Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  He started the engine and set off again. The road, here at least, was good: a wide, straight blacktop. If it remained in a similar state all the way, then he should reach his destination in five or six hours. He planned to spend the night in the town of Lincolnville, ten kilometres from Campbell’s End, and then consider his next move in the morning.

  The day on Mallory was longer than that of Earth: twenty-six hours divided, now that it was late Autumn, into days of twelve hours, and long fourteen hour nights. Eta Ophiuchi, a blue-white main sequence star, burned with a distinctly orange cast. The ambient light, combined with fields of blue grass, created a definite alien atmosphere. Vaughan found the experience somewhat disconcerting, his senses confused by the contrast between the familiarity of man-made roads, cars, farmsteads, and the otherworldly combination of triple moons, sallow light, and the spiked, blue grass.

  As he drove, he passed through the region of farmed land around Mackintyre and came to an area of old upland meadow, scattered with polychromatic wildflowers and bizarre, spiral-trunked trees. The horizon in three directions was crenellated by distant, snow-capped mountain ranges, their peaks tinted tangerine in the afternoon light. He was to notice this geographical effect during his long drive south: the road cut through range after range of low mountains, crossed high pastures, and always the horizon presented ever more mountain ranges. He had read, on the voyage here, that Mallory had once boasted six continents, but over the course of millions of years tectonic drift had brought them together to form two vast land-masses: where they joined, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, mountain ranges were pushed up from the fertile grassland.

  He passed through great areas of cultivated land. At points, the road swept around bluffs to give an elevated view of oceans of wheat, with lone timber farmsteads lost in the vastness like becalmed galleons.

  At one point, perhaps halfway through his journey, he pulled into the side of the road and climbed out. The view was no less than a visual assault of beauty. He had been climbing the foothills of a mountain range for an hour, and he looked down on a cascade of blue grassland, chivvied by the wind so that it presented alternate shades of silver and indigo, like caressed velvet. Beyond, in stark contrast, was the bright golden expanse of wheat, stretching to the far horizon and the enclosing palisade of peaks.

  He ate a meal here and pored over the map on his handset. Lincolnville was another two hundred kilometres distant, beyond the next mountain range and across the plain.

  He had discussed tactics with Kapinsky in the little time they had to prepare before he caught the voidliner. It was imperative that he reach the environmentalists and warn them that Denning and his team were coming for them, and that Gustave Scheering’s order was to bring them in dead or alive. They possessed, according to Scheering, information dangerous to the corporation and to Mallory—though as the business concern and the planet were one and the same thing, Vaughan knew that Scheering’s claim for the safety of Mallory was nothing more than a rhetorical flourish with which to impress his underlings.

  In an ideal world he would find the radicals, warn them, learn what their big secret was, and get out again. With luck, the information might lead him to the apprehension of the assassin on Earth, even the salvation of the street-kid Pham. Or was he being too optimistic? Did his sanguine take on existence, since meeting Sukara, blind him to the dangers involved in messing with a ruthless multicolonial like Scheering-Lassiter?

  The difficulty would be in locating the radicals at Campbell’s End without alerting their watchers to the fact of his presence. As there was nothing he could do to foresee how he might go about avoiding this, he decided to worry about it tomorrow, after he had reached Lincolnville.

  He finished the pre-packed meal of broiled fish and greens—bland almost to the point of tastelessness after a diet of Indian and Thai cuisine back home—and strolled away from the Bison. He stood on the edge of the road and stared out over the wind-ruffled blue plain. Experimentally, he tapped the start-up code into his handset and activated his implant.

  He scanned, but was unable to detect the transition between his implant being turned off and its functioning. All was silent. He turned, pushing out his mind-probe towards the last farmstead he had passed, perhaps fifty kilometres away.

  Did he detect the faintest hint of mind-noise, or was he deluding himself?

  Smiling, he climbed back into the Bison. He decided to leave his implant active, as an experiment to see how deserted this landscape really was.

  Gunning the engine, he drove into the mountains.

  * * * *

  He braked on a high mountain pass and stared down across the plain, a fertile expanse of farmland nursed in the lap of the enclosing peaks. As he started up and took the winding road down into the valley, he looked out over a sea of golden wheat and, beyond, vast squares of cultivated land bearing another crop entirely, this one dark green but anonymous at this distance.

  He left the mountain pass in his wake and raced along the high straight road between fields of wheat. Kilometres ahead and to his right, he made out another farmstead set back from the road. Remembering that his implant was activated, he scanned ahead. He came across no mind-signatures—the silence continued. He wondered idly if the farm were deserted, or its owners away.

  Only when he was a kilometre from the farm did he make out the tiny shape of a beetling harvester, a red bug against the golden field. He assumed, quite naturally, that the machine must be automated, as he still could detect no human mind-presence. Then he drew closer, and saw upon the back of the harvester the dark shape of the farmer, turned in his seat to monitor the threshing.

