in a mighty flotilla, with their exhaust plumes so strong and bright they will turn night into day. Nobody will mistake it. But in the meantime we must not pour cold water on the others’ hopes.”
“I understand, Father. I’m not as dumb as them.”
He ruffled her hair, which she pretended not to like, wriggling away. “Come along now,” he said. “Breakfast first. Then we’ll get our expedition sorted out.”
“I suppose Russ will come with us?” she asked in a martyred voice.
“Yes, he will. And stop thinking uncharitable thoughts.”
The children already had most of the bedding off the floor. Two boys were sweeping up the dried grass from the sack mattresses (Must find a better replacement, Horst thought). Eustice’s voice could be heard through the open door, yelling instructions to the children airing the linen outside.
Horst helped to pull the big table into the middle of the room. Andria’s team were scurrying round the kitchen corner, tending the equipment and the meal. The big urn was just starting to boil, and the three IR plates were heating up the boiling pans ready for the eggs.
Once again Horst gave a fast prayer of thanks that the solar-powered equipment functioned so well. It was easy enough for the children to use without hurting themselves, and most of them had helped their mothers with the cooking before. All they needed was some direction, as they did in every task he set them. He didn’t like to think how he would have coped if the homestead hadn’t been empty.
It took another fifteen minutes before Andria’s cooking party were ready to serve breakfast. Several of the eggs Shona brought back were broken, so Horst himself scrambled them up in a pan on a spare IR plate. It was easier to feed Jill, the toddler, that way.
The tea was finally ready, and the eggs boiled. Everyone lined up with their mug and cutlery and eggcup, and filed past the kitchen bar which doubled as a serving counter. For a few wonderful minutes the room was actually quiet as the children drank, and cracked their eggs open, and pulled faces as they munched the dry oatmeal biscuits, dunking them in the tea to try and soften them up first. Horst looked round his extended family and tried not to feel frightened at the responsibility. He adored them in a way he had never done with his parishioners.
After breakfast it was wash time, with the extra two tanks he had installed in the rafter space struggling to provide enough hot water. Horst inspected them all to make sure they were clean and that they had jell-rinsed their teeth. That way he could have a few words with each of them, make them feel special, and wanted, and loved. It also gave him the chance to watch for any sign of illness. So far there had been remarkably little, a few colds, and one nasty outbreak of diarrhoea a fortnight ago, which he suspected was from a batch of jam that had come from another homestead.
The morning would follow its standard pattern while he and Jay were away. Clothes to be washed in the stream and hung out to dry. Hay to be taken into the cows, corn to be measured out into the chicken-run dispensers (they never did that very well), lunch to be prepared. When he went away it was always the packets of protein- balanced meals from Earth—all they had to do was put them in the microwave for ninety seconds, and nothing could go wrong. Sometimes he allowed a group to pick elwisie fruit from the trees on the edge of the jungle. But not today; he gave Danny a stern lecture that no one was to wander more than fifty metres from the cabin, and someone must be on watch the whole time in case a kroclion turned up. The plains carnivores hadn’t often plagued the homesteads, but his didactic memory showed what a menace the lumbering animals could be. The boy nodded earnestly, eager to prove his worth.
Horst was still suffering from stings of doubt when he led the group’s one horse from its stable. He trusted Jay to be left in charge, she acted far older than her years. But he had to hunt for meat, there were hardly any fish in the nearby stream. If they stuck to the cache of food in his bedroom it would be gone within ten days; it existed to supplement what he killed and stored in the freezer, and acted as an emergency reserve just in case he ever did get ill. And Jay deserved a break from the homestead, she hadn’t been away since they arrived.
He took two other children with him as well as Jay. Mills, an energetic eight-year-old from Schuster village, and Russ, a seven-year-old who simply refused to ever leave Horst’s side. The one and only time he had gone hunting without him the boy had run off into the savannah and it had taken the whole afternoon to find him.
Jay was grinning and waving and playing up to her jealous friends when they set off. The savannah grass quickly rose up around their legs; Horst had made Jay wear a pair of trousers instead of her usual shorts. A thick layer of mist started to lift from the waving stalks and blades now the sun was rising higher into the sky. Haze broke the visibility down to less than a kilometre.
“This humidity is worse than the Juliffe back in Durringham,” Jay exclaimed, waving her hand frantically in front of her face.
“Cheer up,” Horst said. “It might rain later.”
“No, it won’t.”
He glanced round to where she was walking in the track he was making through the stiff grass. Bright eyes gleamed mischievously at him from below the brim of her tatty felt sun-hat.
“How do you know?” he asked. “It always rains on Lalonde.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not any more, not during the day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? It only ever rains at night now.”
Horst gave her a perplexed stare. He was about to tell her not to be silly. But then he couldn’t remember the last time he’d rushed indoors to shelter from one of Lalonde’s ferocious downpours—a week, ten days? He had an uncomfortable feeling it might even have been longer. “No, I hadn’t noticed,” he said temperately.
“That’s all right, you’ve had a lot on your mind lately.”
“I certainly have.” But the chirpy mood was broken now.
I should have noticed, he told himself. But then who regards the weather as something suspicious? He was sure it was important though, he just couldn’t think how, or why. Surely they couldn’t change the weather.
Horst made it a rule that he was never away for more than four hours. That put seven other homestead cabins within reach (eight counting the ruins of the Skibbow building) as well as allowing enough time to shoot a danderil or some vennals. Once he had shot a pig that had run wild, and they’d eaten ham and bacon for the rest of the week. It was the most delicious meat he’d ever tasted, terrestrial beasts were pure ambrosia compared to the coarse and bland aboriginal animals.
There was hardly anything of any value left in the cabins now, he had stripped them pretty thoroughly. After another couple of visits there would be little point in returning. He caught himself before brooding turned to melancholia; he wouldn’t need to go back, the navy would come. And don’t ever think anything different.
Jay bounded up to walk beside him, adjusting her stride to match his. She gave him a sideways smile, then returned her gaze to the front, perfectly content.
Horst felt his own tensions seeping away. Having her so close was like the time right after that dreadful night. She had screamed and fought him as he pulled her away from Ruth and Jackson Gael. He had forced her through the village towards the jungle, only once looking back. He saw it all then, in the light of the fire which pillaged their sturdy tranquil village, snuffing out their ambitions of a fair future as swiftly as rain dissolved the mud castles the children built on the riverbank. Satan’s army was upon them. More figures were marching out of the dark shadows into the orange light of the flames, creatures that even Dante in his most lucid fever-dreams had never conceived, and the screams of the ensnared villagers rose in a crescendo.
Horst had never let Jay look back, not even after they reached the trees. He knew then that waiting for the hunting party to return was utter folly. Laser rifles could not harm the demon legions Lucifer in his wrath had loosed upon the land.
They had carried on far into the jungle, until a numbed, petrified Jay had finally collapsed. Dawn found them huddled together in the roots of a qualtook tree, soaked and shivering from a downpour in the night. When they eased their way cautiously back towards Aberdale and hid themselves in the vines ringing the clearing they saw a village living a dream.
Several buildings were razed to the ground. People walked by without paying them a glance. People Horst knew, his flock, who should have been overwrought by the damage. That was when he knew Satan had won, his demons had possessed the villagers. What he had seen at the Ivet ceremony had been repeated here, again and again.
