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“Brilliant.” Joshua tossed down the last of his brandy and called the barmaid over. “That would work, wouldn’t it?”
“It did work.”
“No, not really. You see, your hypothesis is based on one assumption. Tragically false.”
Syrinx picked up the second glass of wine. “What’s that?”
“That I’m an ace astrogrator.”
“I think you are.”
“Right, so on a normal commercial run I would use this alleged skill of mine to shave hours off the journey time, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“So I would have used this skill to get here, to Norfolk, wouldn’t I? I mean, I brought a cargo to trade, I’m not going to waste time, money, and fuel getting it here, now am I?”
“No.”
“Right, so first of all ask the captain on the good ship Pestravka when and where I emerged in the Norfolk system. Then you can go and check my departure time from Lalonde, and work out how long it took me. Tell me after that if you think I’m a good astrogrator.” He gave her an annoying toothsome smile.
Thanks to Oenone , she was instantly aware of Lalonde’s spacial location; how long it ought to take an Adamist starship of Lady Macbeth ’s class and performance to make the trip. “How long did it take you?” she asked in resignation.
“Six and a half days.”
It shouldn’t have taken them that long,Oenone said.
Syrinx said nothing. She simply couldn’t bring herself to believe he was innocent. His whole attitude spelt complicity.
“Ah, here’s Ashly now.” Joshua stood and waved at the pilot. “And simply because you committed an extraordinarily rude faux pas don’t think you have to pay for the drinks to make up for it. They’re on me, I insist.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to mutual understanding and future friendship.”
Chapter 17
“It did work.”
“No, not really. You see, your hypothesis is based on one assumption. Tragically false.”
Syrinx picked up the second glass of wine. “What’s that?”
“That I’m an ace astrogrator.”
“I think you are.”
“Right, so on a normal commercial run I would use this alleged skill of mine to shave hours off the journey time, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“So I would have used this skill to get here, to Norfolk, wouldn’t I? I mean, I brought a cargo to trade, I’m not going to waste time, money, and fuel getting it here, now am I?”
“No.”
“Right, so first of all ask the captain on the good ship Pestravka when and where I emerged in the Norfolk system. Then you can go and check my departure time from Lalonde, and work out how long it took me. Tell me after that if you think I’m a good astrogrator.” He gave her an annoying toothsome smile.
Thanks to Oenone , she was instantly aware of Lalonde’s spacial location; how long it ought to take an Adamist starship of Lady Macbeth ’s class and performance to make the trip. “How long did it take you?” she asked in resignation.
“Six and a half days.”
It shouldn’t have taken them that long,Oenone said.
Syrinx said nothing. She simply couldn’t bring herself to believe he was innocent. His whole attitude spelt complicity.
“Ah, here’s Ashly now.” Joshua stood and waved at the pilot. “And simply because you committed an extraordinarily rude faux pas don’t think you have to pay for the drinks to make up for it. They’re on me, I insist.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to mutual understanding and future friendship.”
Chapter 17
The Coogan ’s battered prow was riding heavily over the steep wavelets the Zamjan tributary sent rushing down its length towards the Juliffe. Lori could feel the length of the light trader boat exaggerating each pitch as they drove against the current. After four and a half days nothing about the Coogan bothered her any more; it creaked continually, the engines produced a vibration felt throughout every timber, it was hot, dark, airless, and cramped. But enforced routine had made it all inconsequential. Besides, she spent a lot of time lying inertly on her cot, reviewing the images the eagles Abraham and Catlin provided her.
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 riverboats.
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 upriver. 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.
When the Coogan nosed up to the main central jetty Darcy and Lori were relieved to see a considerable number of people working the fields. Oconto hadn’t succumbed yet. Several shouts went up as the trader boat was spotted. Men came running, all of them carrying guns.
It took a quarter of an hour to convince the nervous reception committee that they posed no threat, and for a few minutes at the start Darcy thought they were going to be shot out of hand. Len and Gail Buchannan were well known (though not terribly popular), which acted in their favour. The Coogan was travelling upriver, heading towards the rebel counties, not bringing people down from them. And finally, Lori and Darcy themselves, with their synthetic fabric clothes and expensive hardware units, were accepted as some kind of official team. With what mandate was never asked.
“You gotta understand, people round here are getting mighty trigger happy since last Tuesday,” Geoffrey Tunnard said. He was Oconto’s acting leader, a lean fifty-year-old with curly white hair, wearing much-patched colourless dungarees. Now he was satisfied the Coogan wasn’t bringing revolution and destruction, and his laser rifle was slung over his beefy shoulder again, he was happy to talk.
“What happened last Tuesday?” Darcy asked.
“The Ivets.” Geoffrey Tunnard spat over the side of the jetty. “We heard there’d been trouble up Willow West way, so we shoved ours in a pen. They’ve been good workers since we arrived. But there’s no point in taking chances, right?”
“Right,” Darcy agreed diplomatically.
“But on Monday we had some people visit, claimed they were from Waldersy village, up in Kristo County. They said the Ivets were all rebelling in the Quallheim Counties and Willow West, killing the men and raping the women. Said plenty of younger colonists had joined them, too. They was nothing but a vigilante group, you could see that, all hyped up they were, on a high. I reckoned they’d been smoking some canus; that’ll send you tripping if you dry the leaves right. Trouble they were, just wanted to kill our Ivets. We wouldn’t have it. A man can’t kill another in cold blood, not just on someone else’s say so. We sent them on downriver. Then blow me if they didn’t creep back that night. And you know what?”
“They let the Ivets out,” Lori said.
Geoffrey Tunnard gave her a respectful look. “That’s right. Stole back in here right under our noses. Dogs never even noticed them. Slit old Jamie Austin’s throat, him that was standing guard on the pen. Our supervisor Neil Barlow went right off after them that morning. Took a bunch of fifty men with him, armed men they were, too. And we haven’t heard a damn thing since. That ain’t like Neil, it’s been six days. He should have sent word. Them men have families. We’ve got wives and kiddies left here that are worried sick.” He glanced from Darcy to Lori. “Can you tell us anything?” His tone was laboured; Geoffrey Tunnard was a man under a great deal of strain.
“Sorry, I don’t know anything,” Darcy said. “Not yet. That’s why we’re here, to find out. But whatever you do, don’t go after them. The larger your numbers, the safer you are.”
