Текст книги "The Abyss Beyond Dreams"

Автор книги: Peter F. Hamilton

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

July 11th 3326

The Skylady rose silently up into Augusta’s night sky. A fat ellipsoid twenty-five metres long, with rounded delta wings. Her nondescript grey-green fuselage soaked up the starlight, making her very difficult to see.

Umbaratta flew beside her, Nigel Sheldon’s personal starship – a sleek teardrop ultradrive, capable of flying anywhere in the galaxy at fifty-six lightyears an hour. Two thousand kilometres above Augusta, they both rendezvoused with Vallar’s spherical starship, and all three went FTL.

*

Eighteen hours later, a long way outside the Commonwealth, they dropped back into ordinary space. The nearest star was three light-years away.

Sitting in the Umbaratta’s circular cabin, Nigel Sheldon told the smartcore to scan round. The starship’s excellent sensors could detect nothing. He’d been expecting a Raiel starship of some kind to be waiting for them. One of their colossal warships, he’d hoped. They were still over thirty thousand lightyears from the Void, and he was extremely interested in how the Raiel were going to transport them there. The Commonwealth had never managed to produce anything faster than ultradrive.

Vallar opened a link. ‘Stand by,’ she told him.

Nigel opened his gaiamotes, and detected his clone’s thoughts. Like his, they reflected a quiet anticipation.

‘How much faster do you think their ship will be?’ he asked.

‘It won’t be a ship,’ the clone replied.

‘How do you figure?’

His clone’s thoughts turned smug. ‘We only use starships inside the Commonwealth because of politics, and outside because it’s practical. The Raiel are evangelicals devoted to saving the galaxy, and they were more technologically advanced than us a million years ago.’

‘Well argued.’

‘You really do need to get a better brain.’

‘Smartass.’

‘Thankfully, yes.’

They shared a mental smile.

The Umbaratta’s smartcore reported an exotic energy distortion manifesting five hundred kilometres away. Nigel linked in to the external sensors, and his exovision showed him the wormhole opening across the starfield. It was a large one, measuring three hundred metres in diameter.

‘This will take you to your destination,’ Vallar told them. ‘The warrior Raiel are waiting for you. Nigel, I would like to thank you for your help.’

‘Anytime,’ Nigel replied airily. He could feel a spike of irony rising in his clone’s thoughts at the polite response.

Umbaratta and Skylady flew into the wormhole, emerging a second later in a very different part of the galaxy. Hundreds of lightyears away, a shimmering band of giant stars formed a magnificent archway across space. The Wall stars, Umbaratta’s smartcore confirmed, a bracelet of intense blue-white light surrounding the galactic core – not that there was much left of it. The Void was slowly expanding into the massive Gulf which the Wall surrounded, the dangerously radioactive zone of broken stars and seething particle storms. Not far away – in galactic terms – was the loop: a dense halo of supercharged atoms that orbited the Void. It burnt a lethal crimson across the Gulf, though that was only the visible aspect of its electromagnetic emissions; its X-ray glare was powerful enough to be detected clear across the galaxy.

Nigel hurriedly reviewed the flight data in his exovision, with particular emphasis on the force fields. They were protecting the hull against the prodigious flood of ultra-hard radiation outside, but it was taking a lot of power to maintain them.

Three massive Raiel warships were holding station behind the wormhole, their shielding only revealing dark spectres, like globes of solidified smoke that were hard for the sensors to focus on. And behind them . . . ‘Sonofabitch,’ Nigel muttered. A Dark Fortress sphere glowed an intense indigo from the swirl of exotic energy it was manipulating. The size of Saturn, the sphere was a lattice of dark struts. Its external shell was wrapped round a series of concentric inner lattice shells, each possessing different physical properties, with a core that was full of extremely odd energy functions.

‘No wonder they can produce a wormhole that reaches halfway across the galaxy,’ the clone Nigel said. ‘The size of the damn thing!’

Humans had first encountered the awesome machines during the Starflyer War. The Raiel had used one to encase an entire solar system in an impenetrable force field, imprisoning the psychotic alien Primes inside. The starship crew who first encountered the sphere that was generating the force field had named it, somewhat quixotically, the Dark Fortress.

