The Night's Dawn Trilogy (147 page)

It was late afternoon, and the savannah was already giving way to low humpbacked foothills when the mercenary team saw their
first Tyrathcan house. There was no mistaking it, a dark cinnamon-coloured tower twenty-five metres high with slightly tapering
walls, and circular windows sealed over with ebony blisters. The design had evolved on the abandoned Tyrathcan homeworld,
Mastrit-PJ, over seventeen thousand years ago, and was employed on every planet their arkships had colonized right across
the galaxy. They never used anything else.

This one stood like a border sentry castle overlooking the river. Octan glided round it a couple of times, seeing the vague
outlines of fields and gardens reclaimed by grass and small scrub bushes. Moss and weeds were growing around the inside of
the roof’s turret wall where soil and dust had drifted.

“Nothing moving,” Pat reported to Reza. “I’d say it was deserted three or four years ago.”

They had gathered together on the riverbank just downstream from the tower house, hovercraft drawn up on the grass. The river
was getting narrower, little more than a stream, down to about eight metres wide, and littered with boulders which made it
virtually unnavigable. For the first time since they had landed that morning there were no snowlilies in sight, only the broken
tips of their stems trailing limply.

“The Tyrathca do that,” Sal Yong said. “A house is only ever used once. When the breeders die it’s sealed up as their tomb.”

Reza consulted his guidance block. “There’s a plantation village called Coastuc-RT six kilometres south-east of here. The
other side of that ridge,” he pointed, datavising the map image to them. “Ariadne, can the hovercraft take it?”

She focused her optical sensors on the rolling land which skirted the mountains. “Shouldn’t be a problem, the grass is a lot
shorter here than the savannah and there isn’t much stone about.” When she looked west she could see another three of the
dark towers sticking out of the bleak countryside. They were all in shadow; thick black rain-clouds were surging towards them
along the side of the mountains. The wind had freshened appreciably since they had left the jungle. Looking back to the north
she could see the red cloud over the Quallheim forging the entire northern horizon; it was almost edge on, they had climbed
steadily since leaving it behind. The sky above it was a perfect unblemished blue.

Kelly felt the first smattering of the drizzle on her bare arms as she clambered back into the hovercraft. She dug into her
cylindrical kitbag for a cagoule, her burnt armoursuit jacket had been left behind in the jungle—in that state it wouldn’t
have been any use anyway. “I’m sorry,” she told Shaun Wallace as he sat beside her. “I’ve only got the one, and the others
don’t need them.”

“Ah now, don’t you go worrying yourself over me, Miss Kelly,” he said. The jump suit he wore turned a rich indigo, then the
fabric became stiffer. He was wearing a cagoule which was identical to the one in her hands, right down to the unobtrusive
Collins logo on the left shoulder. “There, see? Old Shaun can look after himself.”

Kelly gave him a flustered nod (thankful her memory cell was still recording), and hurriedly struggled into her own cagoule
as the warm drizzle thickened. “What about food?” she asked the Irishman as Theo goaded the hovercraft over the summit of
the riverbank and started off towards the Tyrathca village.

“Don’t mind if I do, thanks. Nothing too rich mind, not for me. I likes me pleasures simple.”

She dug round in the bag and found a bar of tarrit-flavoured chocolate. None of the mercenaries had brought any food, with
their metabolisms they could graze off the vegetation indefinitely, potent intestinal enzymes breaking up anything with proteins
and hydrocarbons.

Shaun Wallace chewed in silence for a minute. “That’s nice,” he said, “reminds me a little of bilberries on a cold morning,”
and he grinned.

Kelly found she was smiling back at him.

The hovercraft moved a lot slower over the land than on water. Cairnlike clusters of weather-smoothed stone and sudden pinched
gullies made the pilots’ task a demanding one. The rain, which was now a solid downpour of heavy grey water, added to the
difficulty.

Pat had sent Octan northward to avoid the worst of the deluge. Back out on the savannah it was still dry and sunny, a buffer
zone between nature and supernature. Reza dispatched Fenton and Ryall to survey the ground ahead. Lightning began to spear
down.

“I think I preferred the river,” Jalal said glumly.

“Ah, Mr. Jalal, buck up now, this is nothing for Lalonde,” Shaun Wallace said. “A little shower, that’s all. It was much worse
than this before we returned from beyond.”