Geoffrey Tunnard pursed his lips and looked away, eyes raking the jungle with bitter enmity. “Thought you’d say something like that. Course, there’s those that have gone looking. Some of the women. We couldn’t stop them.”
Darcy put his hand on Geoffrey Tunnard’s shoulder, gripping firmly. “If any more want to go, stop them. Have a log fall on their foot if that’s what it takes, but you must stop them.”
“I’ll do my best.” Geoffrey Tunnard dipped his head in defeat. “I’d leave if I could, take the family downriver on a boat. But I built this place with my own hands, and no damn Govcentral interference. It was a good life, it was. It can be again. Bloody Ivets never were any use for anything, waster kids in dungarees, that’s all.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Lori said.
“Sure you will. You’re doing what you tell me not to: go out in the jungle. Just the two of you. That’s madness.”
Lori thought Geoffrey Tunnard had been about to say suicide. “Can you tell us where Quentin Montrose lives?” she asked.
Geoffrey Tunnard pointed out one of the cabins, no different to any of the others; solar panels on the roof, a sagging overhang above the verandah. “Won’t do you no good, he was in Neil’s group.”
Lori stood at the side of the wheel-house as the Coogan cast off; Darcy was aft, heaving more of the interminable logs into the furnace hopper. Len Buchannan whistled tunelessly as he steered his boat into the middle of the river. Oconto gradually shrank away to stern until it was nothing but a deeper than usual gash in the emerald cliff. Smoke from the cooking fires drifted apathetically across the choppy water.
We could send one of the eagles looking for them,lori suggested.
You don’t really mean that.
No. I’m sorry, I was just trying to save my own conscience.
Fifty armed men, and no trace. I don’t know about your conscience, but my courage has almost deserted me.
We could go back, or even wait for Solanki’s marines.
Yes, we could.
You’re right. We’ll go on.
We should have told Geoffrey Tunnard to leave,darcy said. I should have told him; take his family and flee back to Durringham. At least it would have been honest. None of this false hope we left him with.
That’s all right, I think he already knows.
Karl Lambourne woke without knowing why. It wasn’t noon yet, and he hadn’t got to go back on watch until two o’clock. The blinds on his cabin’s port were still shut, reducing the light inside to a mysterious and enticing dusk. Booted feet thudded along the deck outside the door. Conversation was a persistent background hum, children calling out in their whiny voices.
Everything normal. So why was he awake with a vague feeling of unease?
The colonist girl—what was her name?—stirred beside him. She was a few months younger than him, with dark hair teased into ringlets around a dainty face. Despite his initial dismay with the Swithland carrying all those extra sheriffs and deputies it was turning out to be a good trip. The girls appreciated the space and privacy his cabin gave them; the boat was very crowded, with sleeping-bags clogging every metre of deck space.
The girl’s eyelids fluttered, then opened slowly. She—Anne, no Alison; that was it, Alison! remember that—grinned at him.
“Hi,” she said.
He glanced along her body. The sheet was tangled up round her waist, affording him a splendid view of breasts, lean belly muscles, and sharply curving hips. “Hi yourself.” He brushed some of the ringlets from her face.
Shouts and a barking laugh sounded from outside. Alison gave a timid giggle. “God, they’re only a metre away.”
“You should have thought of that before you made all that noise earlier.”
Her tongue was caught between her teeth. “Didn’t make any noise.”
“Did.”
“Didn’t.”
His arms circled her, and he pulled her closer. “You did, and I can prove it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He kissed her softly, and she started to respond. His hand stole downwards, pushing the sheet off her legs.
Alison turned over when he told her to, shivering in anticipation as his arm slid under her waist, lifting her buttocks up. Her mouth parted in expectation.
“What the hell was that?”
“Karl?” She bent her head round to see him kneeling behind her, frowning up at the ceiling. “Karl!”
“Shush. Listen, can you hear it?”
She couldn’t believe this was happening. People were still clumping up and down the deck outside. There wasn’t any other sound! And she’d never ever been so turned on before. Right now she hated Karl with the same intensity she’d adored him a second before.
Karl twitched his head round, trying to catch the noise again. Except it wasn’t so much a noise, more a vibration, a grumble. He knew every sound, every tremble the Swithland made, and that wasn’t in its repertoire.
He heard it again, and identified it. A hull timber quaking somewhere aft. The creak of wood under pressure, almost as if they had touched a snag. But his mother would never steer anywhere near a snag, that was crazy.
Alison was looking up at him, all anger and hurt. The magic had gone. He felt his penis softening.
The noise came again. A grinding sound that lasted for about three seconds. It was muted by the bilges, but this time it was loud enough even for Alison to hear.
She blinked in confusion. “What . . . ”
Karl jumped off the bed, snatching up his shorts. He jammed his legs into them, and was still struggling with the button when he yanked the door lock back and rushed out onto the deck.
Alison squealed behind him, trying to cover herself with her arms as vibrant midmorning sunlight flooded into the cabin. She grabbed the thin sheet to wrap herself in, and started hunting round for her clothes.
After the seductive shadows of his cabin the sunlight on deck sent glaring purple after-images chasing down Karl’s optic nerves. Tear ducts released their stored liquid, which he had to wipe away annoyingly. A couple of colonists and three deputies, barely older than him, were staring at him. He leaned out over the rail and peered down at the river. There was some sediment carried by the water, and shimmering sunlight reflections skittering across the surface, but he could see a good three or four metres down. But there was nothing solid, no silt bank, no submerged tree trunk.
Up on the bridge Rosemary Lambourne hadn’t been sure about the first scrape, but like her eldest son she was perfectly in tune with the Swithland . Something had left her with heightened senses, a suddenly hollow stomach. She automatically checked the forward-sweep mass-detector. This section of the Zamjan was twelve metres deep, giving her a good ten metres of clearance below the flat keel, even overloaded like this. There was nothing in front, nothing below, and nothing to the side.
Then it happened again. The aft hull struck something. Rosemary immediately reduced power to the paddles.
“Mother!”
She bent over the starboard side to see Karl looking up at her.
“What was that?”
He beat her to it by a fraction.
“I don’t know,” she shouted down. “The mass-detector shows clear. Can you see anything in the water?”
“No.”
