A quick status check revealed both the nanonic clusters were still functional. God’s Brother hadn’t deserted him, not entirely.
“Smart boy. Come on, then.” The crewman grabbed Quinn’s shoulder, and began to swim along the mesh with nonchalant flips of
his free hand.
Most of the pods they passed were empty. Quinn could see the outlines of more pods on the other side of the mesh. The light
was dim, casting long grey shadows. Looking round him he knew how a fly must feel crawling about inside an air-conditioning
duct.
After the life-support module, there were a couple of long tubular corridors. Crewmen and colonists floated past. One family
was clustered around a wailing four-year-old girl who clung to a grab hoop with a death-grip. Nothing her parents could say
would make her let go.
They went through an airlock into a long cylindrical compartment with several hundred seats, nearly all of them occupied.
Spaceplane, Quinn realized. He had left Earth on the Brazilian orbital tower, a ten-hour journey crammed into a lift capsule
with twenty-five other Involuntary Transportees. It suddenly struck him he didn’t even know where he was now, nothing had
been said about his destination during his fifty-second hearing in front of the magistrate.
“Where are we?” he asked the crewman. “What planet?”
The crewman gave him a funny look. “Lalonde. Why, didn’t they tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, you could have copped a worse one, believe me. Lalonde is EuroChristian-ethnic, opened up about thirty years ago.
I think there’s a Tyrathca settlement, but it’s mainly humans. You’ll do all right. But take my advice, don’t get the Ivet
supervisor pissed at you.”
“Right.” He was afraid to ask what a Tyrathca was. Some kind of xenoc, presumably. He shuddered at that, he who had never
ventured out of the arcologies or vac-train stations back on Earth. Now they were expecting him to live under open skies with
talking animals. God’s Brother!
The crewman hauled Quinn down to the rear of the space-plane, then took his collar off and told him to find a spare seat.
There was a group of about twenty people sitting in the last section, most of them lads barely out of their teens, all with
the same slate-grey one-piece jump suit he’d been issued with. IVT was printed in bright scarlet letters on their sleeves.
Waster kids. Quinn could recognize them, it was like looking into a mirror which reflected the past. Him a year ago, before
he joined the Light Brothers, before his life meant something.
Quinn approached them, fingers arranged casually in the inverted cross sign. Nobody responded. Ah well. He strapped himself
in next to a man with a pale face and short-cropped ginger hair.
“Jackson Gael,” his neighbour said.
Quinn nodded numbly and muttered his own name. Jackson Gael looked about nineteen or twenty, with the kind of lean body and
contemptuous air that marked him down as a street soldier, tough and uncomplicated. Quinn wondered idly what he had done to
be transported.
The PA came on, and the pilot announced they would be undocking in three minutes. A chorus of whoops and cheers came from
the colonists in the front seats. Someone started playing a mini-synth, the jolly tune grating on Quinn’s nerves.
“Balls,” Jackson Gael said. “Look at ’em, they want to go down there. They actually believe in that New Frontier crap the
development company has peddled them. And we’ve got to spend the rest of our lives with these dickheads.”
“Not me,” Quinn said automatically.
“Yeah?” Jackson grinned. “If you’re rich how come you didn’t bribe the captain, have him drop you off at Kulu or New California?”
“I’m not rich. But I’m not staying.”
“Yeah, right. After you finish your work-time you’re gonna make it as some hotshot merchant. I believe you. Me, I’m gonna
keep my head down. See if I can’t get assigned to a farm for my work-time.” He winked. “Some good-looking daughters in this
batch. Lonely for them out there in their little wilderness homesteads. People like you and me, they start looking at us in
a better light after a while. And if you ain’t noticed yet, there ain’t many Ivet fems.”
Quinn stared at him blankly. “Work-time?” “Yeah, work-time. Your sentence, man. Why, you think they were going to turn us
loose once we hit the planet?”
“They didn’t tell me anything,” Quinn said. He could feel the despair opening up inside him, a black gulf. Only now was he
beginning to realize how ignorant of the universe outside the arcology he truly was.
“Man, you must’ve pissed someone off bad,” Jackson said. “You get dumped on by a politico?”