It was only later, when the Commonwealth was invited to join the Raiel in observing the Void, that the Navy discovered it was the Raiel who had built the Dark Fortress. At which point the nomenclature was diplomatically shortened to DF sphere. There were a dozen DF spheres in the Centurion Station star system, and many thousands more positioned all the way around the Wall. All the Raiel would say about them was that they were part of their defence against the Void should it start its long-feared catastrophic expansion phase.

A link opened from one of the warships. ‘I am Torux, ships-captain. Please stand by for teleport on board.’

‘Thank yo—’

The Umbaratta was abruptly sitting in an empty, softly lit compartment the size of a CST terminal just as Nigel’s exovision icons were telling him a T-sphere had manifested. The Skylady sat next to it. Nigel had to smile at the guilty thrill his clone was emitting into the gaiafield; it matched his own.

‘We are proceeding to the insertion point,’ Torux told them. ‘Transit time, seven hours fourteen minutes.’

Nigel’s excitement was instantly replaced by a twinge of anxiety, also matched then surpassed by his clone.

‘Welcome aboard, Nigel Sheldon,’ Torux said. ‘You are welcome in my habitation section. Please deactivate your ship’s force fields.’

There was a moment of hesitation, the petulant thought: What if I don’t? Which he knew his clone would also be having. Umbaratta was just about the pinnacle of Commonwealth technology, yet it was nestled here in some obscure corner of this monster warship and he finally knew what the NASA astronauts had felt after they landed on Mars to plant their flag, only to find him waiting there beside a prototype wormhole laughing at them because his technology was oh so superior. No human had ever been on board a Raiel warship. It was a historic moment on many levels.

He switched off the force fields and a T-sphere manifested in the cabin. He was snatched away . . .

. . . to a Raiel’s private chamber similar to those he’d visited in the High Angel. His link to Umbaratta’s smartcore remained; he had courteous hosts, then. The room was circular, fifty metres in diameter, with a ceiling that was lost in the gloom above him, making it seem as if he was standing at the bottom of some giant mine shaft. The walls rippled as though they were a single sheet of water; small coloured jewels glimmered behind the idiosyncratic surface effect casting a wavering sheen of phosphorescence.

A warrior Raiel stood before him. Nigel was expecting it to be larger than the Raiel on High Angel. If you’ve spent a million years breeding for war, everything should be bigger and tougher. But this one was actually smaller than Vallar, although its skin had metamorphosed into an armour of blue-grey segments with tiny lights sparkling below the surface like entombed stars.

‘I am Torux,’ it said in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Welcome aboard our ship, Olokkural.’

‘It is impressive.’

‘I would like to personally thank you for helping us.’

‘The Void affects all of us, ultimately,’ Nigel said. ‘Helping you was the least I could do; your vigil is truly selfless. I will do what I can, though I have to say I am not terribly confident.’

‘Paula Myo considered this to be a worthwhile attempt.’

‘Yes, indeed. Do you know Paula?’

‘We have heard of her from our cousins on High Angel.’

And why does that not surprise me? Nigel could feel his clone laughing.

‘We have a link that will enable you to observe the external environment,’ Torux said.

‘Thank you,’ Nigel replied as his u-shadow reported that a connection to the ship was opening.

*

Seven hours after coming aboard, Nigel watched the Olokkural and its two sister warships drop out of FTL and slow to a relative halt half a million kilometres from the lightless boundary of the Void. Greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and it had taken millennia for humans to bridge that gap, but the scale unveiled before him was severely intimidating to Nigel’s primitive core. This was the eater of stars, of cultures beautiful and terrible, consumer of hope. The one true enemy of all species across the galaxy.

Five more Raiel warships were already waiting for them, along with seven DF spheres. When he saw what else was out there, Nigel gave a smile of complete admiration.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he heard his clone say in the Skylady’s cabin. ‘Win or lose, this is going to make it all worthwhile.’

The DF spheres were using an intricate mesh of gravitational forces to suspend three blue-white supergiant stars, preventing them from the final plunge into the infinite gravity tide of the event horizon which would tear them apart. Even here, half a million kilometres out, surrounded by a cage of inverted gravity fields, their incandescent coronas bulged and writhed, spitting out brutal flares that played across the boundary, dissolving into meta-cascades of radiation as their individual particles were sucked inward and crushed into their sub-atomic components.

‘Please stand by,’ Torux said.

‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ Nigel asked. ‘Even an ordinary event horizon is impossible to break.’

‘This is the method by which we inserted our armada.’

And look what happened to them, Nigel thought.

‘We begin,’ Torux announced.

