Third World (21 page)

He looked up, dark circles of grief and
something else, fear or hate, she couldn’t quite decide, in his
eyes.

“
We’re going to try and make
you a little more comfortable.”

His eyes fell.

Whether he would sleep or not, she
couldn’t say, but he would at least be able to stretch out across
several seats.

Chapter
Seventeen

The Pony Nickered
Softly

The pony nickered softly when Newton
entered the barn, but kept its head down and its eyes
closed.

“
Honey, I’m home.” Newton
blew air out through his loose lips, partially closed, and giving a
fair imitation.

The head swung up, and it looked at him
with dull wonder.

Newton grinned in spite of himself, and
then went to the stool and end-table where he had his few odd
personal belongings, a comb, his toothbrush, and shaving
gear.

Pulling up a stool that might once have
been used to milk cows, although he hadn’t seen more than two or
three in the whole town, he opened up the tactical communicator.
There was no acknowledgement of signal lock and his heart sank. It
might be a malfunction with his unit, but he doubted it more and
more with each passing day.

“
Ground party calling
Hermes.
Lieutenant Newton
Shapiro of Her Majesty’s Ship
Hermes
reporting. Come in
please.”

His guts quivered, perhaps from lack of
food, lack of sleep, or just plain good old worry.

But there was no answer and no
signal.

The thoughts were not pleasant ones.
They just weren’t up there. In which case, where did they
go?

It was hard to believe that they had
simply been abandoned.

There was light knock at the
door.

Newton groaned inwardly, taking a quick
look at his watch. Then he straightened up, remembering the small
mob out front.

“
Come in.”

It was Dave Semanko.

“
Still no
answer?”

“
Nope.” It sounded better
when stated casually.

Semanko stood there. He looked Newton
in the face for a long moment, searching for something and not
finding any reassurance.

“
Interesting.” Then, with a
quick look at the pony, and another back at Newton, he turned and
headed for the door.

“
Dave.”

He stopped, looking over his shoulder
wordlessly.

“
Let’s just keep this to
ourselves, okay?”

“
Oh, hell. Absolutely. I
mean, yes, sir!” Then he was gone.

Newton looked at his bed, a couple of
thick sheets spread over a flattened mound of hay or straw with a
couple of pillows from the Gregory’s own bed.

He sighed deeply, and took another look
at the bottle.

With a shake of the head, he ruled out
another pull, or even a half-dozen.

He was going to need as much rest as he
could get, and he would need a clear head in the morning. Newton
thought of going out front and sneaking a quick peek at the trucks,
but thought better of it. Showing a bit of trust in the people
under your command was a good thing once in a while. That’s what
all the better training manuals said.

***

Predictably, the next morning saw a
heavy, sodden rain. It only seemed to come down harder as they
waited. The drumming on the roof over the porch was considerable.
There were gripes and murmurs from the assembled troops, but being
as eager as he was to get out of there, they were all awake,
dressed, and not too hung-over by the look of them.

A couple of short, abrasive remarks
from Newton shut them up. After making sure the guard was changed
at three a.m., and a fitful night of odd, unpleasant but relatively
mundane dreams, he was in no mood for their bullshit.

“
Ladies and gentlemen. This
is what you signed up for.” He pointed at the door. “We’ll be home
in three or four days, maybe less if we can make reasonable time.
Mount up.”

As they gathered up the small mound of
equipment bags, he picked three of them.

“
You, you, and
you.”

They stared blankly at
Newton.

“
Put your stuff in the
vehicles. Same one you rode in on. Then do a sweep of the premises.
You’ll be looking for lost articles, clothing, toothbrushes, and
equipment. We will leave nothing behind.”

They departed smartly, without a look
back and then Newton went looking for Gregory, standing in a rather
subdued fashion behind the till, an old-fashioned relic that was a
hundred percent mechanical. A collector’s item, it would be worth
some real money, almost anywhere else but here.

“
Do you have our bill
ready?”

“
Yes, sir.” Jim Gregory
cleared his throat. “We hope you enjoyed your stay. Please come and
see us again.”

Looking at the bill, several pages of
it paper-clipped together, Newton was a bit shocked, but all those
people eat a lot of meals, drink a lot of beer, wine and liquor by
the looks of it…several other small charges. Laundry seemed
reasonable, and hot water and wood…

There was a stack of restaurant bills,
all initialed more or less legibly by the parties concerned. He’d
instructed them to put their badge numbers on there as well,
printed in block numerals. All that training had to count for
something.

Newton signed it with a scribble. When
he looked up, Gregory was having some trouble meeting his
eyes.

Newton pulled out his roll of cash and
began peeling off notes.

There was nothing rational to say so he
said nothing at all.

Finally he had it.

“
Thank you.” While it would
probably do no good, it wouldn’t do any harm, so he peeled off a
couple of big bills and handed it over.

They had busted their asses for him,
and earned the gratuity.

He was just turning to go.

“
Lieutenant?”

“
Yes, Jim?”

“
What’s he done?” Jim’s
rheumy eyes regarded him in honest wonder.

Ah.

“
We have a bench warrant to
apprehend a number of deserters.”

“
Huh? Hank’s a deserter?”
The man’s face hung open and empty as he contemplated
this.

