About quarter of an hour into the job he noticed the ground crew had all slunk back into the shade of the hangar. Nobody was bothering with the Ivets.

Two more McBoeing BDA-9008s landed, bringing another batch of colonists down from the orbiting starship. One spaceplane took off, ferrying LDC personnel up to the empty berths; they were going home, their contract time expired. He stopped to watch the big dark delta-shape soar into the sky, dwindling away to the east. The sight laced his thoughts with vicious envy. And still nobody was paying him any attention. He could run, here and now, away into that awesome expanse of untamed land beyond the perimeter. But the spaceport was the place where he wanted to run to , and he could well imagine how the homesteaders would treat fugitive Ivets. He might have been stupid enough to be Transported, but he wasn’t that naпve. Cursing softly under his breath, he hauled another composite box full of carpentry tools out of the McBoeing’s hold and carried it over to the lorry.

By the time the Ivets finished the unloading and began their long trudge into Durringham the clouds from the west had arrived bringing a warm, persistent rain. Quinn wasn’t surprised to find his grey jump suit turned out not to be waterproof.

The Lalonde Immigration Registration Department manager’s office was in an administration block grafted onto the spaceport’s flight-control centre. A long rectangular flat roof structure of ezystak panels clipped onto a metal frame. It had been assembled twenty-five years previously when the first colonists arrived, and its austere fittings were showing their age. Lalonde didn’t even rate programmed-silicon constructs for its administration buildings, Darcy thought bleakly; at least the Lunar-built structures had some concessions to comfortable living. If ever a colony project was funded on the cheap, it was Lalonde. But the office did have air-conditioning, powered from solar cells. The temperature was appreciably lower than outside, though the humidity remained constant.

He sat on the settee working his way through the registration cards which the latest batch of arrivals had handed over in exchange for their citizenship and LDC credit disks. The starship had brought five and a half thousand people from Earth; five and a half thousand losers, dreamers, and criminals let loose to wreck another planet in the name of noble destiny. After sixty years in the Edenist Intelligence agency, Darcy couldn’t think of Adamists in any other terms. And they claim they’re the normal ones, he thought wryly, give me ungodly freakishness every time.

He entered another card’s memory into his processor block, glancing briefly at the hologram. A fairly handsome twenty-year-old man, face composed, eyes haunted with fear and hatred. Quinn Dexter, an Involuntary Transportee. The processor block balanced on his lap didn’t respond to the name.

The card was tossed onto the growing pile. Darcy picked up another.

“Something you never told me,” Nico Frihagen said from behind his desk. “Who are you people looking for?”

Darcy looked up. Nico Frihagen was Lalonde’s Immigration Registrar, a grand title for what was essentially a clerk working in the Governor’s Civil Administration Division. He was in his late fifties, dourly Slavic in appearance, with rolling jowls and limp receding hair. Darcy suspected his ancestors had had very little to do with geneering. The slobbish civil servant was drinking beer from a tube, an offworld brand, no doubt pilfered from some unsuspecting arrival’s farmsteading gear. Spaceport staff had a nice racket going ripping off the new colonists. Nico Frihagen was an essential segment of the scam; a list of belongings was included on the colonists’ registration cards.

That readiness to jam his nose in the trough made the registrar an ideal contact for the Edenist operatives. For a straight five hundred fuseodollars a month, Darcy and his partner, Lori, ran through the new immigrants’ identification without having to access the colony’s civic data store.

Details on the immigrants were sparse, the Lalonde Development Company didn’t really care who settled the planet as long as they paid their passage and land registration fee. The company wouldn’t declare a dividend for another century yet, when the population had grown above a hundred million and an industrial economy was rising to replace the agrarian beginnings. Planets were always very long term investments. But Darcy and Lori kept ploughing through the data. Routine procedure. Besides, someone might get careless.

“Why do you want to know? Has somebody been showing an interest?” Lori asked, sitting at the other end of the settee from Darcy. A seventy-three-year-old woman with plain auburn hair and a round face, she looked about half of Nico Frihagen’s age. Like Darcy she lacked the distinctive height of most Edenists, which made both of them ideal for deep cover work.

