The carrier wave hissed for another couple of seconds, then fell silent. “God Almighty,” Candace Elford whispered. She was sitting at her desk at the end of the rectangular room. Like most of the capital’s civic buildings, the sheriff’s headquarters was made of wood. It sat in its own square fortified enclosure a couple of hundred metres from the governor’s dumper, a simplistic design that any pre-twentieth-century soldier would have felt at home in. The command centre itself formed one side of the parade ground, a long single-storey building with four grey composite spheres housing the satellite uplinks spaced along the apex of the roof. Inside, plain wooden benches ran around the walls, supporting an impressive array of modern desktop processor consoles operated by sheriffs seated in composite chairs. On the wall opposite Candace Elford’s desk a big projection screen displayed a street map of Durringham (as far as it was possible to map that conglomeration of erratic alleyways and private passages). Conditioners hummed unobtrusively to keep the temperature down. The atmosphere of technological efficiency was spoilt slightly by the fans of yellow-grey fungus growing out of the skirting-board underneath the benches.
“Contact lost,” Mitch Verkaik, the sheriff sitting at the tactical communication station reported, stone faced.
Candace turned to the small team she had assigned to monitor the posse’s progress. “What about the sheriffs on the ground? Did they see it come down?”
Jan Routley was operating the satellite link to the Swithland survivors; she loaded an order into her console. “There is no response from any communicator on the Swithland or the Hycel . I can’t even raise a transponder identity code.”
Candace studied the situation display projected by her own console’s AV pillar, more out of habit than anything else. She knew they were all waiting for her to rap out orders, smooth and confident, producing instant perfect solutions like an ambulatory computer. It wasn’t going to happen. The last week had been a complete nightmare. They couldn’t contact anyone in the Quallheim Counties or Willow West any more, and communications with villages along the Zamjan were patchy. The reinforcement flights to Ozark were a stopgap at best; privately she had intended that the fresh men and weapons would simply safeguard an evacuation of settlers down the river. She had long since abandoned the idea of restoring order to the Quallheim Counties, confinement was her best hope. Now it looked like Ozark was inside the affected zone. Seventy men and almost a quarter of her armoury.
“Call the second BK133 back to Durringham right away,” she said shortly. “If the invaders can bring down one, they can bring down another.” And at least ten sheriffs with their heavy-duty weapons would be saved. They might need them badly in the weeks to come. It was pretty obvious the invaders were intent on complete domination of the planet.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mitch Verkaik turned back to his console.
“How long before the observation satellite makes a pass over the paddle-boats?” Candace asked.
“Fifteen minutes,” Jan Routley answered.
“Program it for an infrared overscan fifty kilometres either side of its orbital track, see if it can locate the downed BK133. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot.” She rested her chin in her hands, staring blankly at her desktop processor. Protecting Durringham was her priority now, she decided. They must hold on to the city until the LDC sent a combat force capable of regaining the countryside. She was convinced they were faced with an invasion, the hour-long briefing she’d had with Kelven Solanki that morning had put paid to any final doubts. Kelven was badly worried, which wasn’t like him at all.
Candace hadn’t told her staff what Kelven had said to her, about the possible use of sequestration and river-boats that might have already brought a preliminary platoon of invaders to Durringham. It didn’t bear thinking about. There were three chairs conspicuously empty in the command centre today; even the sheriffs were reverting to a self-protective mentality. She couldn’t blame them; most had a family in the city, and none had signed on to fight a well-organized military force. But she’d agreed to cooperate with the Confederation Navy office in reviewing satellite image records of river traffic for the last fortnight.
“We’re receiving the images now,” Jan Routley called out.
Candace stirred herself, and walked over to the woman’s position. Kilometre after kilometre of jungle streamed across the high-definition holoscreen; the green treetops were overlaid by transparent red shadows to indicate the temperature profile. The Zamjan leapt into view at the bottom of the screen, Swithland ’s stern jutting out onto the water from under the bankside canopy of vegetation. Graphics flashed across the holoscreen, drawing orange circles around a glade close to the water.
“It’s a fire,” Jan Routley said. She datavised an order into the desktop processor to centre on the infrared source. The clearing expanded on the screen, showing a bonfire burning in its centre. There were blankets and the unmistakable white cargo-pods of homesteading gear littered about. Several trees had been felled on one side. “Where have all the people gone?” she asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know,” Candace said. “I really don’t.”
