Prisoners of Tomorrow (71 page)

Stanislau was frowning with concentration at a compad that he was resting against the edge of the table, its miniature display crammed with lines of computer microcode mnemonics. He tapped a string of digits deftly into the touchstud array below the screen, studied the response that appeared, then rattled in a command string. A number appeared low down in a corner. Stanislau looked up triumphantly at Sirocco. “3.141592653,” he announced. “It’s
pi
to ten places.” Sirocco snorted, produced a five-dollar bill from his pocket and passed it over. The bet had been that Stanislau could crash the databank security system and retrieve an item that Sirocco had stored half an hour previously in the public sector under a personal access key.

“How about that?” Hanlon shouted delightedly. “The guy did it!”

“Don’t forget—a round of beers too,” Colman reminded Sirocco. The girls whooped their approval.

“Where did you learn that, Stan?” Paula, one of the civilian girls, asked. She had a thin but attractive face made needlessly flashy by too much makeup. Her clothes were tight and provocative.

Stanislau slipped the compad into his pocket. “You don’t wanna know about that,” he said. “It’s not very respectable.”

“Come on, Stan. Give,” Terry, Paula’s companion, insisted. Colman gave Stanislau a challenging look that left him no way out.

Stanislau took a long draught from his glass and made a what-the-hell? gesture. “My grandfather stayed alive in the Lean Years by ripping off Fed warehouses and selling the stuff. He could bomb any security routine ever dreamed up. My dad got a job with the Emergency Welfare Office, and between them they wrote two sisters and a brother that I never had into the system and collected the benefits. So life wasn’t too bad.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I guess it got to be kind of a tradition . . . sort of handed down in the family.”

“A real pro burglar!” Terry exclaimed.

“You son-of-a-gun.” Hanlon said admiringly.

“Son-of-a-something, anyway,” Anita added. They all laughed.

Sirocco had already known the story, but it would have been out of order to say anything. Stanislau’s transfer to D Company had followed an investigation of the mysterious disappearance from Brigade stores of tools and electrical spares that had subsequently appeared on sale in the Home Entertainment department of one of the shopping marts.

Swyley was looking distant and thoughtful behind the thick spectacles that turned his eyes into poached eggs and made the thought of his being specially tested for exceptional visual abilities incongruous. He was wondering how useful Stanislau’s nefarious skills might be for inserting a few plus-points into his own record in the Military’s administrative computer, but couldn’t really say anything about the idea in Sirocco’s presence. There was such a thing as being too presumptuous. He would talk to Stanislau privately, he decided.

“Where’s Tony Driscoll tonight?” Paula asked, straightening up in her chair to scan the bar. “I don’t see him around anywhere.”

“Don’t bother looking,” Colman said. “He’s got the late duty.”

“Don’t you ever give these guys a break?” Terry asked Sirocco.

“Somebody has to run the Army. It’s just his turn. He’s as qualified to do it as anyone else.”

“Well what do you know—I’m on the loose tonight,” Paula said, giving Hanlon a cozy look.

Bret Hanlon held up a hand protectively. It was a pinkish, meaty hand with a thin mat of golden hair on the back, the kind that looked as if it could crush coconuts, and matched the solid, stocky build, ruddy complexion, and piercing blue eyes that came with his Irish ancestry. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m contracted now, all nice and respectable.
That’s
the fella you should be making eyes at.” He nodded toward Colman and grinned mischievously.

“Do him good too,” Sirocco declared. “Then they might make him an engineer. But you’ll have a hard time. He’s holding out till he’s found out what the talent’s like on Chiron.”

“I didn’t know you had a thing about little girls, Steve,” Anita teased. “You don’t look the type.” Hanlon roared and slapped his thigh.

“I’ve got two sisters you can’t get in trouble with,” Stanislau offered.

“You got it wrong,”‘ Colman told them. “It’s not the little ones at all.” He widened his eyes in a parody of lewd anticipation and grinned. “Think of all those
grandmothers.”
Terry and Paula laughed.