The river current was slowing the Swithland rapidly now the paddles were stilled. Without the steady thrash of the blades, the racket the colonists made seemed to have doubled.
It came again, a long rending sound of abused wood. There was a definite crunching at the end.
“That was aft,” Rosemary yelled. “Get back there and see what happened. Report back.” She pulled a handset from its slot below the communication console, and dropped it over the edge of the rail. Karl caught it with an easy snap of his wrist and raced off down the narrow decking, slipping through the knots of colonists with urgent fluid movements.
“Swithland , come in, please,” the speaker on the communication console said. “Rosemary, can you hear me? This is Dale here. What’s happening, why have you stopped?”
She picked up the microphone. “I’m here, Dale,” she told the Nassier ’s captain. When she glanced up she could see the Nassier half a kilometre upriver, pulling ahead; the Hycel was downriver on the starboard side, catching up fast. “It sounds like we struck something.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll get back to you.”
“Rosemary, this is Callan, I think it would be best if we didn’t get separated. I’ll heave to until you know if you need any assistance.”
“Thanks, Callan.” She leant out over the bridge rail and waved at the Hycel . A small figure on its bridge waved back.
A screech loud enough to silence all the colonists erupted from the Swithland ’s hull. Rosemary felt the boat judder, its prow shifting a degree. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. They were almost dead in the water, it couldn’t possibly be a snag. It couldn’t be!
Karl reached the afterdeck just as the Swithland juddered. He could feel the whole boat actually lift a couple of centimetres.
The afterdeck was packed full of colonists and posse members. Several groups of men were lying down, playing cards or eating. Kids charged about. Eight or nine people were fishing over the stern. Cases of farmsteading gear were piled against the superstructure and the taffrail. Dogs ran about underfoot; there were five horses tethered to the side rail, and two of them started pulling at their harnesses as the brassy scrunching noise broke across the boat. Everybody froze in expectation.
“Out of the way!” Karl shouted. “Out of the way.” He started elbowing people aside. The noise was coming from the keel, just aft of the furnace room which was tacked on to the back of the superstructure. “Come on, move.”
A sayce snarled at him. “Killl.”
“Get that fucking thing out of my way!”
Yuri Wilken dragged Randolf aside.
The whole afterdeck complement was watching Karl. He reached the hatchway over the feed mechanism that shunted logs into the furnace. It was hidden beneath a clutter of composite pods. “Help me move these,” he yelled.
Barry MacArple emerged from the furnace room, a brawny twenty-year-old, sweaty and sooty. He had kept indoors for most of this trip, and carefully avoided any member of the posse. None of the Lambourne family had mentioned that he was an Ivet.
The noise came to an abrupt halt. Karl was very aware of the apprehensive faces focusing on him, the silent appeal for guidance. He held up his hands as Barry started to haul the pods off the hatchway. “OK, we’re riding on some sort of rock. So I want all the kids to slowly make their way forwards. Slowly mind. Then the women. Not the men. You’ll upset the balance with that much weight forward. And whoever those horses belong to, calm them down now.”
Parents hustled their children towards the prow. A hushed murmur swept round the adults. Three men were helping Barry clear the hatchway. Karl lifted off a couple of the pods himself. Then he heard the noise again, but it was distant this time, not from the Swithland ’s hull.
“What the hell—” He looked up to see the Hycel a hundred metres astern.
“Karl, what’s happening?” Rosemary’s voice demanded from the handset.
He raised the unit to his mouth. “It’s the Hycel , Mum. They’ve hit it as well.”
“Bloody hell. What about our hull?”
“Tell you in a minute.”
The last of the pods were cleared away, revealing a two-metre-square hatch. Karl bent down to unclip the latches.
That was when the second sound rang out, a water-muffled THUNK of something heavy and immensely powerful slamming into the keel. Swithland gave a small jolt, riding up several centimetres. Some of the more loosely stacked cases and pods tumbled over. The colonists shouted in panic and dismay, and there was a general surge for the prow. One of the horses reared up, forelegs scraping the air.
Karl ripped the hatch open.
THUNK
Ripples rolled away from the Swithland as it wallowed about.
“Karl!” the handset squawked.
He looked down into the hull. The log-feed mechanism took up most of the space below the hatch, a primitive-looking clump of motors, pulley loops, and pistons. Two grab belts ran away to the port and starboard log holds. The black mayope planks of the hull itself were just visible. Water was welling out of cracks between them.
THUNK
Karl stared down in stupefaction as the planks bowed inward. That was mayope wood, nothing could dint mayope.
THUNK
Splinters appeared, long dagger fingers levering apart.
THUNK
Water poured in through the widening gaps. An area over a metre wide was being slowly hammered upwards.
THUNK
THUNK
Swithland was rocking up and down. Equipment and pods rolled about across the half-abandoned afterdeck. Men and women were clinging to the rail, others were spread-eagled on the decking, clawing for a handhold.
“It’s trying to punch its way in!” Karl bellowed into the handset.
“What? What?” his mother shouted back.
“There’s something below us, something alive. For Christ’s sake, get us underway, get us to the shore. The shore, Mum. Go! Go!”
THUNK
The water was foaming up now, covering the hull planks completely. “Get this shut,” Karl called. He was terribly afraid of what would come through once the hole was big enough. Together, he and Barry MacArple slammed the hatch back down, dogging the latches.
THUNK
Swithland ’s hull broke. Karl could hear a long dreadful tearing sound as the iron-hard wood was wrenched apart. Water seethed in, gurgling and slurping. It ripped the log feeder from its mountings, crashing it against the decking above. The hatch quaked violently.
A gloriously welcome whine from the paddle engines sounded. The familiar slow thrashing of the paddles started up. Swithland turned ponderously for the unbroken rampart of jungle eighty metres away.
Karl realized people were sobbing and shouting out. A lot of them must have made it forward, the boat was riding at a downward incline.
THUNK
This time it was the afterdeck planks. Karl, lying prone next to the hatch, yelled in shock as his feet left the deck from the impact. He twisted round immediately, rolling over three times to get clear. Pods bounced and pirouetted chaotically. The horses were going berserk. One of them broke its harness, and plunged over the side. Another was kicking wildly. A blood-soaked body lay beside it.
THUNK
The planks beside the hatch lifted in unison, snapping back as if they were elastic. Water started to seep out.
