The limousine halted in its assigned space—less than ten meters from the VIP entrance to the passenger terminal. Ran pressed the door release. The panel shrank from an impervious sheet to a centimeter-thick block resting on the lower coaming.
He got out. He thought Hilda had started to say something, but when he looked back she was still seated, and her eyes were straight ahead.
Ran stretched. Passengers and the uniformed but unarmed doorman glanced at him—a young man of middle height, in the white uniform of a Staff Side officer of Trident Starlines. Men on Bifrost were rangy rather than solid, but no one who had ever seen a Bifrost Cold Crew riot doubted the strength—or the ruthlessness—of those who came from that bitter world on the fringe of civilization.
The atmosphere of the parking area was slightly warmer than that set by the limousine's climate control. It contained vague tinges of lubricant and ozone from the vehicular traffic. At the distant rear of the lot, a monorail hissed to a halt and began transferring the normal mass of passengers and visitors to the slideways that would take them within the building.
Ran looked up through the cleardome of Port Northern. For a moment, all he could see was steam roiling in patterns of compression and rarefaction from the thrust that balanced the starliner's huge mass.
The view cleared abruptly. The motors of the tugs and starship had blasted away all the condensate on the landing field.
The Empress of Earth hung poised a few meters from touching the ground: 800 meters long, 150 meters across the diameter of her cylindrical hull; built to the precision of an astronomical dock despite her enormous mass.
The highest expression of technology within the known universe . . . and Ran Colville was an officer aboard her.
He straightened his cap. He considered throwing it in the air, but he'd gotten this far by not putting a foot wrong professionally. He wasn't going to jeopardize his chances of getting much farther.
Shouting with laughter hidden by the thunder of the starliner landing, Ran Colville marched toward the entrance and his future. He didn't look back at the limousine, which still sat with the right-hand door open.
* * *
Franz Streseman's monorail compartment was a party of Grantholm citizens: two couples and six single men. All of them were middle-aged, all of them were buzzed if not drunk; and they were very loud. Franz sat stiffly, staring toward his hands crossed in his lap and thinking about the engineering degree he was leaving behind.
Perhaps forever; but "forever" was a concept beyond the experience of an eighteen-year-old, while the utter disruption of his life was a present reality.
"Damn, damn, damn the Mindanesians," sang the party from Grantholm, all the men and three of the women joining in on the choruses.
Franz knew the lyrics, from a camp song of the Mindanao campaign twenty years before. Mindanao had been settled from Earth, mostly by Filipinos and other East Asians, but with funding and control from Grantholm. The colony fell behind on its repayment schedule, because a significant proportion of its wireweed production was being diverted to interloping traders at free-market prices rather than going to Grantholm on fixed-rate contracts.
Grantholm's determination to have its rights sparked a full-scale rebellion.
"Cross-eyed, dirty-faced ladrones," the party sang.
"Underneath the triple suns, civilize them with our guns,
"And return us to our own beloved homes!"
The men in the Grantholm party were of an age to have served on Mindanao, but it was unlikely that all of them had done so. Grantholm had developed a network of dependant worlds through a combination of entrepreneurial drive and governmental action. Most of the armed forces which put down the Mindanese Rebellion—and they did put it down, though wireweed production was only now beginning to equal what it had been before the war—came from those subject planets.
Five years after the Mindanese Rebellion drowned in blood, Mindanese battalions were serving Grantholm on Cartegena during the "emergency" there.
"Social customs there are few," boomed the Grantholm men.
"All the ladies smoke and chew . . ."
The monorail swayed gently as its gyroscopic stabilizer matched the polar winds without difficulty. Ultra-high-frequency sound predicted the force and direction of gusts, feeding data to the stabilizer, so that the monorail actively met disturbances instead of reacting to them. Magnetic bearings supported the cars which slipped along above the rail without direct contact, and the podded drive motors vibrated only at the molecular level.
The cars' physical environment was as smooth as human endeavors could be in the real world. The social environment within Franz Streseman's compartment, however—
"And the men do things the padres say are wrong . . ."