“Yes, Jim?”
“What’s he done?” Jim’s rheumy eyes regarded him in honest wonder.
Ah.
“We have a bench warrant to apprehend a number of deserters.”
“Huh? Hank’s a deserter?” The man’s face hung open and empty as he contemplated this.
Then those big grey eyes swung back to Newton’s.
“Naw. I don’t believe it.”
Just one more kick in the crotch. Newton uttered a deep sigh. His eyes fell to the desktop, which was a lot less uncomfortable than meeting Mister Gregory’s.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure either. We need a proper identification. Look, your friend will be well treated.”
Jim Gregory nodded lugubriously.
“I’m not doubting that—you seem to know your business.” He gazed earnestly into Newton’s face.
“I’m sorry for all of this.”
Gregory nodded.
“He’s a really good man, Lieutenant.” He swallowed and looked away.
“Yeah—I don’t doubt it.”
Gregory looked away again, and Newton waited for the upstairs party to come back. They were taking their time about it, and perhaps that spoke of how much more seriously they were taking him now.
It was the most horrible feeling in the quiet of the bar, empty of patrons at this early hour, with Mister Gregory and all of those unspoken questions. Newton didn’t have any answers and so he was grateful the man didn’t ask them.
***
It was still pretty dim outside when Newton got out, and the place looked far less attractive in this light. The clouds were very bleak and low overhead, a seething mass of subdued greys.
He was a bit surprised to see a couple of people standing on the other side of the street watching them. There were still people not on the backs of the vehicles, looking faintly ridiculous in the bulky rain ponchos, thrown over the armour they wore. The left-side door of the command truck stood open.
“Stay or go, it’s up to you.”
They threw cigarette butts down and hurriedly climbed aboard. Pulling the end of the tarp down a bit to keep the cold breeze out, the people up there looked distinctly unhappy and he couldn’t really blame them.
The road out of there was going to be rough in the extreme. It would be boring as all get out and there was just no way they would be able to catch up a little on their sleep.
Newton clambered up into the cab, his customary seat just behind the passenger seat occupied by a trooper.
“Roy.”
“Yes, sir?”
Newton jerked a thumb.
“Move.”
“Yes, sir.” Nice thing about Roy, there was no resentment there.
He wasn’t particularly intelligent, and had few specialized skills, but at least he was amenable to suggestion, not like some of the others.
Jackson was in the driver’s seat.
Jackson touched the radio’s microphone button.
“All right, let’s find a place to turn around.” There was no way they could do it in the centre of town.
Spaulding’s voice came back, loud and clear.
“Roger that.”
The motors fired up and the lights came on in the truck up ahead of them, and then it lurched away as whoever was driving it let out the clutch and began working their way up through the gears. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth in determined fashion and Jackson or somebody had found some music, which played softly over the interior speaker system. Glancing over, Newton saw they were going about thirty kilometres an hour.
What was a straggling village with two parallel streets and a half a dozen very narrow cross-streets rapidly petered out into brush, fields, and small farmsteads. The trucks were wide and long, and there were no attractive prospects in the first five hundred metres.
“What about here?”
Jackson looked over at him and shook his head.
“We’ll let numb-nuts decide.”
“Who’s driving Unit One?”
“Cornell.”
“Ah.” Cornell was getting his first turn at it, as pretty much everyone else had had a go, some more successfully than others.
They kept going until the truck ahead stopped.
Spaulding’s voice came over the radio,
“Skipper, I’m thinking.”
“What?”
“Either we go all the way out of town, or maybe we just take down this wire fence on the left.”
Newton took a good look, getting up out of his seat and going to the far side and looking down at a farm paddock, with green hummocks of terrain grass sticking up.
“Can we get between the posts?”
Jackson studied it.
“Oh, man, it would be close.”
Up ahead was a farm house, a low, rambling affair with several outbuildings fifty metres back from the road, or more accurately, track. Several more houses loomed a hundred metres beyond.
“Ensign Spaulding, can you go up and speak to whoever’s in the house?”
“Roger that.”
She took an anonymous trooper with her and struggled up a slight rise through the mud and the rain and the gradually increasing light. Their windows were fogging up.
“At least it’s warm and dry in here.” Trooper Marlowe sounded doubtful.
Newton looked over.
“Hmn. By the time we rotate everybody through here, it’ll be a bit of a swamp.”
Oscar in the passenger seat studied the weather on their micro-millimetre-band radar.
He looked back at Gillian.
“With a little luck, the sun will be out by the time we have to go back.”
She nodded but said nothing.
Ensign Spaulding was still at the door, and they could see a person, whether it was a man or a woman was unknown, standing in the doorway talking to her.
“Sir?” Spaulding reported in.
“Go ahead.”
“They say the wires are tied up at this end of the field and stapled on. But they have a roll of wire, so they can repair it if we cut it. His name is Billy, incidentally. He’s saying if we need to pull up a post, we can either shove it back down again or just leave it and he’ll fix it up later.”