Barry MacArple was scrambling on all fours along the deck, his face engorged with desperation. Karl held out his hand to the Ivet, willing him on.
THUNK
The planks directly below Barry were smashed asunder. They ruptured upwards, jagged edges puncturing the Ivet’s belly and chest, then ripping his torso apart like a giant claw. A metre-wide geyser of water slammed upwards out of the gap, buffeting the corpse with it.
Karl turned to follow the water rising, fear stunned out of him by the incredible, impossible sight. The geyser roared ferociously, shaking Karl’s bones and obliterating the impassioned shouts from the colonists. It rose a full thirty metres above the decking, its crown blossoming out like a flower. Water, silt, and fragments of mayope plank splattered down.
Clinging for dear life to one of the cable drums as the Swithland bucked about like a wounded brownspine, Karl watched the geyser chewing away at the ragged sides of the hole it had bored. It was creeping forward towards the superstructure. The bilges must be full already. Slowly and surely more and more wood was eroded by the terrific force of the water. In another minute it would reach the furnace room. He thought of what would happen when the water struck all fifteen tonnes of the searingly hot furnace, and whimpered.
Rosemary Lambourne had a hard struggle to stay upright as the Swithland tossed about. Only by clinging to the wheel could she even stay on her feet. It was the sheer fright in Karl’s voice which had spurred her into action. He wasn’t afraid of anything on the river, he had been born on the Swithland .
That deadly battering noise was knocking into her heart as much as the hull. The strength behind anything that could thump the boat about like this was awesome.
How much of the Swithland is going to be left after this? God damn Colin Rexrew, his laxness and stupidity. The Ivets would never dare to revolt with a firm, competent governor in charge.
A roar like a continual explosion made her jump, almost sending her feet from under her. It was suddenly raining on the Swithland alone. The entire superstructure was trembling. What was happening back there?
She checked the little holoscreen which displayed the boat’s engineering schematics. They were losing power rapidly from the furnace. Reserve electron-matrix crystals cut in, maintaining the full current to the engines.
“Rosemary,” the radio called.
She couldn’t spare the time to answer.
Swithland ’s prow was pointing directly at the bank sixty-five metres away, and they were picking up speed again. Pods and cases were scattered in the boat’s wake, jouncing about in the water. She saw a couple of people splashing among them. More people went falling from the foredeck; it was as tightly packed as a rugby scrum down there. And there wasn’t a thing she could do, except get them to the shore.
Off on the port side, Nassier was floundering about, paddles spinning intermittently. Rosemary saw a giant fountain of water smash through the middle of its superstructure, debris whirling away into the sky. What the fuck could do that? Some kind of water monster skulking around the riverbed? Even as the fantasy germinated in her mind she knew that wasn’t the real answer. But she did know what the roaring noise behind her was now. The knowledge sucked at the last of her strength. If it hit the furnace . . .
Nassier ’s prow lifted into the air, shoving the afterdeck below the water. The superstructure crumpled up, large chunks being flung aside by the tremendous jet of water. Dozens of people were swept into the river, arms and legs twirling frantically. In her mind she could hear the screams.
There were just too many people on board the paddleboats. Rexrew had already increased the numbers of colonists they were made to carry, refusing to listen to the warning from the captains’ delegation. Then he dumped this posse on them as well.
If I ever get back to Durringham, you’re dead, Rexrew, she promised herself. You haven’t just failed us, you’ve condemned us.
Then the Nassier began to capsize, rolling ever faster onto her starboard side. The jet of water died away as the keel flipped up. Rosemary saw a huge hole in the planks amidships as it reached the vertical. That was when the water must have rushed in on the furnace. A massive blast of white steam devoured the rear of the boat, rolling out across the surface of the river. Mercifully, it shielded the final act in the Nassier ’s convulsive death.
Swithland ’s prow was fifteen metres from the trees and creepers which were strangling the bank. Rosemary could hear the sound of their own bedevilling geyser reducing. She fought the wheel to keep the boat lined up straight on the bank. The bottom was shelving up rapidly, the forward-sweep mass-detector emitting a frantic howl in warning. Five metres deep. Four. Three. They struck mud eight metres from the long flower-heavy vines trailing in the water. The big boat’s awesome inertia propelled them along, slithering and sliding through the thick black alluvial muck. Bubbles of foul-smelling sulphurous gas churned around the sides of the hull. The geyser had died completely. There was a moment of pure dreamy silence before they hit the bank.
Rosemary saw a huge qualtook tree dead ahead; one of its thick boughs was the same height as the bridge. She ducked—
The impact threw Yuri Wilken back onto his belly just as he was starting to get up again. His nose slammed painfully against the deck. He tasted warm blood. The boat was making hideous crunching sounds as it ploughed into the frill of vegetation along the bank. Long vine strands lashed through the air with the brutality of bullwhips. He tried to bury himself into the hard decking as they slashed centimetres above his head. Swithland ’s blunt prow rammed the low bank, jolting upwards to ride a good ten metres across the dark-red sandy earth. The paddle-boat finally came to a bruising halt with its forward deck badly mangled, and the qualtook tree embedded in the front of the superstructure.
Screams and wailing gave way to moans and shrill cries for help. Yuri risked glancing about, seeing the way in which the jungle had shrink-wrapped itself around the forward half of the boat. The superstructure looked dangerously unstable, it was leaning over sharply, with tonnes of vegetation pressing against the front and side.
His limbs were shaking uncontrollably. He wanted to be home in Durringham, taking Randolf for walks or playing football with his mates. He didn’t belong here in the jungle.
“Are you all right, son?” Mansing asked.
Sheriff Mansing was the one who had signed him on for the expedition. He was a lot more approachable than some of the sheriffs, keeping a fatherly eye out for him.
“I think so.” He dabbed at his nose experimentally, sniffing hard. There was blood on his hand.
“You’ll live,” Mansing said. “Where’s Randolf?”
“I don’t know.” He climbed shakily to his feet. They were standing at the front corner of the superstructure. People were lying about all around, slowly picking themselves up, asking for help, wearing a numb, frightened expression. Two bodies had been trapped between the qualtook trunk and the superstructure; one was a small girl aged about eight. Yuri could only tell because she was wearing a dress. He turned away, gagging.
