War World X: Takeover (23 page)

The Reverend Castell ran his hands all over the clot of knots. He leaned down and pressed a cheek to it. He muttered something, then hummed one of the many tunes recorded in the Writings. His movements became slow, languorous.

Kev blushed and looked away. He said, “What have you heard? And from whom?”

“My own son, for one,” the Reverend Castell said, rising to stand straight and glaring. He took on much of his old charisma in such moments of lucidity. “Secret agents,” he said. “Plans.”

“We might be of service to—”

“Of service?” Scorn twisted the words like over-heated metal. Charles Castell openly mocked the idea by repeating, “Service?” He slapped his hands together so hard that Kev winced. “Are we mercenaries, then? Do we seek Harmony through the slavery of service?”

Kev’s wince tightened. His fists clenched. He scrunched down, as if resisting a physical force. “I’d hoped you’d lead us,” he said. “I’d hoped you’d visit those Chosen living beyond our walls. I’d wanted you to walk with me on my next rounds.”

“Do you see?” Charles Castell wailed, gazing upward.

Kev’s flesh rippled, and he stood as the Reverend Castell continued staring upward, through the smoke-hole, as if he saw something up there, or someone.

“Father,” Kev muttered, backing away. He dropped to his knees as the older man began howling semi-coherent laments and curses upward, as if shrieking his betrayal to heaven and beyond, to the very heart of Universal Harmony itself. He shouted as if he wished to shatter the silence at the heart of the note that swells to fill each song; Kev fled, scrambling on hands and knees through the zigzag tunnel, out into the cold.

Only when Bren complained, as he snuggled against her in their warm pallet-bed, did he realize how near-frozen his feet had become.

“No rules,” Alwyn Meany said, swiping beer froth from his scraggly mustache and belching with immense satisfaction, proud as a boy. “Shit, Cole, Haven ain’t got no whatcha-call Ecology. No damn tree-hugging leaf-lovers. Hell, on Haven a man can just plain dig. Dig right down a pit fit for the devil himself.”

“Hence Hell’s-A-Comin’, I suppose,” Cole said, lifting the cloudy yellow wine to his lips, sniffing, then placing the stuff untasted back on the table. He looked at the bartender and snapped his fingers, then held an actual Earth-note aloft. Several sets of feral eyes gazed at the cash, but only the barkeep moved for it. “Take this away and bring me the best whiskey in the house,” he said.

When it came, he sniffed it, then shoved it across to Mister Meany, whose facial tattoos stood out much better when flushed with drink.

Slamming down the double shot of rot-gut maize-bourbon, Meany said, “Look,” then paused to squeeze water from his eyes and let a shudder shake, rattle and roll through his flab. “Jesus with mayonnaise,” he said, “Hold the fucking onions.”

Finally able to relate to a wider reality than that found inside a glass, Meany said, “Call me Wyn, everyone does. Call me Al, I’ll bust your chops and split your ass, and y’wanna know why? ’Cause my daddy’s name was Al, and I killed him when I was fifteen and got just plumb sick of being a whippin’ boy, know what I’m saying?”

“Sure do, Wyn,” Cole said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “So how about it? Can you fix me up with some fireworks?”

“Y’gotta understand,” Wyn Meany said. “They keep closer watch on their bangers than a British poufter, but there are times when not every charge in the blasting pattern goes off. Det caps shake loose, wires break, who can tell? Dangerous as jumpin’ a puddy-tat, but I know guys who’ll grab anything for a buck.”

“Money’s no problem,” Cole said. His back rested against the tavern’s wall, just under a crude portrait of sex Haven miner style. The artist had used blue chalk as a medium, and had incorporated several holes and gashes from various fights. Collectors the worlds over might have bid small fortunes to own such genuine, heart-felt folk art, but not if they had to come to the source to get it. Cole flexed his shoulders and kept one hand near a weapon at all times. “In fact, money’s the whole point,” he added.

Wyn Meany slobbered, wiped most of it off on the back of a hand still dirty from his work unloading Kennicott barges, and said, “So when you want the big kaboom?”

“Any time you can arrange it. Take out the tipple or something, tear up some tracks, that kind of thing. It’s got to do damage, though.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. Doing damage is second nature.” He slurped from his empty glass, then slammed it down and bellowed. When a jumpy waiter scampered over to fill the glass, Meany laughed. “What I don’t get is how you’re going to hang all this on them pussy Harmonies. I mean, hell, everyone knows those folks don’t do nothin’ to nobody.”

“That’s the beauty,” Cole said. “It’s not them doing it, it’s the explosives. Just a harmonious chemical reaction.”

“I’ll be scrogged sideways on a hand-car,” Meany said, draining his glass again. “Them philosopher types can explain anything.”

“Can’t we, though,” Cole muttered, grinning on the inside as he tossed down a few more bills and strode from the tavern.

Wilgar’s eyes glittered. “But why do we even want trade? Won’t valuables bring exploitation?”

Kev slowed his gait and glanced down at his leader’s son. In a hushed voice, he said, “Speak gently of such things.”

Dashing around Kev, Wilgar jostled a pair of CoDo Marines. The streets saw such pairs often, but never in force. Only a token company or so were stationed at Castell City, and rumors had it there might be camps or bivouacs in the countryside, but in a city of ten to twelve thousand no one added them up to any kind of official CoDominium presence. If anything, the two-hundred-odd soldiers acted like supervisors, looking after CoDo interests and often sloughing off rougher military disciplines. At least, that’s what Haveners had observed; it could all be subterfuge, considering the source.

Glaring, the older Marine walked on, but his younger companion snarled and said, “Kid, come here.”