“No.” Nico Frihagen gestured with the beer tube. “But you’ve been doing this for three years now, hell probably for three years before that for all I know. It’s not just the money, that doesn’t mean much to you people. No, it’s the time you spend. That’s got to mean you’re searching for someone important.”

“Not really,” Lori said. “It’s a type of person we’re after, not a specific individual.”

Good enough,darcy told her silently.

Let’s hope he’s satisfied with it,she replied.

Nico Frihagen took a swig of beer. “What type?”

Darcy held up his personal processor block. “The profile is loaded in here, available on a need to know basis. Do you think you need to know, Nico?”

“No. I just wondered. There have been rumours, that’s all.”

“What sort of rumours, Nico?”

Nico Frihagen gazed out of the office’s window, watching an Ivet team unloading a McBoeing BDA-9008. “Upriver. Some settlers vanished, a couple of homesteads up in Schuster County. The sheriffs couldn’t find any trace of them, no sign of a struggle, no bodies; just empty houses.”

Where the heck is Schuster County?lori asked.

Darcy queried the bitek processor in his block; a map of the Juliffe’s tributary basin bloomed in his mind. Schuster County glowed a soft amber, a sprawling area, roughly rectangular, clinging to the side of the Quallheim River, one of the hundreds of tributaries. Like Nico said, way upriver. Over a thousand kilometres; it’s an area they’re just opening up for settlement.

It could be some kind of big animal. A kroclion, or even something the ecological analysis crew didn’t find.

Maybe.darcy couldn’t bring himself to believe that. “So what was the rumour about it, Nico? What are people saying?”

“Not much, not many people know. The Governor wanted it kept quiet, he was worried about stirring up trouble with the Tyrathca farmers, there’s a group of them on the other side of the savannah which borders Schuster County. He thought they’d get the blame, so the county sheriff hasn’t made an official report. The homesteads have been listed as abandoned.”

“When did this happen?” Lori asked.

“Couple of weeks back.”

Not much to go on,lori said.

It’s remote enough. The kind of area he’d go to.

I concede that. But what would he want with some hick farmers?

Insufficient data.

Are we going to go and check?

Check what? That the homesteads are empty? We can’t go gallivanting off into the jungle over a couple of families who have broken their settlement contract. Goodness, if you stuck me out there in the middle of nowhere, I’d want to run away.

I still say it’s odd. If they had been ordinary malcontents, the local sheriff would have known about it.

Yes. But even if we did go, it would take us two or three weeks to reach Schuster County. That means the trail would be well over a month old and cold. How good are you at tracking trails like that through a jungle?

We could take Abraham and Catlin out of zero-tau, use them to scout the area.

Darcy weighed up the options. Abraham and Catlin, their eagles, had enhanced senses, but even so sending them off without even a reasonable idea of where their quarry might be was pointless. They could spend half a year covering Schuster County alone. If they had more operatives he might have sanctioned it, but not with just the two of them. Covering Lalonde’s immigrants was a long shot, acting on one piece of dubious information nearly forty years old: that Laton had bought a copy of the original ecological assessment team’s report. Chasing off into the hinterlands was completely out of the question.

No,he said reluctantly. We’ll keep them for when we have a definite scent. But there’s a voidhawk due from Jospool in a month, I’ll ask the captain for a complete survey of Schuster County.

OK, you’re the boss.

He sent the mental image of a grin. They had worked together for too long for rank to be anything other than nominal between them.

“Thanks for mentioning this,” Darcy told Nico Frihagen.

“It was useful?”

“Could be. We’ll certainly show our appreciation.”

“Thank you.” Nico Frihagen smiled thinly and took another gulp of beer.

He is a disgusting oaf,lori said.

“We’d be even more grateful if you let us know of any more disappearances,” Darcy said.

Nico Frihagen cocked his beer tube in his direction. “Do my best.”

Darcy picked up another registration card. The name Marie Skibbow was printed along the top; an attractive teenage girl smiled rebelliously at him from her hologram. Her parents were in for a few years of hell, he decided. Outside the grimy window, thick grey clouds were massing on the western horizon.