“Ask him if he’d like a hundred dollars in compensation.”
“Roger that.”
There was a brief pause.
“He says yes.” The smile in her voice came through clearly, as well as faint tones from some other person, picked up by her microphone.
Newton looked over at Jackson.
“All right, I’ll get our people on it.”
The troopers looked at him expectantly.
“Okay. You two go through the side-bins and find us some wire-cutters.” If nothing else, they could cut it with a laser rifle as a last resort, but on friendly planets in peacetime conditions the paperwork involved in reporting the discharge of such a weapon, which were costly to operate with their rapid-discharge batteries costing tens of thousands of dollars, was onerous to say the least.
With the bare minimum of people off the trucks, six in all, taking down the wire took ten minutes. The hardest part was drawing the staples out of the posts, but with Oscar’s brute strength and a pair of big grip pliers, the job was easy enough.
Jackson got out and came over to where they were working by Unit One as Newton had taken to calling it, somewhat of a satirical reference for the military passion for proper nomenclature.
He eyed up the spaces.
“Yeah. I think we’d better pull a couple of posts.”
Newton nodded.
He looked around, but Oscar needed no prodding. With a grin, he spat into his palms and handed off the pliers to Trooper Sims.
“Can you do it?”
“Easy as pie, sir.”
Taking the top of a post, Oscar began pushing it back and forth, and within seconds it was evident that the soft ground was giving way.
The back and forth motion sped up and g
ot bigger as Oscar worked it. He wiggled it around in circles. Then he stood close.
Bending his knees, he got a good grip and then straightened his legs. It came up about twenty-five millimetres. Letting go, he shook his head and pushed the post back and forth some more.
Trying it again, the thing came out with a nasty sucking sound, and Oscar almost went over backwards but Khan and Grimaldi caught him, barely.
With a kind of contempt, Oscar tossed the two and a half-metre post out of the way.
The second one took more working back and forth, but ultimately it couldn’t resist his brute strength either. That post was tossed aside as well.
Newton peeled off a hundred from the roll.
“Roy. Take this to the gentleman with our thanks.”
“Yes, sir.” Roy plodded off up the hill.
Newton keyed his microphone.
“Cornell.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you think you can hit that hole?”
“I always think that, sir.” His youthful voice was firm and resolute.
Laughter drowned out Newton’s response, which was perhaps just as well. He waited until it died down again. The problem with having everyone on live microphones always has been and always will be, discipline. That one was right out of the book.
“All right, pull in there and then stop.”
The troops from Unit One hastily climbed aboard as it was the safest place to be with Cornell driving, and Newton and his people marched back to their machine. Their legs were already smeared with mud and dead bits of vegetation and their boots slipped and slid in the muck and the filth and he just wanted to get out of there.
Gillian Marlowe looked up and down and all around. She darted a look at Newton.
“Oh!” It had taken some time to sink in.
There was just no way the trucks could pass, side-by-side, on that narrow track.
Ten minutes later, they were turned around and headed back towards the centre of town. That’s when they realized that it was always a good time for a parade. What with the unfamiliar noise of the vehicles, and sheer peace and quiet of the place, it seemed pretty much everybody in town had turned out along the boardwalks and on front porches to see them depart.
The rain pelted down unrelentingly, but no one out there seemed to care or even notice.
A few small children waved, but for the most part they just stood and stared grimly.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gillian Marlowe sort of hugging herself and seemingly shivering, whether from the cold, or the dampness, or just her own thoughts. They were all soaked down inside the armour, and the suit heaters would take a while to clear it.
It felt good to be going home.
It was a feeling a person rarely got when they lived onboard a starship for long periods of time, and all spaces were interior spaces.
All the while, Newton Shapiro could feel the cold eyes of their prisoner, secured to the frame of the back row of seating by multiple restraints, silently boring into the side of his head.
A wracking sob came from the rear seat and Newton looked at the prisoner and then followed his hopeless, open-mouthed stare out the side window. In amongst the formless crowd, one forlorn figure stood out and his eyes locked on her face, either wet from the rain or from weeping. The red-rimmed eyes bored straight into his in accusation. The sound of the man crying quietly behind them was a reminder that this wasn’t all fun and games.
It was her, the young woman from the dance. Once beautiful, her pallid features and slender form snagged on something inside of Newton Shapiro and it was all he could do to tear his eyes away from their personal tragedy and take a deep breath.
***
A couple of hours later they stopped for breakfast, bland packaged rations after the home-cooked meals of the hotel further depressing the mood. Newton had always found them pretty good although the portions were small. The spaghetti was of course a little too sweet in the sauce and the noodles mushy and without any texture at all.
The prisoner refused to eat, which was not entirely unexpected. Patricia Kane was watching him and she sighed in mock regret.
“Well, it’s your funeral.” She looked at the pouch, gave the contents an appreciative sniff and began to eat.
