“Yes. Come on, let’s see if these two have got anything for your wrist. I think that’s Onku Noi on the second horse. The Imperial Oshanko mob are always loaded down with gadgets.”
According to his neural nanonics’ timer function it was high noon. But Chas Paske wasn’t sure how to tell any more. There hadn’t been any fluctuation in the red cloud’s lambent emission since he started walking—hobbling, rather. The black and red jungle remained mordantly uninviting. Every laboured step was accompanied by the incessant hollow rolls and booms of thunder from high above.
He had managed to splint his leg, after a fashion: five laths of cherry oak wood that stretched from his ankle to his pelvis, lashed into place by ropy vines. The thigh wound was still a real problem. He had bound it with leaves, but every time he looked it seemed to be leaking capacious amounts of ichor down his shin. And it was impossible to keep the insects out. Unlike what appeared to be every other living creature, they hadn’t abandoned the jungle. And devoid of other targets, they massed around him—mosquito-analogues, maggot-analogues, things with legs and wings and pincers that had no analogue. All of them suckling at his tender flesh. Twice now he’d changed the leaves, only to find a seething mass of tiny black elytra underneath. Flies crawled round his skin burns as though they were the only oases of nourishment in a barren world.
According to his guidance block he had come two and a half kilometres in the last three hours. It was hard going through the virgin undergrowth which lay along the side of the river. His crutch kept getting snagged by the thick cords that foamed over the loam. Slender low-hanging branches had a knack of catching the splint laths.
He picked the small wrinkled globes of abundant vine fruit as he went, chewing constantly to keep his fluid and protein levels up. But at this rate it was going to take him weeks to get anywhere.
Durringham was his ultimate goal. Whatever resources and wealth existed on this misbegotten planet, they resided in the capital. Scouting it had been his team’s mission. He saw no reason to abandon that assignment. Sitting waiting to die in the jungle wasn’t a serious option. Recovery and evacuation was obviously out of the question now. So, there it was, an honourable solution; one which would keep him occupied and motivated, and, should he achieve the impossible and make it, might even accomplish something worthwhile. Chas Paske was going to go down swinging.
But for all his determination he knew that he was going to have to find an easier way to travel. The medical program was releasing vast amounts of endocrines from his implants, analgesic blocks had been thrown across a good twenty per cent of his nerve fibres. Boosted metabolism or not, he couldn’t keep expending energy at this rate.
He accessed his guidance block and summoned up the map. There was a village called Wryde fifteen hundred metres downstream on the other bank. According to the LDC file it had been established nine years ago.
It would have to do.
He plucked another elwisie fruit, and limped on. One advantage of the thunder was that no one would hear the racket he made ploughing through the vegetation.
The light was visible long before the first of the houses. A welcome gold-yellow nimbus shrouding the river. Snowlilies glinted and sparkled with their true opulence. Chas heard a bird again, the silly surprised warble of a chikrow. He lowered himself in tricky increments, and started to slither forward on his belly.
Wryde had become a thriving, affluent community, far beyond the norm for a stage one colony planet. The town nestled snugly in a six-square-kilometre clearing that had been turned over to dignified parkland. It was comprised of large houses built from stone or brick or landcoral, all of them the kind of elegantly sophisticated residence that a merchant or wealthy farmer would own. The main street was a handsome tree-lined boulevard, bustling with activity: people wandering in and out of the shops, sitting at the tables of pavement cafés. Horse-drawn cabs moved up and down. An impressive red-brick civic hall stood at one end, four storeys high, with an ornate central clock tower. He saw some kind of sports field just outside the main cluster of houses. People dressed all in white were playing a game he didn’t know while spectators picnicked round the boundary. Close to the jungle at the back of the park, five windmills stood alongside a lake, their huge white sails turning steadily even though there was very little breeze. Grandiose houses lined the riverbank, lawns extending down to the water. They all had boat-houses or small jetties; rowing-boats and sailing dinghies were moored securely against the sluggish tide of snowlilies. Larger craft had been drawn up on wooden slipways.
