“You’ve brought your family to the Zone?” Evertsen said in amazement. “Good God, I didn’t know that!”
“I shouldn’t wonder if a lot goes on around here that you don’t know about, Colonel,” Crais said with not quite a sneer. “We’ve got a dugout as snug as you please with paneling inside. Lute doesn’t hunt with me—it’s no more his thing than it would be your nephew’s here, I reckon—but he takes care of the kids and the garden. We’ll have all our own food come this time next year.”
“Where is it you live, Mistress Crais?” Janni asked with careful politeness. He was too much a gentleman to allow Crais’ belittling to affect him openly, though Evertsen had seen a vein throb in the boy’s throat a time or two during the conversation.
“Nowhere, now,” Crais said, turning her cold eyes onto him, “but it’ll be an estate in a few years when things settle down. Me and mine’ll be here on the land, and no rich party-boy from Capetown will take it away from us. There’ll be no more scraping a crop from sunbaked clay the way my family’s always had to do.”
She caught the line of Janni’s eyes and tapped the broken sovereign. “This, you mean?” she said. “This came from Lute’s family. My folks arrived at the Cape without a pot to piss in, but that’ll change, boy. My son and the girls, they’ll be folk as good as any walking the streets of Capetown!”
Crais looked out the viewslit. Vehicles were still grunting and snarling through the entrance baffles. It might be an hour before the last of the convoy was safely within the perimeter of Fort Burket.
“The outbound convoys drop me on the road and I hump my goods home myself,” she said. She was obviously pleased to tell a young aristocrat how hard her life was and how well she succeeded. “From a different spot each time. Most of the hostiles couldn’t track a tank over a grass lawn, but I don’t make it easy for them. When I come in, I wait at Depot Seven-niner for an inbound convoy.”
She grinned. “You don’t stand out in the middle of the road and flag a convoy,” she said. “Not even me.”
“How do you get into the fuel depot?” Evertsen asked, both from interest and because he saw that the chance to talk—to brag—put Crais in a better mood. “I’d have thought the garrison would be just as quick to shoot as the convoy escorts are.”
Crais shrugged. Even the simplest of her movements were as graceful as a gymnast’s. “We have click signals on the radio so they know I’m coming,” she said. “And they know they need me. Depot Seven-niner would do better to take down its barbed wire than to lose me patrolling the district.”
Her left hand reached under her cape and came out with objects on a string. “That’s talk enough,” Crais said. “I’ve got six hundred aurics coming. Pay me and I’ll arrange for my needs.”
She tossed the string onto the center of the desk. There were six items tied on a strand of sinew. Shrivelled up the way they were, they could be mistaken for mushrooms or nutmeats, but of course they were—
“Those are human ears!” Janni said. “Good God! Some of them are from children!”
“Your uncle don’t trust nobody, boy,” Crais said with a sly grin toward Evertsen. “Not the Ralliers and not even a fellow citizen from the hardscrabble part of his own country. He wants proof, so we bring him the left ear from every kill.”
She looked at Evertsen. “So here they are, Colonel. Want to soak them open so you can be sure I’m not trying to cheat you with a right ear or two?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Evertsen said without inflection. He and Kuyper had seen more ears than Crais had, many more of them. They were experts by now, well able to make sure the State wasn’t cheated by the irregulars in its service.
“The lieutenant’s right,” Kuyper said. “Four of these are children. Stay-behinds, and all the men able to carry a gun off with the guerrillas.”