The Night's Dawn Trilogy (181 page)

At first light tomorrow the operation to evacuate the four towns would begin. Now that Diana Tiernan and the AIs were reasonably
satisfied that no possessed were left anywhere else on the continent, Princess Kirsten agreed to dispatch marine troops from
Guyana to assist with the evacuation. All Xingu police reserves would be called in, and together with the marines they would
encircle the towns. Squads would then move in to conduct a house-to-house examination. Non-possessed members of the population
were to be escorted out and flown on military transports to a Royal Navy ground base north of Pasto where they would be housed
for the immediate future.

As for the possessed, they would be given a stark choice: release the body or face imprisonment in zero-tau. No exceptions.

“I think that covers everything,” Admiral Farquar said.

“You’d better make it clear to the marine commanders that they’re not to use assault mechanoids under any circumstances,”
Ralph said. “In fact, the more primitive the systems they deploy, the better.”

“I don’t know if we’ve got enough chemical projectile weapons in store for everyone,” the admiral said. “But I’ll see that
all our current stock is issued.”

“It wouldn’t be too difficult for Ombey’s engineering factories to start production of new projectile rifles and ammunition,”
Ralph said. “I’d like to see what can be done in that direction.”

“It would take at least a couple of days to set up,” Ryle Thorne said. “Our current situation should have been settled by
then.”

“Yes, sir,” Ralph said. “If we truly have got all the possessed trapped on Mortonridge this time. And if no more sneak on
to the planet.”

“Starship interception has been one hundred per cent throughout the Ombey system for the last five hours,” Deborah Unwin said.
“And you were the first ship to arrive from Lalonde, Ralph. I guarantee no more possessed will escape from orbit down to the
planet.”

“Thank you, Deborah,” Princess Kirsten said. “I’m not doubting the competence of your officers, nor the efficiency of the
SD network, but I have to say I think Mr Hiltch is correct in requesting contingency arrangements. What we’ve seen so far
is simply the very first encounter with the possessed; and combating them is absorbing nearly all of our resources. We have
to assume that other planets will not be as successful as us in containing the outbreaks. No, this problem is not one which
is going to go away in the near or even mid-future. And, as is likely, it is proved beyond reasonable doubt that there is
both an afterlife and an afterworld, the philosophical implications are quite extraordinary, and profoundly disturbing.”

“Which brings us to our second problem,” Ryle Thorne said. “What are we going to tell people?”

“Same as always,” Jannike Dermot said. “As little as possible, certainly to start with. We really can’t risk the prospect
of a general panic right now. I would suggest we use the energy virus as a cover story.”

“Plausible,” Ryle Thorne agreed.

The Home Secretary, the Princess, and her equerry put together a statement for general release the next morning. It was instructive
for Ralph to see the Saldana body politic at work in the flesh, as it were. There was no question of the Princess herself
delivering the statement to the news companies. That was the job of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. A Saldana simply
could not announce such appalling news. It was the function of royalty to offer comments of support and sympathy to the victims
at a later date, and people were going to need all the comfort they could get when that byte of official news hit the communications
net.

•  •  •

The town of Exnall sat two hundred and fifty kilometres below the neck of Mortonridge, where the peninsula joined the main
body of the continent. It had been founded thirty years ago, and had grown with confidence ever since. The soil around it
was rich, the haunt of any number of aboriginal plant species, many of which were edible. Farmers came in the hundreds to
cultivate the new species alongside terrestrial crops which thrived in the moist tropical climate. Exnall was a town dominated
by agriculture; even the light industries attracted by the council produced and serviced farm machinery.

