Into the Hinterlands-ARC

by David Drake; John Lambshead

  She stopped walking and waited until he met her eyes.

  “Brasman Destry’s grandchildren, my children, were not born to be hewers of wood or drawers of water in someone else’s enterprise,” she said. “My father’s influence with our cousins in Brasilia will die with him. My brother lacks the drive to secure our position; his time in Brasilia proved a disappointment.”

  Linsye shrugged angrily. Allenson thought she caught her lower lip in her teeth for an instant but her voice was frigidly calm as she resumed.

  “Todd is no longer in a position to provide for the family so that leaves you, brother-in-law. Todd has always had great faith in your abilities and I trust his judgement. Todd’s position as Inspector of Military Forces for the Cutter Stream will soon be vacant.”

  Linsye made a flicking motion with her left hand. “You must move fast to secure the title before his predicament becomes common knowledge,” she said.

  “I think it unseemly to be discussing this before Todd is cold,” said Allen. “Let other people do as they may.”

  “Grow up, Allen!” Linsye didn’t raise her voice, but her tone stabbed him like broken glass. “You, not Todd, are now head of the family so act like it. You do your best for Todd by shouldering his burdens otherwise all he worked for will be lost. You can’t play the hero-worshipping little brother any longer.”

  Linsye turned on her heel and started back the way they had come, head and body erect, every inch a Destry.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rafe

  The Continuum was placid the next day. That spared Allenson the temptation to rationalize staying on Paragon. They made a fast crossing and reached Rafe ahead of schedule.

  Allenson considered: they had made good time and the next possible rest point after Rafe was a good two hours away. It would do no harm to take a break and allow the air recyclers on the frame to refresh. He was surprised to hear a chime and see a directional beacon indicator light up. Rafe was supposedly uninhabited. There had been talk of setting up permanent hunting lodges on various Hinterland worlds, as a commercial enterprise to attract wealthy Brasilians, but Allenson had paid little attention. The Hinterland inspired madcap schemes but nothing came of most of them. The little amber light triggered his curiosity and crystallized his decision; they would land at Rafe.

  The beacon was a simple reference point type without automatic guidance. Allenson phased in about a klom from it. The team broke down their frames and hiked the rest of the way on foot. The climate was hot and humid and they soon had sweat running down their faces and necks. Tall, well-spaced trees spread an almost continuous blue-green roof over their heads. The light leaking through had a purple tint. In contrast, browns and reds dominated the bulbous ground level vegetation.

  “I think that maybe I should have taken us in a little closer,” said Allenson, wiping the moisture from his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “No, you were right,” said Hawthorn. “It never hurts to be careful.”

  “Brown and red pigments provide the most efficient utilization of the limited purple light under the canopy,” said Destry, prodding a pod-like plant with his datapad.

  The plant made a popping sound and deposited orange powder all over his legs. He brushed it off absentmindedly while flicking through his pad readout. He seemed not to notice that the spores had stained his clothes.

  “But it’s unusual to find different photosynthetic pigment colors evolving from the same genetic stock,” Destry said. He pressed his datapad against some leaf litter that had fallen from the forest canopy.

  “The vegetation is monophyletic but not closely related. You know, I suspect the ground cover is more like a fungus than a true plant,” Destry said, more to himself than the other members of the team.

  “This way,” Allenson said, tuning his datapad to the beacon’s frequency.

  * * *

  The team moved easily between the trees, turning aside when the ground fungus was heavy enough to block their way, but could not see ahead for more than twenty meters or so. The forest seemed endless and it would have been difficult to hold a course without the beacon.

  Allenson continually checked his datapad. It not only showed the direction of the beacon but gave an estimate of distance. He checked the modulation and frowned.

  He said in a loud voice. “We are within half a klom of the beacon but I don’t see any sign of a settlement, Destry. Do you think there is something wrong with the receiver?”

  “What’s that, Allenson,” Destry said, honestly puzzled. “I don’t see how there can be. It either works or it doesn’t.”

