Right now the birds were six kilometres ahead of
Coogan
, gliding five hundred metres above the water, with just the occasional indolent flick of a wing needed to maintain their
flight. The jungle on either side of the swollen river was choked with mist from the rain that had just fallen, swan-white
wisps clinging to the glistening green trees like some kind of animate creeper. There was no understanding the jungle’s immensity,
Lori thought. The sights she saw through the eagles brought home how little impression the settlers had made on the Juliffe
basin in twenty-five years. The timorous villages huddled along the riverbanks were a sorry example of the human condition.
Microscopic parasites upon the jungle biota rather than bold challengers out to subdue a world.
Abraham saw a ragged line of smoke staining the sky ahead. A village cooking pit, judging by the shape and colour: she’d certainly
had enough practice over the last few days to recognize one. She consulted her bitek processor block, and the visualization
of the Zamjan eclipsed the image from the eagles. A vast four-hundred-kilometre river in its own right, the broad tributary
was the one which the Quallheim emptied into. Inertial guidance coordinates flicked round. The village was called Oconto,
founded three years ago. They had an asset planted there, a man by the name of Quentin Montrose.
Lori,
Darcy called,
I think there’s another one, you’d better come and have a look.
The visualization withdrew into the bitek processor.
I’m on my way.
She opened her eyes, and looked out through the nearest slit in the side of the rickety cabin wall. All she could see was
the grizzled water being lashed by the squall. Warm droplets ran along the inside of the roof, defying gravity before they
plopped down on the cots where she and Darcy had spread their sleeping-bags. There was more room now a third of the logs had
been fed into the insatiable hopper, but she still had to squirm out through the Buchannans’ cabin and the galley.
Gail was sitting at the table on one of the special stools that could take her weight. Packets of freeze-dried food were strewn
across the greasy wood in front of her. “What would you like tonight?” she asked as Lori hurried past.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“That’s typically thoughtless. How am I supposed to prepare an adequate meal for people who won’t help? It would serve all
of you right if I was to do nothing but boiled rice. Then you’d all moan and complain, I’d be given no peace at all.”
Lori gave her a grimace-smile and ducked through the hatch out onto the deck. The fat woman disgusted her, not just her size,
but her manner. Gail Buchannan surely represented the antithesis of Edenism, everything her culture strove to distance themselves
from in human nature.
Rain was pelting down on the little wheel-house’s solar-cell roof. Darcy and Len Buchannan were inside, hunched against the
drops which came streaking in through the open sides. Lori dashed the four metres round to the door, drenching her loose grey
jacket in the process.
“It’ll be over in a minute,” Darcy said. Up ahead, the end of the steel rainclouds was visible as a bright haze band surmounting
the river and jungle.
“Where’s the boat?” she asked, screwing her eyes against the stinging rain.
“There.” Len raised a hand from the wheel and pointed ahead.
It was one of the big paddle-boats used to take colonists upriver, slicing imperiously through the water towards them. It
didn’t pitch about like the
Coogan
, its greater mass kept it level as the wavelets broke against its side and stern. Smoke streamed almost horizontally from
its twin stacks.
“Dangerous fast, that is,” Len said. “Specially for these waters. Plenty of foltwine about; catch a bundle of that in the
paddle and she’ll do her bearings a ton of damage. And we’re heading into the snowlily season now as well, they’re as bad
as foltwine when they stick together.”
Lori nodded briefly in understanding. Len had pointed out the thin grasslike leaves multiplying along the shallow waters near
the shores, fist-sized pods just beginning to rise above the surface. Snowlilies bloomed twice every Lalonde year. They looked
beautiful, but they caused havoc with the boats.
