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Earth: The Next Step on the Road

As soon as C41's command group got out at what was supposed to be a major starport on Earth, the aircar lifted again with a spray of gritty soil. The pilot hadn't said a word to the three strikers during the flight from Oakland District to Emigration Port 10 on the Balcones Escarpment. Farrell wondered if the fellow had dropped them at the wrong place.

The hull of automated transport 10-1442 was complete. From inside, the whining of power wrenches, the angrier howl of saws, and extrusion equipment that sounded like lions vomiting indicated that construction continued. Sixteen similar vessels were spaced a quarter mile apart at decreasing levels of completion. The monorail that joined the sites in a racetrack pattern brought materials graduated by the stage of construction.

An empty eighteenth site waited immediately west of where Farrell stood with his patched-together command group. The prickly nut grass crawling across the ground there was yellowed. The roots had been cooked by eddy currents between the buried magnetic mass and the starship launched a few days before.

"I don't remember the last time I was in a civilian port," said Lieutenant Marina Kuznetsov. She'd been CO of First Platoon. By virtue of being the only other officer who survived Active Cloak, she was now Farrell's XO. "This isn't much like I expected, though."

Sgt5 Daye, C41's First Sergeant, said, "Active Cloak was a civilian port. Part civilian, anyhow."

"It wasn't a lot noisier when we were there either," Kuznetsov agreed.

Pallets just unloaded from a ten-car train were being gobbled by construction crews. The port's only permanent buildings were five-story rammed-earth barracks, one per site. Every room had a balcony, and the walls' basic dirty-yellow hue was overpainted in garish patterns. Farrell found the result attractive if not in any sense of the word beautiful.

Even when the facilities are the same, civilians live better than soldiers. Well, they've got something to live for.

Farrell would have tried to find a reporting office in the nearest barracks except for the high fence which surrounded the building. There was an eyeprint lock on the gate, and the sign said SITE PERSONNEL ONLY.

It was hot and dry. Mesquite and prickly pear cactus ten feet high grew between the sites. The strikers didn't have helmets or other equipment, just battledress uniforms so new they had a chemical odor. Farrell felt naked and angry and very, very tired.

"Come on," he said. "Let's see if there's anybody in charge in the ship. If there's no billets for our people . . ."

He didn't finish the sentence. There was no finish. The rest of his strikers were scheduled to arrive in forty-seven minutes. If nobody'd arranged for C41's housing and rations, if they'd been sent to the wrong place, if they had to spend the night in a fucking scrub desert with no gear at all . . .

What else was new?

10-1442 was constructed with the extreme simplicity of an object which would be used once and then scrapped. The entrance hold was the entire bottom deck. For the moment it was bare of everything except grime and cryptic symbols chalked on the plates around the support pillars. Inside a workman in blue coveralls was fitting a fresh bottle of insulating foam to his spray head.

"Hey, buddy," Farrell said. "We're looking for the project manager, Jafar al-Ibrahimi. Got any notion where he'd be?"

"Nope," said the workman. He pulled down a clear mask to cover his face and began spraying the bulkhead. The foam went on a dull white but darkened to gray in seconds. The smell made Farrell sneeze; his eyes watered.

Daye switched off the sprayer.

Kuznetsov lifted the man's mask away and tossed it behind her. "Do better," she said. Her voice had sounded like a crow's ever since she took a bullet through the throat.

"Hey, I got a deadline!" the workman said.

"So do we," said Farrell. "Forty-three minutes. Where do we find the project manager?"

"The upper decks got finished first," the workman said. "I'd guess he was up in the nose, somewhere around there. But look, I don't know. Can I do my job now?"

"Maybe in a bit," said Daye. "How do we get to the nose?"

The workman grimaced and pointed toward the pillar along the axis of the ship. "The lifts are that way," he said. "Three and Four work, the others I don't know about. They didn't this morning."

"Thank you, Citizen," Farrell said. "Marina, would you wait by the hatch? I don't know how long this'll take, and I don't want our people to arrive and not have anybody meet them."

"Yeah," rasped the lieutenant. "They might get the idea that nobody gives a shit about strikers." She walked back outside, whistling a snatch of Tchaikovsky.

There were eight lift shafts in a central rotunda, but hoses and power cables snaked into five of them. The door of the sixth was open into an empty cage. Busy workmen in blue, puce, or orange ignored not only the strikers but anybody wearing a uniform of a different color. They shouted to their fellows or into epaulet communicators.

Lift Four arrived as Farrell and Daye entered the rotunda. Three workmen, one of them carrying a powered jack as long as her arm, pushed aboard with the strikers. The cage would easily have held twenty.

There wasn't a call button inside, nor had Farrell noticed one in the rotunda. The cage paused twenty seconds at each deck with the door open, then rose again without command. A workman hopped off at the next stop. Three more got on two decks above.

Farrell frowned. He hadn't realized the degree to which the transport was automated. He'd thought the term applied only to the navigation system. It looked like the passengers would be treated as canned goods in all fashions.

Well, at least the strikers were used to that.

"Sir," Daye said, "what the fuck are we doing here?"

"All I know is that C41 is the security element for a new colony," Farrell said. "The planet's BZ 459, and I haven't gotten to a database that has anything to add to the bare listing."

Daye frowned. "External security, sir?" he asked. "Or police for the folks themselves?"

"I don't know," Farrell said. He stared at the door, wishing there were answers written there instead of the stencilled notice MOUNT THIS DIRECTION with an arrow up.

"We're not cops, sir," Daye said. "Shit-fire, they wouldn't be that dumb, would they?"

"I don't know," Farrell repeated. Though the real answer was: that dumb, no; that callous, maybe.

"Shit-fire," Daye repeated softly.

For the first half dozen times the door opened, racket from the deck beyond made the cage vibrate. The last workman got out on Deck 10; above that the pauses were quiet. Only occasionally did Farrell glimpse somebody in the corridor. It occurred to Farrell that he didn't know how many levels the ship had.

When the lift reached Deck 25, Farrell heard angry voices. He nodded to Daye and the pair of them stepped out of the cage just before the door closed. Insulation covered the floor as well as bulkheads and ceiling. It was as soft as a deep-pile carpet. Foot traffic had already dented it.

A young woman stood at the door of an austerely furnished office/conference room. She nodded as they approached and called, "Major Farrell and Sergeant Daye have arrived, sir."

