It was a few minutes before six and the edges of the scattered clouds were a brilliant pink when Cally got off the city bus at the Columbia gate of the Wall. She had her backpack, one rolling suitcase, and had teamed an old pair of cutoff shorts with a T-shirt, complete with garish beach sunset, and a bright yellow Folly Beach visor. She wore an expression of slightly desperate hopefulness as she scanned the vehicles lining up for the morning convoy. She started towards a rather battered white van, but one scowl from the female driving it had her looking for another. Towards the end of the line she spotted a VW van that must have been damn near eighty years old. The tie-dyed patterns painted on the panels showed different degrees of fading, but had also clearly been carefully touched up over the years. The skull with roses coming out of the top was absolutely perfect, as was the lovingly painted legend that she knew even before she got far enough past the other vehicles to see all the words.
Before approaching, she took care of the buckley, turning voice access and response off and running the emulation all the way down to two, tucking it back into her purse. Wouldn't do to have him saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The driver had long, blond hair and a full mustache and well-combed beard. He was built like a small bear. As she approached, she could detect a faint whiff of oak leaves and patchouli over the salt and fish from the tanks in back. The music from his cube player reached a good way from the open window and his fingers were tapping to the beat on the sill. " . . . gotta tip they're gonna kick the door in again. I'd like to get some sleep before I travel . . ."
"Hey, bitchin' shirt. You surf?" He noticed her as she dragged the suitcase up.
"I've caught a coupla waves here and there. But I usually head out to L.A. for that. For the waves here, I didn't even bring my own board. Didn't have the cash or the time to go out that far this trip."
"Bummer," he sympathized. "Too much of everything's about money, man. But you gotta make a living, so what can you do. You ridin' out on the bus?"
"Well, actually, I was kinda hoping I could find somebody I could hitch a ride with. I spent a little too much and I could afford the ticket, I just, you know, would have to go real light on meals till I got back to campus."
"Oh man, that sucks, say no more." He leaned over and unlocked the passenger side door. "By the way, I'm Reefer. Reefer Jones."
"Marilyn Grant. Thanks, dude." She lugged her suitcase around the front of the car, stowed it behind the passenger seat, tucked her pack in the floorboard under her feet, and got in, carefully not wrinkling her nose at the salty, fishy smell.
"Oh, we've gotta figure out some way to square you with the paperwork," he grimaced apologetically. "Sorry, but my boss can be a pain in the ass about hitchhikers. Hey, I don't suppose you can shoot, can you?"
Cally fumbled in her purse and handed him a very sincere range certification from a local Charleston range, dated a few days ago, rating Marilyn Grant an expert, non-resident.
"I went on a lark. Hadn't shot in years, but my mom made me learn, you know?" she said.
"Yeah, mine too. I think the war like affected that whole generation. But it was okay, I mean, if I ever meet a steel Postie pop-up target, I'll know how to kill it." He laughed and scribbled something on the clipboard. "Okay, I put you down as a freelance guard. The boss'll be cool with that. Lived in Urbs his whole life, came to Charleston for the money, man, old fart is scared to death of Posties." He shrugged, easing the van up in the line that was finally beginning to move. "I've been drivin' this route for five years and there's never been a Postie get close that those guys," he gestured to the machine-gun turret mounted on the top of an eighteen wheeler, "didn't saw in half before it even got close to us."
"Does that happen often?" Her eyes were round.
"Nah." He offered her a stick of gum, popping one in his own mouth. "About every other run. It's a pain in the ass because then the whole convoy has to stop while they take the head for the bounty." He made a gagging gesture. "Well, we usually don't actually stop. They just lose their place in line and we slow down a bit." He gestured to the trucks again. "Every one of those guys has a boma blade tucked away up there, so it doesn't really take any time at all."
They had pulled up to the gate while he was talking, and he handed the guard her range card and his own, showing the guard the Colt .45 by his seat and the second one in the glove box. "The boss won't mind you because the extra shooter drops our convoy fee." He shrugged and took their cards back from the guard, handing her hers and tucking his own back in his wallet.
It took another fifteen minutes for the guards to clear the other vehicles and the group to begin the drive back to real civilization.
"Next stop, Columbia." He cranked the volume on the stereo slightly, glancing at her curiously. "So where are you headed, anyway?"
"Cincy."
"Oh. Well, you can, like, ride the whole way then. That's cool." He looked uncomfortable for a minute. "I'll just have to pretend you got out in Knoxville, when the convoy zone ends."
"Will I get you in trouble?"
He thought a minute and shook his head. "Nah, not really. The boss isn't too bad a guy. If he finds out I'll just tell him it was part of your fee for riding guard from here to Knoxville."
"So what do you haul?" she asked politely, glancing over her shoulder into the back of the van where several packed aquariums bubbled away, air exchanges sticking up several inches above the sealed lids.
"Blue crab. Like, live, you know? Buncha rich dudes in Chicago like their fresh seafood." He shrugged.
"So why you and why not one of them?" She waved at the lines of semis ahead and behind them.
"Oh, like, it's a niche market. They're carrying frozen stuff, and, well, some of 'em have iced down live oysters and clams and stuff. Crabs are just incredibly fussy about live travel. But a little of the right stuff in the water so they aren't too crabby," he grinned, "and you can pack a lot of the little buggers into the tanks."
"So, what, they're too drugged up to rip each other to bits? What's that do to them as food?"
"Basically," he agreed cheerfully. "Like, put 'em in a clean, salt-water tank and in like six hours or so they're clean. And crab valium doesn't really affect humans, anyway, you know?"
She politely ignored that the inner dimensions of the back of the van seemed to her practiced eye to be just a bit smaller than the outside would normally indicate.
Business out of the way, he seemed more inclined to listen to his music than chat. That suited Cally fine. It must have been ten years since she'd had the time or need to take the overland route out of Charleston and she let her eyes glaze over watching the miles and miles of pine forest, punctuated by the occasional burn zone and abat-meadow.
It was only as they approached Columbia a couple of hours later that the now mixed pine and hardwood forests gave way to cleared fields of cows and crops, each field bordered by widely spaced sensor poles.
"I guess the bounties cover the costs of the sensors and the power to run them," she said.
"Those bounty farmers are some strange birds. Get at least half their money off stalking bounties, spend half of that fighting the abat and grat. Real loner kinda dudes. Then there was one of 'em about fifteen years ago went totally off his nut and got caught breeding Posties. It was before my time, but he'd had a Postie God King next to his land. Seems he'd made a deal with it to deliver heads of Postie normals just up from nestlings in exchange for half the take. It was, like, really nasty what they did to him when they caught him."
"How'd they catch him?" she asked politely, since Marilyn wouldn't remember the story.
"He was always delivering twice the bounty of the other guys around him. I guess somebody just got suspicious. Next time the Postie God King made delivery, they had surveillance on him and everything." He stuck a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. "What was real weird was when they traced the Postie back to where it had been living. Man, it was like a freakin' magpie's nest. Tinfoil, polished pennies, chromed bike bars and car parts and stuff, even some gold. The Postie must have been bughouse nuts, too. I mean, what are the odds." He shrugged and they drove on in silence until the convoy began to slow as the front vehicles reached the gate into Columbia Trading Station.
Entry through the gates was much faster than exit from Charleston had been. The Columbia guards obviously wanted to keep the gates open as short a time as possible, admitting the entire convoy and closing the big steel slab behind them before beginning the paperwork.
As he waited his turn to sign in he waved across the large parking lot to a squat building with gas pumps in front of it. One of the tankers in the line had pulled around to the side of the building and was unhooking hoses.
"I've gotta top off my gas after I get through here. It's just the way they do this convoy thing. Won't let you leave unless you're full. If you want to go stretch your legs or buy a drink or, like, other stuff, this is the last stop until Spartanburg Station in three hours."
As a tourist, goggling was normal, so she took the opportunity to get a good long look at everything while she went up to the station building to wait in line for the restroom. The place hadn't changed much in ten years. The asphalt of the big parking lot had been resurfaced at some point, but not too recently. They hadn't expanded the walls any—it would have just been more perimeter to man in an emergency. Oh, the store was stocked a bit better, and there were a few more children trailing around with the occasional farm wife doing some shopping, but mostly it was the same old general store, feed and seed, and bounty processing center. She bought a glass of apple cider and some gingersnaps and went back out into the parking lot. The single mechanic's bay was taken up with work on a tractor today. Fortunately no one in the convoy seemed to need it. Over by the incinerator the bounty agent was paying off on a few Postie heads. She wrinkled her nose as the shifting wind wafted over the unforgettable stench of ripe, dead Posleen mixed with motor oil and exhaust fumes. She took her snack back towards the van, farther away from the grisly trophies, walking past one of the refrigerator trucks that was offloading a few crates of fish and perishables for the station store and loading some crates of spring greens and assorted poultry and dairy products. A semi was unloading a couple of crates of miscellaneous merchandise but, not being refrigerated, had nothing to take on to fill the space left.
