The light from Duchess was just making its presence felt as Joshua and Ashly walked out of the Drayton’s Import office. Norfolk’s short period of darkness was giving way to the light of the red dwarf. Walls and cobbles were acquiring a pinkish shading.
“You did it!” Ashly whooped.
“Yeah, I did,” Joshua said.
“A thousand tonnes, I’ve never heard of anyone getting that much before. You are the sneakiest, most underhand, deviously corrupt little bugger I have met in all my centuries.” He flung an arm round Joshua’s neck and dragged him towards the main street. “God damn, but we’re going to be rich. Medical insurance, by God! Joshua you are beautiful!”
“We’ll put Gideon in zero-tau till we reach Tranquillity. It shouldn’t take a clinic more than eight months to clone a new arm for him. He can enjoy himself with Dominique’s party set for the rest of the time after that. I’ll have a word with her.”
“How’s he going to explain away a new arm when he gets back?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Magic clockwork, I expect. This world is backward enough to believe it.”
Laughing, the two of them waved for a taxi coach.
* * *
When Duchess had risen well above the horizon, sending her bold scarlet rays to discolour the city, Joshua settled himself on a stool in the Wheatsheaf’s wharfside bar and ordered a local brandy. The view outside the window was fascinating, casting everything in tones of red. Some colours were almost invisible. A regular train of barges sailed down the willow-lined river, helmsmen standing by the big tillers at the rear.
It was wonderful to watch, the whole city was a giant tourist fantasy pageant. But some of the inhabitants must lead incredibly dull lives, doing the same thing day after day.
“We worked out how you did it eventually,” a female voice said in his ear.
Joshua turned, putting his eyes level with a delightful swelling at the front of a blue satin ship-tunic. “Captain Syrinx, this is a pleasure. Can I get you a drink? This brandy is more than passable, I can recommend it, or perhaps you’d like a wine?”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No, I’ll drink anything.”
“I don’t know how you can sleep at night. Antimatter kills people, you know. It’s not a game, it’s not funny.”
“A beer, maybe?”
“Good day, Captain Calvert.” Syrinx started to walk past.
Joshua caught her arm. “If you don’t join me for a drink, how can you brag about working it out? And incidentally demonstrate how superior you Edenists all are to us poor mud-chewing primitives. Or maybe you don’t want to hear my counter-argument. After all, you’ve convinced yourself I’m guilty of something. I don’t even know what that is yet. Nobody ever had the decency to tell me what you thought I was carrying. Have Edenists left justice behind as well as the rest of our poor flawed Adamist customs?”
Syrinx’s mouth dropped open. The man was intolerable! How did he twist phrases like that? It was almost as if she was in the wrong. “I never said you were a mud-chewing primitive,” she hissed. “That’s not what we think at all.”
Joshua’s eyes slid pointedly to one side. Syrinx realized everyone in the bar was staring at them.
Are you all right? Oenone asked anxiously, picking up on the flustered thoughts in her skull.
I’m fine. It’s this bloody Calvert man again.
Oh, is Joshua there?
“Joshua?” She winced. She’d been so surprised at Oenone’s use of his first name it had slipped out.
“You remembered,” Joshua said warmly.
“I . . .”
“Have a stool, what are you drinking?”
Furious and embarrassed, Syrinx sat on a barstool. At least it would stop everyone from looking. “I’ll try a wine.”
He signalled the barmaid for drinks. “You’re not wearing your naval stripe.”
“No. Our duty tour finished a few weeks back.”
“So you’re an honest trader now?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got yourself a cargo?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Hey, that’s great news, well done. These Norfolk merchants are tough buggers to crack. I got the Lady Mac stocked up, too.” He collected the drinks, and touched his glass to hers. “Have dinner with me tonight, we can celebrate together.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you have a previous engagement?”
“Well . . .” she couldn’t bring herself to lie outright, that would make her no better than him. “I was just on my way to bed. It’s been a long day with some tough negotiations. But thanks for the invitation. Another time.”
“That’s a real shame,” he said. “Looks like you’ve condemned me to a terminally dull evening, then. There’s only my pilot down here, and he’s too old for my kind of fun-seeking. I’m waiting for him now. We seem to have lost our paying passenger. Not that I’m complaining, he wasn’t the party type. Apparently there’s a good restaurant in town called the Metropole, we were going to check it out. It’s our one night in town, we’ve been invited to an estate for the midsummer itself. So, tough negotiations, eh? How many cases did you get?”
“You were a decoy,” Syrinx said, jumping at the chance to get a word in.
“I’m sorry?”
“You were smuggling antimatter-confinement coils into the Puerto de Santa Maria system.”
“Not me.”
“We were trailing you all the way from Idria, we’d got you in our sensors every kilometre. That’s what we couldn’t understand. It was a direct flight. The confinement coils were on board when you left, and they were gone when you arrived. At the time we assumed you hadn’t rendezvoused with anybody, because we never detected them. But then you didn’t know we were there, did you?”
Joshua drank some of his brandy, his eyes never leaving her over the rim of the glass. “No, you were in full stealth mode, remember?”
“So was your friend.”
“What friend?”
