Dean stared at the narrow wound, partly numbed, partly shocked. Will was right, it must be a xenoc. As he watched, the skin on the forearm rippled, closing the gash. The farmer laughed evilly, teeth showing white in his grubby face. He started to walk towards Dean, arms coming up menacingly. Dean stepped inside the embrace, and ordered his suit to solidify below his shoulders. The farmer’s arms closed round him in a bear hug. Composite fibres, stiffened by the suit’s integral valency generators, creaked ominously as the farmer’s arms squeezed. A couple of equipment blocks snapped. Instinct made Dean switch off the fission blade’s power, leaving a dull black blade with wickedly sharp edges. The hostiles seemed capable of controlling and subverting any kind of electrical circuit—maybe if the knife wasn’t powered up . . . He pressed the tip up into the base of the farmer’s jaw.
“You can heal wounds on your arm. But can you heal your brain as it’s sliced in half?” The blade was shoved up a fraction until a bead of blood welled out around the tip. “Wanna try?”
The farmer hissed in animosity. He eased off his grip around Dean’s chest.
“Now keep very still,” Dean said as he unlocked his suit. “Because I’m very nervous, and an accident can happen easily and quickly.”
“You’ll suffer,” the farmer said malevolently. “You’ll suffer longer than you have to. I promise.”
Dean took a pace to one side, the blade remaining poised on the man’s neck. “You speak English, do you? Where do you come from?”
“Here, I come from here, warrior man. Just like you.”
“I don’t come from here.”
“We all do. And you’re going to stay here. For ever, warrior man. You’re never going to die, not now. Eternity in purgatory is that which awaits you. Do you like the sound of that? That’s what’s going to happen to you.”
Dean saw Will walk behind the farmer, and touch the muzzle of the gaussgun to the back of his skull.
“I’ve got him,” said Will. “Hey, xenoc man, one bad move, one bad word, and you are countryside.” He laughed. “You got that?”
The farmer’s dirty lips curled up in a sneer.
“He’s got it,” Dean said.
Jenny came over and studied the strange tableau. The farmer looked perfectly ordinary apart from his arrogance. She thought of his two comrades that had run into the jungle, the hundreds—thousands—more just like him out there. Maybe he had a right to be arrogant.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The farmer’s eyes darted towards her. “Kingsford Garrigan. What’s yours?”
“Cuff him,” Jenny told Dean. “We’ll take him back to the Isakore . You’re going for a long trip, Kingsford Garrigan. All the way to Kulu.” She thought she saw a flash of surprise in his eyes. “And you’d better hope your friends don’t try and interfere with us. I don’t know what you are, but if you attempt to screw up our electronics again, or if we have to cut and run, the first thing we drop is you. And drop you we will, from a very great height.”
The farmer spat casually on her foot. Will jabbed him with the gaussgun.
Jenny opened a communication channel to the geosynchronous platform, and connected into the Kulu Embassy dumper.
“We’ve got you one of the hostiles,” she datavised to Ralph Hiltch. “And when I say hostile, I’m not kidding.”
“Fantastic. Well done, Jenny. Now get back here soonest. I’ve got our transport to Ombey arranged. The ESA office there has the facilities for a total personality debrief.”
“I wouldn’t bank on it working,” she said. “He’s immune to a TIP shot.”
“Repeat, please.”
“I said the TIP carbine doesn’t hurt him, the energy pulse just breaks apart. Only physical weapons seem to have any effect. At the moment we’ve got him subdued with a gaussgun. He’s also stronger than the G66 boys, a lot stronger.”
There was a long silence. “Is he human?” Ralph Hiltch asked.
“He looks human. But I don’t see how he can be. If you want my opinion, I’d guess at some kind of super bitek android. It’s got to be a xenoc bitek, and a pretty advanced bitek at that.”
“Christ Almighty. Datavise a full-spectrum image over, please. I’ll run it through some analysis programs.”
“Sure thing.”
Dean had the man’s hands behind his back to slide a zipcuff over his wrists. It was a figure-of-eight band of polyminium with a latch buckle at the centre. Jenny watched Dean tighten the pewter-coloured loops; no electronic lock, thank heavens, just simple mechanics.
She ordered her neural nanonics to encode the retinal pixels, and datavised the complete image over to the embassy. Infrared followed, then a spectrographic print.
Dean ejected the power magazine from his broken TIP carbine and handed it to Jenny along with the spares, then recovered his gaussgun. With Will covering their prisoner, they started walking back towards the Isakore at a brisk pace. Jenny aimed them off at a slight tangent, taking them quickly back into the jungle. She still felt too exposed in the firestorm clearing.
“Jenny,” Ralph called after a minute. “What did the hostile say his name was?”
“Kingsford Garrigan,” she replied.
“He’s lying. And you’re wrong about him being a xenoc android, too. I’ve run a search program through our records. He’s a colonist from Aberdale called Gerald Skibbow.”
“It is a wet, humid night here in Durringham, as they always are on this poor benighted planet. The heat clogs my throat and my skin sweats as though I have caught a fever. But still I feel cold inside, a coldness that grips the very cells of my heart.” Was that a bit too purple? Oh well, the studio can always edit it out.
Graeme Nicholson was squatting on aching ankles in the deepest shadows cast by one of the spaceport’s big hangars. It was drizzling hard, and his cheap synthetic suit was clinging to his flabby body. Despite the warmth of the water he really was shivering, the fat rolls of his beer belly were shaking the same way they did when he laughed.
Fifty metres away a defeated yellow light shone from an office in the spaceport’s single-storey administration block. It was the only occupied office, the rest had shut long ago. With his retinal implants straining, Graeme could just make out Laton, Marie Skibbow, and two other men through the grimed glass. One of them was Emlyn Hermon, the Yaku ’s second-in-command, who had met Marie and Laton in the Crashed Dumper. He didn’t know the fourth, but he must work for the spaceport administration in some capacity.
He just wished he could listen to whatever deal they were making. But his boosted hearing was only effective inside a fifteen-metre radius. And no prize in the universe would make him creep any closer to Laton. Fifty metres was quite close enough, thank you.
“I have followed the arch-diabolist here from the city. And nothing I have seen has given me the slightest hope for the future. His interest in the spaceport can only indicate he is ready to move on. His work on Lalonde is complete. Violence and anarchy reign beyond the city. What monstrous curse he has let loose is beyond my imagination; but each new day brings darker stories down the river, sucking away the citizens’ hope. Fear is his real weapon, and he possesses it in abundance.”
Marie held out a small object Graeme took to be a Jovian Bank credit disk. The spaceport administration official proffered its counterpart.
“The alliance has been formed. His plan advances another notch. And I cannot believe it will bring anything other than disaster upon us. Four decades has not reduced the fear. What has he achieved in those four decades? I ask myself this question time and again. The only answer must be: evil. He has perfected evil.”