Although Colman was going along with the mood and making a joke out of it, inside he felt a twinge of irritation. He wasn’t sure why. Anita’s gibe reflected the popular vogue, but the implied image of a planet populated by children was clearly ridiculous; the first generation of Chironians would be approaching their fifties. He didn’t like foolish words going into people’s heads and coming out again without any thought about their meaning having transpired in between. Anita was an attractive girl, and not stupid. She didn’t have to do things like that. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was being too solemn. Hadn’t he just done the same thing?

“Some grandmothers!” Terry exclaimed. “Did anybody see the news today? Some scientist or other thinks the Chironians could be building bombs. There was an interview with Kalens too. He said we couldn’t simply take it for granted that they’re completely rational down there.”

“You’re not suggesting there’ll be a fight, are you?” Paula said.

“I didn’t say that. But they’re funny people . . . cagey. They’re not exactly giving straight answers about everything.”

“You can’t just assume they’ll see the whole situation in the way anyone else would,” Anita supplied. “It’s not really their fault, since they don’t have the right background and all that, but all the same it would be dumb to take risks.”

“It makes sense, I guess,” Paula agreed absently.

“Do you figure they might start trouble, chief?” Stanislau asked, turning his head toward Sirocco.

Sirocco shrugged noncommittally. “Can’t say. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you stick close to Steve and Bret and do what they tell you, you’ll come through okay.” Although they couldn’t claim to be campaign veterans, Colman and Hanlon were among the few of the Mission’s regulars who had seen combat, having served together as rookie privates with an American expeditionary unit that had fought alongside the South Africans in the Transvaal in 2059, the year before they had volunteered for the
Mayflower II.
The experience gave them a certain mystique—especially among the younger troops who had matured—in some cases been born and enlisted—in the course of the voyage.

“I think it will be all right if Kalens gets elected,” Terry told them. “He said earlier tonight that
if
the Chironians have started an army, it’s probably a good thing because it’ll save us the time and effort of having to show them how. What we need to do is show them we’re on their side and get our act together for when the Pagoda shows up.” The EAF starship was designed differently from the
Mayflower II.
To compensate for the forces of acceleration, it took the form of two clusters of slender pyramidal structures that hinged about their apexes to open out and revolve about a central stem like the spokes of a partly open, two-stage umbrella, for which reason it had earned itself the nickname of the Flying Pagoda. Terry sipped her drink and looked around the table. “The guy’s got it figured realistically. You see, there’s no need for a fight. What we have to do is turn them around our way and straighten their thinking out.”

“But that doesn’t mean we have to take chances,” Anita pointed out.

“Oh, sure . . . I’m just saying there doesn’t have to be anything to get scared about.”

Colman was becoming irritated again. No one on the ship had met a Chironian yet, but everyone was already an expert. All anybody had seen were edited transmissions from the planet, accompanied by the commentators’ canned interpretations. Why couldn’t people realize when they were being told what to think? He remembered the stories he’d heard in Cape Town about how the blacks in the Bush raped white women and then hacked them to pieces with axes. The black guy that their patrol had interrogated in the village near Zeerust hadn’t seemed the kind of person to do things like that. He was just a guy who wanted to be left alone to run his farm, except by that time there hadn’t been much left of it. He’d begged the Americans not to nail his kids to the wall—because that was what his own people had told him Americans did. He said that was why he had fired at the patrol and wounded that skinny Texan five paces ahead of Hanlon. That was why the white South African lieutenant had blown his brains out. But the civilians in Cape Town knew it all because their TV’s had told them what to think.

Corporal Swyley wasn’t saying anything, which was significant because Swyley was usually a pretty good judge of what was what. His silence meant that he didn’t agree with what was being said. When Swyley agreed with something, he said he didn’t agree. When he really didn’t agree, he said nothing. He never said he agreed with anything. When he had decided that he felt fine after the dietitian discovered the standing order for spinach and fish, the Medical Officer hadn’t been able to accuse him of faking anything because Swyley had never agreed with anybody that he was sick; all he’d said was that he had stomach cramps. The M.O. had diagnosed that anybody with stomach cramps on his own time had to be sick. Swyley hadn’t. In fact, Swyley had disagreed, which should have been obvious because he hadn’t said anything.