  “I guess you two must be on the level,” said an unfamiliar voice. “Bandits normally do more sneaking around.”

  A man stepped out from behind a tree trunk. He was dressed in cheap, coarse clothes colored in neutral purple-browns. He sounded friendly enough but he kept a shotgun levelled, and his forefinger was on the trigger.

  “I am Sar Destry, Chief Surveyor for the Harbinger Project,” Destry said.

  “Is that so?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” Destry replied. “We are on our way back to Wagner. These gentlemen are my associates.”

  He turned and waved a hand at Allenson.

  “Gentlemen? I see only one,” said the man, suspiciously.

  “That’s because I am standing behind you,” said Hawthorn.

  The man stiffened, fear flicking across his face.

  “Hell’s bells man, relax,” said Hawthorn. “You would already be dead if I wanted to kill you. Humor me and break that gun over your arm. Lethal weapons make me nervous and we don’t want any accidents now, do we?”

  The man considered. Clearly he was not the type to make quick decisions but eventually he accepted the reality of the situation. He flicked the catch that lowered the barrels, rendering the weapon harmless.

  Hawthorn sauntered into view, laserifle across his shoulder.

  “I see you let me play bait again,” said Allenson, without rancor. “One day you’ll get me shot.”

  “Possibly, but you should accept that risk to prevent a greater tragedy,” said Hawthorn.

  “Like what?” asked Allenson.

  “Like me getting shot,” Hawthorn replied. “Imagine the tragic impact that news of my death would inflict on the good ladies of the Cutter Stream. No gentleman could tolerate that.”

  It was an old piece of repartee but it had the desired effect of giving the local a moment to compose himself.

  “What is a beacon doing on Rafe?” asked Allenson, finally turning to the man.

  “That’s Lakeside, our settlement,” replied the man.

  “You can’t have been here long,” said Allenson.

  “No, not long,” the man said. “But the town is growing fast. We have nigh on fifty people now with more arriving every week. My name is Gupper, by the way.”

  He shook hands with each of them as they went through the formal introduction process. This seemed to transform the survey team in Gupper’s eyes to a known quantity.

  “Have you folks eaten? It will be dinner soon and Fara, my wife, would enjoy offering you hospitality. She likes to hear news of the outside and we don’t get many visitors.”

  “That would be most kind,” said Allenson. “I think that I speak for everybody when I say that we are heartily sick of packed food.”

  “Absolutely!” Destry nodded vigorously. “Tell me, Master Gupper, is there much seasonal change in the plants?”

  Calling Gupper “Master” was stretching a point as the title was usually reserved for artisans or smallholders and a Hinterland settler was neither. Allenson none the less approved of Destry bumping Gupper up a social scale. Politeness was seldom wasted and he approved in principle of encouraging settlers as a way of spreading civilization. Unfortunately, Cutter Stream residents reserved the same social contempt for settlers that they themselves received from Brasilians. Mudtrotter was one of the more polite labels by which settlers were known.

 
Almost everyone this side of the Bight was Destry’s social inferior, which had the odd result of causing him to treat strangers of all classes with the same cool politeness.

  “Very little, Sar Destry. In truth, there is little seasonable change here. It rains to excess at times in the summer making the ground swampy but nothing too untoward,” said Gupper.

  “This is summer now?” Allenson asked, mopping his brow.

  “No, indeed, sar,” Gupper replied. “We have just passed the winter solstice.”

  Allenson thought that Rafe must be distinctly unpleasant come summer. He made a note on his datapad to that effect. Any tourist-based enterprise would be limited to polar winters only.

  “This way, sars,” said Gupper, leading the way.

  * * *

  They left the tree-line after only a hundred meters, emerging into a cleared area. Large fleshy plants fully two meters high with large yellow-ochre lobes grew either side of the path. They were laid out in neat rows so were clearly a crop. Destry reached out with his datapad to take an analysis.

  “Careful, Sar Destry,” said Gupper. “Gunja-plants sting and leave a nasty rash.”