In fact Len Buchannan had opened up considerably once the trip started. He still didn’t like the idea of Lori and Darcy steering
his precious boat, but had grudgingly come to admit they could manage it almost as well as himself. He seemed to enjoy having
someone to talk to other than his wife; he and Gail hadn’t shared ten words since they cast off from Durringham. His conversation
was mostly about river lore and the way Lalonde was developing, he had no interest in the Confederation. Some of the information
was useful to her when she took the wheel. He seemed surprised by the way she remembered it all. The only time he’d gone sullen
on her was when she told him her age, he thought it was some kind of poor-taste joke; she looked about half as old as he did.
The three of them watched the paddle-boat race past. Len turned the wheel a couple of points, giving it a wide passage. Darcy
switched his retinal implants up to full resolution and studied the deck. There were about thirty-five people milling about
on the foredeck; farmer-types, the men with thick beards, women with sun-ripened faces, all in clothes made from local cloth.
They paid very little attention to the
Coogan
, apparently intent on the river ahead.
Len shook his head, a mystified expression in place. “That ain’t right. The
Broadmoor
ought to be in a convoy, three or more. That’s the way them paddlers always travel. Captain didn’t call us on the radio neither.”
He tapped the short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector. “Boats always talk out here, ain’t so much traffic
as you can ignore each other.”
“And those weren’t colonists on the deck,” Darcy said.
The
Coogan
pitched up hard as the prow reached the first of the deep furrows of water which the wayward
Broadmoor
produced in its wake.
“Not going downriver, no,” Len said.
“Refugees?” Lori suggested.
“Possibly,” Darcy said. “But if the situation is that bad, why weren’t there more of them?” He replayed the memory of the
paddle-boat. It was the third they had encountered in twenty hours; the other two had steamed past in the dark. The attitude
of the people on deck bothered him. They just stood there, not talking, not clustered together the way people usually did
for companionship. They even seemed immune to the rain.
Are you thinking the same as me?
Lori asked. She conjured up an image of the reptile people from Laton’s call, and superimposed them on the deck of the Broadmoor—rain
running off their green skin without wetting it.
Yes,
he said.
It’s possible. Probable, in fact. Some kind of sequestration is obviously involved. And those people on board weren’t behaving
normally.
If boats are carrying the sequestrated downriver, it would mean that the posse on the
Swithland
have been circumvented.
I never expected them to be anything other than a token, and a rather pathetic one at that. If this is a xenoc invasion, then
obviously they will want to subdue the entire planet. The Juliffe tributaries are the only feasible transport routes. Naturally
they would use the river-boats.
I can’t believe that anyone with the technology to cross interstellar space would then be reduced to using wooden boats to
get about on a planet.
Human settlers do.
Darcy projected an ironic moue.
Yes, colonists who can’t afford anything better, but a military conquest force?
Point taken. But there’s an awful lot about this situation we don’t understand. For a start, why invade Lalonde?
True. But to return to the immediate, if we’ve already penetrated the incursion front, do we need to go on?
I don’t know. We need information.
We have an asset in the next village. I suggest we stop there and see what he knows.
Good idea. And Solanki will have to be informed about the aberrant river traffic.
Lori left Darcy to feed the furnace hopper and made her way back to the space in the cabin they shared. She pulled her backpack
from under the cot and retrieved the palm-sized slate-grey communication block from among her clothes. It took a couple of
seconds for the Confederation Navy’s ELINT satellite to lock on to the scrambled channel. Kelven Solanki’s tired-looking face
appeared on the front of the slim rectangular unit.
“We may have a problem,” she said.
“One more won’t make any difference.”
“This one might. We believe the presence Laton warned us of is spreading itself downriver on the boats. In other words, it
can’t be confined by the posse.”
“Bloody hell. Candace Elford decided last night that Kristo County has also been taken over, that’s halfway down the Zamjan
from the mouth of the Quallheim. And after reviewing the satellite images, I have to concur. She’s reinforcing the posse by
BK133. They have a new landing point, Ozark, in Mayhew County, fifty kilometres short of Kristo. The BK133s are lifting in
men and weapons right now. The
Swithland
should reach them early tomorrow, they can’t be far ahead of you.”