“That’s enough, Kane.”
She looked up, briefly indignant at being reprimanded by a mere technical specialist, but the look passed as she quickly hid it.
“Yes, Mister Jackson.”
“Look, buddy, you’re just making yourself miserable. You can’t starve yourself to death in three days and the docs will just force-feed you through a tube anyway. Are you sure?”
Jackson didn’t care whether the man was guilty or innocent, but he sure acted guilty and it was his responsibility, for the next four hours, to look after him. Perhaps there was some compassion there, but he was mostly covering his own ass. He would pass the information to their relief and to the officer of the watch, and that was where his cares ended.
Hank ignored them, head hanging.
Kane tapped the command link button on her wrist-plate.
“Ensign Spaulding. Prisoner refuses to eat.”
Ensign Spaulding was in charge as Newton was trying to sleep, lying across the rear floor of the cab, wrapped up with the sleeping bag over his head.
Spaulding, up in the front vehicle, responded.
“Roger that.” She made a note of it and wrote down the time.
“Oh, well.”
Kane looked at Jackson and their driver this shift, Dave Billsom. Dave had just climbed aboard and was familiarizing himself with the systems. He’d driven it before. After taking the time to read the manual, he was looking forward to it a little more this time. It was always better than sitting in the back. He kept looking at the manual and then eye-balling the lights and switches and displays on the dashboard, turning things on and off and fooling around with the air-conditioning, which he believed should be able to clear the fog off the windows better than it was doing. He did something and warm air began gushing out of the vents. His uncle’s combine back in Iowa was nothing like this, complex as they were these days.
“Ah-ha!”
Kane looked at him in surprise. That was the first time anyone had been able to turn that system on.
“Nice. You’ll get a medal for that.”
Jackson chuckled quietly at something, and she wondered if he had actually heard her or not.
She finished the grub and disposed of the pouch by bagging it up with other debris of the trip.
A light snore came from Shapiro. She grinned and shook her head, rolled her eyes, and tried to engage Jackson in eye contact, but he wasn’t having any. His ear-phones were in and he was listening to his God-awful classical music, eyes half closed in appreciation.
“Huh.” If she woke Shapiro, he’d be miserable.
Let sleeping dogs lie. She stuck her own ear-pieces in and tried to tune in one of the FM radio stations in Capital City, finally finding something a little more modern and danceable. The view out the windows was unprepossessing. The rain still poured down, although there was a rumour going around that it might clear up by mid-afternoon.
While it all tended to blend in to one long stream of consciousness, the road wended its way through relatively hard terrain, edging downhill. They were making good progress.
After a while, they paused for a brew-up.
The small gasoline fire was right beside the alleged road, with most of the troops, looking oddly happy in their groupings, talking and eating and wandering here and there like tourists.
Oscar sat on a stump off to one side and Semanko and Faber were engaged in some kind of deep consultation. Semanko spooned food into his mouth and Faber, already finished, took deep drags from a cigarette, a habit she had never understood. Faber made important-looking gestures to reinforce some point.
Kane looked at her chronometer.
“Can we go now?”
Shapiro snorted in h
is sleep and she shut up. Wiping away some of the mist from the side window, she tried waving at Semanko and Faber, but the only one she could get was Hatcher, who grinned stupidly and waved back like it was the train station or something. He had some kind of stupid crush on her, she was firmly convinced.
Hatcher cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled at the window before she could get it down.
“Gotta pee? I’ll relieve you!” The fool doubled up in laughter.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you would,” She listened intently for a corresponding chuckle from Jackson, but he was still absorbed.
She looked over at Billsom.
“When it comes to dirty cracks, that guy’s got ‘em all licked.”
He snickered and gave her a nod.
“Did you know there’s seven-hundred and fifty kilowatts up front? You’d hardly know it by the top end though. This baby’s built for rough country…”
Argh.
The trouble with Billsom was that he took himself just a bit too seriously and seemingly had no idea of what a penis was for. It was rumoured that he was still a virgin, and Kane for one accepted that one at face value. Yet most guys would be happy to be rid of it. He wasn’t bad looking, although maybe a couple of years younger than her. Under other circumstances it might be worth looking into.
She shook her head at the futility of it all.
Chapter Eighteen
The Long Hours of the Night
It was the long hours of the night. Shapiro, having taken a couple of melatonin tablets and sleeping a good six and a half hours on the floor of the truck, woke with a stiff neck and a bit of a headache. With the troops in the big tents by the side of the road, and another trooper, Cornell, keeping fire watch, Shapiro had elected to take the first shift of guard duty all by himself.
“Oh…” He rose stiffly from the passenger side and then began rummaging for some aspirin.
Mister Beveridge was lying on the back seats of the truck, his restraints clamped to the seat frame. His unblinking eyes regarded Newton as he dimmed the lights and turned off the noise. Overhead, a billion unfamiliar stars blazed and the aurora lit up the northern horizon.
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