“But why didn’t he tell us that he knew Quineau?”
Mackendrick came from the veranda and sat next to Ten Lee on the foam-form. He looked at Bennett. “I couldn’t tell you anything. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what the situation was here. For all I knew the elders might’ve taken us into custody and tortured us for information. I couldn’t risk that happening.”
“They might have tortured you,” Bennett said.
“Of course, but that was a risk I had to take.”
Ten Lee tried to sit up. “What’s happening?”
The medic finished applying fresh bandage and Bennett eased Ten Lee into a sitting position. Others came up the steps and into the A-frame, Miriam James and four other green-uniformed guards. They were joined by two men and a woman in civilian dress, ragged and soiled versions of the simple fashions worn by the farmers Bennett had seen earlier. There was a hushed sense of anticipation about the group as they quietly settled themselves around the room, their eyes taking in Mackendrick, Bennett and Ten Lee.
Hans Hupcka pulled up a three-legged stool and sat before the gathering. He was a big man, perhaps in his late twenties, his beard and broad lintel brow giving him an imposing air of authority.
“We’ve waited a long time for your arrival,” he said, nodding at each of them in turn. He spoke English with the precision of someone to whom it was an acquired language. “We often despaired that you’d ever arrive. For fifteen years we’ve planned for this day. We planted sleepers in the militia; for a time we even had a man on the council itself, until he was discovered. In the interim, waiting for help from outside, we have waged a war with the regime known innocently as the Council of Elders.” Hupcka indicated James and the other men and women. “This is my own council. They might call us terrorists, but we prefer to call ourselves rebels.”
Bennett leaned forward. “We’ve been hearing a lot about someone called Quineau,” he said. “The elders said that he left Homefall to get word of the colony to the Expansion. But the council sent Klien to eliminate him.” He looked at Mackendrick. “I presume Quineau reached Earth, where he contacted you?” Bennett considered the many questions he wanted to ask, not the least of which was why Quineau had sought out Mackendrick.
What Hupcka said next cleared up that mystery. “Quineau didn’t head specifically for Earth—anywhere in the inhabited Expansion would have done. He went with the intention of locating the representatives of one of the big shipping lines or exploration companies—Patel or Redwood; we were not aware of the Mackendrick Foundation at the time—who might view the fact that Homefall was Earth-norm and inhabitable as a reason to open up lines of trade and communications. He obviously achieved this, though not quite as fast as we hoped.”
“It’s fortunate that Quineau reached the cone of Expansion at all,” Mackendrick added, “and pure luck that he came to my attention. His ship was poorly equipped, in a bad state of repair. It was a miracle he achieved transfer to and from the void in one piece.”
Hupcka smiled. “He departed in somewhat hurried and dangerous circumstances,” he said.
“How did you find Quineau, Mr Mackendrick?” Miriam James asked.
“I didn’t,” Mackendrick answered. “One of my exploration vessels came across a small scout ship becalmed in regular space just inside the limit of the Expansion. They took the ship on board and found someone in the suspension unit. We learned that his name was Pierre Quineau. The ship had suffered massive systems failure in trans-c flight through the void; only an automatic eject program had brought it back into regular space. One of the systems failures meant that Quineau had been in suspension for over a year as the ship floated in space. When my men found him and gave medical assistance, he was irreparably brain-damaged.”
Hupcka shook his head. “But was he able to tell you about the expedition to the interior?”
“I was on Earth at the time of the discovery, and I wasn’t immediately notified of his rescue. I had many other matters to attend to. My engineers and computer specialists had been working to find out where the scout ship had originated as the systems failures had all but destroyed the record of its flight-path. The information they did find suggested that the ship had phased into the void at some location far out on the Rim, which they couldn’t believe. Ships didn’t explore that far afield, and as there were no colonies out there…
“This is when I was told of the mysterious star traveller. I was intrigued enough to travel to the colony world of Madrigal, where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment at a foundation medical centre. I found a man…” Mackendrick paused and looked around the group of staring faces. “He could only be described as not being in his right mind. At the time of our first meeting he was extremely violent and had to be forcefully restrained. I tried to talk to him, but his rantings made little sense. No one had ever survived more than a year in suspension and the psychiatrists diagnosed his symptoms as those produced by chronic suspension trauma.”
“Did he recover?” Hupcka asked.
Mackendrick shook his head. “I saw him three more times during the week I was on Madrigal, and he showed no signs of recovery.”
Miriam James said, “What did he tell you, Mr Mackendrick?”
“You must understand that he was barely coherent at the time. He ranted for hours in a mixture of French and English. He couldn’t even tell me the name of his planet. All he said was that he came from a world on the Rim, and that he’d been on an expedition, a long trek with two other men. He said that they’d walked into mountainous country and descended into a deep underground chamber. There he claimed that they’d discovered an alien race. He told me that the Ancients, as he called them, had incredible healing powers.” Mackendrick smiled. “Of course, I was far from convinced. I took his story for the rantings of a madman.”
“But didn’t he have the softscreen?” James asked.
Mackendrick nodded. “He told me about the screen. He’d told no one else, he said, because he could trust no one. Secreted aboard the scout ship was a softscreen recording of the exploration he undertook with his colleagues, Klien and Carstairs. I had my engineers search the ship. I was still on Madrigal when they found the screen. I watched it with Quineau in his hospital room.
“It showed the first week of the expedition, the long trek through high mountainous terrain, much of it through snow blizzards. They reached the entrance of the underground chamber and descended, but then the quality of the recording deteriorated drastically. There was very little light down there, and only shadows could be made out. The recording actually ends before Quineau and the others make contact with the aliens, if of course he was telling the truth. I left for Earth, taking the softscreen with me. I wanted to get it analysed, the underground shots computer-enhanced.”
Mackendrick stopped there, staring at his hands. He looked up, at Hupcka and the other rebels, and shook his head.
“When I reached Earth, I was contacted by the police authorities on Madrigal. Pierre Quineau had escaped from the grounds of the hospital while taking exercise, and had been found murdered in a public park a kilometre away. A woman had witnessed the shooting, and I requested a copy of the police computer-visual of her description of the killer. To my amazement it bore more than a marked resemblance to Quineau’s fellow explorer I’d seen on the softscreen recording, Klien. I began to wonder if there might be a grain of truth in Quineau’s story.”
Miriam James said, “You told me that the softscreen was stolen.”
Mackendrick nodded. “Shortly after I arrived on Earth, a thief broke into my house in Calcutta and stole it.”
Hupcka said, “So Klien killed Quineau, came to Earth and took the softscreen.”