“Nooo,” Randolf moaned. “Baddd.”
“Bollocks,” Yuri said.
The girls caught sight of them and shrieked with delight, smiling and waving.
Yuri shouldered his laser rifle, grinning deliriously at the seven pairs of wet breasts bouncing about.
“Bloody hell,” Mansing muttered.
Yuri pushed past him, and scuttled down the slope into the stream. The girls cheered.
“Nooo.”
“Yuri,” Mansing gestured ineffectually.
He turned round, face illuminated with delight. “What? We’ve got to find out where their village is, haven’t we? That’s our assignment, scout the terrain.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” He couldn’t keep his eyes from the naiads sporting about.
Yuri was plunging on, legs sending up a wave of spray.
“Nooo,” Randolf bayed urgently. “Baddd. Peeeople baddd.”
Mansing watched the girls whooping encouragement to Yuri as the lad ploughed through the water towards them. “Oh, to hell with dignity,” he said under his breath, and splashed down into the stream.
The first girl Yuri reached was about nineteen, with scarlet flowers tucked into her wet hair. She smiled radiantly up at him, hands holding his. “I’m Polly,” she laughed.
“All right!” Yuri cried. The water only came halfway up her thighs; she really was completely naked. “I’m Yuri.”
She kissed him, damp body pressing against his sleeveless shirt, leaving a dark imprint. When she broke off another girl slipped a garland of the orange vine flowers round his neck. “And I’m Samantha,” she said.
“You gonna kiss me too?”
She twined her arms round his neck, tongue slipping hungrily into his mouth. Other girls were circling round, scooping up handfuls of spray and showering them. Yuri was in the midst of a warm silver rain with raw ecstasy pounding down his nerves. Here in the middle of nowhere, paradise had come to Lalonde. The droplets fell in slow motion, tinkling sweetly as they went. He felt hands slip the rifle strap from his shoulder, more hands pulled at his shirt buttons. His trousers were undone, and his penis stroked lovingly.
Samantha took a pace back looking at him in adoration. She cupped her breasts, lifting them up towards him. “Now, Yuri,” she pleaded. “Take me now.”
Yuri pulled her roughly against him, his soaking trousers tangling round his knees. He heard an alarmed shout that was cut off. Three of the girls had pushed Mansing under the water, his legs were thrashing above the surface. The girls were laughing hysterically, muscles straining with the effort of keeping him down.
“Hey—” Yuri said. He couldn’t move because of his stupid trousers.
“Yuri,” Samantha called.
He turned back to her. She was opening her mouth wider than he would have believed physically possible. Long bands of muscle writhed around her chin as if fat worms were tunnelling through her veins. Her cheeks started to split, beginning at the corners of her mouth and tearing back towards her ears. Blood leapt out of the wounds in regular beats, and she was still hinging her jaw apart.
Yuri stared for one petrified second then let loose a guttural roar of fright that reverberated round the impassive sentinel trees. His bladder gave out.
Samantha’s grisly head darted forward, carmine teeth clamping solidly round his throat, her blood spraying against his skin.
“Randolf—” he yelled. Then her teeth tore into his throat, and his own blood burst out of his carotid artery to flood his gullet, quashing any further sounds.
Randolf howled in rage as his master fell into the water with Samantha riding him down. But one of the other girls looked straight at him and hissed in warning, flecks of saliva spitting out between her bared teeth.
The sayce turned tail and sprinted back into the jungle.
“Power’s going. Losing height. Losing height!” The BK133 pilot’s frantic voice boomed out of the command centre’s AV pillars.
Every sheriff in the room stared at the tactical communication station.
“We’re going down!”
The carrier wave hissed for another couple of seconds, then fell silent.
“God Almighty,” Candace Elford whispered. She was sitting at her desk at the end of the rectangular room. Like most of the capital’s civic buildings, the sheriff’s headquarters was made of wood. It sat in its own square fortified enclosure a couple of hundred metres from the governor’s dumper, a simplistic design that any pre-twentieth-century soldier would have felt at home in. The command centre itself formed one side of the parade ground, a long single-storey building with four grey composite spheres housing the satellite uplinks spaced along the apex of the roof.
Inside, plain wooden benches ran around the walls, supporting an impressive array of modern desktop processor consoles operated by sheriffs seated in composite chairs. On the wall opposite Candace Elford’s desk a big projection screen displayed a street map of Durringham (as far as it was possible to map that conglomeration of erratic alleyways and private passages). Conditioners hummed unobtrusively to keep the temperature down. The atmosphere of technological efficiency was spoilt slightly by the fans of yellow-grey fungus growing out of the skirting-board underneath the benches.
“Contact lost,” Mitch Verkaik, the sheriff sitting at the tactical communication station reported, stone faced.