Farrell had no idea who she was.

A man in his sixties sat behind an electronic desk which was welded to the floor. Like the woman he wore loose, many-pocketed clothing that would have been battledress if there'd been any badge or patch on it.

The cloth was brown rather than chameleon-dyed, but it was still the same synthetic that went into the strikers' uniforms. The fabric was tough and breathed even better than natural fibers, but it was harsh enough to take your skin off when pressed against you by armor and equipment. Maybe these civilians wore underwear.

The three other civilians—a man of thirty, a woman in her fifties, and another man who was probably as old as the fellow at the desk—turned when the strikers entered. All of them wore ordinary business clothes of excellent quality, though the older man's socks were mismatched.

The younger man had been shouting in a resonant tenor voice. The three were standing, though the bulkheads had fold-down seats. Two short benches could also have been pulled up from the floor to face the desk.

"Gentlemen," the young woman said, "this is Project Manager Jafar al-Ibrahimi. I'm his assistant, Tamara Lundie—"

Farrell saw a thought flick behind Lundie's eyes, though she didn't blink physically.

"I'm a Manager 3, that's the equivalent of a senior lieutenant," Lundie continued. "Manager al-Ibrahimi is the equivalent of a full colonel and is in sole charge of the project."

Farrell felt his mouth smile. Did she think strikers were so rank-conscious that they needed to have civilian pecking orders explained to them? Oh, God, his poor strikers, being dropped into another ratfuck . . .

"Major," al-Ibrahimi said, "is the remainder of your unit on schedule?"

The project manager was a slight man who appeared brittle, an appearance Farrell decided was false as soon as he heard the man speak. Al-Ibrahimi wasn't going to break, and Farrell didn't think he'd be easy to grind down either. What surprised Farrell was the degree to which something had already ground al-Ibrahimi down.

There was plenty of steel left, though.

"Yes sir," Farrell said. If there'd been a problem, somebody would have reported through the finger-sized communicator he carried in his pocket in lieu of the helmet he was used to. This wasn't a combat operation where no news might mean—usually meant—that everybody in the silent unit had been killed instantly.

"Good," said al-Ibrahimi. "Major, Ms. Susannah Reitz is president of the building council and therefore de facto leader of the colony. Dr. Joao Suares—"

He nodded toward the older man. Suares looked surprised.

"—and Mr. Matthew Lock are her co-councillors. Madame, gentlemen, Major Farrell is head of our security element, and Sergeant Daye is his ranking enlisted man. We'll be working closely together after landfall."

"Mr. al-Ibrahimi," Lock said, "I demand that you halt this process until my request for an injunction can be heard. The very idea of assigning the residents of an urban apartment building as the initial colony on a totally unsettled planet is insane!"

Farrell didn't let his face show surprise, but that was at least one thing he and the councillor could agree on.

Lock was in good shape. He must keep fit with sports and exercise equipment. It was a civilian sort of "good condition" though, and it looked soft to eyes like Farrell's. He was used to strikers whose flesh had been pared off by discomfort, stress, and the lack of appetite caused by exhaustion.

Farrell found it odd to look at civilians close up. Real civilians, not Unity bureaucrats providing support to the armed forces. Farrell hadn't been on leave in a real rear area during the past five years, and civilians sure as hell didn't show up in the places he did go.

"Tamara," al-Ibrahimi said, "brief Major Farrell on his unit's billets, supplies, and duties during the voyage. The remainder of C41 can be expected in thirty-nine minutes."

The project manager hadn't checked either a clock or a schedule, so far as Farrell could see.

Lundie turned on her heel. She was pretty enough but not Farrell's type. Farrell's type was a woman who didn't look at him as if he were a pallet of rations—and an equally unlikely love object.

"As for you, Councillor Lock," al-Ibrahimi continued as the strikers followed Lundie out of the office, "I will carry out Unity policy as it devolves on me, and you will do the same. Failure to comply with a Colonization Order means loss of citizenship—"

"I know that!" Lock said. "But—"

"—and a life sentence to a labor camp," the manager continued. Lundie had led the strikers back to the rotunda, but her chief's crisp voice was still perfectly clear. "Now, during the voyage each two decks of colonists will be separated by a deck of supplies and . . ."

A lift cage arrived. The strikers stepped aboard in unison with Lundie. Daye looked as worried as Farrell had ever seen him.

The only thing that kept Daye going was the hope that his CO had the situation in hand. Farrell knew that was a vain hope if ever there'd been one.

Lundie led them off on the next deck down. "Your quarters are here on Twenty-four," she said, the first words she'd spoken directly to the strikers since introducing them. "Your rations and equipment will be stored with you. The remaining volume on this deck will store colony supplies that won't be needed until after landing on Bezant 459."

She led Farrell and Daye down a corridor. The doors to either side were ajar. The rooms had eight pull-down bunks, a shower stall, a double washstand, and a latrine. The space and amenities were better than those of a troopship and enormously better than an assault vessel's, but Farrell didn't imagine the civilian colonists were going to be happy.

"Ma'am," said Sergeant Daye. "Ah, can I ask a question?"

"Yes, of course," Lundie said. "And please refer to me as you would refer to one of your own officers."

"Yes ma'am," Daye said. Farrell wondered if he was having as much trouble as Farrell himself was imagining the young woman in C41. "What that fellow said about a whole building being turned into a colony—is that true?"

"Yes," said Lundie. "Horizon Towers in the Central Chicago District. Every resident of Earth is subject to Colonization Orders, but this particular technique has never been used before."

"Did some computer blow a fuse?" Farrell asked. "Or did some dickheaded human really think this was a good idea?"

"I can't answer that," Lundie said. When she spoke on most subjects, her voice had the false rhythms of an AI program forming words. This was so flat that perversely it indicated real feeling.

"Rations and other consumables for your company have already been loaded into these two compartments," Lundie continued. "And there's a large compartment here—"

"C41 bunks aboard while the ship's being finished, you mean?" Daye interjected.

Lundie looked at him. "The ship will be finished very shortly," she said. "Liftoff is in six hours, twelve minutes."

She opened the door as she'd started to do. There was nothing to be seen but an empty room. Throughout the vessel, ringbolts on all flat surfaces provided anchors for cargo nets and tie-downs.

"—for your personal stores and equipment. There's a separate compartment for use as an armory."

