Warren Harding, one of the P-G’s younger brothers, looked across the table at Commander-General Ben Karlstrom. ‘When do you plan to initiate SQUARE-DANCE?’
SQUARE-DANCE was the code-name given to the proposed MX field-operation in which Brickman was to be reunited with his Plainfolk captors.
‘We have no firm date as yet,’ said Karlstrom.
Warren glanced around the table with a puzzled frown then came back to Karlstrom. ‘I don’t understand. Shouldn’t we be taking some positive action on something as important as this right now?’
‘It’s the end of November, Warren,’ said Karlstrom. ‘I know that doesn’t mean much down here but the first reports of snow falls came in yesterday. The wagon-trains are all on their way back in and they’ll stay in Nixon/Fort Worth for the usual winter over-haul and refit, and stateside patrols. All our MX field-teams will remain up and running as usual but with snow on the ground most of the Mutes won’t put their noses out of doors. We will probably go for an insertion in the early spring.’ Karlstrom broke off and looked at the P-G. ‘Assuming, of course, that Brickman agrees –’
‘He will,’ said the P-G.
Karlstrom turned back to Warren Harding. ‘He will have to go through an induction course and then the usual pre-op planning sessions. We still have a lot of work to do on various aspects of the operation before we get to that stage.’
‘And meanwhile?’ said Warren.
Karlstrom passed the question on with his eyes to the P-G.
‘Meanwhile?’ The P-G smiled. ‘Young Mr Brickman will stay in the A-Levels – gaining what, I hope, will prove to be valuable work-experience.’
From 25 November 2989 – the date of his transfer to the A-Levels – to the end of February in the following year, Steve worked with a pipe-laying battalion. Not in the A-Levels, but on Level B-3, some two hundred feet below the marble floor of John Wayne Plaza. Steve’s unit was under the command of Brad Maxey, a hard-driving Seamster line-boss with the compassion of a bulldozer blade and the good humour of a man with an outbreak of boils on the butt. Maxey, who had an obsession with performance quotas, had divided the men under his command into A and B teams and was running a three-shift round-the-clock operation, making a nine-shift, seventy-two hour, six-day week. Deep in the bowels of the earth, with a constant level of light, there was no night or day – just a continuous rhythmic ebb and flow of time; eight hours on, eight hours off and then, just when everyone had been worked onto their knees, a whole twenty-four hours that most people spent horizontally, cancelled out in their bunks. Even if they had been standing up, there weren’t a lot of places they could have gone to. Seamsters were only allowed up into the Quad – Level One-1 to Four-10 – during their periods of furlough. At all other times, their ID-cards restricted them to the A-Levels. COLUMBUS – the computer that acted as the central nervous system of the Federation – controlled access to the elevators. If your card did not authorise you to change levels you could not get through the turnstiles into the elevator lobbies; something Steve had discovered since going ‘through the floor’.
Steve had also been surprised to discover that, under the grime and grease, some of the guys he was working with were girls. Broad-shouldered, wide-necked and hard-handed. Real jack-hammers, with strong powerful thighs that, had you been foolish enough to stick your head between them, would have welded your ears together. But girls just the same. Steve was offered a few chances to crack the pot but couldn’t raise either the steam or the enthusiasm. After a straight eight hours hauling pipe he couldn’t even have pressed the buttons on one of the mess-deck electronic arcade games. He wasn’t alone. When the whistle blew there was very little bunk-hopping. Most guys had but two thoughts – slop and shut-eye. Slop was Seamster slang for the food supplied by the A-Level mess decks. Guys would cancel out on the ride back from the site and would have stayed there until reveille if someone hadn’t hauled them out of the trailer. Some mess-deck comedian had claimed that Maxey was not his name but stood, instead for Maximum Effort. It was probably the same guy that had christened Maxey’s battalion ‘The Walking Dead’. Having joined them, Steve had to admit it was not far from the truth. After washing up, the majority would shuffle past the mess counter like a sullen, dull-eyed chain-gang of Mutes. Even the effort of choosing one of the three meal choices was too much. Most thrust their mess tray forward and mumbled ‘Gimme whatever’s goin…’ then they would prop their heads up with one hand while they ate their slop with the other. Once or twice, Steve didn’t even get that far – he fell asleep in the shower.
