FALLEN DRAGON (68 page)

Lawrence went back to mountain-gazing again. There were more Mitchells visible now, thrusting bluntly out of the lush subtropical plain, the awesome monuments of tectonic petulance. Long strips of dark cloud scudded round them, raining hard on the lower slopes.

The convoy reached Rhapsody Province first—an area marked out by dozens of slate-gray slag heaps thrown up across the plain where mining equipment bit deep into the plateau's stratums, hunting out bauxite deposits. The spoil was fresh and dark, slick with dank chemicals that prevented anything from growing on its treacherous, shifting sides.

Aluminum was not one of the metals that Auley supplied to the planet. And capturing another asteroid that had it in quantity wasn't cost-effective given the amount used by Thallspring's industrial concerns. Most cities had secured their own source, and Rhapsody Province even produced enough of a surplus for Memu Bay to export to other settlements.

Located almost dead center of Rhapsody was Dixon, a mining town, or at least an engineering center where the mining machinery was maintained and repaired. A full quarter of the town was given over to huge sheds of corrugated composite where cybernetic tools and humans worked alongside each other to service the mining and processing equipment. There was even a small fusion plant sited a kilometer away, a squat white concrete hexagon with a slightly convex roof. It was surrounded by pylons that carried bright red power cables out to the active mining sites.

The houses, shops and offices, that made up the rest of Dixon all had a prefab appearance. Their layout and size were highly individual, but every wall was made from the same insulated composite paneling, and each roof was a matte-black solar collector. Even the air-conditioning cabinets that stood outside were the same make, all with their fans whirring away behind rusting chrome dissipater fins. The plain's dusty volcanic soil hazed the air above the grid of streets, frosting every surface with a dark ocher patina.

As soon as the convoy arrived at the end of the main street they had to stop and reverse. One of the massive excavator processors was being delivered back to its site after a spell in the maintenance sheds. The unit was twice as long as a locomotive, and three times as wide. It was sitting on an even bigger low loader whose caterpillar tracks must have been as wide as Lawrence was tall. He whistled with respect inside his Skin helmet as the massive rig crawled past, shaking the nearby buildings.

Captain Lyaute, who was commanding the convoy, ordered the vehicles to draw up in the town's central square. By the time they'd parked in a circle and the squaddies jumped out they'd gathered quite a crowd. It was the first time Z-B
h
ad visited the plateau; people were curious. They were also suspicious and sullen, standing well back from the Skins.

Lawrence hoped they weren't going to have to demonstrate the weapons capability of their Skin. It had taken several unpleasant days to convince the citizens of Memu Bay that they were invincible and everyone should just knuckle under and cooperate. But this bunch were tough engineers working hard for a living. They also had a quantity of hardware and tools that could damage Skin if correctly and creatively misapplied.

Lyaute snapped out a few quick orders, and three Skins snatched a civilian each. Before anyone could react, they'd been fitted with collateral necklaces. The captain started to speak to the crowd; he quickly had to crank up the volume on his Skin's speaker as the crowd shouted abuse and insults back at him. They were furious at what they were being told, that the squaddies were going to go through their town and help themselves to anything remotely valuable. Any resistance would result in the collateral necklaces being activated.

After walking just a couple of streets, Lawrence decided the convoy was a waste of time. There really wasn't much in Dixon worth taking. Not that the town saw it that way. As soon as the Skins went into the cavernous maintenance sheds they found the articulated trucks that brought the aluminum down to Memu Bay. Except they hadn't been used since the day the starships flew into orbit overhead. Every one of the big trailers was filled to capacity. But that was only a fraction of the hoard. Lawrence and Amersy walked into the first of the big sheds, only to stop in amazement. Aluminum ingots were piled up as high as the roof. Nobody was going to send the town's one product to the coast where it could well be stolen by the invaders and taken away on their pirate star-ships. Amersy laughed at the metal mountain. "What kind of idiot thinks we can afford to transport a shitload of aluminum on a starship?" he asked.

