by Диана Дуэйн
She smiled at Gabriel and said, "Assessment: our party most interesting thing to pass through these parts in a while."
Then Angela and Grawl came in. Angela looked pale and annoyed. Grawl was narrow-eyed with anger and growling after every breath.
"You okay?" Gabriel asked Angela under his breath.
She gave him a sidelong look and replied, "Yeah." She would say nothing else.
A few moments later a Galvinite soldier came in and said, "All right, you people can go. Your ships are in impound until you're ready to leave."
"But we have data to dump—" said Enda.
"Guess you won't be lingering in town, then," said the soldier and grinned a most unsympathetic grin. "You said you were going shopping?"
"Lalain's," Gabriel said.
"Go out the front door here and pick up a transport. They'll drop you at the access/exit facility in Fort Drum. Walk west half a kilometer—you can't miss the place. They'll ship the stuff back here for you, so it can be searched and packed."
A few minutes later they had been bundled into a small transport flyer and were taken to the exit facility in town, a blockhouse-like building also surrounded by high blast walls and weapons emplacements. Here each of the six travelers was given a chip embedded with his or her picture and ID details, each one covered with the repetitive statement PROPERTY OF FSA.
"Show that to anyone who requires you to," said the bored officer who made the IDs. "Do not attempt to purchase anything without showing this ID. Do not discuss local politics. Do not enter any premises that show a representative of this ID with a negation sign over it. Do not attempt to leave the city without authorization. Be back by 1700 local time if you wish access to your vessel before tomorrow at 0800. Enjoy your stay in Fort Drum."
They went out into the street, a long stretch of concrete with mostly military traffic parked along it. "You know," Enda said softly, "I think that the tourist board here has its job cut out for it." "You don't know the half of it," Helm growled. "Did you know what that—"
"Advisory," said Delde Sota. She paused. They all looked at her, for such pauses were unusual. "Can it. Invitation: go shopping."
They went.
Chapter Six
It was without question the single most unpleasant city Gabriel had ever been in, and as a Marine, he had seen a lot of unpleasant cities.
It was not that the place was physically unattractive. Fort Drum was actually extremely handsome. Wide swathes of parkland and arboretum, patches of what looked like native forest, and pools and grasslands alternated with broad avenues and clusters of handsome buildings. The place looked much less populated than it was.
But Gabriel knew what the field sites concealed: vast hardened bunkers containing power plants and hospitals, comms facilities and computer centers, transport junctions, storage caverns and armories, all built to the orders of Galvin's Supreme Commanders. Down those wide airy avenues, Gabriel kept hearing the menacing rumble of armored weapons carriers. Uniformed and helmeted men came out of every street, stopping them and asking for their identification and looking at them as if they were almost certainly an enemy in disguise. For Gabriel, who for the moment felt like no more than an innocent shopper with Concord dollars to spend, it was all extremely wearing.
The thing that made it most annoying was not the soldiers and the weapons—he had dealt with enough of those in his time—but people's faces, just the ordinary faces of citizens in the street. There was a peculiar look to them, not the "planetary look," famous among Marines and other service people, who claim they can tell the inhabitants of a given world from some attribute particular to that planet among all others. No, the faces of people here had a pinched quality, a hard look. People's eyes were narrowed, and their faces seemed very constrained. They always seemed to be looking sidelong at things and at each other, as if afraid to be caught looking. as if afraid of something they might see. The hard look was set deep in everyone over the age of fifteen, as if long years of never letting it go, even during sleep, had stamped it there indelibly.
Gabriel found himself wondering what you had to do to people to make them look this way. Numerous possibilities suggested themselves to him, and he liked none of them. The most likely one was, "Have a hundred-odd years of war." Another was, "Make sure that no one knows whether or not the person walking down the street behind him is in the secret police." Gabriel knew that the Galvinite Internal Security Directorate had thousands of uniformed and plainclothes officers watching and listening to their people, making sure that they adequately supported the war effort—meaning that they never spoke against it. For his own part, he was determined to keep his mouth very shut indeed until it was time for them to go.
The store they were hunting was close to the access/exit facility. Lalain's called itself, perhaps due to some obscure family tradition, a "Sundries Supplier." It was in fact a hardware store and ship's chandlery of magnificent, even florid proportions. Nearly two acres of space was filled with every kind of supply for people who lived and worked in space. Gabriel could have happily spent their entire day—hell, he thought, two or three or four!—ranging around and examining the merchandise: the mining and exploration gear, the beautiful range of pressure suits, the ships' equipment and ancillary vehicles, the clothes, the furnishings, the accessories, but every time he turned into a new and interesting aisle, he came up against someone wearing that same guarded, hard, uneasy face. After a while it took all the enjoyment out of what he had come to do.
Gabriel sighed and got on with putting together his order. By the time an hour had passed, he had two large induction palettes and the better part of a third packed with low volume staples and a very mixed assortment of "specialty" single-pack foods, the kind of thing that would serve to break the monotony if they were out for an unusually long time.