"We keep our hardware with us in C41," Farrell said flatly. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Lundie's face was still. "That isn't necessary on the voyage," she said carefully.

"It's necessary if I'm going to sleep," Daye said. "I'm itchy right now, ma'am."

"C41's pretty stressed," Farrell said. He didn't know how to explain to a civilian. "I know there's a risk, but I think the risk is worse if I, if we . . ."

Daye grimaced. "Look, ma'am, if you can get us reassigned to something we know how to do, that'd be great. We're strikers, we're not, we're . . ."

"Arrangements for security personnel are yours to determine, major," Lundie said. "Assignments to the Bezant 459 project are of course from higher levels of the government."

She cleared her throat as a period, then continued, "The colonists will be arriving in three hours. Since your helmets have full communications and mapping capacity, we'll use your personnel as guides for corridor assignments. Initially only the upper seventeen decks will be complete, so . . ."

Farrell continued to listen to the young woman. From long experience he'd be able to reel off her statements word perfect when he assigned individual missions to his people.

But Farrell's heart was in a dark place of its own, and his soul was as dead as the strikers C41 had left scattered across a galaxy at war.

The landscape of spiky trees and spiky grass, scattered sparsely over gritty dirt, could easily have been a frontier planet. Abbado hadn't known there were parts of Earth that looked like this.

It was probably news to the colonists being herded off the train by uniformed police, too. The largest expanse of vegetation most of the civilians would have seen before was their apartment building's roof garden.

The poor bastards stared at their surroundings with shell-shocked expressions. "They better get used to it," Abbado said aloud. "I don't know about Bezant, but I've seen a lot of planets that make this look like an R&R base."

The police carried shock batons. They weren't hitting people with them that Abbado saw, but they chivied the civilians with their free hands while the batons waved.

"This ain't right," Glasebrook muttered. "I don't like us being mixed up with it."

"Cheer up, Flea," Abbado said. "This assignment got us off Stalleybrass fast. I wasn't much looking forward to answering questions about a little problem there at a cadre bar."

Abbado had been more relieved than he would admit to his strikers. The morning after they'd shot up the REMFs he'd been asking himself how the hell he'd let himself do that; but at the time, at the time . . .

The police wore riot helmets and breastplates, not a patch on Strike Force equipment for weight but not particularly comfortable in this climate either. That was probably part of the reason they were treating the civilians like animals.

Already some strikers were shepherding ragged columns of civilians toward the starship. "Sarge, we've found ours," Horgen called over the squad push. "We'll see you at the billet. Out." 

"The ones we're looking for are going to be the batch that caught the wrong train," Abbado grumbled to Glasebrook. Matushek, the third member of the group, was scanning civilians to match the holographic portraits downloaded into his helmet database.

For the loading, Top Daye had broken 3-3 into fire teams under Horgen and Abbado to get colonists to decks 18 and 19 respectively. Methie and Foley were detached to help the two survivors of Heavy Weapons guide the building support staff.

The apartment block from which the colonists came had eight stories. For the voyage the residents were split into east and west corridors and each group was supposed to be on a single car of the train. If there'd been a little coordination back when the train was loaded the strikers would know exactly which carload went to which deck, but of course that hadn't happened.

"Don't see why civilians can't count the decks up to nineteen themselves," Glasebrook muttered.

"Buck up, Flea," said Abbado. "Nobody's shooting at us, right?"

The monorail shivered for its full length as current to the magnets raised the hangers a hair's breadth from the elevated track. The train accelerated slowly, but it was up to ninety miles an hour by the time the last car whipped past Abbado and his strikers. Suction dragged at them, but the only sound the train made was a hiss and the faint click of couplers.

"Sarge, got them!" Matushek reported. He was standing twenty feet from the others, so he used helmet commo to speak over the nervous chatter of a thousand colonists and their guides. "They were on the other side of the track! Over." 

"Fucking typical," Abbado said as he strode toward the clump of fifty-odd stunned-looking civilians. In a louder voice he shouted, "Six West! Form on me!"

The track serving Emigration Port 10 had loading platforms only on one side. Naturally, one of the cars had been misaligned so that its doors were on the wrong side; and naturally, the folks Abbado was looking for were on that car.

The police had noticed the misplaced civilians also. Half a dozen of the nearest strode under the support rail ahead of the strikers. A tall, badly overweight cop bellowed, "Hey you assholes! What're you doing over there? Move it!"

He grabbed the nearest civilian by the arm and jerked her in the direction of the starship. She was carrying bulging net bags, far too much of a load for a woman in her sixties. One of them spilled packages onto the ground.

"That's okay, buddy, we'll take care of this!" Abbado said. His voice was thinner than normal because he was going to be reasonable, he wasn't going to do what he wanted to. "Folks, we're your—"

The cop turned and said, "When I want your opinion, dickhead, I'll—"

Abbado kicked him in the balls. Shit, he'd known he was going to do that all the time.

A cop holding a shock rod faced Glasebrook, who took the rod from him and broke it over his knee. The blue sparks snarling against Flea's left palm stopped when the shaft fractured.

"Fellas, we can let this stop right here," Abbado said. The big cop had settled to his knees. His riot helmet had skewed and now hid his eyes, though the faceshield was up. "Let's do that, right?"

"Yeah," said Matushek. "Let's."

He bobbled a grenade in his open right hand. For an instant Abbado was afraid somebody might not believe the grenade was real or that Matushek really would throw it. A grenade wasn't much of a weapon for close enough to spit, not if you cared about surviving yourself.

"Ace, put that fucking thing away," Abbado said as he stepped between his striker and the police. Christ on a crutch! He'd thought this was a cush assignment and he'd be able to keep out of trouble.

Glasebrook helped up the man Abbado had kicked, holding the fellow by collar from behind. "All under control, right?" Abbado said.

A cop looked over her shoulder. Maybe she was expecting to see help coming. What she saw was the rest of C41. There were about as many cops in the escort detail as strikers, but the police didn't have lethal weapons and C41 didn't have anything else. The company's baggage hadn't been delivered yet, but the strikers had been nervous about the screwy situation. Most everybody'd brought a security blanket.

Abbado keyed the unit channel. "C41, doesn't anybody have a job to do?" he snarled. "Come on, there's not a problem! Out!" 

"S'okay, we're going," a policeman said. The group of them moved down the trackway.