The road linking Durringham to the spaceport was a broad strip of pinkish rock chippings slicing straight through the thick jungle. Father Horst Elwes marched towards the capital as best he could with his swelling feet rubbing what felt suspiciously like blisters on both heels. He kept a cautionary eye on the clouds accumulating above the gently waving treetops, hoping the rain would hold off until he made it to the transients’ dormitory.

Thin spires of steam drifted out of the chippings around his feet. The narrow gorge between the trees seemed to act as a lens for the sun, and the heat was awesome. A carpet of bushy grass was besieging the edge of the road. Vegetation on Lalonde certainly was vigorous. Birdsong filled the air, a resonant chittering. That would be the chikrows, he thought, reviewing the didactic memory of local conditions which the Church had given him before he left Earth. About the size of a terran pheasant, with bright scarlet plumage. Eatable, but not recommended, the artificial memory informed him.

There wasn’t much traffic on the road. Battered lorries rumbling to and from the spaceport, carrying wooden crates and ancient-looking composite cargo-pods, some loaded up with homesteading gear. The spaceport crews riding power bikes with broad, deep-tread tyres, tooting their horns as they sped past, the men shouting at the girls. Several horse-drawn carts trundled by. Horst stared with unashamed delight at the big creatures. He’d never visited his arcology’s zoo back on Earth. How strange that the first time he should meet them was on a planet over three hundred light-years from their birthworld. And how could they stand the heat with such thick coats?

There were five hundred members in Group Seven, of which he was included. They had all started off down the road in a tightly packed group following the LDC officer, chattering brightly. Now, after a couple of kilometres, they had become well spread out, and subdued. Horst was close to the rear. His joints were already creaking in protest, and the need for a drink was rising sharply. Yet the air was so moist. Most of the men had shrugged out of their jump suit tops and T-shirts, tying the arms around their waist. So too had several of the women. He noticed that all the locals on power bikes were in shorts and thin shirts; so was the LDC officer leading them, come to that.

He stopped, surprised by the amount of blood pounding away in his cheeks, and gave the seal catch at his neck a full ninety-degree twist. The front of his jump suit split open to reveal his thin powder-blue T-shirt, stained a shade deeper by sweat. The lightweight silk-smooth garment might be ideal for shipboard use, and even in an arcology, but for dealing with raw nature it was ridiculous. Somebody must have got their communication channels fouled up. Surely colonists hadn’t been arriving dressed like this for twenty-five years?

A little girl, about ten or eleven years old, was looking up at him. She had that miniature angel’s face of all young children, with straight shoulder-length white-blonde hair, gathered into two pony-tails by small red cords. He was surprised to see she was wearing sturdy ankle-length hiker boots, along with baggy yellow shorts and a small white cotton top. A wide-brimmed green felt hat was tilted back sharply. Horst found himself smiling down at her automatically.

“Hello, there. Shouldn’t you have got on the bus back at the spaceport?” he asked.

Her face screwed up in indignation. “I’m not a baby!”

“I never said you were. But you could have fooled the development company officer into giving you that lift. I would have done it, if I had the chance.”

Her eyes darted to the white crucifix on his T-shirt sleeve. “But you’re a priest.”

“Father Horst Elwes, your priest, if you are in Group Seven.”

“Yes, I am. But claiming a lift would have been dishonest,” she persisted.

“It would have been sensible. And I’m sure Jesus would understand.”

She grinned at that, which made the day seem even brighter to Horst.

“You’re nothing like Father Varhoos back home.”

“Is that good?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded vigorously.

“Where’s your family?”

“There’s only me and Mother.” The girl pointed to a woman who was walking towards them. She was in her mid-thirties, a strong face with the same fair hair as her daughter. Her robust figure made Horst sigh for what could never be. Not that the Unified Christian Church forbade its priests from marrying, far from it, but even in his prime, twenty years ago, he had been curved in most directions. Now he was what his kinder colleagues described as cuddly, and that was after treating every calorie like an invading virus.

Her name was Ruth Hilton, she told him briskly, and her daughter was Jay. There was no mention of a husband or boyfriend. The three of them started walking down the road together.

