That more than anything else brought home the reality of the situation to the majority. Fights and squabbles between gangs and districts ended, those barricades which had been erected were strengthened, sentry details were finalized. Everyone headed home, the roads fell silent. The rain which had held off all day began to slash down. Beneath its shroud of miserable low cloud, Durringham held its breath.
Stewart Danielsson watched the rain pounding away on the office windows as the conditioner hummed away efficiently, sucking the humidity from the air. He had made the office his home over the last week; Ward Molecular had seen a busy time of it. Everybody in town was keen to have the ancillary circuits on their electron-matrix cells serviced, especially the smaller units which could double as rifle power magazines at a pinch.
He’d sold a lot of interface cables as well.
The business was doing fine. Darcy and Lori would be pleased when they got back. They hadn’t actually said he could sleep over when they left him in charge, but with the way things were it was only right. Twice he’d scared off would-be burglars.
His sleeping-bag with the inflatable mattress was comfy, and the office fridge was better than the one in his lodgings; he’d brought the microwave cooker over from the cabin out back of the warehouse. So now he had all the creature comforts. It was turning into a nice little sojourn.
Gaven Hough stayed late most nights, keeping him company. Neither of them had seen Cole Este since the night after the first anti-Ivet riot.
Stewart wasn’t much bothered by that.
Gaven opened the door in the glass partition wall and stuck his head round. “Doesn’t look like Mr. Crowther is coming to pick up his unit now, it’s gone four.”
Stewart stretched himself, and turned the processor block off. He’d been trying to keep their work records and payments up to date. It had always seemed so easy when Darcy was handling it. “OK, we’ll get closed up.”
“We’ll be the last in the city. There’s been no traffic outside for the last two hours. Everyone else has gone home, scared of these invaders.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No, not really. I haven’t got anything an army would want.”
“You can stay here tonight. I don’t think it’ll be safe walking home through this town now, not with the way people are on edge. There’s enough food.”
“Thanks. I’ll go and shut the doors.”
Stewart watched the younger man through the glass partition as he made his way past the workbenches to the warehouse’s big doors. I ought to be worried, he thought, some of the rumours flying around town are blatantly unreal, but something is happening upriver. He gave the warehouse a more thoughtful glance. With its mayope walls it was strong enough to withstand any casual attempt at damage. But there were a lot of valuable tools and equipment inside, and everybody knew that. Maybe we should be boarding the windows up. There was no such thing as an insurance industry on Lalonde, if the warehouse went so did their jobs.
He turned back to the office windows, giving them a more objective appraisal; the frames were heavy enough to nail planks across.
Someone was walking down the muddy road outside. It was difficult to see with the way the rain was smearing the glass, but it looked like a man dressed in a suit. A very strange suit; it was grey, with a long jacket, and there was no seal up the front, only buttons. And he wore a black hat that looked like a fifty-centimetre column of brushed velvet. His right hand gripped a silver-topped cane. Rain bounced off him as though his antique clothes were coated in frictionless plastic.
“Stewart!” Gaven called from somewhere in the warehouse. “Stewart, come back here.”
“No. Look at this.”
“There’s three of them in here. Stewart!”
The native panic in Gaven’s voice made him turn reluctantly from the window. He squinted through the partition wall. It was dark in the cavernous warehouse, and Gaven had shut the wide doors. Stewart couldn’t see where he’d got to. Humanoid shapes were moving around down by the stacks of crates; bigger than men. And it was just too gloomy to make out quite what—
The window behind him gave a loud grating moan. He whirled round. The frames groaned again as though they had been shoved by a hurricane blast.
But the rain was falling quite normally outside. It couldn’t be the wind.
The man in the grey suit was standing in the middle of the road, cane pressing into the mud, both hands resting on the silver pommel. He stared directly at Stewart.
“Stewart!” Gaven yelled.
The window-panes cracked, fissures multiplying and interlacing. Animal reflex made Stewart spin round, his arms coming up to protect his head.
They’re going to smash!
A two and a half metre tall yeti was standing pressed up against the glass of the partition wall. Its ochre fur was matted and greasy, red baboon lips were peeled back to show stained fangs. He gagged at it in amazement, recoiling.
All the glass in the office shattered at once. In the instant before he slammed his eyelids shut, he was engulfed by a beautiful prismatic cloud of diamonds, sparkling and shimmering in the weak light. Then the slivers of glass penetrated his skin. Blood frothed out of a thousand shallow cuts, staining every square centimetre of his clothes a bright crimson.
