The Night's Dawn Trilogy (30 page)

Colin sat behind his desk, ignoring the datawork flashing urgently on his screens to watch the deluge through the window.
Like everyone on Lalonde he wore shorts, although his were tailored in the London arcology; his pale blue jacket was slung
over one of the conference chairs, and the conditioner failed to stop sweat stains from appearing under the arms of his pale
lemon silk shirt.

There was no such thing as a gym on the whole planet, and he could never bring himself to jog from his official residence
to the office in the morning, so he was starting to put on weight at a disappointing rate. His already round face now had
accentuated jowls, and a third chin was developing; a smattering of freckles had expanded under Lalonde’s sunlight to cover
both cheeks and his forehead. Once hale ginger hair was thinning and fading towards silver. Whatever ancestor had paid for
the geneered metabolic improvements which increased his life expectancy had obviously stinted on the cosmetic side.

More lightning bolts stabbed down out of the smothering cloud blanket. He counted to four before he heard the thunder. If
this goes on much longer even the puddles will develop puddles, he thought bleakly.

There was a bleep from the door, and it slid open. His neural nanonics told him it was his executive aide, Terrance Smith.

Colin swivelled his chair back round to the desk. Terrance Smith was thirty-five, a tall, elegant man with thick black hair
and a firm jaw; today he was dressed in knee-length grey shorts and a green short-sleeved shirt. His weight was never anything
less than optimum. The rumour around Colin’s staff said Smith had bedded half of the women in the administration office.

“Meteorology say we’re due for a dry week after this passes over,” Terrance said as he sat in the chair in front of Colin’s
desk.

Colin grunted. “Meteorology didn’t say this lot was expected.”

“True.” Terrance consulted a file in his neural nanonics. “The geological engineers up at Kenyon have finished their preliminary
survey. They are ready to move on to more extensive drilling for the biosphere cavern.” He datavised the report over to Colin.

Kenyon was the twelve-kilometre-diameter stony iron asteroid that had been knocked into orbit a hundred and twelve thousand
kilometres above Lalonde by a series of nuclear explosions. When Lalonde’s first stage of development was complete, and the
planetary economy was up and functioning without requiring any additional investment, the LDC wanted to progress to developing
a space industry station cluster. That was where the real money lay, fully industrial worlds. And the first essential for
any zero-gee industrial stations was an abundant supply of cheap raw material, which the asteroid would provide. The mining
crews would tunnel out the ores, literally carving themselves a habitable biosphere in the process.

Unfortunately, now Kenyon was finally in place after its fifteen-year journey from the system’s asteroid belt, Colin doubted
he had the budget even to maintain the geological engineering team, let alone pay for exploratory drilling. Transporting new
colonists into the continental interior was absorbing funds at a frightening rate, and the first thing an asteroid settlement
needed was a reliable home market as a financial foundation before it could start competing on the interstellar market.

“I’ll look into it later,” he told Terrance. “But I’m not making any promises. Somebody jumped the gun on that one by about
twenty years. The asteroid industry project looks good on our yearly reports. Moving it into orbit is something you can point
to and show the board how progressive you’re being. They know it doesn’t make a dollar while it’s underway. But as soon as
it’s here in orbit they expect it to be instantly profitable. So I’m lumbered with the bloody thing while my cretinous predecessor
is drawing his standard pension plus a nice fat bonus for being so dynamic while he was in office. The auditors should have
caught this, you know. It’s going to be another fifty years before these mud farmers can scrape together enough capital to
support high-technology industries. There’s no demand here.”

Terrance nodded, handsome features composed into a grave expression. “We’ve authorized start-up loans for another eight engineering
companies in the last two months. Power bike sales are healthy in the city, and we should have an indigenous four-wheel-drive
jeep within another five years. But I agree, large-scale consumer manufacturing is still a long way off.”

“Ah, never mind,” Colin sighed. “You weren’t the one who authorized Kenyon. If they’d just stop sending us colonists for six
months, allow us to catch our breath. A ship every twenty days is too much, and the passage fees the colonists pay don’t cover
half of the cost of sending them upriver. Once the starship’s been paid for the board doesn’t care. But what I wouldn’t give
for some extra funds to spend on basic infrastructure, instead of subsidizing the river-boats. It’s not as if the captains
don’t make enough.”

