Each dumper was thirty metres high, fifteen metres across its base, weighing three hundred and fifty tonnes fully loaded. Small fins around the base steered them with reasonable accuracy through the atmosphere until they were seven hundred metres above the ground, by which time they had slowed to subsonic speed. A cluster of eight giant parachutes lowered them for the final few hundred metres, bringing them to a landing which resembled a controlled crash to the small flight-control team watching from a safe distance. They were designed for a one-way trip; where they landed, they stayed.
Construction crews followed them down in small VTOL spaceplanes, and began unloading. When the dumpers had been emptied they formed environment-proof accommodation for the crews’ families and offices for the governor’s civil administration staff.
The jungle surrounding the dumpers was levelled first, a chop and burn policy producing a wide swath of desolated foliage and charred animals; the spaceport clearing followed. After the runway grids were assembled, a second wave of workers arrived in the McBoeings, along with more equipment. This time they had to build their own accommodation, using the profusion of logs the earlier crews had left scattered across the ground. Rings of crude wooden cabins sprang up around all of the dumpers, looking as if they were rafts floating on a sea of mud. Stripped of its scrub cover, subject to continual heavy plant traffic and Lalonde’s daily rains, the rich black loam was reduced to a fetid-smelling sludge which was over half a metre thick in places. The rock crushers worked continuously throughout the planet’s twenty-six-hour day, but they could never supply enough chippings to stabilize the expanding city’s quagmire roads.
The view from the scuffed and algae-splattered window of Ralph Hiltch’s office, on the third floor of the dumper which housed the Kulu Embassy, showed him the sun-soaked timber-plank roofs of Durringham spread out across the gently undulating land next to the river. The conglomeration was devoid of any methodical street pattern. Durringham hadn’t been laid down with logical forethought, it had erupted like a tumour. He was sure even Earth’s eighteenth-century cities had more charm than this. Lalonde was his fourth offworld assignment, and he had never seen anything more primitive. The weather-stained hulls of the dumpers rose above the shanty-town precincts like arcane temples, linked to the ramshackle buildings with a monstrous spider web of sable-black power cables slung between tall poles. The dumpers’ integral fusion generators provided ninety per cent of the planet’s electrical power, and Durringham was completely dependent on their output.
By virtue of the Royal Kulu Bank taking a two per cent stake in the LDC, Kulu’s Foreign Office had acquired the dumper for its staff as soon as the start-up phase of colonization was over, ousting the Governor’s Aboriginal Fruit Classification Division in the process. Ralph Hiltch was grateful for the political arm-twisting manoeuvre of twenty years ago; it allowed him to claim an air-conditioned office, and a tiny two-room apartment next door. As the Commercial Attachй he was entitled to a bigger apartment in the embassy’s residential block outside, but his actual position as Head of Station for the Kulu External Security Agency operation on Lalonde meant he needed the kind of secure quarters which the old dumper with its carbotanium structure could provide. Besides, like everything else in Durringham, the residential block was made of wood, and leaked something rotten.
He watched the near-solid cliff of silver-grey rain sweeping in from the ocean, obscuring the narrow verdant line peeping above the rooftops to the south which marked the boundary of the jungle. It was the third downpour of the day. One of the five screens on the wall opposite his desk showed a real-time weather-satellite image of Amarisk and the ocean to the west, both covered by spiral arms of cloud. To his wearily experienced eye the rain would last for a good hour and a half.
Ralph eased himself back in his chair and regarded the man sitting nervously on the other side of his desk. Maki Gruter tried not to shift about under the stare. He was a twenty-eight-year-old grade three manager working for the Governor’s Transport Office, dressed in fawn shorts and a jade shirt, his lemon-yellow cagoule hanging off the back of his chair. Like almost everyone else in Lalonde’s civil administration he was for sale; they universally regarded this backwoods posting as an opportunity to rip off both the LDC and the colonists. Ralph had recruited Maki Gruter two and a half years ago, a month after he himself had arrived. It wasn’t so much an entrapment exercise as simply making a selection from a host of eager volunteers. There were times, Ralph reflected sagely, when he would like to see an official who wouldn’t sell out for just a sniff of the ubiquitous Edenist fuseodollar. Once his duty tour on Lalonde was finished in another three years he would have to go through innumerable refresher courses. Subversion was so easy here.
