a kind of colonial war at home.

  Terra responded by sending aid to Frankistan. The war devastated both Frankistan and Piwi before the business wound down to the point where a politically face-saving compromise was possible. It was not clear who had won. Probably, nobody—nobody often did.

  “You know what reward they gave me when the 103rd returned home?” Buller asked, rhetorically.

  Todd opened his mouth but never got the chance to speak.

  “Nothing, that’s what,” Buller said. “They disbanded the regiment to save money and put me on the beach. They kept Guard popinjays who’d never fired a shot in anger and who’d probably shit themselves in fear if they ever saw a body but the Fighting 103rd was disbanded to save money. We weren’t fashionable, you see.”

  Buller made the word fashionable sound like it described a particularly virulent strain of antisocial disease.

  “So I went east as a soldier of fortune and became general and aide to the king-emperor of Quorn in his war against the Syracusian Confederacy. Gave up on Brasilia and emigrated out here when the king-emperor was poisoned by his wife.”

  Buller appeared to think that the king-emperor had deliberately died to spite him.

  “Bought a plantation on Prato Rio. I’m damned if I’ll pay ta
xes to support an army led by popinjays who couldn’t protect the Stream from a bunch of society ladies armed with cream puffs.”

  “Quite,” Todd said, faintly, when Buller finally wound down.

  Allenson convinced himself that he had enough power to reach Syma but took the precaution of running a continuous analysis of fuel with a warning set if the situation deteriorated.

  “That’s why you emigrated,” Allenson said, joining the conversation to Todd’s palpable relief. “Because you felt your abilities were being unfairly overlooked in Brasilia.”

  Buller snorted, “Too right, Allenson. Brasilia’s run as an old boy network for the dim-witted sons of the well connected. There’s a complete block on real talent to cut out the competition.”

  Allenson found himself sucked into the conversation.

  “But is it better here? Brasilian trans-Bight colonies reflect the Home World’s social structure, do they not?”

  Buller nodded.

  “Damn right, which is why we have to cut ourselves off from Brasilia and get full independence.”

  “I am not sure we could sell that to the Brasilian establishment,” Allenson said.

  “Hardly,” Buller said. “We’ll have to fight for independence.”

  “You mean war,” Allenson said.

  Buller thrust his chin forward.

  “Of course I mean war. You think the ruling families will just sign away their privileges?”

  It had always been Allenson’s contention that those who had actually seen combat would be less keen on repeating the experience. He began to wonder whether that opinion was optimistic. The smell of war wafted around the Stream like an odor from something that had recently died under the floorboards. Not yet a stench, but unchecked it soon would be.

  “And we’ll need an army. Need men who’ll stand their ground against Brasilian regulars. A disciplined force commanded by a professional,” Buller said, striking a fist into the palm of his other hand for emphasis.