"It took me a while to realize, because they've used the best camouflage there is: put your biggest secret in plain sight. I thought they were Regressors that first time. I saw them eating fruit from a tree." He smiled softly at the platoon.
"So?" Lewis asked. "They are Regressors. Nobody else does that kind of thing. It's filthy. Decent people eat protein cell food."
Lawrence chuckled. "Which just proves my point. You can't see it either. Willow webs are a local plant. The forest up there in the hills is indigenous. Arnoon Province wasn't gamma soaked."
"No way," Dennis said sharply. "Terrestrial plants won't grow in alien environments. For a start, the soil bacteria is all wrong. That's why you have to gamma soak the land and re-seed it with our own bacteria."
"Exactly," Lawrence said. "But I saw it. I saw them pluck fruit from a bush and eat it. From what I remember, it wasn't even a terrestrial bush."
"Then you didn't see it, Sarge. Sorry, but humans don't have a biochemistry that is compatible with this planet's indigenous organisms. I might have flunked my degree, but I did manage to take in stuff that basic."
"I know. But I've seen this happen on one other planet as well. You weren't with us then." Lawrence cocked an eyebrow at Amersy. "You remember Calandrinia?"
"Hardly likely to forget her."
"She was a new-native on Santa Chico," Lawrence told the others. "They ate fruit that was growing on trees. I called them Regressors, too. But I was wrong there as well. Calandrinia told us that the biotechnology experts who emigrated from California eventually worked out how to blend the terrestrial and alien gene pools. It made Calandrinia's generation what they were, and it gave them food the old-fashioned way, so they weren't dependent on food refineries. That was a big part of their philosophy, liberating themselves from machinery. So it is possible."
Dennis pulled a face. "Maybe. On Santa Chico I could believe it. But here, on Thallspring? Christ, Sarge, the most advanced thing ever to come out of Memu Bay is a new shape for a windsurfing board."
"Yeah. And according to Calandrinia it took decades for Santa Chico to develop the gene blend. Decades of work by hundreds of the greatest geneticists and biotechnicians Earth ever had. Yet here we are, in the middle of the hinterlands on a planet thirty-seven light-years from Santa Chico, and I see the same thing. How do you explain that, Dennis?"
"You think they bought the genetic blending technology from Santa Chico. Don't you?" Amersy asked.
"There's nowhere else it could have come from. And it would have taken a lot of money. You'd have to travel from here to Santa Chico carrying a complete range of Thallspring botanical and bacterial samples. Then you'd have to employ a team of geneticists to adapt the techniques. That takes serious money. Billions in anyone's currency."
"Santa Chico's cut off," Edmond said. "Everyone knows that."
Lawrence shook his head. "I was on Thallspring before I went to Santa Chico. This must have happened thirty, forty years ago, maybe even longer. Back when credit meant something to Santa Chico."
"All right," Amersy said. "I can accept that it's theoretically possible for the Arnoon villagers to have trees that produce terrestrial food. But where did the money come from?"
"Two possibilities," Lawrence said. "The first is they're exiles. A group of billionaires setting up a colony inside a colony. Essentially, they're self-sufficient—that's where the food trees come in. They have a high standard of living, which they support by quietly buying in all the consumer goodies that a relatively advanced world can provide. The problem I have with this idea is billionaires don't live like that. You don't work your ass off amassing that kind of fortune and then spend it on some forest idyll community. Earth is their element, with its stock markets and stakes and boards."
"So what's the other possibility?" Odel asked.
"That Arnoon began exactly the way they said it did. A group of honest people looking for a quiet life who harvested willow webs for a living. They start their community, establish some decent tenets to live by. Then suddenly they find something valuable. Fabulously valuable. This is the mother-lode of all motherlodes, here. What do they do? If they tell the rest of their world, everyone will want a piece of the action. Arnoon Province is developed and industrialized. Their way of life will be wiped out. So they decide to spend it on safeguarding that good quiet life they've got for themselves.
