“Yeah, but I can’t see where they came from,” Pat said. “There are no roads at all, no way to bring the stone in.”
“Air or river,” Sewell suggested.
“Invade a planet then airlift in stone houses for the population?” Pat said. “Come on, this is weird, but not insane. Besides, there is no sign of any construction activity. The grass and paths haven’t been churned up. And they should have been, the houses have only been here a fortnight at most.”
“They could be something like our programmed silicon,” Kelly said, and rapped a gloved knuckle on the hard gunwale behind her. “Assembled in minutes, and easily airlifted in.”
“They look substantial,” Pat said with vague unease. “I know that’s not an objective opinion, but that’s the way it feels. They’re solid.”
“How many people?” Reza asked.
“Twenty or twenty-five walking about. There must be more inside.”
“OK, this is our first real chance to obtain serious Intelligence data as to what’s going on down here,” Reza said. “We’re going to deactivate the hovercraft and cut through the jungle around the back of Pamiers. After we’ve reached the river again and set up a retreat option, I’ll take Sewell and Ariadne with me into the village, while the rest of you provide us with some cover. Assume anyone you meet is hostile and sequestrated. Any questions?”
“I’d like to come into Pamiers with you,” Kelly said.
“Your decision,” Reza said indifferently. “Any real questions?”
“What information are we looking for?” Ariadne asked.
“Intent and capability,” Reza said. “Also physical disposition of their forces, if we can get it.”
Hackles raised inside her armour, Kelly let the team shove a couple of hovercraft electron matrices into her pack before they all set off again. Reza didn’t want them to walk in single file, for fear of ambush; instead they fanned out through the trees with chameleon circuits on, avoiding animal paths. There was a method of trekking through the raw jungle, Kelly learnt, and for her it was always walking where Jalal walked. He seemed to instinctively find the easiest way around trees and thick undergrowth, avoiding having to force his way against the clawing branches and heavy loam. So she kept her helmet sensors focused on the low-power UV pin-point light at the nape of his neck, and bullied her legs to keep up.
It took them fifty minutes to skirt the village and wind up back at the river. Sewell and Jalal set to activating the hovercraft at the top of a short slope above the water. Kelly dumped her pack into the locker at the rear of the second craft, and felt as though she could fly without the extra weight. With equipment stowed, the team fitted their weapons, checked power and projectile magazines, and set off back towards Pamiers.
Reza found the first corpse two hundred metres short of the village clearing. It was Ryall who smelt it for him, a sharp tang of dead flesh which even the jungle’s muggy air couldn’t disguise. He sent the hound veering off towards it. Ryall promptly smelt another corpse, causing Reza to hurriedly damped down his reception of the hound’s olfactory sense.
It was a child, about five or six, he guessed. Ryall had found it sitting huddled up at the foot of a mayope tree. Age was hard to determine; there wasn’t a lot left, so he had to go by size. Insects and humidity had accelerated the decomposition, though it was strange no animal had disturbed it. According to his didactic memory, sayce were supposed to be fairly brutal carnivores.
He led Sewell, Kelly, and Ariadne through the trees to the body, and dispatched Ryall to the second.
“It’s a girl,” Ariadne said after examining the remains. She held up a nondescript length of filthy, dripping-wet fabric. “This is a skirt.”
Reza wasn’t going to argue. “How did she die?” he asked.
“There are no broken bones, no sign of violence. Judging by the way she’s curled up between the roots I’d say she crawled here to die. Poisoned? Starving? No way of knowing now.”
“Scared of the invaders,” Reza said thoughtfully. “They probably didn’t bother to sequestrate the children.”
“You mean the adults just ignored her?” Kelly asked in disgust.
“Ignored her, or drove her away. A child like this wouldn’t walk around in the jungle by herself. The village had been established long enough for her to pick up basic jungle lore.”
Ryall trotted up to the second corpse, emitting a warm feeling of satisfaction as his muzzle touched the putrefying flesh. Reza picked up the sense of accomplishment and expanded the affinity band allowing himself to see through the hound’s enhanced retinas. “It’s another kid,” he told them. “A bit older, there’s a baby in its arms.” Ryall could scent more decaying meat in the humid air, three or four blends, all subtly different. Closer to the river, Fenton had picked up a further series of traces. “My God,” Reza growled in a dismayed whisper. “They’re everywhere, all around.”
A village like Pamiers would start off with a population of about five hundred. Say two hundred families, and they’ve been here a couple of years. That would mean about a hundred and fifty children.
He stood, scanning the jungle. Slender yellow target graphics slid up over the black and red image in an uncomplicated, unprogrammed reflex. He wanted to shoot something dead. His neural nanonics ordered a slight endocrine effusion, stabilizing the sudden hormonal surge.
“Come on, she can’t help us any more,” he said, and began pushing briskly through the bushes and vines towards the village. He turned his chameleon circuit off, and after a few paces the others followed suit.
