Third World (15 page)

This kind of problem was right out of
the book. If the man gave trouble, he could always up the ante—they
were all on the Queen’s account, and field allowances, while not
lavish, carried at least some weight as they were paid in coin of
the realm. This was always of concern on a planet without a
currency or standard rate of exchange of its own.

“
Me and the missus have one
room, and my girl can sleep with her. My son has a room, but he can
go sleep at his aunt’s.”

“
And where will you sleep,
sir?”

“
I have a couch in a room
right beside the kitchen. I can sleep there.”

Newton smiled and patted the man on the
arm.

“
Thank you, and don’t think
I don’t appreciate this.” Newton had more thoughts. “Ah. I’ll
instruct my troops that everything in the room is someone’s
personal possessions, and we are guests here. Nothing will be
touched, I assure you, kind sir.”

Flatter the man a little, that might
help.

“
Oh, ah. Well.”

Newton patted the man on the shoulder,
which didn’t seem to reassure him much.

“
I want to put some young
female troopers all in the same room. A couple of the male officers
can bunk up or just sleep on the floor. It will be good for them to
set an example. Ha! If we have to, we can put a couple on top of
the pool tables. At least it’s warm and dry in here.”

The troops all had sleeping
bags.

The sound of pots and pans and crockery
rang out from a small cubby window behind the bar, and a cheerful
face, a lady with a youthful visage but prematurely grey hair,
looked out and gave him a wave.

“
That’ll be the wife.” The
man stuck out a hand. “Call me Jim. Her name’s Magg.”

They shook hands, the grip tightening
when Newton spoke again.

“
What’s the going
rate?”

The fellow answered straight away with
no hesitation.

“
Two dollars a night per
person.”

“
I’ll pay ten dollars per
head, plus whatever they buy in meals and beer.”

Jim blinked and then quickly
nodded.

Shapiro had the impression they had
made friends for life. Maybe they had—maybe they had.

Chapter Twelve

Newton Explained the
Situation

While most of them were still in the
front rooms, Newton quietly went through explaining the situation,
which with the level of maturity exhibited by some of the troops,
could get out of hand fairly quickly. Out in the brush, there was
little they could do except wander off or fall down a ravine,
neither of which they had shown much propensity to do. It was why
he had tacitly tolerated a certain amount of grousing, even an
innocent kind of back-talk from the more innocuous ones. Here there
was property that could be damaged and people who could be
offended, injured, or other liabilities that could be incurred, all
of which entailed time, effort, paperwork, higher authority and of
course money to resolve.

The trouble was, they were entitled to
some time off duty, and there was the rub.

It wasn’t exactly a war-zone and he was
asking a lot in some ways. Some of them were just kids far from
home for the first time and he understood the psychology very well.
They signed up for adventure as much as anything. Patriotism and an
eagerness to get at the enemy were all very well in basic training,
it disappeared quickly once a recruit had a permanent assignment,
and Fleet duty was better than some. For some folks, it was a
chance to get away from home for the very first time in their
lives. They didn’t have a strong basis of life experience to keep
them on an even keel.

A wave of exhaustion swept over him. He
still had to call up to the ship and give the daily
report.

If only he could sleep in—just once.
Aboard ship, when he was only on duty one-third of each day, he
could at least go to bed early. He got a day off every five days.
Then, if he wanted to lie in bed an extra hour, he could do it. He
could take naps at odd hours or even at lunch. He didn’t have a
bunch of people traipsing all over the place and looking to him for
inspiration.

Napping simply wasn’t possible with
this sort of field duty, and it was wearing on him.

With the click of pool balls and the
soft rumble of talk from a few metres away, he sat at the end of
the bar where Jim habitually lurked. He exchanged the smallest of
talk with Ensign Spaulding, and Jackson had shown up too. Where the
others were was of little consequence to Newton, probably still
upstairs getting the sleeping arrangements sorted out. He could
hear them walking around up there. He was fortunate to be able to
delegate some of the workload, if not outright
responsibility.

It was good to delegate once in a
while.

“
So, no response from the
ship?” Beth’s eyebrows rose.

This was the first time that had
happened in her experience, but then she’d never done any sort of
ground-side duty before.

“
None.” Newton took a long
pull from a beer that was wet, but unfortunately not very cold as
they had no ice this time of year and the electricity didn’t come
out this far.

“
Shit.” She took a pull from
her beer.

Raising her eyebrows, she held it up to
the light and took a look at the label, then shrugged.

He already knew that, but accepted the
beer and the explanation with thanks. The news was that they would
be firing up the generator first thing in the morning as there were
guests and things would get better as the day wore on. Jim said
he’d been having trouble with it, so the prospects were fifty-fifty
in his words.

“
Ta da!”

They looked up as Magg, co-owner and
chief cook and bottle-washer as she said, bustled out of the back
room. The daughter was named Victoria and the boy Samuel. They came
and went and seemed to be hard workers, more willing and able than
some of his troops, that was for sure. They were mature for their
age and used to the sort of labour where you saw the results
straight away in terms of comfort or sustenance. Magg visited
several tables in turn.

Without a whole hell of a lot of
education, Newton wondered how the boy in particular would turn
out, what sort of a man he would grow into. It was an odd thought.
Would he pine for places distant and glamorous? Would he long for
the bright lights and night life, the concerts, the entertainment
and culture of Earth? Kids of a certain age loved their music. It
was a perennial problem with the troops, as virtually everyone had
their own music pod. In combat conditions, as CO, he would have
asked them not to use them, especially not while on patrol or
sentry duty, and confiscated them from anybody who couldn’t get
with the program.

