Some of the glimpses he had snatched through the scouts defied physics. Either that or physics had advanced beyond all reasonable expectations during his exile. That was conceivable, he reasoned, weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.

Memory: of a man looking up at the sky and seeing the affinity bonded kestrel. The man laughed and raised his hand, snapping his fingers. Air around the kestrel solidified, entombing it in a matrix of frozen molecules, and sending it tumbling from the sky to dash its body against the rocks two hundred metres below. A snap of the fingers . . .

Memory: of a frantic terrified villager from Kilkee firing his laser hunting rifle at one of the usurped. The range had been fifteen metres, and the beam had no effect whatsoever. After the first few shots the rifle had died completely. Then the vennal Laton was using to scout with had curled up and sunk into some kind of coma.

The villages throughout the Quallheim Counties had been conquered with bewildering swiftness. That more than anything convinced Laton he was up against some kind of military force. There was a directing intelligence behind the usurped, expanding their numerical strength at an exponential rate. But what really baffled him was why. He had chosen Lalonde because it fitted his long-range goals; other than that it was a worthless planet. Why take control of people out here?

A test was the only explanation he could think of. Which begged the question what was it a preliminary to? The potential was awesome.

Laton?waldsey’s mental tone was fearful and uncertain, not like him at all.

Yes,laton replied equitably. he could guess what was coming next. After sixty years he knew the way his colleagues’ minds worked better than they did. He was only mildly surprised that it had taken them so long to confront him.

Do you know what it is yet?

No. I have been considering some kind of viral nanonic, but the number of demonstrated functions it possesses would be orders of magnitude above anything we even have theories for. And some of those functions are difficult to explain in terms of the physics we know and understand. In short, if you have a technology that powerful, why bother using it in this fashion? It is most puzzling.

Puzzling!tao said angrily. Father, it is bloody lethal, and it’s right outside the tree. To hell with puzzling , we have to do something.

Laton let the glimmer image of a smile penetrate their shared affinity. Only his children ever dared to contradict him, which pleased him after a fashion; obsequiousness was something he disapproved of almost as much as disloyalty. Which gave everybody a narrow, and perilous, balance to maintain. No doubt you have an idea as to what we should do.

Yeah. Load up the landcruisers, and head for the hills. Call it a strategic withdrawal, call it prudence, but just let’s get out of this tree. Now. While we still can. I don’t mind admitting I’m frightened, if nobody else will.

I would imagine that even this planet’s chief sheriff will know that something odd is happening in Aberdale and the other Quallheim villages by now,laton said. he sensed the others coming into the conversation, their minds carefully shielded from leaking too many emotions. The LDC’s surveillance satellite may be in a deplorable condition, but I assure you it would be quite capable of spotting the landcruisers. And it will be focused on the Quallheim Counties with considerable diligence.

So? We just zap it. The old blackhawk masers you brought down can reach it. It’ll be weeks before the LDC replace it. By that time we’ll be long gone. They’ll see the track we made breaking through the jungle, but once we reach the savannah they’ll lose us.

I would remind you just how close to success our immortality project is. Are you willing to sacrifice that?

Father, unless we get out of here, we aren’t going to have a project left, or a life to immortalize. We can’t defend ourselves against these usurped villagers. I’ve watched what happens when anyone shoots them. They don’t even notice it! And even if somebody does manage to beat them, the Quallheim Counties are going to be searched a centimetre at a time afterwards. Either way, we can’t stay here.

The lad’s got a point there, Laton,salkid said. We can’t cling on here simply out of sentiment.

You always told me knowledge can’t be destroyed,tao said. We know how to splice a parallel-processing brain together. What we need is a secure location in which to do it. The tree certainly isn’t it, not any more.

Well argued,laton said. Except I’m not sure anywhere on Lalonde can be classed as safe any more. This technology is fearsome.he deliberately allowed his emotional shield to slip, and felt the shocked recoil of their thoughts that he who never demonstrated weakness was so deeply perturbed.

