“Six,” said Coke. “Is there a problem?”
“Not for six,” the woman said. “I was going to take the operations van home anyway. My husband has our—”
She caught herself, flushed, and continued. “You see, the port bus just left with your ship’s crew. They didn’t say anything about passengers. I suppose they wanted to get into Potosi before dark.”
Her skin was white, though from her dark lips Coke suspected she would tan to an umber color. She wore neither make-up nor, apart from the combs and crucifix, any jewelry.
“I’m Pilar Ortega,” she said. “I’m the, well, I’m the passenger services officer, but for the past few months I’ve been sort of running Terminal Operations—to the extent they’re being run.”
“What sort of entry formalities are there?” Coke asked. “Cantilucca is part of the Marvelan Confederacy, isn’t it?”
The building was none too clean. From the sound of the static broom which the team’s entry had interrupted, Pilar was doing not only the terminal director’s work but also that of the janitor.
“Here, I’ll log you in as well,” Pilar said with a grimace. She turned to a console and brought it live. “Call your friends inside, will you please?”
Coke nodded to Vierziger, who moved to the door.
“The clerks in the Commission office next door have all gone home,” the woman explained as she sorted through electronic files. Her fingers were tapering. They moved a light pen with short, positive strokes to control the holographic data. “High Commissioner Merian is …isn’t as diligent as he might be. To tell the truth, so long as the port duties are paid, the Confederacy doesn’t bother much about Cantilucca.”
The team entered the terminal building in a smooth movement, forming a chain to slide all the luggage inside ahead of the personnel. Pilar looked up from her console to eye the cases. “It’ll be tight,” she murmured, “but we’ll fit.”
“Is the city far?” Johann Vierziger asked. His voice was calm and melodious, but his eyes never rested more than a second in one place. Watching him was like following a tiny, ravenous insectivore as it snuffled through the leaf mold.
“Two kilometers is all,” Pilar said. “The usual separation in case of a landing accident. But sometimes the road—”
She looked up again. “There are people here who inject tailings from the gage refineries. It can make them dangerous. It’s better not to be on foot when you’re out of town. Potosi isn’t anything more than a town.”
Without changing her inflection she added, “May I see your identity chips, please?”
“Gage tailings are poison,” Margulies said as she gave Pilar her ID chip left-handed. She and Vierziger were both nervous, though that wouldn’t have been obvious to many outsiders. “Why use them when the whole planet’s full of the pure stuff?”
“Poor people, of course,” Pilar said primly as she fed the chips into a slot on her console. “Gage on Cantilucca is controlled for export. If you expected”—she glanced up sidelong, then back to the console—“to find it running free for the taking in the gutters here, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”
“That won’t really affect us one way or the other, Mistress Ortega,” Coke said. “Ah—are there dangerous life forms on Cantilucca?”
“Only the human beings,” Pilar said. “Some of them. Many of them.”
The console popped the ID chips forth one at a time at half-second intervals. Pilar scooped them into her hand and distributed them to the members of the survey team. Though she scarcely glanced at the imprinted legends, she returned each to its owner on the first try.
“There,” she said as she closed down the console again. “In theory, you should come in tomorrow when the clerks are on duty and go through this again. But I can’t imagine anybody will mind. Half the time nobody shows up next door at all.”
She took a deep breath and shook herself. “Are you ready to go?” she added.
“You bet we are,” Margulies muttered, eyeing the translucent door behind her. A starship coughed plasma again, brightening the panels into feathery iridescence.
Pilar stepped into the office on the other side of the counter and returned a moment later with a dark wrap. She opened the gate in the counter and said, “This way, then, please. The van is right outside.”
Vierziger led again. He moved with serpentine grace, that one. He didn’t appear to have hastened to get from one end of the room to the other ahead of his companions, but there he was.
Coke was impressed with Vierziger. Lieutenant Margulies’ face was unreadable, but there was more to her expression than mere professional appreciation.
The night was as Coke remembered it, warm and muggy. He couldn’t understand why the woman had bothered with an overgarment, until he noticed that it turned her into a shapeless blob without sex or individuality. He wondered whether that was more of a comment on Potosi or on Pilar’s personality.
Beside the building was a four-wheeled van whose windows were broken out. Pilar got in while the team members wrestled their luggage into the back through the doors in both sides. The only seats were the pair of buckets in front.
Sten Moden opened the passenger door and swept his arm down in a courtly gesture toward Coke. “Rank hath its privileges,” he said in a booming baritone.
“Bob, give me a leg up on top,” Margulies called. “It’s crowded inside, and I like the view from up there.”
“I think perhaps I should ride there instead,” Johann Vierziger said.
“I don’t think so,” Margulies snapped. Niko Daun chuckled.
Barbour made a stirrup of his hands. He grunted as he took the weight of the close-coupled woman, but she got a boot on the window frame and flipped herself neatly onto the vantage point.
Coke allowed himself a grin as he took his seat beside Pilar. The six of them had a lot of sorting out to do, with each other and with a job they were all new at. So far, so good.
The van was diesel powered. Pilar coaxed the engine to life with difficulty, and it ran rough after it caught.
“Are there aircars on Cantilucca?” Coke asked over the engine noise. From the amount of racket, there was no insulation in the firewall or body of the van to deaden sound.
“A few,” the woman said. “It’s hard to get maintenance on them. It’s hard to get anyone to do anything in Potosi.”
She engaged the torque converter. The van surged forward instead of picking up speed in a rising curve as Coke had expected.
“Except,” Pilar added, “to swagger around with guns looking tough.”
The van had a bar headlight across the upper hood. It worked, though its icteric cast suggested low voltage. The yellow light swept the gate of the starport compound, open and unguarded. Something hung from a pole just beyond the woven-wire fencing.
“Sir!” Margulies shouted.
“It’s all right!” Coke called back. He’d seen the object as soon as Margulies did. “He isn’t any danger, at any rate.”
A corpse with its hands tied behind its back dangled by one ankle from a cross-pole. Either by chance or intention, the scene duplicated one of the Arcana of a Tarot deck, The Hanged Man.
“Yes,” Pilar Ortega said grimly. “That’s also very popular in Potosi. Dying, I mean.”
Either the breeze through the windowless van was unexpectedly cool, or the hormones flooding Coke’s system were playing hell with his temperature regulation. He slid open the front seam of his dress jacket and let his index finger rest on the trigger guard of his pistol.
He began to smile. Survey work might not be as different from what he was used to as he’d feared.
Coke had decided to enter Potosi quietly and not to arouse the locals’ attention until he’d been able to view the situation on the ground. Frisian commo helmets with their array of vision-enhancing capacities would have marked the team even more clearly than would entering armed to the teeth.