But by no means a hick town, Chief Inspector Neville Latham thought as his car drove along Maingreen, which ran straight through
the centre. Exnall had amalgamated with the local harandrid forest instead of chopping it down to make way for buildings as
other Mortonridge towns had done. Even twenty minutes after midnight Maingreen looked superb, the mature trees importing an
air of rustic antiquity for the buildings, as if the two had been coexisting for centuries. Streetlights hanging from overhead
cables cast a glareless haze of orange-white light, turning the harandrids’ dripping leaves a spooky grey. Only a couple of
bars and the all-nighter coffee shop were open; their liquid glass windows swirling in abstract patterns, making it impossible
to see exactly what was happening inside. Not that anything wild ever did take place; Neville Latham knew that from his days
as a patrol officer twenty years ago. Terminal drunks and stim victims slummed the bars, while night shift workers took refuge
in the coffee shop, along with the duty police officers.

The car’s drive processor datavised an update request, and Neville directed it off Maingreen and into the police station’s
car park. Almost all of Exnall’s twenty-five-strong police complement were waiting for him in the station’s situation management
room. Sergeant Walsh stood up as he entered, and the rest stopped talking. Neville took his place at the head of the room.

“Thank you all for coming in,” he said briskly. “As you know from the level two security datavise you’ve received, the Prime
Minister has decreed a continent-wide curfew to come into effect from one o’clock this morning. Now, I’m sure we’ve all accessed
the rumours streaming the net today, so I’d like to clarify the situation for you. First the good news: I’ve been in communication
with Landon McCullock who assures me that Ombey has not been contaminated by a xenoc biohazard as the media has been hinting.
Nor are we under any sort of naval assault. However, it seems someone has released an extremely sophisticated sequestration
technology down here on Xingu.”

Neville watched the familiar faces in front of him register various levels of apprehension. The ever-dependable Sergeant Walsh
remained virtually emotionless, the two detectives, Feroze and Manby, wary and working out angles, genuine disquiet among
the junior patrol officers—who knew full well they’d have the dirty job of actually going out in their cars and enforcing
the curfew order.

He waited a few moments for the grumbles to subside. “Unfortunately, the bad news is that the Privy Council security committee
believes several examples of this technology may already be loose here in Exnall. Which means we are now under a full state
of martial law. Our curfew has to be enforced one hundred per cent, no exceptions. I know this is going to be difficult for
you, we’ve all got family and friends out there, but believe me the best way to help them now is to make sure the order holds.
People must not come into contact with each other; which is how the experts think this technology spreads. Apparently it’s
very hard to spot anyone who has been sequestrated until it’s too late.”

“So we just sit in our homes and wait?” Thorpe Hartshorn asked. “For how long? For what?”

Neville held up a placatory hand. “I’m coming to that, Officer Hartshorn. Our efforts will be supported by a combined team
of police and marines who are going to seal off the entire area. They should be here in another ninety minutes. Once they
arrive all the houses in the town will be searched for any victims of the sequestration, and everyone else is going to be
evacuated.”

“The whole town?” Thorpe Hartshorn asked suspiciously.

“Everybody,” Neville confirmed. “They’re sending over a squadron of military transports to take us away. But it’s going to
take a few hours to organize, so it falls upon us to ensure that the curfew is maintained until then.”

•  •  •

DataAxis, Exnall’s sole news agency, was at the other end of Maingreen from the police station; a shabby, three-storey flat-roofed
office module which made few creditworthy concessions to the sylvan character of the town. The agency itself was a typical
small provincial outfit, employing five reporters and three communications technicians who between them combed the whole county
for nuggets of information. Given the nature of the area their brief was wide-ranging, dealing in local human interest stories,
official events, crime (such as it was), and the horrendously mundane crop price sheets which the office processors handled
with little or no human supervision. Out of this fascinating assortment of articles they had managed to sell precisely four
items to Ombey’s major media companies in the last six weeks.

But that had certainly changed today, Finnuala O’Meara thought jubilantly as the desktop processor finished decrypting the
level two security datavise from Landon McCullock to Neville Latham. She’d spent a solid ten hours fishing the net streams
today, digesting every rumour since yesterday’s Guyana alert. Thanks to the trivia and paranoid nightmares which every bulletin
site geek on the planet had contributed she’d felt completely stimmed out and ready to pack it in. Then an hour ago things
got interesting.

