‘What about weapons?’ Liu asked. He looked around the group. ‘I’m just asking.’
Delga laughed.
Mardina asked, ‘Is there any of that tea left?’
CHAPTER 53
The party to travel was pretty much self-selecting.
Mardina and Mattock, stranded astronaut and Peacekeeper respectively, had the strongest personal reasons for going to seek out whatever the ISF had left behind in the Hub. Mattock even put on the remains of his Peacekeeper uniform, though he was going to be way too hot in it. Delga and Liu were going in as representatives of their factions. As a captured Chinese, Liu had even less motive than the rest to go near any semblance of UN authority. But he had a group behind him too, roughly those who had once endured the rule of Gustave Klein, and they had to be represented.
Yuri had to go, because Mardina was going in with Beth, who had scouted out the route. Where his family went, he must go too.
And, incredibly, they took a bunch of builders. The ColU somehow talked them into it. If the authoritarian-type humans in the Hub, a builder name for a builder location, had thrown these natives out, maybe it was right to take them back in.
The other kids watched the adults getting ready to go. They seemed bemused by the whole thing, uncaring; to them the ISF was a fantasy of their parents’, as unreal as the ghost of Dexter Cole.
The party walked in a convoy, the ColU and one of the dumb trucks at the centre, the humans walking alongside. They all wore packs, with some food, water, weapons, though most of their stuff was on the back of the truck. Beth went ahead, running with a natural fluidity despite the heat. Tom Mattock trailed behind. He looked ridiculous in his Peacekeeper uniform, he was hampered by his limp, and he was soon overheating.
And a little party of builders, Yuri counted nine, all adults, came spinning and skimming behind.
They skirted the southern shore of the lake and made it to the estuary where Beth and Freddie had had to give up their attempted circumnavigation of the lake. The river they’d found flowed out of a belt of forest, dense and green, and Yuri thought he could feel the humid heat radiating from the forest even from this distance, a few kilometres away.
‘Look,’ Beth called, pointing. ‘You can see the tracks we made before.’ A half-dozen sets of human footprints, one of them barefoot, Yuri saw, snaking off to the south.
Mardina grunted. ‘And beside them, this.’ She pointed to a set of tyre tracks, more footprints of booted feet, another set of tracks heading back to the jungle. ‘They saw you, Beth. They came out for a look.’ She glanced up at the jungle. ‘They know we’re on the way.’
Liu shrugged. ‘They probably always did. What’s the point of them being here at all if not to watch us?’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘We Chinese have plenty of stealth sats in orbit around Earth, and Mars, that no UN body has ever spotted. Probably the other way round too.’ He waved into the air. ‘Hi, Major McGregor!’
They walked on, Mardina leading the way south, along the river valley. She said, ‘But they haven’t done anything about it. Maybe they can’t do anything. They’ve been here twenty-plus years already. Shit breaks down.’
‘Or they don’t know what to do about us,’ Yuri said. ‘I mean, we aren’t supposed to be here, are we?’
‘True,’ said the ColU. ‘Each dropped group was programmed to be sedentary. And besides, the belt of heat and aridity around this Hub should have excluded foot travellers.’
Yuri said mildly, ‘But nobody at the ISF seems to have “programmed” a migrating lake. Or a star winter.’
‘Or human nature,’ Liu said with a grin. ‘And here we are.’
They had to climb up a rock face, past the pretty impressive waterfall Beth had told Yuri about.
Then, after a couple of hours, they reached the rough boundary of the central forest. As Beth had described, the trees were not like those of the great canopy forests of the higher latitudes; these were shorter, with stout, squat trunks, and multiple leaves sprouting from stubby branches. But their trunks were just the usual scaled-up stems, the short branches and small leaves no doubt local adaptations to the turbulent substellar weather.
Mardina called a halt before they took on the forest interior. There was a pond nearby, thick with stems, and the builders skittered off that way.
They parked the truck and the ColU well away from the forest and its unknown dangers, and set up camp for the night. They built a fire for washing water and to boil up tea, and prepared to take turns to stand watch, under the unchanging grey sky.
Yuri found it difficult to sleep, under a quickly erected tepee. It wasn’t like in the permanent camps, there were no little kids running around, nobody getting drunk on Klein vodka. But Peacekeeper Mattock did snore like his throat had been slit. And one of the mutilated ColUs gave off an endless low hum of small sounds, a whir of pumps, a hiss of hydraulics, the occasional cough of some small engine. Yuri’s ColU blamed its lobotomy; its ‘subconscious’, the semi-autonomic systems that ran the truck’s infrastructure, were full of small malfunctions as a result. Beth suggested the truck was having bad dreams. The ColU said that was more true than not.
In the camp morning they packed up and got ready to push on into the alien jungle. Beth, who’d been up early and had done some scouting, thought she had found a path.
The ColU, deploying its sensor arm, confirmed it. ‘Vehicles have travelled this way, leaving characteristic traces – even faint radioactivity in places – though an attempt has been made to cover up the tracks. Nevertheless, a way exists.’ It plugged its fibre-optic cable into the dumb truck, said, ‘All aboard,’ and set off without hesitation into the jungle, leading its passive partner.
Yuri, Mardina and Beth clambered aboard the ColU as it rolled off. Mattock, Delga and Liu took the truck. The builders, without apparent concern, followed in their wake, but they kept away from the human-made track, preferring to work their own way through the thicker undergrowth.
As soon as they got into the shade of the trees Yuri was immediately hit by the increased heat, the humidity; it was like entering some huge mouth, and he was glad he wasn’t walking. Yuri heard Mattock wheezing as he gulped down water.
The light had an oddly liquid quality, as if they pushed through some murky pond, stained with Per Ardua’s sombre green. The canopy here was low, not the virtually solid roof of the high-latitude forest; the smaller leaves let plenty of light get through to the ground level, where a healthy undergrowth sprouted. When a wind blew up – bringing the travellers no relief, the moving air itself was hot and moist – the stubby branches of the trees shook and rattled. Insects, or insect-analogues, fluttered around, the size of butterflies but built from sticklike stems and bits of filmy webbing. They landed on the skin of the people, only to lurch away again apparently disappointed, but they kept coming back for another try. Yuri suspected they would be a plague until they got out of the jungle.
And they started to see animal life, some of it built on an impressive scale: hefty-looking kites in the trees’ upper branches, smaller than those of the high-latitude forests but more powerful-looking to Yuri’s eye, and smaller, even stronger-looking flightless versions that scuttled across the forest floor. One big beast with flight-vanes like samurai blades sat and watched them go by, with multiple upright eye-leaves.
Beth was holding a crossbow, loaded. ‘I do not like the look of that.’
‘I think we must expect vigorous variants of life here,’ the ColU said as it rolled forward. ‘More energy is available from Proxima here than anywhere else on the planet. Rather like the forests that once swathed Earth’s tropics, there is plenty of opportunity for life here, for speciation. Perhaps, for example, the kites first evolved here. Some may have migrated to the high-latitude forests and adapted. Others might have settled on the lakes and marshes. Yet others might have stayed here and given rise to the flightless predatory forms we have glimpsed.’