“No.” Not a politician, somebody far worse, and infinitely subtler. He watched the last colonist family emerge from the airlock,
it was the one with the terrified four-year-old girl. Her arms were wrapped tightly round her father’s neck and she was still
crying. “So what do we do for work-time?”
“Well, once we get down there, you, me, and the other Ivets start doing ten years’ hard labour. See, the Lalonde Development
Company paid for our passage from Earth, and now they want a return on that investment. So we spend the prime of our life
shovelling shit for these colonists. Community maintenance, they call it. But basically we’re a convict gang, Quinn, that’s
what we are; we build roads, clear trees, dig latrines. You name it, every crappy job the colonists need doing, we do it for
them. Work where we’re told, eat what we’re given, wear what we’re given, all for fifteen Lalonde francs a month, which is
about five fuseodollars’ worth. Welcome to pioneer paradise, Quinn.”
The McBoeing BDA-9008 spaceplane was a no-frills machine designed for operations on stage one agrarian planets; remote basic
colonies where spare parts were limited, and maintenance crews were made up of wash-outs and inexperienced youngsters working
their first contract. It was a sturdy delta shape built in a New Californian asteroid settlement, seventy-five metres long,
with a wingspan of sixty metres; there were no ports for the passengers, just a single curving transparent strip for the pilot.
A fuselage of thermal-resistant boron-beryllium alloy glinted a dull oyster in the sharp light of the F-type star a hundred
and thirty-two million kilometres away.
Faint jets of dusty gas spirted out of the airlock chamber as the seal disengaged. Docking latches withdrew into the bulk
of the starship, leaving the spaceplane floating free.
The pilot fired the reaction-control thrusters, moving away from the seamless curve of the huge starship’s hull. From a distance
the McBoeing resembled a moth retreating from a football. When they were five hundred metres apart, a second, longer, burn
from the thrusters sent the spaceplane curving down towards the waiting planet.
Lalonde was a world which barely qualified as terracom-patible. With a small axial tilt and uncomfortable proximity to its
bright primary, the planet’s climate was predominantly hot and humid, a perennial tropical summer. Out of its six continents
only Amarisk in the southern hemisphere had been opened for settlement by the development company. Humans couldn’t venture
into the equatorial zone without temperature-regulated suits. The one, northern, polar continent, Wyman, was subject to severe
storms as the hot and cool air fronts clashed around its edges all year long. Shrivelled ice-caps covered less than a fifth
of the area normal for terracompatible planets.
The spaceplane sliced cleanly down through the atmosphere, its leading edges glowing a dull cerise. Ocean rolled past below
it, a placid azure expanse dotted with volcanic island chains and tiny coral atolls. Pristine clouds boiled across nearly
half of the visible surface, generated by the relentless heat. Barely a day went by anywhere on Lalonde without some form
of rain. It was one of the reasons the development company had managed to attract funding; the regular heat and moisture was
an ideal climate for certain types of plants, rewarding the farmer colonists with vigorous growth and high yields.
By the time the McBoeing dropped to subsonic velocity it had fallen below the vast cloudband sweeping in towards Amarisk’s
western coast. The continent ahead covered over eight million square kilometres, stretching from the flood plains of the western
coast to a long range of fold mountains in the east. Under the midday sun it glared a brilliant emerald, jungle country, broken
by huge steppes in the south where the temperature dropped towards subtropical.
Beneath the spaceplane the sea was stained with mud, a grubby brown blemish extending for seventy to eighty kilometres out
from the boggy shore. It marked the mouth of the Juliffe, a river whose main course stretched just under two thousand kilometres
inland, way into the foothills guarding the eastern coast. The river’s tributary network was extensive enough to rival Earth’s
Amazon. For that reason alone, the development company had chosen its southern bank as the site of the planet’s capital (and
sole) city, Durringham.
The McBoeing passed low over the coastal swamps, lowering its undercarriage, bullet-shaped nose lining up on the runway thirty
kilometres ahead. Lalonde’s only spaceport was situated five kilometres outside Durringham, a clearing hacked out of the jungle
containing a single prefabricated metal grid runway, a flight-control centre, and ten hangars made from sun-bleached ezystak
panels.
