“Pick up your stuff. What unit are you snappers with?”
“Anti-armor.” Galen picked up his wallet and pocketknife. “Why’d you take my money?”
“These guys are as stupid as they look,” said the guard with the pistol. “Should we turn them in or let them go?”
“Turn us in for what?”
“You can’t take this much money off the compound. Who knows what you might buy? And maybe you’ll ruin the local economy and cause rampant inflation.”
Galen started to understand. The cash machine was positioned so the gate guards could watch it and stop mercenaries from taking too much money down town.
“Aw, let ‘em go, Chief,” said the guard in the booth. “After all, they’re from the Cav troop.”
“All right. Take your cash back to the bank where it belongs. Not more than ten thousand czan per day per trooper leaves the compound. And don’t forget to return my bag. Today.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said Galen.
“Don’t thank me, thank your agent.”
Four hours later the three friends walked along the streets of the town of Xongxong. The crowd of short, black-haired citizens barely made a gap wide enough for the mercenaries to pass through them in single file. Galen led.
“Present arms!” said Tad.
Galen and Spike reflexively obeyed the command. Galen stopped, dropped his salute and looked around. “What was that for?”
“There,” Tad pointed at a life-size statue of an old man in front of a restaurant. “The Colonel.”
Galen and Spike gave him confused looks.
“The Kentucky Colonel, Colonel Sanders, the man who invented the secret recipe for fried chicken back on Terra, more than two thousand years ago.”
“So?”
“Good Terran-style food. Let’s eat!” Tad pushed his way through the street crowd, followed by Spike and Galen. They took seats at a flimsy table in the dining area. The menu was a plastic card taped to the wall beside the table. A waitress came to the table. She wore an orange cap and apron over her white dress. She must have been sixty years old at least, thought Galen.
“I’ll take a chicken.”
“Me too,” said Spike.
“I’ll have the drumstick dinner,” Tad looked around. “Extra crispy and a large cola for each of us.”
When the waitress left Spike asked, “How come I never heard of this Colonel?”
“You two aren’t from Terra. I am. Everybody there knows about Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Colonel.”
“What’s a Kentucky? A special kind of regiment?”
“No. It’s a state, a commonwealth of the Earth Federation.”
“So you’re from Kentucky,” stated Galen.
“You wanna fight?”
“No.”
“It was a rhetorical question. I’m not from Kentucky.”
The waitress wheeled a dinner cart over to their table. She had two platters containing two full roasted chickens and sat one in front of Galen and one in front of Spike. The platter for Tad had four drumsticks, a bowl of mashed potatoes covered with gravy, and a scoop of coleslaw. The waitress then put plastic flatware and sodas in plastic cups beside each of the three men. Before she could state the price, Tad handed her a one thousand czan bill.
“Keep the change.”
The waitress smiled, then pushed the dinner cart ahead of her as she left.
“How much of a tip was that?”
“About two hundred czan.”
Galen still wasn’t sure how many czans were in a credit, or how many Ostreich Kroners a credit was worth.
“How many czan in a kroner?”
Tad thought a moment. “About sixty.”
“So our dinner costs only seventeen kroner?”
“About that, I’m not exactly sure,” said Tad.
“For us to eat like this back on Ostreich would cost about a hundred kroner each.”
“So,” said Spike, “our money buys twenty times as much here?”
“At restaurants, anyway.” Tad chewed a drumstick and gulped his cola.
Spike and Galen tore pieces of flesh from their whole chickens as best they could with their fingers. They weren’t familiar with eating real chicken and followed Tad’s example of not using flatware. They dispensed with conversation until they finished the meal.
“We all done?” Tad pulled his cloth napkin from his lap and carefully wiped his hands.
“Sure.” Spike wiped his hands on the tablecloth, then the napkin.
Galan nodded as he finished his cola and wiped the chicken grease from his hands and mouth. The three off-duty mercenaries pushed their way back into the street crowd and moved further away from the compound. They hadn’t gone fifteen meters when a relatively tall Mandarin man bumped into Galen. The stranger wore a brown leather jacket, a yellow derby-style cap and faded Mandarin regular army dungaree pants.
“Hey sahjee, you like girls?”
Galen continued to walk. The stranger walked beside him, opening a binder with pictures of nude girls taped to its inside. He held the pictures in Galen’s face.
“Get away from me, you pervert!” Galen smacked the binder and shoved the man. Looking indignant, the Mandarin pimp snapped the binder shut and started to walk away.
Then he turned and shouted, “Funny man! No like girls!”
The pimp melted into the crowd.
“Why’d you do that?” Spike said. “I could use a piece.”
“They were really young,” Galen suddenly remembered Trooper Harover… Inger. “Sorry Spike, I got to go back to the compound. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Spike and Tad continued away from the compound.
Galen found the garrison personnel’s barracks right behind the welcome center. He found building 36O9 and buzzed the main door.
“I’m here to see Inger.”
A woman’s voice came from a speaker built into the frame of the door, “Hold on.”
Galen waited a few seconds, wondering if he were doing the right thing.
“Who is it?” Inger’s voice came from the speaker.
“Galen Raper, Sergeant Raper. We met a couple of weeks ago. You made my ID card.”
“Uh, okay. Come on up to room three oh two.”
The speaker made a buzz. Galen pulled the door open. The lobby area was empty. No furniture, nothing but a door in the center of the wall to the front. The walls were painted battleship grey. The dark brown tiled floor was as shiny as glass, except where a few footfalls marred the surface with streaks from combat boot soles. The steel door was black and had no handle. Galen pushed it inward. Beyond it was the stairwell, the steps wide enough for three people to ascend them abreast. Galen counted seven steps to the first landing, eight to the next, a total of thirteen steps between each floor. Galen climbed the steps to the third floor landing and pushed the door open. He walked down the hallway and found room 3O2. He knocked, getting nervous. His pulse quickened and he felt warmer.
The door opened.
“Come on in,” Inger wore a bathrobe and her hair was wrapped in a towel on her head, looked like a turban. Galen took two steps into the room. Inger motioned him to sit on the two-seater couch. He did.
“So Sergeant, some problem with your ID card?”
Galen’s heart sank and seemed to beat slower. He felt cold. “You don’t remember me.”
Inger paused, “Oh, I’m sorry. I truly am.”
Galen thought she looked older. No makeup, no tight uniform, no body-shaping undergarment. A different woman from what he remembered from the ID card office. He heard the sound of a toilet flushing and running water from the bathroom. A man came out wearing a bath towel wrapped around his waist.