Redliners(16)

Methie stumbled because the leg burned at Active Cloak hadn't fully healed on the voyage back. Glasebrook kept him from tumbling.

The driver accelerated, leaving a wake of dust stirred from the barren landscape by the truck's stub wings. He'd tried to argue 3-3 out of hiding in the back as he deadheaded to the port, but he'd given in when Abbado insisted. The driver's kid brother had been a striker in B-4 before he was killed.

"All present and accounted for, Sarge," Horgen said. Abbado waited till the pall of fine red powder had settled a little, then tugged down the kerchief he'd tied over his nose and mouth to filter some of the solids out of the local atmosphere.

Abbado didn't want them to look as though they'd come to stick the place up. They just wanted a beer or two—dozen. He and his six strikers sauntered in line abreast across the "street," a hundred-foot channel between buildings. There wasn't a lot of traffic, but twice they had to wait for a vehicle to pass in the other direction.

The club had been converted from a warehouse like those to either side of it. The unit insignia painted over the door was too dusty to be legible. A Sergeant 4th Class watched through a clear window as 3-3 approached. He looked pissy.

Abbado didn't blame the locals for being in a bad mood. Glasebrook must have been thinking the same thing because he said, "You know, I think I'd eat my gun before I'd let them stick me here in the permanent garrison."

The doorman was in his late thirties, ten years older than Abbado. He wore a dove-gray rear echelon fatigue uniform that was so clean he must have changed into it after he entered the club. Nothing could exist in the open on Stalleybrass without getting a coating of dust.

"Good afternoon, Sergeant," Abbado said. He was a Sgt3 himself, and the one-step difference in rank made no matter off-duty. "What's the beer like on Stalleybrass?"

He pulled at the doorhandle. The door didn't open.

"You're barbs from the fleet, right?" the garrison soldier called through the panel. "Anyway, you're out of uniform for this club. Better get your asses gone before the Shore Police show up to ask what you're doing out of your compound."

"Hey, look, Sarge," Abbado said. He licked his lips. His mouth had a dangerous adrenaline dryness. He didn't like being called a barbarian, especially not through a locked door. "We're Strike Force, yeah, but we just come here for a drink. Our base element got screwed up or something and there's no beer in our assigned compound. We're all the same army, right?"

"I don't know what army you're in, buddy," the older sergeant said. "I just know you're not wearing rank tabs, you're not wearing a uniform prescribed for military personnel on Stalleybrass, and you're not getting into this club."

His hand moved. A buzzer sounded somewhere behind him.

"What is this shit?" Horgen demanded. She tweaked the mandarin collar of her field-service fatigues. "These are the only fucking uniforms we got!"

The fabric blurred like a chameleon's skin, suggesting the color and patterning of its surroundings. For the moment, that meant it was dull, dusty red.

"Then you're in the wrong place, barb, just like I told you before," the doorman said. "Beat it!"

Abbado nodded. He was starting to tremble. "Let's go in, Flea," he said quietly.

Glasebrook put his massive right boot on the doorjamb and gripped the handle with both hands. He pulled. The mortise split and the latchplate pulled completely out of the panel.

"Let's not have a problem, Sarge," Abbado said as he strode past the doorman. "We're just after a—"

Music, a ballad wailed a cappella by a trio of androgynes, continued on a holographic stage against the wall opposite the bar. The garrison soldiers inside had formed a rank. They shifted forward. None of the locals was Glasebrook's size, but there were more than a hundred of them in the cavernous hall.

"Three-three!" Abbado shouted as he kicked an oncoming garritrooper in the nuts.

He knew it was all over before it started. The only reason it took nearly two minutes before Glasebrook flew out into the dust with the rest of them was that the locals were packed too tightly together to use their numbers to full advantage.

The Sgt4 stood in the doorway, panting and livid. The doorpanel had been demolished at some point in the proceedings. The front of the doorman's neat tunic was ripped down to his waistband.

"Go back to the reservation, barbs!" he shouted.

Abbado picked himself up. "Everybody all right?" he murmured. He could feel his cheek swelling. A chair had hit him in the face.

"I'm better than somebody's going to be right soon," Flea Glasebrook said. He started forward again. Abbado caught his arm.