Engineman

by Eric Brown

  She stared through the interface. In the fifteen minutes since the ‘face had opened, the sun had set fractionally. Sunrise and sunset lasted for five hours on the Reach, with correspondingly long days and nights—approximately fourteen standard hours each. The sunset phase had been Ella’s favourite time of day, warm and balmy. She’d spent long evenings swimming in the sun-warmed lagoons of the Falls with her friend L’Endo-kharriat.

  The bitterness provoked by these memories was stopped short when the military courier called, “Everyone for Hennessy’s Reach...”

  She shouldered her bag and crossed the lounge to the desk, standing in line behind the military officer. When it was his turn to be processed, the official at the desk gave his card a cursory scan and saluted. “Pleasant trip, Major.”

  He was not so swift in dealing with Ella.

  He examined her card, then slipped it into a computer scanner. He read the information revealed on the screen, frequently glancing at Ella. She pulled the lapels of her jacket together, conscious of her silversuit beneath.

  “I take it that ‘Fernandez’ is an assumed surname?” he asked.

  “Right.”

  “And that you’re a Disciple.”

  What good would come from denying it? “Right again.”

  The official tapped at his keyboard, entering the information. “Your profession?”

  Her details were on the identity card. He was trying to intimidate her with his authority.

  “I’m an artist,” she answered evenly.

  “And why are you visiting the Reach, Ms Fernandez?”

  “Pleasure. I’m visiting my father.”

  “His name and address?”

  Ella gave him the information.

  The official entered the details, then waited. Ella guessed he was cross-referencing the name of her father with a list of the planet’s citizens. He read something on the screen, then looked at Ella.

  “One minute.”

  He opened a swing door behind his desk and stepped out. Ella watched him cross to where the uniformed courier was waiting by the exit. They exchanged a hurried, whispered conversation, the courier allowing his gaze to remain fixed on her.

  The official returned. “How long do you intend to stay on the Reach, Ms Fernandez?”

  Ella shrugged. “Maybe a week or two.”

  “Where will you be staying?”

  “At first in a hotel in Zambique City, then perhaps with my father-”

  The official interrupted, “Much of the city is out-of-bounds to off-world travellers, and the country north of the twentieth parallel is off-limits to all non-Reach citizens.”

  “Why?” Ella asked. “What’s happening?”

  The official smiled. “Civil unrest in Zambique province,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, a curfew is operating on the Reach. Eight till eight, and the patrols have shoot-on-sight orders. If I were you I’d be very careful.” He returned Ella’s identity card. “I hope you find inspiration for your art on the Reach,” he said with barely concealed sarcasm.

  Ella plucked her card from’ his fingers. “Merci, Monsieur. I’m sure I will.”

  She crossed to where the courier was waiting with the other five travellers. She was aware that she had undergone a more than usually rigorous grilling.

  Civil unrest in Zambique province? Somehow she found that hard to believe. And since when had it taken nuclear rocket launchers to quell civil unrest?

  The coach ferried them across to the interface. The convoy had long since passed through, and were drawn up in columns on the other side. This time when the coach approached the portal, Ella closed her eyes. The pain hit without warning. Her innards were constricted, and for a fraction of a second it seemed as though her heart might stop. Then she was on Hennessy’s Reach and breathing the familiar, heady fragrance of bougainvillea and assorted alien blooms.

  The coach carried Ella and the others—among them the military courier from Sanctuary, she noticed—to the terminal, a long, low building with Spanish colonial columns and shuttered windows in the Latin style. She passed through customs, expecting another comprehensive interrogation. This time, however, her identity card was given hardly a second glance. As she strode towards the exit, she was aware of the courier consulting with a knot of security guards. One of them watched her walk from the building. Her presence had been noted.

  She halted at the top of the steps, shocked by the scene that greeted her. She recalled the bustle of activity before the ‘port on the evening she had left the Reach ten years ago. The forecourt had been packed with the stalls of a night market selling grilled fish and assorted sea-food, fresh fruit—Terran and alien—hot coffee and coca. Music had belted out from the stallholder’s radios, sambas competing with their cries. The scene had been typical of a busy market place on any bustling, agricultural colony planet.

  Now the forecourt was deserted. A single, defective street-lamp fluttered light across the empty, pot-holed stretch of concrete. One combustion-engined taxi stood on the rank, its driver sprawled across the front seats, his bare feet protruding from the passenger window. His radio played a tinny rumba, the music lost in the night.

  Across the unlighted coast road, the beach extended north for as far as the eye could see. Timber fishing boats, testimony of the planet’s backward economy, were drawn up past the high-tide mark. Five kilometres up the coast, Zambique City was a collection of two- and three-storey buildings climbing the hillside around the bay. Even the city looked deserted; in none of the wildings or streets could Ella see a burning light or any other signs of life. The most vital aspect of the scene before her was the sunset, the filament bow of the red giant suffusing the western sky with a gorgeous roseate glow. Before it, the abandoned, human-built coastline lay in abasement.

