“That’s what the maintenance bay supervisor said.”
“Good God, that’s all we need, this Ione girl turning Tranquillity into some kind of anarchistic pirate nation. It might be
a blackhawk base, but the Lords of Ruin have always supported the Confederation before.” Commander Neale glanced round the
polyp walls, then stared at the AV pillar sticking out of his desk’s processor block, half expecting the personality to contact
him and deny the accusation. “Do you think your cover’s blown?”
“I don’t know. The refit team thought it was all a big joke. Apparently Joshua Calvert signed on some girl to replace me.
They said she was rather attractive.”
“Well, it certainly fits what we know about him; he could very easily have dumped you for a doxy and a quick leg-over.”
“Then why the reference to the Lord of Ruin?”
“God knows.” He let out a long breath. “I want you to keep trying for a berth on a ship; you’ll find out soon enough if you
have been blown. I’m going to put all this on the diplomatic report flek, and let Admiral Aleksandrovich worry about it.”
“Yes, sir.” Erick Thakrar saluted and left.
C
ommander Neale sat in his chair for a long time, watching the starfield rotate past the window. The prospect of Tranquillity
going renegade was horrifying, especially given the one particular status quo it had maintained for twenty-seven years. Eventually
he accessed his neural nanonics file on Dr Mzu, and started to check through the circumstances under which he was authorized
to have her assassinated.
Some of the more superstitious amongst Aberdale’s population were heard to say that Marie Skibbow had taken the village’s
luck with her when she departed. There was no change in their physical circumstances, but they seemed to suffer a veritable
plague of depressing and unfortunate incidents.
Marie had been right about her family’s reaction. After the truth was finally established (Rai Molvi confirmed she boarded
the
Coogan
, Scott Williams confirmed she was loading the thermal furnace when it cast off) Gerald Skib-bow’s reaction to what he thought
of as his daughter’s betrayal was pure fury. He demanded Powel Manani either chase after the tramp trader on his horse, or
use his communication block to have the county sheriff arrest her when the
Coogan
sailed past Schuster.
Powel politely explained that Marie was now legally an adult, and didn’t have a settlement contract with the LDC, and was
therefore free to do as she pleased. Gerald, with Loren weeping quietly at his side, raged at the injustice, then went on
to complain bitterly of the incompetence of the LDC’s local representatives. At which point the Ivet supervisor, exhausted
from leading the search for Gwyn Lawes after a full day spent in the saddle rounding up stray animals on the savannah, came
very close to punching Gerald Skib-bow’s lights out. Rai Molvi, Horst Elwes, and Leslie Atcliffe had to pull them apart.
Marie Skibbow’s name was never mentioned again.
The fields and plantations carved out of the jungle at the rear of Aberdale’s clearing were now so large that the vigorous
ground creepers which invaded the rotovated soil were growing back almost as fast as they could be chopped up. It was a wearisome
task, taxing even the disciplined Ivets. Any further expansion was clearly out of the question until the first batch of crops
was firmly established. The more delicate varieties of terrestrial vegetables were struggling laboriously under the never-ending
assault from the rain. Even with their geneering, tomatoes, courgettes, lettuce, kale, celeriac, and aubergines laboured upwards,
their leaves bent and drooping, yellowing round the edges. One violent storm which left the jungle shrouded in mist for days
afterwards scattered half of the village’s chickens, few of which were ever found.
A fortnight after the
Coogan
departed, another tramp trader, the
Louis Leonid
, arrived. There was almost a riot at the prices the captain charged; he cast off hurriedly, swearing to warn every boat in
the Juliffe basin to avoid the Quall-heim tributary in future.
And there were the deaths as well. After Gwyn Lawes there was Roger Chadwick, drowned in the Quallheim, his body discovered
a kilometre downriver. Then the terrible tragedy of the Hoffman family: Donnie and Judy, along with their two young teenage
children, Angie and Thomas, burnt to death in their savannah homestead one night. It wasn’t until morning when Frank Kava
saw the thin pyre of smoke rising from the ashes that the alarm was raised. The bodies were charred beyond recognition. Even
a well-equipped pathology lab would have been hard pressed to realize that they had all died from having a hunting laser fired
through their eyes at a five-centimetre range.
