Xenopath (27 page)

At last he said,
"Pham, are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"Unfortunately,
for some unknown reason I am unable to contact Mr Vaughan."

"But I need
to find him..."

A long silence
followed, broken by Dr Rao's, "Ah-cha. Very well, I will give
you his address. When you find Mr Vaughan, tell him that Dr Rao sent
you, ah-cha?"

"Ah-cha.
I'll do that."

"Mr Vaughan
has recently moved from Level Ten and now has a big place on Level
Two, 12 Nehru Boulevard, Chittapuram. Have you got that?"

"Thank you
Dr Rao!" Pham called, and slammed down the receiver.

She left the
kiosk and hurried along the street, losing herself in the crowd and
heading for the train station on Chandi Road. When she reached the
station she took her map-book from her backpack and looked for Nehru
Boulevard on Level Two.

A minute later
she found it. It was not far from here, a couple of kilometres south
of the spaceport. She boarded a southbound train and five minutes
later alighted at Jaggernath station, then dropped to Level Two and
followed the map towards the exclusive outer edge.

Nehru Boulevard
was a wide street with occasional viewscreened recesses, which
overlooked the ocean. Between these viewing points were luxury
apartments. Pham found number ten and stood across the boulevard,
nervous now that the time had come to approach the detective.

"Khar,"
she said under her breath, "am I doing the right thing?"

Seconds later,
the voice in her head responded.
There are certain dangers
inherent in approaching Vaughan, especially if the killer is aware
that Vaughan is working on the case.

"So you
think—"

However, it
is also true that Vaughan might be of use to us.

Pham nodded.
That was that, then.

She was about to
cross to the double doors of number twelve when a small Thai woman
approached the doors, loaded with shopping. She was heavily pregnant
and beautiful, even though her face was divided in two by a big scar.

Resting the bag
of shopping on one knee, the woman fumbled with a key-card and let
herself into number ten.

Pham smiled to
herself. She liked the look of the woman. Could she be Vaughan's wife
or lover, she wondered.

Feeling oddly
confident, Pham crossed the boulevard and knocked on the door.

RADICALS

Vaughan woke
early on his first full day on Mallory. Intense sunlight filled the
room with gold and, outside, burned up last night's fall of snow.

He breakfasted
at the same table he'd occupied the night before, served this time by
a middle-aged woman who showed no inclination to chat. Over a bowl of
local fruit salad and good coffee, he consulted the map and charted a
route to Campbell's End.

The highway
passed ten kilometres from the small township. Two minor roads
branched off it and headed for the settlement, one direct and the
other taking a circuitous route and coming into the town from the
rear. Vaughan recalled that Scheering had told Denning about a shack
on the outskirts of the town, being used by the S-L agents. The
question was: on which road was the shack situated? Vaughan sipped
his coffee and considered his options.

The only other
customers were two men in their fifties, who Vaughan had watched draw
up in a small truck. Bales of blue grass stacked on the flatbed
suggested they were farmers.

They sat at the
next table over steaming mugs of coffee and cooked breakfasts, and
when they nodded good-morning Vaughan returned the pleasantry. "I'm
heading for Campbell's End," he said. "I was wondering what
the roads were like?"

"Campbell's
End?" one of the farmers said around a mouthful of egg. "Why
the interest, all of a sudden?"

Vaughan assumed
ignorance. "Interest?"

"Campbell's
been deserted ever since the drought, twenty years back. It's a ghost
town—or was. Then a month back a couple move in, fix a house up
on the main street. Last week two guys move into a shack out of town
a-ways." He shrugged. "Place is awful pretty in summer, but
come winter..." He smiled at his partner, who laughed.

Vaughan nodded.
"I'm just passing through, on my way to do a little hiking in
the mountains." He hesitated. "I was thinking of stopping
in Campbell's for a night. I don't suppose one of the couples would
put me up?"

The farmer
shrugged. "That'd be for them to say. We Mallorians are a pretty
hospitable people, so you might be in luck."

