Marie was following him down the stairs, her pretty face registering a slight sulk, nose all crinkled up at the scent of the jungle. Even that didn’t bother him; she was seventeen, nothing in life was right when you were seventeen. Give her two years, she’d grow out of it.
His eldest daughter, Paula, who was nineteen, was staring round appreciatively. Her new husband, Frank Kava, stood beside her with his arm protectively round her shoulder, smiling at the vista. The two of them sharing the moment of realization, making it special. Now Frank had what it took, a perfect son-in-law. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. Any homestead with Frank as a partner was bound to prosper.
The apron in front of the hangar was made from compacted rock chips, with puddles everywhere. Six harried Lalonde Development Company officers were collecting the passengers’ registration cards at the bottom of the steps, running them through processor blocks. Once the data was verified, each immigrant was handed a Lalonde citizenship card and an LDC credit disk with their Govcentral funds converted to Lalonde francs, a closed currency, no good anywhere else in the Confederation. Gerald had known that would happen; he had a Jovian Bank credit disk stashed in an inner pocket, carrying three and a half thousand fuseodollars. He nodded thanks as he received his new card and disk, and the officer directed him towards the cavernous hangar.
“You’d think they’d be a bit better organized,” Loren muttered, cheeks puffed against the heat. It had taken fifteen minutes’ queueing before they got their new cards.
“Want to go back already?” Gerald teased. He was holding up his citizenship card, grinning at it.
“No, you wouldn’t come with me.” The eyes smiled, but the tone lacked conviction.
Gerald didn’t notice.
In the hangar they joined the waiting passengers from an earlier spaceplane flight, where the LDC officer collectively labelled them Transient Group Seven. A manager from the Land Allocation Office told them there was a boat scheduled to take them upriver to their allocated settlement land in two days. They would be sleeping in a transients’ dormitory in Durringham until it departed. And they’d have to walk into town, though she promised a bus for the smaller children.
“Dad!” Marie hissed through her teeth as the groans rose from the crowd.
“What? You haven’t got legs? You spent half the time at your day club in the gym.”
“That was muscle toning,” she said. “Not forced labour in a sauna.”
“Get used to it.”
Marie almost started to answer back, but caught the look in his eye. She exchanged a slightly worried glance with her mother, then shrugged acceptance. “OK.”
“What about our gear?” someone asked the manager.
“The Ivets will unload it from the spaceplane,” she said. “We’ve got a lorry ready to take it into town, it’ll go straight onto the boat with you.”
After the colonists started their march into town a couple of the spaceport ground crew marshalled Quinn and the other Involuntary Transportees into a work party. So his first experience of Lalonde was spending two hours lugging sealed composite containers out of a spaceplane’s cargo hold, and stacking them on lorries. It was heavy work, and the Ivets stripped down to their shorts; it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference to Quinn, sweat appeared to have consolidated into a permanent layer on his skin. One of the ground crew told them that Lalonde’s gravity was fractionally less than Earth standard; he couldn’t feel that, either.
About quarter of an hour into the job he noticed the ground crew had all slunk back into the shade of the hangar. Nobody was bothering with the Ivets.
Two more McBoeing BDA-9008s landed, bringing another batch of colonists down from the orbiting starship. One spaceplane took off, ferrying LDC personnel up to the empty berths; they were going home, their contract time expired. He stopped to watch the big dark delta-shape soar into the sky, dwindling away to the east. The sight laced his thoughts with vicious envy. And still nobody was paying him any attention. He could run, here and now, away into that awesome expanse of untamed land beyond the perimeter. But the spaceport was the place where he wanted to run to , and he could well imagine how the homesteaders would treat fugitive Ivets. He might have been stupid enough to be Transported, but he wasn’t that naïve. Cursing softly under his breath, he hauled another composite box full of carpentry tools out of the McBoeing’s hold and carried it over to the lorry.
By the time the Ivets finished the unloading and began their long trudge into Durringham the clouds from the west had arrived bringing a warm, persistent rain. Quinn wasn’t surprised to find his grey jump suit turned out not to be waterproof.
The Lalonde Immigration Registration Department manager’s office was in an administration block grafted onto the spaceport’s flight-control centre. A long rectangular flat roof structure of ezystak panels clipped onto a metal frame. It had been assembled twenty-five years previously when the first colonists arrived, and its austere fittings were showing their age. Lalonde didn’t even rate programmed-silicon constructs for its administration buildings, Darcy thought bleakly; at least the Lunar-built structures had some concessions to comfortable living. If ever a colony project was funded on the cheap, it was Lalonde. But the office did have air-conditioning, powered from solar cells. The temperature was appreciably lower than outside, though the humidity remained constant.
