“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 attaché 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.