Enda, walking along with him, looked at the big pile of staples and sighed, rather ruefully. "I remember telling you that you were going to have to stop eating like a Marine," she said. "I did not expect you ever to take my advice quite so much to heart."
"You never do anyway," Gabriel said, slightly amused.
Enda clucked her tongue in mild annoyance and looked ruefully at the industrial-sized vacuum bricks of starch staples. "I am going to have to start exercising more," she said and strolled a little ways off.
They met Helm and Delde Sota by the checkouts with a small fleet of supplies, and Angela and Grawl with two palettes of their own.
"Better go to separate staff for this," Gabriel said. "Last thing we need is to have someone mix the orders tt
u p.
Grawl grinned at that. Angela looked amused, for several of the larger packages on their float were entire irradiated carcasses of gurnet and whilom, two quadripedal herbivores apparently much favored by weren when they could get them.
"Sure you don't want these, Gabriel?" Angela asked.
"Please, don't tempt me," he said. He headed over to one of the checkout podiums, and the palettes came after him, Enda bringing up the rear to make sure nothing fell off.
It took another half hour or so to see the purchases paid for, wrapped, and labeled, then the whole massive lot was trundled away out into the back area to be loaded on the transport for Erhardt Field. Gabriel sighed to see it go, partly because of the money he had just dropped. The others gathered around.
"Now what?" Helm asked, glancing around him. "We could go find somewhere to eat," said Angela.
"Opinion: welcome change of pace," Delde Sota said. "Query: any good restaurants in this city?"
"There are supposed to be several," Enda said, "but we are on the wrong side of town for them, I believe. If we can find a public transport, we might head over that way."
They waved good-bye to the Lalain's front-of-house clerks and headed out into the street. A large convoy of armored personnel carriers was presently making its way down the avenue. Gabriel paused to watch it go by. From the tops of the carriers, an assortment of hard, frowning st
ares lingered on him.
Angela said softly, "Is 'looking hard at the hardware' an offense here?"
"Let's go get lunch before we find out the hard way," Helm said. It was so unusually pacific a suggestion from him that everyone immediately began looking for a transport stop.
"Uh-oh," said Angela after a moment. Down the street, they could see a young woman in Galvinite Army uniform coming in their direction and making straight for them.
"Do we try to escape," Helm muttered, "or flip a coin to see who gets to take her?"
"Helm, hush," Enda said.
The young woman came up and greeted them courteously enough. "What's your destination in the city today?" she inquired.
"You might tell us how you know we're not heading back to Erhardt Field," said Helm.
The young officer smiled. "Because you can't get there from here," she said, "but more to the point, you didn't tell the people in Lalain's that that was where you wanted to go. When you went out the way you came in, the assumption was that you'd be going into the city. For that, you need an escort. Rina Welsh, Department of Hospitality."
Whether you like it or not, Gabriel thought. "We didn't have an escort getting here," he said.
She grinned at him. "Maybe not one that you saw, Mr. Calvin, but you were in a hurry, and you were on your way to take care of specified business. The staff in there said you had been mentioning lunch. Anything specific in mind?"
"There was a restaurant called Elmo's," said Enda, "over by the big hotel, I believe."
"The Interstellar Arms," said Welsh. "It's about a block away. I'll take you there. Come on. The tram stop is down here."
She led them about half a block down the avenue from Lalain's, and as they came up to the stop, a transport came along, a roofed-over floater with poles to hang onto, presently inhabited by about ten of the hard-faced city people.
Welsh invited Gabriel and the rest of the group aboard and said to the driver, "Near side of Central Square."
As they went, Welsh pointed out various parks and lakes to them, a handsome building here, a spire there. Enda, Angela, Delde Sota, and even Helm and Grawl all nodded and made various vaguely
complimentary noises. Gabriel had to smile slightly. He had never seen such a planet for making people either very polite conversationalists or shutting them up entirely. When they finally pulled up in Central Square among the tall clean-lined buildings, all done in white stone, Gabriel found himself wishing that someone would do something unusual here, shout, swear, scream or collapse—except that the police would almost certainly come along in short order and throw everyone involved in jail. No, he thought, save the noise and collapsing for later.
They all got off the tram and made their way around the green expanse of the Square.
"No walking on the grass," Welsh said cheerfully. "The Supreme Commander wouldn't like it!"
Past the imposing facade of the Interstellar Arms, all gleaming in white marble, she turned the corner after the hotel and led them down a little street.
"Elmo's is down this way a few hundred meters," she said.
The group followed, looking into shop windows as they went. Next to Gabriel, Enda made a small weary sound as they walked.
"Long day?" Gabriel said.
Enda tilted her head to one side. "If it were only that," she said, "I would not be so troubled." "What, then?"
"I dislike to speak of it here," she said.
Unusual as that was for Enda, who was nearly always talkative, Gabriel understood. No question, he thought, that this planet definitely makes you want to whisper. He sensed that everyone was listening and that any innocent word could be misunderstood and probably would be. Some uneasy shopkeeper would get on the comm to the authorities, and seconds later he would be in front of a firing squad for some unsuspected but deadly infringement of the local laws.