We can hardly walk into Durringham’s spaceport and ask for a lift outsystem,waldsey said.

The children can,laton said. They have been born here, the intelligence agencies have no record of them. Once in orbit they can secure a starship for us.

Bloody hell, you mean it.

Indeed. It is the logical course. At the ultimate extreme, I am prepared to contact the Intelligence agencies in Durringham and report the situation to them. They will take me seriously, and that way a warning will get out.

Is it that bad, Father?salsett asked anxiously.

Laton projected a burst of reassuring warmth at the fifteen-year-old girl. I don’t think it will come to that, darling.

Leaving the tree,she said wonderingly.

Yes,he said. Tao, that was a good suggestion of yours; you and Salkid take a blackhawk maser out of storage, and be ready to eliminate that observation satellite. The rest of you have ten hours to pack. We start for Durringham tonight.

He couldn’t detect a single whiff of dissension. Minds retreated from the affinity contact.

In the hours which followed, the gigantea tree was subject to the kind of coordinated activity it hadn’t seen since their arrival. Orders were flung frantically at the incorporated and the housechimps as the residents attempted to dismantle the work of thirty years in the short hours they had left. Heartbreaking decisions were made over what could go and what must stay, several couples arguing. The landcruisers had to be checked over and prepared after thirty years’ unemployment. Laton’s younger children scampered about getting in the way, nervous and elated at the prospect of leaving; the older members of the fellowship started thinking about the Confederation worlds again. Thermal charges were set throughout the rooms and corridors, ready to obliterate all trace of the gigantea’s secrets.

The hectic activity registered as a background burble amid Laton’s steely thoughts. Occasionally someone would intrude into his contemplation to ask for instructions.

After designating the few personal items he wanted to accompany them, he spent his time reviewing the memory of what happened in the clearing when Quinn Dexter killed Supervisor Manani. That strange lightning was the start of it. He ran and re-ran Camilla’s memory images, which were stored in the tree’s sub-sentient bitek processor array. The lightning seemed to be flat, almost compressed, some sections darker than others. As he ran the memory again the dark areas moved, sliding down the glaring streamers of rampaging electrons. The lightning bolts were acting as conduits to some kind of energy pattern, one which behaved outside the accepted norm.

A draught of air stroked his face. He opened his eyes to darkness. The study was as it always had been. He switched his retinal implants to infrared. Jackson Gael and Ruth Hilton stood on the curving wood before him.

“Clever,” Laton said. His contact with the processors faded away. Affinity was reduced to a whisper rattling round the closed confines of his skull. “It’s energy, isn’t it? A self-determining viral program that can store itself in a non-physical lattice.”

Ruth bent down, and put her hand under his chin, tilting his face up so she could examine him. “Edenists. Always so rational.”

“But where did it come from, I wonder?” Laton asked.

“What will it take to break his beliefs?” Jackson Gael asked.

“It’s not of human origin,” Laton said. “I’m sure of that; nor any of the xenoc races we know.”

“We’ll find out tonight,” Ruth said. She let go of Laton’s chin, and held out her hand. “Come along.”

The morning after Governor Rexrew’s briefing with Candace Elford, Ralph Hiltch was sitting behind his own desk in the Kulu Embassy dumper receiving a condensed version of events from Jenny Harris. One of the ESA assets she ran in the sheriff’s office had asked for a meeting and told her about the trouble brewing in the Quallheim Counties.

All well and good, it was nice to see the Governor couldn’t fart without the ESA knowing, but like Rexrew before him, Ralph was having a lot of trouble with the concept of an Ivet uprising.

“An open revolt?” he asked the lieutenant sceptically.

“It looks that way,” she said apologetically. “Here, my contact gave me a flek of the surveillance satellite images.” She loaded it into the processor block on Ralph’s desk, and the screens on the wall began to show the Quallheim’s motley collection of villages.

Ralph stood in front of them, hands on his hips as the semicircular clearings cut into solid jungle appeared. The treetops looked like green foam, broken by occasional glades, and virtually sealing over streams and the smaller rivers. “There’s been a lot of fires,” he agreed unhappily. “And recently, too. Can’t you manage a better resolution than this?”