Jalal ignored the casual reference to the power of the possessed; Shaun Wallace, he thought, was playing a subtle war of nerves
against them. Sowing the seeds of doubt and despondency.

“Hold it,” Reza datavised to Theo, and Sal Yong, who was piloting the second hovercraft. “Deflate the skirts.”

The hovercraft sank onto their hulls with flagging whines, crushing the sturdy grass tufts, settling at awkward angles. Rain
had reduced visibility to less than twenty-five metres even with enhanced sight. Kelly could just make out Ryall up ahead.
The hound was shifting about uneasily in front of a big sandy-brown boulder.

Reza took off his magazine belt, and left the TIP carbine he’d been carrying with it. He hopped over the gunwale and started
to trudge towards the restive animal. Kelly had to wipe a slick film of water from her face. The rain was worming its way
round her cagoule hood to run down her neck. She toyed with the idea of putting on her shell-helmet again—anything to stop
this insidious clammy invasion.

Reza stopped five metres short of the brown lump, and slowly opened his arms, rain dripping from his greyskinned fingers.
He shouted something even Kelly’s studio-grade audio-discrimination program couldn’t catch above the wind and rain. She squinted,
the rain suddenly chilling inside her T-shirt. The boulder rose up smoothly on four powerful legs. Kelly gasped. Her Confederation
generalist didactic memory identified it immediately: a soldier-caste Tyrathca.

“Oh bugger,” Jalal muttered. “They’re clan creatures, it won’t be alone.” He started to scan around. It was hopeless in the
rain, even infrared was washed out.

The soldier-caste Tyrathca was about as big as a horse, although the legs weren’t as long. Its head, too, was faintly equine,
tilted back at a shallow angle at the end of a thick muscular neck. There were no visible ears, or nostrils; the mouth had
a complex double-lip arrangement resembling overlapping clam shells. The sienna hide, which Kelly had thought solid like an
exoskeleton, was actually scaled, with a short-cropped chestnut-brown mane running along its entire spine. Two arms extended
from behind the base of its neck, ending in nine-fingered circular hands. A pair of slender antennae also protruded from its
shoulder joints, swept back along the length of its body.

Although it had a strong animal appearance, it was holding a large very modern-looking rifle. A broad harnesslike belt hung
round its neck, with grenades and power magazines clipped on.

It held out a processor block, and a slim AV projection pillar telescoped out. “Turn your vehicles around,” a synthetic voice
clanged through the rain. “Humans are no longer permitted here.”

“We need somewhere to shelter for the night,” Reza replied. “We can’t go back north; you must have seen the red cloud.”

“No humans.”

“Why not? We must have somewhere to stay. Tell me, why?”

“Humans have become—” The block gave a melodic cheep. “No direct translation available; similarity to:
elemental
. Coastuc-RT has suffered damage, merchant spaceplane has been stolen. Breeders and other castes have been killed by amok
humans. You are not permitted entry.”

“I know about the disturbances in the human villages. I have been sent by the Lalonde Development Corporation to try and restore
order.”

“Then do that. Go to your own race’s villages and bring order.”

“We have tried, but the situation was beyond our capability to resolve. There has been a major invasion of an unknown origin.”
He just couldn’t bring himself to say possession. The processor block was quiet; he guessed he was talking to a breeder, the
soldier caste were only marginally sentient—not that he’d like to go up against one. “I would like to discuss what can be
done to protect you from further attack. My team are combat trained and well equipped, we should be able to augment whatever
defences you have.”

“Acceptable. You may enter Coastuc-RT by yourself to view the situation. If you believe you are able to increase our defences
your team will be allowed to enter and stay.”

“Reza,” Kelly datavised. “Ask if I can come with you, please.”

“I will need to bring two others to assess the area around Coastuc-RT with any degree of accuracy before nightfall,” he said
out loud, then datavised: “That makes us quits now.”

“Absolutely,” she replied.

“Two only,” the synthetic voice agreed. “None may carry weapons. Our soldiers will provide protection.”

“As you wish.” He turned and walked back to the first hovercraft, feet sinking up to his ankles in slimy puddles. The processor
block AV projection pillar began to emit the reverberative whistles and hoots which were the Tyrathcan speech. Answering calls
shrilled through the rain, causing the mercenaries to up their sensor resolution to the maximum in a vain attempt to locate
the other soldier castes.

