Being able to see into the nighted forest would have been more calming to Coke than the weight of a 2-cm weapon in his hands. He supposed he’d made the right decision at leisure aboard the Norbert IV, but it didn’t feel that way just now.
The van drove past a lean-to of brushwood and scrap sheeting. An open flame glimmered through the doorway. The shadow of an occupant ducked across the light.
“We’re booked into a place called the Hathaway House,” Coke said. “Is that near your house, mistress?”
“My husband and I have a suite on the other side of town,” Pilar snapped. “Terence is in charge of cargo operations.”
“I see,” Coke said in a neutral voice. He saw, or thought he did, quite a lot. “I was only concerned that we were taking you out of your way, mistress. We’re perfectly capable of making our way on foot. The cases are awkward, but the suspension takes all the weight.”
The van rattled along at 45 or 50 kph, about all the pavement would allow. The vehicle steered with a pair of thumbwheels set on the arms of a control yoke. Pilar looked down at her hands for a moment, then raised her eyes to the road again.
“I have to go right past the Hathaway House to get home,” she said. “Potosi has only the one street fit for a full-sized vehicle. There are alleys, but they’re generally blocked.”
“You’re going out of your way to help us,” Coke said, watching the woman with his peripheral vision. “I don’t want to put you to needless trouble.”
“Many of the people, the men, who come to Cantilucca are a rough sort,” Pilar said. She still didn’t look toward Coke. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that to you. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” Coke said. “Were you born on Cantilucca?”
He knew what he was doing, and a part of his mind didn’t like him much for it, but he was tense. This sort of game, this hunt, was a way to take his mind off wondering whether the next shadow was going to erupt in gunfire.
“Marvela,” Pilar said. She wasn’t a good driver; she had a tendency to overcorrect. At least she kept her eyes on the road while she talked. “We met when Terence was working in the port there. When he returned home to Cantilucca to run cargo operations, I—we married and I came with him.”
From the glow in the sky ahead, the van was nearing the town proper. They passed a straggle of hovels like the first one. The dwellings weren’t so much clustered as squatting in sight of one another, like a pack of vicious dogs penned together.
There was hinted motion, but no figure appeared in the open. There’d have been trouble had the team walked this way from the port. Nothing they couldn’t have handled, but it would have gotten in the way of Coke’s intention to start out with a low profile.
“Do you miss Marvela?” Coke asked. His eyes swept broad arcs though his head moved only slightly.
“No,” Pilar said. “No.”
She paused. “But I wish we hadn’t come here. Cantilucca is a …”
She grimaced. Coke wasn’t sure whether she was unable to find words to describe the planet, or if she was simply unwilling to voice them.
“There’s too much nastiness here,” Pilar said finally. “A man can go wrong anywhere. But on Cantilucca, it’s very difficult to live decently.”
Nothing wrong with my instincts, thought a part of Matthew Coke’s mind; and another part scowled at the smug realization.
The van came up the far side of a dip and rounded a slight curve. Potosi lay directly ahead.
The town had no streetlights, but the ground floors and occasionally one or two of the higher stories were dazzles of direct and reflected enticement. Instead of having common walls, the buildings were set separately, sometimes behind a walled courtyard. Barkers doubling as armed guards stood outside business entrances, shouting to the traffic through bullhorns.
Pilar slowed the van to a crawl. The theoretical right-of-way was fifteen meters wide, but hawkers and shills narrowed the street, grabbing at pedestrians. Coke saw a trio of crewmen from the Norbert IV. The sailors stayed together as they crossed from one set of premises to the next. Though the men wore pistols openly, they looked more apprehensive than dangerous.
There were no other vehicles on the street. A pink-haired woman with wild eyes stuck her head into the van on Coke’s side. Her breath stank. She shouted something about the tray of electronic gadgets in her hand. The casings of gadgets, at any rate. Coke wouldn’t have bet they had the proper contents.
He ignored the woman. She shouted a curse and spat at him. The roof post caught most of the gobbet instead.