“You took a long time to manoeuvre into each jump coordinate. I’ve never seen anyone so clumsy before.”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“No, but nobody’s that imperfect either.” She took a sip of the wine. Oh, he was a canny one, this Joshua Calvert; she could see why she’d been fooled before. “What I think happened was this. You had your friend waiting a light-month outside the New California system, in full stealth mode, at a very precise coordinate. When you left Idria you jumped to within a few thousand kilometres of him. It would be difficult, but you could do that. With the nodes the Lady Macbeth is equipped with, and your own astrogration skill, that sort of accuracy is possible. And who would suspect? Nobody is that accurate jumping out of a system; it’s when you come insystem you need precision to jump into the correct emergence zones.”
“Go on, this is riveting stuff.”
She took another sip. “Once you jumped outsystem, you shoved the illegal coils out of the cargo hold, and jumped away again. We couldn’t detect that sort of dump of inert mass, not by using passive sensors at the distance we were operating from. Then as soon as Oenone and Nephele jumped in pursuit, your friend moved in and picked them up. So while you were taking an age to get to Puerto de Santa Maria, and keeping us occupied tracking you, he was racing on ahead. The coils were already there by the time we arrived.”
“Brilliant.” Joshua tossed down the last of his brandy and called the barmaid over. “That would work, wouldn’t it?”
“It did work.”
“No, not really. You see, your hypothesis is based on one assumption. Tragically false.”
Syrinx picked up the second glass of wine. “What’s that?”
“That I’m an ace astrogrator.”
“I think you are.”
“Right, so on a normal commercial run I would use this alleged skill of mine to shave hours off the journey time, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
; “So I would have used this skill to get here, to Norfolk, wouldn’t I? I mean, I brought a cargo to trade, I’m not going to waste time, money, and fuel getting it here, now am I?”
“No.”
“Right, so first of all ask the captain on the good ship Pestravka when and where I emerged in the Norfolk system. Then you can go and check my departure time from Lalonde, and work out how long it took me. Tell me after that if you think I’m a good astrogrator.” He gave her an annoying toothsome smile.
Thanks to Oenone, she was instantly aware of Lalonde’s spacial location; how long it ought to take an Adamist starship of Lady Macbeth’s class and performance to make the trip. “How long did it take you?” she asked in resignation.
“Six and a half days.”
It shouldn’t have taken them that long, Oenone said.
Syrinx said nothing. She simply couldn’t bring herself to believe he was innocent. His whole attitude spelt complicity.
“Ah, here’s Ashly now.” Joshua stood and waved at the pilot. “And simply because you committed an extraordinarily rude faux pas don’t think you have to pay for the drinks to make up for it. They’re on me, I insist.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to mutual understanding and future friendship.”
17
The Coogan’s battered prow was riding heavily over the steep wavelets the Zamjan tributary sent rushing down its length towards the Juliffe. Lori could feel the length of the light trader boat exaggerating each pitch as they drove against the current. After four and a half days nothing about the Coogan bothered her any more; it creaked continually, the engines produced a vibration felt throughout every timber, it was hot, dark, airless, and cramped. But enforced routine had made it all inconsequential. Besides, she spent a lot of time lying inertly on her cot, reviewing the images the eagles Abraham and Catlin provided her.
Right now the birds were six kilometres ahead of Coogan, gliding five hundred metres above the water, with just the occasional indolent flick of a wing needed to maintain their flight. The jungle on either side of the swollen river was choked with mist from the rain that had just fallen, swan-white wisps clinging to the glistening green trees like some kind of animate creeper. There was no understanding the jungle’s immensity, Lori thought. The sights she saw through the eagles brought home how little impression the settlers had made on the Juliffe basin in twenty-five years. The timorous villages huddled along the riverbanks were a sorry example of the human condition. Microscopic parasites upon the jungle biota rather than bold challengers out to subdue a world.
Abraham saw a ragged line of smoke staining the sky ahead. A village cooking pit, judging by the shape and colour: she’d certainly had enough practice over the last few days to recognize one. She consulted her bitek processor block, and the visualization of the Zamjan eclipsed the image from the eagles. A vast four-hundred-kilometre river in its own right, the broad tributary was the one which the Quallheim emptied into. Inertial guidance coordinates flicked round. The village was called Oconto, founded three years ago. They had an asset planted there, a man by the name of Quentin Montrose.
Lori, Darcy called, I think there’s another one, you’d better come and have a look.
The visualization withdrew into the bitek processor. I’m on my way. She opened her eyes, and looked out through the nearest slit in the side of the rickety cabin wall. All she could see was the grizzled water being lashed by the squall. Warm droplets ran along the inside of the roof, defying gravity before they plopped down on the cots where she and Darcy had spread their sleeping-bags. There was more room now a third of the logs had been fed into the insatiable hopper, but she still had to squirm out through the Buchannans’ cabin and the galley.
Gail was sitting at the table on one of the special stools that could take her weight. Packets of freeze-dried food were strewn across the greasy wood in front of her. “What would you like tonight?” she asked as Lori hurried past.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“That’s typically thoughtless. How am I supposed to prepare an adequate meal for people who won’t help? It would serve all of you right if I was to do nothing but boiled rice. Then you’d all moan and complain, I’d be given no peace at all.”
