The Night's Dawn Trilogy (63 page)

“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.”

“How up to date are the files?”

“Last year’s.” He walked back to his seat. “But you’re missing the point. Firstly it’s a wholly ineffective system, all it
does is fuzz the image slightly. Secondly, if you’ve gone to all the trouble to tamper with the satellite why not knock it
out altogether? Given the age of Lalonde’s satellite, everyone would assume it was a natural malfunction. This method actually
draws attention to the Quallheim.”

“Or draws attention away from somewhere else,” she said.

“I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?” he muttered. Outside the window the dark rooftops of Durringham were steaming softly
in the bright morning sun. It was all so cheerfully primitive, the residents walking through the tacky streets, power bikes
throwing up fans of mud, a teenage couple lost in each other, the tail end of a new colonist group making their way down to
the transients’ dormitories. Every morning for the last four years he’d seen variants on the same scene. Lalonde’s inhabitants
got on with their basic, modestly corrupt lives, and never bothered anyone. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the means. “The
thing which disturbs me most is Rexrew’s idea that it could be an external group attempting some kind of coup. I almost agree
with him, it’s certainly more logical than an Ivet revolt.” He rapped his knuckles on the desktop, trying to think. “When
is this posse of Candace Elford’s setting off?”

“Tomorrow; she’s going to start recruiting her deputies this morning. And incidentally, the
Swithland
is one of the boats that will be carrying them. Captain Lambourne can keep us updated if you allow her to use a communication
block.”

“OK, but I want at least five of our assets in that group of deputies, more if you can manage. We need to know what’s going
on up in the Quallheim Counties. Equip them with communication blocks as well, but make sure they understand they must only
use them if the situation is urgent. I’ll speak to Kelven Solanki about the issue, he’s probably as keen as we are to know
what’s going on.”

“I’ll get onto it,” she said. “One of the sheriffs Elford is sending belongs to me anyway, that’ll make placing assets among
the deputies a lot easier.”

“Good, well done.”

Jenny Harris saluted professionally, but before she got to the door she turned back and said, “I don’t understand. Why would
anyone want to stage a coup out in the middle of the hinterlands?”

“Someone with an eye to the future, maybe. If it is, our duty is very clear cut.”

“Yes, sir; but if that is the case, they’d need help from out-system.”

“True. Well, at least that’s easy enough to watch for.”

Ralph occupied himself with genuine embassy attachǠwork for the next two hours. Lalonde imported very little, but from the
list of what it did require he tried to secure a reasonable portion for Kulu companies. He was trying to find a supplier for
the high-temperature moulds a new glassworks factory wanted when his neural nanonics alerted him to an unscheduled starship
that had just jumped into Lalonde’s designated emergence zone, fifty thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. The dumper’s
electronics tapped the downlink from Lalonde’s two civil spaceflight monitor satellites, giving him access to the raw data.
What it didn’t provide was system command authority, he was a passive observer.

Lalonde’s traffic control took a long time to respond to the monitor satellite’s discovery. There were three starships in
an equatorial parking orbit, two colonist transports from Earth, and a freighter from New California, nothing else was due
for a week. The staff probably hadn’t even been in the control centre, he thought impatiently as he waited for them to get
off their arses and provide him with more information.

Starship visits outside the regular LDC contracted vessels, and the voidhawk supply run for Aethra, were rare events, there
were never more than five or six a year. That this one should appear at this time was a coincidence he couldn’t put out of
his mind.

The starship was already under power and heading for a standard equatorial parking orbit when traffic control eventually triggered
its transponder and established a communication channel. Data flooded into Ralph’s mind, the standard Confederation Astronautics
Board registration and certification. It was an independent trader vessel called
Lady Macbeth
.

His suspicion deepened.

Rumour hit Durringham and spread with a speed that a news company’s distribution division would have envied. It started when
Candace Elford’s staff went out for a drink after a hard day assessing the scrambled information they were getting from the
Quallheim Counties. Durringham’s strong beer, sweet wines from nearby estates, and running mild mood-stimulant programs through
their neural nanon-ics liberated a quantity of almost accurate information about exactly what had been going on all day in
the chief sheriff’s office.

It took half of Lalonde’s long night to filter out of the pubs the sheriffs used and down into the more basic taverns the
agricultural workers, port labourers, and river crews favoured. Distance, time, alcohol, and weak hallucinogens distorted
and amplified the story in creative surges. The end results which were shouted and argued over loudly through the riverside
drinking dens would have impressed any student of social dynamics. The following day, it proliferated through every workplace
and home.

The main exchanges of conversations went thus.

The colonists in the Quallheim Counties had been ritually massacred by the Ivets, who had taken up Devil worship. A Satanic
theocracy had been declared to the Governor and demanded recognition as an independent state, and all the Ivets were to be
sent there.

An army of radical anarchistic Ivets was marching downriver, razing villages as they went, looting and raping. They were kamikazes,
sworn to destroy Lalonde.

Kulu Royal Marines had landed upriver and established a beachhead for a full invasion force: all the locals who resisted had
been executed. The Ivets had welcomed the marines, betraying colonists who resisted. Supplementary: Lalonde was going to be
incorporated into the Kulu Kingdom by force. (Pure crap, people said, why would Alastair II want this God-awful shit-tip of
a planet?)

The Tyrathca farmers had suffered a famine and they were eating humans, starting with Aberdale. (No, not possible. Weren’t
the Tyrathca herbivores?)