His skin went numb as his brain rejected outright the shocking level of pain. His sight, the misty vermilion of tightly shut eyes, turned scarlet. Pain stars flared purple. Then the universe went harrowingly black. Through the numbness he could feel hot coals burning in his eye sockets.
“Blind, I’m blind!” He couldn’t even tell if his voice was working.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” someone said to him. “We can help you. We can let you see again.”
He tried to open his eyelids. There was a loathsome sensation of thin tissues ripping. And still there was only blackness. Pain began to ooze its way inwards, pain from every part of his body. He knew he was falling, plummeting to the ground.
Then the pain in his legs faded, replaced by a blissful liquid chill, as if he was bathing in a mountain tarn. He was given his sight back, a spectral girl sketched against the infinite darkness. It looked as though she was made up from translucent white membranes, folded with loving care around her svelte body, then flowing free somehow to become her fragile robes as well. She was a sublime child, in her early teens, poised between girlhood and womanhood, what he imagined an angel or fairy would be like. And she danced all the while, twirling effortlessly from foot to foot, more supple and graceful than any ballerina; her face blessed by a bountiful smile.
She held out her arms to him, ragged sleeves floating softly in the unfelt breeze. “See?” she said. “We can stop it hurting.” Her arms rose, palms pressing together above her head, and she spun round again, lightsome laughter echoing.
“Please,” he begged her. “Oh, please.”
The pain returned to his legs, making him cry out. His siren vision began to retreat, skipping lightly over the emptiness.
She paused and cocked her head. “Is this what you want?” she asked, her dainty face frowning in concern.
“No! Back, come back. Please.”
Her smile became rapturous, and her arms closed around him in a celebratory embrace. Stewart gave himself up to her balmy caresses, drowning in a glorious tide of white light.
Ilex coasted out of its wormhole terminus a hundred thousand kilometres above Lalonde. The warped gateway leading out of space-time contracted behind the voidhawk as it refocused its distortion field. Sensors probed round cautiously. The bitek starship was at full combat stations alert.
Waiting tensely on his acceleration couch in the crew toroid, Captain Auster skimmed through the wealth of data which both the bitek and electronic systems gathered. His primary concern was that there were no hostile ships within a quarter of a million kilometres, and no weapon sensors were locking on to the voidhawk’s hull. A resonance effect in Ilex’s distortion field revealed various ship-
sized masses orbiting above Lalonde, then there were asteroids, satellites, moons, boulder-sized debris. Nothing large was in the starship’s immediate vicinity. It took a further eight seconds for Ilex and Ocyroe, the weapons-systems officer, working in tandem, to confirm the absence of any valid threat.
> Auster said.
> Ilex queried.
>
>
Together their unified minds arrived at a suitable flight vector. Ilex swooped down the imaginary line towards the bright blue and white planet.
“We’re going into a parking orbit,” Auster said aloud for the benefit of the three Adamist naval officers on the bridge. “I want combat stations maintained at all times; and please bear in mind who could be here waiting for us.” He allowed an overtone of stern anxiety to filter out to the Edenist crew to emphasize the point. “Ocyroe, what’s our local space situation?”
“Nine starships in a parking orbit, seven colonist-carriers and two cargo ships. There are three interplanetary fusion drive ships en route from the asteroid Kenyon, heading for Lalonde orbit. Nothing else in the system.”
“I can’t get any response from Lalonde civil flight control,” said Erato, the spaceplane pilot. He looked up from the communication console he was operating. “The geosynchronous communication platform is working, as far as I can tell. They just don’t answer.”
Auster glanced over at Lieutenant Jeroen van Ewyck, the Confederation Navy Intelligence officer they had brought with them from Avon. “What do you think?”
“This is a backward planet anyway, so their response isn’t going to be instantaneous. But given the contents of those fleks I’d rather not take any chances. I’ll try and contact Kelvin Solanki directly through the navy ELINT satellites. Can you see if you can get anything from your planetside agents?”
“We’ll broadcast,” Auster said.
“Great. Erato, see what the other starship captains can tell us. It looks like they must have been here some time if there are this many left in orbit.”
Auster added his own voice to Ilex’s affinity call, spanning the colossal distance to the gas giant. Aethra answered straight away; but the immature habitat could only confirm the data which Lori and Darcy had included in their flek to the Edenist embassy on Avon. Since Kelven Solanki had transmitted the files to Murora there had only been the usual weekly status updates from Lalonde. The last one, four days ago, had contained a host of information on the colony’s deteriorating civil situation.