AT Squads had seen action in Pasto. Violent action by all accounts—and still no official media release on that from the police.
The motorways were being shut down clean across the continent. Reports of SD fire on vehicles abounded, including a clear
account of a runaway bus being vaporized not a hundred and fifty kilometres south of Exnall. And now, Xingu’s police commissioner,
in person, informing Neville Latham that an unknown, but probably xenoc, sequestration virus was loose in Exnall.

Finnuala O’Meara datavised a shutdown order into the desktop processor block and opened her eyes. “Bloody hell,” she grunted.

Finnuala was in her early twenties, eleven months out of university in Atherstone. Her initial delight at landing a job within
two days of qualifying, had, during the first quarter of an hour at the agency, turned into dismay. The Exnall agency didn’t
deal in news, it churned out anti-insomnia treatments. Dismay had slumped to surly anger. Exnall was everything which was
rotten with small towns. It was run by a clique, a small elite group of councillors and businessmen and the richer local farmers,
who made the decisions which counted at their dinner parties and out on their golf course.

It was no different from her own hometown, the one over on the Esparta continent where her parents never quite made the leap
to real money contracts because they lacked the connections. Excluded, by class, by money.

She did nothing for half a minute after the decrypted datavise slipped from her mind, sitting staring at the desktop processor.
Accessing the net’s police architecture was illegal enough, owning a level two decryption program was grounds for deportation.
But she couldn’t ignore this.
Couldn’t
. It was everything she’d become a reporter for.

“Hugh?” she called.

The communications technician sharing the graveyard shift with her cancelled the Jezzibella album he was running and gave
her a disapproving look. “What?”

“How would the authorities announce a curfew to the general public, one where everyone is confined to their house? Specifically,
a curfew here in Exnall.”

“Are you having me on?”

“No.”

He blinked away the figments of the flek and accessed a civil procedures file in his neural nanonics. “Okay, I’ve found it;
it’s a pretty simple procedure. The chief inspector will use his code rating to load a universal order into the town’s net
for every general household processor. The message will play as soon as the processor is accessed, no matter what function
you asked for—you tell it to cook your breakfast or vacuum the floor, the first thing it will do is tell you about the curfew.”

Finnuala patted her hands together, charting out options. “So people won’t know about the curfew until tomorrow morning after
they wake up.”

“That’s right.”

“Unless we tell them first.”

“Now you really are winding me up.”

“No way.” The smile on her face was carnivorous. “I know what that prat Latham is going to do next. He’ll warn his friends
before anyone else, he’ll make sure they’re ready to be evacuated first. It’s his style, this whole bloody town’s style.”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” Hugh Rosler said edgily. “If the evacuation is under McCullock’s command, nobody will be able to pull
a fast one from this end.”

Finnuala smiled sweetly and datavised an order into the desktop processor block. It accessed the net’s police architecture
again, and the monitor programs she designated went into primary mode.

The results simmered into Hugh’s mind as a cluster of grey, dimensionless icons. Someone at the police station was datavising
a number of houses in the town and outlying areas. They were personal calls, and the households they were being directed at
were all depressingly familiar.

“He already is,” Finnuala said. “I know these people as well as you do, Hugh. Nothing changes, not even when our planet is
under threat.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“What this agency is supposed to do: inform people. I’ll assemble a package warning everyone about the sequestration, but
instead of just releasing it on the media circuit I want you to program the agency processor to datavise it to everyone in
Exnall right away, coded as a personal priority message. That way we’ll all have an equal chance to get clear when the military
transports arrive.”

“I don’t know about this, Finnuala. Maybe we ought to check with the editor first…” “Bugger the editor,” she snapped. “He
already knows. Look who was seventh on Latham’s list. Do you think his priority is to call us? Do you? Right now he’s getting
his fat wife and their backwards brat dressed ready to take off for the landing site. Are your wife and kids being told, Hugh?
Are they being made safe?”