Vaughan leaned
towards the farmers' table, indicating the map on his handset. "The
shack on the outskirts, do you know which road it's on?"

Tne farmer
looked at the screen, then jabbed a weathered forefinger at the lower
road. "This one. Around here, about a kay out of town. The roads
should be fine at this time of year."

"And
roadblocks?" he asked, confident now he knew where the S-L
agents were holed-up.

The farmer shook
his head. "The military finished what they were doing last
night."

Curious, Vaughan
considered his next question. "What were they doing?" he
asked with all the innocence of a wide-eyed off-worlder.

This time the
second farmer replied. "The annual cull," he said, casting
a glance at his partner.

Vaughan sensed
an uneasiness about the pair. "The cull?"

"The
military are taking out a few tuskers," the second man said, and
fell to finishing his breakfast.

Vaughan nodded
his thanks and returned to his coffee. The tuskers...? He wondered if
they could be the gentle pachyderms he'd encountered on his way here.

He set off south
again immediately after breakfast, the side-screen of his Bison wound
down to combat the increasing heat of the day.

He turned on to
the highway and headed towards the silver mountains, rising ahead of
him like a thicket of scimitar blades. The highway bypassed
Campbell's End and cut through the mountains a hundred kilometres
south.

An hour after
setting off, Vaughan came to the first of two turnings to the
settlement. The first looped around the town, while the second, five
kilometres further south, headed directly into Campbell's End.

The S-L agents
occupied a shack on the second road, a kilometre out of town.

Vaughan turned
left along the first turning, leaving the metalled highway and
bucking over another neglected track, climbing through a spectacular
landscape of undulating hills, the blue grass catching the light of
the sun like a billion blades.

To his right was
a broad valley, with the highway he had left bisecting it as straight
as a laser. He made out the direct track, which left the highway and
meandered towards the town. Ahead, the hills crumpled before the
massifs and Vaughan saw, nestling picturesquely on ridges high above
the valley, a series of tiny, white-painted dwellings. He slowed the
Bison and looked back along the direct track: there, perhaps a
kilometre out of town, were three or four tumbledown buildings.

He accelerated,
considering the best course of action. The obvious thing would be to
locate the so-called radicals and warn them of the danger they faced,
without alerting the surveillance team to the fact. He would leave
the Bison on this side of town and make his way in on foot. He was
beginning to wish that Kapinsky had come up with some way of
smuggling a weapon onto the planet, but they had decided it would be
safer not to attempt the subterfuge.

Vaughan hauled
the Bison over a rutted crest of track, rounded a outcropping of grey
rock, and braked suddenly. He sat at the wheel, staring through the
windshield with a mixture of shock and revulsion.

Slowly, he eased
open the door and climbed down. He stepped off the track, onto the
sward of blue grass, which shelved steeply towards the broad valley.

He was not
mistaken—the shapes dotting the valley were not boulders, but
beasts identical to those he had encountered the previous evening.
The tuskers, as the farmers had called them.

There were nine
of the creatures, a couple of families, perhaps. He counted four
full-sized animals, as big as the leader of the herd he had
encountered, and five smaller creatures, including two no larger than
small ponies.

He stood before
the slaughtered beasts and was overcome by a wave of anger.

They had been
lasered through the head, though two tuskers had obviously survived
the first strike, as they bore macabre lacerations to their necks and
bodies.

They had died
where they fell, crumpled with legs splayed or bent beneath their
bodies, as undignified in death as they had been full of dignity and
ponderous grace in life.

Vaughan examined
the wounds. He was no expert, but he guessed that the slaughter had
occurred a matter of hours ago, perhaps last night as he'd followed
the other herd through the cutting in the rocks.

The culling of
various types of animals on settled worlds was not proscribed—some
beasts were considered vermin, or a danger to settlers—but
Vaughan could see no way that the tuskers might fit into either
category.

