Two more McBoeing BDA-9008s landed, bringing another batch of colonists down from the orbiting starship. One spaceplane took
off, ferrying LDC personnel up to the empty berths; they were going home, their contract time expired. He stopped to watch
the big dark delta-shape soar into the sky, dwindling away to the east. The sight laced his thoughts with vicious envy. And
still nobody was paying him any attention. He could run, here and now, away into that awesome expanse of untamed land beyond
the perimeter. But the spaceport was the place where he wanted to run
to
, and he could well imagine how the homesteaders would treat fugitive Ivets. He might have been stupid enough to be Transported,
but he wasn’t that naÏve. Cursing softly under his breath, he hauled another composite box full of carpentry tools out of
the McBoeing’s hold and carried it over to the lorry.
By the time the Ivets finished the unloading and began their long trudge into Durringham the clouds from the west had arrived
bringing a warm, persistent rain. Quinn wasn’t surprised to find his grey jump suit turned out not to be waterproof.
The Lalonde Immigration Registration Department manager’s office was in an administration block grafted onto the spaceport’s
flight-control centre. A long rectangular flat roof structure of ezystak panels clipped onto a metal frame. It had been assembled
twenty-five years previously when the first colonists arrived, and its austere fittings were showing their age. Lalonde didn’t
even rate programmed-silicon constructs for its administration buildings, Darcy thought bleakly; at least the Lunar-built
structures had some concessions to comfortable living. If ever a colony project was funded on the cheap, it was Lalonde. But
the office did have air-conditioning, powered from solar cells. The temperature was appreciably lower than outside, though
the humidity remained constant.
He sat on the settee working his way through the registration cards which the latest batch of arrivals had handed over in
exchange for their citizenship and LDC credit disks. The starship had brought five and a half thousand people from Earth;
five and a half thousand losers, dreamers, and criminals let loose to wreck another planet in the name of noble destiny. After
sixty years in the Edenist Intelligence agency, Darcy couldn’t think of Adamists in any other terms. And they claim they’re
the normal ones, he thought wryly, give me ungodly freakishness every time.
He entered another card’s memory into his processor block, glancing briefly at the hologram. A fairly handsome twenty-year-old
man, face composed, eyes haunted with fear and hatred. Quinn Dexter, an Involuntary Transportee. The processor block balanced
on his lap didn’t respond to the name.
The card was tossed onto the growing pile. Darcy picked up another.
“Something you never told me,” Nico Frihagen said from behind his desk. “Who are you people looking for?”
Darcy looked up. Nico Frihagen was Lalonde’s Immigration Registrar, a grand title for what was essentially a clerk working
in the Governor’s Civil Administration Division. He was in his late fifties, dourly Slavic in appearance, with rolling jowls
and limp receding hair. Darcy suspected his ancestors had had very little to do with geneering. The slob-bish civil servant
was drinking beer from a tube, an offworld brand, no doubt pilfered from some unsuspecting arrival’s farmsteading gear. Spaceport
staff had a nice racket going ripping off the new colonists. Nico Frihagen was an essential segment of the scam; a list of
belongings was included on the colonists’ registration cards.
That readiness to jam his nose in the trough made the registrar an ideal contact for the Edenist operatives. For a straight
five hundred fuseodollars a month, Darcy and his partner, Lori, ran through the new immigrants’ identification without having
to access the colony’s civic data store.
Details on the immigrants were sparse, the Lalonde Development Company didn’t really care who settled the planet as long as
they paid their passage and land registration fee. The company wouldn’t declare a dividend for another century yet, when the
population had grown above a hundred million and an industrial economy was rising to replace the agrarian beginnings. Planets
were always very long term investments. But Darcy and Lori kept ploughing through the data. Routine procedure. Besides, someone
might get careless.
“Why do you want to know? Has somebody been showing an interest?” Lori asked, sitting at the other end of the settee from
Darcy. A seventy-three-year-old woman with plain auburn hair and a round face, she looked about half of Nico Frihagen’s age.
Like Darcy she lacked the distinctive height of most Edenists, which made both of them ideal for deep cover work.
