Gerald Skibbow’s jaw dropped. People on the nearby cots were turning over, peering at them blearily.
“Do you know how late it is? What have you been up to?” he hissed.
“Are you quite sure you want a truthful answer to that, Daddy? Quite sure?”
“You despicable little vixen. Your mother’s been fretting over you all night. Doesn’t that even bother you?”
Marie curled her lip up. “What tragedy could possibly happen to me in this paradise you’ve brought us to?”
For a moment she thought he was going to strike her again.
“There have been two murders in the port this week,” he said.
“Yeah? That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Get into bed,” Gerald said through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
“Discuss it?” she asked archly. “You mean I get an equal say?”
“For fuck’s sake, can it, Skibbow,” someone shouted.
“We want to get some sleep here.”
Under the impotent stare of her father, Marie pulled her shoes off and sauntered over to her cot.
Quinn was still dozing in his sleeping-bag, struggling against the effects of the rough beer he had drunk in Donovan’s, when someone gripped the side of his cot and yanked it through ninety degrees. His arms and legs thrashed about in the sleeping-bag as he tumbled onto the floor, but there was no way he could prevent the fall. His hip smacked into the concrete first, jarring his pelvis badly, then his jaw landed. Quinn yelled out in surprise and pain.
“Get up, Ivet,” a voice shouted.
A man was standing over him, grinning down evilly. He was in his early forties, tall and well built, with a shock of black hair and a full beard. The brown leather skin of his face and arms was scarred with a lunar relief of pocks and the tiny red lines of broken capillaries. His clothes were all natural fabric, a thick red and black check cotton shirt with the arms torn off, green denim trousers, lace-up boots that came up to his knees, and a belt which carried various powered gadgets and a vicious-looking ninety-centimetre steel machete. A silver crucifix on a slim chain glinted at the base of his neck.
He laughed in a bass roar as Quinn groaned at the hot pain in his throbbing hip. Which was too much. Quinn grappled with the seal catch at the top of the bag. He was going to make the bastard pay. The seal opened. His hands came out, and he kicked his legs, trying to shake off the constricting fabric. Somewhere around the edges of his perception the other Ivets were shouting in alarm and jumping over the cots. A huge damp jaw closed around his right hand, completely around, sharp teeth pinching the thin skin of his wrist, their tips grating between his tendons. Shock froze him for a horrific second. It was a dog, a hound, a fucking hellhound. Even a sayce would have thought twice before taking it on. The thing must have stood a metre high. It had short grizzled grey fur, a blunt hammerhead muzzle, jowls of black rubber, wet with gooey saliva.
Big liquid eyes were fixed on him. It was growling softly. Quinn could feel the vibration all the way along his arm. He waited numbly, expecting the jaws to close, the mauling to begin. But the eyes just kept staring at him.
“My name is Powel Manani,” said the bearded man. “And our glorious leader, Governor Colin Rexrew, has appointed me as Group Seven’s settlement supervisor. That means, Ivets, I own you: body, and soul. And just to make my position absolutely clear from the start: I don’t like Ivets. I think this world would be a better place without putrid pieces of crap like you screwing it up. But the LDC board has decided to lumber us with you, so I am going to make bloody sure every franc’s worth of your passage fee is squeezed out of you before your work-time is up. So when I say lick shit, you lick; you eat what I give you to eat; and you wear what I give you to wear. And because you are lazy bastards by nature, there is going to be no such thing as a day off for the next ten years.”
He squatted down beside Quinn and beamed broadly. “What’s your name, dickhead?”
“Quinn Dexter ... sir.”
Powel’s eyebrows lifted in appreciation. “Well done. You’re a smart one, Quinn. You learn quick.”
“Thank you, sir.” The dog’s tongue was pressing against his fingers, sliding up and down his knuckles. It felt utterly disgusting. He had never heard of an animal being trained so perfectly before.