  Ella hurried down the steps and approached the taxi-cab. She decided to check the truth of what the official had said about the city being off-limits.

  At the sight of her, the driver withdrew his feet from the window and started the engine. “Hotel, senorita?”

  She peered in at him. “Can you take me into Zambique?”

  The driver made a pained face. “Not possible, senorita. City closed. Military patrols. Local hotel, yes?”

  Ella recalled the small town three kilometres down the coast where she’d stayed once with her father. She dumped her bag on the back seat and climbed in beside it. “Do you know the Hotel Santa Rosa, Costa Julliana?”

  “Si, senorita. No problem.”

  She sat back as the car chuntered from the forecourt and headed down the coast road. The driver braked, then muttered something under his breath as the military convoy pulled from the spaceport and moved north. The procession of identically camouflaged jungle-green vehicles passing before them soon became monotonous. Ten minutes later, as the last armoured truck left the ‘port, Ella asked in Spanish, “What is the problem? Why all the military?”

  The driver glanced at her in the rear-view mirror, smiling sadly. He mimed locking his mouth and throwing the key through the window. “No questions, no answers, no awakenings at two in the morning.” He drew a finger across his Adam’s apple and made an accompanying gurgling sound in his throat.

  “Christ,” Ella murmured to herself. She stared out at the fields of rice and the occasional sumptuous villa.

  Hennessy’s Reach was one of half a dozen planets on the Rim settled almost seventy years ago by colonists from the countries that made up the Latin Federation. Over a period of twenty years, two million citizens from Spain, Mexico and South America had made the journey by bigship to the Reach, and settled on the world’s three largest continents. It had never been a prosperous colony, even in the early days when subsidised by the Federation. Twenty years ago, the Danzig Organisation launched a successful economic take-over of the planet—one of over two hundred which had fallen dominolike to the Organisation around the Rim — and since then the economy of the planet had declined still further. The four million inhabitants of the Reac
h managed to feed themselves, but only just. Ella guessed that the Hennessians had finally had enough, and instigated a rebellion—hard though that was to imagine of a people she remembered as being peaceable and easy-going. She wondered why she had heard nothing of the trouble on any of the news channels back on Earth.

  The taxi followed the coast road around the headland. The small fishing town of Costa Julliana nestled in a horse-shoe cove ahead. A few lights burned in the windows of the stone buildings on the hillside, but the main square which fronted the ocean was empty, as was the jetty extending from the harbour wall. Ella recalled the town’s inhabitants promenading along the jetty on hot evenings.

  The driver was cutting though the square, heading for the continuation of the coast road and the hotel, when Ella saw the statue. She leaned forward. “Stop here!”

  “But your hotel, senorita?”

  “That’s okay. It’s not far. I’ll walk from here.”

  She paid him in the local currency she’d bought back on Earth, grabbed her bag and climbed from the taxi. As it started up and u-turned, Ella stood on the cobbles beside a dry fountain and stared across the square.

  A hover-truck was parked on the harbour wall, the crane on its flat-bed silhouetted against the sunset. A corps of green-uniformed engineers stood around, regarding the statue. Ella moved forward, then stopped — close enough to see the detail of the towering figure, but not so close that she attracted the attention of the engineers.

  She had never seen the statue before—it had certainly been erected since her departure from the Reach. She found the piece terribly moving not just in an aesthetic sense, but also in what it symbolised. The bronze casting, perhaps three, metres high, was of a figure standing and staring inland, a staff in its right hand — a male member of the Lho-Dharvo race, the aliens native to the Reach. To human eyes, the statue seemed to be out of proportion, too tall and attenuated for the insectoid width of its starvation-thin limbs, as if stretched to the point of being unable to bear its own slight weight. Its rib-cage was long, each individual, curving bone distinct beneath its copper and bronze piebald skin. Its head was long and thin, too, with large eyes, no nose other than two vertical slits, and a mouth no more than a thin humourless line. To a human observer, the alien at first seemed too alien, and then when the eye accepted its similarities, it appeared reassuringly humanoid. Only then, when the observer had been fooled into accepting the alien as familiar, did its differences reassert themselves and mark the statue for what it was—a member of a sentient species not human.

  It was, thought Ella, a fitting tribute to an extinct race. Eleven years ago, the first of the Lho had succumbed to a viral epidemic, and four years later all three million aliens on the four continents of the Reach—or Dharvon, as they knew it—were dead. Ella had read of the extinction in a Paris magazine, and she felt now much the same sense of impotent rage and personal loss.

  As she watched, an engineer took a cutting tool and sliced through the statue’s thin left ankle. A noose suspended from the crane was slipped around the alien’s noble head.

