Nightfall_at_Algemron

It occurred to Gabriel that since Danwell, he had come by some form of protection—or rather, a protector. He thought of the little edanweir child that he had picked up so casually, in big-friendly-uncle mode—only to find that the child was the one who was in charge, the conduit or perhaps the hiding place of some old power that had been waiting inside one or another of the edanwe people for a long time, waiting for the right combination of circumstances and people. Had she passed something or someone to Gabriel in turn? For a month or so after leaving Danwell, after the strangeness of his experiences there had a little time to wear off, Gabriel had felt that he had left the influence or attention of that power behind. It had, he thought, only been interested in the stone. Now, though, he wondered if it was the other way around? Was it the stone that was interested in that ancient intelligence on Danwell? Did I just stumble into some old association that had been broken for a while—a few tens of millennia or so—and was now reforging itself?
He had no answers. I need to talk to Enda about this, Gabriel thought, but definitely not right this minute. This was not a place to discuss your troubles. It had a pressured feeling, like a cooker with the top bolted on, slowly getting ready to blow.
After a while Helm came in, looking very sour indeed, along with Delde Sota. Helm sat down and folded his arms and would not say a word. Doctor Sota sat down beside him, leaning back in one of the much-used chairs with as much apparent ease as if she were sitting in her own lounge.
She smiled at Gabriel and said, "Assessment: our party most interesting thing to pass through these parts in a while."
Then Angela and Grawl came in. Angela looked pale and annoyed. Grawl was narrow-eyed with anger and growling after every breath.
"You okay?" Gabriel asked Angela under his breath.
She gave him a sidelong look and replied, "Yeah." She would say nothing else.
A few moments later a Galvinite soldier came in and said, "All right, you people can go. Your ships are in impound until you're ready to leave."
"But we have data to dump—" said Enda.
"Guess you won't be lingering in town, then," said the soldier and grinned a most unsympathetic grin. "You said you were going shopping?"
"Lalain's," Gabriel said.
"Go out the front door here and pick up a transport. They'll drop you at the access/exit facility in Fort Drum. Walk west half a kilometer—you can't miss the place. They'll ship the stuff back here for you, so it can be searched and packed."
A few minutes later they had been bundled into a small transport flyer and were taken to the exit facility in town, a blockhouse-like building also surrounded by high blast walls and weapons emplacements. Here each of the six travelers was given a chip embedded with his or her picture and ID details, each one covered with the repetitive statement PROPERTY OF FSA.
"Show that to anyone who requires you to," said the bored officer who made the IDs. "Do not attempt to purchase anything without showing this ID. Do not discuss local politics. Do not enter any premises that show a representative of this ID with a negation sign over it. Do not attempt to leave the city without authorization. Be back by 1700 local time if you wish access to your vessel before tomorrow at 0800. Enjoy your stay in Fort Drum."
They went out into the street, a long stretch of concrete with mostly military traffic parked along it. "You know," Enda said softly, "I think that the tourist board here has its job cut out for it." "You don't know the half of it," Helm growled. "Did you know what that—"
"Advisory," said Delde Sota. She paused. They all looked at her, for such pauses were unusual. "Can it. Invitation: go shopping."
They went.
Chapter Six
It was without question the single most unpleasant city Gabriel had ever been in, and as a Marine, he had seen a lot of unpleasant cities.
It was not that the place was physically unattractive. Fort Drum was actually extremely handsome. Wide swathes of parkland and arboretum, patches of what looked like native forest, and pools and grasslands alternated with broad avenues and clusters of handsome buildings. The place looked much less populated than it was.
But Gabriel knew what the field sites concealed: vast hardened bunkers containing power plants and hospitals, comms facilities and computer centers, transport junctions, storage caverns and armories, all built to the orders of Galvin's Supreme Commanders. Down those wide airy avenues, Gabriel kept hearing the menacing rumble of armored weapons carriers. Uniformed and helmeted men came out of every street, stopping them and asking for their identification and looking at them as if they were almost certainly an enemy in disguise. For Gabriel, who for the moment felt like no more than an innocent shopper with Concord dollars to spend, it was all extremely wearing.
The thing that made it most annoying was not the soldiers and the weapons—he had dealt with enough of those in his time—but people's faces, just the ordinary faces of citizens in the street. There was a peculiar look to them, not the "planetary look," famous among Marines and other service people, who claim they can tell the inhabitants of a given world from some attribute particular to that planet among all others. No, the faces of people here had a pinched quality, a hard look. People's eyes were narrowed, and their faces seemed very constrained. They always seemed to be looking sidelong at things and at each other, as if afraid to be caught looking. as if afraid of something they might see. The hard look was set deep in everyone over the age of fifteen, as if long years of never letting it go, even during sleep, had stamped it there indelibly.
Gabriel found himself wondering what you had to do to people to make them look this way. Numerous possibilities suggested themselves to him, and he liked none of them. The most likely one was, "Have a hundred-odd years of war." Another was, "Make sure that no one knows whether or not the person walking down the street behind him is in the secret police." Gabriel knew that the Galvinite Internal Security Directorate had thousands of uniformed and plainclothes officers watching and listening to their people, making sure that they adequately supported the war effort—meaning that they never spoke against it. For his own part, he was determined to keep his mouth very shut indeed until it was time for them to go.
The store they were hunting was close to the access/exit facility. Lalain's called itself, perhaps due to some obscure family tradition, a "Sundries Supplier." It was in fact a hardware store and ship's chandlery of magnificent, even florid proportions. Nearly two acres of space was filled with every kind of supply for people who lived and worked in space. Gabriel could have happily spent their entire day—hell, he thought, two or three or four!—ranging around and examining the merchandise: the mining and exploration gear, the beautiful range of pressure suits, the ships' equipment and ancillary vehicles, the clothes, the furnishings, the accessories, but every time he turned into a new and interesting aisle, he came up against someone wearing that same guarded, hard, uneasy face. After a while it took all the enjoyment out of what he had come to do.
Gabriel sighed and got on with putting together his order. By the time an hour had passed, he had two large induction palettes and the better part of a third packed with low volume staples and a very mixed assortment of "specialty" single-pack foods, the kind of thing that would serve to break the monotony if they were out for an unusually long time.
Enda, walking along with him, looked at the big pile of staples and sighed, rather ruefully. "I remember telling you that you were going to have to stop eating like a Marine," she said. "I did not expect you ever to take my advice quite so much to heart."
"You never do anyway," Gabriel said, slightly amused.