As he walked
away from the scene of carnage, he began to wonder if this had
something to do with the deaths of Kormier, Travers, and Mulraney,
and perhaps why members of Eco-Col were being targeted by Denning's
team.

But surely the
culling of the tuskers was being carried out legally, with the
permission of and supervision by the colonial council? Why,
otherwise, would Scheering risk the illegal slaughter of innocent
creatures?

Troubled, and
wondering where the killings might fit into his investigations to
date, Vaughan gunned the Bison's engine and accelerated towards the
distant township.

He braked on a
ridge a few hundred metres above the scattered buildings of
Campbell's End, climbed down and stared out across the ghost-town.

The fifty-odd
buildings were in a state of disrepair, ravaged by both the forces of
summer and winter: paintwork seared by the sun, the wood beneath
warped by rain and frost.

More
importantly, there was no sign of life. He activated his implant and
scanned, but sensed nothing. He looked for the radicals'
vehicle—assuming they had one, which was likely—but in
vain. When he walked into the village, he would check the garages and
other places of possible concealment. None of the dwellings looked
lived in, and many of them appeared uninhabitable. If the radicals
knew of the likelihood that they would be either watched or followed,
then they would have selected the least likely building in which to
conceal themselves. Which begged the question, what were they doing
up here anyway?

Perhaps, he
thought as he returned to the Bison and backed it behind a concealing
outcropping, they were here to monitor the cull.

He left the
vehicle and made his way down the incline and into the township.

An eerie silence
hung about the place, though he realised that the town was no more
silent than any of the other places where he had stopped on his way
south. It was the presence of buildings and the absence of people—of
the everyday commerce of such communities, the noise of cars and
music and conversation—that seemed so unnatural, lending the
settlement the melancholy atmosphere of somewhere evacuated in haste,
the focus of some tragic happening.

There were fewer
than fifty buildings strung out along the mam street, and Vaughan
entered them one of one and scanned for telltale signs of recent
hah'taooo.

All the houses
were empty, rotting inside and taken over by animals, the Mallorian
equivalent of rats and mice and larger rodents.

He trod
carefully over the planks of dilapidated verandas, pushing open
screen-doors to reveal front rooms and kitchens devoid of human life.
There was something mausoleum-like about many of the houses, with
items of furniture, pictures and personal possessions still in situ.

When emerging
from each dwelling, he made sure that the street was empty, that
Scheering's men had not seen his arrival and decided to investigate.
He moved slowly from house to house and then, with perhaps only
another half dozen dwellings to check, he came across signs of recent
occupation.

From the outside
the house was no different to any of the others: a tumbledown
weatherboard frontage, smashed windows, a door hanging awry on one
hinge...

But inside, in a
room at the back of the house overlooking the valley, he found a
portable heater and two armchairs arranged either side of a small
table bearing the foil remains of self-heating meals.

In another room
he found a mattress, and beside it a couple of old books, and another
heater. This, then, was where the radicals had holed up—but
where were they now?

He emerged into
the lambent noon sunlight and looked up and down the main street. The
surface of the road was metalled—or rather had been at one
point. Now it was crumbled at the edges, and in places worn down to
the underlying aggregate.

He was about to
go back into the house, and search it more thoroughly, when he saw
track marks in the gravel drive beside the house. They were the
unmistakable, churned prints of a big off-road vehicle. He stepped
from the drive, onto the road. It was possible to follow the progress
of the vehicle across the patched tarmac road—its weight had
crumbled the edges like broken biscuit—and up a track into the
hills. Here, the surface of the unmade track bore the perfect, ribbed
prints of the off-roader. He walked up the track, shielding his eyes
and gazing up the incline. The track left the settlement, crossed the
road on which he had come in, and wound further into the hills.

Vaughan followed
the incline to the crossroads. The track-marks were continued on the
other side of the road, imprinting themselves on the shale of the
cutting. The off-roader had turned neither right nor left, but had
continued on into the mountains.