She looked around at the various trucks and buses, and the occasional car, and sighed. It would probably be at least fifteen minutes before they got moving again, and there just wasn't a lot more to see. She pulled out her PDA and spent the rest of the break clicking through the daily news.
The road to Spartanburg seemed quiet enough, the scenery by the side of the interstate passing from fields and cows near Columbia to dense stands of pine and poplar starting a few yards back from the Roundup zone. The edges of the highway had earned the popular appellation from the tanker truck that came through at the back of the convoy every few months with a sprayer attachment to mist the roadside with the inexpensive herbicide. Federal authorities had decided early on that it was easier, cheaper and safer than lawnmower crews for maintaining a small but adequate free-fire zone back from the road. In the spring, runners from the underbrush reached back quickly to reclaim the tempting open soil and ready sunlight—it looked like another run with the sprayer truck was a bit overdue.
The tender vegetation at the border was especially attractive to the herds of whitetail, who were no doubt accustomed to safe feeding times morning and evening when neither the convoys nor other traffic disturbed their peace. Predation by the occasional feral Posleen kept the herd barely below starvation levels. Healthy deer could usually smell, hear, and outrun a lone Posleen normal. Unfortunately for the deer, this fact failed to stop feral normals from trying. This became clear to the convoy when a yearling buck broke cover right in front of a church van from Nashville, causing it to slam on its brakes and take a bump from the semi behind it that could almost, but not quite, stop in time.
The first indication Cally had that something was wrong was the crunch of metal behind them and the chattering of a machine gun, it sounded like one of the MG-90s on top of the semis. She grabbed the .45 from the glove box while Reefer swore and swerved as the bus in front of them hit the brakes and stopped in the middle of its lane, the van coming to a more gradual stop alongside the bus's driver. All along the length of the convoy, the approximately thirty vehicles that comprised it were pulling to a stop, the drivers and gunners first looking for Posleen, and then, seeing none, checking their detectors and getting on the radios onto channel nineteen for official convoy information.
"Front door, this is truck seventeen." The female voice had a distinctly Texan drawl. "We got one dead Postie, one dead medium passenger vehicle, and some minor vee-hicular injuries back here. Negative on Postie emissions and high grade equipment. Negative crest. Just another feral normal. We're gonna need a EMT and someplace to put 'em, 'cause their van ain't goin' nowhere, come on." Reception was extraordinarily clear for the simple reason that there was so little to compete with it. Oh, there was a little crackle from sunspots and other unavoidable whatnot, but it was a surprisingly cheap method of keeping a convoy together. Besides, it was traditional.
"Ten-four, Seventeen. Johnny, you got your ears on?"
"Ten-four, Front Door. Got my little black bag and I am on the way, come on."
"Ten-four. Seventeen, get the healthies squared away along the line and have Johnny call me back once he's got the bleeders stashed, come on."
"That's a big ten-f—Larry, quit messing with that thing. You can load the head up after we get them church folks on the . . . oops. This thing's still on. Sorry Front Door, over."
"Hey, uh, Marilyn?" Reefer had walked around to the right side of the bus where she was standing with her back against it, looking outward. "Might as well get back in and put that thing in the glove box, man. I mean, like, I know it's pretty bogus to have one of those Postie dudes running out on the road and all, but honest, there's like never been more than one at a time as long as I've been driving."
Cally walked back to the van, looked at the sensor on the dash and climbed back in. She didn't put the pistol back in the glove box, but Reefer just shrugged and popped another piece of gum. Even twenty years ago the convoy would have circled up, instead of remaining sprawled out like a lunch line of gawking kindergartners. Their complacency made the back of her neck itch, but as she watched the negative sensors on the dash and her PDA screen, tied into the roadside sensor net, the combat-chill gradually leached its way back out of her system and time resumed its normal flow.
It seemed longer, of course, but it was actually only about ten minutes later that the convoy got rolling again, one van shorter but with no human fatalities. On the far side of the highway, just inside the tree line, a yearling whitetail buck placidly browsed through the fresh growth.
Spartanburg's Trading and Bounty Station was very much like Columbia's. The upstate city hadn't been part of Fortress Forward and so the buildings had survived in varying states of destruction and disrepair from Posleen looting and local self-destruct systems. But vacancy during the Posleen occupation and the relatively slow pace of human reclamation had taken its toll on the prewar portions of the city. The station was not, strictly speaking, part of the original prewar city. Instead, one of the least-damaged truck stop and gas station clusters had been repaired, an incinerator and sufficient electrical generation to fuel the station installed, along with the necessary water tower and septic system. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation had walled and manned the resulting facility, along with a few neighboring buildings, hauled in a double-wide to house the staff, and called it a day.
The biggest difference in the routine at Spartanburg was the line at the pay radio as the members of the group from Nashville called friends and family back home.
The station residents were clearly used to their station being the lunch stop on the convoy route. One of the buildings inside the walls was a salvaged prewar short-order grill. Over the years, the sun had faded the plastic around the flat roof of the building to a dingy yellowish-cream. The steel pole that had once carried a lighted sign had been extended and was now home to the station's radio antenna.
The parking lot of the restaurant had been filled with ancient picnic tables of various materials obviously scrounged locally. Perhaps a third were of clearly postwar construction, made of split and roughly sanded pine logs. A handful of teenage girls in jean shorts and T-shirts waited on the tables. Cally's omelet was tough and overpriced, though the waitress was obviously eager to please, refilling her water frequently and offering a smile that was tacit apology for the food.
"If you want something that's actually good to get the taste out of your mouth, try a small jar of pickled peaches from the store over there. One of our neighbors puts them up, and they're actually good. I mean, if you like peaches."
"Thanks, I will." Cally smiled, noticing the girl's wistful glances at her PDA.
"You're a college student ain't . . . aren't you? That must be wonderful." She fielded a dirty look from another girl who was moving a bit faster.
"Yeah, I like it. Where are you planning to apply?"
"It wouldn't do no good." The girl flushed. "They don't take you if you're out of state, unless you've got money."
"I know a lot of out of state students. And there are scholarships."
"You gotta pass tests. I checked." She glared briefly as the other girl moving back by with a stack of empty plates made a rude noise. "I bet none of your out of state friends are bounty farm brats, are they?"
"If you can't pass the tests, read and study until you can."
The girl laughed tonelessly. "Library." She indicated the bounty agent's trailer. "Two shelves of pre-war encyclopedias and a dog-eared copy of Leather Goddesses of Phobos."
"You're kidding." Cally's jaw dropped.
"Nope." She grinned tightly. "Well, unless you count the porno mags under Agent Thomas's bed. I've been that bored. Oop, gotta go. Try the peaches." She shrank a bit from the face of the middle-aged woman looking out the plastic and duct tape "window" of the grill and began rapidly collecting empty dishes and silverware.
Cally stared after her for a moment before rummaging in her backpack for a battered paperback copy of Pygmalion and staring at it a moment.
I can always get another prop. She tucked the girl's tip in the inside cover and finished her water, making her way to where the waitress was returning for another load. Her mouth tightened at the reddening print on the girl's face and her hot eyes. She pressed the book into the girl's hand.
"Never give up," she told her firmly, grabbing her chin gently and pulling her face around for eye contact. "Never give up. Not ever. You will make it out."
The teenager paused for a second, looking at the other woman as if she had sudden sneaking suspicion that she was far older than twenty, whatever else she may have been. She smiled grimly and tucked the book into her front pocket where it was bulkier but probably safer, and got back to work.
Cally heard her mutter, "Thanks, ma'am," as she strolled back to the van exactly like a student tourist, trying not to visibly berate herself for breaking cover.
Outside the walls, Cally grimaced at the profusion of roadside kudzu. "Hell of an abat hazard, isn't it?"
"What? Like, oh, yeah, totally bogus. Happens a bit in some of these places. If it's not good farmland or right next to your house, it's somebody else's problem. It's a lot of work to get in and clear that stuff and if you're doing that, like, you aren't getting bounties or raising your own crops. Until some poor schmuck gets stung by a grat. There's just totally not enough money in the world to get me to bounty farm, man."
As the land and the road got more hilly, first the small trees and undergrowth rose beside the highway like green walls, then the huge granite cut-throughs and drop-offs passed by as they climbed into the Blue Ridge, which rose in front of them in a great green wall, softened by the afternoon haze. With the changing terrain eliminating the need for a Roundup zone, clumps of grass vied for purchase in the rocky soil with brown-eyed Susans and some small purple flower she didn't recognize. Occasionally she caught a dull orange flash of Virginia creeper, or the more brilliant orange splash of what she vaguely remembered were mountain azaleas. Reefer flipped off the air conditioner and opened the windows to let in the cooler, fresher mountain air. She suppressed the urge to wrinkle her nose at the exhaust fumes from the rest of the convoy and pulled her hair back into a quick ponytail to keep the dark curls from flying around her face.