“That was something else I wanted to bring up. I’ve just finished accessing the latest schedules flek from the board; they’re
going to send us five colonist-carrier starships over the next seventy days.”

“Typical.” Colin couldn’t even be bothered with a token protest.

“I was thinking we might ask the river-boat captains to take more passengers each trip. They could easily cram another fifty
on board if they rigged up some awnings over the open decks. It wouldn’t be any different from the transients’ dormitories,
really.”

“You think they’d go for that?”

“Why not? We pay their livelihood, after all. And it’s only temporary. If they don’t want to take them, then they can sit
in harbour and lose money. The paddle-boats can hardly be used for bulk cargo. Once we’ve repossessed the boats, we’ll give
them to captains who are more flexible.”

“Unless they all band together; those captains are a clannish lot. Remember that fuss over Crompton’s accident? He rams a
log, and blames us for sending him off into an uncharted tributary. We had to pay for the repairs. The last thing we need
right now is an outbreak of trade unionism.”

“What shall I do, then? The transients’ dormitories can’t hold more than seven thousand at once.”

“Ah, to hell with it. Tell the captains they’re taking more heads per trip and that’s final. I don’t want the transients in
Durringham a moment longer than necessary.” He tried not to think what would ever happen if one of the paddle-boats capsized
in the Juliffe. Lalonde had no organized emergency services; there were five or six ambulances working out of the church hospital
for casualties in the city, but a disaster a thousand kilometres upriver… And the colonists were nearly all arcology dwellers,
half of them couldn’t swim. “But after this we’ll have to see about increasing the number of boats. Because as sure as pigs
shit, we won’t ever get a reduction in the number of colonists they send us. I heard on the grapevine Earth’s population is
creeping up again, the number of illegal births rose three per cent last year. And that’s just the official illegals.”

“If you want more boats, that will mean more mortgage loans,” Terrance observed.

“I can do basic arithmetic, thank you. Tell the comptroller to shrink some other budgets to compensate.”

Terrance wanted to ask which divisions, every administration department was chronically underfunded. The look on Colin Rexrew’s
face stopped him. “Right, I’ll get onto it.” He loaded a note in his neural nanonics general business file.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into safety on those paddle-boats some time. Make them carry lifebelts.”

“Nobody in Durringham makes lifebelts.”

“So that’s a fresh business opportunity for some smart entrepreneur. And yes I know it would need another loan to establish.
Hell, do we have a cork-analogue tree here? They could carve them, everything else on this bloody planet is made out of wood.”

“Or mud.”

“God, don’t remind me.” Colin glanced out of the window again. The clouds had descended until they were only about four hundred
metres above the ground. Dante got it all wrong, he thought, hell isn’t about searing heat, it’s about being permanently wet.
“Anything else?”

“Yes. The marshal you sent up to Schuster County has filed his report. I didn’t want to load it into the office datanet.”

“Good thinking.” Colin knew the CNIS team monitored their satellite communications. There was also Ralph Hiltch sitting snugly
over in the Kulu Embassy, like a landbound octopus with its tentacles plugged into damn near every administration office,
siphoning out information. Although God alone knew why Kulu bothered, maybe paranoia was a trait the Saldanas had geneered
into their super genes. He had also heard a strictly unofficial whisper that the Edenists had an active intelligence team
on the planet, which was pushing credulity beyond any sane limits.

“What was the summary?” he asked Terrance.

“He drew a complete blank.”

“Nothing?”

“Four families have definitely gone missing, just like the sheriff said. All of them lived out on the savannah a fair distance
away from Schuster town itself. He visited their homesteads, and said it was like they walked out one morning and never came
back. All their gear had been looted by the time he arrived, of course, but he asked around, apparently there was even food
laid out ready for a meal in one home. No sign of a struggle, no sayce or kroclion attack. Nothing. It really spooked the
other colonists.”

“Strange. Have we had any reports of bandit gangs operating up there?”

“No. In any case, bandits wouldn’t stop after just a few families. They’d keep going until they were caught. Those families
disappeared nine weeks ago now, and there have been no reports of any repetition. Whatever did happen, it looks like a one
off.”

