A village like Pamiers would start off with a population of about five hundred. Say two hundred families, and they’ve been here a couple of years. That would mean about a hundred and fifty children.
He stood, scanning the jungle. Slender yellow target graphics slid up over the black and red image in an uncomplicated, unprogrammed reflex. He wanted to shoot something dead. His neural nanonics ordered a slight endocrine effusion, stabilizing the sudden hormonal surge.
“Come on, she can’t help us any more,” he said, and began pushing briskly through the bushes and vines towards the village. He turned his chameleon circuit off, and after a few paces the others followed suit.
Pamiers followed the standard configuration of settlements along the Juliffe’s tributaries. A semicircular clearing chopped out of the jungle along the side of the river. Crude single-storey houses clustered together in no particular order at the centre, along with larger barns, a church, a meeting hall, an Ivet compound. Wooden jetties ventured ten or fifteen metres into the water, with a few fishing skiffs tied up. Fields and plots ringed the outside, a surfeit of crops pushing out of rich black loam.
However, Pamiers’ layout was all that remained recognizable as the four of them stepped out of the trees.
“Where is this light coming from?” Kelly asked, looking round in surprised confusion. As Pat had reported, the village bathed luxuriantly in a bright pool of sunlight, and yellow pollen was thick in the air. She scanned the cloud overhead, but there was no break. Thunder, muted while they were in the trees, rolled insistently around them once more.
Ariadne walked on a few paces, activating her full implant sensor suite as well as the specialist blocks clipped to her belt. She turned a complete circle, sampling the environment. “It’s omnidirectional. We’re not even leaving shadows. See?”
“Like an AV projection,” Reza said.
“Yes and no. The spectrum matches Lalonde’s sun.”
“Let’s go see what those new houses are made of,” he said.
Pamiers’ fields had been left untended. Terrestrial plants were fighting a fierce battle for light and height with the vines that had surged out of the jungle to reclaim their native territory. Fruit was hanging in mouldy white clusters.
Yet inside the ring of fields, the grass around the houses was short and tidy, studded with what looked suspiciously like terrestrial daisies. When he had studied the sheriff’s satellite images on the flight from Tranquillity Reza had seen the way the village clearings were worn down and streaked with muddy runnels. Grass and weeds grew in patchy clumps. But this was an even, verdant carpet that matched Tranquillity’s parkland for vitality.
Stranger still were the houses.
Apart from three burnt-out ruins, the original wooden shacks had been left standing, their planks bleached a pale grey, shuttered windows open to the weather, bark slates slipping and curling, solar-cell panels flapping loosely. They were uninhabited, that was obvious at a glance. Mosses, tufts of grass, and green moulds were tucked into corners and flourishing promisingly. But jammed at random between the creaky cabins were the new structures. None of them was the same, with architectural styles ranging across centuries—a beautiful two-storey Tudor cottage, an Alpine lodge, a Californian millionaire’s cinderblock ranch, a circular black landcoral turret, a marble and silverglass pyramid, a marquee which resembled a cross between a Bedouin tent and a medieval European pavilion, complete with heraldic pennants fluttering on tall poles.
“Having some trouble with my blocks,” Ariadne said. “Several malfunctions. Guido and communications are right out.”
“If it begins to affect the weapons we’ll pull back,” Reza cautioned. “Keep running diagnostic programs.”
They cleared the fields and started to walk over the grass. Ahead of them a woman in a long blue polka-dot dress was pushing a waist-high gloss-black trolley that had a white parasol above it, and huge spindly wheels with chrome wire spokes. Whatever it was, it was impossibly primitive. Reza loaded the image’s pixel pattern into his neural nanonics with an order to run a comparison search program through his encyclopaedia. Three seconds later the program reported it was a European/North American style pram circa 1910–50.
He walked over to the woman, who was humming softly. She had a long face that was crudely painted in so much make-up it was almost a clown’s mask, with dark brown hair worn in a severe bun, encased by a net. She smiled up happily at the four members of the team, as though their weapons and equipment and boosted form were of no consequence.
That simpleton smile was the last straw for Reza, whose nerves were already stretched painfully thin. Either she was retarded, or this whole village was an incredibly warped trap. He activated his short-range precision sensors, and scanned her in both electromagnetic and magnetic spectrums, then linked the return into a fire-command protocol. Any change in her composition (such as an implant switching on or a neural nanonics transmission) and his forearm rifle would slam five EE rounds into her. The rest of his sensors were put into a track-while-scan mode, allowing his neural nanonics to keep tabs on the other villagers he could see walking about among the buildings behind her. He had to use four backup units, several principal sensors had packed up altogether. The overall resolution was way down on the clarity he was used to.
“What the fucking hell’s going on here?” he demanded.
“I have my baby again,” she said in a lilting tone. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“I asked you a question. And you will now answer.”
“Do as he says,” Kelly said hastily. “Please.”
The woman turned to her. “Don’t worry, my dear. You can’t hurt me. Not now, not any more. Would you like to see my baby? I thought I’d lost him. I lost so many back then. It was horrible, all those dead babies. The midwives tried to stop me seeing them; but I looked just the same. They were all perfect, so beautiful, my babies. An evil life it was.” She bent forwards over the pram and lifted out a squirming bundle draped in lacy white cloth. The baby cooed as she held it out.
“Where have you come from?” Reza asked. “Are you the sequestration program?”
“I have my life back. I have my baby back. That’s what I am.”
Ariadne stepped forward. “I’m going to get a sample from one of those buildings.”
“Right,” Reza said. “Sewell, go with her.”
The two of them walked round the woman and started off towards the nearest house, a whitewashed Spanish hacienda.
The baby let out a long gurgle, smiling blithely, feet kicking inside the wrap. “Isn’t he just adorable,” the woman said. She tickled his face with a finger.
“One more time,” Reza said. “What are you?”
“I am me. What else could I be?”
“And that?” He pointed to the cloud.
“That is part of us. Our will.”
“Us? Who is us?”
“Those who have returned.”
“Returned from where?”
She rocked the baby against her chest, not even looking up. “From hell.”
“She’s either nuts, or she’s lying,” Reza said.
“She’s been sequestrated,” Kelly said. “You won’t get anything out of her.”
“So sure of yourselves,” the woman said. She gave Kelly a sly look as she cuddled the baby. “So stupid. Your starships have been fighting among themselves. Did you know that?”
Reza’s neural nanonics’ optical-monitor program reported more people were appearing from the houses. “What do you know about it?”
“We know what we feel, the pain and the iron fire. Their souls weeping in the beyond.”
“Can we check?” Kelly asked urgently.
“Not from here.”
The woman laughed, a nervous cackle. “There aren’t many left to check, my dear. You won’t hear from them again. We’re taking this planet away, right away. Somewhere safe, where the ships can never come to find us. It will become paradise, you know. And my baby will be with me always.”