At one of the cut-throughs you could still see the scraps of exotic rubble where they blew the Wall and relaid the road after the Green River Gorge drawbridge came on-line as part of reopening the route to Charleston harbor.
There was no delay at the drawbridge, the lead truck having radioed ahead the time-synchronized codes to signal the attendant. Cally was reassured to see the unusually alert and attentive man obviously watching the convoy and all his sensors as the van clattered across the lowered bridge.
After the first exit past the bridge, they started to pass some local traffic—the occasional ancient pickup truck or SUV from the mountain communities that, after the great postwar RIF of the surviving soldiers, had gone back to living mostly as they had for the past four hundred years. A bit poorer, perhaps, but for a people who had come to love these highlands as their ancestors had loved an earlier home, they had their mountains, and they had their neighbors, and the mild poverty wrapped around them felt more like a comfortably broken-in and familiar set of work clothes than any true hardship. Their mountains weren't for the soft, or the greedy, or the lazy, but they had protected them from a hazard that had gone through softer and richer peoples like a hot knife through butter. This knowledge had cemented the locals' attachment to their mountains from a rough affection to a respectful devotion approaching reverence, so that rural Appalachia had one of the lowest out-migration rates on the planet. While the mountain folk knew there were many places men could live in the modern galaxy, this one was theirs, and they reckoned they'd keep it.
It was early evening but still quite bright when the convoy entered Baldwin Gap, home of the Southeast Asheville Urb. Turning off the Blue Ridge Parkway onto Victory Road, they came into the valley through the dilapidated remains of forty-year-old fortifications, topped with a mishmash of sensor boxes and transmitters probably emplaced and maintained by local farmers who were more interested in protecting their stock than in any bounty. With power, protection, and ample refrigeration, Asheville was cattle country, selling much of its lower grade beef to the local Urbs and shipping the better cuts back down to Charleston for the tourists' surf 'n' turf dinners. Her driver, obviously city-bred, had switched back to closed windows and the AC at the first whiff of rural cow manure—not that she minded.
The first thing Cally noticed when they came in sight of the Asheville Urb Vehicle Assembly Zone was the increased number of people manning the wall and their relative inattention to that job. Some wore headphones which, judging from the rhythmic nodding of the wearers' heads were for music rather than information. At one corner of the wall, a female in a guard uniform was chatting up a male in civvies. One of the more alert guards was standing over the entrance gate facing outward. While she looked out, eyes scanning the hills, most of the time, judging from her hand movements she also appeared to have a game of solitaire going on the top edge of the wall.
"I guess they don't get many ferals this close to civilization," she said, slipping her sandals back on and closing up the novel on her PDA as they drove through the gates.
"Huh?"
"Those were just, you know, some pretty bored looking guards. Not that I have much to compare with. We don't have them back home," she said.
"Oh, yeah," he nodded. "They're like, pretty laid back here, you know? I hung out with a couple of guards on one of my trips through. This girl I talked to said it pays pretty well, and they're feds, so they get good bennies." He swallowed hard and added a fresh piece of gum. "It wouldn't be the gig for me, man. I mean, okay, it's not major stressful or anything, but I just couldn't, like, handle being a fed."
"Me neither," she grinned. "So what happens now?"
"Well, like, I gotta wait for this chick from one of the restaurants and, you know, see how much stuff she wants to buy, and put my van down for the convoy out tomorrow. Then I guess, like, food and someplace to crash. Maybe find a party, if, you know, there's one mellow enough that I won't be too fucked up to drive in the morning." He looked sheepish for a minute. "Oh, like, sorry."
"You must come through here a lot. I hate to ask when you've already done so much for me, but could you recommend anywhere to eat and, well, stay that's okay but not too expensive?" she asked, dropping her eyes and scuffing the ground a bit with a foot.
"Oh, like, no problem. I'm, um, meeting a friend, so I'm gonna be like totally out of the net until morning, no offense. Um . . . the cafeteria is totally bogus, so don't even go there. They sell the food in Asheville Urb Calorie Credits, and they seriously scalp you on the exchange rates. Your best bet is probably the mall food court. The Taco Hell was okay the last time I tried it, but that was like a few months ago when I was majorly low on cash. For rooms, I'd tell a guy to take the no-tell motel outside the walls and leave all his stuff in the van, but if I were you I'd honestly pick up an Urbie dude for a one nighter before I did that 'cause it's not exactly your high-rent district." He frowned, scratching his chin through the beard and looking glum. "Shit. Why don't you hang around until Janet gets here? Maybe she can, like, find you some crash space for the night. Urb hostel prices are, like, well, the bogosity is beyond belief, I kid you not."
"Oh, no, it's all right. I don't want to horn in on your date or anything. I mean, I saved the bus fare up here, and I'd planned to stay overnight. I'll be okay." She put a hand on his arm and smiled reassuringly.
"Aw, hang around anyway. You can meet Janet and we can all walk in together. I can at least keep them from cheating you too bad when you rent your hostel room. Oh, 'scuse me." He left her and walked over to a plump, middle-aged woman with a clipboard and a little red wagon with a bucket half full of water.
Cally went back to Marilyn's romance novel on her PDA while Reefer and the restaurateur dickered and made their trade, leaning against the van as strains of music came drifting through the open window. . . . dog has not been fed in years. It's even worse than it appears but it's all right. Cows giving kerosene, kid can't read at seventeen . . .
After a bit the older woman dragged her wagon back off, bucket sloshing a bit as she went. Reefer stayed in the back, fiddling quite a while with the tanks while the afternoon sun sank to the edge of the mountains. Finally, he sighed and came around to her side, scratching the back of his head with one hand and looking up at the impending sunset.
"Um . . . look, it would be like a major favor if you could wait here for Janet for a minute while I go sign up for tomorrow's convoy. I mean, like, she knows the van, so if you see her . . . uh, like she's tiny, okay? And she's got straight black hair about down to here, looks about your age. Do you, like, how do I say this? Have you ever heard of the Goths?" he asked.
"What, you mean European Franco-Germanic barbarian tribes from the dark ages?"
"Um . . . no. Not like that at all. Just . . . she wears a lot of black, okay? And silver jewelry. She'll probably be wearing, like, lots of silver jewelry. And she has this really cool Celtic knot kind of bracelet tattooed around one wrist. Like, left, I think. You can't miss her. So, if she like shows while I'm gone, which she probably will, could you tell her I'll be right back?" He bit his lip and craned his neck back over towards the Urb entrance as if he could make her appear just by looking often enough.
"Sure, Reefer, I'll tell her you'll be right back," she said
"Awesome. Thanks, man." He walked off towards the pack of semis that had made up the front of the convoy from Charleston.
The clouds had turned to brilliant splashes of hot pink, vermilion, and orange by the time Reefer got back with his convoy slot number for the morning. His face fell slightly when he saw there was nobody but Cally at the truck.
"Bogus," he muttered softly under his breath as he opened the driver's side door and grabbed his backpack. "I guess I made us wait for nothing. Sorry, Marilyn. I didn't mean to be a dweeb. Uh, let's go, I guess."
Cally grabbed her own pack without comment and followed him towards the door of the Urb. The parking lot was cracked and pot-holed in places and clearly needed resurfacing, but the freshly painted lines on the faded asphalt suggested it wasn't on the schedule anytime soon. Even from a distance, she could see that the walls of the entry level of the Urb were covered with graffiti, some fresh, some of which had flaked and started to peel over time, along with the building's own paint.
As they approached the door, a couple in faded jeans and artfully ripped black T-shirts came out and started walking towards them. Reefer seemed to recognize them and missed a step, recovering and starting forward easily. As they reached each other, Cally noted the strain in the smile on his face.
"Well, like, cool. More people. Hi, Janet. Janet, this is Marilyn. Marilyn, Janet." His voice had a slightly desperate edge to it. Cally stepped to his side and put an arm easily around his waist. Least I can do. He gave me a lift and he didn't do anything obnoxious on the way. Besides, Marilyn's sensitive.
"Oh, pleased to meet you." Janet tilted her head back to look up at the skinny boy next to her. "Thad, this is that guy I was telling you about, Reefer. He's a really good guy. Reefer, this is Thad."
The kid unwrapped his arm from around her waist to shake Reefer's hand. "Oh, like, cool. Janet says you're a pretty rad painter, dude. Good to meet you."
"Yeah, sure." He clutched the hand Cally had put around his waist and shot her a grateful look. There was an awkward silence as they looked each other up and down. Thad's red goatee clashed wildly with the electric blue spikes in his black hair. One shoulder, bared where the sleeves had been ripped out of the shirt, sported a tattooed head of a Posleen God King, crest erect, snarling. His forehead tattoo was a bright, metallic gold lightning bolt. His skin had the clear complexion typical of a generation that viewed acne with the same skepticism their grandparents had held for tales of walking through the snow to school in the mornings.
Cally broke the stalemate by pinching Reefer's butt soundly and grinning when he jumped. "Hey, babe, we gonna grab some eats, or what?"