“
Knew it!” She placed a bowl
of salted peanuts on the bar in front of Newton, balancing a flat,
round tray with several more bowls with her other arm. “I looked
all over the place for these.”

She looked around
appraisingly.

“
The people in the back
would love some of these.” Magg was a cheerful sort.

She went down the bar and around the
corner.

“
I wondered where she got
off to.” Jackson reached casually over and hooked a few nuts out of
the bowl. “Mmn. Not bad. With a product like this, it usually keeps
pretty good.”

He munched with a beatific look on his
face. Grabbing the peanuts, under the astonished glance of Beth
Spaulding, he picked up the bowl and held it under his nose. He
drank in the smell with a bizarre look of ecstasy.

Jackson looked at Newton.

“
I haven’t had peanuts in
about seventeen years. For some reason the ship never has
them.”

An expensive import, the sort of thing
that could only come from one place.

“
So, what’s our plan?” Beth
brought Newton’s attention back to matters at hand.

Reaching over, she took the peanuts
away from Jackson. Newton smiled for the first time in what seemed
like hours.

Jackson seemed to be slightly drunk,
but not loud or obnoxious. Newton thought he was still on his first
beer, but some folks tolerated it better than others, he knew that.
He’d just never seen it in Jackson. The man was so separate, so
distinct from all the others that Newton had it figured that the
guy must have it all together. Jackson was grizzled where the
others were just soft.

“
Well. The town is about two
kilometres long, half to a quarter wide, and it stretches maybe a
half to one kilometre out that north-east line from this position.
There are what, four hundred souls?” Newton figured one day to
patrol the town, hit a couple of other trails, one or two villages
and hamlets nearby, and then start heading back. “A half a dozen
blocks, a few side-streets. Paths running out into the hills to the
south.”

“
What about the surrounding
areas?” Ensign Spaulding didn’t really care if they caught any
deserters or not.

She liked to know what came next. It
was a lot more comfortable with some planning and forethought.
Otherwise things got balled up in a hurry, and consulting with all
these people could be frustrating.

“
I was thinking three
patrols, and this time we’ll keep a watch in a vehicle—maybe two or
three people.”

She nodded, thinking.

“
Do it all in a
day?”

“
Yes. In this muck foot
patrolling will definitely be quicker.” Newton took a small sip of
foam, noting the grains of salt on the upper lip as they went by.
“Being out of contact changes nothing, and it changes
everything.”

“
Yes. We’re three days at
least from the shuttle.” Beth had nailed his unspoken
thoughts.

There was silence. Two troopers,
Hernandez and Ozawa, came down the stairs immediately to their left
in their sock feet and headed around to the tables in the far front
corner. Ozawa in particular had a lean and hungry look as he
snatched at the menu. Hatcher and Grimaldi showed up next, dropping
into their seats with a furtive look at their seniors.

“
Ozawa.”

The young man turned.

“
Sir?”

“
These people were just
going to bed when we got here. Keep it simple, okay?’

Ozawa gave him a thumbs-up.

Newton turned back to Spaulding and
Jackson, who was clearly listening well enough.

“
How do you see it,
Lieutenant?” Jackson was still nursing that last
half-inch.

“
What? Oh. Most likely
water, the equipment is probably soaking wet. All that steam and
condensation in the cab, is what I’m thinking. Faber says he’s
heard of it happening before somewhere, I don’t know how accurate
that is.”

“
The suit radios still
work.” Beth raised an eyebrow.

“
Yes, but they’re
battle-tested, and heavily cushioned. They have
frequency-buffering. The portable field set is maybe not so well
designed for smashing and bumping around. It may be the encoding.
It may even be equipment failure at their end.”

She nodded, working away at the
significance of it. It would have to be a serious event if that was
the case.

“
Burp.” Jackson seemed in no
hurry to move on to the next beer.

Maybe he wasn’t a drunk, who
knew.

Newton was glad to have Beth along,
Jackson was all right but he was kind of a loner, an excellent
soldier in the old-fashioned sense. He seemed to do well around
camp, while others were a pain in the ass, and Trooper Sims a
veritable pest. He didn’t have anything in common with Jackson.
Jackson was sufficient unto himself, and he wasn’t even an officer,
he was a in a specialist technical trade. He was neither officer
nor trooper, and so he held himself aloof in some ways and Newton
just had to live with it because Jackson sure as hell didn’t care
one way or the other.

***

Early the next morning Ensign Spaulding
and Faber took six troopers up the northwest road, which petered
out in a hamlet called Concord. That took care of them for the day,
and in the evening the squad could take some time off. According to
their reports, the road was little better than a game trail beyond
that point. The map showed it leading another hundred and fifty
kilometres. Newton shuddered at the implications of that. Imagine
living up there year-round.

Jackson and Semanko took five troopers
and began tramping the paths and laneways, seeking out the small
farms and homesteads in the immediately surrounding area. They also
would be off duty that evening, and Newton was left in town with
the least able crew. His taking them was a disciplinary thing, more
implied than real. They could loaf around under his jaundiced
eye.

The trouble with these folks wasn’t in
their intentions, neither was it in their intelligence. Somehow or
other they were hard to work with. He could find little good to put
in the report as to their abilities and usefulness. They weren’t
particularly flawed characters, in fact a dose of anger or pride or
defiance might have been a little better to work with. They were
amiable and apathetic. With this bunch he didn’t know where to
start, and so they would be on duty this evening. Apparently there
was a dance, and all the other troopers could go if they
wished.