by David Drake
It was the job of the security element, Margulies and Vierziger, to protect the survey team’s staff personnel. Coke, as team commander, couldn’t object with even a frown at his people doing their jobs.
A hissing static broom shut off as the door opened. A woman, hidden until then behind the counter, stood up. Her lustrous auburn hair was caught in a braid and coiled on top of her head.
As Coke judged the mass, the hair would dangle to the floor if she removed the ornate silver combs pinning it up. Unlikely that she let it down often, though; the arrangement would take an hour to rebuild.
The woman wore black, relieved only by the massive silver crucifix hanging across her breast on a chain of the same metal. She was full-featured rather than fat and could have modeled for Rubens.
“Yes, gentlemen?” she said. Her voice held a touch of sharpness, a sign of uncertainty otherwise hidden. She appeared to be alone in the office. Two men had entered, well dressed but men and strangers, and there were further shapes looming outside the door.
“We’re passengers from the Norbert, ma’am,” Coke explained. “We’re looking for the entry control office.”
He hadn’t forgotten the sailor had said that would be in the left-hand structure. The center building was the only one that was lighted, however.
“Oh, they should have told me!” the woman said with a stricken look.
Her eyes focused on the door. The panels had once been clear, but years of grit blown by nearby landings had blasted them to a pebbled surface. “How many of you are there?”
“Six,” said Coke. “Is there a problem?”
“Not for six,” the woman said. “I was going to take the operations van home anyway. My husband has our—”
She caught herself, flushed, and continued. “You see, the port bus just left with your ship’s crew. They didn’t say anything about passengers. I suppose they wanted to get into Potosi before dark.”
Her skin was white, though from her dark lips Coke suspected she would tan to an umber color. She wore neither make-up nor, apart from the combs and crucifix, any jewelry.
“I’m Pilar Ortega,” she said. “I’m the, well, I’m the passenger services officer, but for the past few months I’ve been sort of running Terminal Operations—to the extent they’re being run.”
“What sort of entry formalities are there?” Coke asked. “Cantilucca is part of the Marvelan Confederacy, isn’t it?”
The building was none too clean. From the sound of the static broom which the team’s entry had interrupted, Pilar was doing not only the terminal director’s work but also that of the janitor.
“Here, I’ll log you in as well,” Pilar said with a grimace. She turned to a console and brought it live. “Call your friends inside, will you please?”
Coke nodded to Vierziger, who moved to the door.
“The clerks in the Commission office next door have all gone home,” the woman explained as she sorted through electronic files. Her fingers were tapering. They moved a light pen with short, positive strokes to control the holographic data. “High Commissioner Merian is . . . isn’t as diligent as he might be. To tell the truth, so long as the port duties are paid, the Confederacy doesn’t bother much about Cantilucca.”
The team entered the terminal building in a smooth movement, forming a chain to slide all the luggage inside ahead of the personnel. Pilar looked up from her console to eye the cases. “It’ll be tight,” she murmured, “but we’ll fit.”
“Is the city far?” Johann Vierziger asked. His voice was calm and melodious, but his eyes never rested more than a second in one place. Watching him was like following a tiny, ravenous insectivore as it snuffled through the leaf mold.
“Two kilometers is all,” Pilar said. “The usual separation in case of a landing accident. But sometimes the road—”
She looked up again. “There are people here who inject tailings from the gage refineries. It can make them dangerous. It’s better not to be on foot when you’re out of town. Potosi isn’t anything more than a town.”
Without changing her inflection she added, “May I see your identity chips, please?”
“Gage tailings are poison,” Margulies said as she gave Pilar her ID chip left-handed. She and Vierziger were both nervous, though that wouldn’t have been obvious to many outsiders. “Why use them when the whole planet’s full of the pure stuff?”
“Poor people, of course,” Pilar said primly as she fed the chips into a slot on her console. “Gage on Cantilucca is controlled for export. If you expected”—she glanced up sidelong, then back to the console—“to find it running free for the taking in the gutters here, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”
“That won’t really affect us one way or the other, Mistress Ortega,” Coke said. “Ah—are there dangerous life forms on Cantilucca?”