Horst Elwes pushed the sharpened bottom of the cross thirty centimetres into the sodden black loam, and started to press it
in with his boot. He had made the cross himself from may-ope wood, not as good as anything Leslie could make, of course, but
untainted. He felt that was important for little Angie.
“There’s no proof,” he said as he looked down at the pathetically small oblong mound of earth.
“Ha!” Ruth Hilton said as she handed him Thomas’s cross.
They went over to the boy’s grave. Horst found it very hard to visualize Thomas’s face now. The boy had been thirteen, all
smiles, always running everywhere. The cross went in the ground with a sucking sound.
“You said yourself they are Satanists,” Ruth insisted. “And we damn well know those three colonists were murdered back in
Durringham.”
“Mugged,” Horst said. “They were mugged.”
“They were murdered.”
The cross had Thomas’s name burnt in crudely with a fission blade. I could have done better than that, Horst thought, it wouldn’t
have been much to ask for the poor boy, staying sober while I carved his headmarker.
“Murdered, mugged, it happened in a different world, Ruth. Was there ever really such a place as Earth? They say the past
is only a memory. I find it very hard to remember Earth now. Does that mean it’s gone, do you think?”
She looked at him with real concern. He was unshaven, and probably hadn’t been eating properly. The vegetable garden he kept
was choked with weeds and vine tendrils. His beefy figure had thinned down considerably. Most people in Aberdale had lost
weight since they’d arrived, but they’d built muscle to compensate. Horst’s flesh was starting to hang in folds below his
chin. She suspected he’d found another supply of drink since she stood on the end of the jetty and emptied his last three
bottles of Scotch into the Quallheim. “Where was Jesus born, Horst? Where did he die for our mortal sins?”
“Oh, very good. Yes, very good indeed. I could train you up as a lay preacher in no time if you’d let me.”
“I have a field to tend. I have chickens and a goat to feed. I have Jay to look after. What are we going to do about the Ivets?”
“Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.”
“Horst!”
“I’m sorry.” He looked mournfully at the cross she was holding.
Ruth thrust it into his hand. “I don’t want them living here. Hell, have you seen the way that little Jason Lawes trots around
after Quinn Dexter? He’s like a puppy on a leash.”
“How many of us stop by to look after Rachel and Jason? Oh, we were all such fine neighbours to her for the first week after
Gwyn died, ten days even. But now… To keep on and on for weeks without end when you have your own family to nurture. People
can’t do it, they lack the tenacity. Of course they designate the Ivets to help Rachel. Something is done, and conscience
is saved. But I attach no blame for that. This place drains us, Ruth. It turns us inwards, we only have time for ourselves.”
Ruth bit back on what she had heard about Rachel and Quinn Dexter. Hell, poor Gwyn had only been gone five weeks, couldn’t
the damn woman wait a little longer? “Where is it going to stop, Horst? Who’s next? Do you know what I dream about? I dream
of Jay running round after that super-macho Jackson Gael, or Lawrence Dillon with his pretty face and his dead smile. That’s
what I dream. Are you going to tell me I have nothing to worry about, that I’m just paranoid? Six deaths in five weeks. Six
accidents
in five weeks. We have to do something.”
“I know!” Horst jabbed Judy Hoffman’s cross into the ground. Water oozed up around the edge of the wood. Like blood, he thought,
filthy blood.
The jungle steamed softly. It had rained less than an hour ago, and every trunk and leaf was still slick with water. One thick
stratum of swan-white mist had formed at waist height. It meant the four Ivets tramping down the animal track could barely
see their feet. Fingers of sunlight probing down through the screen of overhead leaves shone out like solid strands of gold
in the ultra-humid air. Away in the distance was the tremulous gobbling and cooing of the birds, the chorus they had long
since learnt to filter out.
The ground here was rough, distorted by meandering hummocks twice the height of a man. Trees grew out of their sides at slapdash
angles, curving upwards, supported by vast buttress roots. Their ash-grey trunks were slender in relation to their height,
seldom more than thirty centimetres wide, yet they were all over twenty metres high, crowned by interlaced umbrellas of emerald
foliage. Nothing grew on the trunks below. Even the vines and scrub plants around the triangular roots lacked their usual
vigour.
