Steel Beach (68 page)

No, the CC was surely curious about these people, and no doubt frustrated, but the CC was a strange being. Whatever cryogenic turmoil was currently animating his massive brain was and probably would remain a mystery to me. It was clear that things were going wrong, or he’d never have been able to over-ride his programming and do the things he’d done to me. But it was equally clear that most of his programming was still intact, or he’d simply have kicked down the front door of this place and marched everyone off for trial.

Having said all that, why the disillusion, Hildy?

Two reasons. Unreasonable expectations: in spite of all good sense, I had hoped these people would be somehow better than other people. They weren’t. They just had different ideas. And two, I didn’t fit. They didn’t need reporters in here. Gossip sufficed. Teaching was taken very seriously; no dilettantes need apply. The only other thing I was interested in was building a starship, and I’d be about as useful as a kewpie with a slide rule.

“Three reasons,” I said. “You’re depressed, too.”

“Don’t be,” Libby said. “I’m here.”

I looked up and saw him sit down after first carefully placing a dish oozing with chocolate, caramel, and melting ice cream on the table in front of him. He reached down and scratched Winston’s head. The dog licked his nose, sniffed, and went back to sleep, ice cream being one of the few foodstuffs he had little interest in. Libby grinned at me.

“Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long,” he said.

“No problem. Where’s H & G?”

“They said they’d be along later. Liz is back, though.” I saw her approaching across the village green. She had a bottle in one hand. The Heinleiners made their own booze, naturally, and Liz had professed to like it on her earlier visit. Probably that little dab of kerosene they added for flavor.

“Can’t stay, folks, can’t stay, gotta run,” she said, just as if I’d urged her to stick around. She produced a folding cup from her gunbelt and poured a shot of pure Virginia City Bonded, tossed it down. It wasn’t the first of the day.

That’s right, I said gunbelt. Liz had taken to Heinlein Town from the first moment I brought her in, because it was the only place outside of the movie studios where she worked that she could wear a gun. But in here she could load it with real bullets. She currently sported a matched pair of Colt .45’s, with pearl handles.

“I was hoping we could go do some shooting,” Libby said.

“Not today, sweetie. I just dropped by to get a bottle, and retrieve my dog. Next weekend, I promise. But you buy the lead.”

“Sure.”

“Has he been a good dog?” Liz cooed, crouching down and scratching his back, almost toppling over in the process. She was probably talking to Winston, but I told her he’d been good, anyway. She didn’t seem to hear.

Libby leaned a little closer to me and looked at me with concern.

“Are you really feeling depressed?” he asked. He put his hand on mine.

All I really needed at that point in my life was another case of puppy love, but that’s just what had happened. At the rate he was going, pretty soon he’d be humping my leg, like Winston.

For pity sake, Hildy, give it a rest.

“Just a little blue,” I said, putting on a smile for him.

“How come?”

“Wondering where my life is going.”

He looked blankly at me. I’d seen the same expression on Brenda’s face when I said something incomprehensible to one who sees nothing but endless, unlimited vistas stretching ahead. Charitably, I didn’t kick him. Instead, I removed my hand from under his, patted his hand, and finally noticed the disturbance going on under the table.

“Problems, Liz?” I asked.

“I think he wants to stay here.” She had attached a leash to his collar and was tugging on it, but he had planted his forepaws and dug in. Forget mules; if you want a metaphor for stubbornness, you need look no farther than the English bulldog.

“You could pick him up,” Libby suggested.

“If I had no further use for my face,” she agreed. “Also arms, legs, and ass. Winston’s slow to anger, but he’s worth seeing when he gets there.” She stood, hands on hips in frustration, and her dog rolled over on his back and went to sleep again. “Damn, Hildy, he surely must like you.”

I thought what he liked was hunting live prey-horses and cows, mostly, though recently a kewpie had gone missing. But I didn’t mention that. Not for Libby’s tender ears.

“It’s okay, Liz,” I said. “He’s not much trouble. I’ll just keep him this weekend and drop him by your place on my way home.”

“Well, sure, but…  I mean I’d planned to…  ” She groped around a little more, then poured herself another drink and made it vanish.