The DF spheres changed the quantum characteristics of the cage. Nigel could sense the forces alter even though he couldn’t comprehend their nature. The surface of the stars, already impossibly hot, bright and violent, began to burn still brighter as their atoms lost cohesion and transformed into pure energy. For over a quarter of an hour the compression wave grew, travelling inwards, while the coronas mutated to relativistic barbs of raw energy stabbing out in every direction through the cage bands. Subjected to the artificial implosion dynamics even their own incredible gravity couldn’t absorb, the three supergiants went nova.

Instead of allowing them to detonate in a radiative blast of energy and superdense hydrogen, the DF spheres did something weird to local spacetime. The power of the novas was converted into negative gravity, and directed in one direction. Straight into the Void’s boundary.

‘Ho-lee crap,’ Nigel grunted, his arms instinctively waving round trying to find something to hold on to as the Olokkural accelerated fast across the horribly short distance to the Void. Skylady was teleported outside, held in place by a gravity node. The warship’s force fields protected it from the cosmic energies wrecking local spacetime.

Ahead of the Olokkural, the Void’s perfectly smooth black boundary began to distort upwards, as if some kind of tumour was growing inside. Up and up it was stretched by the terrible stress of negative gravity, forming a single grotesque mound.

Nigel held his breath. He could feel his clone closing his eyes, hands gripping the cabin’s acceleration couch.

At the peak of the distension, the Void’s boundary tore open. Elegant nebula light shone out into real spacetime. The Olokkural released Skylady, then veered away at two hundred gees, whipping round in a hard parabola and heading back out away from the shrinking rent.

Skylady slipped in through the gap, and thirty seconds later the Void’s wounded boundary closed up behind it.

Nigel gulped down air again.

‘Did he survive?’ Torux asked.

‘Yes.’

BOOK THREE

Revolution for Beginners

1

An hour after the patrol squad broke camp, the morning mist still hadn’t lifted. Grey haze clung to the ground, swirling slowly round the big ecru-shaded tree trunks, keeping the temperature pleasantly low. All across the densely wooded valley, native birds called to each other in their strange oscillating whistle, competing with the incessant rustling sound of bussalore rodents creeping through the undergrowth. Bienvenido’s hot sun was nothing more than a blur-patch above the eastern horizon. Nonetheless, its intensity fluoresced the mist, making it difficult to see more than ten metres.

Slvasta dragged his boots through the feathery lingrass that grew lavishly between the trunks of the quasso trees, ripping the twiny blades apart. It was easier than picking his feet up; the lingrass came halfway up his shins. Dew slicked his stiff regiment-issue canvas garters; he knew that by midday that damp would be soaking his socks and rubbing his feet raw. An hour into the sweep, and he was bored and irked already.

‘Crud, Slvasta, why not just ring a bell to tell the Fallers we’re here?’ Corporal Jamenk chided.

‘This stuff is everywhere,’ Slvasta complained, as he carried on tearing the wispy strands apart. ‘I can’t help it.’

Jamenk drew an annoyed breath, but decided not to push it. Slvasta gave Ingmar a desperate look, but his friend wasn’t about to take his side in any dispute with the corporal.

Slvasta was peeved by the betrayal. The two of them had signed on with the regiment in Cham three months ago. Slvasta could have done it earlier, but he’d agreed to wait for Ingmar’s seventeenth birthday so they could do it together. Signing on was all he’d wanted to do since he was nine, and his father and uncle had vanished after a Fall. The regiment had never found the bodies, not in all the sweeps they made of the county during the following month. Even at school, everyone knew what that meant.

Two years later his mother had married Vikor; he was a decent man, and Slvasta now had two little half-brothers. But the loss of his father – the way he was taken – was a fire which burnt his very soul. He knew he would never be fulfilled, never be guided by the Skylords to the Giu nebula where the Heart of the Void waited, not until he had exorcized his demons. And that would only happen when he had his vengeance on the diabolical Fallers, smashing up every one of their eggs that plagued the world.

Joining the regiment was the first step in achieving that. Slvasta had dreams of rising up through the ranks until he was Bienvenido’s lord general, commanding troops across the globe. He would show the Fallers no mercy until the Forest which birthed them eventually realized it could never defeat him, and retreated from Bienvenido forever. Now that would be true fulfilment.

