An empty eighteenth site waited immediately west of where Farrell stood with his patched-together command group. The prickly nut grass crawling across the ground there was yellowed. The roots had been cooked by eddy currents between the buried magnetic mass and the starship launched a few days before.
“I don’t remember the last time I was in a civilian port,” said Lieutenant Marina Kuznetsov. She’d been CO of First Platoon. By virtue of being the only other officer who survived Active Cloak, she was now Farrell’s XO. “This isn’t much like I expected, though.”
Sgt5 Daye, C41’s First Sergeant, said, “Active Cloak was a civilian port. Part civilian, anyhow.”
“It wasn’t a lot noisier when we were there either,” Kuznetsov agreed.
Pallets just unloaded from a ten-car train were being gobbled by construction crews. The port’s only permanent buildings were five-story rammed-earth barracks, one per site. Every room had a balcony, and the walls’ basic dirty-yellow hue was overpainted in garish patterns. Farrell found the result attractive if not in any sense of the word beautiful.
Even when the facilities are the same, civilians live better than soldiers. Well, they’ve got something to live for.
Farrell would have tried to find a reporting office in the nearest barracks except for the high fence which surrounded the building. There was an eyeprint lock on the gate, and the sign said SITE PERSONNEL ONLY.
It was hot and dry. Mesquite and prickly pear cactus ten feet high grew between the sites. The strikers didn’t have helmets or other equipment, just battledress uniforms so new they had a chemical odor. Farrell felt naked and angry and very, very tired.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s anybody in charge in the ship. If there’s no billets for our people . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. There was no finish. The rest of his strikers were scheduled to arrive in forty-seven minutes. If nobody’d arranged for C41’s housing and rations, if they’d been sent to the wrong place, if they had to spend the night in a fucking scrub desert with no gear at all . . .
What else was new?
10-1442 was constructed with the extreme simplicity of an object which would be used once and then scrapped. The entrance hold was the entire bottom deck. For the moment it was bare of everything except grime and cryptic symbols chalked on the plates around the support pillars. Inside a workman in blue coveralls was fitting a fresh bottle of insulating foam to his spray head.
“Hey, buddy,” Farrell said. “We’re looking for the project manager, Jafar al-Ibrahimi. Got any notion where he’d be?”
“Nope,” said the workman. He pulled down a clear mask to cover his face and began spraying the bulkhead. The foam went on a dull white but darkened to gray in seconds. The smell made Farrell sneeze; his eyes watered.
Daye switched off the sprayer.
Kuznetsov lifted the man’s mask away and tossed it behind her. “Do better,” she said. Her voice had sounded like a crow’s ever since she took a bullet through the throat.
“Hey, I got a deadline!” the workman said.
“So do we,” said Farrell. “Forty-three minutes. Where do we find the project manager?”
“The upper decks got finished first,” the workman said. “I’d guess he was up in the nose, somewhere around there. But look, I don’t know. Can I do my job now?”
“Maybe in a bit,” said Daye. “How do we get to the nose?”
The workman grimaced and pointed toward the pillar along the axis of the ship. “The lifts are that way,” he said. “Three and Four work, the others I don’t know about. They didn’t this morning.”
“Thank you, Citizen,” Farrell said. “Marina, would you wait by the hatch? I don’t know how long this’ll take, and I don’t want our people to arrive and not have anybody meet them.”
“Yeah,” rasped the lieutenant. “They might get the idea that nobody gives a shit about strikers.” She walked back outside, whistling a snatch of Tchaikovsky.
There were eight lift shafts in a central rotunda, but hoses and power cables snaked into five of them. The door of the sixth was open into an empty cage. Busy workmen in blue, puce, or orange ignored not only the strikers but anybody wearing a uniform of a different color. They shouted to their fellows or into epaulet communicators.