The Night's Dawn Trilogy (144 page)

Durringham was his ultimate goal. Whatever resources and wealth existed on this misbegotten planet, they resided in the capital.
Scouting it had been his team’s mission. He saw no reason to abandon that assignment. Sitting waiting to die in the jungle
wasn’t a serious option. Recovery and evacuation was obviously out of the question now. So, there it was, an honourable solution;
one which would keep him occupied and motivated, and, should he achieve the impossible and make it, might even accomplish
something worthwhile. Chas Paske was going to go down swinging.

But for all his determination he knew that he was going to have to find an easier way to travel. The medical program was releasing
vast amounts of endocrines from his implants, analgesic blocks had been thrown across a good twenty per cent of his nerve
fibres. Boosted metabolism or not, he couldn’t keep expending energy at this rate.

He accessed his guidance block and summoned up the map. There was a village called Wryde fifteen hundred metres downstream
on the other bank. According to the LDC file it had been established nine years ago.

It would have to do.

He plucked another elwisie fruit, and limped on. One advantage of the thunder was that no one would hear the racket he made
ploughing through the vegetation.

The light was visible long before the first of the houses. A welcome gold-yellow nimbus shrouding the river. Snowlilies glinted
and sparkled with their true opulence. Chas heard a bird again, the silly surprised warble of a chikrow. He lowered himself
in tricky increments, and started to slither forward on his belly.

Wryde had become a thriving, affluent community, far beyond the norm for a stage one colony planet. The town nestled snugly
in a six-square-kilometre clearing that had been turned over to dignified parkland. It was comprised of large houses built
from stone or brick or landcoral, all of them the kind of elegantly sophisticated residence that a merchant or wealthy farmer
would own. The main street was a handsome tree-lined boulevard, bustling with activity: people wandering in and out of the
shops, sitting at the tables of pavement cafÉs. Horse-drawn cabs moved up and down. An impressive red-brick civic hall stood
at one end, four storeys high, with an ornate central clock tower. He saw some kind of sports field just outside the main
cluster of houses. People dressed all in white were playing a game he didn’t know while spectators picnicked round the boundary.
Close to the jungle at the back of the park, five windmills stood alongside a lake, their huge white sails turning steadily
even though there was very little breeze. Grandiose houses lined the riverbank, lawns extending down to the water. They all
had boat-houses or small jetties; rowing-boats and sailing dinghies were moored securely against the sluggish tide of snowlilies.
Larger craft had been drawn up on wooden slipways.

It was the kind of community every sane person would want to live in; small-town cosiness, big-city stability. Even Chas,
lying in muddy loam under a bush on the opposite bank, felt the subtle attraction of the place. By simply existing it offered
the prospect of belonging to a perpetual golden age.

His retinal implants showed him the sunny, happy faces of the citizens as they went about their business. Scanning back and
forth he couldn’t see anyone labouring in the pristine gardens, or sweeping the streets; no people, no bitek servitors, no
mechanoids. The nearest anyone came to work was the cafÉ proprietors, and they seemed cheerful enough, chatting and laughing
with their customers. All generals and no privates, he thought to himself. It isn’t real.

He accessed the guidance block again. A green reference grid slipped up over his vision and he focused on a jetty at the far
end of the town’s clearing. The block calculated its exact coordinate and integrated it into the map.

When he checked his physiological status, the neural nanonics reported his haemoglobin reserve was down to half an hour. His
metabolism wasn’t producing it with anything like its normal efficiency. He ran through the guidance block’s display one last
time. Half an hour ought to be enough.

Chas started to crawl forwards again, easing himself down the muddy slope and into the water like an arthritic crocodile.

Twenty minutes later he judiciously parted a pair of snowlilies and let his rigid moulded face stick up out of the water.
The guidance block had functioned flawlessly, delivering him right beside the jetty. A trim blue-painted rowing-boat was pulling
gently against its mooring two metres away. There was nobody anywhere near. He reached up and cut the pannier with his fission
blade, grabbing the end as it fell into the water.

The boat started to drift with the snowlilies. Chas dropped below the surface.