In fact there were times when he questioned the whole point of the ESA mounting an operation on what was basically a jungle populated by psychological Neanderthals. But Lalonde was only twenty-two light-years from the Principality of Ombey, the Kulu Kingdom’s newest dominion star system, itself only just out of stage-two development. The ruling Saldana dynasty wanted to make sure that Lalonde didn’t mature along hostile lines. Ralph and his colleagues were assigned to watch the colony’s political evolution, occasionally offering covert assistance to aspirants with coincident policies; money, or black data on opposing candidates, it didn’t make any difference in the end. The formative years of a colony’s independence set the political agenda for centuries to come, so the ESA did its best to make sure the first elected leaders were ideologically benign as regards the Kingdom. Placemen, basically.
It made sense if you took the long-term consequences into account; a few million pounds spent now as opposed to the billions any form of naval action would cost once Lalonde had a technoeconomy capable of building military starships. And God knows, Ralph thought, the Saldanas approached every problem from that angle—with their life-expectancy long term was the only term they understood.
Ralph smiled pleasantly at Maki Gruter. “Anyone of any interest in this batch?”
“Not that I can see,” the civil servant said. “All Earth nationals. Usual Ivet types, waster kids dumb enough to get caught. No political exiles, or at least, none listed.” Behind his head, the screen displaying the vectors of Lalonde’s miserly orbital traffic showed another spaceplane docking with the vast colonist-carrier starship.
“Fine. I’ll have it checked, of course,” Ralph said expectantly.
“Oh, right.” Maki Gruter’s mouth twitched in a half-embarrassed grin. He pulled out a processor block and datavised the files over.
Ralph observed the information flood into his neural nanonics, assigning it to spare storage cells. Tracer programs ran through the fifty-five hundred names, comparing them to his primary list, the most troublesome of Earth’s political agitators known to the ESA. There was no match-up. Later he would datavise the files into a processor block, running a comparison with the huge catalogue of recidivist names, facial images, and in some cases DNA prints which the ESA had trawled from right across the Confederation.
He glanced out through the window again to see a group of the new arrivals slogging along the mushy road which led down the side of the square of grass and straggly roses which passed for the embassy gardens. The rain had arrived, drenching them in seconds. Women, children, and men with their hair beaten down, jump suits clinging to their bodies like a dark, crinkled, lizard hide, all looking thoroughly wretched. There might have been tears on their faces, but he couldn’t tell with the rain. And they still had another three kilometres to go before they reached the transients’ dormitories down by the river.
“Christ, look at them,” he murmured. “And they’re supposed to be this planet’s hope for the future. They can’t even organize a walk from the spaceport properly, none of them thought to take waterproofs.”
“Have you ever been to Earth?” Maki Gruter asked.
Ralph turned away from the window, surprised by the younger man’s question. Maki was normally keen to simply collect the money and run. “No.”
“I have. That planet is one giant hive queen for misbegottens. Our noble past. Compared to that, what this planet offers in the way of a future doesn’t look so bad.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Ralph opened a drawer and took out his Jovian Bank credit disk.
“There’s someone else going upriver with this batch of colonists,” Maki said. “My office had to arrange a berth for him, that’s how I know.”
Ralph stopped in the act of authorizing the usual three-hundred-fuseodollar payment. “Who’s that?”
“A marshal from the Sheriff’s Office. Don’t know his name, but he’s being sent up to Schuster County to scout round.”
Ralph listened to Maki Gruter explain about the missing homestead families, his mind running over the implications. Somebody in the Governor’s Office must consider it important, he thought, there were only five marshals on the planet: combat specialists with nanonic-boosted metabolisms, and well armed. Colony Governors deployed them to sort out severe problems, like bandits and potential revolts, problems that had to be eliminated fast.
