“I know what it looks like,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, that’s all. An Ivet revolt which has successfully taken control of the Quallheim Counties, and in just four days, too.”
“There are over six thousand colonists spread out in those counties,” Terrance Smith said. “Most of them have weapons and aren’t afraid to use them. Against that, there are a hundred and eighty-six Ivets, unarmed and unorganized, and without any form of reliable communication. They’re Earth’s junk, waster kids; if they could organize something like this they would never be here in the first place.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I said I don’t believe it. But what else could it be? Someone from outside? Who?”
Colin Rexrew frowned. “Schuster’s been a problem before. What ...” He trailed off, requesting a search through the files stored in his neural nanonics. “Ah, yes; the disappearing homestead families. Do you remember, Terrance, I sent a marshal up to investigate last year. Bloody great waste of money that was.”
“It was a waste of money from our point of view because the marshal didn’t find anything,” Terrance Smith said. “That in itself was unusual. Those marshals are good. Which means either it was a genuine case of some animal carrying the families away, or some unknown group was responsible, and managed to cover their tracks to such an extent it fooled both the local supervisor and the marshal. If it was an organized raid, then the perpetrators were at least the equal of our marshal.”
“So?” Colin Rexrew asked.
“So now we have another event, originating in the same county, that would be hard to explain away in terms of an Ivet revolt. Certainly the scale of the trouble argues against it being the Ivets by themselves. But an external group taking over the Quallheim Counties would fit the facts we have.”
“We only have a second-hand report that it was Ivets anyway,” Colin Rexrew said, pondering the unwelcome idea.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” Candace Elford said. “I concede that the facts indicate the Ivets are getting help. But what external group?And why the Quallheim Counties, for God’s sake? There’s no wealth out there; the colonists are barely self-sufficient. There’s no wealth anywhere on Lalonde, come to that.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colin Rexrew said. “Look, I’ve got three river-boats scheduled to leave in two days, they’re taking six hundred fresh settlers up to Schuster County so they can start another village. You’re my security adviser, Candace, are you telling me not to send them?”
“I think my advice would have to be, yes; certainly at this stage. It’s not as if you’re short of destinations. Sending unsuspecting raw colonists into the middle of a potential revolt wouldn’t look good on any of our records. Is there a nearby alternative to Schuster where you can settle them?”
“Willow West County on the Frenshaw tributary,” Terrance Smith suggested.
“It’s only a hundred kilometres north-west of Schuster; plenty of room for them there. It’s on our current territory development list anyway.”
“OK,” Colin Rexrew said. “Get it organized with the Land Allocation Office. In the meantime, what do you intend to do about the Quallheim situation, Candace?”
“I want your permission to send a posse up there on the boats with the colonists. Once the colonists have been dropped off at Willow West, the boats can take them on to the Quallheim. As soon as I’ve got reliable people on the ground we can establish what’s really going on and restore some order.”
“How many do you want to send?”
“A hundred ought to be enough. Twenty full-time sheriffs, and the rest we can deputize. God knows, there’s enough men in Durringham who’ll jump at the chance of five weeks cruising the river on full pay. I’d like three marshals, as well, just to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, all right,” Colin Rexrew said. “But just remember it comes out of your budget.”
“It’ll be nearly three weeks before you can get your people up there,” Terrance Smith said thoughtfully.
“So?” the chief sheriff asked. “I can’t make the boats go any faster.”
“No, but a lot can happen in that time. If we believe what we’ve seen so far, this revolt spread down the Quallheim in four days. Taking a worst case scenario, the revolt could carry on growing at the same rate, leaving your initial hundred-strong posse heavily outgunned. What I suggest is that we get the posse out there as fast as physically possible, and stop any further expansion before it gets totally out of hand. We have three VTOL aircraft at the spaceport, BK133s that our ecology research team use for survey missions. They’re subsonic, and they only seat ten, but they could run a relay out to the mouth of the Quallheim. That way we’d have your posse there in two days.”
Colin Rexrew let his head rest on the back of the chair, and ran a cost comparison through his neural nanonics. “Bloody expensive,” he said. “And one of those VTOLs is out of service anyway after last year’s cuts reduced the Aboriginal Fruit Classification budget. We’ll compromise, as always. Candace sends her sheriffs and deputies up to the Quallheim on the river-boats, and her office here in town continues to monitor the situation with the observation satellite. If this revolt, or whatever it is, looks like it’s spreading down out of the Quallheim Counties, we’ll use the VTOLs to reinforce the posse before they get there.”