“Apparently not, and that’s the second cause for alarm. Something is affecting the satellite every time it passes over the Quallheim tributary. No other section of Amarisk is affected.”

He gave her a long look.

“I know,” she said. “It sounds ridiculous.”

Ralph gave his neural nanonics a search request and returned his attention to the screens while it was running. “There’s certainly been some kind of fight down there. And this isn’t the first time Schuster County has come to our attention.” The neural nanonics reported a blank; so he opened a channel to access his processor block’s classified military systems file, extending the search.

“Captain Lambourne reported that nothing ever came out of the marshal’s visit last year,” Jenny Harris said. “We still don’t know what happened to those homestead families.”

Ralph’s neural nanonics told him that the processor block file couldn’t find a match for his request. “Interesting. According to our files, there is no known electronic warfare system which can distort a satellite image like this.”

“How up to date are the files?”

“Last year’s.” He walked back to his seat. “But you’re missing the point. Firstly it’s a wholly ineffective system, all it does is fuzz the image slightly. Secondly, if you’ve gone to all the trouble to tamper with the satellite why not knock it out altogether? Given the age of Lalonde’s satellite, everyone would assume it was a natural malfunction. This method actually draws attention to the Quallheim.”

“Or draws attention away from somewhere else,” she said.

“I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?” he muttered. Outside the window the dark rooftops of Durringham were steaming softly in the bright morning sun. It was all so cheerfully primitive, the residents walking through the tacky streets, power bikes throwing up fans of mud, a teenage couple lost in each other, the tail end of a new colonist group making their way down to the transients’ dormitories. Every morning for the last four years he’d seen variants on the same scene. Lalonde’s inhabitants got on with their basic, modestly corrupt lives, and never bothered anyone. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the means. “The thing which disturbs me most is Rexrew’s idea that it could be an external group attempting some kind of coup. I almost agree with him, it’s certainly more logical than an Ivet revolt.” He rapped his knuckles on the desktop, trying to think. “When is this posse of Candace Elford’s setting off?”

“Tomorrow; she’s going to start recruiting her deputies this morning. And incidentally, the Swithland is one of the boats that will be carrying them. Captain Lambourne can keep us updated if you allow her to use a communication block.”

“OK, but I want at least five of our assets in that group of deputies, more if you can manage. We need to know what’s going on up in the Quallheim Counties. Equip them with communication blocks as well, but make sure they understand they must only use them if the situation is urgent. I’ll speak to Kelven Solanki about the issue, he’s probably as keen as we are to know what’s going on.”

“I’ll get onto it,” she said. “One of the sheriffs Elford is sending belongs to me anyway, that’ll make placing assets among the deputies a lot easier.”

“Good, well done.”

Jenny Harris saluted professionally, but before she got to the door she turned back and said, “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to stage a coup out in the middle of the hinterlands?”

“Someone with an eye to the future, maybe. If it is, our duty is very clear cut.”

“Yes, sir; but if that is the case, they’d need help from out-system.”

“True. Well, at least that’s easy enough to watch for.”

Ralph occupied himself with genuine embassy attachй work for the next two hours. Lalonde imported very little, but from the list of what it did require he tried to secure a reasonable portion for Kulu companies. He was trying to find a supplier for the high-temperature moulds a new glassworks factory wanted when his neural nanonics alerted him to an unscheduled starship that had just jumped into Lalonde’s designated emergence zone, fifty thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. The dumper’s electronics tapped the downlink from Lalonde’s two civil spaceflight monitor satellites, giving him access to the raw data. What it didn’t provide was system command authority, he was a passive observer.

Lalonde’s traffic control took a long time to respond to the monitor satellite’s discovery. There were three starships in an equatorial parking orbit, two colonist transports from Earth, and a freighter from New California, nothing else was due for a week. The staff probably hadn’t even been in the control centre, he thought impatiently as he waited for them to get off their arses and provide him with more information.