Pamiers followed the standard configuration of settlements along the Juliffe’s tributaries. A semicircular clearing chopped out of the jungle along the side of the river. Crude single-storey houses clustered together in no particular order at the centre, along with larger barns, a church, a meeting hall, an Ivet compound. Wooden jetties ventured ten or fifteen metres into the water, with a few fishing skiffs tied up. Fields and plots ringed the outside, a surfeit of crops pushing out of rich black loam.
However, Pamiers’ layout was all that remained recognizable as the four of them stepped out of the trees.
“Where is this light coming from?” Kelly asked, looking round in surprised confusion. As Pat had reported, the village bathed luxuriantly in a bright pool of sunlight, and yellow pollen was thick in the air. She scanned the cloud overhead, but there was no break. Thunder, muted while they were in the trees, rolled insistently around them once more.
Ariadne walked on a few paces, activating her full implant sensor suite as well as the specialist blocks clipped to her belt. She turned a complete circle, sampling the environment. “It’s omnidirectional. We’re not even leaving shadows. See?”
“Like an AV projection,” Reza said.
“Yes and no. The spectrum matches Lalonde’s sun.”
“Let’s go see what those new houses are made of,” he said.
Pamiers’ fields had been left untended. Terrestrial plants were fighting a fierce battle for light and height with the vines that had surged out of the jungle to reclaim their native territory. Fruit was hanging in mouldy white clusters.
Yet inside the ring of fields, the grass around the houses was short and tidy, studded with what looked suspiciously like terrestrial daisies. When he had studied the sheriff’s satellite images on the flight from Tranquillity Reza had seen the way the village clearings were worn down and streaked with muddy runnels. Grass and weeds grew in patchy clumps. But this was an even, verdant carpet that matched Tranquillity’s parkland for vitality.
Stranger still were the houses.
Apart from three burnt-out ruins, the original wooden shacks had been left standing, their planks bleached a pale grey, shuttered windows open to the weather, bark slates slipping and curling, solar-cell panels flapping loosely. They were uninhabited, that was obvious at a glance. Mosses, tufts of grass, and green moulds were tucked into corners and flourishing promisingly. But jammed at random between the creaky cabins were the new structures. None of them was the same, with architectural styles ranging across centuries—a beautiful two-storey Tudor cottage, an Alpine lodge, a Californian millionaire’s cinderblock ranch, a circular black landcoral turret, a marble and silverglass pyramid, a marquee which resembled a cross between a Bedouin tent and a medieval European pavilion, complete with heraldic pennants fluttering on tall poles.
“Having some trouble with my blocks,” Ariadne said. “Several malfunctions. Guido and communications are right out.”
“If it begins to affect the weapons we’ll pull back,” Reza cautioned. “Keep running diagnostic programs.”
They cleared the fields and started to walk over the grass. Ahead of them a woman in a long blue polka-dot dress was pushing a waist-high gloss-black trolley that had a white parasol above it, and huge spindly wheels with chrome wire spokes. Whatever it was, it was impossibly primitive. Reza loaded the image’s pixel pattern into his neural nanonics with an order to run a comparison search program through his encyclopaedia. Three seconds later the program reported it was a European/North American style pram circa 1910–50.
He walked over to the woman, who was humming softly. She had a long face that was crudely painted in so much make-up it was almost a clown’s mask, with dark brown hair worn in a severe bun, encased by a net. She smiled up happily at the four members of the team, as though their weapons and equipment and boosted form were of no consequence.
That simpleton smile was the last straw for Reza, whose nerves were already stretched painfully thin. Either she was retarded, or this whole village was an incredibly warped trap. He activated his short-range precision sensors, and scanned her in both electromagnetic and magnetic spectrums, then linked the return into a fire-command protocol. Any change in her composition (such as an implant switching on or a neural nanonics transmission) and his forearm rifle would slam five EE rounds into her. The rest of his sensors were put into a track-while-scan mode, allowing his neural nanonics to keep tabs on the other villagers he could see walking about among the buildings behind her. He had to use four backup units, several principal sensors had packed up altogether. The overall resolution was way down on the clarity he was used to.
“What the fucking hell’s going on here?” he demanded.
“I have my baby again,” she said in a lilting tone. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“I asked you a question. And you will now answer.”
“Do as he says,” Kelly said hastily. “Please.”
The woman turned to her. “Don’t worry, my dear. You can’t hurt me. Not now, not any more. Would you like to see my baby? I thought I’d lost him. I lost so many back then. It was horrible, all those dead babies. The midwives tried to stop me seeing them; but I looked just the same. They were all perfect, so beautiful, my babies. An evil life it was.” She bent forwards over the pram and lifted out a squirming bundle draped in lacy white cloth. The baby cooed as she held it out.
“Where have you come from?” Reza asked. “Are you the sequestration program?”