Redliners(21)

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.