He waited as long as he dared. The neural nanonics’ physiological monitor program was flashing dire warnings of oxygen starvation
into his brain before he risked surfacing.

Wryde was out of sight round a curve, although the ordinary light which clung to its rolling parkland was spilling round the
trees on the bank. When he looked at his prize it had changed from the well-crafted skiff he had stolen to a dilapidated punt
that was little more than a raft. Tissue-thin gunwales, which had been added in what must have been a surreal afterthought,
were crumbling like rotten cork before his eyes. They left a wake of dark mushy dust on the snowlilies.

Chas waited a minute to see if any other drastic changes were going to occur. He rapped experimentally on the

wood which was left. It seemed to be solid enough. So with a great deal of effort, and coming dangerously near to capsizing,
he managed to half-clamber, half-roll into the shallow bottom of the boat.

He lay there inertly for a long time, then ponderously raised himself onto his elbows. The boat was drifting slowly into the
bank. Long slippery ribbons of foltwine were trailing from his splint. River beetles crawled over his thigh wound. Both the
medical nanonic packages were approaching overload trying to screen the blood from the lower half of his leg.

“Apart from that, fine,” he said. His grating voice provided a harsh discord to the persistent fruity rumble of thunder.

He crushed or swept away as many of the beetles and other insects as he could. Naturally there weren’t any oars. He cut through
the vines holding his splint together, and used one of the laths to scull away from the bank and back into the main current.
It took a while, with the snowlilies resisting him, but when he was back in the middle of the river the boat began to move
noticeably swifter. He made himself as comfortable as possible, and watched the tall trees go past with an increasing sense
of eagerness. A keen amateur student of military history, Chas knew that back on old Earth they used to say all roads led
to Rome. Here on Lalonde, all the rivers led to Durringham.

A bubble of bright white light squatted possessively over Aberdale. From the air it appeared as though the village was sheltering
below a translucent pearl dome to ward off the perverse elements assailing the jungle. Octan circled it at a respectable distance,
wings outstretched to their full metre and a half span, riding the thermals with fluid ease, contemptuous of gravity. The
jungle underneath him was the same discoloured maroon as the sky. But away to the south a single narrow horizontal streak
of bright green shone with compulsive intensity. Instinctively he wanted to soar towards it, to break out into the cleanliness
of real light.

Tandem thoughts circulated through the bird’s brain, his kindly master’s wishes directing his flight away from the purity,
and tilting his head so that he looked at the buildings in the middle of the illuminated clearing. Enhanced retinas zoomed
in.

“It’s virtually the same as Pamiers,” Pat Halahan said. “They’ve got maybe fifty of those fancy houses put up. The ground
is all lawns and gardens, right out to the jungle. No sign of any fields or groves.” He leaned forwards blindly. Octan casually
curved a sepia wing-tip, altering his course by a degree. “Now that is odd. Those trees along the riverbank look like terrestrial
weeping willows. But they’re big, twenty metres plus. Got to be thirty years old.”

“Don’t count on it,” Kelly muttered in a surly undertone, covering subtler emotions. “In any case, this is the wrong climate.”

“Yeah, right,” Pat said. “Switching to infrared. Nope. Nothing. If there’s any installation underground, Reza, then they’re
dug in way deep.”

“OK,” the team commander said reluctantly. “Have Octan scout further east.”

“If you want. But it doesn’t look like there are any more inhabited clearings in the jungle that way. He can see the light
from Schuster quite plainly from his altitude. There’s nothing like that eastwards.”

“They aren’t going to advertise with hundred-kilowatt holograms, Pat.”

“Yes, sir. East it is.”

A crucial urge to explore the as-yet-unseen land beyond the village flowed through Octan’s synapses, and the big eagle wheeled
abruptly, reducing landscape and injured sky to chaotic smears.

The mercenary team were also marching eastwards, but they were on the Quallheim’s northern shore, keeping roughly parallel
to the water, a kilometre inland. They had come ashore west of Schuster where deirar trees covered the ground as thoroughly
as though they were a plantation. Such regularity made the team’s journey much easier than their first venture ashore when
they had bypassed Pamiers.