Starship visits outside the regular LDC contracted vessels, and the voidhawk supply run for Aethra, were rare events, there were never more than five or six a year. That this one should appear at this time was a coincidence he couldn’t put out of his mind.

The starship was already under power and heading for a standard equatorial parking orbit when traffic control eventually triggered its transponder and established a communication channel. Data flooded into Ralph’s mind, the standard Confederation Astronautics Board registration and certification. It was an independent trader vessel called Lady Macbeth.

His suspicion deepened.

Rumour hit Durringham and spread with a speed that a news company’s distribution division would have envied. It started when Candace Elford’s staff went out for a drink after a hard day assessing the scrambled information they were getting from the Quallheim Counties. Durringham’s strong beer, sweet wines from nearby estates, and running mild mood-stimulant programs through their neural nanonics liberated a quantity of almost accurate information about exactly what had been going on all day in the chief sheriff’s office.

It took half of Lalonde’s long night to filter out of the pubs the sheriffs used and down into the more basic taverns the agricultural workers, port labourers, and river crews favoured. Distance, time, alcohol, and weak hallucinogens distorted and amplified the story in creative surges. The end results which were shouted and argued over loudly through the riverside drinking dens would have impressed any student of social dynamics. The following day, it proliferated through every workplace and home.

The main exchanges of conversations went thus.

The colonists in the Quallheim Counties had been ritually massacred by the Ivets, who had taken up Devil worship. A Satanic theocracy had been declared to the Governor and demanded recognition as an independent state, and all the Ivets were to be sent there.

An army of radical anarchistic Ivets was marching downriver, razing villages as they went, looting and raping. They were kamikazes, sworn to destroy Lalonde.

Kulu Royal Marines had landed upriver and established a beachhead for a full invasion force: all the locals who resisted had been executed. The Ivets had welcomed the marines, betraying colonists who resisted. Supplementary: Lalonde was going to be incorporated into the Kulu Kingdom by force. (Pure crap, people said, why would Alastair II want this God-awful shit-tip of a planet?)

The Tyrathca farmers had suffered a famine and they were eating humans, starting with Aberdale. (No, not possible. Weren’t the Tyrathca herbivores?)

Waster kids from Earth had stolen a starship, and after zapping the sheriff’s surveillance satellite they’d landed to help their old gang mates, the Ivets.

Blackhawks and mercenary starships had banded together; they were invading Lalonde, and they were planning on turning it into a rebel world which would be a base for raiding the Confederation. Colonists were being used for slave labour to build fortifications and secret landing sites out in the jungle. Ivets were captaining the work parties.

Two things remained reasonably constant amid all the wild theorizing. One: colonists had been killed by Ivets. Two: Ivets were heading/helping the revolt.

Durringham was a frontier town, the vast majority of its population scraping their living with long hours of hard labour. They were poor and proud, and the only group which stood between them and the bottom rung were those evil, workshy, criminal, daughter-raping Ivets; and by God that’s where the Ivets were going to stay: underfoot.

When Candace Elford’s sheriffs started to recruit deputies for the posse, tension and nervousness was already gripping the town. Seeing the posse actually assembling down at the port, confirming there really was something going on upriver, tipped unrest into physical aggression.

Darcy and Lori were lucky to miss the worst of the mayhem. On Lalonde they acted as the local representatives for Ward Molecular, a Kulu company that imported various solid-state units as well as a lot of the electron-matrix power cells which the capital’s embryonic industries were incorporating into an increasing number of products. The Kulu connection was an ironic added touch to their cover; the deeply religious Kulu and the Edenists were not closely allied in the Confederation. Edenists were not permitted to germinate their habitats in any of the Kingdom’s star systems, which made it unlikely that anyone would think of them as anything other than loyal subjects of King Alastair II.

They handled their business from a long wooden warehouse structure, a standard industrial building with an overhanging roof, and a floor which was supported on raised stone pillars a metre above the muddy gravel. Built entirely from mayope, it was strong enough to resist any casual break-in attempt by the capital’s slowly increasing population of petty criminals. The single-storey cabin which they lived in sat in the middle of a half-acre plot of land at the back, which like most of Durringham’s residents they used to grow vegetables and fruit bushes.