"Have a nice trip," Ace Matushek called. He dropped the grenade back into a side pocket.

"Six West!" Abbado called to the civilians staring at him. "We're going to take you folks to Deck 19, but we'll wait a bit to let some of the folks ahead of us clear the lifts, okay? Let's just relax for a bit."

A woman started to cry. A pretty one, too. Jeez, he'd really stepped on his dick this time!

"Can I help you pick those up, ma'am?" he offered brightly. And it wasn't till he knelt to help the old lady with her packages that Abbado realized he was holding his powerknife. The blade trembled like caged lightning in the bright sun.

"Look," Seligman said to Esther Meyer as they waited for a construction crew to lay decking over the maze of conduits in the corridor floor, "the cits who live in the building, if they want to go play colonist, that's fine. But it's not right they take us staff along! I'm a services supervisor, I'm not a fucking farmer."

Seligman was an overweight, middle-aged man with a red face and wavy hair implants that didn't match the fringe remaining around the edges of his scalp. He acted angry because he was scared and ashamed of it.

He ought to be ashamed. Scared of going off-planet!

"You think this was their idea?" Meyer asked. "I heard they got drafted into this, same as you."

Meyer hadn't been drafted. Everybody in the Strike Force was a volunteer. Sometimes she tried to think back to when she took that step forward. Stupid fucking thing to do, but she couldn't imagine an existence in which it hadn't happened. Funny.

"Don't you believe that crap!" Seligman said. "Horizon Towers isn't full of peons, these are cits! They don't get orders they don't want. Or if they do, they call somebody so high in the Unity you and I couldn't breathe there, and the order gets cancelled. If they're going off-planet, it's because that's what they decided. And they're dragging me along, just like I was their pet dog."

The service personnel were supposed to operate the colony's heavy equipment and provide the sort of support that they'd given the building residents, the citizens, on Earth. The Population Directorate was like a hog processing plant: it used every part of the pig except the oink.

"Life's tough all over," Meyer said. Two workmen held plating in place as a third drove a welder down the seams. As soon as the deck was complete, she could deliver Seligman to the storeroom where he'd wait the arrival of the on-voyage consumables for which he'd be responsible.

The welding trolley reached the end and turned around. With the other two workmen jogging behind, it whined toward Meyer and Seligman. One was talking into a lapel microphone.

"Hey, is this safe to walk over?" Seligman asked as the crew came past. They ignored him.

"They're walking on it, aren't they?" Meyer said as she started down the corridor. She'd be glad to see the back of Seligman. Civilians had to be told every fucking thing. It gave her the creeps, being around people who didn't know how to react.

"All right, this is where you go," Meyer said, opening the door. "It'll be keyed to your palm-print after the goods arrive."

They stepped inside. Meyer bumped the doorframe. She'd projected a corridor map on her helmet visor with a sidebar giving specs of the storeroom and its contents. She was used to looking through a thirty-percent mask, but she moved awkwardly because normally Heavy Weapons set up in open terrain. Working in a ship was a new experience.

The volume was empty except for the omnipresent tie-down anchors. The strip lighting in the moldings flickered; somebody in the construction crew shouted angrily in the corridor. Seligman chalked his initials, WAS, on the door. He didn't have a helmet database to distinguish between identical panels.

"Ah, hell," Seligman said miserably as he looked at the barren gray cell. "I told my brother-in-law, you know? He's in district government. I figure, he can do something. And you know what he says?"

"Look, I got to get back," Meyer said. She'd done her job.

An insulation sprayer whined in the corridor. Whitish fog entered the room. Seligman sneezed and closed the door.

" `Too bad,' he tells me," Seligman said. " `Too bad!' That's all he can say about his brother-in-law being shipped God knows where to be eaten like as not!"

"Nobody's going to eat you—" Meyer said.

The lights went out.

The room was pitch dark. The walls crushed down on Meyer. She was alone and there was only blackness squeezing—

"—you all right?" Seligman cried. He held her arms as she sagged.

Meyer straightened. The lights were on again. She looked at herself through Seligman's horrified eyes. She jerked the door open.

"I'm fine," she said in a whisper. "I think . . . There must have been a short circuit, you know? I got a shock."

She strode down the corridor, bumping her right shoulder on the bulkhead at every other step. A workman called to her.

"Fuck off," she said without turning her head.

Alone. 

The doors of Lifts Four and Six opened. Faces staring from the packed cages matched those projected on Caius Blohm's visor.

"Come on," he ordered, grabbing the nearer door with his hand to keep it from closing automatically. Nobody in the cages moved. A baby was wailing.

"Come on, Four East, this is your deck!"

The other door started to close. An older woman reached an arm past the people in front of her and blocked it. "This is where our quarters will be," she called in a clear voice. "Quickly, now. Let's clear the lift for the others."

Blohm's helmet AI identified the woman as Seraphina Suares. She looked alert if not cheerful. Most of the other civilians had the appearance of the human prisoners Blohm saw in the camp C41 had liberated a year and a half before.

People moved out of the cages. One of the men held the door so that Blohm could step away. "Where do we go?" asked a woman holding an infant. A man with a toddler in either hand stood beside her in the rotunda, looking gray.

Blohm shrugged. "There's rooms," he said. "They bunk eight."

He didn't know what to say. He didn't have any connection with these people. They were a different species with their worried faces and their children. God, how many of them had children!

Another lift opened. "Here's our deck, folks," Sergeant Gabrilovitch called from the cage. "Everybody out for Deck Nine, that's home till we get to Bezant."

This duty didn't bother Gabe. "Hey, I ran a restaurant on Verugia before I enlisted," he'd said when Blohm complained. "What's so hard about showing people to their stalls?"

"All right," Suares said, "we'll group ourselves to minimize difficulty on the voyage. Will all the families with children under ten please step this way."

The words were a question, but the tone wasn't. People began sorting themselves obediently. The lifts emptied and closed.

Gabrilovitch stepped close to Blohm. "Guess she's got things under control," the sergeant murmured. "Her husband's a building councillor, but it looks to me like it's her who calls the shots."

Blohm didn't speak. Gabe frowned, waited a moment more, and said, "Hey Blohm! You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," the striker said. He was watching the crowd of frightened civilians. The children clutched toys and extra clothing, looking around in wonder as their parents were directed to rooms.

So many children.