"Hey, Marilyn, like, I appreciate the support but you don't have to do this." Reefer nuzzled her ear, whispering, as they walked down the residential corridors to Janet's suite, staying three steps behind his ex-girlfriend and the new guy.
"Shhh," she placed a finger over his lips, "it's allright."
"We can just go up and check into the hostel, separate rooms and all, and if I look like a dweeb, well, you got me through a real bummer of an evening. . . ."
"Shhh." She stopped him again and nipped his ear whispering, "I'm not offering to do the deed, but I need a place to crash, you need some moral support, just chill out and shut up, okay?" And not having to check in anywhere is good tradecraft.
"Hey, you two, get a room," Janet called back over her shoulder.
"We are. Yours," Cally grinned back. "Well, okay, your futon, anyway."
Beyond the inevitable futon, the first thing Cally noticed about the apartment was that the smoke detector inlet had been covered with duct tape, and filters cobbled together over the air vents. The second thing was the portable air scrubber over in the corner, plugged into the wall. The small den was shrunken even further by the dark holographic posters of various musicians and groups that papered most of the wall area. The exception was the square meter on which the thin vidscreen was hung. Black, red, and silver "fantasy fish" with various motifs programmed into their scale patterns swam back and forth in the screensaver program. Cally spotted an ankh, an elder sign (complete with electric blue flame), a spider's web, and a star of David in a circle before she shook herself slightly and resumed cataloging the details of the room.
The futon was set up in couch mode against the wall opposite the monitor. Two rooms led off from the den. One was clearly the bathroom, from the bare Galplas floor. The other had to be the bedroom. A small makeshift kitchen sat on and under a desk in the same corner as the air scrubber. Microwave, big bowl, and gallon jug of water on top, small refrigerator underneath. Various convenience foods were jammed in a mishmash in the shelves of the desk. A clutter of dirty laundry, empty food wrappers, empty cans and bottles, and cube cases covered the floor.
"Y'all like movies?" Their hostess strolled in with sublime indifference and brushed the clutter from one of the two fabric and steel lawn chairs onto the floor, picking up a scattered handful of cubes and sorting through them, looking up at Thad. "Whaddya think, luv, Lair of the White Worm, Evil Dead II, or Night of the God King: The Return?"
"I dunno." He walked over and opened the fridge and started passing out beer. "Maybe Lair, it's pretty cool. Hey, Reefer, do you live up to your name, dude?"
The other man glanced at Cally nervously, but he must have decided it was okay, because he shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and pulled his clothes out onto the floor, pulling out a largish compressed pack vacuum-sealed in clear plastic. Janet perked up, pulling a small plastic scale out from under the futon and tossing the pack on it. "A whole kilo? For us? Damn, Reefer, you did score. Good shit?"
"Like, I shit you not, that is the most righteously awesome Jamaican Blue you will ever find coming up the pipeline," he said.
"Not like I'd ever doubt you, dude, but I've heard that before." The girl eyed the package speculatively. "All right, usual price up front, we try it, and if it really is good shit, and I mean seriously good shit, say, ten percent of the face over in dollars."
"What, you mean you don't trust me? Damn, Janet, haven't I always brought you, like, the most truly fantabulous stuff on the whole route?" He clapped his hand to his chest in an air of injured innocence.
"Yeah, except for that shit cut with oregano," she said.
"Okay, like, once, four years ago. And the truly heinous bastard who did it doesn't, like, well, like, he's gone. I mean, like totally gone, okay? And that was the last time I ever let somebody handle my shit out of my sight. And didn't I make it right on the next trip? Didn't I?"
"Well, yeah, Reef, I'll give you that. Still, you didn't have to listen to all the bitching I caught in the meantime. All right, twelve percent face over dollars, then."
"Fifteen, FedCreds," he countered.
"Reef, I gotta be able to sell at a price the customers can afford. You're not the only guy on a convoy, you know. Ten in FedCreds is the absolute best I can do—eleven if you've got another kilo like it. And if it's as good as you said," she allowed.
He smiled slightly and pulled a second bag from the backpack, stacking it on top of the first on the scale. The buyer checked the weight and picked up a bag in each hand, comparing them carefully to make sure they looked the same, before setting them on the floor by the scale, nodding and going back to the bedroom. Cally heard a faint metallic click and the woman came back into the room with a large envelope, counting a mixed pile of dollars and FedCreds in front of her source, then another stack of FedCreds onto a milk crate with a plywood top that obviously served as an end table.
"Hey, Janny, if you're through buying it, can we, you know, smoke some of it now?" Thad asked plaintively, taking the cube she'd dropped beside the chair earlier and popping it into the player below the monitor. "This is such a cool movie. I mean, to watch it, you'd never guess it was based on a book by some old dude," he offered knowledgeably. "That's what the credits say, anyway."
The younger man moved a dirty T-shirt and picked up an older hardback from the floor, opening it to the middle, where a section of the pages had been cut away to make a box for rolling papers. Cally tilted her head enough to read Oliver Twist on the spine as he set it down and scooted over to hand a stack of papers to his girlfriend.
The girl put the full bag inside an empty, slit the seal with a razor, and took a zipper baggie from inside the milk crate, noticing Cally's raised eyebrows as she stuck a paper on the scale and added a careful amount from it, and an equal amount from the bag she'd just purchased.
"Premium North Carolina tobacco. Best cut there is. My old man's a bounty farmer," she tapped the bag of marijuana with a finger, "but he sure don't grow this. Too bad, but he don't. Good enough source of papers, though."
She rolled it with expert hands, lit it, and took a deep drag, holding it for a moment. She blew the smoke out, tilting her head consideringly and giggled a bit, passing it to her toy-boy.
"Damn, Reefer, you're right. This is some primo shit," she said, and nodded to him. He picked up the stack of FedCreds and stowed them in his pack.
When it was her turn, Cally noticed the two buyers watching her, and Reefer just as carefully not watching her. She grinned and took a long pull, holding it as she passed the joint on. The other three people relaxed slightly as Cally let the smoke out, allowing a silly-stupid grin across her face. Wonderful evening. The only straight in a roomful of stoneds. Well, at least it's the next best thing to anonymous and I don't have to do any of the three. In any sense.
The movie had played through its preview sequence and Cally scooted back to lean against the futon. At least it was a decent movie, and she hadn't seen it recently. After the second joint made the rounds, Janet pushed the scale and rolling papers away.
"No more for me. The munchies are hell on a woman's figure." She looked Cally up and down critically. "You should probably stop, too, Marilyn. If you don't mind my saying so, you're carrying a teenie bit extra on the hips."
"Oh, I never get the munchies." Cally smiled coolly, amused at the baseless slander.
"Well I do, dude." Thad rummaged in the shelves of the desk and pulled out a bag, sitting back down beside Reefer. "Cheese curls?"
"Hey, sure, dude. Thanks." He was clearly feeling more mellow as the drug took effect, and leaned forward to roll another one, skipping the tobacco.
"Ah, I'm not, like anal about weighing the stuff," he laughed at the sour expression on his girlfriend's face. "I love ya, babe, but you're anal."
She threw a cheese curl at him.
Cally sat on the opened futon and stared into the darkness, arms wrapped around her knees. Janet and Thad had gone to sleep, Thad completely out of it and Janet almost straight. Once the third joint had made the rounds, Reefer and Thad had got on like long-lost brothers. The older man now slept the sleep of the stoned, his snores competing with one of his music cubes to cut through the slightly irritating but completely nonintoxicating oak-leaf smoke. She sat in the darkness and didn't know what she felt, whether it was coldness, or numbness, or tiredness. She lay down against his rather odoriferous arm and sighed up at the ceiling. After a whole day of it, she was getting a little tired of Reefer's favorite songs . . . in again, I'd like to get some sleep before I travel, but . . .
She heard the snick of the apartment door unlocking and trained instincts must have warned her because she was already rolling off the futon, onto the floor by the door, as the door slid open and the two stocky women in security uniforms stepped through. What are the odds . . .
One of them tripped over Cally's outstretched leg as she stood. The world had gone into slow motion as Reefer sat up and began to blink owlishly in the light the other woman had flicked on as she came through the door. Cally tripped over the falling woman, just happening to catch the second one, trying to maintain her balance, and bringing her down as well. On the way down, the top of her forehead "accidentally" bumped into the second guard's temple, hard. Cally rocked back and sprawled on top of the first guard, just happening to be sitting on top of her shoulders, as she held a hand to her head and uttered a plaintive and bewildered cry.
"Ow!" She looked at a disbelieving Reefer blearily as Janet came hustling out of the bedroom. "I bumped my head!"
"Get off me, you stupid cow!" The first guard was swearing viciously. Cally shifted slightly on her shoulder blades and the woman jerked a bit and swore some more. She had clearly fallen on top of her own shock baton. The second woman lay on the floor, unmoving, as Janet, in a pink T-shirt, rushed across the room with a gray plastic pack in her hand and yanked the first guard's slacks away from one hip, jabbing her quickly with a hypodermic. She went limp. The dealer checked for a pulse on the second guard before breathing a sigh of relief and injecting her with another hypo from the pack.