“Right,” she said. “See you later, Hildy.” She slapped my shoulder in passing, then took off across the green.

“What was that all about?” Libby asked.

“You never know with Liz.”

“Is she really the Queen of England?”

“Yep. And
I
am the ruler of the Queen’s navee!”

He got that blank look, field-tested and honed to perfection by Brenda, then shrugged and applied himself to demolishing the melting mess in front of him. I guess Gilbert and Sullivan was too much even for a Heinleiner youth.

“Well…  ” he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, “she sure can shoot, I’ve gotta say that.”

“I wouldn’t get into a fistfight with her either, if I was you.”

“But she drinks too much.”

“Amen to that. I’d hate to have to pay her liver-replacement tab.”

He leaned back in his chair, looking well satisfied with life.

“So. You taking me back to Texas this Sunday evening?”

In a weak moment I’d promised to show all three children where I lived. Hansel and Gretel seemed to have forgotten about it, but not Libby. I’d have taken him, but I was pretty sure I’d spend most of my time fighting him off, and I just wasn’t up to it.

“Afraid not. I’ve got too many test papers to grade. All this traveling to and from Delambre’s gotten me far behind in my teaching duties.”

He tried not to show his disappointment.

“Next time,” I told him.

“Sure,” he said. “Then what do you want to do today?”

“I really don’t know, Libby. I’ve seen the stardrive, and I didn’t understand it. I’ve seen the farm, and Minamata, and I’ve seen the spider people.” I’d seen even more wonders than that, some of them unmentioned here because of promises I made, others for reasons of security, and most because they simply weren’t that interesting. Even a community of wild-eyed genius experimenters is going to lay some eggs. “What do you think we should do?”

He thought it over.

“There’s a baseball game over in Strangeland in about an hour.”

I laughed.

“Sure,” I said. “I haven’t watched one in years.”

“You can watch if you want,” he said. “I meant, we sort of choose up sides, you know, depending on how many people show up…  ”

“A pick-up game. I thought you meant, like—”

“No, we don’t have—”

“—the Heinleiner Tanstaafls against the King City—”

“—that many people in here.”

“Forgive me. I’m still a big-city girl, I guess. You need an umpire?” I smacked my bloated belly. “I brought my own pads.”

He grinned, opened his mouth, and said “We could everybody freeze, and nobody will get hurt.”

At least that’s what it sounded like to me, for a split second, before the synapses sorted themselves out and I saw the last seven words had come from a tall, bulky party in an alarming but effective costume, holding a rifle in one hand and a bullhorn in the other.

Once I spotted him, I quickly saw about a dozen others like him and the same number of King City police, moving across the square in a ragged skirmish line. The cops had drawn handguns, something seldom seen on Luna. The others had big projectile weapons or hand-held lasers.

“What the hell are
they
?” Libby asked. We’d both stood up, like most of the other people I could see.

“I’d guess they were soldiers,” I said.

“But that’s crazy. Luna doesn’t have an army.”

“Looks like we got one when we weren’t looking.”

And quite a bunch they were, too. The KC cops were equally men and women, the “soldiers” were all male, and all large. They wore black: jumpsuits, equipment belts, huge ornate crash helmets with tinted visors, boots. The belts were hung with things that might have been hand grenades, ammunition clips, or high-tech pencil sharpeners, for all I could tell.

It later turned out they were mostly props. The costumes had been rented from a film studio, since the non-existent Army of Luna had nothing to offer in the way of super-macho display.

They came in our general direction. When they encountered people they pushed them to the floor and the cops started patting them down for weapons, and slipping on handcuffs. The soldiers kept on moving, swinging the muzzles of their weapons this way and that, looking quite pleased with themselves, all to the booming accompaniment of more orders from the bullhorn.

“What should we do, Hildy?” Libby asked, his voice shaking.

“I think it’s best if we do what they say,” I said, quietly, patting his shoulder to settle him down. “Don’t worry, I know a good lawyer.”

“Are they going to arrest us?”

“Looks like it.”

A cop and a soldier marched up to us and the soldier looked at a datapad in his hand, then at my face.