It was the kind of community every sane person would want to live in; small-town cosiness, big-city stability. Even Chas, lying in muddy loam under a bush on the opposite bank, felt the subtle attraction of the place. By simply existing it offered the prospect of belonging to a perpetual golden age.
His retinal implants showed him the sunny, happy faces of the citizens as they went about their business. Scanning back and forth he couldn’t see anyone labouring in the pristine gardens, or sweeping the streets; no people, no bitek servitors, no mechanoids. The nearest anyone came to work was the café proprietors, and they seemed cheerful enough, chatting and laughing with their customers. All generals and no privates, he thought to himself. It isn’t real.
He accessed the guidance block again. A green reference grid slipped up over his vision and he focused on a jetty at the far end of the town’s clearing. The block calculated its exact coordinate and integrated it into the map.
When he checked his physiological status, the neural nanonics reported his haemoglobin reserve was down to half an hour. His metabolism wasn’t producing it with anything like its normal efficiency. He ran through the guidance block’s display one last time. Half an hour ought to be enough.
Chas started to crawl forwards again, easing himself down the muddy slope and into the water like an arthritic crocodile.
Twenty minutes later he judiciously parted a pair of snowlilies and let his rigid moulded face stick up out of the water. The guidance block had functioned flawlessly, delivering him right beside the jetty. A trim blue-painted rowing-boat was pulling gently against its mooring two metres away. There was nobody anywhere near. He reached up and cut the pannier with his fission blade, grabbing the end as it fell into the water.
The boat started to drift with the snowlilies. Chas dropped below the surface.
He waited as long as he dared. The neural nanonics’ physiological monitor program was flashing dire warnings of oxygen starvation into his brain before he risked surfacing.
Wryde was out of sight round a curve, although the ordinary light which clung to its rolling parkland was spilling round the trees on the bank. When he looked at his prize it had changed from the well-crafted skiff he had stolen to a dilapidated punt that was little more than a raft. Tissue-thin gunwales, which had been added in what must have been a surreal afterthought, were crumbling like rotten cork before his eyes. They left a wake of dark mushy dust on the snowlilies.
Chas waited a minute to see if any other drastic changes were going to occur. He rapped experimentally on the wood which was left. It seemed to be solid enough. So with a great deal of effort, and coming dangerously near to capsizing, he managed to half-clamber, half-roll into the shallow bottom of the boat.
He lay there inertly for a long time, then ponderously raised himself onto his elbows. The boat was drifting slowly into the bank. Long slippery ribbons of foltwine were trailing from his splint. River beetles crawled over his thigh wound. Both the medical nanonic packages were approaching overload trying to screen the blood from the lower half of his leg.
“Apart from that, fine,” he said. His grating voice provided a harsh discord to the persistent fruity rumble of thunder.
He crushed or swept away as many of the beetles and other insects as he could. Naturally there weren’t any oars. He cut through the vines holding his splint together, and used one of the laths to scull away from the bank and back into the main current. It took
a while, with the snowlilies resisting him, but when he was back in the middle of the river the boat began to move noticeably swifter. He made himself as comfortable as possible, and watched the tall trees go past with an increasing sense of eagerness. A keen amateur student of military history, Chas knew that back on old Earth they used to say all roads led to Rome. Here on Lalonde, all the rivers led to Durringham.
A bubble of bright white light squatted possessively over Aberdale. From the air it appeared as though the village was sheltering below a translucent pearl dome to ward off the perverse elements assailing the jungle. Octan circled it at a respectable distance, wings outstretched to their full metre and a half span, riding the thermals with fluid ease, contemptuous of gravity. The jungle underneath him was the same discoloured maroon as the sky. But away to the south a single narrow horizontal streak of bright green shone with compulsive intensity. Instinctively he wanted to soar towards it, to break out into the cleanliness of real light.
Tandem thoughts circulated through the bird’s brain, his kindly master’s wishes directing his flight away from the purity, and tilting his head so that he looked at the buildings in the middle of the illuminated clearing. Enhanced retinas zoomed in.