The members of the survey team were in civilian clothing, but Margulies still wore her field boots. Her right leg described a quick arc, across the open window and up out of sight again. The hawker spun backward, tray flying as her eyes rolled up in their sockets.
It didn’t seem to Coke that an action of that sort should arouse comment in Potosi; nor did it.
The ground floor of each building was walled like a pillbox, generally as a form of appliqué to the original structure. In some cases the strengthening took the form of sandbags behind a frame of timber and wire, but fancier techniques included cast concrete and plates of metal or ceramic armor.
In general, two or three upper stories were as-built. Many of the structures now had several additional stories added with flimsy materials.
Banners, lighted signs, and occasionally nude women or boys were displayed in second- and third-floor windows. There was always a screen of heavy wire mesh to prevent objects from being thrown in—or perhaps out. Music pumped from street-level doorways, different in style at every one; always distorted, always shatteringly loud.
Every major starport had a district like Potosi. The difference here was that Potosi appeared to have nothing else.
As Pilar had said, no proper streets crossed the road from the port, but the set-backs between adjacent buildings created de facto alleys. One or more gunmen stood at each intersection, strutting arms akimbo or profiling on one leg with the other boot against the wall.
The gunmen weren’t in uniform, but they wore swatches of either red or blue—a cap, an armband, a jacket—and never both colors. Most of them ran to crossed bandoliers, with knives and holstered pistols in addition to a shoulder weapon.
They eyed the van as it passed. A heavy-set, balding fellow with bits of red light-stripping twisted into his beard stepped after the vehicle, then changed his mind and took his former station. Coke relaxed slightly. He heard Vierziger sigh behind him, perhaps with disappointment.
“Are those your police?” Coke asked their driver.
Pilar sniffed. “There are no police in Potosi,” she said. “None that count, at any rate. Those are toughs from the gage syndicates, Astra and L’Escorial. The Astras wear blue.”
A leavening of ordinary citizens shared the streets with the thugs, shills, and roisterers. Laborers; farmers in a small way, in town on business necessity but without money to spend as a few of their wealthier fellows had for the moment; clerks and office workers going home, hunched over and covered by capes like the one which concealed Pilar.
Somebody clanged a stone against the back of the van. Coke didn’t react physically. He wondered if he should have put two of his people on the roof, so that Margulies wouldn’t be clocked from behind. Too late to change plans now without precipitating the trouble he wanted to avoid.
“It isn’t always this bad,” Pilar said apologetically. Her hands were stiff on the control yoke. “Both the gangs have been hiring recently and bringing men in from the fields. It’s, it’s worse than any time in the six years we’ve lived here.”
Coke didn’t bother to ask whether “years” meant standard or the shorter Cantiluccan rotation.
“These are farmers?” he said, frowning at two bands of a dozen each, kitty-corner from one another at an intersection and only ten meters apart. The gangs glowered at one another as they postured.
A short man with a blue beret hopped up to the side of the van. He braced himself on the window ledge and shouted, “Dog vomit!” at the red-clad gang on the opposite corner.
Niko Daun clutched beneath his tunic. Sergeant Vierziger raised his left index finger to prevent his fellows in the back of the van from moving. His eyes were on the opposite side of the vehicle, however, ready to react if a L’Escorial thug decided to shoot through the vehicle at the challenger.
None of them did. The van rumbled on.
Pilar swallowed, showing that she too recognized how dangerous the past instant had been.
“I meant guards from the fields,” she said, watching the roadway. “Some of them were farmers. Some of them were sailors who jumped ship or were discharged on Cantilucca for bad behavior. Many of them are just, just badmen. They’ve come to Cantilucca because word’s out that the syndicates are willing to hire anybody who’ll carry a gun and swagger.”
“But there’s no formed units of mercenaries on Cantilucca?” Coke asked.
“No,” said Pilar. “No, we’ve at least been spared that.”
So far, Coke thought. But only so far.