Candace turned to the small team she had assigned to monitor the posse’s progress. “What about the sheriffs on the ground? Did they see it come down?”
Jan Routley was operating the satellite link to the Swithland survivors; she loaded an order into her console. “There is no response from any communicator on the Swithland or the Hycel. I can’t even raise a transponder identity code.”
Candace studied the situation display projected by her own console’s AV pillar, more out of habit than anything else. She knew they were all waiting for her to rap out orders, smooth and confident, producing instant perfect solutions like an ambulatory computer. It wasn’t going to happen. The last week had been a complete nightmare. They couldn’t contact anyone in the Quallheim Counties or Willow West any more, and communications with villages along the Zamjan were patchy. The reinforcement flights to Ozark were a stopgap at best; privately she had intended that the fresh men and weapons would simply safeguard an evacuation of settlers down the river. She had long since abandoned the idea of restoring order to the Quallheim Counties, confinement was her best hope. Now it looked like Ozark was inside the affected zone. Seventy men and almost a quarter of her armoury.
“Call the second BK133 back to Durringham right away,” she said shortly.
“If the invaders can bring down one, they can bring down another.” And at least ten sheriffs with their heavy-duty weapons would be saved. They might need them badly in the weeks to come. It was pretty obvious the invaders were intent on complete domination of the planet.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mitch Verkaik turned back to his console.
“How long before the observation satellite makes a pass over the paddle-boats?” Candace asked.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jan Routley answered.
“Program it for an infrared overscan fifty kilometres either side of its orbital track, see if it can locate the downed BK133. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot.” She rested her chin in her hands, staring blankly at her desktop processor. Protecting Durringham was her priority now, she decided. They must hold on to the city until the LDC sent a combat force capable of regaining the countryside. She was convinced they were faced with an invasion, the hour-long briefing she’d had with Kelven Solanki that morning had put paid to any final doubts. Kelven was badly worried, which wasn’t like him at all.
Candace hadn’t told her staff what Kelven had said to her, about the possible use of sequestration and river-boats that might have already brought a preliminary platoon of invaders to Durringham. It didn’t bear thinking about. There were three chairs conspicuously empty in the command centre today; even the sheriffs w
ere reverting to a self-protective mentality. She couldn’t blame them; most had a family in the city, and none had signed on to fight a well-organized military force. But she’d agreed to cooperate with the Confederation Navy office in reviewing satellite image records of river traffic for the last fortnight.
“We’re receiving the images now,” Jan Routley called out.
Candace stirred herself, and walked over to the woman’s position.
Kilometre after kilometre of jungle streamed across the high-definition holoscreen; the green treetops were overlaid by transparent red shadows to indicate the temperature profile. The Zamjan leapt into view at the bottom of the screen, Swithland’s stern jutting out onto the water from under the bankside canopy of vegetation. Graphics flashed across the holoscreen, drawing orange circles around a glade close to the water.
“It’s a fire,” Jan Routley said. She datavised an order into the desktop processor to centre on the infrared source. The clearing expanded on the screen, showing a bonfire burning in its centre. There were blankets and the unmistakable white cargo-pods of homesteading gear littered about.
Several trees had been felled on one side. “Where have all the people gone?” she asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know,” Candace said. “I really don’t.”
It was midafternoon, and the Coogan was twenty-five kilometres downriver from the abandoned paddle-boats when Len Buchannan and Darcy spotted the first pieces of flotsam bobbing about in the water. Crates of farmsteading gear, lengths of planking, fruit. Five minutes later they saw the first body: a woman in a one-piece ship-suit, face down, with arms and legs spread wide.
“We’re turning back now,” Len informed him.
“All the way to the mouth of the Quallheim,” Darcy reminded him.
“Shove your money and your contract.” He started turning the wheel. “You think I’m blind to what’s going on? We’re already in the rebel area. It’s gonna take a miracle to get us downriver if we start now, never mind from another hundred and fifty kilometres further east.”
“Wait,” Darcy put his hand on the wheel. “How far to Ozark?”
Scowling, Len consulted an ancient guidance block sitting on a shelf in the wheel-house. “Thirty kilometres, maybe thirty-five.”
“Put us ashore five kilometres short of the village.”
“I dunno—”
“Look, the eagles can spot any boat coming down the river ten kilometres ahead of us. If one does come, then we turn round immediately and sail for Durringham. How does that sound?”
“Why didn’t the eagles spot all this, then? Hardly something you could miss.”
“They’re out over the jungle. We’ll call them back now. Besides, it could be a genuine accident. There might be people hurt up ahead.”