"God, you were lucky. To knock someone out, you have to damn near kill them," she glanced up and down the empty corridor outside the apartment and shook her head slightly, closing the door.
"Ow," Cally repeated plaintively, holding a hand to her head as she got up off of the now unconscious guard and stumbled shakily to the bed.
"What in the hell happened?" Janet demanded, looking from Reefer to Cally and back at the guards on the floor.
"Um . . . I just heard a noise, and it startled me, and I tried to get up, but, well, I tripped. Ow."
"You tripped?" she echoed.
"Like, wow. That was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life." Reefer was rubbing his chin. "Yeah, Janny, I swear to god she tripped. It was, like, she was trying to keep her balance, and, like, there's no room with the futon opened out and all, and they just all went over. Like . . . wow, just wow."
"Do you have some Tylenol? I think I might have twisted my ankle, too."
"Wait a sec, lemme see your eyes." She held Cally's chin with one hand and tilted it up to the light, looking in each eye in turn. "Well, you don't look like you've got a concussion, I guess. Hell, your eyes look better than mine ever do after a night of partying. I think I'm jealous."
"Uh . . . what about them?" Reefer had stood up and hoisted his boxers a bit, obviously torn between looking at the guards and looking for his jeans.
"Uh . . . Tylenol's in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, go ahead." Janet gestured Cally off before looking back down at the bodies. "Well, they were obviously alone, or we'd all be unconscious and on our way to being locked up now. It's Greer and Walton. They're greedy enough. I think they just wanted to either shake us down or steal the stash outright. Um . . . lemme think a minute."
As Cally left for the bathroom, out of the corner of her eye she saw the other woman walk over to the kitchen-desk, pop something in her mouth, and pour herself a glass of water to wash it down with. She shut the door and used the facilities, flushing a couple of Tylenol down the toilet for good measure, scrunched her hair a bit to look more slept in, and went back to the living room to find Thad and Janet wide awake, if a little less straight than more. Reefer was helping Thad undress the women while Janet was spreading out a couple of blankets on the floor.
"Like, are you sure this is gonna work, Janny?" he bleared, tugging a shirt loose from one arm, then the other.
"Best I can think of. These bitches won't remember a thing, probably since lunch. Dump 'em sixty-nine in a corridor, douse 'em with beer, dump their clothes in the incinerator, the force'll be too busy covering up to ask too many questions. If they'd had the brains to tell anybody where they were going, we wouldn't be having this conversation." She shrugged helplessly and set a couple of cheap beers on the floor next to the blankets. "Just don't douse 'em until we get 'em there, okay, Reef? I don't want my apartment smelling like spilled beer for the next week."
Cally backed against the futon muzzily, bumping the backs of her knees and sitting down, hard, still holding her head.
"Um, can I go back to sleep?" she muttered.
"Uh . . . sure." Janet blinked at her a couple of times, but seemed to dismiss her from her mind as Cally rolled back into bed and pulled the other pillow over her eyes.
Without tourist money to sustain them, many Caribbean island nations had suffered something of a population crash and a certain consequent degradation of environmental assets, to put it kindly, during and after the Posleen war. Nevis and St. Kitts had been fortunate. Or wise, depending on your opinion. A strict policy that allowed immigration before and during the war only in exchange for FedCreds or large sums of dollars had enabled it to stock enough mainland food and Hiberzine to maintain both the original citizens and the select few new ones.
Regrettably, a hurricane that had struck the island had destroyed one of the facilities of Hiberzined patients. It was believed that not even Hiberzine would save a person who had been swept out to sea. Certainly not after the sharks had gotten through with them. The authorities had thus been left with large amounts in hard-currency deposits in the local banks with no next of kin to claim them. Under the circumstances, neither the locals nor the revived patients from the other two Hiberzine facilities had objected too strenuously when the government had poured the largess into postwar capital improvements designed to revive the island's tourist industry. There might not be much tourism in the post-Posleen world, but what there was of it Nevis and St. Kitts wanted, and largely got.
None of this was on the mind of the trim and balding, but otherwise young-looking, man in a speedo, lying under a beach umbrella, enjoying the salt air and a mai tai with one of those little paper umbrellas in it. His mind was instead occupied, as it frequently was, if truth be told, with money. Specifically, with the challenges of acquiring more of it while simultaneously keeping his primary employer safely ignorant of both the source and very existence of his extra funds.
His present location had a lot to do with meeting those challenges. He liked fast cars, big houses, and designer clothes as much as anyone, but those would have been a dead giveaway in his daily life. Instead, he had worked out a compromise that allowed him to use some of his moonlighting income while continuing with other little luxuries he'd come to enjoy. Breathing, for example. So in his daily workaday life, he lived on his inadequate, in his opinion, salary. Then, once or twice a year on his vacations, he dropped off the map. As far as work was concerned, he was a hiking buff who enjoyed roughing it in out-of-the-way places. Actually, of course, he would end up in places much like this one, where he could wear expensive clothes, eat expensive foods, stay in expensive hotels, fuck expensive women, and generally live in the style he preferred. At the end of his vacation, the clothes had to go in some charity bin, which bothered him not a little bit, but it was one of the temporary sacrifices he would just have to make until he could afford to retire. Very anonymously, of course.
A pair of very definitely male legs suddenly blocked his previously entirely satisfactory view of a slim brunette in a monokini. She didn't have much in the way of assets, but what she had was attractively distributed. He squinted up in annoyance at his unwelcome visitor.
"Mr. . . . Jones. Fancy meeting you here," the other man said. He was slightly built and dressed in swim trunks, but something about his haircut and bearing suggested either a law enforcement or military background. With dark hair and eyes, he looked almost like a late teenaged or early twenty-something kid, but the old eyes marked him as a fellow juv.
"Mr. Smith. Our appointment wasn't supposed to be until tonight." The balding man's voice had a slight edge to it.
"Let's just say I was impatient for your scintillating company, Mr. Jones."
"Well, have a seat, then." Mr. Jones gestured at the sand beside him, favoring the other man with a rather reptilian smile. Impatience could mean money. Money meant beautiful, long-legged women in much more intimate arrangements. He could make time for Mr. Smith.
"Your other information checked out, as I'm sure you knew when you checked your bank balance. This raises the prospect of more business, of course. We would be prepared to pay handsomely, for instance, for an organization name."
"I'm a big believer in job security, Mr. Smith. Too much too soon renders me too replaceable. Or worse, disposable. How about another agent name where you're penetrated?"
"We'd pay one hundred thousand FedCreds for that."
"What?! That's only half of what you paid for the last one."
"They don't know anything, Mr. Jones. As you doubtless know. We want a little more. We want something in your organization, Mr. Jones. Oh, we'll pay for the names of more agents in our organization. Have to do the housecleaning, after all. But we'll pay far more for, well, more. More, Mr. Jones. But one hundred thousand FedCreds is a lot of money. Of course we'll understand if you'd rather play it safer and settle for less."
The balding man gritted his teeth as the military man smiled at him. It wasn't a particularly nice smile. It had a knowing element to it that was rather offensive.
"I'll have to think for a bit about what I can offer you in that line."
"I can understand that, Mr. Jones. Just remember that we will pay more for more. And less for less." The man stood and brushed sand from his swim trunks, as if he wasn't used to walking around in clothes that were less than immaculate. "Until tonight, Mr. Jones."
Cally sat bolt upright in bed, searching the room as an unknown voice cheerily boomed, "Dude! Rise and shine. Surf's up and it's gonna be a righteous day!" Reefer groaned and tried to hide under his pillow. She stretched across him and shut his damn PDA off, getting back off of him quickly. At least part of the sleeping deadhead knew it was morning.
"Hey, Reef, convoy time." She shook his shoulder and took his pillow away.
He opened his red-rimmed eyes and bleared at her, blinking, before swinging his legs over the side and pulling on his jeans.
"Morning," he pronounced, "is an unutterably egregious thing."
She tilted her head and looked at him assessingly, pondering the wisdom of riding in a vehicle driven by this man.
"Provigil?" she offered brightly.
"Shit, yes, if you've got any," he said.
She rummaged in her pack a minute and came up with a tablet, pressing it into his hand. His eyes widened when he saw the "C" inscribed in the center of the sky-blue pill.
"You've got some good sources." He dry-swallowed it then grimaced and chased it with some beer left in a bottle from the night before. "This shit's mil-grade."
"Do we have time for me to grab a five-minute shower?" She rubbed the side of her face that smelled like unwashed male, telling her he'd been her pillow in the night.
"If you really mean five minutes and you don't care if I foam my face and brush my teeth while you're in there. I need one too. I'm pretty ripe. Sorry," he said.
"No problem." She snagged her backpack in one hand and went.
