“Yes,” said Lundie. “Horizon Towers in the Central Chicago District. Every resident of Earth is subject to Colonization Orders, but this particular technique has never been used before.”
“Did some computer blow a fuse?” Farrell asked. “Or did some dickheaded human really think this was a good idea?”
“I can’t answer that,” Lundie said. When she spoke on most subjects, her voice had the false rhythms of an AI program forming words. This was so flat that perversely it indicated real feeling.
“Rations and other consumables for your company have already been loaded into these two compartments,” Lundie continued. “And there’s a large compartment here—”
“C41 bunks aboard while the ship’s being finished, you mean?” Daye interjected.
Lundie looked at him. “The ship will be finished very shortly,” she said. “Liftoff is in six hours, twelve minutes.”
She opened the door as she’d started to do. There was nothing to be seen but an empty room. Throughout the vessel, ringbolts on all flat surfaces provided anchors for cargo nets and tie-downs.
“—for your personal stores and equipment. There’s a separate compartment for use as an armory.”
“We keep our hardware with us in C41,” Farrell said flatly. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Lundie’s face was still. “That isn’t necessary on the voyage,” she said carefully.
“It’s necessary if I’m going to sleep,” Daye said. “I’m itchy right now, ma’am.”
“C41’s pretty stressed,” Farrell said. He didn’t know how to explain to a civilian. “I know there’s a risk, but I think the risk is worse if I, if we . . .”
Daye grimaced. “Look, ma’am, if you can get us reassigned to something we know how to do, that’d be great. We’re strikers, we’re not, we’re . . .”
“Arrangements for security personnel are yours to determine, major,” Lundie said. “Assignments to the Bezant 459 project are of course from higher levels of the government.”
She cleared her throat as a period, then continued, “The colonists will be arriving in three hours. Since your helmets have full communications and mapping capacity, we’ll use your personnel as guides for corridor assignments. Initially only the upper seventeen decks will be complete, so . . .”
Farrell continued to listen to the young woman. From long experience he’d be able to reel off her statements word perfect when he assigned individual missions to his people.
But Farrell’s heart was in a dark place of its own, and his soul was as dead as the strikers C41 had left scattered across a galaxy at war.
The landscape of spiky trees and spiky grass, scattered sparsely over gritty dirt, could easily have been a frontier planet. Abbado hadn’t known there were parts of Earth that looked like this.
It was probably news to the colonists being herded off the train by uniformed police, too. The largest expanse of vegetation most of the civilians would have seen before was their apartment building’s roof garden.
The poor bastards stared at their surroundings with shell-shocked expressions. “They better get used to it,” Abbado said aloud. “I don’t know about Bezant, but I’ve seen a lot of planets that make this look like an R&R base.”
The police carried shock batons. They weren’t hitting people with them that Abbado saw, but they chivied the civilians with their free hands while the batons waved.
“This ain’t right,” Glasebrook muttered. “I don’t like us being mixed up with it.”
“Cheer up, Flea,” Abbado said. “This assignment got us off Stalleybrass fast. I wasn’t much looking forward to answering questions about a little problem there at a cadre bar.”
Abbado had been more relieved than he would admit to his strikers. The morning after they’d shot up the REMFs he’d been asking himself how the hell he’d let himself do that; but at the time, at the time . . .
The police wore riot helmets and breastplates, not a patch on Strike Force equipment for weight but not particularly comfortable in this climate either. That was probably part of the reason they were treating the civilians like animals.
Already some strikers were shepherding ragged columns of civilians toward the starship. “Sarge, we’ve found ours,” Horgen called over the squad push. “We’ll see you at the billet. Out.”