The lines around Len’s mouth tightened, reflecting his indecision. No true captain would ignore another boat in distress. A broken chunk of yellow foam packaging scraped down the side of the Coogan. “All right,” he said, clutching at the wheel. “But the first sign of trouble, and I’m off downriver. It’s not the money. Coogan’s all I’ve got, I built her with my own hands. I ain’t risking the old girl for you.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just as anxious as you that nothing happens to the boat, or you. No matter what we find in the villages, we’ve still got to get back to Durringham. Lori and I are too old to walk.”
Len grunted dismissively, but started feeding the wheel round again, lining the prow up on the eastern horizon.
The affinity call went out, and Abraham and Catlin curved through the clear air, racing for the river. From their vantage point seven kilometres ahead of the Coogan they could see tiny scraps of debris floating slowly in the current. They were also high enough for the water to be almost completely transparent. Lori could see large schools of brown-spines and reddish eel-analogues swimming idly.
It wasn’t until the sun was a red-gold ball touching the treetops ahead of the little trader boat that the eagles found the paddle-boats jammed into opposite banks. Lori and Darcy guided them in long spirals above the surrounding jungle, searching for the colonists and crew and posse. There was nobody on the boats, or in the camps that had been set up.
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> Lori said. She felt Darcy come into the link with Abraham, looking through the bird’s enhanced eyes. Down below, a figure was slipping through the jungle. The tightly packed leaves made observation difficult, granting them only the most fleeting of glimpses.
It was a man, a new colonist they judged, because he was wearing a shirt of synthetic fabric. He was walking unhurriedly westwards, parallel to the river about a kilometre inland.
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The Coogan advanced up the river at a much slower pace, waiting for the sun to set before passing the two paddleboats. For the first time since he arrived on the planet, Darcy actually found himself wishing it would rain. A nice thick squall would provide extra cover. As it was they had to settle for thin clouds gusting over Diranol, subduing its red lambency to a sourceless candle-glow which reduced ordinary visibility to a few hundred metres. Even so the trader’s wheezing engines and clanking gearbox sounded appallingly loud on the night-time river where silence was sacrosanct.
Lori engaged her retinal implants as they crept thieflike between the two boats. Nothing moved, there were no lights. The two derelicts set up cold resonances in her heart she couldn’t ignore. The ships brooded.
“There should be a small tributary around here,” Darcy said an hour later. “You can moor the Coogan in it; that ought to make it invisible from anyone on the Zamjan.”
“How long for?” Len asked.
“Until tomorrow night. That should give us plenty of time, Ozark is only another four kilometres east of here. If we’re not back by 04:00 hours, then cast off and get home.”
“Right you are. And I ain’t spending a minute more, mind.”
“Make sure you don’t cook anything. The smell will give you away if there’s any trained hunting beasts in the area.”
The little tributary stream was only twice the width of the Coogan, with tall cherry oak trees growing on the boggy banks. Len Buchannan backed his boat down it, cursing every centimetre of the way. Once cables had secured it in the middle of the channel, Len, Lori, and Darcy worked for an hour cutting branches to camouflage the cabin.
Len’s dark mood became apprehensive when Darcy and Lori were finally set to leave. Both of them had put on their chameleon suits; matt grey, tight fitting, with a ring of broad equipment pouches around the waist. He couldn’t see an empty one.
“Look out for yourselves,” he mumbled, embarrassed at what he was saying, as they walked down the plank to the jungle.
“Thank you, Len,” Darcy said. “We will. Just make sure you’re here when we get back.” He pulled the hood over his head.
Len raised a hand. The air around the Edenists turned impenetrably black, flowing like oily smoke around their bodies. Then they were gone. He could hear their feet squelching softly in the mud, slowly fading into the distance. A sudden chill breeze seemed to rise out of the cloying jungle humidity, and he hastened back into the galley. Those chameleon suits were too much like magic.
Four kilometres through the jungle in the dead of night.
It wasn’t too bad, their retinal implants had low-light and infrared capability. Their world was a two-tone of green and red, shot through with strange white sparkles, like interference on a badly tuned holoscreen. Depth perception was the trickiest, compressing trees and bushes into a flat mantle of landscape.
Twice they came across sayces on a nocturnal prowl. The animals’ hot bodies shone like a dawn star amongst the lacklustre vegetation. Each time, Darcy killed them with a single shot from his maser carbine.
Lori’s inertial guidance block navigated them towards the village, its bitek processor pumping their coordinates directly into her brain, giving her the mindless knowledge and accuracy of a migratory bird. All she had to watch out for was the lie of the land; even the most exhaustive satellite survey couldn’t reveal the folds, rillets, and gullies that hid below the treetops.
Two hundred metres from the edge of Ozark’s clearing, their green and red world began to grow lighter. Lori checked through Abraham high overhead, keeping the bird circling outside the clearing. There were a number of fires blazing in open pits outside the cabins.
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