Although Steve had been tagged for General Duties – the lowest grade of the lowest form of life – the engineering training he had undergone during his three years at the Flight Academy came to the attention of one of the supervisors who decided to put it to some use. For one whole week he was transferred to a squad welding clean new sections of pipe together. For six glorious days, in the brief moments of silence when he changed rods, he congratulated himself on the slight improvement in his fortunes. A skilled job was the first step up the ladder. It was only a matter of time, he told himself, before Maxey’s staff recognised his leadership qualities and then… No such luck. After the twenty-four-hour weekend break, he found himself back in his original squad, disconnecting old, corroded sections of pipe containing a thick, foul-smelling coating of effluent. It was with a distinct feeling of desperation that Steve learned that Maxey’s assignment was to replace and expand the sewage system under the whole of Houston/Grand Central.
Like the overground, the world of the A-Levels left within him its own set of vivid impressions. Huge, echoing, slab-sided tunnels lined with pipes and power lines, valves, and vents belching steam. Pools of darkness and light with brown-and-yellow-suited Seamsters illuminated one minute, thrown into silhouette the next, then just as suddenly swallowed up by the darkness. The white hard-hats of supervisors and line-bosses. Snowdrops. One or two sprinkled among the yellow hats was a sign that things were okay; on schedule. One or two wheelies full of them usually meant they’d come to kick ass. Down in the A-Levels they didn’t go in for handing out prizes.
Noise: the constant thrumming of the huge fans in the main vents; the staccato clamour of compressed air drills and rivet guns hammering at the eardrums, the shrill buzz of metal edge-grinders cutting into the brain. Wave upon wave of sound, pulsing through the air with tangible force, reverberating off the tunnel walls, seeping through the insulation lining the bunkhouse walls. During the first few days, Steve thought he might crack up but, after a few weeks, his body gradually built up a resistance to the initially unbearable level of noise. His brain began to blank off the raw nerve endings; began to build a wall around itself.
Water: running in rivulets down the walls; dripping from ceilings of service tunnels and galleries. Sometimes Steve found himself working in it up to his knees. Pumps worked constantly to drain areas where it threatened to become a flood. During his travels he encountered huge steel and concrete watertight doors that could seal off whole sections, or one level from another. And he wondered how it would feel to find yourself on the wrong side of the door when the water began to rise towards the ceiling.
Heat: enervating, inescapable. Despite the geothermal power-plants, heat-exchangers, refrigeration, air conditioning and the complex ventilation system that made life bearable in the rest of the Federation, conditions in the A-Levels varied enormously. The environment in the rest and recreation areas was roughly equivalent to that in the Quad but in some of the less-populated work-faces, such as the service tunnels on B-3 – which was nearly seventeen hundred feet undergound – it was hot, and it was humid. Great conditions for growing rice and bamboo shoots in narrow tanks as long as football pitches but liable to stunt your growth if you were unlucky enough to be working on Maxey’s pipeline.
Think of it as a challenge, Steve told himself as he collapsed gratefully onto his bunk at the end of each shift. They’re trying to break you. Don’t let them win. D
on’t go under…
Two days before the end of February, at the end of yet another shift, Steve rolled out of his seat on the ten car trailer, arched his back to try and take some of the pain out of it and shuffled along to the showers. As was usual throughout the Federation, all the guys shared the same facilities. Uniforms, bunkhouses, washrooms, work assignments, P-D, military service, combat duty… no differentiation was made on the basis of sex. There were two major exceptions to the unisex principle; the female Trackers selected to be host mothers to the new generation, and the male members of the First Family who inherited the position of President-General. The only minor variation was in the haircuts. Not all the girls had crewcuts; some opted for the only permitted alternative – the short bob.