However, the reality of regimental life was altogether more mundane that he’d been expecting. Uniform to be painstakingly maintained. Horses to muck out. Food you wouldn’t even use as pigswill back home on the farm. Drill – endless drill, marching round the headquarters’ yard. Flamethrower practice against mannequins representing Fallers – now that was exciting, the two times he’d got to do it. Search exercises that were basically little more than camping trips out in the wilds beyond the county’s farmland.

Then finally, the beacon fires had been lit. There had been a Fall in the lands around Prerov, six hundred miles east along the Eastern Trans-Continental line, the main railway track that bisected the continent from west to east. The regiment had swung into action. They’d deployed their full strength of five hundred troops in less than three hours. Along with all their equipment and mods, they’d embarked the special train laid on for them. Half the town had come out to cheer them off.

He had spent most of the journey with his face pressed against the train carriage window, watching the beacon flames roaring away in their huge iron cage braziers. So big they took days to burn out. He could almost feel their heat every time the steam train raced past one, helping to raise his excitement and determination.

The bulky iron engine had finally pulled in to Prerov’s station along with several other troop trains. Eight regiments had been called out to help sweep the estimated Fall zone for eggs. It was the first time Slvasta had ever been outside his own county – his first time anywhere, really. The station was in the middle of the commercial district at the foot of the striking mountain town on the western end of the Guelp range. Slvasta stood on the platform and stared up at the regional capital in delight. Prerov was over two thousand years old. Humans and mods had spent generations hacking into the stony slopes, producing terrace after terrace cluttered with buildings that had whitewashed walls and red clay tile roofs. Most of them were shaded under huge tomfeather and flameyew trees growing in their courtyards. And, perched right at the top, without any trees close by, was the great observatory dome of the Watcher Guild, whose eternal vigil helped protect Bienvenido from Falls. He was desperate to climb the steep winding steps that knitted the terraces together and explore the ancient town, with its wealth and colour, and lots of well-to-do girls who would probably be appreciative of regiment troops risking their lives.

As it happened, the regiment didn’t even spend one night billeted in town. A squadron of Marines had arrived from Varlan, the capital, as soon as the beacons were lit. Smart tough men in their imposing midnight-black uniforms, they’d quickly claimed the authority of the Captain and started organizing the regiments. It was important to get the sweeps underway as soon as possible, before the eggs had time to ensnare anyone. So an hour after the train pulled in, Corporal Jamenk’s squad, which comprised just Slvasta and Ingmar, had been assigned to sweep the whole Romnaz valley. Slvasta had been proud of the responsibility – it was a huge area. Until Captain Tamlyan had sneeringly pointed out that they were on the very fringe of the estimated Fall zone; it was an assignment to keep the new recruits and an untried corporal out of the way and out of trouble.

A convoy of farm carts had taken them and eleven other squads out of Prerov, the humans rattling round in the back while the regiment’s mods trotted alongside. The farmland immediately outside the regional capital was like an extended garden, with the fields and meadows and groves immaculately tended by mods and their human owners. Lovely villas sat in the middle of each estate, larger and grander than any of the houses back in Cham. Streams and canals were meshed together, providing excellent irrigation and drainage. Pump houses clattered away, puffing smoke into the blazing sapphire sky as the engines spun big iron flywheels, maintaining the all-important water levels. It was the only noise the troops could hear. No one else was on the broad road with its guardian rows of tolmarc trees. The villages they passed through had sentries – the old men and stout women; the younger, able, men were in the local regiment reserve, out helping to sweep.

On the second day, the farms were larger, and less arable. Cattle, sheep and ostriches roamed across bigger and bigger meadows. Abandoned quarries disfigured the land. Slvasta was amazed at how much ore, sand and rock had been dug out in the past. The hills to the south grew steeper – precursors to the distant Algory mountains. Active quarries were still and silent, their mod workforces penned up in corrals while their wranglers waited for the sweeps to finish and give the all-clear. Forests began to dominate the rolling landscape, most of them with big square areas eaten out of them where logging operations were felling timber. Farms were further and further apart, and most buildings were made from wood rather than stone.

Trees lined both sides of every public road on Bienvenido, forming leafy avenues the whole world over. It was a law dating back to Captain Iain, who ruled seven hundred years after Landing, so travellers could always see the route ahead. Here, they were just icepalm saplings, the hope of a road to come rather than a definitive path. The convoy began to split up, with carts rolling off at junctions down tracks marked by even smaller saplings. As the sweltering afternoon stretched out interminably, Jamenk’s squad rattled on until they finally left the sentinel trees behind. All that marked the way to Romnaz valley now was a couple of wheel ruts in the ground. Their driver dropped them off at the head of the valley. The last village they’d passed was half a day behind them.