Later, as they waited for the convoy to finish assembling and pull out, she drank coffee and munched a protein bar, looking up at the mountain that rose above the Urb. Scott Mountain, the sign said. She didn't know the name of the smaller one to the east, but she could still see the remains of the old defensive works through the trees. Unmanned, now, of course. With each winter the ice must work a bit further into the cracks.
"Thanks for last night," the deadhead interrupted her reverie. "Um . . . Janet says you're, like, welcome to 'trip' at her place, any time."
"I was half asleep." She took a healthy swallow of coffee. "Do I want to know what you did with them?"
"Probably not." He grinned.
"Was it fatal?"
"Oh, hell no! You can't just go around killing cops, no matter how bogus they are. It's, like, unhealthy, man."
"Okay." She shook her head. "Sorry, I'm still not awake. They were cops? Are they, like, going to be able to track us down or catch us or something?" She looked around anxiously as if police were about to sprout from the parking lot around them.
"Don't panic." He laid a reassuring hand on her arm. "In forty-two years of my life, I've only been caught twice, you know? And none in the last ten years. Cops are, like, only human."
"Did you have to go to jail?" Her eyes got a little rounder as she looked at him over the rim of her cup.
"Nah. I learned the trade from my mom, like, she was fabulous. She knew the right people, you know? It was, like, expensive as hell, though." He looked off into the distance and popped a fresh piece of gum in his mouth. "My mom said that, like, before the war, the cops and politicians used to be really anal about, you know, what people took to get high. Like, now, though, some of the cops care, but most of 'em are on the take, and you just have to go up the line until you get high enough, and poof, for the right price, it all goes away. But, like, killing cops—they're still real anal about that. There's nothing'll make that go away. Or if there is, I don't know it, you know?"
"Quit talkin' about killing people, dude." She shivered delicately. "You're starting to scare me."
"Oh, well, like, yeah." He shrugged, punching in his favorite cube and setting it to shuffle. "Looks like we're starting to move."
She opened her PDA and went back to Marilyn's novel, yawning occasionally at the altitude changes as they moved on out to I-40 and the Smokies.
. . . Never mind how I stumble and fall. You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot for a taste of your elegant pride. . . .
The funny thing about the Smokies was that it didn't matter how many times you'd been through them, they always kind of took you by surprise.
The Blue Ridge was no kind of preparation for the great, sweeping walls of wet, dark rock, almost any of which could have served for wartime fortifications way back when, but none of which had, given the ease and economy of rigging the I-40 tunnel for rapid demolition. Fortunately for the people back in Asheville, it had never been necessary.
There was obviously less time and money spent on road maintenance through here than had apparently been the case in an earlier age. Remnants of netting or fencing or whatever still clung to the bare cliffs above the highway, but the going was far slower than it had to be, because you never knew when you'd have to swerve around a boulder sitting in the middle of the road that nobody had gotten around to moving yet. A few places, probably some of the worst judging from ancient, rusted signs warning of falling rock, had been Galplased over at some point, but judging by the dingy and mottled finish of those surfaces, it had been in the distant past.
After the tunnel and crossing the state line into Tennessee, the road maintenance improved dramatically, but, then, UT had made the Tennessee economy one of the bright spots of postwar Earth. With federal highway funds a thing of the past except in very rare circumstances, like the stretch from Charleston to Green River Drawbridge, a state's plenty or need could be clearly read in its roads.
Coming into Knoxville, she looked up as they reached the Tennessee River, looking out over the water as they crossed the bridge. On the road from Asheville, especially after the exit to Gatlinburg, they'd seen more and more nonconvoy traffic joining into the mix of cars and trucks on the roads. Even midmorning, they slowed surrounding traffic a bit coming into the Asheville Highway exit.
"We're, like, coming up on the end of the convoy up here at Volunteer Park," he said as they pulled off the interstate. "You've been a pretty cool passenger, you know? You're, like, totally welcome to, you know, hang out with me all the way up to Cincinnati, man. You won't, like, technically be a guard or anything, but, like, with no convoy dudes to maybe narc on me to my boss for having a passenger, it, like, doesn't really matter anymore. I can always say I dropped you off in Knoxville, you know?"
The parking lot was freshly paved and recently painted, and large enough to accommodate about twice as many vehicles as the present convoy. The park had a couple of ball fields, vacant in the middle of a school day, and, surrounded by a handful of cedars and well-tended flower beds, a brightly colored playground where a few mothers watched a gaggle of toddlers and small children swarm over the climbing gym and slides. Two of the little girls, in shorts and T-shirts, one with wispy child-blond hair and the other with tangled light-brown curls, were busily building a sand castle in a sandbox shaped like a giant turtle.
"So, like, if you need to take a leak or anything, you might want to hurry and get in line before the bus unloads, you know?"
When Reefer spoke, she jumped slightly as if for a moment she'd forgotten where she was, looking at him blankly as he continued, "It'll only take me a couple of minutes to check out from the convoy list and get my deposit back, and then we can, like, really make up some time. Gotta have the convoy for safety but, damn, it's slow."
He shooed her out the door and as she hurried across the parking lot to beat the rush, she saw him walk off towards the circle of drivers gathering around the convoy master.
The restrooms were in a strictly utilitarian cinderblock building, but there was a whole line of them. Having beaten the bus, she didn't have to wait. Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or pee goes double when you're female—at least for the last bit.
She checked her reflection in the mirror. The perm was, as expected, holding up well. Contacts were fine, but she'd want to take them out and clean them tonight. Nail polish was chipped and needed a touch-up—bad.
She got back to the van before Reefer did, so she sat down on the back bumper and took out the rose nail polish. She made her hand shake very slightly to keep the inexpert effect going. When he got back a minute or two later, they were already dry.
Back in easy wireless range, she downloaded another couple of novels while he checked his tanks. "I've got one stop downtown, you know? We can, like, grab some food in Lexington."
"I was surprised you sold off any of your stock in Asheville. I mean, wouldn't they pay more in Chicago? I know what I'd pay for live blue crab in Cincy, if I could find it."
"Oh, well, like, they would. This dude, I make the detour because he's a friend, but he pays Chicago prices just like anybody, you know? The rest of the way, I call ahead when I know about what time I'm coming through, and, you know, if they want any they meet me at an exit and make the buy. But really, almost all of it goes all the way there. If it weren't for the big money stock trader and banker dudes, there just wouldn't be enough demand to pay for the route."
As they drove into downtown on I-40, the view of the Knoxville skyline made a nice change from farms and mountains, even blurred as it was by a gentle haze of smog.
"What's with the giant microphone?"
"Huh? Oh, like, you mean the tower with the ball on top? Yeah, man, I guess it does look a bit like an old-timey microphone. It's way pre-war. It's, like, left over from some prewar 'World' something or other, you know?" He pulled onto 158 and headed for the riverfront
"Oh. That's kind of neat. Where's your friend's restaurant?"
"Oh, like right on the river. Awesome place, got a dock and everything."
"Is there something wrong with my eyes, or has everything gone suddenly orange?" Once they turned onto West Cumberland, the streets had suddenly sprouted big orange streamers and balloons with a silver atom symbol blazoned on them. They drove under a large orange banner that spanned the street, proclaiming "AntimatterFest '47!" Another welcomed them to historic downtown Knoxville, "Birthplace of the Antimatter Age!"
"Aw, man!" he groaned. "I forgot! They go, like, totally nuts for this thing. Parking will just be hell." He scratched his head and thought for a minute. "Can you drive?"
"Oh, sure. . . . Why?"
"Well, like, these people will jump all over my butt if I even think about double parking on the street, here." He waved a hand casually at the pedestrians, about half of whom were wearing orange beanies with revolving silver atom holograms overhead. "Geez, like never combine a consumer electronics town with a dorky festival. Antimatter fireworks and everything. Totally bonkers," he said, shuddering.
The light in front of him turned yellow and he slowed down and stopped behind the cars in front of him.
"Switch!" He slammed the gearshift into park, hit his seatbelt release, and was out the door, yelling, "Don't take off before I'm in the back, man!"
She snapped her jaw shut and scrambled over to the driver's seat, grabbing the door he'd left open, adjusting the seat, and checking her mirrors as he yanked the back of the van open and squeezed in between his tanks, shutting it behind him.
"Uh, like, I need to get some stuff out back here. Hang a left at the next light, and a left onto West Main. Just, you know, keep going around the block for a little while. Please?"
She restrained the impulse to laugh as he lurched around in back, avoiding the tanks, unbolting a false panel, stubbing his toe, yanking a couple of vacuum-sealed bricks of familiar dried vegetation out of the cavity, and fumbled with the false panel, trying to get it back in place with the van in motion. Finally, he got it and sighed, grabbing his backpack and shoving the packages in the bottom, covered by clothes.