Steve spent a good twenty minutes under the shower letting the heat draw the tiredness from his body, then finished off with a needle sharp burst from the cold tap – a move which drew howls of rage from his immediate neighbours. He towelled himself dry in the crowded locker room, changed into his off-duty set of coveralls, headed over to the mess-deck and joined one of the lines at the food-counter. In the weeks he had been working down under, he had gotten to know the guys he bunked down and worked with. At first, some of them had been a little hostile; had taken pleasure in the fact that a high-flyer from Lindbergh Field had landed in the A-Levels. Steve had been warned to say nothing about his period of captivity with the Mutes. As far as his Seamster bosses knew, he had been transferred to Service Engineering & Maintenance because of – quote – ‘his negative operational performance’. The official way of saying that he had crapped out of an overground firefight.
Such an entry on his records was supposed to remain confidential but the word had gotten around and Steve had been hassled by a few guys who took him for a soft target. He shrugged off as much of it as he could then had been obliged to fatten a few mouths. Some of his opponents had been hard to crack, but they were brawlers not fighters. They were mean, but Steve had a lot of cold anger stored up inside him – and he’d been trained to kill. After a while, when he had established that he wasn’t a guy to mess with, things got a lot better.
Steve learned something too. It had been a terrible blow to his pride to be reduced to the rank of a Seamster but he discovered that the despised Zed-heads, the greaseballs, the scumbags he was now working alongside were not as hopeless, awful, or as pitiful as he had imagined when his elitist opinions on the subject had been formed in the rarified atmosphere of the Flight Academy. The Seamsters in his unit might not share his vaulting ambition or sense of destiny, but most of them were OK guys with a firm grasp of the realities of their situation and more modest, achievable goals. None of them were aiming to make it to the Black Tower and wouldn’t have thanked you if you’d offered them a free ride up the wire. Alongside that it had to be admitted some of them were real Zed-heads with zero upstairs, and there were a number who, even on the most generous appraisal, were a genuine pain in the ass. But then, so was Gus White, a fellow-graduate from the Academy – and someone with whom Steve still had a score to settle. Yes, good old Gus, who had flown off promising to get help, leaving him trapped in the middle of a burning crop-field…
Steve laid his tray of food in front of an empty seat at one of the mess-tables, sat down and began to eat hungrily. His earlier reservations about Federation food had disappeared. Ever since he’d started work in the A-Levels, he had eaten anything and everything that was on offer and had gone back for more. He looked around at the other tables as he raised the first heaped spoonful and almost missed his mouth as he spotted John Chisum sitting at a table over on his left. Steve stared open-mouthed, unable to decide whether to go over at once, or stay put and clear his tray first. He stayed put but kept his eyes on Chisum while he ate, making only monosyllabic contributions to the conversation around the table. Chisum did not look his way. He sat with one arm over the back of his chair, talking to the guys seated opposite him. He wore the same green uniform Steve had seen him in before but now, a chrome yellow diamond patch had been inserted between the white and red chevron on his sleeve. And when he swivelled around to look at somebody one of his companions was pointing at, Steve saw he had another yellow patch on the back of his jumpsuit. Seamster yellow. Surely that couldn’t mean…? Unable to bear the suspense any longer, Steve grabbed his tray and threaded his way through the seated diners towards Chisum.
As Steve approached, the two guys sitting opposite Chisum got up, shook hands with him and walked away. Chisum began speaking to the guy next to him as Steve put his tray down.
‘Hey – John – remember me?’
Chisum broke off his conversation and glanced back over his shoulder. As their eyes connected, Steve saw the neutral expression on Chisum’s face change to one of thinly disguised anger.
‘What gives? You just visiting – or what?’
Chisum turned back to his neighbour and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Must go. I’ll check with you later.’ He stood up abruptly without looking at Steve and began to walk away.
Steve dodged round the table and grabbed Chisum’s arm. ‘Hey, John – c’mon! What’d I do? What the heck’s going on?!’
Chisum stopped and turned around, his arm stiff and unyielding in Steve’s grasp. ‘Let go of my arm, scumbag.’ The harshness in his voice matched the expression on his face.