“Only the human beings,” Pilar said. “Some of them. Many of them.”
The console popped the ID chips forth one at a time at half-second intervals. Pilar scooped them into her hand and distributed them to the members of the survey team. Though she scarcely glanced at the imprinted legends, she returned each to its owner on the first try.
“There,” she said as she closed down the console again. “In theory, you should come in tomorrow when the clerks are on duty and go through this again. But I can’t imagine anybody will mind. Half the time nobody shows up next door at all.”
She took a deep breath and shook herself. “Are you ready to go?” she added.
“You bet we are,” Margulies muttered, eyeing the translucent door behind her. A starship coughed plasma again, brightening the panels into feathery iridescence.
Pilar stepped into the office on the other side of the counter and returned a moment later with a dark wrap. She opened the gate in the counter and said, “This way, then, please. The van is right outside.”
Vierziger led again. He moved with serpentine grace, that one. He didn’t appear to have hastened to get from one end of the room to the other ahead of his companions, but there he was.
Coke was impressed with Vierziger. Lieutenant Margulies’ face was unreadable, but there was more to her expression than mere professional appreciation.
The night was as Coke remembered it, warm and muggy. He couldn’t understand why the woman had bothered with an overgarment, until he noticed that it turned her into a shapeless blob without sex or individuality. He wondered whether that was more of a comment on Potosi or on Pilar’s personality.
Beside the building was a four-wheeled van whose windows were broken out. Pilar got in while the team members wrestled their luggage into the back through the doors in both sides. The only seats were the pair of buckets in front.
Sten Moden opened the passenger door and swept his arm down in a courtly gesture toward Coke. “Rank hath its privileges,” he said in a booming baritone.
“Bob, give me a leg up on top,” Margulies called. “It’s crowded inside, and I like the view from up there.”
“I think perhaps I should ride there instead,” Johann Vierziger said.
“I don’t think so,” Margulies snapped. Niko Daun chuckled.
Barbour made a stirrup of his hands. He grunted as he took the weight of the close-coupled woman, but she got a boot on the window frame and flipped herself neatly onto the vantage point.
Coke allowed himself a grin as he took his seat beside Pilar. The six of them had a lot of sorting out to do, with each other and with a job they were all new at. So far, so good.
The van was diesel powered. Pilar coaxed the engine to life with difficulty, and it ran rough after it caught.
“Are there aircars on Cantilucca?” Coke asked over the engine noise. From the amount of racket, there was no insulation in the firewall or body of the van to deaden sound.
“A few,” the woman said. “It’s hard to get maintenance on them. It’s hard to get anyone to do anything in Potosi.”
She engaged the torque converter. The van surged forward i
nstead of picking up speed in a rising curve as Coke had expected.
“Except,” Pilar added, “to swagger around with guns looking tough.”
The van had a bar headlight across the upper hood. It worked, though its icteric cast suggested low voltage. The yellow light swept the gate of the starport compound, open and unguarded. Something hung from a pole just beyond the woven-wire fencing.
“Sir!” Margulies shouted.
“It’s all right!” Coke called back. He’d seen the object as soon as Margulies did. “He isn’t any danger, at any rate.”
A corpse with its hands tied behind its back dangled by one ankle from a cross-pole. Either by chance or intention, the scene duplicated one of the Arcana of a Tarot deck, The Hanged Man.
“Yes,” Pilar Ortega said grimly. “That’s also very popular in Potosi. Dying, I mean.”
Either the breeze through the windowless van was unexpectedly cool, or the hormones flooding Coke’s system were playing hell with his temperature regulation. He slid open the front seam of his dress jacket and let his index finger rest on the trigger guard of his pistol.
He began to smile. Survey work might not be as different from what he was used to as he’d feared.