  Allenson examined the nearest lobe. Hairs, almost too fine to see, stuck out from brown nodules on the lobes.

  “You grow them for food or can you extract something useful from them?” Allenson asked.

  “Naw, they taste like shit,” said Gupper. “And I never heard of anyone harvesting gunja for anything. You can’t even smoke it.”

  “Then why cultivate the crop?” Allenson asked.

  Gupper grinned at his bafflement. “Bless you, ser. Rooters won’t come anywhere near a gunja field. Gunjas work better than a shock fence and there’s no maintenance or running costs once you grow them.”

  “Rooters?” Allenson asked, patiently.

  “Native animals,” Gupper replied. “Big buggers. They feed on giant worms and they have these tusks under the jaws for digging ’em up. A herd of rooters can create an almighty mess of a settlement. They spook easily and charge off trampling everything under foot.”

  “I see,” Allenson said.

  “No you don’t,” Gupper said. “You have to be there. Rooter herds smashed up the first few settlements on Rafe, killed quite a few people, too.”

  He ran his fingers through his beard, contemplating the gunja crop.

  “I doubt whether we would have survived here if we hadn’t discovered gunja. Rooters are the reason I was carrying old Henry here when I bumped into you.”

  Gupper patted his battered shotgun.

  “That will stop a charging rooter?” asked Hawthorn scepticism clear in his tone.

  “Most times, sar,” Gupper replied. “Especially, if you give it both barrels.”

  He pulled a cartridge out of the gun and gave it to Hawthorn who whistled and showed the round to Allenson. The cartridge held a single, large caliber lead shot with a hollowed out nose that would stop a bull and tear the leg of a man.

  “I would have taken your shotgun more seriously if I had known what you had loaded,” Allenson said.

  Allenson recorded the conversation, adding a note that big-game hunting was a possibility on Rafe.

  The gunja crop was only a few meters deep but the safe path snaked to present an impossible wall of plants to a large clumsy animal. Allenson had to maneuver with care, burdened as he was by his packs.

  They emerged into cultivated fields of more recognisable crops. Women and children moved up and down the rows with hoes and spray guns. The women wore cheap high color-saturated utility clothing. They favored russet reds, greens and yellow ochre, colors that would not easily show stains. The locals stopped and stared at the survey team.

  “We don’t see much in the way of visitors,” said Gupper, somewhat defensively.

  “I would jump at any excuse for a break from such backbreaking work,” said Allenson. “Do you do all the farming manually?”

  “At the moment, we do,” Gupper replied. “But we hope to buy some fleeks as soon as we have a surplus to sell on. We may eventually be able to get some autos.”

  “Good for you,” said Destry.

  “Cash crops are the only sensible way to fund colonization of the Hinterland but automotons take a great deal of maintenance,” said Allenson, quietly. “In their own way, so do fleeks. What do you envisage would make a profitable cash crop?”

  “Then us Lakesiders can live properly, like gentlefolk,” said Gupper.

  He did not appear to have heard Allenson, who did not push the point.

  Hawthorn smiled at a girl gaping at them and half lifted a hand in salute. She blushed and recommenced frantically hoeing, head down.

  The Lakeside settlement was based on a variant of the square-grid pattern, modified to follow the contours of the slope down to the water. Most of the buildings followed a traditional settlers’ design of a single story with a sideways sloping roof. Gutters funnelled rainwater down to a storage tank. The buildings sat on rafts of plasticized soil, the lower walls being made of the same material. The roof and upper walls were constructed of wooden planks. A single two-story building dominated.

  Wooden shacks built directly on the soil were scattered higgledy-piggledy around the edges of the settlement. Many were in poor condition with rotted out planks and tacked-together repairs. Allenson assumed that they were storage sheds but a woman emerged from one as they passed, pushing aside plastic strips that hung down across the doorway as a makeshift door. She jiggled a baby who was suckling at her breast. The woman watched them pass without expression and did not reply to Allenson’s greeting.

