Abbado keyed the unit channel. “C41, doesn’t anybody have a job to do?” he snarled. “Come on, there’s not a problem! Out!”
“S’okay, we’re going,” a policeman said. The group of them moved down the trackway.
“Have a nice trip,” Ace Matushek called. He dropped the grenade back into a side pocket.
“Six West!” Abbado called to the civilians staring at him. “We’re going to take you folks to Deck 19, but we’ll wait a bit to let some of the folks ahead of us clear the lifts, okay? Let’s just relax for a bit.”
A woman started to cry. A pretty one, too. Jeez, he’d really stepped on his dick this time!
“Can I help you pick those up, ma’am?” he offered brightly. And it wasn’t till he knelt to help the old lady with her packages that Abbado realized he was holding his powerknife. The blade trembled like caged lightning in the bright sun.
“Look,” Seligman said to Esther Meyer as they waited for a construction crew to lay decking over the maze of conduits in the corridor floor, “the cits who live in the building, if they want to go play colonist, that’s fine. But it’s not right they take us staff along! I’m a services supervisor, I’m not a fucking farmer.”
Seligman was an overweight, middle-aged man with a red face and wavy hair implants that didn’t match the fringe remaining around the edges of his scalp. He acted angry because he was scared and ashamed of it.
He ought to be ashamed. Scared of going off-planet!
“You think this was their idea?” Meyer asked. “I heard they got drafted into this, same as you.”
Meyer hadn’t been drafted. Everybody in the Strike Force was a volunteer. Sometimes she tried to think back to when she took that step forward. Stupid fucking thing to do, but she couldn’t imagine an existence in which it hadn’t happened. Funny.
“Don’t you believe that crap!” Seligman said. “Horizon Towers isn’t full of peons, these are cits! They don’t get orders they don’t want. Or if they do, they call somebody so high in the Unity you and I couldn’t breathe there, and the order gets cancelled. If they’re going off-planet, it’s because that’s what they decided. And they’re dragging me along, just like I was their pet dog.”
The service personnel were supposed to operate the colony’s heavy equipment and provide the sort of support that they’d given the building residents, the citizens, on Earth. The Population Directorate was like a hog processing plant: it used every part of the pig except the oink.
“Life’s tough all over,” Meyer said. Two workmen held plating in place as a third drove a welder down the seams. As soon as the deck was complete, she could deliver Seligman to the storeroom where he’d wait the arrival of the on-voyage consumables for which he’d be responsible.
The welding trolley reached the end and turned around. With the other two workmen jogging behind, it whined toward Meyer and Seligman. One was talking into a lapel microphone.
“Hey, is this safe to walk over?” Seligman asked as the crew came past. They ignored him.
“They’re walking on it, aren’t they?” Meyer said as she started down the corridor. She’d be glad to see the back of Seligman. Civilians had to be told every fucking thing. It gave her the creeps, being around people who didn’t know how to react.
“All right, this is where you go,” Meyer said, opening the door. “It’ll be keyed to your palm-print after the goods arrive.”
They stepped inside. Meyer bumped the doorframe. She’d projected a corridor map on her helmet visor with a sidebar giving specs of the storeroom and its contents. She was used to looking through a thirty-percent mask, but she moved awkwardly because normally Heavy Weapons set up in open terrain. Working in a ship was a new experience.
The volume was empty except for the omnipresent tie-down anchors. The strip lighting in the moldings flickered; somebody in the construction crew shouted angrily in the corridor. Seligman chalked his initials, WAS, on the door. He didn’t have a helmet database to distinguish between identical panels.
“Ah, hell,” Seligman said miserably as he looked at the barren gray cell. “I told my brother-in-law, you know? He’s in district government. I figure, he can do something. And you know what he says?”