A couple of guys from Steve’s work-squad sitting at the next table looked at each other, pushed their chairs back, and ranged themselves alongside him. Dan Dover and Ty Morrison. Dover, the bigger of the two, aimed a finger at Chisum’s nose. ‘You’d better watch your mouth, medic. Otherwise you’ll find yourself in urgent need of life-support.’
Chisum eyed his interlocutor contemptuously. ‘Go suck a bucket of lumpshit –’
The people at the surrounding tables stood up and moved out of the way as the two Seamsters made a grab for Chisum. Steve moved in between and wrestled them off. ‘Whoa! Hold it, guys! Hold it down! Listen, I really appreciate your help but, uh – I can handle it. Just, uh – leave it with me. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Dover. ‘But get that jerk-off out of here. He’s spoiling my digestion.’
Steve hustled Chisum through the crowd that had gathered round them before he could reply. ‘Come on, move! Let’s get out of here!’
Chisum tried to wrestle free. ‘Hey! Get your fucking hands off me?! What the hell’s the matter with you?!’ he demanded angrily.
Steve managed to propel him into the corridor outside the main entrance doors and pinned him against the wall. ‘Calm down, will you? I just want to talk!’
Chisum stopped struggling. ‘Look, fly-boy. I don’t want to talk to you. Can you understand that? Or have you swapped your brains for shit since you’ve been working down here? I’ll give it to you one more time. I – don’t – want – to – talk – to – you. I – don’t – want – to – even – see – you. You got that? And if you’re planning to fall sick, don’t do it on A-l to A-5. You may get the wrong prescription. Comprendo?’
Steve let go of Chisum and stood back totally perplexed. ‘I don’t get it, John. Why? What did I do?’
Chisum gave a sniffy laugh. ‘Why? Because you’re big trouble, that’s why! What did you do? You tell me! Whatever it was you said to your goddam kin-sister left her so upset, she turned rat-fink and blabbed it all to some hot-wire in the Black Tower! Result? The lumpshit hit the fan, my friend! Your sweet little sister fingered me as the guy that set up the meeting with you at Santanna Deep! She spilled her guts! What the eff-eff did you tell her?!’
‘Nothing,’ said Steve dully. ‘Well – not anything special.’
‘Lying sonofabitch!’ hissed Chisum. He tried to push past but Steve blocked the way. ‘AmEx had four guys working on me for over a week! I’m lucky to be alive! Christo!’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘The only thing she didn’t tell ’em about was you two smoking grass and me shipping it. If they’d got onto that…’
Steve grabbed Chisum’s arm. ‘J
ohn, you’ve got to believe me. I had no idea Roz would pull anything like this. I can’t think what made her do it!’
‘Must have been something you said.’
Steve waved his hands helplessly. ‘So… what happened to you?’
‘Me? They sent me down here to serve out the rest of my time. I’m twenty-eight now, so what’s that – twelve, fifteen years? And unlike you, I don’t have the luxury of an Annual Review.’ Chisum gave another bitter laugh. ‘Ah, well, that’s what happens when you try to do a guy a favour. Nice one, Stevie.’ He drew back. ‘Is it okay if I go now?’
Steve felt confused and guilty. ‘John, listen. There’s was no way I could have known –’
‘Sure, of course. I understand that. Don’t let’s talk about it. Okay? Just stay well away from me from now on. You are a real disaster area, Brickman.’
‘Yeah, okay, okay. Just tell me one thing. What did they do to Roz?’
Chisum laughed. ‘Well, they didn’t pin a medal on her, I’ll tell you that! I don’t know what happened. Not for sure, anyway. I think I heard someone say she’d been suspended.’
‘From Inner State U? Oh, sweet Christopher! I should never have gone to see her!’ He rounded on Chisum angrily. ‘It was your idea! You –’
Chisum cut him short. ‘Look, I don’t need any of this shit! I’ve got enough trouble! Just get out of my way!’ He pushed Steve aside.
Steve made no attempt to hold him. ‘What’s going to happen to her?!’ he shouted.
Chisum turned around and waved his arm dismissively. ‘Who gives a fuck? From here on in, you’d better start worrying about what’s going to happen to you!’ He turned the corner and was gone.
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