  A noise on the other side of the square, behind Ella, made her turn. A flier descended and landed on the cobbles. Someone—in the descending twilight it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman — climbed out and stared across at the statue’s removal.

  Cautiously, Ella approached the engineers. She stood beside a sergeant who seemed to be in charge of the operation.

  She gestured at the statue as its left leg was severed with a shriek of tortured metal. Now only its staff secured the statue to its plinth. The hawser around its neck tightened, drawing the alien off-centre.

  “Why...?” she asked, shaking her head.

  The sergeant glanced at Ella. He was a tall, grey-haired and patriarchal European, as noble in his own way as the statue.

  “I wish I knew,” he said in a Scandinavian accent. “It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it? But I have my orders.”

  They watched together as the staff was severed. Released from its final mooring, the alien hung from the noose and rotated absurdly. Half a dozen soldiers steadied the statue and directed it towards the hover-truck.

  Unable to find the words to express the sense of loss that was like a cavity within her, Ella turned and hurried off across the square.

  Someone stepped from the shadow of the fountain. For a second, she thought it was the driver of the flier, but then she saw that the figure was short, dumpy: an old woman.

  “Ssst! Senorita!” the woman hissed. “A hotel, yes?” She pointed along the harbour to a white-washed building overlooking the sea. She smiled, a gold tooth gleaming in the light of the sun.

  Ella hesitated. She had wanted to revisit the Santa Rosa, to stir old memories.

  The old woman caught her arm, not unkindly. “Senorita, it is almost curfew!” she said in Spanish. “They will take great delight in shooting you in the head at the first stroke of eight! Please, this way...”

  Ella judged that there was nothing mercenary in the old woman’s concern; she seemed genuinely concerned for Ella’s safety. She gestured towards the hotel, taking Ella by the hand and dragging her from the square.

  As they turned the corner, the woman looked back over her shoulder at the tall figure standing beside the flier. She hissed something under her breath, then hauled Ella up three steps and through the timber door of a small whitewashed building.

  Two old men were bent over a board-game in the bar-room. Wooden chairs and tables stood on a polished timber floor, and supporting the ceiling were what looked like genuine oak beams. Ella reminded herself that she was on the Reach now, a relatively young colony world with abundant natural resources. The use of timber would not be regarded as profligate here, as it would on Earth.

  The woman ordered an old man behind the bar to pour Ella a drink, then all but pushed her into a chair beside an open hearth. Ella took off her jacket, and the woman stared with round eyes at the revealed silversuit. Then she saw the infinity symbol on Ella’s arm.

  “Mama mia! No wonder they follow you!”

  “Follow me? Who?”

  The woman gestured with her thumb. “Who else? The bastard in the flier. Here, drink!”

  The woman took a small glass of colourless liquid from the rough-grained timber bar and passed it to Ella. Hesitantly, she took a sip, gagged and coughed. She regained her breath, her eyes watering.

  While she was recovering, the old woman was speaking to the man behind the bar in Spanish so rapid that Ella had no hope of following what was being said.

  The woman smiled. “Your taxi driver. He called five minutes ago to tell me that you had been followed from the ‘port. He thought you needed help. He was a brave man to even call me, senorita. One month ago his son was arrested by the military on suspicion of assisting the Disciples. The following day he was found in an alley with his throat cut.” The woman shook her head. “But you cannot stay here, little one. It is not safe. Costa Julliana swarms with the military. My husband will arrange for your people to come and take you away-”

  “My people?”

  The old woman slapped Ella’s arm with her meaty hand. “Disciples, who else? Now come this way.”

  She took Ella through to a back room. Sheep skins were draped over armchairs and old photographs and images of Christ covered the walls. Ella sat in a comfortable chair. She was still clutching her drink. She took a mouthful, the alcohol helping to calm her.

  The woman drew up a three-legged stool. “Now -you need not tell me if you so wish—but why did you come to the Reach? Surely you have heard about the troubles?”

  Ella shook her head. “We’ve had no news on Earth-”

  The woman closed her eyes. “I hoped at least that help might arrive from somewhere, if what was happening here was known. So you came here in all innocence?”

  Ella hesitated, deciding to tell only half the truth. “I came for a holiday. I lived here as a child. I wanted to revisit-”

  “I’m
truly sorry. You might have been allowed onto the Reach, but let me tell you, little one, that there’s no way they would let you leave the planet. We are under military command. Many citizens have fled south, down the coast.”

  “But what’s happening? Why should they be persecuting the Disciples?”

  “Something is happening in the mountains—don’t ask me what. For weeks, convoys have been heading north. All over the Reach, Ex-Enginemen and -women, their families and friends, are being rounded up, interrogated. Most are never seen again. I am an old woman—it is a mystery to me. But I know on whose side I stand! Ever since the organisation came to the Reach—no good. Have you heard of the Nazis, little one?”