“Smartarses are troublemakers, Quinn. Are you going to be a troublemaker for me?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you going to get up in the mornings in future, Quinn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. We understand each other, then.” Powel stood up. The dog released Quinn’s hand, and backed off a pace.
Quinn held his hand up: it glistened from all the saliva; there were red marks like a tattooed bracelet around his wrist, and two drops of blood welled up.
Powel patted the dog’s head fondly. “This is my friend, Vorix. He and I are affinity bonded, which means I can quite literally smell out any scams you dickheads cook up. So don’t even try to pull any fast ones, because I know them all. If I find you doing anything I don’t like, it will be Vorix who deals with you. And it won’t be your hand he bites off next time, he’ll be dining on your balls. Do I make myself clear?”
The Ivets mumbled their answer, heads bowed, avoiding Powel’s eye.
“I’m glad none of us are suffering any illusions about the other. Now then, your instructions for the day. I will not repeat them. Group Seven is going upriver on three ships: the Swithland, the Nassier, and the Hycel. They are currently docked in harbour three, and they’re sailing in four hours. So that is the time you have to get the colonists’ gear loaded. Any pods that aren’t loaded, I will have you carry on your backs the whole way to the landing site upriver. Do not expect me to act as your permanent nursemaid, get yourselves organized and get on with it. You will be travelling with me and Vorix on the Swithland. Now move!”
Vorix barked, jowls peeled back from his teeth. Powel watched Quinn skitter backwards like a crab, then pick himself up and chase off after the other Ivets. He knew Quinn was going to be trouble, after helping to start five settlements he could read the Ivets’ thoughts like a personality debrief. The youth was highly resentful, and smart with it.
He was more than a waster kid, probably got tied in with some underground organization before he was transported. Powel toyed with the idea of simply leaving him behind when the Swithland sailed, let the Durringham sheriffs deal with him. But the Land Allocation Office would know what he’d done, and it would be entered in his file, which had too many incidents already. “Bugger,” he muttered under his breath. The Ivets were all outside the dormitory, heading along the path to the warehouse. And it looked like they were gathering round Quinn, waiting for him to start directing them. Oh well, if it came to it, Quinn would just have to have an accident in the jungle.
Horst Elwes had been watching the episode with a number of Group Seven’s members, and now he stepped up to Powel. The supervisor’s dog turned its neck to look at him. Lord, but it was a brute. Lalonde was becoming a sore test for him indeed. “Was it necessary to be quite so unpleasant to those boys?” he asked Powel Manani.
Powel looked him up and down, eyes catching on the white crucifix. “Yes. If you want the blunt truth, Father. That’s the way I always deal with them. They have to know who’s in charge from the word go. Believe me, they respect toughness.”
“They would also respond to kindness.”
“Fine, well you show them plenty of it, Father. And just to prove there’s no ill feeling, I’ll give them time off to attend mass.”
Horst had to quicken his pace to keep up. “Your dog,” he said cautiously.
“What about him?”
“You say you are bonded with affinity?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you an Edenist, then?”
Vorix made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.
“No, Father,” Powel said. “I’m simply practical. And i
f I had a fuseodollar for every new-landed priest who asked me that I would be a millionaire. I need Vorix upriver; I need him to hunt, to scout, to keep the Ivets in line. Neuron symbionts give me control over him. I use them because they are cheap and they work. The same as all the other settlement supervisors, and half of the county sheriffs as well. It’s only the major Earth-based religions which maintain people’s prejudice against bitek. But on worlds like Lalonde we can’t afford your prissy theological debates. We use what we have to, when we have to. And if you want to survive long enough to fill Group Seven’s second generation with your noble bigotry over a single chromosome which makes people a blasphemy, then you’ll do the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a settlement expedition to sort out.” He brushed past, heading for the harbour.