It was midafternoon, and the Coogan was twenty-five kilometres downriver from the abandoned paddle-boats when Len Buchannan and Darcy spotted the first pieces of flotsam bobbing about in the water. Crates of farmsteading gear, lengths of planking, fruit. Five minutes later they saw the first body: a woman in a one-piece ship-suit, face down, with arms and legs spread wide.
“We’re turning back now,” Len informed him.
“All the way to the mouth of the Quallheim,” Darcy reminded him.
“Shove your money and your contract.” He started turning the wheel. “You think I’m blind to what’s going on? We’re already in the rebel area. It’s gonna take a miracle to get us downriver if we start now, never mind from another hundred and fifty kilometres further east.”
“Wait,” Darcy put his hand on the wheel. “How far to Ozark?”
Scowling, Len consulted an ancient guidance block sitting on a shelf in the wheel-house. “Thirty kilometres, maybe thirty-five.”
“Put us ashore five kilometres short of the village.”
“I dunno—”
“Look, the eagles can spot any boat coming down the river ten kilometres ahead of us. If one does come, then we turn round immediately and sail for Durringham. How does that sound?”
“Why didn’t the eagles spot all this, then? Hardly something you could miss.”
“They’re out over the jungle. We’ll call them back now. Besides, it could be a genuine accident. There might be people hurt up ahead.”
The lines around Len’s mouth tightened, reflecting his indecision. No true captain would ignore another boat in distress. A broken chunk of yellow foam packaging scraped down the side of the Coogan . “All right,” he said, clutching at the wheel. “But the first sign of trouble, and I’m off downriver. It’s not the money. Coogan ’s all I’ve got, I built her with my own hands. I ain’t risking the old girl for you.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just as anxious as you that nothing happens to the boat, or you. No matter what we find in the villages, we’ve still got to get back to Durringham. Lori and I are too old to walk.”
Len grunted dismissively, but started feeding the wheel round again, lining the prow up on the eastern horizon.
The affinity call went out, and Abraham and Catlin curved through the clear air, racing for the river. From their vantage point seven kilometres ahead of the Coogan they could see tiny scraps of debris floating slowly in the current. They were also high enough for the water to be almost completely transparent. Lori could see large schools of brown-spines and reddish eel-analogues swimming idly.
It wasn’t until the sun was a red-gold ball touching the treetops ahead of the little trader boat that the eagles found the paddle-boats jammed into opposite banks. Lori and Darcy guided them in long spirals above the surrounding jungle, searching for the colonists and crew and posse. There was nobody on the boats, or in the camps that had been set up.
There’s one,lori said. she felt darcy come into the link with Abraham, looking through the bird’s enhanced eyes. Down below, a figure was slipping through the jungle. The tightly packed leaves made observation difficult, granting them only the most fleeting of glimpses. It was a man, a new colonist they judged, because he was wearing a shirt of synthetic fabric. He was walking unhurriedly westwards, parallel to the river about a kilometre inland.
Where does he think he’s going?darcy asked. There isn’t another village on this side for fifty kilometres.
Do you want to send Abraham down below the tree level for a better look?
No. My guess is this man’s been sequestrated. They all have.
There were nearly seven hundred people on those three boats.
Yes.
And there are close to twenty million people on Lalonde. How much would it cost to sequestrate them all?
A lot, if you used nanonics.
You don’t think it is nanonics?
No; Laton said it was an energy virus. Whatever that is.
And you believe him?
I hate to say it, but I’m giving what he said a great deal of credence right now. There’s certainly something at work here beyond our normal experience.
Do you want to capture this man? If he is a victim of the virus we should learn all we need to know from him.
I’d hate to try chasing anyone through this jungle, especially a lone man on foot who obviously has colleagues nearby.
We go on to Ozark, then?
Yes.
The Coogan advanced up the river at a much slower pace, waiting for the sun to set before passing the two paddleboats. For the first time since he arrived on the planet, Darcy actually found himself wishing it would rain. A nice thick squall would provide extra cover. As it was they had to settle for thin clouds gusting over Diranol, subduing its red lambency to a sourceless candle-glow which reduced ordinary visibility to a few hundred metres. Even so the trader’s wheezing engines and clanking gearbox sounded appallingly loud on the night-time river where silence was sacrosanct.
Lori engaged her retinal implants as they crept thieflike between the two boats. Nothing moved, there were no lights. The two derelicts set up cold resonances in her heart she couldn’t ignore. The ships brooded.