"A few of them buy passage to Earth on a Navarro house starship. Then fly on to Santa Chico. Several years later, when the gene blending has been accomplished, they come back the same way. After that, it's easy. They can expand their population without the local authorities knowing about it, because they have an independent food supply. Buying in every civilized luxury is relatively easy; they set up a couple of wholesale companies down here in Memu Bay, maybe another in the capital. They're fronts so they can send the products up to the plateau without anyone knowing."
"How did they know about Santa Chico?" Amersy asked. "We damn well didn't until after we landed."
"We didn't know how far they'd carried the modifications," Lawrence said. "We knew about the modification project. It was the big difference that the settlers were so proud of. Santa Chico was not going to be colonized the same way as every other planet. They made that very clear right at the start and went out of their way to advertise the fact. Even on Amethi I'd heard of Santa Chico."
"All right, maybe you did, but a bunch of willow web farmers?"
"They had datapool access and money. It's a wonderful combination; it always gets you what you want in the end."
"I don't believe hundreds of people can keep a secret that big for so long. One of them would come down into Memu Bay and blow his wad in a marina club. Word would leak out."
"Nobody knows about them," Lawrence said. "So the secret has been kept. Simple logic."
"I don't see how."
Lawrence didn't know what else to say to convince him. You couldn't dispute the plain facts.
"Hey, Sarge," Karl said. "What do you reckon this motherlode is?"
"That's where it gets interesting. The survey satellites never came up with anything on the plateau other than the bauxite. So, geologically speaking, it's got to be something that shouldn't be there, an anomaly. Expand on Arnoon," he told the desktop pearl AS. The picture flowed. Snow-capped mountains rippled up as the focus shifted past them. Huge tracts of forest swept by until the AS centered on a valley with a circular lake. There was a small island in the middle. "I saw this, too, when I was there last time. I didn't recognize it then, because you don't often see these all covered in trees and grass."
"Oh, my goodness," Odel murmured. "It's a crater."
"You got it. And it's impact, not volcanic. That island is the central peak. A chunk of some asteroid or comet hit the plateau a few thousand years ago, maybe less. The cliff on the west side is still almost sheer. There's been very little movement or erosion since it happened."
"So what hit it?" Karl was leaning forward, staring intently at the pane.
"I'm betting on metal," Lawrence said. "A near-solid lump of it. That would survive the flight through the atmosphere, and the impact. It also gives the Arnoon villagers something to mine."
"What kind of metal?" Karl wanted to believe. Manna from heaven mixed in with a great treasure hunt. He was buying in heavily.
"I don't know for sure, but it's got to be one of the precious ones. Gold, platinum. Or maybe I'm wrong, and it was an ordinary carbonaceous chondritic that fused into diamond from all that heat and pressure during the impact."
Karl slapped Odel's shoulder. "You hear that? There's a diamond mountain in them there hills, and it's all ours."
Odel gave him a pitying look.
"Maybe it's there," Lawrence said. "And that's what you've got to decide. By yourselves. I need to know if you're in or out. All I know for certain is there's evidence of a lot of money up on that plateau, and there's an impact crater in the same place. To me that's more than coincidence, but I can't guarantee anything."
"What sort of proposition are you offering, Sergeant?" Odel asked.
"Equal share for everyone who goes up there with me. We also have to pay off my contact and a spaceplane pilot."
"How do we get there?" Amersy asked.
"We've been assigned a hinterland patrol, leaving oh-eight-thirty tomorrow. Estimated duration two days."
"Jesus." Amersy gave a surprised, slightly troubled grin. "That's some contact you've got. Our assignments come out of Zhang's office."
"I've been planning this for a while" was all Lawrence said. Even now he wasn't about to trust anyone else with Prime.
"Man, we're covered," Lewis said as his smile broadened. "We're going to be up there on an official mission. And the villagers are going to be the last people to protest about some private asset realization. They can't let on they had anything worth taking in the first place." He looked at Lawrence in admiration. "Fucking-a, Sarge. Count me in."
They all turned as Hal began his loud grunting. "I'm. With. Sarge," he ground out. "Need. Money. To. Be. Better. Not. Live. Like. This."
Edmond patted his friend. "It's okay, man. You get a share anyway."
"Actually, if we go we have to take him with us," Lawrence said. "There's nobody here to give him the kind of care he needs. He can ride in the back of the jeep."