“Call for him,” Mansing said. “We’re going to need all the help we can get pretty soon.”
“Sir?”
“You think this was an accident?”
Yuri hadn’t thought it was anything. The notion sent a tremble down his spine. He put his lips together, and managed a feeble whistle.
“Twelve years I’ve been sailing up and down this river,” Mansing said grimly. “I’ve never seen anything like that geyser before. What the hell can shoot water about like that? And there was more than one of them.”
Randolf came lumbering up over the gunwale, his sleek black hide covered in smelly mud. The sayce had lost all of his usual aggressive arrogance, slinking straight over to Yuri and pressing against his master’s legs. “Waaterrr baddd,” he growled.
“He’s not far wrong there,” Mansing agreed cheerlessly.
It took quarter of an hour to establish any kind of order around the wrecked paddle-boat. The sheriffs organized parties to tend to the wounded and set up a makeshift camp. By general consensus they moved fifty metres inland, away from the river and whatever prowled below the water.
Several survivors from the Nassier managed to swim to the stern of the Swithland which was half submerged; the boat formed a useful bridge over the stinking quagmire which lined the bank. The Hycel had managed to reach the Zamjan’s far bank; it had been spared the destructive geyser, but its hull had taken a dreadful pounding. Radio contact was established and both groups decided to stay where they were rather than attempt to cross the river and join forces.
Sheriff Mansing located an unbroken communication block amongst the remnants of the posse’s gear, and patched a call through the LDC’s single geostationary satellite to Candace Elford. The shocked chief sheriff agreed to divert the two BK133s to the Swithland and fly the seriously injured back to Durringham straight away. What she never mentioned was the possibility of reinforcing the forsaken boats. But Sheriff Mansing was above all a pragmatic man, he really hadn’t expected any.
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 riverboats.
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 upriver. 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.
When the Coogan nosed up to the main central jetty Darcy and Lori were relieved to see a considerable number of people working the fields. Oconto hadn’t succumbed yet. Several shouts went up as the trader boat was spotted. Men came running, all of them carrying guns.
It took a quarter of an hour to convince the nervous reception committee that they posed no threat, and for a few minutes at the start Darcy thought they were going to be shot out of hand. Len and Gail Buchannan were well known (though not terribly popular), which acted in their favour. The Coogan was travelling upriver, heading towards the rebel counties, not bringing people down from them. And finally, Lori and Darcy themselves, with their synthetic fabric clothes and expensive hardware units, were accepted as some kind of official team. With what mandate was never asked.
“You gotta understand, people round here are getting mighty trigger happy since last Tuesday,” Geoffrey Tunnard said. He was Oconto’s acting leader, a lean fifty-year-old with curly white hair, wearing much-patched colourless dungarees. Now he was satisfied the Coogan wasn’t bringing revolution and destruction, and his laser rifle was slung over his beefy shoulder again, he was happy to talk.
“What happened last Tuesday?” Darcy asked.
“The Ivets.” Geoffrey Tunnard spat over the side of the jetty. “We heard there’d been trouble up Willow West way, so we shoved ours in a pen. They’ve been good workers since we arrived. But there’s no point in taking chances, right?”
“Right,” Darcy agreed diplomatically.
“But on Monday we had some people visit, claimed they were from Waldersy village, up in Kristo County. They said the Ivets were all rebelling in the Quallheim Counties and Willow West, killing the men and raping the women. Said plenty of younger colonists had joined them, too. They was nothing but a vigilante group, you could see that, all hyped up they were, on a high. I reckoned they’d been smoking some canus; that’ll send you tripping if you dry the leaves right. Trouble they were, just wanted to kill our Ivets. We wouldn’t have it. A man can’t kill another in cold blood, not just on someone else’s say so. We sent them on downriver. Then blow me if they didn’t creep back that night. And you know what?”
“They let the Ivets out,” Lori said.
Geoffrey Tunnard gave her a respectful look. “That’s right. Stole back in here right under our noses. Dogs never even noticed them. Slit old Jamie Austin’s throat, him that was standing guard on the pen. Our supervisor Neil Barlow went right off after them that morning. Took a bunch of fifty men with him, armed men they were, too. And we haven’t heard a damn thing since. That ain’t like Neil, it’s been six days. He should have sent word. Them men have families. We’ve got wives and kiddies left here that are worried sick.” He glanced from Darcy to Lori. “Can you tell us anything?” His tone was laboured; Geoffrey Tunnard was a man under a great deal of strain.
“Sorry, I don’t know anything,” Darcy said. “Not yet. That’s why we’re here, to find out. But whatever you do, don’t go after them. The larger your numbers, the safer you are.”
Geoffrey Tunnard pursed his lips and looked away, eyes raking the jungle with bitter enmity. “Thought you’d say something like that. Course, there’s those that have gone looking. Some of the women. We couldn’t stop them.”
Darcy put his hand on Geoffrey Tunnard’s shoulder, gripping firmly. “If any more want to go, stop them. Have a log fall on their foot if that’s what it takes, but you must stop them.”
“I’ll do my best.” Geoffrey Tunnard dipped his head in defeat. “I’d leave if I could, take the family downriver on a boat. But I built this place with my own hands, and no damn Govcentral interference. It was a good life, it was. It can be again. Bloody Ivets never were any use for anything, waster kids in dungarees, that’s all.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Lori said.
“Sure you will. You’re doing what you tell me not to: go out in the jungle. Just the two of you. That’s madness.”
Lori thought Geoffrey Tunnard had been about to say suicide. “Can you tell us where Quentin Montrose lives?” she asked.
Geoffrey Tunnard pointed out one of the cabins, no different to any of the others; solar panels on the roof, a sagging overhang above the verandah. “Won’t do you no good, he was in Neil’s group.”
Lori stood at the side of the wheel-house as the Coogan cast off; Darcy was aft, heaving more of the interminable logs into the furnace hopper. Len Buchannan whistled tunelessly as he steered his boat into the middle of the river. Oconto gradually shrank away to stern until it was nothing but a deeper than usual gash in the emerald cliff. Smoke from the cooking fires drifted apathetically across the choppy water.
We could send one of the eagles looking for them,lori suggested.
You don’t really mean that.
No. I’m sorry, I was just trying to save my own conscience.
Fifty armed men, and no trace. I don’t know about your conscience, but my courage has almost deserted me.