> Gaura asked through the affinity link between Aethra and Ilex. He was the chief of the station supervising the habitat’s growth out at the lonely edge of the star system.
> Auster said. >
>
> Auster extended a burst of sympathy.
>
>
> Auster asked Ilex.
>
The voidhawk’s perceptive faculty expanded into Auster’s mind. He perceived a distant soprano voice, or a soft whistle; the effect was too imprecise to tell. It was an adagio, a slow harmonic which slipped in and out of mental awareness like a radio signal on a stormy night.
> Auster asked.
> Ilex said. >
>
>
Jeroen van Ewyck datavised his console processor to point one of Ilex’s secondary dishes at a navy ELINT satellite orbiting Lalonde, then opened a channel down to the office in Durringham. There was nothing like the usual bit rate available, the microwave beam emitted by the navy office was well below standard strength. A flustered rating answered, and switched the call straight through to Kelven Solanki.
“We’re here in response to the flek you sent on the Eurydice,” Jeroen van Ewyck said. “Can you advise us of the situation on the planet, please?”
“Too late,” Kelven datavised. “You’re too bloody late.”
Auster ordered the bitek processor in his command console to patch him into the channel. “Lieutenant-Commander Solanki, this is Captain Auster. We were dispatched as soon as we were refitted for this mission. I can assure you the Admiralty took the report from you and our Intelligence operatives very seriously indeed.”
“Seriously? You call sending one ship a serious response?”
“Yes. We are primarily a reconnaissance and evaluation mission. In that respect, we are considered expendable. The Admiralty needs to know if Laton’s presence has been confirmed, and what kind of force level is required to deal with the invasion.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Sorry if I shouted off,” Kelven said. “Things are getting bad down here. The invaders have reached Durringham.”
“Are these invaders acting under Laton’s orders?”
“I’ve no idea yet.” He started to summarize the events of the last couple of weeks.
Auster listened with growing dismay, a communal emotion distributed equally around the other Edenists on board. The Adamists too, if their facial expressions were an accurate reflection of their thoughts.
“So you still don’t know if Laton is behind this invasion?” Auster asked when he finished.
“No. I’d say not; Lori and Darcy had virtually written him off by the time they got to Ozark. If it is him backing the invaders, then he’s pulling a very elaborate double bluff. Why did he warn Darcy and Lori about this energy virus effect?”
“Have you managed to verify that yet?” Jeroen van Ewyck asked.
“No. Although the supporting circumstantial evidence we have so far is very strong. The invaders certainly have a powerful electronic warfare technology at their fingertips, and it’s in widespread use. I suppose Kulu will be the place to ask; the ESA team managed to get their prisoner outsystem.”
> Erato said sourly.
Auster nodded silently.
“How bad are conditions in the city?” Jeroen van Ewyck asked.
“We’ve heard some fighting around the outlying districts this evening. The sheriffs are protecting the spaceport and the government district. But I don’t think they’ll hold out for more than a couple of days. You must get back to Avon and inform the First Admiral and the Confederation Assembly what’s happening here. At this point we still can’t discount xenocs being involved. And tell the First Admiral that Terrance Smith’s mercenary army must be prevented from landing here, as well. This is far beyond the ability of a few thousand hired soldiers to sort out.”
“That goes without saying. We’ll evacuate you and your staff immediately,” Auster said.
> Ocyroe asked. >
>
“There’s some of the ratings and NCOs I’d like to get off,” Kelven Solanki datavised. “This wasn’t supposed to be
a front-line posting. They’re only kids, really.”
“No, all of you are coming,” Auster said flatly.
“I’d like to capture one of these sequestrated invaders if possible,” Jeroen van Ewyck put in quickly.
> Auster asked. >
> the pilot said. His thoughts conveyed a rising excitement.
Auster acknowledged his leaked feelings with an ironic thought. Pilots were uniformly a macho breed, unable to resist any challenge, even Edenist ones.
> Ilex said with a note of annoyance. >
> Auster pointed out.
>
“Commander Solanki, we’re going to attempt to recover the marines as well,” Auster said.
“I haven’t been able to contact them for over a day. God, I don’t even know if they’re still alive, let alone where they are.”
“None the less, they are our naval personnel. If there’s any chance, we owe them the effort.”
The statement drew him a startled glance from Jeroen van Ewyck and the other two Adamists on the bridge. They quickly tried to hide their gaffe.
Auster ignored it.