“Yes,” Candace Elford agreed. “We ran a diagnostic check on the observation satellite, but there was no malfunction. The images from any other area it views are flawless. The satellite only has trouble when it’s passing over the Quallheim.”
“Oh, come on,” Terrance Smith said. “You can’t mean that the people in the Quallheim Counties can distort our observation, surely?”
Candace Elford considered her answer. She was fifty-seven, and Lalonde was her second appointment as chief sheriff. Both senior appointments had been won because of her thoroughness; she had worked her way up through various colony planet police services, and harboured a kind of bewildered contempt for colonists, who, she had discovered, were capable of damn near anything out in the frontier lands. “It’s unlikely,” she admitted. “The Confederation Navy ELINT satellites haven’t detected any unusual emissions from Schuster County. It’s probably a glitch, that satellite is fifteen years old, and it hasn’t been serviced for the last eleven years.”
“All right,” Colin Rexrew said. “Point noted. We don’t have the money for regular services, as you well know.”
“When it breaks down, a replacement will cost the LDC a lot more than the expense of proper triennial maintenance,” Candace Elford countered.
“Please! Can we stick with the topic in hand,” Colin Rexrew said. He eyed the drinks cabinet longingly. It would have been nice to break open one of the chilled white wines and have a more relaxed session, but Candace Elford would have refused, which would make it awkward. She was such an uncompromising officer; one of his best though, someone the sheriffs respected and obeyed. He needed her, so he put up with her rigid adherence to protocol, counting his blessings.
“Very well,” she said crisply. “As you can see, Aberdale has twelve burnt-out buildings. According to the sheriff in Schuster town, Matthew Skinner, there was some kind of Ivet disturbance four days ago, which is when the buildings were razed. The Ivets allegedly murdered a ten-year-old boy, and the villagers set about hunting them down. Supervisor Manani’s communication block wasn’t working, so an Aberdale villager visited Schuster the day after this murder, and Matthew Skinner reported it to my office. That was three days ago. He said he was riding to Aberdale to investigate; apparently most of the Ivets had been killed by that time. We heard nothing until this morning, when Matthew Skinner said the disturbance was over, and the Aberdale Ivets were all dead.”
“I disapprove of vigilante action,” Colin Rexrew said. “Officially, that is. But given the circumstances I can’t say I blame the Aberdale villagers, those Ivets have always been a mixed blessing. Half of them should never be sent here, ten years’ work-time isn’t going to rehabilitate the real recidivists.”
“Yes, sir,” Candace Elford said. “But that’s not the problem.”
Colin Rexrew brushed back tufts of his thinning hair with clammy hands. “I didn’t think it would be that simple. Go on.”
She datavised an order into the office’s computer. The screens started to display another village; it looked even more impecunious than Aberdale. “This is Schuster town itself,” she said. “The image was recorded this morning. As you can see, there are three burnt-out buildings.”
Colin Rexrew sat up a little straighter behind his desk. “They had Ivet trouble, too?”
“That is the curious thing,” Candace Elford said. “Matthew Skinner never mentioned the fires, and he should have done, fires like that are dangerous in those kinds of communities. The last routine satellite images we have of Schuster are two weeks old, the buildings were intact then.”
“It’s pushing coincidence a long way,” Colin Rexrew said, half to himself.
“That’s what my office thought,” Candace Elford said. “So we started checking a little closer. The Land Allocation Office divided the Quallheim territory up into three counties, Schuster, Medellin, and Rossan, which between them now have ten villages. We spotted burnt-out buildings in six of those villages: Aberdale, Schuster, Qayen, Pamiers, Kilkee, and Medellin.” She datavised more instructions. The screens started to run through the images of the villages her office had recorded that morning.
“Oh, Jesus,” Colin Rexrew muttered. Some of the blackened timbers were still smoking. “What’s been happening up there?”
“First thing we asked. So we called up each of the village supervisors,” Candace Elford said. “Qayen’s didn’t answer, the other three said everything was fine. So we called up the villages that didn’t show any damage. Salkhad, Guer, and Suttal didn’t answer; Rossan’s supervisor said they were all OK, and nothing out of the ordinary was happening. They hadn’t heard or seen anything from any of the other villages.”