‘I’ll pick you up back here in eight days,’ he told them. So their sweep began.

*

The squad’s equipment and supplies were carried by a regimental horse-mod and a pair of dwarf-mods. Slvasta was never entirely comfortable around the creatures. They were different from most of Bienvenido’s native animals, which bolstered his suspicions. He just found the whole thing weird – the way their embryos could be moulded by skilled adaptors into any form. In their neut form they were simple six-legged beasts half the size of a terrestrial horse, but fatter. Six odd lumps along their back were vestigial limbs which the adaptors could coax out in the various mods if they were needed. He simply didn’t see how that could be natural.

For the mod-horse that carried the bulk of the squad’s kit, adaptors had produced something not dissimilar to a basic neut, but larger and with stronger legs. More subtle internal changes gave them colossal stamina; they weren’t fast, but they could carry a load for days at a time. And the simple thoughts in their brain could be easily controlled with ’pathed instructions.

The mod-dwarfs were loosely modelled on a humanoid form. With four legs and four arms kept in vestigial form, they were bipedal, though clumsy with it. Their heads came up to Slvasta’s elbow. Jamenk had given them the flamethrower cylinder backpacks to carry. If they did find any Fallers, the mod-dwarfs could hand over the weapons quickly. In an emergency they could even fire them – though Slvasta wasn’t entirely convinced about how good their aim was.

Flamethrowers were supposedly a fool-proof method of dealing with Fallers. They could cover themselves with much stronger protective teekay shells than most humans; bullets didn’t always get through. Even so, Slvasta felt reasonably confident that the carbine he carried on a sling would give any Faller a pretty hard time of it. If the weapon worked, that is; they jammed all too often in practice firings.

The mist began to lift, long tendrils winding up lazily into the sky, where they vanished amid the delicate indigo twigwebs of the quasso trees. Bright beams of sunlight filtered down past the blue-green leaves, dappling the lingrass. The sky above became very blue again, with no clouds.

Slvasta took his tunic jacket off, and ’pathed a mod-dwarf. The dumb creature trudged over and took the jacket from him.

‘Did you ask permission to do that?’ Jamenk asked. ‘Regiment uniform will resist an eggsumption.’

Slvasta didn’t let his contempt for the corporal show through his teekay shell; he was too used to the idiot’s insecurities for that. Jamenk had been a corporal for four months; he was twenty-two with all the maturity of a twelve-year-old. The youngest son of the Aguri family, who owned some land in the county, which was why he was in the regiment in the first place; he wasn’t going to inherit anything. And also why he’d got a promotion while better men languished in the ranks.

‘Sorry, corporal,’ Slvasta said in a strictly level voice. ‘It’s getting warm. I was worried the jacket might slow down my reactions when we come across the eggs.’ And he was mighty dubious about the jacket being resistant to eggsumption; it was just ordinary tweed soaked in mythas herb juice.

‘All right,’ Jamenk said. ‘But nothing else, okay?’

‘Yes, corporal.’ Slvasta made sure he didn’t look at Ingmar. They’d both smirk. No telling how Jamenk would react to that. Half the time he wanted to be their friend; the rest of the day was spent trying to lord it over them. Inconsistency: another sign of a truly bad NCO.

After another half-hour the mist had vanished altogether. Jamenk and Ingmar had both taken off their jackets. Plenty of sunlight was filtering down through the trees, heating the still air underneath. Even the bussalores had stopped rushing round as the heat built. Thankfully the lingrass was shorter here, or it would be exhausting work just to walk.

Jamenk unrolled the map Captain Tamlyan had given them, then closed his eyes. Somewhere high above, his mod-bird was gliding on the thermals, keen eyes scouring the bedraggled tree canopy that smothered the rumpled valley – a view which skilled ex-sight could borrow. Slvasta wondered why the regiment didn’t give all of them a mod-bird and train them to see through it; the ungainly things had excellent eyesight and actually did most of the searching during a sweep. But it was a status thing, of course. Officers and NCOs only, distinguishing them from the ordinary troops. That would be one of a very, very long list of things Slvasta was going to change when he was lord general of the regiments.