We could go back, or even wait for Solanki’s marines.
Yes, we could.
You’re right. We’ll go on.
We should have told Geoffrey Tunnard to leave,darcy said. I should have told him; take his family and flee back to Durringham. At least it would have been honest. None of this false hope we left him with.
That’s all right, I think he already knows.
Karl Lambourne woke without knowing why. It wasn’t noon yet, and he hadn’t got to go back on watch until two o’clock. The blinds on his cabin’s port were still shut, reducing the light inside to a mysterious and enticing dusk. Booted feet thudded along the deck outside the door. Conversation was a persistent background hum, children calling out in their whiny voices.
Everything normal. So why was he awake with a vague feeling of unease?
The colonist girl—what was her name?—stirred beside him. She was a few months younger than him, with dark hair teased into ringlets around a dainty face. Despite his initial dismay with the Swithland carrying all those extra sheriffs and deputies it was turning out to be a good trip. The girls appreciated the space and privacy his cabin gave them; the boat was very crowded, with sleeping-bags clogging every metre of deck space.
The girl’s eyelids fluttered, then opened slowly. She—Anne, no Alison; that was it, Alison! remember that—grinned at him.
“Hi,” she said.
He glanced along her body. The sheet was tangled up round her waist, affording him a splendid view of breasts, lean belly muscles, and sharply curving hips. “Hi yourself.” He brushed some of the ringlets from her face.
Shouts and a barking laugh sounded from outside. Alison gave a timid giggle. “God, they’re only a metre away.”
“You should have thought of that before you made all that noise earlier.”
Her tongue was caught between her teeth. “Didn’t make any noise.”
“Did.”
“Didn’t.”
His arms circled her, and he pulled her closer. “You did, and I can prove it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He kissed her softly, and she started to respond. His hand stole downwards, pushing the sheet off her legs.
Alison turned over when he told her to, shivering in anticipation as his arm slid under her waist, lifting her buttocks up. Her mouth parted in expectation.
“What the hell was that?”
“Karl?” She bent her head round to see him kneeling behind her, frowning up at the ceiling. “Karl!”
“Shush. Listen, can you hear it?”
She couldn’t believe this was happening. People were still clumping up and down the deck outside. There wasn’t any other sound! And she’d never ever been so turned on before. Right now she hated Karl with the same intensity she’d adored him a second before.
Karl twitched his head round, trying to catch the noise again. Except it wasn’t so much a noise, more a vibration, a grumble. He knew every sound, every tremble the Swithland made, and that wasn’t in its repertoire.
He heard it again, and identified it. A hull timber quaking somewhere aft. The creak of wood under pressure, almost as if they had touched a snag. But his mother would never steer anywhere near a snag, that was crazy.
Alison was looking up at him, all anger and hurt. The magic had gone. He felt his penis softening.
The noise came again. A grinding sound that lasted for about three seconds. It was muted by the bilges, but this time it was loud enough even for Alison to hear.
She blinked in confusion. “What . . . ”
Karl jumped off the bed, snatching up his shorts. He jammed his legs into them, and was still struggling with the button when he yanked the door lock back and rushed out onto the deck.
Alison squealed behind him, trying to cover herself with her arms as vibrant midmorning sunlight flooded into the cabin. She grabbed the thin sheet to wrap herself in, and started hunting round for her clothes.
After the seductive shadows of his cabin the sunlight on deck sent glaring purple after-images chasing down Karl’s optic nerves. Tear ducts released their stored liquid, which he had to wipe away annoyingly. A couple of colonists and three deputies, barely older than him, were staring at him. He leaned out over the rail and peered down at the river. There was some sediment carried by the water, and shimmering sunlight reflections skittering across the surface, but he could see a good three or four metres down. But there was nothing solid, no silt bank, no submerged tree trunk.
Up on the bridge Rosemary Lambourne hadn’t been sure about the first scrape, but like her eldest son she was perfectly in tune with the Swithland . Something had left her with heightened senses, a suddenly hollow stomach. She automatically checked the forward-sweep mass-detector. This section of the Zamjan was twelve metres deep, giving her a good ten metres of clearance below the flat keel, even overloaded like this. There was nothing in front, nothing below, and nothing to the side.
Then it happened again. The aft hull struck something. Rosemary immediately reduced power to the paddles.
“Mother!”
She bent over the starboard side to see Karl looking up at her.
“What was that?”
He beat her to it by a fraction.
“I don’t know,” she shouted down. “The mass-detector shows clear. Can you see anything in the water?”
“No.”
The river current was slowing the Swithland rapidly now the paddles were stilled. Without the steady thrash of the blades, the racket the colonists made seemed to have doubled.
It came again, a long rending sound of abused wood. There was a definite crunching at the end.
“That was aft,” Rosemary yelled. “Get back there and see what happened. Report back.” She pulled a handset from its slot below the communication console, and dropped it over the edge of the rail. Karl caught it with an easy snap of his wrist and raced off down the narrow decking, slipping through the knots of colonists with urgent fluid movements.
“Swithland , come in, please,” the speaker on the communication console said. “Rosemary, can you hear me? This is Dale here. What’s happening, why have you stopped?”
She picked up the microphone. “I’m here, Dale,” she told the Nassier ’s captain. When she glanced up she could see the Nassier half a kilometre upriver, pulling ahead; the Hycel was downriver on the starboard side, catching up fast. “It sounds like we struck something.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll get back to you.”
“Rosemary, this is Callan, I think it would be best if we didn’t get separated. I’ll heave to until you know if you need any assistance.”
“Thanks, Callan.” She leant out over the bridge rail and waved at the Hycel . A small figure on its bridge waved back.
A screech loud enough to silence all the colonists erupted from the Swithland ’s hull. Rosemary felt the boat judder, its prow shifting a degree. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. They were almost dead in the water, it couldn’t possibly be a snag. It couldn’t be!
Karl reached the afterdeck just as the Swithland juddered. He could feel the whole boat actually lift a couple of centimetres.
The afterdeck was packed full of colonists and posse members. Several groups of men were lying down, playing cards or eating. Kids charged about. Eight or nine people were fishing over the stern. Cases of farmsteading gear were piled against the superstructure and the taffrail. Dogs ran about underfoot; there were five horses tethered to the side rail, and two of them started pulling at their harnesses as the brassy scrunching noise broke across the boat. Everybody froze in expectation.
