Alongside Night(33)
“How do you do,” said Elliot. “Is that not your Christian name, or not your surname?”
“Neither. Or both.”
Elliot wiped his mouth. “Lor, have you done any exploring around this place?”
“Nothing above the fourth floor, the health spa—Joe.”
“Same here. How about us seeing what we can stick our noses into before somebody tells us to stop?”
As soon as Elliot had finished breakfast, he dropped his book back at the library, and the two strolled to the elevator, encountering buttons for half a dozen upper floors they had not seen. “Your badge or mine?” Elliot asked.
“Try yours first. If it doesn’t work, try mine.”
Elliot inserted his photo badge into the control panel, pushing five. The elevator doors closed, then, without its having moved, they immediately opened again. He repeated the procedure with the sixth through tenth floors, getting the same result. He was about to try the entire sequence again with Lorimer’s badge, when the elevator doors closed of their own 112
Alongside Night
accord, the elevator descending.
“I think somebody is about to tell us to stop,” he said. Lorimer nodded.
A few moments later the doors opened to reveal a muscular security guard, Cadre uniformed, pointing a Taser at them. Elliot smiled weakly. “Uh—hello, there,” he said. Lorimer smiled, too.
The guard did not smile. “Just what are you two up to?” he asked sternly, motioning them out of the elevator.
“Just exploring,” said Elliot.
Lorimer started fluttering her lashes, doing an adequate impression of Scarlett O’Hara. “Honestly,” she said. Her accent had moved south. The guard was not seduced; he must have been made of stone. “I think I just caught a couple of statist spies.”
“Do we look like spies?” Lorimer asked. Her accent moved still farther south—any farther and she would have been speaking Spanish. The guard gave her a look suggesting that she, in any event, would pass the physical.
“What makes you think we’re spies?” Elliot asked.
“Why were you trying to get up to the maximum security floors? If you wanted to explore, why didn’t you look through the trading floor?”
“Maximum security floors?” said Elliot. “Trading floor?”
The guard looked them over, and saw they were genuinely confused. He motioned with the Taser. “Come on.”
He led Elliot and Lorimer to the security alcove, and told the commandant—a different one from the previous night,
“Two for Aurora Proper.”
The commandant then asked them, “Anything you want from the lockers?”
“I have a pistol,” said Elliot. “Do you think I need it?”
“I couldn’t say,” he replied. “Cadre are not allowed on the Alongside Night
113
trading floor.”
“Why not?” Lorimer asked.
“Privacy,” the commandant explained. “The allied businesses in Aurora have delegated to the Cadre the right to monitor incoming and outgoing goods and communications, to ensure that the location is kept secret. To make sure that the Cadre can’t try to use this authority against them, they forbid us to enter into their domain and maintain their own security force to keep us out. Their guards are armed; except during emergencies we are not allowed to be.”
“Well,” said Elliot, “if I’m allowed to, I guess I will take my revolver.”
“Right. Surrender your badges, please.”
Taking their badges and feeding them into a collection slot, the commandant then got Elliot his revolver. After Elliot had put on his holster, the guard led the couple down the same corridor through which they had entered the Cadre complex initially, retracing the 45-degree bend around which was the steel door defended by still another guard. The door was opened for them, and they were instructed to walk to the Terminal corridor’s end and wait at the large portal opposite the Terminal. They did—Elliot meanwhile noting the Terminal door locked—and a few minutes later the portal slid open. They were facing a freight elevator.
After they had got on, the door automatically slid shut, the elevator creeping down. When the door opened again, they were looking down the main promenade of what looked to be a small village.
Elliot and Lorimer faced a carpeted mall—daylight simulated by sunlight fluorescent panels in a low acoustic ceiling—
twenty-feet wide and stretching ahead over twice the length of a football field. On each side of the promenade was an array of storefronts and offices the likes of which Elliot had never seen, and shopping in the mall were over a hundred persons 114
Alongside Night