  He pushed out a mind-probe, directly towards the farmer. Even at this distance he should have picked up something, some sub-stratum of emotion, if not articulated thoughts. But the silence suggested that the man did not exist... or was shielded.

  He drew alongside the farmstead and slowed, so that he was a matter of only a hundred metres from the harvester when it reached the end of the field and turned. The farmer in the driving seat gave a friendly wave as Vaughan passed.

  He scanned again, and his probe slipped off and around a mind-shield, the faint white noise of static in the place of vibrant thoughts.

  He drove on, wondering why a farmer this far from civilisation and the possibility of telepaths should wish to shield his mind.

  The mountains ahead, which an hour ago had been an apparent hand’s width above the level of the plain, now reared to fill the windscreen. The plain rose, and the road with it, hugging the contours of the foothills and turning in long loops through undulating countryside patched with strange trees and shrubs like explosions of crimson flame. Squat-bodied birds, with long beaks like chopsticks, darted from bush to bush imbibing nectar from blooms as long as clarinets.

  He wound down the side-screen and the Bison was flooded with a sweet heady scent. The sun was setting behind the mountains, turning the air a combustible tangerine hue, and he suddenly wished that Sukara was with him to appreciate the alien beauty of the colony world.

  Then his regret was replaced by curiosity, again, as his vehicle passed a truck that had pulled into the side of the road. A dozen men in uniforms stood at the side of the road, smoking and chatting. He was moving at speed, and was unable to tell if the men were militia, though he suspected so. He could tell, however, that to a single individual they were shielded. His transit, so close, should have brought their minds flaring into his like so many burning torches, but again all he detected was the slippery blitz of static, and then nothing as he raced on by.

  Even if they had been militia, it was strange that every one of the troop had worn a shield. Vaughan could understand, perhaps, a commanding officer choosing to keep his thoughts a secret... but even that was decidedly odd in such a sequestered backwater.

  Then he saw the second truck, and the laser-cordon barring the way. Half a dozen men and women in camouflage fatigues hung around the vehicle, their interest stir
ring as he approached. They pushed themselves from where they had been lounging, unslung weapons, and moved into the road.

  He scanned, and read nothing.

  The officer in charge strolled along the centre of the road as Vaughan approached, a palm raised nonchalantly to halt him.

  Vaughan slowed, opening the side-screen as he drew alongside the officer.

  The woman had the crew cut and overfed face of a career soldier, and the intimidating gaze of one backed by the authority of superior firepower.

  She rested an arm on the roof of the Bison and pushed her face close, inspecting both Vaughan and the interior of the vehicle with one quick sliding glance. “ID.”

  Sweating despite himself, Vaughan produced his card. He waited, staring through the windscreen at the blue laser cordon, as the officer processed his ID through a com on her hip.

  He wondered if the sweat standing out on his face would be seen by the soldier as a sign of his fear, and therefore his guilt. To get so far, only to be picked up by a random road-block...

  But the card passed muster. She handed it back, and Vaughan gave silent praise to Lin Kapinsky.

  “What’re you doing this far south, Mr Lacey?” The woman spoke with a colonial twang, high and nasal.

  “I’m on holiday,” he said. “Someone suggested I take a look at the southern ranges. I thought I’d check them out.”

  “Think again, Mr Lacey. The road’s closed.”

  He thought fast. “Is there any other way I can get to Preston?” he asked, naming the town a hundred kilometres beyond his destination. If he managed to reach Lincolnville some other way, he didn’t want the military to know he was there.

  “All the roads are closed hereabouts, Mr Lacey.”

  He stared at her. “And when will they be reopened?”

  “That,” she said, “I can’t say. Military operation, Mr Lacey. And who can say how long military operations might last?”

  Vaughan gave a theatrical sigh. “And I was told the southern range was one of the best.”

  “Well, why don’t you take my advice, turn yourself around, and check out MacArthur’s Range away back. That’s almost as pretty, take it from me.”

  “You know,” Vaughan said, “I might just do that.”

  The woman nodded. “Safe journey, Mr Lacey.”

  He reversed, giving the officer a salute, turned the Bison and accelerated back along the road.

  A military operation. He wondered if it might be linked to Denning’s imminent arrival? If so, Scheering was leaving nothing to chance.

  He felt a cold dread in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps he’d been a fool to think he would be able to waltz in here, warn the radicals, and skip back out again with their secret in his possession.

  It was going to be a tad trickier than that.

  He travelled five kilometres north, then pulled into the side of the road. From his earlier examination of the area on his handset, he recalled secondary roads branching off the main highway at intervals and twisting further into the foothills.

