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.
“Adds a bit of spice to the recording, a bit of drama,” Ariadne said. “Speaking of which, you’re not going to blow us out, are you? I mean, we are the good guys.”
“Yeah. You’re the good guys.”
“Great, always wanted to be a sensevise star.”
Kelly accessed her Lalonde sensevise report memory cell file and turned her head until Ariadne was in the