“We’re approaching Oconto village right now.”
“About thirty kilometres, then. What are you going to do?”
“We haven’t decided yet. We’ll need to go ashore whatever the outcome.”
“Well, be careful, this is turning out to be even bigger than my worst-case scenarios.”
“We don’t intend to jeopardize ourselves.”
“Good. Your message flek was dispatched to your embassy on Avon, along with mine to the First Admiral, and one from Ralph
Hiltch to his embassy. Rexrew sent one to the LDC office as well.”
“Thank you. Let’s hope the Confederation Navy responds swiftly.”
“Yes. I think you should know, Hiltch and I have dispatched a combined scout team upriver. If you want to wait in Oconto for
them to arrive, you’re more than welcome to join them. They’re making good time, I estimate they should be with you in a couple
of days at the most. And my marines are carrying a fair amount of fire-power.”
“We’ll retain it as an option. Though Darcy and I don’t believe fire-power is going to be an overwhelming factor in this case.
Judging by what we gleaned from Laton, and what we’ve observed on the paddle-boats, it appears wide-scale sequestration is
playing a major part in the invasion.”
“Dear Christ!”
She smiled at his expletive. Why did Adamists always appeal to their deities? It wasn’t something she understood. If there
was an omnipotent god, why did he make life so full of pain? “You might find a prudent course of action is to review river
traffic out of the affected areas over the last ten days.”
“Are you saying they’ve already reached Durringham?”
“It is more than likely, I’m afraid. We are almost at Kristo, and we’re travelling against the current on a decidedly third-rate
boat.”
“I see what you mean, if they left Aberdale right at the start they could have been here a week ago.”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“All right, thanks for the warning. I’ll pull some people in and start analysing the boats that have come down out of the
Zamjan. Hell, this is just what the city needs on top of everything else.”
“How are things in Durringham?”
“None too good, actually. Everyone’s starting to hoard food, so prices are going through the roof. Candace Elford is deputizing
young men left, right, and centre. There’s a lot of unrest among the residents about what’s happening up-river. She’s afraid
it’s going to spiral out of control. Then on Wednesday the transient colonists decided to hold a peaceful rally outside the
Governor’s dumper demanding new gear to replace what was stolen, and extra land in compensation for the upset. I could see
it from my window. Rexrew refused to talk to them. Too scared they’d lynch him, I should think. It was that sort of mood.
Things got a bit rough, and they clashed with the sheriffs. Quite a lot of casualties on both sides. Some idiot let a sayce
loose. The power cables from the dumper’s fusion generator were torn down. So there was no electricity in the precinct for
two days, and of course that includes the main hospital. Guess what happened to its back-up power supply.”
“It failed?”
“Yeah. Someone had been flogging off the electron-matrix crystals to use in power bikes. There was only about twenty per cent
capacity left.”
“Sounds like there’s not much to choose between your position and mine.”
Kelven Solanki gave her a measured stare. “Oh, I think there is.”
Oconto was a typical Lalonde village: a roughly square clearing shorn straight into the jungle, with the official Land Allocation
Office marker as its pivot; cabins with trim vegetable gardens clustered at the nucleus, while broader fields made up the
periphery. The normally black mayope planks of the buildings were turning a lighter grey from years of exposure to the sun
and heat and rain, hardening and cracking, like driftwood on a tropical shore. Pigs squealed in their pens, while cows munched
contentedly at their silage in circular stockades. A line of over thirty goats were tethered to stakes around the border of
the jungle, chomping away at the creepers which edged in towards the fields.
The village had done well for itself during the three years since its founding. The communal buildings like the hall and church
were well maintained; the council had organized the construction of a low, earth-covered lodge to smoke fish in. Major paths
were scattered with wood flakes to stem the mud. There was even a football pitch marked out. Three jetties stuck out of the
gently sloped bank into the Zamjan’s insipid water; two of them responsible for mooring the village’s small number of fishing
boats.