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Framed

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Earth: The Next Step on the Road

As soon as C41's command group got out at what was supposed to be a major starport on Earth, the aircar lifted again with a spray of gritty soil. The pilot hadn't said a word to the three strikers during the flight from Oakland District to Emigration Port 10 on the Balcones Escarpment. Farrell wondered if the fellow had dropped them at the wrong place.

The hull of automated transport 10-1442 was complete. From inside, the whining of power wrenches, the angrier howl of saws, and extrusion equipment that sounded like lions vomiting indicated that construction continued. Sixteen similar vessels were spaced a quarter mile apart at decreasing levels of completion. The monorail that joined the sites in a racetrack pattern brought materials graduated by the stage of construction.

An empty eighteenth site waited immediately west of where Farrell stood with his patched-together command group. The prickly nut grass crawling across the ground there was yellowed. The roots had been cooked by eddy currents between the buried magnetic mass and the starship launched a few days before.

"I don't remember the last time I was in a civilian port," said Lieutenant Marina Kuznetsov. She'd been CO of First Platoon. By virtue of being the only other officer who survived Active Cloak, she was now Farrell's XO. "This isn't much like I expected, though."

Sgt5 Daye, C41's First Sergeant, said, "Active Cloak was a civilian port. Part civilian, anyhow."

"It wasn't a lot noisier when we were there either," Kuznetsov agreed.

Pallets just unloaded from a ten-car train were being gobbled by construction crews. The port's only permanent buildings were five-story rammed-earth barracks, one per site. Every room had a balcony, and the walls' basic dirty-yellow hue was overpainted in garish patterns. Farrell found the result attractive if not in any sense of the word beautiful.

Even when the facilities are the same, civilians live better than soldiers. Well, they've got something to live for.

Farrell would have tried to find a reporting office in the nearest barracks except for the high fence which surrounded the building. There was an eyeprint lock on the gate, and the sign said SITE PERSONNEL ONLY.

It was hot and dry. Mesquite and prickly pear cactus ten feet high grew between the sites. The strikers didn't have helmets or other equipment, just battledress uniforms so new they had a chemical odor. Farrell felt naked and angry and very, very tired.

"Come on," he said. "Let's see if there's anybody in charge in the ship. If there's no billets for our people . . ."

He didn't finish the sentence. There was no finish. The rest of his strikers were scheduled to arrive in forty-seven minutes. If nobody'd arranged for C41's housing and rations, if they'd been sent to the wrong place, if they had to spend the night in a fucking scrub desert with no gear at all . . .

What else was new?

10-1442 was constructed with the extreme simplicity of an object which would be used once and then scrapped. The entrance hold was the entire bottom deck. For the moment it was bare of everything except grime and cryptic symbols chalked on the plates around the support pillars. Inside a workman in blue coveralls was fitting a fresh bottle of insulating foam to his spray head.

"Hey, buddy," Farrell said. "We're looking for the project manager, Jafar al-Ibrahimi. Got any notion where he'd be?"

"Nope," said the workman. He pulled down a clear mask to cover his face and began spraying the bulkhead. The foam went on a dull white but darkened to gray in seconds. The smell made Farrell sneeze; his eyes watered.

Daye switched off the sprayer.

Kuznetsov lifted the man's mask away and tossed it behind her. "Do better," she said. Her voice had sounded like a crow's ever since she took a bullet through the throat.

"Hey, I got a deadline!" the workman said.

"So do we," said Farrell. "Forty-three minutes. Where do we find the project manager?"

"The upper decks got finished first," the workman said. "I'd guess he was up in the nose, somewhere around there. But look, I don't know. Can I do my job now?"

"Maybe in a bit," said Daye. "How do we get to the nose?"

The workman grimaced and pointed toward the pillar along the axis of the ship. "The lifts are that way," he said. "Three and Four work, the others I don't know about. They didn't this morning."

"Thank you, Citizen," Farrell said. "Marina, would you wait by the hatch? I don't know how long this'll take, and I don't want our people to arrive and not have anybody meet them."

"Yeah," rasped the lieutenant. "They might get the idea that nobody gives a shit about strikers." She walked back outside, whistling a snatch of Tchaikovsky.

There were eight lift shafts in a central rotunda, but hoses and power cables snaked into five of them. The door of the sixth was open into an empty cage. Busy workmen in blue, puce, or orange ignored not only the strikers but anybody wearing a uniform of a different color. They shouted to their fellows or into epaulet communicators.

Lift Four arrived as Farrell and Daye entered the rotunda. Three workmen, one of them carrying a powered jack as long as her arm, pushed aboard with the strikers. The cage would easily have held twenty.

There wasn't a call button inside, nor had Farrell noticed one in the rotunda. The cage paused twenty seconds at each deck with the door open, then rose again without command. A workman hopped off at the next stop. Three more got on two decks above.

Farrell frowned. He hadn't realized the degree to which the transport was automated. He'd thought the term applied only to the navigation system. It looked like the passengers would be treated as canned goods in all fashions.

Well, at least the strikers were used to that.

"Sir," Daye said, "what the fuck are we doing here?"

"All I know is that C41 is the security element for a new colony," Farrell said. "The planet's BZ 459, and I haven't gotten to a database that has anything to add to the bare listing."

Daye frowned. "External security, sir?" he asked. "Or police for the folks themselves?"

"I don't know," Farrell said. He stared at the door, wishing there were answers written there instead of the stencilled notice MOUNT THIS DIRECTION with an arrow up.

"We're not cops, sir," Daye said. "Shit-fire, they wouldn't be that dumb, would they?"

"I don't know," Farrell repeated. Though the real answer was: that dumb, no; that callous, maybe.

"Shit-fire," Daye repeated softly.

For the first half dozen times the door opened, racket from the deck beyond made the cage vibrate. The last workman got out on Deck 10; above that the pauses were quiet. Only occasionally did Farrell glimpse somebody in the corridor. It occurred to Farrell that he didn't know how many levels the ship had.

When the lift reached Deck 25, Farrell heard angry voices. He nodded to Daye and the pair of them stepped out of the cage just before the door closed. Insulation covered the floor as well as bulkheads and ceiling. It was as soft as a deep-pile carpet. Foot traffic had already dented it.

A young woman stood at the door of an austerely furnished office/conference room. She nodded as they approached and called, "Major Farrell and Sergeant Daye have arrived, sir."