The spaceplane touched down with tyres squealing, greasy smoke shooting up as the flight computer applied the brakes. The
nose lowered, and it rolled to a halt, then started to taxi back towards the hangars.
An alien world. A new beginning. Gerald Skibbow emerged from the stuffy atmosphere of the spaceplane’s cabin, looking about
with reverence. Just seeing the solid picket of raw jungle bubbling around the spaceport’s perimeter he knew he’d done the
right thing coming here. He hugged his wife, Loren, as they started down the stairs.
“Damn, will you look at that! Trees, real bloody trees. Millions of them. Trillions of them! A whole bloody world of them.”
He breathed in deep. It wasn’t quite what he’d expected. The air here was solid enough to cut with a knife, and sweat was
erupting all over his olive-green jump suit. There was a smell, vaguely sulphurous, of something rotting. But by damn it was
natural air; air that wasn’t laced with seven centuries of industrial pollutants. And that’s what really counted. Lalonde
was dreamland made real, unspoilt, a world on which the kids could make anything come true just by working at it.
Marie was following him down the stairs, her pretty face registering a slight sulk, nose all crinkled up at the scent of the
jungle. Even that didn’t bother him; she was seventeen, nothing in life was right when you were seventeen. Give her two years,
she’d grow out of it.
His eldest daughter, Paula, who was nineteen, was staring round appreciatively. Her new husband, Frank Kava, stood beside
her with his arm protectively round her shoulder, smiling at the vista. The two of them sharing the moment of realization,
making it special. Now Frank had what it took, a perfect son-in-law. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. Any homestead with Frank
as a partner was bound to prosper.
The apron in front of the hangar was made from compacted rock chips, with puddles everywhere. Six harried Lalonde Development
Company officers were collecting the passengers’ registration cards at the bottom of the steps, running them through processor
blocks. Once the data was verified, each immigrant was handed a Lalonde citizenship card and an LDC credit disk with their
Govcentral funds converted to Lalonde francs, a closed currency, no good anywhere else in the Confederation. Gerald had known
that would happen; he had a Jovian Bank credit disk stashed in an inner pocket, carrying three and a half thousand fuseodollars.
He nodded thanks as he received his new card and disk, and the officer directed him towards the cavernous hangar.
“You’d think they’d be a bit better organized,” Loren muttered, cheeks puffed against the heat. It had taken fifteen minutes’
queueing before they got their new cards.
“Want to go back already?” Gerald teased. He was holding up his citizenship card, grinning at it.
“No, you wouldn’t come with me.” The eyes smiled, but the tone lacked conviction.
Gerald didn’t notice.
In the hangar they joined the waiting passengers from an earlier spaceplane flight, where the LDC officer collectively labelled
them Transient Group Seven. A manager from the Land Allocation Office told them there was a boat scheduled to take them upriver
to their allocated settlement land in two days. They would be sleeping in a transients’ dormitory in Durringham until it departed.
And they’d have to walk into town, though she promised a bus for the smaller children.
“Dad!” Marie hissed through her teeth as the groans rose from the crowd.
“What? You haven’t got legs? You spent half the time at your day club in the gym.”
“That was muscle toning,” she said. “Not forced labour in a sauna.”
“Get used to it.”
Marie almost started to answer back, but caught the look in his eye. She exchanged a slightly worried glance with her mother,
then shrugged acceptance. “OK.”
“What about our gear?” someone asked the manager.
“The Ivets will unload it from the spaceplane,” she said. “We’ve got a lorry ready to take it into town, it’ll go straight
onto the boat with you.”
After the colonists started their march into town a couple of the spaceport ground crew marshalled Quinn and the other Involuntary
Transportees into a work party. So his first experience of Lalonde was spending two hours lugging sealed composite containers
out of a spaceplane’s cargo hold, and stacking them on lorries. It was heavy work, and the Ivets stripped down to their shorts;
it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference to Quinn, sweat appeared to have consolidated into a permanent layer on his skin.
One of the ground crew told them that Lalonde’s gravity was fractionally less than Earth standard; he couldn’t feel that,
either.
About quarter of an hour into the job he noticed the ground crew had all slunk back into the shade of the hangar. Nobody was
bothering with the Ivets.