“No.” Nico Frihagen gestured with the beer tube. “But you’ve been doing this for three years now, hell probably for three
years before that for all I know. It’s not just the money, that doesn’t mean much to you people. No, it’s the time you spend.
That’s got to mean you’re searching for someone important.”
“Not really,” Lori said. “It’s a type of person we’re after, not a specific individual.”
Good enough,
Darcy told her silently.
Let’s hope he’s satisfied with it,
she replied.
Nico Frihagen took a swig of beer. “What type?”
Darcy held up his personal processor block. “The profile is loaded in here, available on a need to know basis. Do you think
you need to know, Nico?”
“No. I just wondered. There have been rumours, that’s all.”
“What sort of rumours, Nico?”
Nico Frihagen gazed out of the office’s window, watching an Ivet team unloading a McBoeing BDA-9008. “Upriver. Some settlers
vanished, a couple of homesteads up in Schuster County. The sheriffs couldn’t find any trace of them, no sign of a struggle,
no bodies; just empty houses.”
Where the heck is Schuster County?
Lori asked.
Darcy queried the bitek processor in his block; a map of the Juliffe’s tributary basin bloomed in his mind. Schuster County
glowed a soft amber, a sprawling area, roughly rectangular, clinging to the side of the Quallheim River, one of the hundreds
of tributaries.
Like Nico said, way upriver. Over a thousand kilometres; it’s an area they’re just opening up for settlement.
It could be some kind of big animal. A kroclion, or even something the ecological analysis crew didn’t find.
Maybe.
Darcy couldn’t bring himself to believe that. “So what was the rumour about it, Nico? What are people saying?”
“Not much, not many people know. The Governor wanted it kept quiet, he was worried about stirring up trouble with the Tyrathca
farmers, there’s a group of them on the other side of the savannah which borders Schuster County. He thought they’d get the
blame, so the county sheriff hasn’t made an official report. The homesteads have been listed as abandoned.”
“When did this happen?” Lori asked.
“Couple of weeks back.”
Not much to go on,
Lori said.
It’s remote enough. The kind of area he’d go to.
I concede that. But what would he want with some hick farmers?
Insufficient data.
Are we going to go and check?
Check what? That the homesteads are empty? We can’t go gallivanting off into the jungle over a couple of families who have
broken their settlement contract. Goodness, if you stuck me out there in the middle of nowhere, I’d want to run away.
I still say it’s odd. If they had been ordinary malcontents, the local sheriff would have known about it.
Yes. But even if we did go, it would take us two or three weeks to reach Schuster County. That means the trail would be well
over a month old and cold. How good are you at tracking trails like that through a jungle?
We could take Abraham and Catlin out of zero-tau, use them to scout the area.
Darcy weighed up the options. Abraham and Catlin, their eagles, had enhanced senses, but even so sending them off without
even a reasonable idea of where their quarry might be was pointless. They could spend half a year covering Schuster County
alone. If they had more operatives he might have sanctioned it, but not with just the two of them. Covering Lalonde’s immigrants
was a long shot, acting on one piece of dubious information nearly forty years old: that Laton had bought a copy of the original
ecological assessment team’s report. Chasing off into the hinterlands was completely out of the question.
No,
he said reluctantly.
We’ll keep them for when we have a definite scent. But there’s a voidhawk due from Jospool in a month, I’ll ask the captain
for a complete survey of Schuster County.
OK, you’re the boss.
He sent the mental image of a grin. They had worked together for too long for rank to be anything other than nominal between
them.
“Thanks for mentioning this,” Darcy told Nico Frihagen.
“It was useful?”
“Could be. We’ll certainly show our appreciation.”
“Thank you.” Nico Frihagen smiled thinly and took another gulp of beer.
He is a disgusting oaf,
Lori said.
“We’d be even more grateful if you let us know of any more disappearances,” Darcy said.
Nico Frihagen cocked his beer tube in his direction. “Do my best.”
Darcy picked up another registration card. The name Marie Skibbow was printed along the top; an attractive teenage girl smiled
rebelliously at him from her hologram. Her parents were in for a few years of hell, he decided. Outside the grimy window,
thick grey clouds were massing on the western horizon.