“It’s virtually the same as Pamiers,” Pat Halahan said. “They’ve got maybe fifty of those fancy houses put up. The ground is all lawns and gardens, right out to the jungle. No sign of any fields or groves.” He leaned forwards blindly. Octan casually curved a sepia wing-tip, altering his course by a degree. “Now that is odd. Those trees along the riverbank look like terrestrial weeping willows. But they’re big, twenty metres plus. Got to be thirty years old.”
“Don’t count on it,” Kelly muttered in a surly undertone, covering subtler emotions. “In any case, this is the wrong climate.”
“Yeah, right,” Pat said. “Switching to infrared. Nope. Nothing. If there’s any installation underground, Reza, then they’re dug in way deep.”
“OK,” the team commander said reluctantly. “Have Octan scout further east.”
“If you want. But it doesn’t look like there are any more inhabited clearings in the jungle that way. He can see the light from Schuster quite plainly from his altitude. There’s nothing like that eastwards.”
“They aren’t going to advertise with hundred-kilowatt holograms, Pat.”
“Yes, sir. East it is.”
A crucial urge to explore the as-yet-unseen land beyond the village flowed through Octan’s synapses, and the big eagle wheeled abruptly, reducing landscape and injured sky to chaotic smears.
The mercenary team were also marching eastwards, but they were on the Quallheim’s northern shore, keeping roughly parallel to the water, a kilometre inland. They had come ashore west of Schuster where deirar trees covered the ground as thoroughly as though they were a plantation. Such regularity made the team’s journey much easier than their first venture ashore when they had bypassed Pamiers.
The deirars’ thick smooth boles rose straight up for twenty-five metres then opened into an umbrella of vegetation that formed a near-solid roof. Together they formed a sylvestral cathedral of enormous proportions. Everywhere the mercenaries looked they could see sturdy jet-black bark pillars supporting the dovetailing leaf domes. On this side of the river the usual deluge of vines and undergrowth was little more than a wispy clutter of straggly sun-starved weeds, long stemmed and pale, heavy with grey mould.
It was Reza who led the march, although he had sent Theo scampering across the treetop canopy on the lookout for hostiles. Few of them had escaped from Pamiers uninjured. He counted himself among the fortunate, with a burn on the rear of his skull that had scorched a couple of sensor warts down to the monobonded carbon reinforced bone; torso scores, and a spiral weal on his right leg. Of all of them, Kelly had borne the worst injury; but the medical packages had resuscitated her to mobile status. She walked with a small cylindrical shoulder-bag carrying her kit; her armour trousers protected her legs from thorns, and an olive-green T-shirt which the red light had turned a raw umber covered the bulge of medical packages on her side.
Pamiers had delivered a deft lesson, bruising their pride as well as their skin. But an important lesson, to Reza’s mind. The team had learnt to give the sequestrated population a proper degree of respect. He wasn’t going to risk probing a village again.
Fenton and Ryall padded tirelessly through the jungle on the southern bank, skirting Aberdale by a wide margin. Jungle sounds filled their ears in the short gaps between the red cloud’s perpetual thunder peals. The organic perfume of a hundred different flowers and ripening vine fruits trickled through the muggy air, a vital living counterpoint to the stink of dead children.
Reza nudged the hounds further south, away from the now-foreign village, from the smell of the small decaying bodies, its voodoo fence, away from the terrible price Lalonde’s populace had paid under the invaders’ regime. Narrow leaves, mottled with fungal furs, parted round the hounds’ muzzles. Chilly distaste and shame—almost inevitably, shame—wormed its trenchant way into their minds along the affinity bond; they shared their master’s susceptibilities, becoming as keen as he to leave the heartbreaker calamity behind.
New scents rode the air: sap dripping from snapped vine strands, crushed leaves, loam ruffled by footprints and wheel tracks. The hounds raced ahead, guided by primal senses. People had been this way recently. Some, but not many.