“Out of the way!” Karl shouted. “Out of the way.” He started elbowing people aside. The noise was coming from the keel, just aft of the furnace room which was tacked on to the back of the superstructure. “Come on, move.”
A sayce snarled at him. “Killl.”
“Get that fucking thing out of my way!”
Yuri Wilken dragged Randolf aside.
The whole afterdeck complement was watching Karl. He reached the hatchway over the feed mechanism that shunted logs into the furnace. It was hidden beneath a clutter of composite pods. “Help me move these,” he yelled.
Barry MacArple emerged from the furnace room, a brawny twenty-year-old, sweaty and sooty. He had kept indoors for most of this trip, and carefully avoided any member of the posse. None of the Lambourne family had mentioned that he was an Ivet.
The noise came to an abrupt halt. Karl was very aware of the apprehensive faces focusing on him, the silent appeal for guidance. He held up his hands as Barry started to haul the pods off the hatchway. “OK, we’re riding on some sort of rock. So I want all the kids to slowly make their way forwards. Slowly mind. Then the women. Not the men. You’ll upset the balance with that much weight forward. And whoever those horses belong to, calm them down now.”
Parents hustled their children towards the prow. A hushed murmur swept round the adults. Three men were helping Barry clear the hatchway. Karl lifted off a couple of the pods himself. Then he heard the noise again, but it was distant this time, not from the Swithland ’s hull.
“What the hell—” He looked up to see the Hycel a hundred metres astern.
“Karl, what’s happening?” Rosemary’s voice demanded from the handset.
He raised the unit to his mouth. “It’s the Hycel , Mum. They’ve hit it as well.”
“Bloody hell. What about our hull?”
“Tell you in a minute.”
The last of the pods were cleared away, revealing a two-metre-square hatch. Karl bent down to unclip the latches.
That was when the second sound rang out, a water-muffled THUNK of something heavy and immensely powerful slamming into the keel. Swithland gave a small jolt, riding up several centimetres. Some of the more loosely stacked cases and pods tumbled over. The colonists shouted in panic and dismay, and there was a general surge for the prow. One of the horses reared up, forelegs scraping the air.
Karl ripped the hatch open.
THUNK
Ripples rolled away from the Swithland as it wallowed about.
“Karl!” the handset squawked.
He looked down into the hull. The log-feed mechanism took up most of the space below the hatch, a primitive-looking clump of motors, pulley loops, and pistons. Two grab belts ran away to the port and starboard log holds. The black mayope planks of the hull itself were just visible. Water was welling out of cracks between them.
THUNK
Karl stared down in stupefaction as the planks bowed inward. That was mayope wood, nothing could dint mayope.
THUNK
Splinters appeared, long dagger fingers levering apart.
THUNK
Water poured in through the widening gaps. An area over a metre wide was being slowly hammered upwards.
THUNK
THUNK
Swithland was rocking up and down. Equipment and pods rolled about across the half-abandoned afterdeck. Men and women were clinging to the rail, others were spread-eagled on the decking, clawing for a handhold.
“It’s trying to punch its way in!” Karl bellowed into the handset.
“What? What?” his mother shouted back.
“There’s something below us, something alive. For Christ’s sake, get us underway, get us to the shore. The shore, Mum. Go! Go!”
THUNK
The water was foaming up now, covering the hull planks completely. “Get this shut,” Karl called. He was terribly afraid of what would come through once the hole was big enough. Together, he and Barry MacArple slammed the hatch back down, dogging the latches.
THUNK
Swithland ’s hull broke. Karl could hear a long dreadful tearing sound as the iron-hard wood was wrenched apart. Water seethed in, gurgling and slurping. It ripped the log feeder from its mountings, crashing it against the decking above. The hatch quaked violently.
A gloriously welcome whine from the paddle engines sounded. The familiar slow thrashing of the paddles started up. Swithland turned ponderously for the unbroken rampart of jungle eighty metres away.
Karl realized people were sobbing and shouting out. A lot of them must have made it forward, the boat was riding at a downward incline.
THUNK
This time it was the afterdeck planks. Karl, lying prone next to the hatch, yelled in shock as his feet left the deck from the impact. He twisted round immediately, rolling over three times to get clear. Pods bounced and pirouetted chaotically. The horses were going berserk. One of them broke its harness, and plunged over the side. Another was kicking wildly. A blood-soaked body lay beside it.
THUNK
The planks beside the hatch lifted in unison, snapping back as if they were elastic. Water started to seep out.
Barry MacArple was scrambling on all fours along the deck, his face engorged with desperation. Karl held out his hand to the Ivet, willing him on.
THUNK
The planks directly below Barry were smashed asunder. They ruptured upwards, jagged edges puncturing the Ivet’s belly and chest, then ripping his torso apart like a giant claw. A metre-wide geyser of water slammed upwards out of the gap, buffeting the corpse with it.
Karl turned to follow the water rising, fear stunned out of him by the incredible, impossible sight. The geyser roared ferociously, shaking Karl’s bones and obliterating the impassioned shouts from the colonists. It rose a full thirty metres above the decking, its crown blossoming out like a flower. Water, silt, and fragments of mayope plank splattered down.
Clinging for dear life to one of the cable drums as the Swithland bucked about like a wounded brownspine, Karl watched the geyser chewing away at the ragged sides of the hole it had bored. It was creeping forward towards the superstructure. The bilges must be full already. Slowly and surely more and more wood was eroded by the terrific force of the water. In another minute it would reach the furnace room. He thought of what would happen when the water struck all fifteen tonnes of the searingly hot furnace, and whimpered.
Rosemary Lambourne had a hard struggle to stay upright as the Swithland tossed about. Only by clinging to the wheel could she even stay on her feet. It was the sheer fright in Karl’s voice which had spurred her into action. He wasn’t afraid of anything on the river, he had been born on the Swithland .
That deadly battering noise was knocking into her heart as much as the hull. The strength behind anything that could thump the boat about like this was awesome.
How much of the Swithland is going to be left after this? God damn Colin Rexrew, his laxness and stupidity. The Ivets would never dare to revolt with a firm, competent governor in charge.