The electrophorescent cells at the apex of Laton’s singular study were darkened, eradicating external stimuli so he could focus himself on the inner self. Senses crept in on his glacial mind, impressions garnered via affinity from the servitor scouts spread throughout the jungle. The results displeased him enormously. In fact they were edging him towards worry. He hadn’t felt like this since the Edenist Intelligence operatives had closed in, forcing him to flee his original habitat nearly seventy years previously. At that time he had felt fury, fear, and dismay the intensity of which he had never known as an Edenist; it had made him realize how worthless that culture truly was. His rejection had been total after that.
And now something was closing in on him again. Something he neither knew nor understood; something which acted like sequestration nanonics, usurping a human’s original personality and replacing it with mechanoid warrior traits. He had watched the drastically modified behaviour of Quinn Dexter and the Ivets after the incident with the lightning in the jungle. They acted like fully trained mercenary troops, and others they came into contact with soon exhibited similar traits, though a minority of those usurped acted almost normally—most puzzling. Nor did they need weapons, they acquired an ability to throw sprays of photons like a holographic projector, light which could act like a thermal-induction field, but with tremendous power and reach. Yet there was no visible physical mechanism.
Laton had felt the first overspill of pain from Camilla when the Ivets cremated her, mercifully shortened as she lost consciousness. He mourned his daughter as was proper, away in some subsidiary section of his mind, her absence from his life a sting of regret. But the important thing now was the threat he himself faced. In order to confront your enemy without fear, for fear is a bolt in the enemy’s quiver, you must understand your enemy. And understanding was the one thing which had not come in four solid days of supreme cerebral effort.
Some of the glimpses he had snatched through the scouts defied physics.
Either that or physics had advanced beyond all reasonable expectations during his exile. That was conceivable, he reasoned, weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.
Memory: of a man looking up at the sky and seeing the affinity bonded kestrel. The man laughed and raised his hand, snapping his fingers. Air around the kestrel solidified, entombing it in a matrix of frozen molecules, and sending it tumbling from the sky to dash its body against the rocks two hundred metres below. A snap of the fingers ...
Memory: of a frantic terrified villager from Kilkee firing his laser hunting rifle at one of the usurped. The r
ange had been fifteen metres, and the beam had no effect whatsoever. After the first few shots the rifle had died completely. Then the vennal Laton was using to scout with had curled up and sunk into some kind of coma.
The villages throughout the Quallheim Counties had been conquered with bewildering swiftness. That more than anything convinced Laton he was up against some kind of military force. There was a directing intelligence behind the usurped, expanding their numerical strength at an exponential rate. But what really baffled him was why. He had chosen Lalonde because it fitted his long-range goals; other than that it was a worthless planet. Why take control of people out here?
A test was the only explanation he could think of. Which begged the question what was it a preliminary to? The potential was awesome.
<
> Waldsey’s mental tone was fearful and uncertain, not like him at all.
<> Laton replied equitably. He could guess what was coming next.
After sixty years he knew the way his colleagues’ minds worked better than they did. He was only mildly surprised that it had taken them so long to confront him.
<>
<>
<> Tao said angrily. <>
Laton let the glimmer image of a smile penetrate their shared affinity.
Only his children ever dared to contradict him, which pleased him after a fashion; obsequiousness was something he disapproved of almost as much as disloyalty. Which gave everybody a narrow, and perilous, balance to maintain. <>
<>
<> Laton said. He sensed the others coming into the conversation, their minds carefully shielded from leaking too many emotions. <>
<>
<>
<
They don’t even notice it! And even if somebody does manage to beat them, the Quallheim Counties are going to be searched a centimetre at a time afterwards. Either way, we can’t stay here.>>
<> Salkid said. <>
<> Tao said. <>
<> Laton said. <> He deliberately allowed his emotional shield to slip, and felt the shocked recoil of their thoughts that he who never demonstrated weakness was so deeply perturbed.
<> Waldsey said.
<> Laton said. <>
<>
<>
<> Salsett asked anxiously.
