The Night's Dawn Trilogy (62 page)

“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?

A test was the only explanation he could think of. Which begged the question what was it a preliminary to? The potential was
awesome.
Laton?
Waldsey’s mental tone was fearful and uncertain, not like him at all.

Yes,
Laton replied equitably. He could guess what was coming next. After sixty years he knew the way his colleagues’ minds worked
better than they did. He was only mildly surprised that it had taken them so long to confront him.

Do you know what it is yet?

No. I have been considering some kind of viral nanonic, but the number of demonstrated functions it possesses would be orders
of magnitude above anything we even have theories for. And some of those functions are difficult to explain in terms of the
physics we know and understand. In short, if you have a technology that powerful, why bother using it in this fashion? It
is most puzzling.

Puzzling!
Tao said angrily.
Father, it is bloody lethal, and it’s right outside the tree. To hell with
puzzling
, we have to do something.

Laton let the glimmer image of a smile penetrate their shared affinity. Only his children ever dared to contradict him, which
pleased him after a fashion; obsequiousness was something he disapproved of almost as much as disloyalty. Which gave everybody
a narrow, and perilous, balance to maintain.
No doubt you have an idea as to what we should do.

Yeah. Load up the landcruisers, and head for the hills. Call it a strategic withdrawal, call it prudence, but just let’s get
out
of this tree. Now. While we still can. I don’t mind admitting I’m frightened, if nobody else will.

I would imagine that even this planet’s chief sheriff will know that something odd is happening in Aberdale and the other
Quallheim villages by now,
Laton said. He sensed the others coming into the conversation, their minds carefully shielded from leaking too many emotions.
The LDC’s surveillance satellite may be in a deplorable condition, but I assure you it would be quite capable of spotting
the landcruisers. And it will be focused on the Quallheim Counties with considerable diligence.

So? We just zap it. The old blackhawk masers you brought down can reach it. It’ll be weeks before the LDC replace it. By that
time we’ll be long gone. They’ll see the track we made breaking through the jungle, but once we reach the savannah they’ll
lose us.

I would remind you just how close to success our immortality project is. Are you willing to sacrifice that?

Father, unless we get out of here, we aren’t going to have a project left, or a life to immortalize. We can’t defend ourselves
against these usurped villagers. I’ve watched what happens when anyone shoots them. They don’t even notice it! And even if
somebody does manage to beat them, the Quallheim Counties are going to be searched a centimetre at a time afterwards. Either
way, we can’t stay here.

The lad’s got a point there, Laton,
Salkid said.
We can’t cling on here simply out of sentiment.

You always told me knowledge can’t be destroyed,
Tao said.
We know how to splice a parallel-processing brain together. What we need is a secure location in which to do it. The tree
certainly isn’t it, not any more.

Well argued,
Laton said.
Except I’m not sure anywhere on Lalonde can be classed as safe any more. This technology is fearsome.
He deliberately allowed his emotional shield to slip, and felt the shocked recoil of their thoughts that he who never demonstrated
weakness was so deeply perturbed.

We can hardly walk into Durringham’s spaceport and ask for a lift outsystem,
Waldsey said.

The children can,
Laton said.
They have been born here, the intelligence agencies have no record of them. Once in orbit they can secure a starship for us.

Bloody hell, you mean it.

Indeed. It is the logical course. At the ultimate extreme, I am prepared to contact the Intelligence agencies in Durringham
and report the situation to them. They will take me seriously, and that way a warning will get out.

Is it that bad, Father?
Salsett asked anxiously.

Laton projected a burst of reassuring warmth at the fifteen-year-old girl.
I don’t think it will come to that, darling.

Leaving the tree,
she said wonderingly.

Yes,
he said.
Tao, that was a good suggestion of yours; you and Salkid take a blackhawk maser out of storage, and be ready to eliminate
that observation satellite. The rest of you have ten hours to pack. We start for Durring-ham tonight.

He couldn’t detect a single whiff of dissension. Minds retreated from the affinity contact.

In the hours which followed, the gigantea tree was subject to the kind of coordinated activity it hadn’t seen since their
arrival. Orders were flung frantically at the incorporated and the housechimps as the residents attempted to dismantle the
work of thirty years in the short hours they had left. Heartbreaking decisions were made over what could go and what must
stay, several couples arguing. The landcruisers had to be checked over and prepared after thirty years’ unemployment. Laton’s
younger children scampered about getting in the way, nervous and elated at the prospect of leaving; the older members of the
fellowship started thinking about the Confederation worlds again. Thermal charges were set throughout the rooms and corridors,
ready to obliterate all trace of the gigantea’s secrets.

The hectic activity registered as a background burble amid Laton’s steely thoughts. Occasionally someone would intrude into
his contemplation to ask for instructions.

After designating the few personal items he wanted to accompany them, he spent his time reviewing the memory of what happened
in the clearing when Quinn Dexter killed Supervisor Manani. That strange lightning was the start of it. He ran and re-ran
Camilla’s memory images, which were stored in the tree’s sub-sentient bitek processor array. The lightning seemed to be flat,
almost compressed, some sections darker than others. As he ran the memory again the dark areas moved, sliding down the glaring
streamers of rampaging electrons. The lightning bolts were acting as conduits to some kind of energy pattern, one which behaved
outside the accepted norm.

A draught of air stroked his face. He opened his eyes to darkness. The study was as it always had been. He switched his retinal
implants to infrared. Jackson Gael and Ruth Hilton stood on the curving wood before him.

“Clever,” Laton said. His contact with the processors faded away. Affinity was reduced to a whisper rattling round the closed
confines of his skull. “It’s energy, isn’t it? A self-determining viral program that can store itself in a non-physical lattice.”

Ruth bent down, and put her hand under his chin, tilting his face up so she could examine him. “Edenists. Always so rational.”

“But where did it come from, I wonder?” Laton asked.

“What will it take to break his beliefs?” Jackson Gael asked.

“It’s not of human origin,” Laton said. “I’m sure of that; nor any of the xenoc races we know.”

“We’ll find out tonight,” Ruth said. She let go of Laton’s chin, and held out her hand. “Come along.”

The morning after Governor Rexrew’s briefing with Can-dace Elford, Ralph Hiltch was sitting behind his own desk in the Kulu
Embassy dumper receiving a condensed version of events from Jenny Harris. One of the ESA assets she ran in the sheriff’s office
had asked for a meeting and told her about the trouble brewing in the Quallheim Counties.

All well and good, it was nice to see the Governor couldn’t fart without the ESA knowing, but like Rexrew before him, Ralph
was having a lot of trouble with the concept of an Ivet uprising.

“An open revolt?” he asked the lieutenant sceptically.

“It looks that way,” she said apologetically. “Here, my contact gave me a flek of the surveillance satellite images.” She
loaded it into the processor block on Ralph’s desk, and the screens on the wall began to show the Quallheim’s motley collection
of villages.

Ralph stood in front of them, hands on his hips as the semicircular clearings cut into solid jungle appeared. The treetops
looked like green foam, broken by occasional glades, and virtually sealing over streams and the smaller rivers. “There’s been
a lot of fires,” he agreed unhappily.