Murphy chuckled. "Ah, that magnificent scent of this here world isn't just mere cows, girls, although there's sure some of 'em about, nor horses, neither. You'll see once we get out into the open and past these formalities."
Some illuminated arrows on the wall of the docking bay indicated direction, and they turned, Chung as pilot leading the way, and headed for the customs symbol. Murphy went behind, then the three passengers, with Maslovic bringing up the rear. The sergeant wanted to make good and sure that he had the whole party in sight the whole time, even though he knew that any modern freight terminal like this one had to have full monitoring. He had seen these girls disappear from the state of the art in monitors before.
You could certainly tell that they had landed in the industrial part of the spaceport, if indeed there was any other part. The place was dirty, stained with who knew what on the floors and walls, and it looked like you could take your fingernail and run it across any point and come up with a large glob of unknown composition.
Once out of the bay and into the loading dock area, they had to go slowly and carefully to keep out of the way of robotic vehicles moving containers full of goods or running empty ones back to the various ships. There were also some really nasty-looking creatures about, most quite small and trying to feed on the dropped matter without getting squashed. These included millipedelike insects so large that a few were the size of human arms, with ugly pincers at their heads and giving off threatening looks; huge hairy spiders; lots of flies and roaches; and quite a number of scuttling things that looked not even close to anything any of them had seen before. The one thing that struck them all, though, was that the seamier side of wildlife on Barnum's World seemed to be oversized.
"Yuk!" Mary Margaret McBride said over the din of port business. "I suddenly feel like things are crawlin' all over me!"
"Just don't step on anything livin' or the remains of somethin' live in them bare feet," Murphy warned. "Some of these got poison. Otherwise, just ignore 'em and they'll ignore you for the most part. They got their business here and we got ours!"
The arrows ended mercifully at a large set of double doors that slid open as they got to them and remained open long enough for them all to get inside.
"Ow!" Irish O'Brian exclaimed as her foot hit the point where the door met the floor. "What the hell was that?"
"Critter barrier," the old captain told her. "Just don't step right on that place where the door's kinda rubbed from openin' and closin' so much and you'll be fine. It's just a mild shock to keep them things from comin' in with us."
There was a second doorway forming a flimsy airlock of sorts just ahead, and from the ceiling a blue energy field, very thin and quite transparent, formed a kind of curtain they would have to pass through. It didn't take a genius to figure out what it was doing; the carcasses of incredible numbers of flying things not only had piled up just in front of it but there was a constant crackling and buzzing as more things that made it past the ground barrier were stopped in midair.
"This one'll tickle you all over," the old captain warned. "But if ye think ye picked up anything, it'll nail that, too. No hitchhikers!"
He was right. It did just tickle. Still, both Moran and McBride stopped ahead of it and seemed unwilling to go through, while Irish O'Brian hardly gave it a thought.
Maslovic smiled. "Come on, girls! It won't hurt you, your babies, or anything else! Promise! But no more creepy crawlies," he promised, adding to himself, until we get back outside, anyway.
Eventually, first McBride, then Moran, got up the nerve to step through, particularly when some of the large flying insects started making for them and their hair, and it was done.
The terminal wasn't really a passenger terminal, either, although it had a small section for that. Mostly it was for captains of orbiting freighters to check in, get their records and orders and bills of lading straight, and to arrange to have whatever part of their cargo was destined for here off-loaded by tugs and delivered to the right docks or for the cargo to be picked up to be put aboard. Only small vessels like port tugs and the occasional shuttle came through this area; there was a commercial passenger shuttle bay on the other side for the use of such passengers when a liner or fully equipped passenger module on a freighter was available.
A woman with short hair and dark skin and eyes wearing a lime green uniform approached them, nodded crisply, and said, "Military shuttle passengers follow me, please!"
Maslovic couldn't help noticing that the woman, clearly Customs and Immigration, had given a more than cursory glance at the three pregnant young women and there was a fleeting look of surprise, perhaps disdain, when she'd done that.
If anyone was here to meet the passengers, clearly they weren't going to be wearing a uniform.
The young woman punched in a code and a sliding door opened on the far wall to reveal a moving walkway. "Does anyone need to sit down?" she asked. "You can pull down seats if you like from the far wall, but please do not touch the area outside of the walkway."
The three young women all looked more than relieved and, when they followed the leaders onto the belt, immediately pulled down the hinged seats and sat.
As they went, they were scanned as thoroughly as they ever had been in their lives. By the time they reached the end point of the walkway, perhaps a kilometer or so, the master Customs and Immigration computers could tell them how many hairs they had on their heads (if they had any), where their scars were, what they'd had for breakfast, and almost everything else. At the end, each of them had to stand and place their right index fingers in a small fitted slot before moving on. Although none felt a thing, their genetic histories were now added to the files.
It ended at an unstaffed set of kiosks. A green light would go on, and you had to enter, one at a time. Lieutenant Chung was first, depositing the credit and authorization cube from the shuttle. It would allow the navy pair to charge throughout the city region and order whatever maintenance was necessary on the shuttle. The others were simply asked by a disembodied voice to state their full names, their planet of origin, and how long they would be on Barnum's World. The girls were told to say "We don't know at this time," to that, which resulted in a warning that they had a week to find out and notify authorities or they would be located and deported.
There was nothing else required of them. No matter where they went on Barnum's World from this point, their own DNA matched to the database just compiled would be known, and their every move tracked within the city. Outside of the city, the transport would be known, so that authorities generally could find them as needed.
The one thing the girls couldn't do was buy anything. That made them totally dependent on Murphy for now, or on whoever might meet them. Murphy wasn't all that worried about that part of it. Even on their own, he bet himself that the girls and their funny gemstones would allow them to buy almost anything they wanted without the transaction ever even registering. When you took over a naval frigate, what was a government tracking system?
For all the precautions taken, and this was typical of modern, well-run colonies now, even Murphy knew how to bypass almost every system they had, and he didn't even have to.
Finally, they reached another double door setup quite like the last part but this time much cleaner and better maintained. When they went through the second of them, though, they were back into the hot, humid, and smelly air of Barnum's World and now facing transport into the city. It ranged from robotic taxis and a basic mass transit train to the more exotic. There were carts about, and carriages, and all sorts of other conveyances, which were in many cases pulled by great beasts the likes of which none but Murphy had ever seen before. Elephants, both Indian and African type, and camels, among others.