Waster kids from Earth had stolen a starship, and after zapping the sheriff’s surveillance satellite they’d landed to help
their old gang mates, the Ivets.

Blackhawks and mercenary starships had banded together; they were invading Lalonde, and they were planning on turning it into
a rebel world which would be a base for raiding the Confederation. Colonists were being used for slave labour to build fortifications
and secret landing sites out in the jungle. Ivets were captaining the work parties.

Two things remained reasonably constant amid all the wild theorizing. One: colonists had been killed by Ivets. Two: Ivets
were heading/helping the revolt.

Durringham was a frontier town, the vast majority of its population scraping their living with long hours of hard labour.
They were poor and proud, and the only group which stood between them and the bottom rung were those evil, workshy, criminal,
daughter-raping Ivets; and by God that’s where the Ivets were going to stay: underfoot.

When Candace Elford’s sheriffs started to recruit deputies for the posse, tension and nervousness was already gripping the
town. Seeing the posse actually assembling down at the port, confirming there really was something going on up-river, tipped
unrest into physical aggression.

Darcy and Lori were lucky to miss the worst of the mayhem. On Lalonde they acted as the local representatives for Ward Molecular,
a Kulu company that imported various solid-state units as well as a lot of the electron-matrix power cells which the capital’s
embryonic industries were incorporating into an increasing number of products. The Kulu connection was an ironic added touch
to their cover; the deeply religious Kulu and the Edenists were not closely allied in the Confederation. Edenists were not
permitted to germinate their habitats in any of the Kingdom’s star systems, which made it unlikely that anyone would think
of them as anything other than loyal subjects of King Alastair II.

They handled their business from a long wooden warehouse structure, a standard industrial building with an overhanging roof,
and a floor which was supported on raised stone pillars a metre above the muddy gravel. Built entirely from mayope, it was
strong enough to resist any casual break-in attempt by the capital’s slowly increasing population of petty criminals. The
single-storey cabin which they lived in sat in the middle of a half-acre plot of land at the back, which like most of Durringham’s
residents they used to grow vegetables and fruit bushes.

Warehouse and cabin were situated on the western edge of the port, five hundred metres from the water. The majority of nearby
buildings were commercial premises—sawmills, lumber-yards, a few forges, and some relatively new cloth factories, their bleak
ranks broken by streets of cabins to accommodate their workers. This end of town had stayed the same for years. It was the
eastern end and long southern side which were expanding, and no one seemed keen to develop out towards the coastal swamps
ten kilometres down the Juliffe. Nor were there any farms to the west; the raw jungle was less than two kilometres away.

But their proximity to the port did put them on the fringe of the trouble. They were in the office at the side of the warehouse
when Stewart Danielsson, one of the three men who worked for them, came barging in.

“People outside,” he said.

Lori and Darcy swapped a glance at the agitation in his tone, and went to see.

There was a loose progression of men from the nearby factories and mills heading towards the port. Darcy stood on the ramp
outside the big open doorway at the front of the warehouse; there was a work area just inside, where they would pack orders
and even perform repairs on Ward Mole-cular’s simpler units. Cole Este and Gaven Hough, the company’s other two employees,
had both left their benches to join him.

“Where are they all going?” Lori asked.
And why do they look so angry?
she addressed Darcy on singular engagement.

“Going down to the port,” Gaven Hough said.

“Why?”

He hunched his shoulders up, embarrassed. “Sort the Ivets out.”

“Bloody right,” Cole Este mumbled sullenly. “Wouldn’t mind going on that posse myself. The sheriffs’ve been recruiting deputies
all morning.”

Damnation, trust this town to think with its arse,
Darcy said. He and Lori had only been told about the Quallheim Counties revolt by one of their contacts in the Land Allocation
Office the previous evening.
Those bloody sheriffs must have been shouting the news about Schuster.

“Gaven, Stewart, let’s get these doors shut. We’re closing for the day.”

They started to slide the big doors shut, while Cole Este stood on the ramp, grinning and exchanging a few shouted comments
with the odd person he knew. He was nineteen, the youngest of the three workers, and it was obvious he wanted to join the
crowd.

Just look at the little idiot,
Lori said.

Easy. We don’t involve ourselves, nor criticize. Prime rule.

Tell me about it. They’ll kill the Ivets down in the transients’ dormitories. You know that, don’t you?

Darcy slammed the bolt home on the door, and locked it with a padlock keyed to his finger pattern.
I know.

“You want us to stay?” Stewart Danielsson asked dubiously.

“No, that’s all right, Stewart, you three get off home. We’ll take care of things here.”

Darcy and Lori sat in the office with all but one of the windows shuttered on the inside. A partition with a line of tall
glass panes in wooden frames looked out over the darkened warehouse. The furniture was basic, a couple of tables and five
chairs Darcy had made himself. A conditioner whirred almost silently in one corner, keeping the atmosphere cool and dry. The
office was one of the few rooms on the planet that was actually dusty.

Once is acceptable,
Lori said.
Twice is not. Something strange is happening in Schuster County.

Possibly.
Darcy put his maser carbine on the table between them. The solitary shaft of sunlight shining through the window made the
smooth grey composite casing glimmer softly. Protection, just in case the riot spread back through the town.

They could both hear the distant growl of the crowd down in the port; the newly arrived Ivets being hunted down and killed.
Beaten into the mud with makeshift clubs, or gored by baying sayce to the sound of cheers. If they looked through the window
at an angle they would be able to see boats of all sizes sailing hurriedly out of the circular polyp harbours for the safety
of the water.