“It’s nice to see someone was thinking along practical lines,” Horst said. “A fine band of pioneers we turned out to be.” Ruth was also dressed for the heat, with shorts, cloth hat, and a sleeveless vest; her boots were larger versions of Jay’s. She was carrying a well-loaded rucksack; and her broad leather belt had several devices clipped on to it. Horst didn’t recognize any of them.

“This is a tropical planet, Father. Didn’t the Church give you a generalist didactic memory of Lalonde before you left?” Ruth asked.

“Yes. But I hardly expected to be undertaking a route march the minute we arrived. By my personal timetable, it’s only been fifteen hours since I left the arcology abbey.”

“This is a stage one colony,” Ruth said, without any sympathy. “You think they’re going to have the time or the inclination to wet-nurse five thousand arcology dwellers who have never seen the open sky before? Do me a favour!”

“I still think we might have been given some warning. Perhaps a chance to change into more appropriate clothing.”

“You should have carried it with you in the zero-tau pod. That’s what I did. There’s an allowance for up to twenty kilos of personal luggage in the passage contract.”

“The Church paid for my passage.” Horst answered carefully. He could see Ruth had what it took to survive in this new, demanding world; but she would have to learn to soften her somewhat mercenary attitude or he could imagine himself trying to calm a lynch mob. He forbade a grin. Now that would be a true test of my ability.

“Know what your problem is, Father?” Ruth asked. “Too much faith.”

Quite the contrary, Horst thought, I have nowhere near enough. Which is why I’m here in the remotest part of the human dominion, where I can do little or no harm. Though the bishop was far too kind to put it like that.

“What do you intend doing when we reach our destination?” he asked. “Farming? Fishing in the Juliffe, perhaps?”

“Not likely! We’ll be self-sufficient, of course, I brought enough seeds for that. But I’m a qualified didactic assessor.” She grinned roguishly. “I’m going to be the village schoolmarm. Probably the county schoolmarm, seeing the scraploose way this place is put together. I’ve got a laser imprinter and every educational course you can think of stored in here.” She patted the rucksack. “Jay and I are going to be able to write our own ticket with that. You wouldn’t believe the things you’re going to need to know once we’re dumped in the middle of nowhere.”

“I expect you’re right,” he said without much enthusiasm. Were all the other colonists experiencing the subtle feeling of doubt now they were facing the daunting physical reality of Lalonde? He looked round at the people nearest to him. They were all plodding along lethargically. A gorgeous teenage girl trudged past, face down, lips set in grim misery. Her jump suit top was tied round her waist; she was wearing a tangerine scoop-neck T-shirt underneath, revealing plenty of smooth skin that was coated in sweat and dust. A silent martyr, Horst decided; he had seen the type often enough when he put in a stint at his arcology’s refuge. None of the males nearby paid her the slightest attention.

“You bet I am,” Ruth boomed irrepressibly. “Take shoes, now. You probably brought two or three pairs, right?”

“Two pairs of boots, yes.”

“Smart. But they’re not going to last five years in the jungle, no matter what fancy composite they’re made out of. After that you make your own. And for that you come to me for a course in cobbling.”

“I see. You have thought this out, haven’t you?”

“Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”

Jay smiled up at her mother with complete adoration.

“Isn’t an imprinter rather heavy to be lugging about?” Horst asked curiously.

Ruth guffawed loudly, and ran the back of her hand across her brow in a theatrical motion. “Sure is. But it’s valuable, especially the newest technical courses, stuff this planet’s never heard of. I’m not about to leave that in the hands of the spaceport crew. No way, no how.”

A chill of alarm slithered through Horst. “You don’t think . . .”

“I’m bloody sure they are. It’s what I’d do.”

“Why didn’t you say something back there?” he demanded in exasperation. “I have reading primer books in my container, medicines, communion wine. Some of us could have remained with it for security.”

“Listen, Father, I’m not aiming to be mayor of this group, I’ll leave that to some hulking macho male, thank you. And I can’t see myself being applauded for standing up in front of that manager woman and saying we should stay behind to stop her friends from stealing our gear. Would you have done that, you with your goodwill to all men?”