The deirars’ thick smooth boles rose straight up for twenty-five metres then opened into an umbrella of vegetation that formed
a near-solid roof. Together they formed a sylvestral cathedral of enormous proportions. Everywhere the mercenaries looked
they could see sturdy jet-black bark pillars supporting the dovetailing leaf domes. On this side of the river the usual deluge
of vines and undergrowth was little more than a wispy clutter of straggly sun-starved weeds, long stemmed and pale, heavy
with grey mould.

It was Reza who led the march, although he had sent Theo scampering across the treetop canopy on the lookout for hostiles.
Few of them had escaped from Pamiers uninjured. He counted himself among the fortunate, with a burn on the rear of his skull
that had scorched a couple of sensor warts down to the monobonded carbon reinforced bone; torso scores, and a spiral weal
on his right leg. Of all of them, Kelly had borne the worst injury; but the medical packages had resuscitated her to mobile
status. She walked with a small cylindrical shoulder-bag carrying her kit; her armour trousers protected her legs from thorns,
and an olive-green T-shirt which the red light had turned a raw umber covered the bulge of medical packages on her side.

Pamiers had delivered a deft lesson, bruising their pride as well as their skin. But an important lesson, to Reza’s mind.
The team had learnt to give the sequestrated population a proper degree of respect. He wasn’t going to risk probing a village
again.

Fenton and Ryall padded tirelessly through the jungle on the southern bank, skirting Aberdale by a wide margin. Jungle sounds
filled their ears in the short gaps between the red cloud’s perpetual thunder peals. The organic perfume of a hundred different
flowers and ripening vine fruits trickled through the muggy air, a vital living counterpoint to the stink of dead children.

Reza nudged the hounds further south, away from the now-foreign village, from the smell of the small decaying bodies, its
voodoo fence, away from the terrible price Lalonde’s populace had paid under the invaders’ regime. Narrow leaves, mottled
with fungal furs, parted round the hounds’ muzzles. Chilly distaste and shame—almost inevitably, shame—wormed its trenchant
way into their minds along the affinity bond; they shared their master’s susceptibilities, becoming as keen as he to leave
the heartbreaker calamity behind.

New scents rode the air: sap dripping from snapped vine strands, crushed leaves, loam ruffled by footprints and wheel tracks.
The hounds raced ahead, guided by primal senses. People had been this way recently. Some, but not many.

Reza saw a path through the jungle. An old animal track running north–south, enlarged some time ago—branches cut back by fission
blades, bushes hacked away—only to fall into disuse again. Almost, but not quite. Somebody still used it. Someone had used
it less than two hours ago.

Nerves and instinct fired now, Fenton and Ryall loped through the moist grass towards the south. After two kilometres they
found a scent trail branching off into the jungle. One person, male. His clothes smearing the leaves with sweat and cotton.

“Pat, bring Octan back. I think we’ve got our man.”

Reza kept the snatch mission simple. The team activated their hovercraft again when they were back on the Quallheim east of
Aberdale and started searching for a tributary fork on the south bank. According to the map stored in his guidance block there
was a modest river which ran south through the jungle, coming from the mountains on the far side of the savannah. It took
them five minutes to find it, and the hovercraft nosed over the clot of snowlilies guarding its mouth. Plaited tree boughs
formed an arched screen overhead.

“After the snatch we’ll keep going up this river and out onto the savannah,” Reza said when they had left the Quallheim behind.
“I want to get him and us out from under this bloody cloud as quickly as possible. We should be able to access the communication
satellites as well once we’re clear of it. That way if we can extract any useful information it can be delivered straight
up to Terrance Smith.”

If Smith is still up there, Kelly thought. She couldn’t forget what the woman in Pamiers had said about the starships fighting.
But Joshua had promised to stay and pick them up. She gave a cynical little sniff. Oh yes, the Confederation’s Mr. Dependable
himself.

“You all right?” Ariadne asked, raising her voice above the steady propeller whine and the rambling thunder booms.

“My analgesic blocks are holding,” Kelly said. “It was just the size of the burn which shocked me.” She resisted the urge
to scratch the medical nanonic packages.