The road linking Durringham to the spaceport was a broad strip of pinkish rock chippings slicing straight through the thick
jungle. Father Horst Elwes marched towards the capital as best he could with his swelling feet rubbing what felt suspiciously
like blisters on both heels. He kept a cautionary eye on the clouds accumulating above the gently waving treetops, hoping
the rain would hold off until he made it to the transients’ dormitory.
Thin spires of steam drifted out of the chippings around his feet. The narrow gorge between the trees seemed to act as a lens
for the sun, and the heat was awesome. A carpet of bushy grass was besieging the edge of the road. Vegetation on Lalonde certainly
was vigorous. Birdsong filled the air, a resonant chittering. That would be the chikrows, he thought, reviewing the didactic
memory of local conditions which the Church had given him before he left Earth. About the size of a terran pheasant, with
bright scarlet plumage. Eatable, but not recommended, the artificial memory informed him.
There wasn’t much traffic on the road. Battered lorries rumbling to and from the spaceport, carrying wooden crates and ancient-looking
composite cargo-pods, some loaded up with homesteading gear. The spaceport crews riding power bikes with broad, deep-tread
tyres, tooting their horns as they sped past, the men shouting at the girls. Several horse drawn carts trundled by. Horst
stared with unashamed delight at the big creatures. He’d never visited his arcology’s zoo back on Earth. How strange that
the first time he should meet them was on a planet over three hundred light-years from their birthworld. And how could they
stand the heat with such thick coats?
There were five hundred members in Group Seven, of which he was included. They had all started off down the road in a tightly
packed group following the LDC officer, chattering brightly. Now, after a couple of kilometres, they had become well spread
out, and subdued. Horst was close to the rear. His joints were already creaking in protest, and the need for a drink was rising
sharply. Yet the air was so moist. Most of the men had shrugged out of their jump suit tops and T-shirts, tying the arms around
their waist. So too had several of the women. He noticed that all the locals on power bikes were in shorts and thin shirts;
so was the LDC officer leading them, come to that.
He stopped, surprised by the amount of blood pounding away in his cheeks, and gave the seal catch at his neck a full ninety-degree
twist. The front of his jump suit split open to reveal his thin powder-blue T-shirt, stained a shade deeper by sweat. The
lightweight silk-smooth garment might be ideal for shipboard use, and even in an arcology, but for dealing with raw nature
it was ridiculous. Somebody must have got their communication channels fouled up. Surely colonists hadn’t been arriving dressed
like this for twenty-five years?
A little girl, about ten or eleven years old, was looking up at him. She had that miniature angel’s face of all young children,
with straight shoulder-length white-blonde hair, gathered into two pony-tails by small red cords. He was surprised to see
she was wearing sturdy ankle-length hiker boots, along with baggy yellow shorts and a small white cotton top. A wide-brimmed
green felt hat was tilted back sharply. Horst found himself smiling down at her automatically.
“Hello, there. Shouldn’t you have got on the bus back at the spaceport?” he asked.
Her face screwed up in indignation. “I’m not a baby!”
“I never said you were. But you could have fooled the development company officer into giving you that lift. I would have
done it, if I had the chance.”
Her eyes darted to the white crucifix on his T-shirt sleeve. “But you’re a priest.”
“Father Horst Elwes,
your
priest, if you are in Group Seven.”
“Yes, I am. But claiming a lift would have been dishonest,” she persisted.
“It would have been sensible. And I’m sure Jesus would understand.”
She grinned at that, which made the day seem even brighter to Horst.
“You’re nothing like Father Varhoos back home.”
“Is that good?”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded vigorously.
“Where’s your family?”
“There’s only me and Mother.” The girl pointed to a woman who was walking towards them. She was in her mid-thirties, a strong
face with the same fair hair as her daughter. Her robust figure made Horst sigh for what could never be. Not that the Unified
Christian Church forbade its priests from marrying, far from it, but even in his prime, twenty years ago, he had been curved
in most directions. Now he was what his kinder colleagues described as cuddly, and that was after treating every calorie like
an invading virus.