Warehouse and cabin were situated on the western edge of the port, five hundred metres from the water. The majority of nearby buildings were commercial premises—sawmills, lumber-yards, a few forges, and some relatively new cloth factories, their bleak ranks broken by streets of cabins to accommodate their workers. This end of town had stayed the same for years. It was the eastern end and long southern side which were expanding, and no one seemed keen to develop out towards the coastal swamps ten kilometres down the Juliffe. Nor were there any farms to the west; the raw jungle was less than two kilometres away.

But their proximity to the port did put them on the fringe of the trouble. They were in the office at the side of the warehouse when Stewart Danielsson, one of the three men who worked for them, came barging in.

“People outside,” he said.

Lori and Darcy swapped a glance at the agitation in his tone, and went to see.

There was a loose progression of men from the nearby factories and mills heading towards the port. Darcy stood on the ramp outside the big open doorway at the front of the warehouse; there was a work area just inside, where they would pack orders and even perform repairs on Ward Molecular’s simpler units. Cole Este and Gaven Hough, the company’s other two employees, had both left their benches to join him.

“Where are they all going?” Lori asked. And why do they look so angry?she addressed darcy on singular engagement.

“Going down to the port,” Gaven Hough said.

“Why?”

He hunched his shoulders up, embarrassed. “Sort the Ivets out.”

“Bloody right,” Cole Este mumbled sullenly. “Wouldn’t mind going on that posse myself. The sheriffs’ve been recruiting deputies all morning.”

Damnation, trust this town to think with its arse,darcy said. he and lori had only been told about the quallheim counties revolt by one of their contacts in the Land Allocation Office the previous evening. Those bloody sheriffs must have been shouting the news about Schuster.“gaven, stewart, let’s get these doors shut. we’re closing for the day.”

They started to slide the big doors shut, while Cole Este stood on the ramp, grinning and exchanging a few shouted comments with the odd person he knew. He was nineteen, the youngest of the three workers, and it was obvious he wanted to join the crowd.

Just look at the little idiot,lori said.

Easy. We don’t involve ourselves, nor criticize. Prime rule.

Tell me about it. They’ll kill the Ivets down in the transients’ dormitories. You know that, don’t you?

Darcy slammed the bolt home on the door, and locked it with a padlock keyed to his finger pattern. I know.

“You want us to stay?” Stewart Danielsson asked dubiously.

“No, that’s all right, Stewart, you three get off home. We’ll take care of things here.”

Darcy and Lori sat in the office with all but one of the windows shuttered on the inside. A partition with a line of tall glass panes in wooden frames looked out over the darkened warehouse. The furniture was basic, a couple of tables and five chairs Darcy had made himself. A conditioner whirred almost silently in one corner, keeping the atmosphere cool and dry. The office was one of the few rooms on the planet that was actually dusty.

Once is acceptable,lori said. Twice is not. Something strange is happening in Schuster County.

Possibly.darcy put his maser carbine on the table between them. The solitary shaft of sunlight shining through the window made the smooth grey composite casing glimmer softly. Protection, just in case the riot spread back through the town.

They could both hear the distant growl of the crowd down in the port; the newly arrived Ivets being hunted down and killed. Beaten into the mud with makeshift clubs, or gored by baying sayce to the sound of cheers. If they looked through the window at an angle they would be able to see boats of all sizes sailing hurriedly out of the circular polyp harbours for the safety of the water.

I hate Adamists,lori said. Only Adamists could do this to one another. They do it because they don’t know one another. They don’t love, they can only lust and fear.

Darcy smiled, and reached out to touch her, because her mind was leaking a longing for the reassurance of physical contact. His hand never bridged the gap. An affinity voice with the power of a thunderstorm roared into their minds.