Lawrence didn't share his mockery. Thallspring had never heard of asset realization before this first campaign had arrived. Out here in the hinterland they certainly didn't know what was regarded as valuable. They were playing safe, trying to protect what they'd worked for. He could appreciate that.

When Dixon's AS was scrutinized, the logs showed that the excavator processors were operating at minimum capacity, and had been for weeks. The only reason the operators hadn't stopped them altogether was that it was more trouble to start them up again than keep them ticking over like this.

Captain Lyaute explained the financial reality of asset realization to the mine managers, trying to tell them they were wasting their time by the go-slow. They just glared at him.

A jeep was sent over to the hospital. Some of the more advanced medicines and vaccines were loaded into it. A truck was driven out to the fusion plant, where it could stock up with expensive spare components. Lawrence and Amersy helped shift excavator cutting heads from their storage racks in one of the big sheds, heaving them into the back of a truck. The bulky cones were studded with long compression-bonded diamond blades that Z-B would strip off back in Memu Bay before boosting them up to the waiting starships.

"That's our livelihood you're killing," one incensed technician yelled at them. "How can we buy food if we can't work, you bastards?"

Lawrence ignored him.

"The guy's got a point," Kibbo said. "This does seem kind of petty. The blades, okay, they're high-tech and expensive. But medicines from the hospital?"

"It's the same deal for everyone on the planet," Lawrence said. "They'll produce replacements as soon as we leave. We're not taking the factories with us."

"Still not quite what I thought we were about"

"Being seen up here is what we're about," Ntoko told them. "We're flag-waving, that's all. The hinterlands have to know we're here, and we're real. It happens on every campaign. You send a convoy round all the backwoods settlements to prove they're not immune. If we didn't, places like this would be a haven for refugees and resistance movements. And the way to pay for these convoys is—"

"Is with valuable goods," Amersy finished. "Asset realization in miniature."

"You got it."

Lyaute decided that the convoy wouldn't be spending the night in Dixon. Anger was running on high voltage through the townspeople, and there were too many of those tempting heavy tools available.

When he got back into the jeep, Lawrence watched several Skins from the other platoons stuffing jewelry and household cards into their personal bags.

The convoy camped out on the plain that night, thirty kilometers past Dixon. They got to Stanlake Province the next day, where waterside villages were strung out all along the shores of the lake itself. They harvested strange aquatic weeds for their complex organic compounds, which were used down in Memu Bay's biomedical factories. Assets here were even scarcer than in Dixon. All the villages used solar panels and wind turbines to generate their electricity; there was no fusion plant. Only three of them had a doctor's office—serious patients were taken to Dixon, or air-ambulanced out to Memu Bay. Electronic systems were years out of date. In their raw form, the organic compounds were worthless. Lyaute did check that all of the harvest was being sent to Memu Bay. It was.

They drove on past the lake, deeper into the high plain. On the third day they reached Arnoon Province. Several of the Mitchell peaks were clustered together here, creating deep, meandering valleys between them. Dense forest had colonized the sheltered saddles between the high slopes. Slim curlicues of white cloud poured down from the craggy snow-covered peaks to writhe amid the treetops. The Great Loop Highway led straight through the thickest section of vegetation. Trees and vines blotted out the sun for long periods. Flat tree stumps lined the route where the highway robots had cut the path, with bulbous fans of bright coral-pink fungus growing out of the damp, rotting wood. But not even the robots could cope with the creepers that twined across the gap. Despite the jeep's all-terrain suspension, the journey began to get rough.

"What do this load of hillbillies do?" Kibbo asked as they rocked and shook their way through yet another tunnel of vegetation. Two hours in the cool forest, and they still hadn't seen any sign of human habitation.

"I think they grow tigercotton," Amersy said.