  The roof had collapsed inwards on the next shed. Someone had effected a repair with a stained tarpaulin. A filamentous purple growth ran through the wood.

  “That’s a nasty case of fungal rot,” said Destry. “Don’t you use fungicides?”

  “We had some,” Gupper said, shrugging, “but they never seemed to work. Contact with the ground makes the problem worse. The strands grow straight out of the soil. That’s why most people build the bottom of their houses out of syncrete.”

  “Fungal spores must still infect the wooden structures even if they are a meter up. Would it not help to avoid the use of wood at all?” asked Destry.

  “I guess so but plasticizer is expensive and the wood is free,” said Gupper.

  Destry examined the rotten wood, waving his datapad over the purple filaments.

  “The fungus has an unusual mix of detoxification enzymes that would break down most off the shelf fungicides but it should be possible to design something that would work,” said Destry.

  “No doubt that would be a pricy business,” Gupper said.

  Allenson gave Destry a warning look and was pleased that he took the hint and let the matter drop. There was no point in winding Gupper up by dangling unattainable luxuries in the man’s face. A single consignment of a few liters of specially tailored fungicide that would probably have to be imported across the Bight could cost more than the capital value of Lakeside.

  “That’s funny,” Allenson said, consulting his datapad. Your beacon seems to be coming from the lake rather than the settlement.”

  Gupper chuckled. “The beacon’s on that little island,” he said, pointing across the water.

  Allenson shielded his eyes and looked in the indicated direction. A handful of scraggly tree clung to a gravel bank that barely cleared the water. He could just see an orange canister tied to the trunk of the largest.

  “That’s so uninvited visitors materialize far enough away that we can get a look at them. We have a detector that warns us if when the Continuum is disturbed. That’s how I picked up your arrival.”

  A detector, Allenson thought, but no automated defenses. That was not ideal as it depended on the warning being acted on faster than a raiding force could swamp the defenses.

  “I’m an alderman so I have a property by the Meeting House,” Gupper said, proudly.

  He pointed out a single story dwelling tha
t stood opposite the two-storey building. It was in decent condition. The wood was new and decorated with yellow stain.

  Gupper ushered them inside. The doorway opened into a single spacious room that occupied a good two thirds of the ground floor. Allenson unclipped his boots and left them by the door. Mats in a variety of clashing colors and patterns were scattered around the syncrete floor.

  “Fara,” Gupper yelled. “We have visitors.”

  A small rotund woman bustled, that was the only word for it, through hanging strips that separated off a kitchen. Gupper made the introductions and Fara was suitably wide-eyed at the rank of her guests. In particular, she paid great deference to Destry and insisted on removing the orange powder from his trousers by vigorous strokes with a clothes brush that she took off a hook by the door.

  “She makes me go outside to clean up,” said Gupper.

  “You are not a gentleman, Gupper” said Fara.

  “But the dirt is the same,” said Gupper, teasingly.

  “Thank you, mistress,” Destry said, breaking up what was clearly a ritualized husband and wife squabble. He inclined his head, politely.

  Gupper pulled a long table out from where it stood against the wall. He arranged benches on each side and placed a wooden arm-chair at each end.

  “Perhaps you would like to sit,” Gupper said, gesturing that Destry should take the chair.

  “Yes, but not at the head of the table,” Destry said, swing his legs over the nearest bench. “That seat is reserved for the master of the house.”

  Gupper looked surprised but pleased. He did not argue the point.

  “Some tea, gentlemen?” Fara asked.

  “That would be delightful,” Destry replied on the behalf of the whole team.

  “A bevy would go down a treat love,” said Gupper.

  The tea, when it arrived was a herbal infusion of a type that Allenson had not tried before. It had a characteristic minty flavor that was not unpleasant. He glanced at his friends to assess their reaction. Destry sipped at his mug in between pumping Gupper about the natural history of Lakeside. Hawthorn had slipped into a detached state. He stared unblinkingly forward, his mind lost in thoughts.