Truck tried to catch his watery, old-animal eyes.
'You're off your head. You know this charge is a frame? You know this General Gaw woman?'
Nodes smiled, staring off down the corridors.
'You know, that isn't much of a contribution, is it John? Honestly? If I offer you a more constructive relationship than that of officer and detainee, you should come some way to meet me, shouldn't you?'
'For Christ's sake stop calling me that.'
Truck thought, I should have kept moving, I could have been halfway across the Galaxy by now (steering for the bloody edge). It was too late for that. He felt the world turn beneath him, obstinate, grinding, heavy. 'Too much gravity.'
'What was that you said, John?'
The corridors paled, cooled; they came into a sort of front lobby with wide glass doors. A drunken spacer slumped on a bench, belching ruminatively; he glanced up as Truck passed. 'The fact is, bos'n, I need surety — ' he began, blinking. He saw Nodes, shrugged, closed his eyes, and retched disinterestedly. Outside, a thin gray sleet was falling on half a dozen blunt, armored Fleet vehicles drawn up against the curb, spattering across the wide, wet street on brief gusts of wind. Fleet marksmen with oily reaction rifles and subtly polarized contact lenses covered the surrounding area — lounging bored and professional, eyes slitted against the wind.
General Gaw was waiting for him there — he saw her through a scum of condensation on the glass. She had discarded her Women's Army uniform for a black coverall which accentuated her small but well-shaped potbelly and brutal thighs. She was carrying a yellow riot helmet in the crook of her arm. She grinned as Nodes ushered Truck through the doors, said something to one of the marksmen. A short, metallic laugh rang down the quiet street
'Welcome home, sonny. Cold enough to freeze your bum, eh?' Truck hesitated on the shining pavement; the wind whipped his hair across his eyes; he shivered, and fumbled with the zip of his second-best jacket. The General, though, was impervious to weather. She scowled ferociously up at him like a one-eyed parrot, her head turned slightly. Shook her index finger at him.
'Oh' — drawing the syllable right out and clicking her tongue with huge enjoyment — 'oh, but you've done it now. If only you'd been a bit sensible about it all, lad. I could have saved you all this — '
She took his arm in a steely possessive grip. The Fleet executioners shifted unobtrusively into a pattern of maximum security, placing themselves on likely lines of fire, their hard eyes flickering to and fro across Truck before going to sweep the misty intersection at the end of the block, the slick, damp rooftops. The sleet fell faster, soft and wet. 'You and I are going to have a quiet talk, laddie, somewhere nice and dry.' She laughed. 'A quiet talk!' she repeated loudly, grinning round at the marksmen.
Abruptly, one of them let out a high-pitched cry, raucous and mechanical. He fluttered his fingers rapidly in front of his eyes to adjust the polarization of his contact lenses, and began firing off his weapon. Bolts flared up into the sleet, vanished utterly. At the intersection, gray shapes shifted jerkily in the murk.
General Gaw shoved Truck powerfully away from her and screamed, 'Get him back in there, Nodes, get him back -!' She seated the yellow helmet like a bulbous growth on her head, spun away. 'Well talk later, Truck, when I've squashed these rats.'
As she vanished into the gloom a great, groaning concussion shook the street, filling the air with bits of floating paper and plastic and dust.
FIVE
Under the Snort with the King of the Moment
For an instant, the sleet fell as mud, bellying like a curtain in a storm wind as the wave front of the explosion pushed it down the conduit of the street. Track staggered back toward the doors of West Central with his knees quivering and his hair wrapped round his face (the cilia of some wet friendly animal, tickling his eyes and filling his mouth). Above him, the concrete symbol of hinterland justice broke up into powder and stones and fell like a waterfall, the globes shattered, the balance dropping away, the grasping hand dissolved.
'Sodding hell!'
He stared up at it, terrified,
Lumps of it bruised his shoulders, beat him coughing to the floor. Nodes dragged him into the lobby, pushed him headlong into the cool plastic floor where he lay trying to ignore his soaking wet trousers. Something burned its way through the glass and battered itself into a glowing smear on the further wall, hissing furiously. The drunken spacer surfaced from some maudlin contemplation of his confinement, stared wildly about him. He shouted, 'Christ, skipper, Number Five's dropped its load again!' blinked enormously, and rolled under his bench.
Truck twisted round to get a look at the street. Visibility was a dead loss. Engines raced as the Fleet tried to get its vehicles out from under; patched with a dermatitis of half-melted sleet, they maneuvered in blunt confusion, booming and roaring. General Gaw was invisible in the murk, but he could hear her voice raised in anger. Slow red bolides arced through the weather to a common vanishing point, and the reaction rifles coughed and choked like sick old men.
'Who the hell is that out there?' he demanded of Nodes.
The IWG man gave it consideration, his tired eyes resting on the commotion outside. 'I'd say that's a politically naïve question even from you,' he decided. His hands discovered a small Chambers pistol in one of his pockets. He pointed it at Track. 'I think we'd be safer away from here, don't you, John?'
As they backed cautiously out of the lobby, the spacer stirred beneath his bench. Down in the abused recesses of his skull some vestige of a martial emotion prodded his bruised brain. He raised a wavering contralto and, after a couple of false starts, assayed a passage from the Finnsburg fragment:
' "Each man made his private piece with Reagan/And, at a signal, released/Heat seekers, side winders, desiccant, decorticant, defoliant;/They ran out their salvaged disrupter grids,/Swallowed their anti-sympathy pills,/Hoping for a sight of the enemy." '
His delivery was round and tremolando; he drew great sobbing breaths between the lines and beat out the intervals with his horny hand. Pleased with the acoustics of West Central, he began on 'Salute the Fleet!' — guttered into a gloomy silence three bars in.
'God bless you, bos'n,' he called after Truck. He belched, gazed disconsolately round the flickering, vacant lobby. 'You're a sterner man than I am!'
Later, Truck said, 'I think we're — ' But then, he owed IWG nothing. He shuffled along, feeling dismal and exposed, while Nodes pursued a steadily downward course, into the chilly and echoic deep-detention levels where nobody had bothered to plaster the walls. Every three or four minutes, a fresh explosion — perceptible here only as a sustained vibration in the soles of the feet — shook the peripheries of the building.
Condensation dripped from the expansion joints in the ceilings, growing milky nubs of mineral, and seeped across the sour untreated floors. It was a warren of right angles: clusters of small-bore pipes followed the passages, faithfully, like giant circuitry; dust furred the ventilators. Peculiar underground winds whistled aimlessly in the stairwells. Nodes avoided the elevators, 'in case of power failure, John.'
'Look, I think we're being followed,' Truck admitted finally. The soft whisper of feet — receding feathery echoes, hesitant, spasmodic — had unnerved him.
The warren opened out into an underground motor pool, a wistful gray light leaking down its access ramp. It was empty but for a few Port Authority five-tonners, jacked up and incomplete. Old rags and bits of paper blew around the oily floor and mere were little mounds of dust in the corners.