Farrell had no idea who she was.

A man in his sixties sat behind an electronic desk which was welded to the floor. Like the woman he wore loose, many-pocketed clothing that would have been battledress if there'd been any badge or patch on it.

The cloth was brown rather than chameleon-dyed, but it was still the same synthetic that went into the strikers' uniforms. The fabric was tough and breathed even better than natural fibers, but it was harsh enough to take your skin off when pressed against you by armor and equipment. Maybe these civilians wore underwear.

The three other civilians—a man of thirty, a woman in her fifties, and another man who was probably as old as the fellow at the desk—turned when the strikers entered. All of them wore ordinary business clothes of excellent quality, though the older man's socks were mismatched.

The younger man had been shouting in a resonant tenor voice. The three were standing, though the bulkheads had fold-down seats. Two short benches could also have been pulled up from the floor to face the desk.

"Gentlemen," the young woman said, "this is Project Manager Jafar al-Ibrahimi. I'm his assistant, Tamara Lundie—"

Farrell saw a thought flick behind Lundie's eyes, though she didn't blink physically.

"I'm a Manager 3, that's the equivalent of a senior lieutenant," Lundie continued. "Manager al-Ibrahimi is the equivalent of a full colonel and is in sole charge of the project."

Farrell felt his mouth smile. Did she think strikers were so rank-conscious that they needed to have civilian pecking orders explained to them? Oh, God, his poor strikers, being dropped into another ratfuck . . .

"Major," al-Ibrahimi said, "is the remainder of your unit on schedule?"

The project manager was a slight man who appeared brittle, an appearance Farrell decided was false as soon as he heard the man speak. Al-Ibrahimi wasn't going to break, and Farrell didn't think he'd be easy to grind down either. What surprised Farrell was the degree to which something had already ground al-Ibrahimi down.

There was plenty of steel left, though.

"Yes sir," Farrell said. If there'd been a problem, somebody would have reported through the finger-sized communicator he carried in his pocket in lieu of the helmet he was used to. This wasn't a combat operation where no news might mean—usually meant—that everybody in the silent unit had been killed instantly.

"Good," said al-Ibrahimi. "Major, Ms. Susannah Reitz is president of the building council and therefore de facto leader of the colony. Dr. Joao Suares—"

He nodded toward the older man. Suares looked surprised.

"—and Mr. Matthew Lock are her co-councillors. Madame, gentlemen, Major Farrell is head of our security element, and Sergeant Daye is his ranking enlisted man. We'll be working closely together after landfall."

"Mr. al-Ibrahimi," Lock said, "I demand that you halt this process until my request for an injunction can be heard. The very idea of assigning the residents of an urban apartment building as the initial colony on a totally unsettled planet is insane!"

Farrell didn't let his face show surprise, but that was at least one thing he and the councillor could agree on.

Lock was in good shape. He must keep fit with sports and exercise equipment. It was a civilian sort of "good condition" though, and it looked soft to eyes like Farrell's. He was used to strikers whose flesh had been pared off by discomfort, stress, and the lack of appetite caused by exhaustion.

Farrell found it odd to look at civilians close up. Real civilians, not Unity bureaucrats providing support to the armed forces. Farrell hadn't been on leave in a real rear area during the past five years, and civilians sure as hell didn't show up in the places he did go.

"Tamara," al-Ibrahimi said, "brief Major Farrell on his unit's billets, supplies, and duties during the voyage. The remainder of C41 can be expected in thirty-nine minutes."

The project manager hadn't checked either a clock or a schedule, so far as Farrell could see.

Lundie turned on her heel. She was pretty enough but not Farrell's type. Farrell's type was a woman who didn't look at him as if he were a pallet of rations—and an equally unlikely love object.

"As for you, Councillor Lock," al-Ibrahimi continued as the strikers followed Lundie out of the office, "I will carry out Unity policy as it devolves on me, and you will do the same. Failure to comply with a Colonization Order means loss of citizenship—"

"I know that!" Lock said. "But—"

"—and a life sentence to a labor camp," the manager continued. Lundie had led the strikers back to the rotunda, but her chief's crisp voice was still perfectly clear. "Now, during the voyage each two decks of colonists will be separated by a deck of supplies and . . ."

A lift cage arrived. The strikers stepped aboard in unison with Lundie. Daye looked as worried as Farrell had ever seen him.

The only thing that kept Daye going was the hope that his CO had the situation in hand. Farrell knew that was a vain hope if ever there'd been one.

Lundie led them off on the next deck down. "Your quarters are here on Twenty-four," she said, the first words she'd spoken directly to the strikers since introducing them. "Your rations and equipment will be stored with you. The remaining volume on this deck will store colony supplies that won't be needed until after landing on Bezant 459."

She led Farrell and Daye down a corridor. The doors to either side were ajar. The rooms had eight pull-down bunks, a shower stall, a double washstand, and a latrine. The space and amenities were better than those of a troopship and enormously better than an assault vessel's, but Farrell didn't imagine the civilian colonists were going to be happy.

"Ma'am," said Sergeant Daye. "Ah, can I ask a question?"

"Yes, of course," Lundie said. "And please refer to me as you would refer to one of your own officers."

"Yes ma'am," Daye said. Farrell wondered if he was having as much trouble as Farrell himself was imagining the young woman in C41. "What that fellow said about a whole building being turned into a colony—is that true?"

"Yes," said Lundie. "Horizon Towers in the Central Chicago District. Every resident of Earth is subject to Colonization Orders, but this particular technique has never been used before."

"Did some computer blow a fuse?" Farrell asked. "Or did some dickheaded human really think this was a good idea?"

"I can't answer that," Lundie said. When she spoke on most subjects, her voice had the false rhythms of an AI program forming words. This was so flat that perversely it indicated real feeling.

"Rations and other consumables for your company have already been loaded into these two compartments," Lundie continued. "And there's a large compartment here—"

"C41 bunks aboard while the ship's being finished, you mean?" Daye interjected.

Lundie looked at him. "The ship will be finished very shortly," she said. "Liftoff is in six hours, twelve minutes."

She opened the door as she'd started to do. There was nothing to be seen but an empty room. Throughout the vessel, ringbolts on all flat surfaces provided anchors for cargo nets and tie-downs.

"—for your personal stores and equipment. There's a separate compartment for use as an armory."