‘I can see where they’ve been logging,’ Jamenk said, his eyes tight shut. ‘Another couple of klicks.’

The track was easy enough to follow. It wasn’t used much, but there must have been some traffic. Trees had been chopped down where there were particularly dense clusters. A couple of streams they’d crossed had been forded by trunks laid across the bed. According to the Prerov mayor’s office, the Romnaz valley was claimed by the Shilo family, who were foresters by trade.

Jamenk nodded in satisfaction and rolled his map up. ‘Come on.’

The mods began plodding forwards again. Slvasta started to follow the corporal. He knew he should be looking round for any sign of a Fallen egg. Smaller trees broken, strange tears in the canopy of larger forests, long furrows in the ground, dead fish in ponds. But none of that was going to be visible in this wild forest. It was impossible to see twenty metres on either side of the track. He just kept trudging on, remembering to take regular sips of water from his canteen. The air was horribly humid, but he was sweating hard. It was important to keep hydrated. That was one of the few things he remembered his father telling him when they were out in their smallholding’s fields.

‘This has been used recently,’ Ingmar said. He was looking at the track as it passed across a runnel.

Ingmar was a skinny youth whose limbs seemed to belong to someone even taller, with glasses that had the thickest lenses Slvasta had ever known. They made his eyes implausibly large, showing up the milky stains in his irises. In another ten years, Ingmar was going to be using his ex-sight alone – just like his father before him, who’d been eye-blind for the last eleven years.

He shouldn’t be able to qualify for the regiment, either, Slvasta thought guiltily. But Ingmar had been so desperate to prove himself capable of living independently from his family, and the recruiting sergeant was always keen for new troops.

‘It’s a cart track,’ Slvasta pointed out reasonably. ‘The Shilos use it to get in and out of the valley.’

‘I know that,’ Ingmar said defensively. ‘I mean this cart was here in the last couple of days.’ He pointed at some wheel ruts in a patch of damp ground. The lingrass had been crushed into the mud. ‘See? The breaks are fresh.’

‘Well that’s good,’ Slvasta said. ‘It means they’re still around.’

Ingmar gave the ruts another glance. ‘Nobody moves round after a Fall. All the farms and villages wait for the all-clear.’

Slvasta threw his arms wide and gestured at the immense forest. ‘Because anyone living here is really going to know what’s going on, right?’

Ingmar ducked his head.

‘There aren’t any beacons out here,’ Slvasta persisted. ‘The Shilos won’t even know there’s been a Fall.’

‘Okay,’ Ingmar said sullenly.

‘Come on, you two,’ Jamenk said. ‘You’re arguing about crud. We can ask the Shilos if they came in or out when we get to the croft.’

‘Yes, corporal,’ Ingmar said. He stood up, not looking at Slvasta.

After a minute of silent walking, Slvasta used a private ’path to say a very direct and humble: ‘Sorry,’ to his friend. Before they’d signed up, they would sometimes spend days on end squabbling about the most ridiculous things as they learned about the world: Did Skylords drop Fallers? Was there an outside to this universe like the first ships claimed, and if so where was it? Why was maize yellow? Would Asja kiss either of them? Was rust a disease from space? Would Paulette kiss either of them? How could coal possibly be squashed wood? What gave every nebula its own shape when stars were all the same? Mynea was a great kisser – oh no she wasn’t – yeah, how do you know? Why do tatus flies always go for blond hair to spawn in? Crud like that. It didn’t mean anything, and Ingmar with his logical brain won most disputes anyway; Slvasta just got in a whole lot of fun from trying to ruin his friend’s argument.

He sighed. Life in the regiment was a fast lesson in growing up.

‘It’s okay,’ Ingmar ’path spoke back, equally direct, so Jamenk couldn’t sense their conversation. ‘I just didn’t understand, that’s all.’

‘Understand what?’

‘If they were leaving the valley, going to town for supplies or something, then we would have known, either passed them or that last village would have told us they’d driven out of the valley. If they were coming in, then why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why come in? The whole county knows there was a Fall; surely they would have stayed in the village until the Marines announced the all-clear.’

Slvasta grinned at his friend. ‘Because they really believe this squad is going to make the valley safe for them.’

‘Oh. Yeah,’ Ingmar’s expression was sheepish. ‘You have a point there.’

‘I always do.’

‘So can’t you tell which way the cart was going?’

‘No not really. It was just luck I saw that rut.’