Then those big grey eyes swung back to
Newton’s.

“
Naw. I don’t believe
it.”

Just one more kick in the crotch.
Newton uttered a deep sigh. His eyes fell to the desktop, which was
a lot less uncomfortable than meeting Mister Gregory’s.

“
I’m not a hundred percent
sure either. We need a proper identification. Look, your friend
will be well treated.”

Jim Gregory nodded
lugubriously.

“
I’m not doubting that—you
seem to know your business.” He gazed earnestly into Newton’s
face.

“
I’m sorry for all of
this.”

Gregory nodded.

“
He’s a really good man,
Lieutenant.” He swallowed and looked away.

“
Yeah—I don’t doubt
it.”

Gregory looked away again, and Newton
waited for the upstairs party to come back. They were taking their
time about it, and perhaps that spoke of how much more seriously
they were taking him now.

It was the most horrible feeling in the
quiet of the bar, empty of patrons at this early hour, with Mister
Gregory and all of those unspoken questions. Newton didn’t have any
answers and so he was grateful the man didn’t ask them.

***

It was still pretty dim outside when
Newton got out, and the place looked far less attractive in this
light. The clouds were very bleak and low overhead, a seething mass
of subdued greys.

He was a bit surprised to see a couple
of people standing on the other side of the street watching them.
There were still people not on the backs of the vehicles, looking
faintly ridiculous in the bulky rain ponchos, thrown over the
armour they wore. The left-side door of the command truck stood
open.

“
Stay or go, it’s up to
you.”

They threw cigarette butts down and
hurriedly climbed aboard. Pulling the end of the tarp down a bit to
keep the cold breeze out, the people up there looked distinctly
unhappy and he couldn’t really blame them.

The road out of there was going to be
rough in the extreme. It would be boring as all get out and there
was just no way they would be able to catch up a little on their
sleep.

Newton clambered up into the cab, his
customary seat just behind the passenger seat occupied by a
trooper.

“
Roy.”

“
Yes, sir?”

Newton jerked a thumb.

“
Move.”

“
Yes, sir.” Nice thing about
Roy, there was no resentment there.

He wasn’t particularly intelligent, and
had few specialized skills, but at least he was amenable to
suggestion, not like some of the others.

Jackson was in the driver’s
seat.

Jackson touched the radio’s microphone
button.

“
All right, let’s find a
place to turn around.” There was no way they could do it in the
centre of town.

Spaulding’s voice came back, loud and
clear.

“
Roger that.”

The motors fired up and the lights came
on in the truck up ahead of them, and then it lurched away as
whoever was driving it let out the clutch and began working their
way up through the gears. The windshield wipers slapped back and
forth in determined fashion and Jackson or somebody had found some
music, which played softly over the interior speaker system.
Glancing over, Newton saw they were going about thirty kilometres
an hour.

What was a straggling village with two
parallel streets and a half a dozen very narrow cross-streets
rapidly petered out into brush, fields, and small farmsteads. The
trucks were wide and long, and there were no attractive prospects
in the first five hundred metres.

“
What about
here?”

Jackson looked over at him and shook
his head.

“
We’ll let numb-nuts
decide.”

“
Who’s driving Unit
One?”

“
Cornell.”

“
Ah.” Cornell was getting
his first turn at it, as pretty much everyone else had had a go,
some more successfully than others.

They kept going until the truck ahead
stopped.

Spaulding’s voice came over the
radio,

“
Skipper, I’m
thinking.”

“
What?”

“
Either we go all the way
out of town, or maybe we just take down this wire fence on the
left.”

Newton took a good look, getting up out
of his seat and going to the far side and looking down at a farm
paddock, with green hummocks of terrain grass sticking
up.

“
Can we get between the
posts?”

Jackson studied it.

“
Oh, man, it would be
close.”

Up ahead was a farm house, a low,
rambling affair with several outbuildings fifty metres back from
the road, or more accurately, track. Several more houses loomed a
hundred metres beyond.

“
Ensign Spaulding, can you
go up and speak to whoever’s in the house?”

“
Roger that.”

She took an anonymous trooper with her
and struggled up a slight rise through the mud and the rain and the
gradually increasing light. Their windows were fogging
up.

“
At least it’s warm and dry
in here.” Trooper Marlowe sounded doubtful.

Newton looked over.

“
Hmn. By the time we rotate
everybody through here, it’ll be a bit of a swamp.”

Oscar in the passenger seat studied the
weather on their micro-millimetre-band radar.

He looked back at Gillian.

“
With a little luck, the sun
will be out by the time we have to go back.”

She nodded but said nothing.

Ensign Spaulding was still at the door,
and they could see a person, whether it was a man or a woman was
unknown, standing in the doorway talking to her.

“
Sir?” Spaulding reported
in.

“
Go ahead.”

“
They say the wires are tied
up at this end of the field and stapled on. But they have a roll of
wire, so they can repair it if we cut it. His name is Billy,
incidentally. He’s saying if we need to pull up a post, we can
either shove it back down again or just leave it and he’ll fix it
up later.”

“
Ask him if he’d like a
hundred dollars in compensation.”

“
Roger that.”