A roar like a continual explosion made her jump, almost sending her feet from under her. It was suddenly raining on the Swithland alone. The entire superstructure was trembling. What was happening back there?
She checked the little holoscreen which displayed the boat’s engineering schematics. They were losing power rapidly from the furnace. Reserve electron-matrix crystals cut in, maintaining the full current to the engines.
“Rosemary,” the radio called.
She couldn’t spare the time to answer.
Swithland ’s prow was pointing directly at the bank sixty-five metres away, and they were picking up speed again. Pods and cases were scattered in the boat’s wake, jouncing about in the water. She saw a couple of people splashing among them. More people went falling from the foredeck; it was as tightly packed as a rugby scrum down there. And there wasn’t a thing she could do, except get them to the shore.
Off on the port side, Nassier was floundering about, paddles spinning intermittently. Rosemary saw a giant fountain of water smash through the middle of its superstructure, debris whirling away into the sky. What the fuck could do that? Some kind of water monster skulking around the riverbed? Even as the fantasy germinated in her mind she knew that wasn’t the real answer. But she did know what the roaring noise behind her was now. The knowledge sucked at the last of her strength. If it hit the furnace . . .
Nassier ’s prow lifted into the air, shoving the afterdeck below the water. The superstructure crumpled up, large chunks being flung aside by the tremendous jet of water. Dozens of people were swept into the river, arms and legs twirling frantically. In her mind she could hear the screams.
There were just too many people on board the paddleboats. Rexrew had already increased the numbers of colonists they were made to carry, refusing to listen to the warning from the captains’ delegation. Then he dumped this posse on them as well.
If I ever get back to Durringham, you’re dead, Rexrew, she promised herself. You haven’t just failed us, you’ve condemned us.
Then the Nassier began to capsize, rolling ever faster onto her starboard side. The jet of water died away as the keel flipped up. Rosemary saw a huge hole in the planks amidships as it reached the vertical. That was when the water must have rushed in on the furnace. A massive blast of white steam devoured the rear of the boat, rolling out across the surface of the river. Mercifully, it shielded the final act in the Nassier ’s convulsive death.
Swithland ’s prow was fifteen metres from the trees and creepers which were strangling the bank. Rosemary could hear the sound of their own bedevilling geyser reducing. She fought the wheel to keep the boat lined up straight on the bank. The bottom was shelving up rapidly, the forward-sweep mass-detector emitting a frantic howl in warning. Five metres deep. Four. Three. They struck mud eight metres from the long flower-heavy vines trailing in the water. The big boat’s awesome inertia propelled them along, slithering and sliding through the thick black alluvial muck. Bubbles of foul-smelling sulphurous gas churned around the sides of the hull. The geyser had died completely. There was a moment of pure dreamy silence before they hit the bank.
Rosemary saw a huge qualtook tree dead ahead; one of its thick boughs was the same height as the bridge. She ducked—
The impact threw Yuri Wilken back onto his belly just as he was starting to get up again. His nose slammed painfully against the deck. He tasted warm blood. The boat was making hideous crunching sounds as it ploughed into the frill of vegetation along the bank. Long vine strands lashed through the air with the brutality of bullwhips. He tried to bury himself into the hard decking as they slashed centimetres above his head. Swithland ’s blunt prow rammed the low bank, jolting upwards to ride a good ten metres across the dark-red sandy earth. The paddle-boat finally came to a bruising halt with its forward deck badly mangled, and the qualtook tree embedded in the front of the superstructure.
Screams and wailing gave way to moans and shrill cries for help. Yuri risked glancing about, seeing the way in which the jungle had shrink-wrapped itself around the forward half of the boat. The superstructure looked dangerously unstable, it was leaning over sharply, with tonnes of vegetation pressing against the front and side.
His limbs were shaking uncontrollably. He wanted to be home in Durringham, taking Randolf for walks or playing football with his mates. He didn’t belong here in the jungle.
“Are you all right, son?” Mansing asked.
Sheriff Mansing was the one who had signed him on for the expedition. He was a lot more approachable than some of the sheriffs, keeping a fatherly eye out for him.
“I think so.” He dabbed at his nose experimentally, sniffing hard. There was blood on his hand.
“You’ll live,” Mansing said. “Where’s Randolf?”
“I don’t know.” He climbed shakily to his feet. They were standing at the front corner of the superstructure. People were lying about all around, slowly picking themselves up, asking for help, wearing a numb, frightened expression. Two bodies had been trapped between the qualtook trunk and the superstructure; one was a small girl aged about eight. Yuri could only tell because she was wearing a dress. He turned away, gagging.
“Call for him,” Mansing said. “We’re going to need all the help we can get pretty soon.”
“Sir?”
“You think this was an accident?”
Yuri hadn’t thought it was anything. The notion sent a tremble down his spine. He put his lips together, and managed a feeble whistle.
“Twelve years I’ve been sailing up and down this river,” Mansing said grimly. “I’ve never seen anything like that geyser before. What the hell can shoot water about like that? And there was more than one of them.”
Randolf came lumbering up over the gunwale, his sleek black hide covered in smelly mud. The sayce had lost all of his usual aggressive arrogance, slinking straight over to Yuri and pressing against his master’s legs. “Waaterrr baddd,” he growled.
“He’s not far wrong there,” Mansing agreed cheerlessly.
It took quarter of an hour to establish any kind of order around the wrecked paddle-boat. The sheriffs organized parties to tend to the wounded and set up a makeshift camp. By general consensus they moved fifty metres inland, away from the river and whatever prowled below the water.
Several survivors from the Nassier managed to swim to the stern of the Swithland which was half submerged; the boat formed a useful bridge over the stinking quagmire which lined the bank. The Hycel had managed to reach the Zamjan’s far bank; it had been spared the destructive geyser, but its hull had taken a dreadful pounding. Radio contact was established and both groups decided to stay where they were rather than attempt to cross the river and join forces.
Sheriff Mansing located an unbroken communication block amongst the remnants of the posse’s gear, and patched a call through the LDC’s single geostationary satellite to Candace Elford. The shocked chief sheriff agreed to divert the two BK133s to the Swithland and fly the seriously injured back to Durringham straight away. What she never mentioned was the possibility of reinforcing the forsaken boats. But Sheriff Mansing was above all a pragmatic man, he really hadn’t expected any.