“And bandits would have stripped the homesteads of every remotely useful piece of gear, anyway,” Colin mused out loud. “What
about the Tyrathca farmers? Do they know anything?”

“The marshal rode out to their territory. They claim they’ve had no contact with humans since they left Durringham. He’s pretty
sure they’re telling the truth. There was certainly no sign of any humans ever being in their houses. His affinity-bonded
dog had a good scout round.”

Colin stopped himself from making the sign of the cross; his Halo asteroid upbringing had been pretty formal. Supervisors
and sheriffs using affinity was something he could never get used to.

“The families all had daughters; some teenagers, a couple in their early twenties,” Terrance said. “I checked their registration
files.”

“So?”

“Several of the girls were quite pretty. They could have moved downriver to one of the larger towns, set up a

brothel. It wouldn’t be the first time. And from what we know, conditions in Schuster are fairly dire.” “Then why not take
their gear with them?” “I don’t know. That was the only explanation I could think of.”

“Ah, forget it. If there aren’t any more disappearances, and the situation isn’t developing into an insurrection, I’m not
interested. Write it down to an animal carrying them off for nest food, and call the marshal back. Those colonists know the
risks of alien frontiers before they start out. If they’re mad enough to go and live out in the jungle and play at being cavemen,
let them. I’ve got enough real problems to deal with at this end of the river.”

Quinn Dexter had heard of the disappearances, it was all round the Aberdale village camp the day a party from Schuster made
their official welcome visit to Group Seven. Four complete families, seventeen people flying off into thin air. It interested
him, especially the rumours. Bandits, xenocs (especially the Tyrathca farmers over in the foothills), secret metamorph aborigines,
they had all been advanced as theories, and all found wanting. But the meta-morph stories fascinated Quinn. One of Schuster’s
Ivets told him there had been several sightings when they had first arrived a year ago.

“I saw one myself,” Sean Pallas told him. Sean was a couple of years older than Quinn, and could have passed for thirty. His
face was gaunt, his ribs were starkly outlined. Fingers and arms were covered in red weals, and pocked sores where insects
had bitten him. “Out in the jungle. It was just like a man, only completely black. It was horrible.”

“Hey,” Scott Williams complained. He was the only Afro-Caribbean among Aberdale’s eighteen Ivets. “Ain’t nothing wrong with
that.”

“No, man, you don’t understand. It didn’t have any face, just black skin, there was no mouth or eyes; nothing like that.”

“You sure?” Jackson Gael asked.

“Yeah. I was twenty metres from it. I know what I saw. I shouted out and pointed, and it just vanished, ducked down behind
a bush or something. And when we got there—”

“The cupboard was bare,” Quinn said.

The others laughed.

“It’s not funny, man,” Sean said hotly. “It was there, I swear. There was no way it could have got away without us seeing.
It changed shape, turned into a tree or something. And there’s more just like it. They are out there in the jungle, man, and
they’re angry with us for stealing their planet.”

“If they’re that primitive, how do they know we’ve stolen their planet?” Scott Williams asked. “How do they know we’re not
the true aboriginals?”

“It’s no joke, man. You won’t be laughing when one of them morphs out of the trees and grabs you. They’ll drag you underground
where they live in big cave cities. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Quinn and the others had talked about Sean and what he said that night. They agreed that he was badly undernourished, probably
hysterical, certainly suffering from sun dreams. The visitors from Schuster had cast a tangible gloom on the mood of all Aberdale’s
residents, an all too physical reminder of how close failure lurked. There hadn’t been much contact between the two groups
since the
Swithland
departed.

But Quinn had thought a lot about what Sean said, and the talk he picked up around the village. A black humanoid, without
a face, who could disappear into the jungle without a trace (more than one, judging by the number of sightings). Quinn was
pretty sure he knew what that was: someone wearing a chameleon camouflage suit. Nobody else in Aberdale had guessed, their
minds just weren’t thinking along those lines, because it would be totally ridiculous to expect someone to be hiding out in
the hinterlands of the greatest shit-hole planet in the Confederation. Which, when Quinn considered it, was the really interesting
part. To hide away on Lalonde, where
nobody
would ever look, you must be the most desperate wanted criminal in the universe. Group of criminals, he corrected himself;
well organized, well equipped. Conceivably, with their own spacecraft.