Laton and his cohorts had all emerged into the bleak night wearing cagoules against the weather. They had their backs to him, heading for the flight line where the indistinct outlines of the parked McBoeings formed windows into an even graver darkness. Laton (betrayed by his height) had his arm around Marie.
“The beauty and the beast, look. What can she see in him? For Marie is just a simple colony girl, proud and decent, loving her new planet, working long hours like all of this city’s residents. She shares the planetary ethic of her neighbours, striving hard to achieve a better world for her children. Yet somehow she has stumbled. A warning that none of us is immune to the attraction of the dark side of human nature. I look at her, and I think: there but for the grace of God go I.”
Halfway along the McBoeings was a smaller spaceplane. It was obviously Laton’s goal. Bright light shone out of its open airlock, casting a grey smear across the ground. A couple of maintenance crew personnel were tending the mobile support units under its nose.
Graeme sneaked up to the big undercarriage bogies of a McBoeing forty metres away, and crouched down below the broad tyres. The spaceplane was one of the small swing-wing VTOL marques starships carried in their hangars. He switched his retinal implants to full magnification and scanned the fuselage. Sure enough, the name Yaku was printed on the low angular tail.
Some kind of argument was going on at the foot of the steps leading up to the airlock. The administration official was talking heatedly to another man wearing a cagoule with the LDC emblem on the arm. Both of them were waving their arms around. Laton, Marie, and Emlyn Hermon stood to one side, watching patiently.
“The last obstacle has been reached. It is ironic to consider that all that stands between Laton and the Confederation is one immigration official. One man between us and the prospect of galactic tragedy.”
The argument ended. A Jovian Bank disk was offered.
“Can we blame him? Should we blame him? It is a foul night. He has a family which looks to him for support. And how harmless it is, a few hundred fuseodollars to avert his eyes for one swift minute. Money which can buy food for his children in these troubled times. Money which can make life that fraction easier. How many of us would do the same? How many? Would you?” Nice touch that, involve people.
Laton and Marie went up the battered aluminium stairs, followed by a furtive Emlyn Hermon. The administration official was talking to the two ground crew.
Just as he reached the airlock hatch, Laton turned, the hood of his cagoule falling back to reveal his face in full. Handsome, well proportioned, a hint of aristocracy: Edenist sophistication, but without the cultural heritage, that essential counterbalance which made the affinity gene carriers human. It looked as though he was staring straight at Graeme Nicholson. He laughed with a debonair raffishness. Mocking.
Everyone in the Confederation who accessed the sensevise in the weeks which followed experienced the old journalist’s heart thud inside his ribs. All of a sudden breath was very hard to come by, stalling in his throat.
That pause, the derision. It wasn’t an accident, chance. Laton knew he was there, and didn’t care. Graeme was too far beneath him to care.
“He is going now. Free to roam the stars. Should I have tried to stop him? Put myself up against a man who can make entire worlds tremble at the mention of his name? If you think I should, then I am sorry. For I am so frightened of him. And I do not believe I would have made any difference, not against his strength. He would still be on his way.”
The airlock hatch shut. The two ground crew scuttled about, hunched against the rain, unplugging the thick dark-yellow ribbed hoses from their underbelly hatches. Compressors wound up, kicking out micro-squalls of the heavy rain. Their reedy sibilance built steadily until the spaceplane rocked on its undercarriage. It lifted into the murky sky.
“My duty now is to warn you all. I will do what I can, what I must, to ensure this sensevise reaches you. So that you know. He is coming. It is you who must fight him. I wish you luck. Those of us left here have our own battle against the calamity he has unleashed out in the hinterlands. It is not one for which we are well prepared, this is not a planet of epic heroes, just ordinary people like yourselves. As always, the burden falls upon those least able to shoulder it; for a terrible night has fallen on Lalonde, and I do not think we will see the dawn again.”
The spaceplane swooped up in a sharp climb, its wings beginning to fold back. It arrowed into the low, bulging cloud base, and disappeared from view.
A dozen paltry fires spluttered and hissed on the broad road outside the Governor’s dumper, the flames devouring fence posts and broken carts that had been snatched for fuel. Little knots of protesters clustered round them under the watchful eyes of the sheriffs and deputies circling the carbotanium cone. An uneasy truce had broken out after the anger and violence of the day. The earlier barrages of stones and bottles had been answered each time by cortical-jamming impulses from the sheriffs. Thankfully the protesters had refrained from using any real weapons today. Now the chanting had stopped. The naked menace in a thousand throats screaming in unison wasn’t something Colin Rexrew was accustomed to dealing with. He could never make out what they had been chanting for these last few days; he thought they weren’t entirely sure themselves apart from wanting the turmoil to end. Well, so did he. Very badly.
Each time Colin Rexrew looked out of his window he could see some new plume of smoke rising from the vista of dark rooftops. Tonight the horizon was dotted with three or four fierce orange flares as buildings burned. If it wasn’t for the rain and humidity Durringham would have been reduced to a single giant firestorm days ago.
And the deteriorating civic situation in the city wasn’t even his real problem.
When Candace Elford came into the office Colin Rexrew was behind his desk as always, gazing vacantly at the window strip and the luckless city outside. Terrance Smith gave her a fast, expressive grimace, and they both sat down.