"We keep our hardware with us in C41," Farrell said flatly. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Lundie's face was still. "That isn't necessary on the voyage," she said carefully.

"It's necessary if I'm going to sleep," Daye said. "I'm itchy right now, ma'am."

"C41's pretty stressed," Farrell said. He didn't know how to explain to a civilian. "I know there's a risk, but I think the risk is worse if I, if we . . ."

Daye grimaced. "Look, ma'am, if you can get us reassigned to something we know how to do, that'd be great. We're strikers, we're not, we're . . ."

"Arrangements for security personnel are yours to determine, major," Lundie said. "Assignments to the Bezant 459 project are of course from higher levels of the government."

She cleared her throat as a period, then continued, "The colonists will be arriving in three hours. Since your helmets have full communications and mapping capacity, we'll use your personnel as guides for corridor assignments. Initially only the upper seventeen decks will be complete, so . . ."

Farrell continued to listen to the young woman. From long experience he'd be able to reel off her statements word perfect when he assigned individual missions to his people.

But Farrell's heart was in a dark place of its own, and his soul was as dead as the strikers C41 had left scattered across a galaxy at war.

The landscape of spiky trees and spiky grass, scattered sparsely over gritty dirt, could easily have been a frontier planet. Abbado hadn't known there were parts of Earth that looked like this.

It was probably news to the colonists being herded off the train by uniformed police, too. The largest expanse of vegetation most of the civilians would have seen before was their apartment building's roof garden.

The poor bastards stared at their surroundings with shell-shocked expressions. "They better get used to it," Abbado said aloud. "I don't know about Bezant, but I've seen a lot of planets that make this look like an R&R base."

The police carried shock batons. They weren't hitting people with them that Abbado saw, but they chivied the civilians with their free hands while the batons waved.

"This ain't right," Glasebrook muttered. "I don't like us being mixed up with it."

"Cheer up, Flea," Abbado said. "This assignment got us off Stalleybrass fast. I wasn't much looking forward to answering questions about a little problem there at a cadre bar."

Abbado had been more relieved than he would admit to his strikers. The morning after they'd shot up the REMFs he'd been asking himself how the hell he'd let himself do that; but at the time, at the time . . .

The police wore riot helmets and breastplates, not a patch on Strike Force equipment for weight but not particularly comfortable in this climate either. That was probably part of the reason they were treating the civilians like animals.

Already some strikers were shepherding ragged columns of civilians toward the starship. "Sarge, we've found ours," Horgen called over the squad push. "We'll see you at the billet. Out." 

"The ones we're looking for are going to be the batch that caught the wrong train," Abbado grumbled to Glasebrook. Matushek, the third member of the group, was scanning civilians to match the holographic portraits downloaded into his helmet database.

For the loading, Top Daye had broken 3-3 into fire teams under Horgen and Abbado to get colonists to decks 18 and 19 respectively. Methie and Foley were detached to help the two survivors of Heavy Weapons guide the building support staff.

The apartment block from which the colonists came had eight stories. For the voyage the residents were split into east and west corridors and each group was supposed to be on a single car of the train. If there'd been a little coordination back when the train was loaded the strikers would know exactly which carload went to which deck, but of course that hadn't happened.

"Don't see why civilians can't count the decks up to nineteen themselves," Glasebrook muttered.

"Buck up, Flea," said Abbado. "Nobody's shooting at us, right?"

The monorail shivered for its full length as current to the magnets raised the hangers a hair's breadth from the elevated track. The train accelerated slowly, but it was up to ninety miles an hour by the time the last car whipped past Abbado and his strikers. Suction dragged at them, but the only sound the train made was a hiss and the faint click of couplers.

"Sarge, got them!" Matushek reported. He was standing twenty feet from the others, so he used helmet commo to speak over the nervous chatter of a thousand colonists and their guides. "They were on the other side of the track! Over." 

"Fucking typical," Abbado said as he strode toward the clump of fifty-odd stunned-looking civilians. In a louder voice he shouted, "Six West! Form on me!"

The track serving Emigration Port 10 had loading platforms only on one side. Naturally, one of the cars had been misaligned so that its doors were on the wrong side; and naturally, the folks Abbado was looking for were on that car.

The police had noticed the misplaced civilians also. Half a dozen of the nearest strode under the support rail ahead of the strikers. A tall, badly overweight cop bellowed, "Hey you assholes! What're you doing over there? Move it!"

He grabbed the nearest civilian by the arm and jerked her in the direction of the starship. She was carrying bulging net bags, far too much of a load for a woman in her sixties. One of them spilled packages onto the ground.

"That's okay, buddy, we'll take care of this!" Abbado said. His voice was thinner than normal because he was going to be reasonable, he wasn't going to do what he wanted to. "Folks, we're your—"

The cop turned and said, "When I want your opinion, dickhead, I'll—"

Abbado kicked him in the balls. Shit, he'd known he was going to do that all the time.

A cop holding a shock rod faced Glasebrook, who took the rod from him and broke it over his knee. The blue sparks snarling against Flea's left palm stopped when the shaft fractured.

"Fellas, we can let this stop right here," Abbado said. The big cop had settled to his knees. His riot helmet had skewed and now hid his eyes, though the faceshield was up. "Let's do that, right?"

"Yeah," said Matushek. "Let's."

He bobbled a grenade in his open right hand. For an instant Abbado was afraid somebody might not believe the grenade was real or that Matushek really would throw it. A grenade wasn't much of a weapon for close enough to spit, not if you cared about surviving yourself.

"Ace, put that fucking thing away," Abbado said as he stepped between his striker and the police. Christ on a crutch! He'd thought this was a cush assignment and he'd be able to keep out of trouble.

Glasebrook helped up the man Abbado had kicked, holding the fellow by collar from behind. "All under control, right?" Abbado said.

A cop looked over her shoulder. Maybe she was expecting to see help coming. What she saw was the rest of C41. There were about as many cops in the escort detail as strikers, but the police didn't have lethal weapons and C41 didn't have anything else. The company's baggage hadn't been delivered yet, but the strikers had been nervous about the screwy situation. Most everybody'd brought a security blanket.

Abbado keyed the unit channel. "C41, doesn't anybody have a job to do?" he snarled. "Come on, there's not a problem! Out!" 

"S'okay, we're going," a policeman said. The group of them moved down the trackway.