"Okay, now don't turn this time, straight, farther up now, turn down this side street. Yeah, like, perfect. Okay, pull in beside this one, see the blue loading sign? Okay, stop right there." He grabbed his PDA and punched in a number from memory. "Hey, Pete, guess who, dude? Yep, like, in the flesh. On your loading dock, dude. Like, now. Well, I would have called ahead, but, like, I was busy trying to avoid all these people on the streets, you know? Oh, there you are. . . ." He hung up as a short, fat man in a white apron rushed out and yanked open the van doors.
"Geez, Re— Mister Jones, you know I only take delivery of the crabs here, I haven't had time to get Joey in place, he's still here, my reputation, I can't afford to get caught. This is not good, Mister Jones."
"Look, let's get this shit under cover. You would have been at more risk sending Joey out with all these people around and you know it." Cally smiled secretly to herself as some of her ride's surfer accent fell away.
"Awright. This time. Come in and grab a bucket. I got lots of extra customers today and I can move a few more of these. Who's she?"
"She's cool. Come on." He hurried the man away towards the doors. The shorter man looked like he was about to explode. After they disappeared Cally surreptitiously checked the sidearm Reefer had left for a full magazine and a round in the chamber, carefully smudging her prints as she set it back down. Not that hers were recorded anywhere, but it didn't pay to take chances.
He came back out alone with a large bucket of salt water and shoveled a bunch of soporific crabs into it, muttering under his breath as he hefted the full load. "It's, like, okay, Marilyn. It's all cool. My . . . friend, he's, like, shy, you know? We'll be totally back on the road in five minutes."
Her body language was casual and relaxed, but very still, until he came back out alone, emptier backpack on his shoulder, closed the back of the van, and came to the driver's side, motioning her to move over. She kept one eye on the mirrors while she did it, relaxing infinitesimally after they made it onto 275 headed out of town.
"Like, excuse me for that scene back there, and thanks once again for righteously saving my ass. With the driving thing, you know?" He looked across at her, speculatively. "You know, you're pretty cool in a pinch, Marilyn. You ever get, like, tired of college life and want a job, you come look me up. Little training and you could be pretty good at this."
"Why, thank you, Reefer." She looked out the window and bit her lip softly. "I'm hoping to make it on my art or my music, but you know what life's like. I'm really flattered. I guess I'll feel better knowing I've got a potential job if things, you know, don't work out."
He grunted and popped another piece of gum and they lapsed into silence as they followed the road through the deep cuts of the Smokies, some with loose gray shale Galplased in place, with a line of drainage holes down at the base, some of deep, black coal, rising from a Galplased base in great open hills of midnight, turning to a thin brown layer of topsoil mere inches from the upper surface of scrub and trees.
"Makes you understand the economics of strip mining," she commented, waving one hand at the mountain of coal cut open by the interstate's passage.
"Oh, for sure. Completely bogus for the environment, though."
"So were the Posties."
"Still are, man. Like, the long term damage from the grat and abat alone. Totally bogus. Damn aliens."
"Oh, are you a humanist? I didn't take you for the type, Reef." She looked at him, interested.
"Well, I mean, the Crabs once you get past that whole bouncing thing seem like pretty laid back dudes. Conceited, but you get the feeling that they're really going after the whole enlightenment thing. And the little green guys are just shy. The Frogs kind of creep me out, though. It's like you never know if you're being watched. The Darhel are . . . too corporate, you know? And, well, we all know about the Posties. I just think Earth was, you know, better, before any of them showed up. I mean, I'm glad we didn't get eaten, but I kinda wish they'd go away now. I'm not, like, a card-carrying humanist or anything, but, I can, like, see their point. You know, we saved each other, now go the hell away. But I don't, like, say so in public too much. Unhealthy."
"I suppose. We've got humanists on campus, but it's always seemed too much like conspiracy stuff to me." She shrugged.
"Yeah, well, you're what, about twenty? I'm twice that, man. If you had, like, lived and seen the saner-sounding humanists die off young, and the lunatic fringe doing just fine, and some of the accidents and such taking the sane ones looking . . . funny. Like, man, it smells so totally bogus . . . I just, you know, keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Oh, I don't, like, buy into that whole Darhel conspiracy theory stuff. I think it's probably more the big corporations trying to grab as much money as they can—the military industrial complex all over again, you know. The only way to, like, fight the whole establishment thing is to drop out, you know? Sometimes I feel like the only way to get back to, you know, the garden this planet could be is for all the aliens to pack up and go home and then, you know, make the big corporations illegal. Then we could all, like, live free, you know? But all I can do is, like, live as free as I can and, like, try not to run my mouth enough to wind up on the corporations' list, you know?"
"I guess I can see both sides. I mean, I had this pretty cool art ethics class that talked about the pressures we could expect in various kinds of jobs and their effect on creative authenticity. On the other hand, one of the most coveted class spots on campus is the live modeling 'Aliens in Art.' I still can't believe I got in. They have to keep the numbers of students really small. The thikp . . . tchpith . . . crab was really funny. Said something about thinking the peaceful pursuit of art was good therapy for bloodthirsty carnivore barbarians." She grinned. "Only he was so hard to draw, because they can't stay still, you know?"
He chuckled and they drifted off into silence again, him concentrating on the road and her reading another of Marilyn's romance novels.
Eventually the mountains gave way to rolling foothills of cedar, different kinds of leafy trees she couldn't have named if you'd paid her, and the occasional weeping willow. The less mountainous the terrain got, the more the hills were covered with strips of white or black board fences with horses or ponies grazing in the fields of lush grass, many of them females with foals. She had been disappointed the first time she visited Kentucky to find that the grass was not at all blue. Even now that she knew better it was vaguely disappointing.
The extraterrestrial market for horses had been one of the stranger outcomes of contact with the Galactics. The Indowy had been delighted with the intelligent, sociable herbivores, and even the Tchpth had been known to comment that perhaps Earth had an incipient intelligent and civilized species. While the Himmit didn't actually buy pets, they seemed fascinated by the interaction between equine and Indowy. The result was that the horse farms of Kentucky occupied more acreage in the state than ever and were currently selling as many animals as they could breed, particularly ponies and miniatures, as pets—making the industry one of the more reliable planetary sources of FedCreds. Once, they even passed a field where a couple of ponies were being inspected by an Indowy buyer, who seemed not the least perturbed that the mare and her foal were gently lipping its fur.
Reefer had phoned ahead as soon as they started to get into horse country, so when they pulled off the interstate into a Waffle House parking lot on the way through Lexington, he parked behind the restaurant right next to an ancient green SUV, whose driver put down his PDA and walked around to open the back glass.
"Why don't you go in and get us a seat? Might as well grab lunch while we're here." The deadhead nodded towards the restaurant. It was a busy, major street with a lot of restaurants, but he had parked to minimize the number of people who'd see him make his sale. Unfortunately, that meant she was hit in the face with a strong reek of Dumpster as she got out onto the hot asphalt, and she couldn't help looking a bit longingly at the upscale Italian chain restaurant across the street on the next block as she walked around to get to the Waffle House entrance.
She was seated at the counter, a seat saved beside her, had already gotten her coffee and was picking at a pecan waffle when he came in. It didn't take him long to wolf down an omelet and Coke, then they were back on the road. Even though they didn't go into the center of the city, almost all of Lexington was certified historic. Her throat felt a bit funny and she wondered if maybe she was coming down with a touch of a cold, or maybe allergies. It was like driving through a tiny slice of prewar Earth, and she focused determinedly on her screen as the landscape flashed past the windows at speed, slowing down occasionally when a chirping from somewhere under the dashboard betrayed the highly illegal piece of equipment hiding underneath.
The first time it went off, she could feel him looking sideways at her. When she looked up at him and shrugged, looking back to her book, he grunted noncommittally and popped another piece of gum, but he didn't seem worried from then on whenever the detector sounded—he just slowed down until the tiny red light on the cube player turned off.
It was mid-afternoon when he dropped her off at a gas station off the Hopple Street exit in Cincinnati. As she got her backpack and suitcase out, shook hands, politely fended off another job offer, and watched the van drive back off towards the interstate on-ramp, she could hear the strains of his cube music cruising through their perpetual shuffle. . . . can't revoke your soul for tryin', Get out of the door and light out and look all around. Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me; Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me . . .
She shook her head with a wry smile as he drove out of sight and took her stuff over to the pay phone to call herself a cab, then sat on the bus stop bench next to the phone and waited, studying her surroundings and the intermix of tall, very narrow old townhouses with small-scale industrial buildings on each side of the street. The bus stop was between the gas station and an appliance repair shop. Across the street, she could see bits of the downtown skyline through gaps between a couple of the houses and a squat, brick machine-shop, but most of it was grayed out into dim, jerky geometric shapes in the smog.
It gave General Beed a feeling of importance to be summoned—well, invited, really—to a meeting in Chicago to discuss his next assignment. After the war, well, there were a lot of old generals with a lot of experience who were, now, going to live a long time. He had been lucky to stay on active, running the Southeastern Regional Criminal Investigations Division. It was a more important position than it looked, at first, since the southeast was vital to the reclamation of the rest of the forty-eight states of the continental U.S.