ATTENTION INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES ON LALONDE, I AM LATON. THERE IS A XENOC ENERGY VIRUS LOOSE IN THE QUALLHEIM COUNTIES. HOSTILE AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. LEAVE LALONDE IMMEDIATELY. THE CONFEDERATION NAVY MUST BE INFORMED. THIS IS YOUR ONLY PRIORITY NOW. I CANNOT LAST LONG.

Lori was whimpering, her hands clutching at her ears, mouth frozen open in a horrified wail. Darcy saw her dissolve under a discharge of chaotic mental images, each of them bright enough to dazzle.

Jungle. A village seen from the air. More jungle. A little boy hanging upside-down from a tree, his stomach sliced open. A bearded man hanging upside-down from a different tree, lightning flaring wildly.

Heat, excruciating heat.

Darcy grunted at the pain, he was on fire. Skin blackening, hair singeing, his throat shrivelling.

It stopped.

He was prone on the floor. Flames in the background. Always flames. A man and a woman were leaning over him, naked. Their skin was changing, darkening to green, becoming scaled. Eyes and mouth were scarlet red. The woman parted her lips and a serpent’s forked tongue slipped out.

His children were crying all around.

Sorry, so sorry I failed you at the last.

Father shame: ignominy that extended down to a cellular level.

Leathery green hands began to run across his chest, a parody of sensuality. Where the fingers touched he could feel the ruptures begin deep below his skin.

NOW DO YOU BELIEVE?

And voices, audible above his agony. Coming from within, from a deeper part of his brain than affinity originated. Whisperers in chorus: “We can help, we can make it stop. Let us in, let us free you. Give yourself.”

WARN THEM, CURSE YOU.

Then nothing.

Darcy found himself curled up on the mayope planks of the office floor. He had bitten his lip; a trickle of blood wept down his chin.

He touched himself gingerly, fingers probing his ribs, terrified of what he would find. But there was no pain, no open wounds, no internal damage.

“It was him,” Lori croaked. She was in her chair, head bowed, hugging her chest, hands clenched into tight fists. “Laton. He’s here, he really is here.”

Darcy managed to right himself into a kneeling position, it was enough for now, if he tried to stand he was sure he’d faint. “Those images . . .” Did you see them?

The reptile people? Yes. But the power in that affinity. It . . . it damn near overwhelmed me.

The Quallheim Counties, that’s where he said it was. That’s over a thousand kilometres away upriver. Human affinity can only reach a hundred at most.

He’s had thirty years to perfect his diabolical genetic schemes.her thoughts were contaminated with fright and revulsion.

“A xenoc energy virus,” Darcy muttered, nonplussed. What did he mean? And he was being tortured, along with his children. Why? What is going on upriver?

I don’t know. All I know is I wouldn’t trust him, not ever. We saw images, fantasy figures. He’s had thirty years to construct them, after all.

But they were so real. And why reveal himself? He knows we will eliminate him whatever the cost.

Yes, he knows we will come in force. But with that affinity power he could probably compel even a voidhawk. It would allow himself and his cronies to spread through the Confederation.

It was so real,darcy repeated numbly. And now we know he is so powerful we can guard against him. It makes no sense, unless he really has run into something he can’t handle. Something more powerful than he.

Lori gave him a sad, almost defeated look. We need to know, don’t we?

Yes.

They let their thoughts flow and entwine like the bodies of amorous lovers, reinforcing their strengths, eliminating weaknesses. Gathering courage.

Darcy used a chair as support, and pulled himself up. Every joint felt ponderously stiff. He sat heavily and dabbed at his bitten lip.

Lori smiled fondly, and handed him a handkerchief.

Duty first,he said. We have to inform Jupiter that Laton is here. That takes precedence over everything. We’re not due a voidhawk visit for another couple of months. I’ll see Kelven Solanki and request he sends a message to Aethra and the support station out at Murora immediately, his office has the equipment to do that direct. The Confederation Navy would have to be told anyway, so it might as well be now. He can also include a report in the diplomatic flek on a colonist-carrier ship that’s heading back to Earth. That ought to cover us.