“Who are all those people?” he asked.
“Anyone who saw Ilex ’s spaceplane taking the staff away earlier,” Vince Burtis said. He was the nineteen-year-old navy rating who had winched the marine squad to safety. To him the invasion was exactly what he had signed on for, adventure on alien worlds; he was enjoying himself. Murphy hadn’t the heart to disillusion him. The kid would realize soon enough.
“I guess they want to leave too,” Vince Burtis said soberly.
The BK133 settled on the roof. Kelven datavised the flight computer to power down the internal systems. “Everyone out,” he said.
“Hurry, please.” Erato’s appeal was relayed through his communication block. “I’m in touch with the sheriffs outside. They say the crowd is already at the door.”
“They shouldn’t be able to get in,” Kelven datavised.
“I think some of the sheriffs may be with them,” Erato said hesitantly. “They’re only human.”
Kelven released his straps and hurried back into the cabin. Vince Burtis was guiding Niels Regehr’s tentative footsteps, helping him down through the hatch. Garrett Tucci and Louis Beith were already out, marching Jacqueline Couteur towards the spaceplane at gunpoint.
Murphy Hewlett gave his superior a tired smile. “Thank you, sir.”
“Nothing to do with me. If the Ilex hadn’t shown up you’d still be paddling home.”
“Is everyone else from the office out?”
“Yes, the spaceplane made a couple of flights earlier this evening, we’re the last,” Kelven said.
They both hopped down onto the roof. The noise of the spaceplane’s compressors rose, obscuring the sound of the crowd below. Kelven did his best to ignore the sensation of guilt. He had made a lot of friends among Lalonde’s civil administration staff. Candace Elford had turned over the BK133 as soon as he asked, no questions. Surely some people could have been taken up to the orbiting colonist-carriers.
Who though? And who would choose?
The best—the only—way to help Lalonde now was through the Confederation Navy.
The stairwell door on the other side of the BK133 burst open. People began to spill out onto the roof, shouting frantically.
“Oh, Christ,” Kelven said under his breath. He could see three or four sheriffs among them, armed with cortical jammers, one had a laser hunting rifle. The rest were civilians. He looked round. Vince Burtis and Niels Regehr were halfway up the stairs to the airlock. One of the Ilex ’s crew was leaning out, offering a hand to Niels. Vince was staring over his shoulder in shock.
“Get in,” Kelven datavised, waving his arms.
Two sheriffs were rounding the nose of the BK133, more people were crouched low scuttling under the fuselage. Still more were running out of the open door. There must have been thirty on the roof.
“Wait for us.”
“You can carry one more.”
“I have money, I can pay.”
Murphy aimed his Bradfield into the air and fired off two shots. The heavy-calibre weapon was startlingly loud. Several people threw themselves down, the rest froze.
“Don’t even think about it,” Murphy said. The Bradfield lined up on one of the ashen-faced sheriffs. A cortical jammer fell from the man’s hands.
The noise of the spaceplane’s compressors was becoming strident.
“There’s no room on board. Go home before anyone gets hurt.”
Kelven and Murphy started backing towards the spaceplane. A young brown-skinned woman who had crawled under the BK133 straightened up, and walked towards them defiantly. She was holding a small child in front of her, it couldn’t have been more than two years old. Plump face and wide liquid eyes.
Murphy just couldn’t bring himself to point the Bradfield at her. He reached the foot of the spaceplane’s aluminium stairs.
“Take him with you,” the woman called. She held the child out. “For Jesus’s sake, take my son, if you have a gram of pity in you. I’m begging you!”
Murphy’s foot found the first step. Kelven had a hand on his arm, guiding him back.
“Take him!” she shrieked over the swelling compressor efflux. “Take him, or shoot him.”
He shuddered at her fervour. She meant it, she really meant it.
“It would be a kindness. You know what will happen to him on this cursed planet.” The child was crying, squirming about in her grip.
The other people on the roof were all motionless, watching him with hard, accusing eyes. He turned to Kelven Solanki, whose face was a mask of torment.
“Get him,” Kelven blurted.
Murphy dropped the Bradfield, letting it skitter away across the silicon roof. He datavised a codelock into its controlling processor so no one could turn it on the spaceplane, then grabbed the child with his right hand.
“Shafi,” the woman shouted as he raced up the stairs. “His name’s Shafi Banaji. Remember.”
He barely had a foot in the airlock when the spaceplane lifted, its deck tilting up immediately. Hands steadied him, and the outer hatch slid shut.
Shafi’s baggy cotton trousers were soiled and stinking; he let out a long fearful wail.
Chapter 03
Including Tranquillity, there were only five independent (non-Edenist) bitek habitats to be found within the boundaries of the Confederation. After Tranquillity, probably the most well known, or notorious depending on your cultural outlook and degree of liberalism, was Valisk.
Although they were both, technically, dictatorships, they occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum, with the dominant ideologies of the remaining three habitats falling between them, a well-deserved mediocrity. Tranquillity was regarded as elitist, or even regal given its founder: industrious, rich, and slightly raffish, with a benevolent, chic ruler, it emphasized the grander qualities of life, somewhere you aspired to go if you made it. Valisk was older, its glory days over, or at the very least in abeyance: it played host to a more decadent population; money here (and there was still plenty) came from exploiting the darker side of human nature. And its strange governorship repelled rather than attracted.
It hadn’t always been so.
Valisk was founded by an Edenist Serpent called Rubra. Unlike Laton, who terrorized the Confederation two and a half centuries later, his rebellion was of an altogether more constructive nature. He was born in Machaon, a habitat orbiting Kohistan, the largest gas giant in the Srinagar star system. After forty-four years, he abandoned his culture and his home, sold his not inconsiderable share in his family’s engineering enterprise, and emigrated to a newly opened Adamist asteroid settlement in Kohistan’s trailing Trojan cluster.
It was a period of substantial economic growth for the star system. Srinagar had been colonized by ethnic-Hindus in 2178 during the Great Dispersal, a hundred and sixteen years earlier. Basic industrialization had been completed, the world was tamed, and people were looking for new ways of channelling their energies. All across the Confederation emerging colony planets were exploiting space resources and increasing their wealth dramatically. Srinagar was eager to be numbered among them.
Rubra started with six leased interplanetary cargo ships. Like all Serpents he was a high achiever in his chosen field (nearly always to Edenist embarrassment, for so many of them chose crime). He made a small fortune supplying the Trojan cluster’s small but wealthy population of engineers and miners with consumer goods and luxuries. He bought more ships, made a larger fortune, and named his expanding company Magellanic Itg—joking to his peers that one day he would trade with that distant star cluster. By 2306, after twelve years of steady growth, Magellanic Itg owned manufacturing stations and asteroid-mining operations, and had moved into the interstellar transport market.