Gerald Skibbow and the other members of Group Seven followed after him, several of them giving shamefaced glances to the startled priest. Gerald watched Rai Molvi gathering up his nerve to speak. Molvi had made a lot of noise at the meeting last night, he seemed to fancy himself as a leader of men. There had been plenty of suggestions that they form an official committee, elect a spokesperson. It would help the group interface with the authorities, Rai Molvi said. Gerald privately gave him six months before he was running back to Durringham with his tail between his legs. The man was an obvious lawyer type, didn’t have what it took to be a farmer.
“You were supposed to be here yesterday to brief us,” Rai Molvi said.
“Quite right,” Powel said without breaking stride. “I apologize. If you would like to make an official complaint about me, the Land Allocation Office which issues my contract is in a dumper down on the western edge of town. It’s only six kilometres.”
“No, we weren’t going to complain,” Rai Molvi said quickly. “But we do need to establish certain facts to prepare ourselves. It would have been helpful had you attended.”
“Attended what?”
“Last night’s council meeting.”
“What council?”
“Group Seven’s council.”
Powel took a breath. He never did understand why half of the colonists came to Lalonde in the first place. The LDC must employ some pretty amazing advertising techniques back on Earth, he thought. “What was it the council wanted to know?”
“Well ... where are we going, for a start?”
“Upriver.” Powel stretched out the pause long enough to make the other man uncomfortable. “A place called Schuster County, on the Quallheim tributary. Although I’m sure that if you have somewhere else in mind the river-boat captain will be happy to take you there instead.”
Rai Molvi reddened.
Gerald pushed his way to the front as they all moved out from under the dormitory’s creaking roof. Powel had turned, making for the circular harbour two hundred metres away, Vorix padding along eagerly behind him.
There were several paddle-boats pulled up at the wooden quays inside the artificial lagoon. The bright red specks of scavenging chikrows swirled overhead. The sight with its sense of purpose and adventure was unbeatable, quickening his blood.
“Is there anything we need to know about the paddleboats?” he asked.
“Not really,” Powel said. “They carry about a hundred and fifty people each, and it’ll take us about a fortnight to reach the Quallheim. Your meals are provided as part of your transit fee, and I’ll be giving talks on the more practical aspects of jungle lore and setting up your home. So just find yourself a bunk, and enjoy the trip, for you won’t ever have another like it. After we make landfall the real work begins.”
Gerald nodded his thanks and turned back to the dormitory. Let the others pester the man with irrelevant questions, he would get the family packed and onto the Swithland straight away. A long river trip would be just what Marie needed to calm her down.
The Swithland followed a standard design for the larger paddle-boats operating on the Juliffe. She had a broad, shallow hull made of mayope planks, measuring sixty metres from prow to stern and twenty metres broad. With the water flowing by a mere metre and a half below the deck she could almost have been mistaken for a well-crafted raft had it not been for her superstructure, which resembled a large rectangular barn.
Her odd blend of ancient and modern technologies was yet another indicator of Lalonde’s development status. Two paddles midway down the hull because they were far simpler to manufacture and maintain than the more efficient screws. Electric motors because the industrial machinery to assemble them was cheaper than the equivalent necessary to produce a steam generator and turbine unit. But then electric motors required a power source, which was a solid-state thermal-exchange furnace imported from Oshanko. Such costly imports would only be tolerated while the number of paddle-boats made the generator and turbine factory uneconomical. When their numbers increased the governing economic equations would change in tandem, quite probably sweeping them away entirely to be replaced with another equally improbable mismatch craft.
Such was the way of progress on Lalonde.
The Swithland herself was only seventeen years old, and good for another fifty or sixty at least. Her captain, Rosemary Lambourne, had taken out a mortgage with the LDC that her grandchildren would be paying off. As far as she was concerned, that was a bargain. Seventeen years of watching hapless colonists sailing upriver to their dream’s ruin convinced her she had done the right thing. Her colonist shipment contract with the Governor’s Transport Office was a solid income, guaranteed for the next twenty years, and everything she brought downriver for Durringham’s growing merchant community was pure profit, earning hard fuseodollars.
