Third World (22 page)

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
got 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 his 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.

“
I’m very sorry about all
this.” He had to start somewhere. “Look, we need to get a proper
identification. Maybe this is all just a big mistake, in which
case, you will have my full apologies and who knows, maybe even a
little compensation…”

Newton was dying inside, and all for
the lack of a good cup of coffee.

The man just stared, knees up and on
his left side.