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.”