“Not publicly, no,” Horst said. “But there are ways.”

“Well, start thinking of them, because those precious containers of ours are going to be left piled up in a warehouse in town for the next couple of days before we set sail. And we’re going to need what’s inside them, and I really do mean need ; because anyone who thinks that all it takes to survive out there is determination and honest toil is in for the shock of their pampered lives.”

“Do you always have to be right about absolutely everything?”

“Listen, you’re here to look after our souls, Father. You’ll be good at that, I can see, you’re the caring type. Deep down, anyway. But keeping my soul connected to my body, that’s all down to me. And I intend to do the best job I can.”

“All right,” he said. “It might be a good idea for me to speak with some of our group this evening. Perhaps we could organize some kind of watch at the warehouse.”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea to see if we can acquire replacements for anything that’s gone walkabout, as well. There’s bound to be other groups’ gear stored with ours, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Alternatively, we could go to the Sheriff’s office, and ask them to find anything that’s been stolen from us,” Horst said forcibly.

Ruth laughed out loud.

They walked on in silence for several minutes.

“Ruth?” he asked eventually. “Why have you come here?”

She exchanged a mournful glance with Jay, the two of them suddenly vulnerable. “I’m running away,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Durringham had been founded in 2582, a couple of (Earth) years after the Confederation inspection team had confirmed the results of the land venture company’s ecological analysis crew, agreeing that Lalonde had no biota exceptionally hazardous to humans—a certificate which was vital for any planet seeking to attract colonists. The hiatus was due to the venture company (which had bought the settlement rights from the scoutship which discovered the planet) attracting partners, and turning itself into the Lalonde Development Company. With enough financial backing to establish a working spaceport and provide a minimal level of civil administration, as well as securing an agreement with the Edenists to germinate a bitek habitat above Murora, the system’s largest gas giant, the task of attracting colonists began in earnest.

After reviewing the predominantly South-East Asian catchment profiles and intended culture-base of other stage one colony planets in the same sector as Lalonde, the LDC board decided to concentrate on EuroChristian-ethnic stock to give themselves an adequate immigrant pool. They wrote a broadly democratic constitution which would come into effect over a century, with the LDC turning over local civil administration functions to elected councils, and ultimately the governorship to a congress and president at the end of the first hundred years. Theory had it that when the process was complete Lalonde would have developed a burgeoning industrial/technological society, with the LDC as the largest across-the-board shareholder in the planet’s commercial enterprises. That was when the real profits would start to roll in.

At the start of the preliminary stage, cargo starships delivered thirty-five dumpers into low orbit: squat, conical, atmospheric-entry craft, packed full of heavy machinery, supplies, fuel, ground vehicles, and the prefabricated sections of runway. The dumpers were aerobraked below orbital velocity, and one by one began their long fiery descent curve towards the jungle below. They rode the beacon signals down to land beside the Juliffe’s southern bank, spread out in a line fifteen kilometres long.

Each dumper was thirty metres high, fifteen metres across its base, weighing three hundred and fifty tonnes fully loaded. Small fins around the base steered them with reasonable accuracy through the atmosphere until they were seven hundred metres above the ground, by which time they had slowed to subsonic speed. A cluster of eight giant parachutes lowered them for the final few hundred metres, bringing them to a landing which resembled a controlled crash to the small flight-control team watching from a safe distance. They were designed for a one-way trip; where they landed, they stayed.

Construction crews followed them down in small VTOL spaceplanes, and began unloading. When the dumpers had been emptied they formed environment-proof accommodation for the crews’ families and offices for the governor’s civil administration staff.

The jungle surrounding the dumpers was levelled first, a chop and burn policy producing a wide swath of desolated foliage and charred animals; the spaceport clearing followed. After the runway grids were assembled, a second wave of workers arrived in the McBoeings, along with more equipment. This time they had to build their own accommodation, using the profusion of logs the earlier crews had left scattered across the ground. Rings of crude wooden cabins sprang up around all of the dumpers, looking as if they were rafts floating on a sea of mud. Stripped of its scrub cover, subject to continual heavy plant traffic and Lalonde’s daily rains, the rich black loam was reduced to a fetid-smelling sludge which was over half a metre thick in places. The rock crushers worked continuously throughout the planet’s twenty-six-hour day, but they could never supply enough chippings to stabilize the expanding city’s quagmire roads.