“What’s your opinion?” Colin Rexrew asked.
The chief sheriff turned back to the screens. “One final piece of information. The satellite made seven passes over the Quallheim Counties today. Despite the shoddy images, at no time did we see anybody working in any of those fields; not in any of the ten villages.”
Terrance Smith whistled as he sucked air through his teeth. “Not good. There’s no way you’d keep a colonist from his field, not on a day with weather like it has been up there. They are utterly dependent on those crops. The supervisors make it quite plain from the start, once they’re settled, they don’t get any help from Durringham. They can’t afford to leave the fields untended. Remember what happened in Arklow County?”
Colin Rexrew gave his aide an irritable look. “Don’t remind me, I accessed the files when I arrived.” He transferred his gaze to the screens, and the image of Qayen village. A black premonition was rising in his mind. “So what are you telling me, Candace?”
“I know what it looks like,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, that’s all. An Ivet revolt which has successfully taken control of the Quallheim Counties, and in just four days, too.”
“There are over six thousand colonists spread out in those counties,” Terrance Smith said. “Most of them have weapons and aren’t afraid to use them. Against that, there are a hundred and eighty-six Ivets, unarmed and unorganized, and without any form of reliable communication. They’re Earth’s junk, waster kids; if they could organize something like this they would never be here in the first place.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I said I don’t believe it. But what else could it be? Someone from outside? Who?”
Colin Rexrew frowned. “Schuster’s been a problem before. What . . .” He trailed off, requesting a search through the files stored in his neural nanonics. “Ah, yes; the disappearing homestead families. Do you remember, Terrance, I sent a marshal up to investigate last year. Bloody great waste of money that was.”
“It was a waste of money from our point of view because the marshal didn’t find anything,” Terrance Smith said. “That in itself was unusual. Those marshals are good. Which means either it was a genuine case of some animal carrying the families away, or some unknown group was responsible, and managed to cover their tracks to such an extent it fooled both the local supervisor and the marshal. If it was an organized raid, then the perpetrators were at least the equal of our marshal.”
“So?” Colin Rexrew asked.
“So now we have another event, originating in the same county, that would be hard to explain away in terms of an Ivet revolt. Certainly the scale of the trouble argues against it being the Ivets by themselves. But an external group taking over the Quallheim Counties would fit the facts we have.”
“We only have a secondhand report that it was Ivets anyway,” Colin Rexrew said, pondering the unwelcome idea.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” Candace Elford said. “I concede that the facts indicate the Ivets are getting help. But what external group? And why the Quallheim Counties, for God’s sake? There’s no wealth out there; the colonists are barely self-sufficient. There’s no wealth anywhere on Lalonde, come to that.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colin Rexrew said. “Look, I’ve got three river-boats scheduled to leave in two days, they’re taking six hundred fresh settlers up to Schuster County so they can start another village. You’re my security adviser, Candace, are you telling me not to send them?”
“I think my advice would have to be, yes; certainly at this stage. It’s not as if you’re short of destinations. Sending unsuspecting raw colonists into the middle of a potential revolt wouldn’t look good on any of our records. Is there a nearby alternative to Schuster where you can settle them?”
“Willow West County on the Frenshaw tributary,” Terrance Smith suggested. “It’s only a hundred kilometres north-west of Schuster; plenty of room for them there. It’s on our current territory development list anyway.”
“OK,” Colin Rexrew said. “Get it organized with the Land Allocation Office. In the meantime, what do you intend to do about the Quallheim situation, Candace?”
“I want your permission to send a posse up there on the boats with the colonists. Once the colonists have been dropped off at Willow West, the boats can take them on to the Quallheim. As soon as I’ve got reliable people on the ground we can establish what’s really going on and restore some order.”
“How many do you want to send?”
“A hundred ought to be enough. Twenty full-time sheriffs, and the rest we can deputize. God knows, there’s enough men in Durringham who’ll jump at the chance of five weeks cruising the river on full pay. I’d like three marshals, as well, just to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, all right,” Colin Rexrew said. “But just remember it comes out of your budget.”