Laton projected a burst of reassuring warmth at the fifteen-year-old girl. <>
<> she said wonderingly.
<> he said. <>
He couldn’t detect a single whiff of dissension. Minds retreated from the affinity contact.
In the hours which followed, the gigantea tree was subject to the kind of coordinated activity it hadn’t seen since their arrival. Orders were flung frantically at the incorporated and the housechimps as the residents attempted to dismantle the work of thirty years in the short hours they had left. Heartbreaking decisions were made over what could go and what must stay, several couples arguing. The landcruisers had to be checked over and prepared after thirty years’ unemployment. Laton’s younger children scampered about getting in the way, nervous and elated at the prospect of leaving; the older members of the fellowship started thinking about the Confederation worlds again. Thermal charges were set throughout the rooms and corridors, ready to obliterate all trace of the gigantea’s secrets.
The hectic activity registered as a background burble amid Laton’s steely thoughts. Occasionally someone would intrude into his contemplation to ask for instructions.
After designating the few personal items he wanted to accompany them, he spent his time reviewing the memory of what happened in the clearing when Quinn Dexter killed Supervisor Manani. That strange lightning was the start of it. He ran and re-ran Camilla’s memory images, which were stored in the tree’s sub-sentient bitek processor array. The lightning seemed to be flat, almost compressed, some sections darker than others. As he ran the memory again the dark areas moved, sliding down the glaring streamers of rampaging electrons. The lightning bolts were acting as conduits to some kind of energy pattern, one which behaved outside the accepted norm.
A draught of air stroked his face. He opened his eyes to darkness. The study was as it always had been. He switched his retinal implants to infrared. Jackson Gael and Ruth Hilton stood on the curving wood before him.
“Clever,” Laton said. His contact with the processors faded away.
Affinity was reduced to a whisper rattling round the closed confines of his skull. “It’s energy, isn’t it? A self-determining viral program that can store itself in a non-physical lattice.”
Ruth bent down, and put her hand under his chin, tilting his face up so she could examine him. “Edenists. Always so rational.”
“But where did it come from, I wonder?” Laton asked.
“What will it take to break his beliefs?” Jackson Gael asked.
“It’s not of human origin,” Laton said. “I’m sure of that; nor any of the xenoc races we know.”
“We’ll find out tonight,” Ruth said. She let go of Laton’s chin, and held out her hand. “Come along.”
The morning after Governor Rexrew’s briefing with Candace Elford, Ralph Hiltch was sitting behind his own desk in the Kulu Embassy dumper receiving a condensed version of events from Jenny Harris. One of the ESA assets she ran in the sheriff’s office had asked for a meeting and told her about the trouble b
rewing in the Quallheim Counties.
All well and good, it was nice to see the Governor couldn’t fart without the ESA knowing, but like Rexrew before him, Ralph was having a lot of trouble with the concept of an Ivet uprising.
“An open revolt?” he asked the lieutenant sceptically.
“It looks that way,” she said apologetically. “Here, my contact gave me a flek of the surveillance satellite images.” She loaded it into the processor block on Ralph’s desk, and the screens on the wall began to show the Quallheim’s motley collection of villages.
Ralph stood in front of them, hands on his hips as the semicircular clearings cut into solid jungle appeared. The treetops looked like green foam, broken by occasional glades, and virtually sealing over streams and the smaller rivers. “There’s been a lot of fires,” he agreed unhappily.
“And recently, too. Can’t you manage a better resolution than this?”
“Apparently not, and that’s the second cause for alarm. Something is affecting the satellite every time it passes over the Quallheim tributary. No other section of Amarisk is affected.”
He gave her a long look.
“I know,” she said. “It sounds ridiculous.”
Ralph gave his neural nanonics a search request and returned his attention to the screens while it was running. “There’s certainly been some kind of fight down there. And this isn’t the first time Schuster County has come to our attention.” The neural nanonics reported a blank; so he opened a channel to access his processor block’s classified military systems file, extending the search.
“Captain Lambourne reported that nothing ever came out of the marshal’s visit last year,” Jenny Harris said. “We still don’t know what happened to those homestead families.”
Ralph’s neural nanonics told him that the processor block file couldn’t find a match for his request. “Interesting. According to our files, there is no known electronic warfare system which can distort a satellite image like this.”