Road traffic was heavier—even congested—and better policed. People had returned to following normal rules of the road. Lines were shorter at fuel cell charge points. Construction was booming, everywhere. There had been a lot of cleanup of outright rubble, but trash collection seemed to have fallen by the wayside. There were drifts of garbage and a dead dog even outside Orcutt Land and Mining’s new offices. Asach got the impression of a strain on managerial capacity. There may have been spare laborers about, but the city was clearly short on people to effectively train, and supervise them.
Ensconced within the TC Security Zone, HG was buffered from electricity outages, but everyone else suffered in the summer heat through rolling blackouts. As spare parts trickled in, more capacity was brought online, but the grid was absorbing mountains of repaired and replaced refrigerators and air conditioners.
Crime seemed less overtly violent. Weapons were no longer openly carried on every street corner. Boxes of large appliances remained outside on the sidewalk overnight, with only a few sleeping watchman to guard them. There were no sounds of nearby or distant gunfire. Despite all this, people themselves were grim and tense. The murder rate was extremely high. There were rumors of revenge and reprisal killings—of whom? By whom? For what? Chained to HG’s leg, which was chained to the oligarchy inside The Zone, Asach could learn little.
Zone operations were retrenching, with offices moved into dug-in concrete shelters surrounded by blast barriers. The True Church Elder insisted that this was merely “precautionary,” pending accession talks. Asach was unconvinced. Ominously, their old hotel—with many apologies—would no longer accept Imperials. While HG blustered his credentials as a True Friend of The People at the front desk, Asach pulled a waiter aside and switched to Tok Pisin.
“Mipela pret .” Was all he would say. “Mipela pret TCM. Mipela Kristen. Emtupela longlong. Emtupela setan setan.” We’re afraid. Afraid of TCM. We’re Christian. Those guys are crazy. Those guys are devils.
Clearly all was not love and roses on New Utah. Everyone claimed that the killings and kidnappings were being done by outsiders pouring in through the newly porous “borders”—from Maxroy’s Purchase, New Ireland, New Scotland, who knows where—but nobody knew what to do about that. The second night, just after two a.m., a man was gunned down across the street from Asach’s hotel room window. Police sirens blared and flashed; he was taken away in the back of a flatbed. Asach could not tell if he was dead or alive, or whether he was a criminal shot by the police themselves. The high prevalence of Tok Pisin speakers amongst the security forces, laborers, and service staff perhaps leant credence to that notion, or perhaps was just a by-product of the appalling penchant for contractors smelling Treasury money to bring in their own workers, rather than employ locals.
Everyone seemed nervous about standing in the shadow of foreigners, yet clearly they were grateful for the change and wanted to help as much as they could. The Saint Georgians, inured to the dangers, asserted the right to act as if things were normal, while the Zonies dug into their bunkers. Blending in was increasingly important. Asach found a little safe-ish triangle bounded old offices, the hotel, and new offices, which were half a block away. The hotel was several notches down from past accommodation, but the price was right and the food was excellent and cheap. The weather was blisteringly hot, which felt right at home.
HG barely ruffled the sheets and choked down a meal before deciding to “head on back” and “report in,” as if (a) they actually had much of any substance to report, and (b) a report could not be sent by outbound courier. Asach had finally had enough, ignored HG’s insistence that they “keep the team together,” and just failed to show up at the spaceport. It was time to get out of the moon raking capital and find out what was going on.
Saint George, New Utah
According to the duty log, Captain Legrange took the first garbled report over the landline from the gatehouse at 7:03. Specialist Theo Parker, the unit’s fastest runner, had been dispatched from the scene to summon the duty officer. Nobody had a ‘tooth, because the commander had forbidden their use during runs. It had not occurred to Parker to check for one at any of the closer military housing; he had accomplished his mission by the simple expedient of sprinting the two-thousand-plus meters back to the main gate, a feat he accomplished in slightly under seven minutes.
This left Parker doubled over, head between his knees, gulping for air while the guard on duty contacted the operations desk. On top of his airlessness, Parker was a supply clerk. He could balance an ammunition accounting ledger down to the last bullet without error, but he could not construct a coherent sentence to save his life. Between Parker’s agonizing thought processes, and his agonized breathing, Legrange had trouble ascertaining what, precisely, Parker was reporting.
Legrange gathered that it involved a girl, the woods, and a great deal of blood. For a moment she thought that a military vehicle had run over a child and struck a tree. Finally, after much quizzing, Legrange came to understand that there had (clearly) been a murder, not an accident; that the victim was in the tree (and did not appear to be military); that there was a girl on the scene who seemed to know who the victim was; and that a detail, with a vehicle, was wanted to secure the scene pending the arrival of civil authorities.
It was the luck of the draw that Legrange had pulled duty the night before, and equally happenstance that the duty NCO, not herself, was out making the hourly checks just as the call came in, but as chance would have it, Legrange was the post security officer, and would have been called in any event. Indeed, had she not been on duty, she’d have been on the run. She was also a linguist. These two facts—security, linguist—had landed her the additional joy, among her many additional duties, of serving as the installation liaison officer to the local police authorities. Murder of a local civilian in the philosopher’s woods well outside the installation perimeter clearly fell in their jurisdiction, not hers.
Under normal circumstances, the duty officer would have simply made a call to the local police like any private citizen, and sent a patrol to keep military personnel clear of the area until the green-and-whites took charge of the scene. However, the proximity to Moorstown, bordered as it was by a patchwork of leased military housing, installation warehouses, and the warren of apartment blocks full of cheap flats rented by private soldiers normally required to live in barracks, made Legrange uneasy. She didn’t like sending those Maxroy’s Purchase boys on public duty at all, but that’s what she had suited up and ready at that hour of the morning. She told Parker to go and find the Duty Sergeant, out making his rounds with the Charge-of-Quarters, contacted the police, then got through to her civilian counterpart.
His desk sergeant informed her that he would not be in until seven-thirty. She asked for a callback when he did, then called the MP detachment for a two-person detail, stressing “Hancock, give me somebody with civil patrol experience, not any of your deadly-force-authorized watchtower rats.” Ringing off, Legrange kicked the dozing duty driver on his boot soles to wake him up.
“Sorry, Swanson. One more run. Get down to Charlie company. There’ll be a detail waiting. Pick ‘em up, then come back for me. We’re going over to the road apples.”
The TCM contracted the commons out for grazing, and the public trails were shared by riders with mounts stabled within and beyond the industrial fringe. The more intrepid among them used the greenbelt section of the Philosopher’s Way, where it cut along the river past the warehouses, as a pass-through to open hill-and-orchard country beyond. This remnant of old city agrarian activity was the subject of much scatological merriment among the troops, mostly of urban extraction, who jogged past (and over) the results every morning. Their children had a kindred, unofficial appellation: “the wee-wees,” derived from the Founder name on the sketch map included in the family welcome packets given to all new arrivals: “the Wiese,” meaning, simply, the meadows.