Chapter 48
A party of four of them, or five if you counted the ColU, made their way along the bank of the river, heading south, upstream to the confluence and the new community. There was only scattered cloud above, and Proxima hung high in the sky, all but overhead now they had come so far south, and their shadows were shrunken beneath them.
Beth had warned that it would take well over an hour to get around the lake, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Yuri thought. The walk would be good for him, good for them all. Long before the confluence came into view he was thoroughly warmed up from the steady exercise, his breath steaming in the cold. As Mardina walked she stretched and twisted and worked her arms and neck, and even practised whipping her crossbow from the backpack she always carried when away from the camp. Meanwhile Delga, the fourth member of the party, stomped along, one sleeve tied off, her own pack on her back, and no doubt weapons hidden about her person. She seemed just as Yuri had known her all those years ago on Mars, despite the grey hairs, the wrinkled skin of her face distorting her tattoos. Ageing but ageless, he thought.
As for Beth, Yuri could see how his daughter, bursting with energy despite her own long run this morning, was only just staying patient with the steady plod of the old folk.
They came upon the green cover Beth had described. You could see it from a distance. Yuri saw there was no height to it; it was more like a green blanket pinned directly to the ground, like none of the native life Yuri remembered seeing before, the stems, the trees.
To avoid trampling the living cover, they stuck close to the riverbank where the ground was more or less bare. The green wasn’t a solid sheet, Yuri saw close to; he made out individual sprawling plants, blankets of greenish web spread out over the flat ground and firmly rooted by multiple skinny tendrils across their widths. They were like water lilies perhaps, or like the great triple leaves of the canopies of the northern forests.
“Fascinating,” the ColU murmured as it rolled carefully along the bank. “Yet another body plan, another life strategy. I must study the phenomenon further.”
“Hm,” Yuri murmured. Straight ahead he saw smoke rising. “I think we’ve a human phenomenon to deal with first.”
“Perhaps, perhaps. But look beyond that, Yuri Eden. What can you see?”
Yuri had to climb up on its carapace to see what it meant. On the southern horizon was a smear of cloud, thick, black. “So? Bad weather for somebody.”
“You don’t understand, Yuri Eden. We have walked far. Very far.”
“Strictly speaking you haven’t walked anywhere.”
“I think we are seeing the substellar point, at last. Or evidence of it. Logically there must be a permanent depression there, low pressure caused by the star’s heat at the point of highest stellar insolation on the planet… An endless storm. And this is our first glimpse of that undying substellar weather system. Still hundreds of kilometres away, but a remarkable sight. I am grateful to have lived long enough to see this.”
“Now don’t go getting morbid about your built-in obsolescence again,” Yuri murmured. “You know how it upsets Beth—”
There was a sharp cracking sound from directly ahead. They all ducked instinctively.
Yuri said, “What was that?”
“A gun shot,” Delga said. “Nice welcome.” She grinned, evidently relishing the prospect of a confrontation.
Mardina said, “Who would get to bring a projectile weapon down from the Ad Astra?”
“One of your lot,” Delga said. “You can talk about old times.”
Yuri said, “You think we should send Beth back?”
Beth snorted. “Like hell.”
Mardina shook her head. “We have to deal with these characters one way or another. Let’s go forward. Proceed with caution. But,” she said heavily, “stay close to the ColU for cover. OK?”
They nodded, tense, Beth more excited than fearful, Mardina calm, Delga grimly determined, Yuri concerned for his daughter.
The ColU rolled forward once more, and the four of them walked slowly beside it.
Ahead, they soon made out the settlement, smoke rising from a couple of fires, a huddle of huts that were domes of drab Arduan green. Beyond the domes there were fields bearing a lighter green, Earth green—potatoes, maybe.
And a man in a bright blue uniform, holding some kind of rifle, stood between the approaching party and the settlement. The uniform was a Peacekeeper’s, Yuri saw with surprise.
“Hold it right there,” the Peacekeeper called. “This thing is loaded, you heard the shot. And I will use it as I was trained.”
To Yuri’s astonishment he recognised the man. “Mattock. Hey, Mattock! Is that you?”
He could see the man scowl. “Who the hell are you?”
“On the ship, remember?” Yuri walked forward, hands empty and held wide from his body. “You were on my back the whole trip. Well, not just me.”
Mattock held his weapon uncertainly, then let it droop. “Eden. The asshole who got cryo-frozen.”
“And you’re the arsehole who spent the whole trip bragging about the hamburgers and the whores he was going to enjoy back on Earth, while we all spent our lives scrabbling in the dirt in this forsaken place. Remember that?”
Mattock raised the gun again. “I’m warning you—”
“Stand down, Peacekeeper,” Mardina said now, stepping forward beside Yuri. “Jones, Lieutenant, ISF. That’s an order.”
Mattock stared in disbelief at her, a gaunt figure swathed in layers of patched-up clothing. “Lieutenant Jones? Are you kidding me?”
“No. Lieutenant Jones. Who you saw stranded on this dump of a world at gunpoint. Similar to how you ended up here, I imagine. Stand down,” she repeated more sternly.
Mattock sighed, lowered his rifle, thumbed a safety. “All right. Welcome to Mattockville. You’d better follow me.” He walked off, limping.
The ColU excused itself and went rolling away to inspect the mysterious Arduan greenery. Its manipulator arms seemed to twitch with the excitement of sampling yet another alien-life mystery, Yuri thought.
Yuri trotted up to walk beside Mattock. “Hey, Peacekeeper. Do you really call it Mattockville?”
“No.”
In the little homestead there were just three low dome-shaped shacks, set around a central area where a fire burned fitfully in the open air.
People came out to see the newcomers, wary, cautious, the children wide-eyed at seeing new faces maybe for the first time in their lives. Yuri counted six adults, all white. They wore the usual remains of ISF-issue clothing, but defied the cold by padding their jumpsuits and overcoats with dried-out stem bark, so they looked like stuffed scarecrows as they waddled around. The little kids were especially comical, and they made Beth laugh.
Mattock showed them to one of the domed dwellings. It was just a frame of stems lashed together somehow, covered over with a layer of blankets and then heaps of Arduan vegetable matter, presumably taken from the ground-covering plants. The visitors went on in, ahead of Mattock. The dome was empty of people. There were pallets and chests, and bundles of clothes stuffed beneath the walls. A hearth smoked, but no fire was lit. Yuri spotted a heap of dirty ship’s-issue crockery, but there seemed no place to cook in here; maybe that was done in another dome.
Mardina said, “So this is what you can build if you don’t have to move every couple of years.”
Yuri shrugged. “We’d have done better.”
Mattock came after them into the crowded dome, followed by more adults, a woman, two men, who looked at the newcomers with a kind of nervous hostility.