"That's Laeti Province," Lawrence said. "Arnoon collects willow webs. It's a vine that only grows in this forest, similar to wool apparently. They have a load of cybernetic looms that churn out clothes and rugs. The cities pay a premium for it" He grunted at the sudden echoes of memory. Isolated crofters living amid the mountains, selling their crafts to the rich city folk so they could buy the few items necessary to maintain their independence.

Either Great Loop Highway marker posts were being stolen, or the transport office had decided to space them farther apart in the forest. Up in the lead jeep, Ntoko was relying heavily on his inertial guidance and maps uploaded from the Memu Bay Town Hall, which were at least a decade out of date. They kept coming across junctions and forks in the muddy road that simply didn't exist in the old files.

Sometime around midafternoon, Lawrence caught sight of what he assumed to be a willow web. A small jade ball of what looked like tightly packed velvet gossamer was hanging from a high bough by a single sapphire-blue stem. The wood where the end of the stem was attached had swollen to three times the bough's ordinary width. In contrast to the rest of the forest vegetation, which was slick and damp, the furry surface of the ball was completely dry, as if it repelled the alternating deluges of rain and mist that inundated the trees.

They began to appear regularly after that. The first one had been a baby. Some he glimpsed deeper in the trees were as tall as himself, their surfaces mottled with dark lichen and plagued by ordinary creepers. Now that he knew what to look for, he could often see the shriveled stems protruding from distended branches, their ends cut cleanly.

Ntoko had actually driven into the village before he realized it. To start with he thought it was just a broad clearing. Then there were small children racing in front of the jeep, and he slammed the brakes on. Wheels slid on the carpet of wet mossgrass as the children squealed. They stopped, mercifully without hitting anyone. Smiling faces were suddenly surrounding the vehicle, hands waving as excitable young voices chattered.

Lawrence, who admittedly wasn't wearing his safety belt, had been thrown forward into the front seats. He straightened up and scanned his helmet sensors round the clearing. It was like a multiphase image that resolved only when you looked at it in the correct focus. Where before he'd seen trees with drooping branches tangled by vines, there were now wooden A-frame houses with roofs of elaborate reed mats that were obviously still alive. What he'd taken as a random scattering of shaggy bushes were actually compact gardens.

"Holy crap," Ntoko muttered as he climbed down. "This place is like the most perfect camouflage."

"You're thinking military, Sarge," Lawrence said. "This is just the way people like this live." '
 
"And you'd know all about people like this, space boy."

Adults were emerging from the foliage, or doors, to gather around the convoy's parked vehicles. They hung on to their lively children, waiting expectantly. Captain Lyaute launched into his standard speech about Z-B acquiring ownership of the planet's founding corporation and requiring a dividend. Instead of the anger and resentment rife in Rhapsody and Stanlake, the Arnoon villagers grinned at him, amused by the whole concept. Even putting collateral necklaces on two of them didn't curtail their open derision.

The squaddies started to search the arboreal A-frames. Lawrence began to revise his opinion of the villagers as simple crofters. The inside of the houses were far from primitive. They had electric lighting, and air-conditioning, and running water; kitchens that were fully equipped with every modern convenience, fridges, washing cabinets, microwaves. Lounges that had full AS desktop pearls with large panes and sheet screens to play the thousands of hours of multimedia recordings stored in extensive libraries.

Domestic convenience items aside, it was the decor that impressed him the most. The villagers had put a lot of effort into fashioning their homes according to individual taste. Many of the frames were carved, then painted or bound with willow wool in vibrant primary colors to emphasize curves and textures. Carvings invariably followed the Hindu or Buddhist school, with many-armed gods and goddesses serenely contemplating the village as they sat astride powerful serpentine dragons. Inside the houses mood decoration was favored, with children's playrooms formed inside nests of brash, exciting patterns; lounges came in elegant abstracts or classical ornate, making them cozy and welcoming, bedrooms in cool, subtly blended pastels. He began to wonder how many of the villagers were artisans. Somebody had to take care of the practical stuff.