The view from the scuffed and algae-splattered window of Ralph Hiltch’s office, on the third floor of the dumper which housed the Kulu Embassy, showed him the sun-soaked timber-plank roofs of Durringham spread out across the gently undulating land next to the river. The conglomeration was devoid of any methodical street pattern. Durringham hadn’t been laid down with logical forethought, it had erupted like a tumour. He was sure even Earth’s eighteenth-century cities had more charm than this. Lalonde was his fourth offworld assignment, and he had never seen anything more primitive. The weather-stained hulls of the dumpers rose above the shanty-town precincts like arcane temples, linked to the ramshackle buildings with a monstrous spider web of sable-black power cables slung between tall poles. The dumpers’ integral fusion generators provided ninety per cent of the planet’s electrical power, and Durringham was completely dependent on their output.

By virtue of the Royal Kulu Bank taking a two per cent stake in the LDC, Kulu’s Foreign Office had acquired the dumper for its staff as soon as the start-up phase of colonization was over, ousting the Governor’s Aboriginal Fruit Classification Division in the process. Ralph Hiltch was grateful for the political arm-twisting manoeuvre of twenty years ago; it allowed him to claim an air-conditioned office, and a tiny two-room apartment next door. As the Commercial Attachй he was entitled to a bigger apartment in the embassy’s residential block outside, but his actual position as Head of Station for the Kulu External Security Agency operation on Lalonde meant he needed the kind of secure quarters which the old dumper with its carbotanium structure could provide. Besides, like everything else in Durringham, the residential block was made of wood, and leaked something rotten.

He watched the near-solid cliff of silver-grey rain sweeping in from the ocean, obscuring the narrow verdant line peeping above the rooftops to the south which marked the boundary of the jungle. It was the third downpour of the day. One of the five screens on the wall opposite his desk showed a real-time weather-satellite image of Amarisk and the ocean to the west, both covered by spiral arms of cloud. To his wearily experienced eye the rain would last for a good hour and a half.

Ralph eased himself back in his chair and regarded the man sitting nervously on the other side of his desk. Maki Gruter tried not to shift about under the stare. He was a twenty-eight-year-old grade three manager working for the Governor’s Transport Office, dressed in fawn shorts and a jade shirt, his lemon-yellow cagoule hanging off the back of his chair. Like almost everyone else in Lalonde’s civil administration he was for sale; they universally regarded this backwoods posting as an opportunity to rip off both the LDC and the colonists. Ralph had recruited Maki Gruter two and a half years ago, a month after he himself had arrived. It wasn’t so much an entrapment exercise as simply making a selection from a host of eager volunteers. There were times, Ralph reflected sagely, when he would like to see an official who wouldn’t sell out for just a sniff of the ubiquitous Edenist fuseodollar. Once his duty tour on Lalonde was finished in another three years he would have to go through innumerable refresher courses. Subversion was so easy here.

In fact there were times when he questioned the whole point of the ESA mounting an operation on what was basically a jungle populated by psychological Neanderthals. But Lalonde was only twenty-two light-years from the Principality of Ombey, the Kulu Kingdom’s newest dominion star system, itself only just out of stage-two development. The ruling Saldana dynasty wanted to make sure that Lalonde didn’t mature along hostile lines. Ralph and his colleagues were assigned to watch the colony’s political evolution, occasionally offering covert assistance to aspirants with coincident policies; money, or black data on opposing candidates, it didn’t make any difference in the end. The formative years of a colony’s independence set the political agenda for centuries to come, so the ESA did its best to make sure the first elected leaders were ideologically benign as regards the Kingdom. Placemen, basically.

It made sense if you took the long-term consequences into account; a few million pounds spent now as opposed to the billions any form of naval action would cost once Lalonde had a technoeconomy capable of building military starships. And God knows, Ralph thought, the Saldanas approached every problem from that angle—with their life-expectancy long term was the only term they understood.