“It’ll be nearly three weeks before you can get your people up there,” Terrance Smith said thoughtfully.
“So?” the chief sheriff asked. “I can’t make the boats go any faster.”
“No, but a lot can happen in that time. If we believe what we’ve seen so far, this revolt spread down the Quallheim in four days. Taking a worst case scenario, the revolt could carry on growing at the same rate, leaving your initial hundred-strong posse heavily outgunned. What I suggest is that we get the posse out there as fast as physically possible, and stop any further expansion before it gets totally out of hand. We have three VTOL aircraft at the spaceport, BK133s that our ecology research team use for survey missions. They’re subsonic, and they only seat ten, but they could run a relay out to the mouth of the Quallheim. That way we’d have your posse there in two days.”
Colin Rexrew let his head rest on the back of the chair, and ran a cost comparison through his neural nanonics. “Bloody expensive,” he said. “And one of those VTOLs is out of service anyway after last year’s cuts reduced the Aboriginal Fruit Classification budget. We’ll compromise, as always. Candace sends her sheriffs and deputies up to the Quallheim on the river-boats, and her office here in town continues to monitor the situation with the observation satellite. If this revolt, or whatever it is, looks like it’s spreading down out of the Quallheim Counties, we’ll use the VTOLs to reinforce the posse before they get there.”
The electrophorescent cells at the apex of Laton’s singular study were darkened, eradicating external stimuli so he could focus himself on the inner self. Senses crept in on his glacial mind, impressions garnered via affinity from the servitor scouts spread throughout the jungle. The results displeased him enormously. In fact they were edging him towards worry. He hadn’t felt like this since the Edenist Intelligence operatives had closed in, forcing him to flee his original habitat nearly seventy years previously. At that time he had felt fury, fear, and dismay the intensity of which he had never known as an Edenist; it had made him realize how worthless that culture truly was. His rejection had been total after that.
And now something was closing in on him again. Something he neither knew nor understood; something which acted like sequestration nanonics, usurping a human’s original personality and replacing it with mechanoid warrior traits. He had watched the drastically modified behaviour of Quinn Dexter and the Ivets after the incident with the lightning in the jungle. They acted like fully trained mercenary troops, and others they came into contact with soon exhibited similar traits, though a minority of those usurped acted almost normally—most puzzling. Nor did they need weapons, they acquired an ability to throw sprays of photons like a holographic projector, light which could act like a thermal-induction field, but with tremendous power and reach. Yet there was no visible physical mechanism.
Laton had felt the first overspill of pain from Camilla when the Ivets cremated her, mercifully shortened as she lost consciousness. He mourned his daughter as was proper, away in some subsidiary section of his mind, her absence from his life a sting of regret. But the important thing now was the threat he himself faced. In order to confront your enemy without fear, for fear is a bolt in the enemy’s quiver, you must understand your enemy. And understanding was the one thing which had not come in four solid days of supreme cerebral effort.
Some of the glimpses he had snatched through the scouts defied physics. Either that or physics had advanced beyond all reasonable expectations during his exile. That was conceivable, he reasoned, weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.
Memory: of a man looking up at the sky and seeing the affinity bonded kestrel. The man laughed and raised his hand, snapping his fingers. Air around the kestrel solidified, entombing it in a matrix of frozen molecules, and sending it tumbling from the sky to dash its body against the rocks two hundred metres below. A snap of the fingers . . .
Memory: of a frantic terrified villager from Kilkee firing his laser hunting rifle at one of the usurped. The range had been fifteen metres, and the beam had no effect whatsoever. After the first few shots the rifle had died completely. Then the vennal Laton was using to scout with had curled up and sunk into some kind of coma.
The villages throughout the Quallheim Counties had been conquered with bewildering swiftness. That more than anything convinced Laton he was up against some kind of military force. There was a directing intelligence behind the usurped, expanding their numerical strength at an exponential rate. But what really baffled him was why. He had chosen Lalonde because it fitted his long-range goals; other than that it was a worthless planet. Why take control of people out here?