Certainly the shop people in Lalain's had been listening. It probably would have been as much as their jobs were worth to let us out of there without calling the Hospitality Department. Who'll be listening in the restaurant? It was an annoyance, for Gabriel had about twenty things he wanted to discuss with Enda. Now he wasn't about to broach any of them until they were somewhere safe—meaning off planet and possibly entirely out of this system. The whatever-it-was inside Major Norrik completely horrified Gabriel. He had never heard of such a thing before, yet whatever had briefly spoken up inside him plainly knew something about what it was.
Gabriel looked in a store window at some cool weather clothes draped over a clutch of stylishly minimal mannequins and suddenly remembered a dream he had had not too long ago, one which had been gone upon waking. That same perception of heat as light, that same sense of things writhing, wreathing, stroking. He shuddered. It was awful but familiar, especially after that terrible morning on Tisane.
Dreaming it only makes things worse, he thought. That particular kind of dream had a habit of coming true. The last time something similar had happened, in those dreams of flinging light into darkness, the reality had come to find him within a matter of months. He was still having those dreams, too, but they were more definite than they had been.
It was all disturbing, but not disturbing enough for Gabriel to lose his appetite. They came up to Elmo's within a few more steps.
"I hope you weren't expecting it to be pricey," Welsh said. "It isn't."
"That is always good news in a strange city," Enda said, pausing outside the restaurant's smoked glass and chrome facade to study the menu display. "Hmm. Not a bad selection. There is caulia, prassith, and. goodness, look at the mixed grill."
Gabriel had to admit there was nothing wrong with the choice of food, which was considerable. His stomach was growling, but he was as eager to lose Welsh as to have something to eat. "This looks good," he said. "Helm?"
"They have steak," Helm said. "No indication what kind of animal or vegetable it comes from, but I don't care. If it won't run off the plate screaming when I stick it, it's mine."
"Rrrr," said Grawl and simply smiled.
Angela and Delde Sota looked at each other. "It'll do," Angela said.
Delde Sota's braid reached out from behind her, wrapped itself around the restaurant door's handle, and tugged at it suggestively.
Welsh laughed and pulled the door open. They went in. A small dark-haired woman with big dark eyes and a simple black dress greeted them effusively and took them to a table. As the hostess made her way back up to the bar at the front, Gabriel saw Welsh have a few smiling words with her before turning, waving, and heading out the door again.
"She'll be back to pick us up," Gabriel said softly, "about the time we're having our chai. Bets?"
"The Department of Hospitality," said Helm, "is a division of the Internal Security Directorate."
"The snoopies," said Grawl. She had picked up the word recently from Helm and had been using it on every kind of bureaucratic official.
"True," Angela said, "and the hell with them. Let's order."
"Won't be any problem with service," Helm said, looking around at the place. Its interior was ornate in contrast to the plain exterior, but it was also nearly empty.
"So much the better," Grawl said. She was looking around in such a way as to suggest that she might eat the table covering if something better didn't come along soon.
Fortunately it did. The menus, when they arrived, had three times as many dishes on them as the one outside had. Finally everyone managed to pick something, and within about twenty minutes—during which the better part of a bottle of kalwine had already been killed—the food started arriving. Chandni steak in red sauce, awarathein mince with sweet green cabbage on a coulis of sharp Grith broadbean puree, an entire haunch of whilom for Grawl—the range of dishes and the expertise with which they had been prepared was astonishing.
Gabriel ate about half his whitemeat in vanilla eau-de-vie sauce before having time even to whisper to Enda, "This may be a totalitarian dictatorship, but they know how to eat."
"If we don't get out of here soon," Angela said, "we're not going to get back to
that—whatchamacallit?—exit facility in time to get back to our ships today."
Gabriel agreed, but at the same time, something in his head was saying, Don. 't leave just yet.
That made him start to worry. On one hand, he had been starting to discover that these hunches could eventually be useful. On the other hand, he had noted that they tended to get him in trouble first. He had just had a nice meal and some nice kalwine, and his insides were saying to him, Trouble? Are you kidding? Why would you want to spoil this? Additionally, the idea of getting in trouble on this planet, above all others, didn't attract him.
At the same time, the inside of his head kept itching.
"Let's pay our scot," Gabriel said, "and walk around a little. We can make up our minds then."
Helm, who was closest to the hostess's station, gestured her over, and everyone produced their credit chips. The hostess took them away to feed all their respective meal charges into them.
"How long, do you figure?" Helm asked softly, leaning across the table toward Gabriel.
"I think about three minutes," Gabriel whispered back.
Despite the fact that the hostess did not make a move toward any form of comms apparatus, as the party had their chips returned to them and the hostess was thanking them and telling them how glad she was that they had enjoyed the meal, the front door swung open. Rina Welsh slipped in.
"Four," Helm muttered.
"So I owe you a fiver," Gabriel muttered back.
They all greeted Welsh with a bonhomme that was not entirely faked. It was hard to feel hostile even to a sort ofjunior secret policeman after a meal like that.
"So," Welsh said as she came over to them, "what's the story? Will you be heading back to your ships now?"
Inside Gabriel's head, something went itch again, more urgently.