Or at least she hadn’t before today.
Something had happened out in the jungle this morning that none of the adults would talk about. She and all the other kids knew that Carter was dead, they’d been told that much. But there had been the awful fight down by the jetty, and a lot of the women had cried, the men too though they tried to hide it. Then twenty minutes ago Mr Manani had some kind of dreadful drawn-out fit, howling and panting as he keeled about.
Things had quietened down after that. There had been a meeting in the hall, and afterwards people had gone back to their cabins. Now though she could see them congregating in the centre of the village again; they were all dressed like they did when they went hunting. Everyone seemed to be carrying a weapon.
She knocked on the front stanchion of Mr Manani’s cabin. He came out dressed in navy-blue jeans, a green and blue check shirt, and a fawn waistcoat that held a lot of cylindrical power magazines for laser rifles. He carried a couple of slate-grey tubes fifty centimetres long, with pistol grips at one end. She had never seen them before, but she knew they were weapons.
Their eyes met for a moment, then Jay looked at the muddy ground.
“Jay?”
She glanced up.
“Listen, honey. The Ivets have been bad, very bad. They’re all funny in their heads.”
“Like waster kids in the arcologies, you mean?”
A sad smile flickered on his lips at the bright curiosity in her voice. “Something like that. They killed Carter McBride.”
“We thought so,” she admitted.
“So we’re going to have to catch them and stop them from doing anything like it again.”
“I understand.”
He slotted the maser carbines into their saddle holsters. “It’s for the best, honey, really it is. Listen, Aberdale’s not going to be very nice for a couple of weeks, but afterwards it’ll get better. I promise. Before you know it, we’ll be the best village on the whole tributary. I’ve seen it happen before.”
She nodded. “Be careful, Mr Manani. Please.”
He kissed the top of her head. Her hair was sprinkled with tiny drops of water.
“I will be,” he said. “And thank you for saddling up Sango. Now go and find your mum, she’s a bit upset about what happened this morning.”
“I haven’t seen Father Elwes for hours. Will he be coming back?”
He stiffened his back, unable to look at the girl. “Only to pick up his things. He won’t be staying in Aberdale any longer. His work’s done here.”
Powel rode Sango over to the waiting hunters, hoofs splattering in the mud. Most of them were wearing waterproof ponchos, slick with rain. They looked more worried than angry now. The initial heat of Carter’s death had abated, and the shock of killing the three Ivets was percolating through their minds. They were more scared for their families and their own skin than they were bothered about vengeance. But the end product was the same. Their fear of Quinn would compel them until the job was done.
He saw Rai Molvi standing among them, clutching a laser rifle beneath his poncho. It wasn’t worth making an issue over. He leaned forward from the saddle to address them. “First thing you should know is that my communication block is out. I haven’t been able to tell Schuster’s sheriff what’s been happening here, or the Governor’s office in Durringham. Now those communication blocks are more or less solid chunks of circuitry with all kinds of redundancy built in, I’ve never heard of one failing before. The LED lights up, so it’s not a simple power loss. It was working when I made my routine report three days ago. I’ll leave it to you to work out the significance of it failing today.”
“Christ, just what are we up against?” someone asked.
“We’re up against waster kids,” Powel said. “Vicious and frightened. That’s all they are. This sect crap is just an excuse for Quinn to order them about.”
“They’ve got guns.”
“They have eight laser rifles, and no spare power magazines. Now I can see about a hundred and twenty rifles just from here. They aren’t going to be any problem. Shoot to kill, and don’t give any warning. That’s all we have to do. We don’t have courts, we don’t have time for courts, not out here. I sure as hell know they’re guilty. And I want to make damn sure that the rest of your kids can walk about this village without looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? To get away from all this shit Earth kept flinging at you. Well, a little bit got carried here with you. But today we finish it. After today there won’t be any more Carter McBrides.”
Determination returned to the gathering; men nodded and exchanged bolstering glances with their neighbours, rifles were gripped just that fraction harder at the mention of Carter’s name. It was a collective building up of nerve, absolving them of any guilt in advance.
Powel Manani watched it accumulate with satisfaction. They were his again, just like the day they came off the
Enlarging the Skibbow homestead’s stockade was hard work; the wood for the fence had to be pre-cut in the jungle, a kilometre away, then hauled all the way back. The ground was difficult to prepare for the posts, with a vast accumulation of dead matted grass to scrape away before the hard, sandy soil was uncovered. Loren Skibbow’s lunch had been cold chikrow meat and some kind of flaccid tasteless stewed vegetable which most of the Ivets had left. And on top of all that, Gerald Skibbow was off on the savannah somewhere looking for a lost sheep, which left Frank Kava in charge, who was a bossy little shit.
By midafternoon Quinn had already decided that the Skibbows and Kavas were going to be playing a very prominent role in his next black mass ceremony.
The lengths of wood they had cut that morning were laid out across the grass, marking out a square of land thirty-five metres a side next to the existing stockade. Quinn and Jackson Gael were working together, taking it in turns to hammer the upright posts into the ground. The other four Ivets in the work party were busy nailing the horizontal beams into place behind them. They had already completed one side, and were three posts along the next. It had rained earlier, but Frank hadn’t let them stop work.
“Bastard,” Jackson Gael muttered as he took another swing with the sledgehammer. The post shook as it thudded another three centimetres into the soil. “He wants to have this finished by tonight so he can show Gerald what a good keen little boy he’s been. Means we’re gonna be walking back in the dark.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Quinn said. He was kneeling down, holding the black post upright. The mayope wood was wet, difficult to grip.
“This rain makes everything slippery,” Jackson grumbled. “Accidents come easy, and on this planet you get damaged, you stay damaged. That drunken old fart of a priest don’t know shit about proper doctoring.” The sledgehammer hit the post again.
“Relax. I been thinking, this place would be a good target for us.”
“Yeah. You know what really pisses me off? Frank climbs into bed with that Paula every bloody night. I mean, she’s not got tits like Marie had, but God’s Brother, every night!”
“Will you stop thinking with your dick for one fucking minute. I let you have Rachel, don’t I? That’s as well as our girls.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Quinn. Sorry.”
“Right, we’ll start working out who we want to bring, and when we’re going to do it.”
Jackson tightened the scraps of cloth he had wrapped round his palms to give a tighter grip on the sledgehammer’s handle. “Tony, maybe. He’s pretty easy around the village; talks to the residents. Think he could do with reminding where his loyalties lie.”
“Could be.”