  He consulted the map and charted three narrower roads, which left this one and climbed south. One of them, a particularly tortuous track, looped around a low peak and approached Lincolnville from the south-east. It would put another hundred kilometres on his journey, maybe delay his arrival until after sunset, but the track looked insignificant enough not to warrant an army blockade.

  And if the militia had barred this track, then he would test the Bison’s off-road capabilities and head for Lincolnville over the hills.

  He set off again and ten kilometres further along the highway turned right up a pot-holed minor road, heading into the mountains.

  He travelled for an hour. The track was rough and unfinished, and at one point a landslide had slurred the track ten metres down the hill, but the Bison was equal to the challenge. He passed a couple of farms, clearly occupied, but again detected not the slightest mind-noise from within. He wondered if it were mandatory for the citizens of Mallory to wear shields, and if so then why the government had passed such a Draconian law. What might the average citizens of the colony world know that their government did not want the rest of the universe to find out?

  The fiery orange sun was a hand’s breadth above the mountain peaks high to his left when he came around a great loop in the road and was presented with a spectacular panorama: the hillside shelved away to form a long, broad valley, its blue grass scintillating in the twilight.

  The track edged along the margin of the valley, and Vaughan made out, perhaps two kilometres distant, the telltale glow of a laser cordon. Beside it, reduced to the size of a child’s toy, was a militia truck.

  Vaughan braked, heart thudding, and considered his options.

  According to the map, he was still a hundred kilometres from Lincolnville. There were no roads branching from this one that would take him anywhere near his destination.

  He supposed he could always conceal the truck, wait until nightfall, and see then if the military checkpoint remained—the laser cordon presented an obvious indication of their presence. But if the militia were aiding Denning’s mission, then they would remain in situ until the exec and his teams arrived.

  He scanned the surrounding land. The valley was wide, and easily navigable by the Bison, but not so wide that his passage would go unnoticed by the military. To his left the hillside climbed acutely, graduating to rocky outcrops and minor peaks. Hardy though the Bison was, he doubted it could negotiate such precipitous terrain.

  He was startled by a noise coming from behind him. He turned in his seat and made out, perhaps a couple of hundred metres further up the valley, the first of a herd of... animals, obviously, but animals the like of which Vaughan had never seen before.

  Only when visually aware of the creatures did he sense their presence in his mind: an inchoate, tuneless music, totally alien and unsettling. He turned off his implant.

  The leading beast was huge—that was the first thing that struck him—perhaps four metres high. It was brown-skinned, and wore its tegument in what looked like sections of armour.

  There, its resemblance to anything Earth-like finished. Its four legs were thick and long, its head huge. It had a thick trunk perhaps a metre long, on either side of which sprouted a lethal array of tusks like tines. Above huge black eyes, arranged on each side of the head, was another set of tines. It looked ferocious, and the thunderous sound of its bellow echoed like a war cry.

  It approached the Bison and slowed. The others, behind it, slowed too. Vaughan counted over twenty in the herd, many of them the size of their leader.

  The others halted, as one, and seemed to be watching their leader as it slowed and took small, cautious steps towards the vehicle.

  Two metres away, the great beast halted.

  Vaughan stared, and the creature stared back at him. He felt suddenly, profoundly, moved. After his initial alarm, it came to him that he had nothing at all to fear from these animals, and only then realised that the side-screen was still wound down.

  The beast blinked, regarding him, and though Vaughan knew that Mallory possessed no intelligent life forms, he felt as if he were communicating on some level with a creature wise beyond its classification.

  Then the beast surprised him.

  It moved forward, a single step bringing it right up to the flank of the Bison. Then, before Vaughan could react, it raised its short, thick trunk and reached out towards his head.

  His first instinct was to draw away, his second to sit tight.

  The trunk, its nostril panting a warm, fetid breath, came in through the window and caressed his head, pressing itself against his skin, inhaling like a vacuum cleaner, sniffing, then settled on his forehead. There it remained for perhaps ten seconds. Vaughan, his pulse racing, looked up, along the length of its trunk, into the dark discus of its left eye.

  The eye blinked, gently.

  Then the animal broke contact, swung around and harrumphed to the rest of the herd. They began m
oving around the Bison, trundling across the track and heading into the high foothills. Their leader was the last to move off. Watching it back off, then move around the vehicle after the others, Vaughan felt impelled to call out some kind of farewell, or lift a hand in a valedictory gesture. Instead, he just watched them go in silence, aware that he had participated in a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  In single file the herd passed through a cutting in the rocks above. When it came to the leader’s turn to ease itself between the slabs of rock, it paused, turned, and stared at Vaughan. It lifted its truck and issued a low, bassoon-like note, and Vaughan received the crazy impression that it was telling him to follow them.