He sat on the settee working his way through the registration cards which the latest batch of arrivals had handed over in exchange for their citizenship and LDC credit disks. The starship had brought five and a half thousand people from Earth; five and a half thousand losers, dreamers, and criminals let loose to wreck another planet in the name of noble destiny. After sixty years in the Edenist Intelligence agency, Darcy couldn’t think of Adamists in any other terms. And they claim they’re the normal ones, he thought wryly, give me ungodly freakishness every time.
He entered another card’s memory into his processor block, glancing briefly at the hologram. A fairly handsome twenty-year-old man, face composed, eyes haunted with fear and hatred. Quinn Dexter, an Involuntary Transportee. The processor block balanced on his lap didn’t respond to the name.
The card was tossed onto the growing pile. Darcy picked up another.
“Something you never told me,” Nico Frihagen said from behind his desk. “Who are you people looking for?”
Darcy looked up. Nico Frihagen was Lalonde’s Immigration Registrar, a grand title for what was essentially a clerk working in the Governor’s Civil Administration Division. He was in his late fifties, dourly Slavic in appearance, with rolling jowls and limp receding hair. Darcy suspected his ancestors had had very little to do with geneering. The slobbish civil servant was drinking beer from a tube, an offworld brand, no doubt pilfered from some unsuspecting arrival’s farmsteading gear. Spaceport staff had a nice racket going ripping off the new colonists. Nico Frihagen was an essential segment of the scam; a list of belongings was included on the colonists’ registration cards.
That readiness to jam his nose in the trough made the registrar an ideal contact for the Edenist operatives. For a straight five hundred fuseodollars a month, Darcy and his partner, Lori, ran through the new immigrants’ identification without having to access the colony’s civic data store.
Details on the immigrants were sparse, the Lalonde Development Company didn’t really care who settled the planet as long as they paid their passage and land registration fee. The company wouldn’t declare a dividend for another century yet, when the population had grown above a hundred million and an industrial economy was rising to replace the agrarian beginnings. Planets were always very long term investments. But Darcy and Lori kept ploughing through the data. Routine procedure. Besides, someone might get careless.
“Why do you want to know? Has somebody been showing an interest?” Lori asked, sitting at the other end of the settee from Darcy. A seventy-three-year-old woman with plain auburn hair and a round face, she looked about half of Nico Frihagen’s age. Like Darcy she lacked the distinctive height of most Edenists, which made both of them ideal for deep cover work.
“No.” Nico Frihagen gestured with the beer tube. “But you’ve been doing this for three years now, hell probably for three years before that for all I know. It’s not just the money, that doesn’t mean much to you people. No, it’s the time you spend. That’s got to mean you’re searching for someone important.”
“Not really,” Lori said. “It’s a type of person we’re after, not a specific individual.”
Good enough,darcy told her silently.
Let’s hope he’s satisfied with it,she replied.
Nico Frihagen took a swig of beer. “What type?”
Darcy held up his personal processor block. “The profile is loaded in here, available on a need to know basis. Do you think you need to know, Nico?”
“No. I just wondered. There have been rumours, that’s all.”
“What sort of rumours, Nico?”
Nico Frihagen gazed out of the office’s window, watching an Ivet team unloading a McBoeing BDA-9008. “Upriver. Some settlers vanished, a couple of homesteads up in Schuster County. The sheriffs couldn’t find any trace of them, no sign of a struggle, no bodies; just empty houses.”
Where the heck is Schuster County?lori asked.
Darcy queried the bitek processor in his block; a map of the Juliffe’s tributary basin bloomed in his mind. Schuster County glowed a soft amber, a sprawling area, roughly rectangular, clinging to the side of the Quallheim River, one of the hundreds of tributaries. Like Nico said, way upriver. Over a thousand kilometres; it’s an area they’re just opening up for settlement.
It could be some kind of big animal. A kroclion, or even something the ecological analysis crew didn’t find.
Maybe.darcy couldn’t bring himself to believe that. “So what was the rumour about it, Nico? What are people saying?”
“Not much, not many people know. The Governor wanted it kept quiet, he was worried about stirring up trouble with the Tyrathca farmers, there’s a group of them on the other side of the savannah which borders Schuster County. He thought they’d get the blame, so the county sheriff hasn’t made an official report. The homesteads have been listed as abandoned.”
“When did this happen?” Lori asked.
“Couple of weeks back.”
Not much to go on,lori said.
It’s remote enough. The kind of area he’d go to.
I concede that. But what would he want with some hick farmers?
Insufficient data.
Are we going to go and check?