Kev tried to herd Wilgar forward, but the child’s curiosity had been piqued: Also, he feared exactly nothing, that Kev had ever seen. “What’s up, general?”

“He’s a Sergeant,” Kev said, adding, “An aspect of respect is the ability to know another’s lot in life.”

The young Sergeant caught only the word respect, and said, “you’d do well to listen to your father, insolent whelp.”

“Insolent whelp?” Wilgar mocked, laughing in a high contralto and bounding back and forth, toward and away from the Marine. “What kind of language is that?” Several street kids gathered, and other, surlier rag-folk, too, at the sound of mockery coming from so small a Harmony.

Kev scratched his forehead with one hand clenched in a fist, thus giving the signal for Beads to gather closer. Some of the ragged folk elbowed in, as if to get a better look at the beating which everyone knew was brewing; Beadles, as first-circle Harmony pledges, could still use violence when necessary, and be absolved. Most knew a pidgin martial art mix as individual, and effective, as each could make it.

“Where are your Deacons?” the older Marine asked, from a distance of several strides. He showed no inclination to actually do anything more than ask questions. He shivered in the light fall of snow, his breath scudding from him in white wisps. His uniform looked new.

Kev snatched Wilgar’s arm. “His discord was minor, and an accident. Peace is ours to offer, Sergeant. We mean no harm.” When Wilgar struggled, Kev gave him a gentle shake, and the boy settled.

With a nod, the Sergeant walked on, joining his companion with a burst of complaint about scruffy poor-mouthing god-chasers. The crowd dispersed, with it the Beadles, who faded into the background to keep watch and do what they could to protect full-fledged Harmonies.

“Would you have us killed?” Kev asked Wilgar, who shook his head but made no answer. They walked on, and entered a shop selling such delicacies as oranges, bananas, and coffee. Coming in from the cold, their noses gradually opened to the fragrances. Their mouths watered.

Tropical products cost several times the going rate on Haven, and no one’s greenhouses had yet managed to produce adequate substitutes in the tough, thin local soil. Photovoltaic energy remained too erratic in Haven’s general dimness to allow proper, even heating and insulation had to be improvised, as nothing high-tech had yet been dropped or made available to the general population. On a backwater planet like Haven, making do usually meant doing without.

Kev waited, hands folded across his chest and head bowed, until the shop’s proprietor, a Bosnian woman with every other tooth missing, finished serving a Kennicott miner’s apprentice all of eleven years old.

“They’ll have him walking ledges and setting primers before long,” she said as she watched the boy leave the shop. Her battered face, although locked in sadness, somehow conveyed pity of a rough sort.

Wilgar, thirteen, also watched the other boy. In his expression curiosity and empathy mingled with a touch of envy.

“These,” Kev said, handing the woman a list prepared by the acolytes and approved by Bren. Pregnant women need nourishment, and growing children, too. Expense could not be counted against the costs of neglect, especially on an unforgiving world like Haven.

As the woman gathered the meager provisions, Kev tugged the sack from his robes. It dangled on a thong around his neck and held Kennicott scrip, CD military scrip, coins from several worlds, one Earth dollar, and even some Haven barter-chips, most made of odd metals or quartz found in trace amounts here and there by displaced engineers and geologists and such forced to become hardscrabble farmers.

Miners bought at company stores; all that cash stayed in a closed loop. For anyone not a company employee, however, there was no such thing as discretionary or disposable income. In the
ad hominem
black market system prevailing then, Haven’s supply of money, limited at best, sufficed only to maintain a few high officers and other semi-legitimate officials in relative luxury. Kev sorted his purchasing power carefully.

“Pre-CoDo
Moskva
,
da
,” several forced immigrants commented, remembering long lines, scarce goods, atrocious quality, and free-floating currencies of so many kinds no one ever actually mastered the totality of the city’s commerce. Now they had a whole world like that and it neither surprised nor depressed them too much; they’d bottomed out long ago. And the CoDominium linking Russian and American governments had proved to be one more pyramid scheme for enriching the snobbish few at the top. Kev’s bizarre, mixed bag of buying-power had no fixed value, no relative rate of exchange, and no fixed amount of work or man-hours behind it.

Taking a breath, Kev gazed down on the bundle the woman made of his purchases, then held out his sack. She rummaged, chewing her upper, then her lower lip, as if they itched. Kev closed his eyes and murmured, “Seek harmony in all things,” as a prayer; buying on Haven was a matter of faith as much as a matter of free, unrestricted, unstructured trade.

He accepted his sack, considerably lightened, without examining it. Replacing it, he took hold of Wilgar’s hand. The boy’s nose pressed up against a jar of peppermint sticks and when the woman noticed, she opened it and presented him with one.

“All this place needs is a pickle jar and a pot-belly stove with old guys playing checkers,” Kev said as he walked out. “Frontiers must always echo each other.”

“Is that a wisdom?” Wilgar asked, peppermint stick sticking out of his mouth as if it were a cigar. A wagon rumbled by, its muskylope hitched by means of frayed hemp rope. Three women, stark naked, danced in a window, beckoning lewdly to passersby.

Unable to tell if the question mocked him or not, Kev merely said, “Don’t step in dung on the way back.”

For once, the boy didn’t ask how it was possible to avoid it.

They walked in a humble posture, heads slightly bowed. They never made eye-contact. Weapons, most makeshift but some impressively illegal in the CoDominium’s eyes, were much in evidence. Most buildings showed bare planks above ground and people walked along the sides of the dirt roads on boards useless for much else, when such boards weren’t stolen for firewood. A pallor of smoke captured smells of sweat, shit, and alcohol and kept them near the ground, on which lay the dead-drunk, the dying, and the just-plain dead.