“I’m afraid I have now effectively lost control over a third of the city,” she started.
It was the nightly situation briefing. Or the nightly crisis meeting, depending on how cynical Colin felt. The intensifying pressures seemed to make it hard to concentrate at the very times he needed his full mental resources. He would have given a lot to be able to run a stimulant program through his neural nanonics, or even escape into a MF album for a few hours like he used to in his adolescence. It would have made the strain a little easier to bear.
Not even his neural nanonics with their top of the range managerial programs were much help. There were too many unaccountable—downright weird—factors cropping up to apply standard responses. Had there ever been a stage one colony governor who had lost all control of his planet? The memory cells held no record of any.
What a way to get into the history books.
“Is it the invaders?” he asked.
“No, as far as we can make out they are still some distance away. What we’re dealing with here is mainly opportunist looting, and some organized grabs for power. Nothing political, but there are some strong criminal gangs who have been quick to take advantage of the unrest. I’d point out that most of the districts my sheriffs have been excluded from are on the south-eastern side of town. Those are the newest and poorest; in other words the most disaffected to begin with. The heart of the city, and more importantly the merchant and industrial sectors, remain stable. If anything, the older residents resent the lawlessness. I’m looking to recruit more deputies from them.”
“How long before you can start to regain control of the south-east districts?” Terrance Smith asked.
“At the moment I’m just looking to contain the trouble,” Candace Elford said.
“You mean you can’t?”
“I didn’t say that, but it isn’t going to be easy. The gangs have captured two dumpers, and their fusion generators. We can’t afford to damage them, and they know that. I lost a lot of good people in Ozark and on the Swithland fiasco. Plus we have to deal with the transient colonists. They seem to be the biggest problem right now; they’re holed up in the docks and I can’t shift them. There are barricades across every access route and there’s a lot of wanton destruction and looting going on. So half the port is currently unusable, which has antagonized the boat captains; and I have to deploy a lot of people to keep an eye on them.”
“Starve them out,” Colin said.
She nodded reluctantly. “That’s one option. About the least expensive at the moment. But it will take time, there was a lot of food stored in those warehouses.”
“The merchants won’t like that,” Terrance Smith said.
“Screw the merchants,” Colin said. “I’m sorry about the transients’ gear being looted, but that doesn’t excuse this kind of behaviour. We can help them eventually, but not if they’re going to hamper every effort with petty-minded belligerence.”
“Some families lost everything—”
“Tough shit! We are in danger of losing an entire planet of twenty million people. My priority is to the majority.”
“Yes, sir.”
There were times when Colin just felt like telling his aide: here’s my seat, you take over, you with your situation summaries and cautiously formulated response suggestions. Instead, the Governor walked over to the drinks cabinet and searched through the bottles for a decent chilled white wine, and to hell with the chief sheriff’s disapproval.
“Can we defend Durringham from the invaders?” he asked quietly as he flipped the neck seal and poured out a glass.
“If we had enough time to prepare, and you declared martial law, and if we had enough weapons.”
“Yes or no?”
Candace Elford watched the glass in the Governor’s hand. It was shaking quite badly, the wine nearly spilling. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Whatever it is that’s out there, it’s strong, well armed, and well organized. The Confederation Navy office thinks they are using some kind of sequestration technology to turn colonists into a slave army. Faced with that, I don’t think we really stand much of a chance.”
“Sequestration nanonics,” Colin mumbled as he sank back into his chair. “Dear God, who are these invaders? Xenocs? Some exiled group from another planet?”
“I’m not one hundred per cent certain,” she said. “But my satellite image analysis people found these this morning. I think it may throw a little light on the situation.” She datavised an order into the office’s computer. The wall-screens lit up, showing a blank section of jungle fifty kilometres west of Ozark.
The satellite had passed over in the middle of the afternoon, giving a clear bright image. Trees were compacted so tightly the jungle looked like an unbroken emerald plain. Five perfectly straight black lines began to probe across the green expanse, as if the talons of a huge invisible claw were being scored down the screen. The satellite cameras zoomed in on the head of one line, and Colin Rexrew saw trees being bulldozed into the ground. A big ten-wheeled vehicle rolled into view, grey metal glinting dully, a black bubble-cab protruding from a flat upper surface. It had a blunt wedge-shaped front that smashed through trunks without the slightest resistance. Viscous sprays of red-brown mud were being flung up by its rear wheels, caking the metal bodywork. There were another three identical vehicles following it along the track of shattered vegetation it was ripping through the jungle.
“We positively identified them as Dhyaan DLA404 landcruisers; they are made on Varzquez. Or I should say, were made. The Dhyaan company stopped producing that particular model over twenty years ago.”
Colin Rexrew datavised a search order into the office computer. “The LDC never brought any to Lalonde.”
“That’s right. The invaders brought them. What you’re seeing is the first definite proof that it is an external force behind all this. And they’re heading straight towards Durringham.”
“Dear God.” He put his empty wineglass down on the desk, and stared at the screens. The enemy had a physical form. After weeks of helpless wrestling with an elusive, possibly imaginary, foe, it was finally real; but a reason for the invasion, logical or otherwise, was impossible to devise.