Lori gave her a grimace-smile and ducked through the hatch out onto the deck. The fat woman disgusted her, not just her size, but her manner. Gail Buchannan surely represented the antithesis of Edenism, everything her culture strove to distance themselves from in human nature.
Rain was pelting down on the little wheel-house’s solar-cell roof. Darcy and Len Buchannan were inside, hunched against the drops which came streaking in through the open sides. Lori dashed the four metres round to the door, drenching her loose grey jacket in the process.
“It’ll be over in a minute,” Darcy said. Up ahead, the end of the steel rainclouds was visible as a bright haze band surmounting the river and jungle.
“Where’s the boat?” she asked, screwing her eyes against the stinging rain.
“There.” Len raised a hand from the wheel and pointed ahead.
It was one of the big paddle-boats used to take colonists upriver, slicing imperiously through the water towards them. It didn’t pitch about like the Coogan, its greater mass kept it level as the wavelets broke against its side and stern. Smoke streamed almost horizontally from its twin stacks.
“Dangerous fast, that is,” Len said. “Specially for these waters. Plenty of foltwine about; catch a bundle of that in the paddle and she’ll do her bearings a ton of damage. And we’re heading into the snowlily season now as well, they’re as bad as foltwine when they stick together.”
Lori nodded briefly in understanding. Len had pointed out the thin grasslike leaves multiplying along the shallow waters near the shores, fist-sized pods just beginning to rise above the surface. Snowlilies bloomed twice every Lalonde year. They looked beautiful, but they caused havoc with the boats.
In fact Len Buchannan had opened up considerably once the trip started. He still didn’t like the idea of Lori and Darcy steering his precious boat, but had grudgingly come to admit they could manage it almost as well as himself. He seemed to enjoy having someone to talk to other than his wife; he and Gail hadn’t shared ten words since they cast off from Durringham. His conversation was mostly about river lore and the way Lalonde was developing, he had no interest in the Confederation. Some of the information was useful to her when she took the wheel. He seemed surprised by the way she remembered it all. The only time he’d gone sullen on her was when she told him her age, he thought it was some kind of poor-taste joke; she looked about half as old as he did.
The three of them watched the paddle-boat race past. Len turned the wheel a couple of points, giving it a wide passage. Darcy switched his retinal implants up to full resolution and studied the deck. There were about thirty-five people milling about on the foredeck; farmer-types, the men with thick beards, women with sun-ripened faces, all in clothes made from local cloth. They paid very little attention to the Coogan, apparently intent on the river ahead.
Len shook his head, a mystified expression in place. “That ain’t right. The Broadmoor ought to be in a convoy, three or more. That’s the way them paddlers always travel. Captain didn’t call us on the radio neither.” He tapped the short-range radio block beside the forward-sweep mass-detector. “Boats always talk out here, ain’t so much traffic as you can ignore each other.”
“And those weren’t colonists on the deck,” Darcy said.
The Coogan pitched up hard as the prow reached the first of the deep furrows of water which the wayward Broadmoor produced in its wake.
“Not going downriver, no,” Len said.
“Refugees?” Lori suggested.
“Possibly,” Darcy said. “But if the situation is that bad, why weren’t there more of them?” He replayed the memory of the paddle-boat. It was the third they had encountered in twenty hours; the other two had steamed past in the dark. The attitude of the people on deck bothered him. They just s
tood there, not talking, not clustered together the way people usually did for companionship. They even seemed immune to the rain.
Are you thinking the same as me? Lori asked. She conjured up an image of the reptile people from Laton’s call, and superimposed them on the deck of the Broadmoor—rain running off their green skin without wetting it.
Yes, he said. It’s possible. Probable, in fact. Some kind of sequestration is obviously involved. And those people on board weren’t behaving normally.
If boats are carrying the sequestrated downriver, it would mean that the posse on the Swithland have been circumvented.
I never expected them to be anything other than a token, and a rather pathetic one at that. If this is a xenoc invasion, then obviously they will want to subdue the entire planet. The Juliffe tributaries are the only feasible transport routes. Naturally they would use the riverboats.
I can’t believe that anyone with the technology to cross interstellar space would then be reduced to using wooden boats to get about on a planet.
Human settlers do. Darcy projected an ironic moue.
Yes, colonists who can’t afford anything better, but a military conquest force?
Point taken. But there’s an awful lot about this situation we don’t understand. For a start, why invade Lalonde?
True. But to return to the immediate, if we’ve already penetrated the incursion front, do we need to go on?
I don’t know. We need information.
We have an asset in the next village. I suggest we stop there and see what he knows.
Good idea. And Solanki will have to be informed about the aberrant river traffic.
Lori left Darcy to feed the furnace hopper and made her way back to the space in the cabin they shared. She pulled her backpack from under the cot and retrieved the palm-sized slate-grey communication block from among her clothes. It took a couple of seconds for the Confederation Navy’s ELINT satellite to lock on to the scrambled channel. Kelven Solanki’s tired-looking face appeared on the front of the slim rectangular unit.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 55