"Have a nice trip," Ace Matushek called. He dropped the grenade back into a side pocket.

"Six West!" Abbado called to the civilians staring at him. "We're going to take you folks to Deck 19, but we'll wait a bit to let some of the folks ahead of us clear the lifts, okay? Let's just relax for a bit."

A woman started to cry. A pretty one, too. Jeez, he'd really stepped on his dick this time!

"Can I help you pick those up, ma'am?" he offered brightly. And it wasn't till he knelt to help the old lady with her packages that Abbado realized he was holding his powerknife. The blade trembled like caged lightning in the bright sun.

"Look," Seligman said to Esther Meyer as they waited for a construction crew to lay decking over the maze of conduits in the corridor floor, "the cits who live in the building, if they want to go play colonist, that's fine. But it's not right they take us staff along! I'm a services supervisor, I'm not a fucking farmer."

Seligman was an overweight, middle-aged man with a red face and wavy hair implants that didn't match the fringe remaining around the edges of his scalp. He acted angry because he was scared and ashamed of it.

He ought to be ashamed. Scared of going off-planet!

"You think this was their idea?" Meyer asked. "I heard they got drafted into this, same as you."

Meyer hadn't been drafted. Everybody in the Strike Force was a volunteer. Sometimes she tried to think back to when she took that step forward. Stupid fucking thing to do, but she couldn't imagine an existence in which it hadn't happened. Funny.

"Don't you believe that crap!" Seligman said. "Horizon Towers isn't full of peons, these are cits! They don't get orders they don't want. Or if they do, they call somebody so high in the Unity you and I couldn't breathe there, and the order gets cancelled. If they're going off-planet, it's because that's what they decided. And they're dragging me along, just like I was their pet dog."

The service personnel were supposed to operate the colony's heavy equipment and provide the sort of support that they'd given the building residents, the citizens, on Earth. The Population Directorate was like a hog processing plant: it used every part of the pig except the oink.

"Life's tough all over," Meyer said. Two workmen held plating in place as a third drove a welder down the seams. As soon as the deck was complete, she could deliver Seligman to the storeroom where he'd wait the arrival of the on-voyage consumables for which he'd be responsible.

The welding trolley reached the end and turned around. With the other two workmen jogging behind, it whined toward Meyer and Seligman. One was talking into a lapel microphone.

"Hey, is this safe to walk over?" Seligman asked as the crew came past. They ignored him.

"They're walking on it, aren't they?" Meyer said as she started down the corridor. She'd be glad to see the back of Seligman. Civilians had to be told every fucking thing. It gave her the creeps, being around people who didn't know how to react.

"All right, this is where you go," Meyer said, opening the door. "It'll be keyed to your palm-print after the goods arrive."

They stepped inside. Meyer bumped the doorframe. She'd projected a corridor map on her helmet visor with a sidebar giving specs of the storeroom and its contents. She was used to looking through a thirty-percent mask, but she moved awkwardly because normally Heavy Weapons set up in open terrain. Working in a ship was a new experience.

The volume was empty except for the omnipresent tie-down anchors. The strip lighting in the moldings flickered; somebody in the construction crew shouted angrily in the corridor. Seligman chalked his initials, WAS, on the door. He didn't have a helmet database to distinguish between identical panels.

"Ah, hell," Seligman said miserably as he looked at the barren gray cell. "I told my brother-in-law, you know? He's in district government. I figure, he can do something. And you know what he says?"

"Look, I got to get back," Meyer said. She'd done her job.

An insulation sprayer whined in the corridor. Whitish fog entered the room. Seligman sneezed and closed the door.

" `Too bad,' he tells me," Seligman said. " `Too bad!' That's all he can say about his brother-in-law being shipped God knows where to be eaten like as not!"

"Nobody's going to eat you—" Meyer said.

The lights went out.

The room was pitch dark. The walls crushed down on Meyer. She was alone and there was only blackness squeezing—

"—you all right?" Seligman cried. He held her arms as she sagged.

Meyer straightened. The lights were on again. She looked at herself through Seligman's horrified eyes. She jerked the door open.

"I'm fine," she said in a whisper. "I think . . . There must have been a short circuit, you know? I got a shock."

She strode down the corridor, bumping her right shoulder on the bulkhead at every other step. A workman called to her.

"Fuck off," she said without turning her head.

Alone. 

The doors of Lifts Four and Six opened. Faces staring from the packed cages matched those projected on Caius Blohm's visor.

"Come on," he ordered, grabbing the nearer door with his hand to keep it from closing automatically. Nobody in the cages moved. A baby was wailing.

"Come on, Four East, this is your deck!"

The other door started to close. An older woman reached an arm past the people in front of her and blocked it. "This is where our quarters will be," she called in a clear voice. "Quickly, now. Let's clear the lift for the others."

Blohm's helmet AI identified the woman as Seraphina Suares. She looked alert if not cheerful. Most of the other civilians had the appearance of the human prisoners Blohm saw in the camp C41 had liberated a year and a half before.

People moved out of the cages. One of the men held the door so that Blohm could step away. "Where do we go?" asked a woman holding an infant. A man with a toddler in either hand stood beside her in the rotunda, looking gray.

Blohm shrugged. "There's rooms," he said. "They bunk eight."

He didn't know what to say. He didn't have any connection with these people. They were a different species with their worried faces and their children. God, how many of them had children!

Another lift opened. "Here's our deck, folks," Sergeant Gabrilovitch called from the cage. "Everybody out for Deck Nine, that's home till we get to Bezant."

This duty didn't bother Gabe. "Hey, I ran a restaurant on Verugia before I enlisted," he'd said when Blohm complained. "What's so hard about showing people to their stalls?"

"All right," Suares said, "we'll group ourselves to minimize difficulty on the voyage. Will all the families with children under ten please step this way."

The words were a question, but the tone wasn't. People began sorting themselves obediently. The lifts emptied and closed.

Gabrilovitch stepped close to Blohm. "Guess she's got things under control," the sergeant murmured. "Her husband's a building councillor, but it looks to me like it's her who calls the shots."

Blohm didn't speak. Gabe frowned, waited a moment more, and said, "Hey Blohm! You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," the striker said. He was watching the crowd of frightened civilians. The children clutched toys and extra clothing, looking around in wonder as their parents were directed to rooms.

So many children.

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