Coke had decided to enter Potosi quietly and not to arouse the locals’ attention until he’d been able to view the situation on the ground. Frisian commo helmets with their array of vision-enhancing capacities would have marked the team even more clearly than would entering armed to the teeth.
Being able to see into the nighted forest would have been more calming to Coke than the weight of a 2-cm weapon in his hands. He supposed he’d made the right decision at leisure aboard the Norbert IV, but it didn’t feel that way just now.
The van drove past a lean-to of brushwood and scrap sheeting. An open flame glimmered through the doorway. The shadow of an occupant ducked across the light.
“We’re booked into a place called the Hathaway House,” Coke said. “Is that near your house, mistress?”
“My husband and I have a suite on the other side of town,” Pilar snapped. “Terence is in charge of cargo operations.”
“I see,” Coke said in a neutral voice. He saw, or thought he did, quite a lot. “I was only concerned that we were taking you out of your way, mistress. We’re perfectly capable of making our way on foot. The cases are awkward, but the suspension takes all the weight.”
The van rattled along at 45 or 50 kph, about all the pavement would allow. The vehicle steered with a pair of thumbwheels set on the arms of a control yoke. Pilar looked down at her hands for a moment, then raised her eyes to the road again.
“I have to go right past the Hathaway House to get home,” she said. “Potosi has only the one street fit for a full-sized vehicle. There are alleys, but they’re generally blocked.”
“You’re going out of your way to help us,” Coke said, watching the woman with his peripheral vision. “I don’t want to put you to needless trouble.”
“Many of the people, the men, who come to Cantilucca are a rough sort,” Pilar said. She still didn’t look toward Coke. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that to you. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” Coke said. “Were you born on Cantilucca?”
He knew what he was doing, and a part of his mind didn’t like him much for it, but he was tense. This sort of game, this hunt, was a way to take his mind off wondering whether the next shadow was going to erupt in gunfire.
“Marvela,” Pilar said. She wasn’t a good driver; she had a tendency to overcorrect. At least she kept her eyes on the road while she talked. “We met when Terence was working in the port there. When he returned home to Cantilucca to run cargo operations, I—we married and I came with him.”
From the glow in the sky ahead, the van was nearing the town proper. They passed a straggle of hovels like the first one. The dwellings weren’t so much clustered as squatting in sight of one another, like a pack of vicious dogs penned together.
There was hinted motion, but no figure appeared in the open. There’d have been trouble had the team walked this way from the port. Nothing they couldn’t have handled, but it would have gotten in the way of Coke’s intention to start out with a low profile.
“Do you miss Marvela?” Coke asked. His eyes swept broad arcs though his head moved only slightly.
“No,” Pilar said. “No.”
She paused. “But I wish we hadn’t come here. Cantilucca is a . . .”
She grimaced. Coke wasn’t sure whether she was unable to find words to describe the planet, or if she was simply unwilling to voice them.
“There’s too much nastiness here,” Pilar said finally. “A man can go wrong anywhere. But on Cantilucca, it’s very difficult to live decently.”
Nothing wrong with my instincts, thought a part of Matthew Coke’s mind; and another part scowled at the smug realization.
The van came up the far side of a dip and rounded a slight curve. Potosi lay directly ahead.
The town had no streetlights, but the ground floors and occasionally one or two of the higher stories were dazzles of direct and reflected enticement. Instead of having common walls, the buildings were set separately, sometimes behind a walled courtyard. Barkers doubling as armed guards stood outside business entrances, shouting to the traffic through bullhorns.
Pilar slowed the van to a crawl. The theoretical right-of-way was fifteen meters wide, but hawkers and shills narrowed the street, grabbing at pedestrians. Coke saw a trio of crewmen from the Norbert IV. The sailors stayed together as they crossed from one set of premises to the next. Though the men wore pistols openly, they looked more apprehensive than dangerous.
There were no other vehicles on the street. A pink-haired woman with wild eyes stuck her head into the van on Coke’s side. Her breath stank. She shouted something about the tray of electronic gadgets in her hand. The casings of gadgets, at any rate. Coke wouldn’t have bet they had the proper contents.
