Base Thomas Forberry was loud with vehicles, construction work, and the frequent roar of starships landing or lifting off from the nearby port. During lulls in the other racket, Kowacs could hear the thumping of plasma cannon from the perimeter. Some officers of the units on guard duty were “clearing their front of areas of potential concealment.”
Blasting clumps of trees a kilometer away wouldn’t prevent the infiltration attacks the surviving Khalia were making; but it did a little to help the boredom of guard duty in a quiet sector.
The civilian detention facility lay along one side of the road. Scores of wan indigs stared out at the traffic, careful not to come too close to the electrified razor ribbon that encircled the prison camp. The military government had already started rounding up Bethesdans who were reported to have collaborated with the Khalia. They’d be held here until they’d been cleared—or they were handed over to the civilian authorities for trial.
When the Fleet got around to setting up a civilian administration.
“Poor bastards,” Kowacs muttered, looking away from the bleak hopelessness of the internees as the jeep crawled past at the speed of the trucks choking the base’s main north-south boulevard.
Sienkiewicz shrugged. “They live in the same barracks as us,” she said. “They eat the same rations. They sit on their butts all the time without a goddam thing to do, just like we do.”
Kowacs met her eyes.
“So tell me where their problem is?” she concluded.
“Same place ours is,” Kowacs agreed without much caring whether the driver could hear him also. “And we’re going there now.”
* * *
The parade square in the center of Base Forberry had been covered with plastic sheeting as soon as the three-story Base HQ and the District Government building were finished—and before crews had completed the structures on the other two sides of the square. Tracked machinery had chewed up half the sheeting and covered the remainder with mud of a biliously purple color.
It was the same color as the silt which had seeped into Admiral Takami’s office when storm winds flexed the seams of the pre-fab building.
Kowacs saluted as carefully as he could, but he’d never been much of a hand at Mickey Mouse nonsense. The District Governor frowned—then scowled like a thunder-cloud when he noticed the Marine was eyeing the purple stain along the edge of the outer wall.
The other naval officer in the room, a commander with good looks and only a hint of paunch, smiled at Kowacs indulgently.
“Well, Kowacs,” Admiral Takami said, “Sitterson here tells me we need you in this district. I’m not going to argue with my security chief. What’s a government for if not security, eh?”
“Ah?” Kowacs said. He couldn’t understand what the governor meant.
He prayed that he didn’t understand what the governor meant.
“What the governor means,” said Commander Sitterson in a voice as smoothly attractive as his physical appearance, “is that the ground contingents are all well and good for large-scale operations, but we need a real strike force. The governor has had the 121st transferred from Naval command to the Fourth District government.”
Well, Kowacs had never believed God listened to a marine’s prayers.
“Well, I’ll leave you men to get on with it,” Takami said dismissively. “I have a great deal of work myself.”
As Kowacs followed the security chief out of the office, he heard the governor snarling into the microphone embedded in his desk. He was demanding a work crew with mops and scrub brushes.
“I thought you’d rather hear about your reassignment from the governor rather than from me directly,” Sitterson said in the anteroom. “Not a bad old bird, Takami. Won’t get in the way of our carrying out our job. Did you keep the car?”
“No sir,” Kowacs said. He was trying to grasp what had just happened to him and his unit. He couldn’t.
“No matter,” Sitterson said, though his frown belied his words. “We’ll walk. It’s just across the square.”
He frowned again as he noticed that Sienkiewicz, carrying both rifles, followed them out of the building.
“My clerk,” Kowacs said flatly.
“Yes, that reminds me,” Sitterson replied. “I’ll want one of your men on duty at all times in my outer office. I have living quarters in the building, you know. I can’t be too careful.”