Life on the river was the best, she could hardly remember her existence back on Earth, working in a Govcentral design bureau to improve vac-train carriages. That was somebody else’s existence.
A quarter of an hour before they were due to cast off, Rosemary stood on the open bridge, which took up the forward quarter of the superstructure’s top deck. Powel Manani had joined her after he had led his horse up the gangplank, tethering it on the aft deck; now the two of them watched the colonists embarking. Children and adults alike shuffled round. The children were mostly gathered round the horse, patting and stroking it gently. Shoulder-bags and larger cases were strewn about over the dark planking. The sound of several heated arguments drifted up to the top deck. Nobody had thought to count how many people were coming on board. Now the boat was overladen, and latecomers were reluctant to find another berth on one of the other ships.
“You got your Ivets organized well,” she told the supervisor. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the gear stowed so professionally before. They finished over an hour ago. The harbour-master ought to nab them from you and put them to work as stevedores.”
“Humm,” Powel said. Vorix, who was lying on the deck behind them, gave an uneasy growl.
Rosemary grinned at that. Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was bonded to who.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Someone, actually. They’ve got themselves a leader. He’s going to be trouble, Rosemary. I know he is.”
“You’ll keep them in line. Hell, you’ve supered five settlements, and all of them wound up viable. If you can’t do it nobody can.”
“Thanks. You run a pretty tight ship yourself.”
“Keep an eye out for yourself this time, Powel. There’s people gone missing up in Schuster County recently. Rumour has it the Governor’s none too happy.”
“Yeah?”
“The Hycel is carrying a marshal upriver. Going to have a scout round.”
“I wonder if there’s a bounty for finding them? The Governor doesn’t like homesteaders ducking out of their settlement contract, it sets a bad example. Everyone would come and live in Durringham otherwise.”
“From what I hear, they want to find out what happened to them, not where they are.”
“Oh?”
“They just vanished. No sign of a fight. Left all their gear and animals behind.”
“Fine, well, I’ll keep alert.” He took a broad-rimmed hat out of the pack at his feet. It was yellow-green in colour, much stained. “Are we sharing a bunk this trip, Roses?”
“No chance.” She leant further over the rail to scan the foredeck for her four children, who along with two stokers were her only other crew. “I’ve got me a brand-new Ivet as my second stoker. Barry MacArple, he’s nineteen, real talented mechanic on both sides of the sheets. I think it shocks my eldest boy. That is, when he actually stops boffing the colonists’ daughters himself.”
“Fine.”
Vorix let out a plaintive whine, and dropped his head onto his forepaws.
“When are you back in Schuster County next?” Powel asked.
“A couple of months, maybe three. I’m taking a group up to Colane County on the Dibowa tributary next time out. After that I’ll be up in your area. Want me to visit?”
He settled the hat on his head, working out agendas and timescales in his mind. “No, it’s too soon. This bunch won’t have exhausted their gear by then. Make it nine or ten months, let them feel a little deprivation, we’ll be able to flog them a bar of soap for fifty fuseodollars by then.”
“That’s a date.”
They shook on it, and turned back to watch the quarrelling colonists below.
Swithland cast off more or less on time. Rosemary’s eldest boy, Karl, a strapping fifteen-year-old, ran along the deck shouting orders to the colonists who were helping with the cables. A cheer went up from the passengers as the paddles started turning and they moved away from the quay.
Rosemary was in the bridge herself. The harbour didn’t have much spare water anyway, and Swithland was sluggish with a hold full of logs for the furnace, the colonists, their gear, and enough food to last them three weeks. She steered past the end of the quay and out into the centre of the artificial lagoon. The furnace was burning furiously, twin stacks sending out a high plume of grey-blue smoke. Standing on the prow, Karl gave her a smiling thumbs-up. He’s going to break a lot of female hearts, that one, she thought proudly.