He ignored the woman. She shouted a curse and spat at him. The roof post caught most of the gobbet instead.
The members of the survey team were in civilian clothing, but Margulies still wore her field boots. Her right leg described a quick arc, across the open window and up out of sight again. The hawker spun backward, tray flying as her eyes rolled up in their sockets.
It didn’t seem to Coke that an action of that sort should arouse comment in Potosi; nor did it.
The ground floor of each building was walled like a pillbox, generally as a form of appliqué to the original structure. In some cases the strengthening took the form of sandbags behind a frame of timber and wire, but fancier techniques included cast concrete and plates of metal or ceramic armor.
In general, two or three upper stories were as-built. Many of the structures now had several additional stories added with flimsy materials.
Banners, lighted signs, and occasionally nude women or boys were displayed in second- and third-floor windows. There was always a screen of heavy wire mesh to prevent objects from being thrown in—or perhaps out. Music pumped from street-level doorways, different in style at every one; always distorted, always shatteringly loud.
Every major starport had a district like Potosi. The difference here was that Potosi appeared to have nothing else.
As Pilar had said, no proper streets crossed the road from the port, but the set-backs between adjacent buildings created de facto alleys. One or more gunmen stood at each intersection, strutting arms akimbo or profiling on one leg with the other boot against the wall.
The gunmen weren’t in uniform, but they wore swatches of either red or blue—a cap, an armband, a jacket—and never both colors. Most of them ran to crossed bandoliers, with knives and holstered pistols in addition to a shoulder weapon.
They eyed the van as it passed. A heavy-set, balding fellow with bits of red light-stripping twisted into his beard stepped after the vehicle, then changed his mind and took his former station. Coke relaxed slightly. He heard Vierziger sigh beh
ind him, perhaps with disappointment.
“Are those your police?” Coke asked their driver.
Pilar sniffed. “There are no police in Potosi,” she said. “None that count, at any rate. Those are toughs from the gage syndicates, Astra and L’Escorial. The Astras wear blue.”
A leavening of ordinary citizens shared the streets with the thugs, shills, and roisterers. Laborers; farmers in a small way, in town on business necessity but without money to spend as a few of their wealthier fellows had for the moment; clerks and office workers going home, hunched over and covered by capes like the one which concealed Pilar.
Somebody clanged a stone against the back of the van. Coke didn’t react physically. He wondered if he should have put two of his people on the roof, so that Margulies wouldn’t be clocked from behind. Too late to change plans now without precipitating the trouble he wanted to avoid.
“It isn’t always this bad,” Pilar said apologetically. Her hands were stiff on the control yoke. “Both the gangs have been hiring recently and bringing men in from the fields. It’s, it’s worse than any time in the six years we’ve lived here.”
Coke didn’t bother to ask whether “years” meant standard or the shorter Cantiluccan rotation.
“These are farmers?” he said, frowning at two bands of a dozen each, kitty-corner from one another at an intersection and only ten meters apart. The gangs glowered at one another as they postured.
A short man with a blue beret hopped up to the side of the van. He braced himself on the window ledge and shouted, “Dog vomit!” at the red-clad gang on the opposite corner.
Niko Daun clutched beneath his tunic. Sergeant Vierziger raised his left index finger to prevent his fellows in the back of the van from moving. His eyes were on the opposite side of the vehicle, however, ready to react if a L’Escorial thug decided to shoot through the vehicle at the challenger.
None of them did. The van rumbled on.
Pilar swallowed, showing that she too recognized how dangerous the past instant had been.
“I meant guards from the fields,” she said, watching the roadway. “Some of them were farmers. Some of them were sailors who jumped ship or were discharged on Cantilucca for bad behavior. Many of them are just, just badmen. They’ve come to Cantilucca because word’s out that the syndicates are willing to hire anybody who’ll carry a gun and swagger.”