“Are you Maria Cabrini, also known as Hildegarde Johnson?”

“I’m Hildy Johnson.”

“Cuff her,” he told the cop. He turned away as the policewoman started toward me, and as Libby moved to put himself between me and the cop.

“You keep your hands off her,” Libby said, and the soldier pivoted easily and brought up the butt of his gun and smashed it into the side of Libby’s face. I could hear his jaw shatter. He fell to the ground, totally limp. As I stared down at him, Winston waddled out from under the table and sniffed his face.

The cop was saying something angry to the soldier, but I was too stunned to hear what it was.

“Just do it,” the soldier snarled at her, and I started to kneel beside Libby but the cop grabbed my arm and pulled me up. She snapped one cuff over my left wrist, still looking at the retreating back of the soldier.

“He can’t get away with that,” she said, more to herself than to me. She reached for my other hand and it finally sunk in that this was more than a normal arrest situation, that things were out of joint, and that maybe I ought to resist, because if a big ape could just club a young boy senseless something was going on here that I didn’t understand.

So I yanked my right hand away and started to run but she was way ahead of me, twisting my left hand hard until I ended up bent over the table with her behind me, pressing my face into the remains of Libby’s sundae. I kept fighting to keep my right hand free and she jerked me upright by my hair, and she screamed, and let go of me.

They tell me Winston came off the ground like a squat rocket, that great vise of a jaw open wide, and clamped it shut on her forearm, breaking her grip on me and knocking her to the ground. I fell over myself, and landed on my butt, from which position I watched in horrified fascination as Winston made every effort to tear the limb from its socket.

I hope I never see anything like that again. Winston couldn’t have massed a seventh as much as the policewoman, but he jerked her around like a rag doll. His jaws opened only enough to get a better grip in a different place. Even over the sound of her screams I could hear the bones crunching.

Now the soldier was coming back, raising his rifle as he came, and now a shot rang out and blood sprayed from the front of his chest, and again, and once more, and he fell on his face, hard, and didn’t move. Then everybody was firing at once and I crawled under the metal table as lead slugs screamed all around me.

The fire was concentrated at first on a window high in the stack of apartment crates surrounding the square. Part of the wall vanished in plastic splinters, then a red line thrust into the wreckage and something bloomed orange flame. I saw more gun barrels sticking out of more windows, saw another soldier go down with the lower part of his leg blown off, saw him turn as he fell and start firing at another window.

In seconds it seemed I was the only person there who didn’t have a weapon. I saw a Heinleiner crouched behind the gallows, snapping off shots with a handgun. His null-suit was turned on, coating him in silver. I saw him hit by a half a clip from an automatic rifle. He froze. I don’t mean he stood still; he
froze
, like a chromium statue, toppled with bullets still whanging off of him, rolled over on his back, still in the same attitude. Then his null-suit switched off and he tried to get up, but was hit by three more bullets. His skin had turned lobster-red.

I didn’t understand that, and I didn’t have time to think about it. People were still running for cover, so I did, too, past overturned tables and chairs and the dead body of a King City policeman, into Aunt Hazel’s shop. I scurried around and crouched behind the counter, intending to stay there until someone came to explain what the hell was going on.

But the itch is buried deep, and makes you do stupid things when you least expect it. If you’ve never been a reporter, you wouldn’t understand. I raised my head and looked over the counter.

I can replay the tape from my holocam and say exactly what happened, in what order, who did what to whom, but you don’t live it that way. You retain some very vivid impressions, in no particular order, with gaps between when you don’t have any idea what happened. I saw people running. I saw people cut almost in half by lasers, ripped by bullets. I heard screams and shouts and explosions, and I smelled gunpowder and burning plastic. I suppose every battlefield has looked and sounded and smelled pretty much the same.

I couldn’t see Libby, didn’t know if he was dead or alive. He wasn’t where he had fallen. I did see more cops and soldiers arriving from some of the feeder tunnels.

Something crashed through the windows in front, something large, and tumbled over the ice cream freezers there, turning one of them over. I crouched down, and when I looked up again there was the policewoman, Winston still attached to her arm, which was in danger of coming off.