“Well, I think there’s something to be scared about,” Paula said. “Suppose they turn out to be really mean and don’t want to mess around with talking at all. Suppose they send a missile up at us without any warning or anything . . . I mean, we’d be stuck out in space like a sitting duck, wouldn’t we. Then where would we be?”

Sirocco gave a short laugh. “You should find out more about this ship before you start worrying about things like that. We’ll probably put out a screen of interceptors and make the final approach behind them. They’ll stop anything before it gets within ten thousand miles. You have to give the company some credit.”

Hanlon made a throwing-away motion in the air. “Ah, this is all getting to be too serious for a Saturday night. Why are we talking like this at all? Are we letting silly rumors get to us?” He looked at Sirocco. “Our glasses are nearly empty, Your Honor. A round was part of the bet.”

Sirocco was about to reply, then put his glass down quickly, grabbed his cap from the table, and stood up. “Time I wasn’t here,” he muttered. “I’ll be up in Rockefeller’s if anyone wants to join me there.” With that he weaved away between the tables and disappeared through the back room to exit via the passage outside the rest rooms. “What in hell’s come over him?” Hanlon asked, nonplussed. “Aren’t they paying captains well these days?”

“SDs,” Swyley murmured, without moving his mouth. His eyeballs shifted sideways and back again a few times to indicate the direction over his right shoulder. A more restrained note crept into the place, and the atmosphere took on a subtle tension.

Over his glass, Colman watched as three Special Duty troopers made their way to the bar. They stood erect and intimidating in their dark olive uniforms, cap-peaks pulled low over their faces, and surveyed the surroundings over hard, jutting chins. Nobody met their stares for long before looking away. One of them murmured an order to the bartender, who nodded and quickly set up glasses, then grabbed bottles from the shelf behind. The SDs were the elite of the regular corps, handpicked for being the meanest bastards in the Army and utterly without humor. They reminded Colman of the commando units he had seen in the Transvaal. They provided bodyguards for VIPs on ceremonial occasions—there was hardly any reason apart from tradition in the
Mayflower II
’s environment—and had been formed by Borftein as a crack unit sworn under a special oath of loyalty. Their commanding officer was a general named Stormbel. B Company made jokes about their clockwork precision on parades and the invisible strings that Stormbel used to jerk them around, but not while any of them were within earshot. They called the SDs the Stromboli Division.

“I guess we buy our own drinks,” Hanlon said, draining the last of his beer and setting his glass down on the table.

“Looks like it,” Stanislau agreed.

“I got the last one,” Colman reminded them. Somehow the enthusiasm had gone out of the party.

“Ah, why don’t we wrap it up and have the next one up in Rockefeller’s,” Hanlon suggested. “That was where Sirocco said he was going.”

“Great idea,” Colman said and stood up. Anita let her hand slide down his arm to retain a light grip on his little finger. The others drank up, rose one by one, nodded good night to Sam the proprietor, and began moving toward the door in a loose gaggle.

Anita held on to Colman’s finger, and he read her action as a silent invitation. He had slept with her a few times, many months ago now, and enjoyed it. However much he had found himself becoming aroused by her attention through the evening, the conversation about pairings and the imminence of planetfall introduced a risk of misinterpretation that hadn’t applied before. Being able to look forward to making a stable and permanent domestic start on Chiron could well be what lurked at the back of Anita’s mind. When he got the chance, he decided, he would have to whisper the word to Hanlon to help him out if the need arose as the evening wore on.

The precinct outside was full of people wasting the evening while trying to figure out what to do with it, when Colman and Anita emerged from the Bowery and turned to follow the others, who were already some distance ahead. Anita stopped to fish for something in her pocketbook, and Colman slowed to a halt to wait. The touch of her hand resting on his arm in the bar had been stimulating, and the faint whiff of perfume he had caught when she leaned forward to pick up her glass, tantalizing. What the hell? he thought. She’s not a kid. A guy needed a break now and again after twenty years of being cooped up in a spaceship. He turned back to find her holding a phial of capsules. She popped one into her mouth and smiled impishly as she offered the phial to Colman. “It’s Saturday, why not live it up a little?” He scowled and shook his head. Anita pouted. “They’re good. Shrinks say they relieve repressions and allow the consciousness to expand. We should get to know ourselves.”