Where are we? he asked the crewman. What planet?
The crewman gave him a funny look. Lalonde. Why, didnt they tell you?
No.
Oh. Well, you could have copped a worse one, believe me. Lalonde is EuroChristian-ethnic, opened up about thirty years ago. I think theres a Tyrathca settlement, but its mainly humans. Youll do all right. But take my advice, dont get the Ivet supervisor pissed at you.
Right. He was afraid to ask what a Tyrathca was. Some kind of xenoc, presumably. He shuddered at that, he who had never ventured out of the arcologies or vac-train stations back on Earth. Now they were expecting him to live under open skies with talking animals. Gods Brother!
The crewman hauled Quinn down to the rear of the spaceplane, then took his collar off and told him to find a spare seat. There was a group of about twenty people sitting in the last section, most of them lads barely out of their teens, all with the same slate-grey one-piece jump suit hed been issued with. IVT was printed in bright scarlet letters on their sleeves. Waster kids. Quinn could recognize them, it was like looking into a mirror which reflected the past. Him a year ago, before he joined the Light Brothers, before his life meant something.
Quinn approached them, fingers arranged casually in the inverted cross sign. Nobody responded. Ah well. He strapped himself in next to a man with a pale face and short-cropped ginger hair.
Jackson Gael, his neighbour said.
Quinn nodded numbly and muttered his own name. Jackson Gael looked about nineteen or twenty, with the kind of lean body and contemptuous air that marked him down as a street soldier, tough and uncomplicated. Quinn wondered idly what he had done to be transported.
The PA came on, and the pilot announced they would be undocking in three minutes. A chorus of whoops and cheers came from the colonists in the front seats. Someone started playing a mini-synth, the jolly tune grating on Quinns nerves.
Balls, Jackson Gael said. Look at em, they want to go down there. They actually believe in that New Frontier crap the development company has peddled them. And weve got to spend the rest of our lives with these dickheads.
Not me, Quinn said automatically.
Yeah? Jackson grinned. If youre rich how come you didnt bribe the captain, have him drop you off at Kulu or New California?
Im not rich. But Im not staying.
Yeah, right. After you finish your work-time youre gonna make it as some hotshot merchant. I believe you. Me, Im gonna keep my head down. See if I cant get assigned to a farm for my work-time. He winked. Some good-looking daughters in this batch. Lonely for them out there in their little wilderness homesteads. People like you and me, they start looking at us in a better light after a while. And if you aint noticed yet, there aint many Ivet fems.
Quinn stared at him blankly. Work-time?
Yeah, work-time. Your sentence, man. Why, you think they were going to turn us loose once we hit the planet?
They didnt tell me anything, Quinn said. He could feel the despair opening up inside him, a black gulf. Only now was he beginning to realize how ignorant of the universe outside the arcology he truly was.
Man, you mustve pissed someone off bad, Jackson said. You get dumped on by a politico?
No. Not a politician, somebody far worse, and infinitely subtler. He watched the last colonist family emerge from the airlock, it was the one with the terrified four-year-old girl. Her arms were wrapped tightly round her fathers neck and she was still crying. So what do we do for work-time?
Well, once we get down there, you, me, and the other Ivets start doing ten years hard labour. See, the Lalonde Development Company paid for our passage from Earth, and now they want a return on that investment. So we spend the prime of our life shovelling shit for these colonists. Community maintenance, they call it. But basically were a convict gang, Quinn, thats what we are; we build roads, clear trees, dig latrines. You name it, every crappy job the colonists need doing, we do it for them. Work where were told, eat what were given, wear what were given, all for fifteen Lalonde francs a month, which is about five fuseodollars worth. Welcome to pioneer paradise, Quinn.
The McBoeing BDA-9008 spaceplane was a no-frills machine designed for operations on stage one agrarian planets; remote basic colonies where spare parts were limited, and maintenance crews were made up of wash-outs and inexperienced youngsters working their first contract. It was a sturdy delta shape built in a New Californian asteroid settlement, seventy-five metres long, with a wingspan of sixty metres; there were no ports for the passengers, just a single curving transparent strip for the pilot. A fuselage of thermal-resistant boron-beryllium alloy glinted a dull oyster in the sharp light of the F-type star a hundred and thirty-two million kilometres away.
Faint jets of dusty gas spirted out of the airlock chamber as the seal disengaged. Docking latches withdrew into the bulk of the starship, leaving the spaceplane floating free.
The pilot fired the reaction-control thrusters, moving away from the seamless curve of the huge starships hull. From a distance the McBoeing resembled a moth retreating from a football. When they were five hundred metres apart, a second, longer, burn from the thrusters sent the spaceplane curving down towards the waiting planet.
Lalonde was a world which barely qualified as terracompatible. With a small axial tilt and uncomfortable proximity to its bright primary, the planets climate was predominantly hot and humid, a perennial tropical summer. Out of its six continents only Amarisk in the southern hemisphere had been opened for settlement by the development company. Humans couldnt venture into the equatorial zone without temperature-regulated suits. The one, northern, polar continent, Wyman, was subject to severe storms as the hot and cool air fronts clashed around its edges all year long. Shrivelled ice-caps covered less than a fifth of the area normal for terracompatible planets.
The spaceplane sliced cleanly down through the atmosphere, its leading edges glowing a dull cerise. Ocean rolled past below it, a placid azure expanse dotted with volcanic island chains and tiny coral atolls. Pristine clouds boiled across nearly half of the visible surface, generated by the relentless heat. Barely a day went by anywhere on Lalonde without some form of rain. It was one of the reasons the development company had managed to attract funding; the regular heat and moisture was an ideal climate for certain types of plants, rewarding the farmer colonists with vigorous growth and high yields.
By the time the McBoeing dropped to subsonic velocity it had fallen below the vast cloudband sweeping in towards Amarisks western coast. The continent ahead covered over eight million square kilometres, stretching from the flood plains of the western coast to a long range of fold mountains in the east. Under the midday sun it glared a brilliant emerald, jungle country, broken by huge steppes in the south where the temperature dropped towards subtropical.
Beneath the spaceplane the sea was stained with mud, a grubby brown blemish extending for seventy to eighty kilometres out from the boggy shore. It marked the mouth of the Juliffe, a river whose main course stretched just under two thousand kilometres inland, way into the foothills guarding the eastern coast. The rivers tributary network was extensive enough to rival Earths Amazon. For that reason alone, the development company had chosen its southern bank as the site of the planets capital (and sole) city, Durringham.
The McBoeing passed low over the coastal swamps, lowering its undercarriage, bullet-shaped nose lining up on the runway thirty kilometres ahead. Lalondes only spaceport was situated five kilometres outside Durringham, a clearing hacked out of the jungle containing a single prefabricated metal grid runway, a flight-control centre, and ten hangars made from sun-bleached ezystak panels.