This conference room would have done credit to any prewar Fortune 500 company—the glossy wood conference table, corporate art on the walls, the plush carpeting in one of those pinkish colors that probably had a fancy name, and fresh paint on the walls—it was all a throwback to a prewar opulence that you rarely saw these days, especially in the service. And the view from the Fleet Strike Tower was fabulous. Rank definitely had its privileges. He raised a hand to check by feel that his mustache was in order, running a light hand over his dark blond hair to check it as well, careful not to disarrange it—although with a good strong touch of hair spray that was not much of a hazard. He almost didn't mind cooling his heels waiting for General Vanderberg. Almost.
The major general, when he came in, didn't impress Beed. The exchange of salutes, as always, gave him a brief period to size the other man up and develop a first impression. Rejuv helped, of course, and he couldn't fault the man's uniform or grooming. Still, a general officer of Fleet Strike should look like a general officer, and this officer's crooked nose, almost connected eyebrows, and leftover juvenile acne scars left an overall impression of, well, ordinariness, that was not, in his guest's experience, representative of what a good general officer should be. Unfortunately, no one had asked him. Still, one showed respect for the rank, and the man at least appeared fit in a way that spoke of commendable continuing devotion to his PT. He had, like Beed, the whipcord runner's build that one tended to associate with good soldiers, and he warmed a bit towards the other man.
"General, you've been ordered here in connection with a highly sensitive counterintelligence assignment. Before I go any further, let's get this out of the way. The information I am about to relate to you is Top Secret Codename Hartford. You will not discuss any of this information with anyone not specifically on the list of persons cleared for Hartford; you are not authorized to add persons to the list of persons cleared for Hartford. The codename 'Hartford' is itself classified and you are not authorized to mention Hartford to anyone not on the list cleared for this operation. Do you understand?"
"I understand, sir," he said gravely, straightening his already perfect posture.
"We have recently become aware, and acquired conclusive proof, that an organization hostile to both the Federation and Fleet Strike exists that has demonstrated both the will and ability to place agents within Fleet Strike at a fairly high level and have those agents operate undetected for extended periods of time. That is practically the sum total of the information we have about that organization, and we wouldn't have that without a combination of a security failure on their part and a piece of good luck and good thinking on the spot."
"Sir, that sounds . . ."
"Preposterous, impossible, outrageous—yes, I know. All of those. We've hesitated to speculate, out of concern for getting locked into preconceptions, but we've prepared a list of known groups or ideologies with hostility towards the Galactic Federation, or the nonhuman races, or Fleet Strike itself. They range from elements of the government of the United States to the humanist movement to Families for Christ."
"Families for Christ?" Beed asked disbelievingly.
"They apparently strongly disapprove of the number of marriages that have broken up after only the husband was rejuvenated. They allege a successful Satanic conspiracy to destroy the American family. And, of course, there is some cross pollination between their group and the humanists."
"With the U.S. government I presume you're thinking of the Constitutionalist Caucus of the Republican Party?"
"Every group has its lunatic fringe. They're still very unhappy that the original contracts with the Galactics for construction of the Sub-Urbs forbid any change to internal rules that make them weapons free zones for civilian personnel." Vanderberg shrugged, "As I said, this part is only speculation. Our actual knowledge is appallingly scant. Your mission relates to an operational plan we have developed for remedying this problem."
Vanderberg stood and began to pace.
"You will shortly be assuming command of the Third MP Brigade, headquartered on Titan Base. Most of the brigade is forward deployed, under able subordinates. Your XO, Colonel Tartaglia, is competent enough that, absent the rejuv bottleneck created by us oldsters, he'd have been promoted long ago. Your headquarters office is in close proximity to CID, which will give you a conceptually familiar environment and ample time and energy to devote to this mission. Because you're going to need one person you can absolutely trust, I'm going to be sending my own aide with you as your new aide de camp. He's fully cleared for Hartford material, and I'm sure you'll find his services as helpful as I have."
"Forgive me a minute, General, but did you say Titan Base? While it's a prime command, I'm rather bewildered about why we'd select it for a counterintelligence operation."
"Physical security is significantly greater on Titan. For various reasons we don't believe the enemy organization, whatever it is, will be as strong there. After the first phase succeeds, we don't want to take any chances on an extraction. But let's go ahead and get your new aide in here." He scratched his chin briefly.
"Jenny," he addressed his AID, "send in Lieutenant Pryce."
"Certainly, Peter," the cool soprano voice answered.
While he did not like having his aide de camp chosen for him without any input on his part, his first impression of the slight, dark haired young man was favorable. Understandably nervous in the presence of highly ranked superiors, the lieutenant was obviously uncomfortable that the tray of coffee he was carrying prevented him from rendering the requisite salute. The general had just had time to reflect that the young man's gray silks were, appropriately, immaculate, when the first impression took an abrupt turn for the worse as that idiot Pryce tripped over his own feet and dumped the entire tray of hot coffee and accessories thereto into his lap.
"Holy fuck!" Beed jumped to his feet, face beet red in pain, rage, and shock as the hapless junior officer brushed ineffectually at Beed's now soaked and stained silks with the small paper napkins that had been on the tray with the coffee. It probably would have been better had the napkins not already been soaked with the spilled coffee, themselves. As it was, he restrained himself from giving this utter moron the dressing down he deserved, barely, with the knowledge that such a display would not look good in front of the more highly ranked general, and worse, his infernal AID. Damned things recorded everything, including understandable but embarrassing moments best forgotten. While embarrassing, the present situation was definitely not understandable, but the junior officer's dressing down would properly be done privately by his own current CO.
"Jenny, could you send Corporal Johnston in with some paper towels?" The major general did not appear fazed by his aide's social faux pas. "Pryce, why don't you get the general a fresh cup of coffee."
"Uh, no! I mean, that's quite all right. I'm fine."
"Actually, we're about done with the face-to-face material here, anyway. I'm sure you want to change into a fresh uniform as soon as possible, so why don't I just send Pryce here around with a printout of the background and briefing materials on your new command. I know you prefer hardcopy." Vanderberg stood and offered his hand and there wasn't much Beed could do other than shake it, even though he was less than thrilled with his new CO. "Welcome aboard."
"Glad to be here, sir. Appreciate the opportunity."
After the still dripping brigadier general had gone, Vanderberg turned to the hapless lieutenant and broke into a grin, "Lieutenant's bars become you, General Stewart. Especially with that peach fuzz face of yours."
"Hey, can I help it if I'm still a fairly fresh juv? So why were you so insistent that I drop hot coffee on the prat?" General James Stewart poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from the tray Corporal Johnston had brought in immediately after Beed left.
"I didn't tell you why I hate his guts?" He pulled open his side desk drawer and removed an unlabeled metal flask, unscrewing the cap and pouring a generous dollop into his own mug, raising an eyebrow at the younger man.
"No, General, I took it on faith that you had a very good reason." He extended his cup and stirred in what smelled like, and was, very decent scotch.
"You met Benson. She used to work for me in logistics before she took leave to raise a family." Vanderberg leaned back against the edge of his desk, taking an appreciative sip from his mug.
"Brunette, about up to here?" Stewart's hand indicated a point roughly even with his chin.
"That's the one. She used to work for Beed. Had one of the worst OER's from him I've ever seen. Derailed a promising career. Benson was, by the way, excellent in logistics, and a fine young officer, in my estimation."
"You're saying she didn't earn the lousy OER."
"I'm saying the son of a bitch fucked her because she wouldn't fuck him. But she couldn't prove it. No wonder the bastard won't have an AID anywhere in his vicinity. Not to mention that there have been several incidents where his fellows from the Hudson School for Boys have just barely saved his ass."
"Okay. That explains the coffee." Stewart grinned. "So why this particular setup, and why the masquerade?"
"Tell you over dinner. Jane hasn't seen you in a long time." He tapped a cigarette out of his pack. Cigarettes had enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among juvs, now that they couldn't hook you or kill you. "Jenny, call Jane and set dinner up, okay?"
"I'll get right on it, Peter."
"Oh, by the way, you're going to have to have your AID disguised as a PDA. Beed barely tolerates the latter because they can be told to turn off, instead of recording everything and dumping it all to the Galactics' central storage like the AIDs do. Beed will have you tell it not to record. A real PDA would obey that order. Your AID not only won't obey, but is smart enough to understand the necessity of acknowledging the command as if it were going to comply. God, I love real AI," he said, grinning evilly.
"Doesn't it ever bother you that the AIDs have learned how to lie?"
"It probably would, except that I learned long ago not to waste my time and energy worrying over things I can't change. So, James, have you talked to Iron Mike lately?"
"Had a letter from him last week, as a matter of fact, apologizing for not being able to make the triple nickel reunion."
"Not even by AID?"
"The Posleen on Dar Ent were getting frisky. He was in the middle of a battle."
"Now if that isn't just like him. Other than that, did you have a good turnout?"