“Ariadne, you come with me and Kelly,” Reza said. “I’ll need someone who can review the area properly. The rest of you wait
here. We’ll try and get back before dusk. I’ll leave Fenton and Ryall on picket duty for you.”

Two seemingly tireless soldiers ran alongside the hovercraft all the way to the village, antennae whipping back and forth
(they were tail-analogues, helping with balance, according to Kelly’s didactic memory). Kelly wasn’t sure whom they were supposed
to be protecting. The guns still appeared incongruous; for creatures that had evolved during the pre-technology tribal era
to fight the Tyrathcan version of rough and tumble against enemy tribe soldiers bows and arrows would be more suited.

When she reviewed the entire didactic memory she found that the breeders (the only fully sentient Tyrathca) secreted what
amounted to chemical control programs in specialist teats. A breeder would think out a sequence of orders—which plants were
edible, how to operate a specific power tool—that would be edited into a chain of molecules by the teat gland. Once instructions
were loaded in the brain of a vassal-caste species (there were six types) they could be activated by a simple verbal command
whenever required. The chemicals were also used to educate young breeders, making the process a natural equivalent to Adamist
didactic imprints and Edenist educational affinity lessons.

The rain was easing off when the hovercraft cleared the crest above Coastuc-RT. Kelly looked down on a broad, gentle valley
with extensively cultivated terraces on both sides. An area of nearly twenty square kilometres had been cleared of scrub and
grass, rebuilt into irrigated ledges, and planted with young rygar bushes. Coastuc-RT itself sat on the floor of the valley,
several hundred identical dark brown towers regimented in concentric rings around a central park space.

Reza steered the hovercraft onto a rough switchback track and set off down the slope. Numerous farmer-caste Tyrathca were
out tending the emerald-green bushes—pruning, weeding, patching up the shallow drainage ditches. The farmers were slightly
smaller than the soldiers but with thicker arms, endowed with the kind of plodding durability associated with oxen or shire-horses.
They saw one or two hunter caste skulking among the bushes, about the same size as Reza’s hounds, but with a streamlined fury
that could probably give a kroclion a nasty fright. The escort soldiers whistled and hooted every time the hunters appeared,
and they turned away obediently.

The first signs of damage were visible when the hovercraft reached the valley floor. Several towers in the village’s outer
ring were broken, five had been reduced to jagged stumps sticking up out of the rubble. Scorch marks formed barbarous black
graffiti across the tower walls.

Fields on either side of the road had been churned up by fresh craters. EE explosives, Reza guessed, the village soldier caste
had put up a good fight. The road itself had been repaired in several places. An earth rampart had been thrown up around the
perimeter, a hundred metres from the outer turret houses. Farmers were still working around its base, using shovels which
even Sewell would have been hard pressed to raise.

“Leave your vehicle now,” the synthesized voice from the processor block told them when they were twenty metres away from
the barricade of raw loam.

Reza cut the fans and codelocked the power cells. The soldiers waited until they had climbed out, then walked them into the
village.

Up close the tower houses were utilitarian, each with four floors, their windows arranged at precise levels. They were made
by the builder caste, the largest of all the vassals, who chewed soil and mixed it with an epoxy chemical extravasated in
their mouth ducts, producing a strong cement. It gave the walls a smooth, extruded feel, as though the towers had come intact
from some giant kiln. There were some modern amenities, bands of solar cell panels tipped most of the turret walls; metal
water pipes lay bent and tangled among the rubble. The windows were all glazed.

Arable gardens encircled every tower, trellises and stakes supporting the grasping yellow confusion of native Tyrathcan vegetation.
Fruit trees lined the paved roads, huge leaves providing ample shade.

Smaller rounded silos and workshops were spaced between the towers, each with a single semicircular door. Carts and even small
power trucks were parked outside.

“I don’t know who is jumpier, us or them,” Kelly subvocalized into her neural nanonics memory cell. “The Tyrathcan soldiers
are clearly immensely capable, to say nothing of the hunter caste. Yet the possessed have hurt them badly. The vassal-caste
bodies you can see half buried in the rubble of the outer towers have been left untended in the haste to fortify Coastuc-RT.
A large breach of the Tyrathcan internment ritual, they obviously consider the threat humans present to be of more pressing
importance.