“There’s no game here,” Scott Williams said after half an hour of scrambling over interminable hummocks and splashing through
the water that pooled around them. “It’s the wrong sort of country.”
“That’s right,” Quinn Dexter said. “No reason for anyone to come this way.” They had started out early that morning, marching
down the well-worn path towards the savannah homesteads to the south of Aberdale, a legitimate hunting party, with four borrowed
laser rifles and one electromagnetic rifle. Quinn had led them straight down the path for five kilometres, then broke off
into the jungle towards the west. He made one sweep each week, the guido block he’d taken from the Hoffmans’ homestead making
sure a different area was searched each time.
They had done well from the Hoffmans that night a fortnight ago. Donnie had come to Lalonde well prepared for the rigours
of pioneering life. There had been freeze-dried food, tools, medical supplies, several rifles, and two Jovian Bank credit
disks. The six Ivets he had led on the night-time mission to the homestead had feasted well before he turned them loose on
Judy and the two children.
That had been the first time Quinn had conducted the full ceremony, the dark mass of dedication to God’s Brother. Binding
the others to him with the shared corruption. Before that it had been fear which made them obey. Now he owned their souls.
Two of them had been the weakest of the Ivet group, Irley and Scott, disbelievers until lovely Angie was offered to them.
The serpent beast had awoken in each of them, as it always did, inflamed by the heat, and chanting, and orange torchlight
shining on naked skin. God’s Brother had whispered into their hearts, and shown them the true way of the flesh, the animal
way. Temptation had triumphed yet again, and Angie’s cries had carried far across the savannah in the still night air. Since
the ceremony they had become Quinn’s most trusted comrades.
It was something Banneth had shown him; the ceremonies were more than simple worship, they had a purpose. If you lived through
them, if you committed the rituals, you became part of the sect for ever. There was nobody else after that. You were a pariah,
irredeemable; loathed, hated, and rejected by decent society, by the followers of Jesus and Allah.
Soon there would be more ceremonies, and all the Ivets would undergo their initiation.
The ground began to flatten out. The trees were growing closer together now, with thicker undergrowth. Quinn plodded through
another stream, boots crunching on the pebbles. He was wearing knee-length green denim shorts and a sleeveless vest of the
same material, just right to protect his skin from thorns and twigs. They used to belong to Gwyn Lawes; Rachel had given all
his clothes to the Ivets as a thank you for keeping her field free of weeds and creepers. Poor Rachel Lawes was not a well
woman these days, she had become very brittle since her husband’s death. She talked to herself and heard the voices of saints.
But at night she listened to what Quinn wanted, and did it. Rachel hated Lalonde as much as he did, and she wasn’t alone in
the village. Quinn took note of the names she confessed, and ordered the Ivets to ingratiate themselves with the disaffected.
Lawrence Dillon let out an exuberant whoop, and fired off his borrowed laser rifle. Quinn looked up in time to see a vennal
shooting through the tops of the trees, the little lizardlike animal flowing like liquid along the high branches, its paws
barely touching the bark.
Lawrence fired again. A puff of smoke squirted from a branch where the vennal had been an instant before. “Sheech, but it’s
fast.”
“Leave it,” Quinn said. “You’ll only have to carry it the rest of the day. We’ll bag some meat on the way back.”
“OK, Quinn,” Lawrence Dillon said doubtfully. His head was cranked back, shifting from side to side as he squinted upwards.
“I’ve lost it, anyway.”
Quinn looked up at where the vennal had been. The nimble tree-dwelling creatures had a blue-green hide which was nearly impossible
to distinguish from more than fifteen metres. He switched to infrared, and scanned the treetops of the shadowless red and
pink world his retinal implant revealed. The vennal was a bright salmon-pink corona, lying prone along the top of a thick
bough, triangular head peering down nervously at them. Quinn turned a complete circle.
“I want you to put your weapons down,” he said.
The others gave him puzzled glances. “Quinn—”
“Now.” He unslung his laser rifle, and laid it on the wet grass. It was a tribute to his authority that the others did as
they were told without any further protest.