Reza saw a path through the jungle. An old animal track running north–south, enlarged some time ago—branches cut back by fission blades, bushes hacked away—only to fall into disuse again. Almost, but not quite. Somebody still used it. Someone had used it less than two hours ago.
Nerves and instinct fired now, Fenton and Ryall loped through the moist grass towards the south. After two kilometres they found a scent trail branching off into the jungle. One person, male. His clothes smearing the leaves with sweat and cotton.
“Pat, bring Octan back. I think we’ve got our man.”
Reza kept the snatch mission simple. The team activated their hovercraft again when they were back on the Quallheim east of Aberdale and started searching for a tributary fork on the south bank. According to the map stored in his guidance block there was a modest river which ran south through the jungle, coming from the mountains on the far side of the savannah. It took them five minutes to find it, and the hovercraft nosed over the clot of snowlilies guarding its mouth. Plaited tree boughs formed an arched screen overhead.
“After the snatch we’ll keep going up this river and out onto the savannah,” Reza said when they had left the Quallheim behind. “I want to get him and us out from under this bloody cloud as quickly as possible. We should be able to access the communication satellites as well once we’re clear of it. That way if we can extract any useful information it can be delivered straight up to Terrance Smith.”
If Smith is still up there, Kelly thought. She couldn’t forget what the woman in Pamiers had said about the starships fighting. But Joshua had promised to stay and pick them up. She gave a cynical little sniff. Oh yes, the Confederation’s Mr. Dependable himself.
“You all right?” Ariadne asked, raising her voice above the steady propeller whine and the rambling thunder booms.
“My analgesic blocks are holding,” Kelly said. “It was just the size of the burn which shocked me.” She resisted the urge to scratch the medical nanonic packages.
“Adds a bit of spice to the recording, a bit of drama,” Ariadne said. “Speaking of which, you’re not going to blow us out, are you? I mean, we are the good guys.”
“Yeah. You’re the good guys.”
“Great, always wanted to be a sensevise star.”
Kelly accessed her Lalonde sensevise report memory cell file and turned her head until Ariadne was in the centre of her vision field (wishing the combat-boosted could produce some halfway decent facial expressions). “What did you learn from the sample you took from the houses?”
“Nowt. It was dust, that’s all.
Literally, dry loam.”
“So these ornamental buildings are just an illusion?”
“Half and half. It isn’t a complete fiction; they’ve moulded the loam into the shape you see and cloaked it with an optical illusion. It’s similar to our chameleon circuit, really.”
“How do they do that?”
“No idea. The closest human technology can come is the molecular-binding generators starships use to strengthen their hulls. But they’re expensive, and use up a lot of power. Be cheaper to build a house, or use programmed silicon like you suggested. Then again”—she tilted her head back to focus her sensors on the cloudband above the trees—“logic doesn’t seem to be playing a large part in life on Lalonde right now.”
The hovercraft eased in against the crumbling loam bank. Ryall was standing among the qualtook trees above the water, waiting for them. Reza jumped ashore and ruffled the big hound’s head. It pressed against his side in complete devotion.
“Jalal and Ariadne, with me,” Reza said. “The rest of you stay here and keep the hovercraft ready. Pat, monitor us through Octan. If we blow the snatch, I suggest you keep heading south. There’s a Tyrathca farming settlement on the other side of the savannah. It’s as good a place as any to hide out. This snatch is our last stab at completing the mission. Don’t waste yourselves trying to gather further Intelligence, and don’t attempt a rescue. Got that?”
“Yes, sir,” Pat said.
Jalal and Ariadne joined Reza on the top of the bank. The big combat-adept mercenary had plugged a gaussrifle into one elbow socket and a TIP rifle into the other; power cables and feed tubes looped round into his backpack.
“Kelly?” Reza asked ingenuously. “Not wanting to come with us this time?”
“It took eight generations of cousins marrying to produce you,” she told him.
The three mercenaries on the bank activated their chameleon circuits. Laughter floated down to the hovercraft out of unbroken jungle.
Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2 Page 46
