Conquistador (36 page)

“Kemosabe.” Tully's voice brought him awake and sitting upright on the bunk. “Thought you'd want to cut the beauty sleep short.”

Tom shook his head and stretched. They'd lost their watches along with everything else, but his internal clock, not to mention his stomach, said he'd slept at least twelve hours. After the stress of the past twenty-four, that was only to be expected. Possibly shoving them in here buck naked was supposed to keep them subdued, which might have worked with ordinary civilians.

Not that the state of our morale makes much difference in a bare concrete cubicle with a steel door,
he thought.
And doubtless under constant remote surveillance.

“Anything in the way of food show up?” he said carefully.

“Couple of ration bars, sort of like pressed granola,” Tully said, and threw him one. “Being the sweet guy I am, I didn't eat both. Also some munificent toiletries and fancy duds via the dumbwaiter there.” He jerked a thumb at the swivel-box arrangement in the plain steel door.

There were plain dark sweat suits, underwear, socks and sneakers, all smelling both new and cheap. Disposable razors, soap, toothpaste and brushes came with them, along with one plastic comb. After he cleaned up as best he could there was nothing to do but sit on the bunks and make desultory conversation, of the type you didn't mind being overheard. Doubtless the boredom, without even a variation in the light or a distracting sound, was also intended to shake inmates. Neither of them had a problem with it; both police work and military service were good training for waiting. In the long spells of silence, he found his thoughts returning to Adrienne—humiliation at the thought of how he'd been duped, and an obsessive replay of each word and action since the fiasco at the meet.

Could I have played it better?
he thought. Dozens of methods occurred to him, each crazier than the last; when he found himself doing the if-only-things-had-been-different daydream game and imagining she'd really been the dewy innocent he'd first assumed, he wrenched his mind away with a concentrated effort of will and did calisthenics instead, mostly isometric types, the sort you could do lying down on a narrow bunk.

When the guards came with the wheelchairs, it was almost a relief. Another stretch of corridor led to an echoing metal-box building with the look of a warehouse—most of the floor was great stacks of boxed goods on pallets, with forklifts whining about and the prickly ozone smell of heavy-duty electric motors. A people mover stood waiting, and Adrienne and Piet Botha stood beside it.

He looked as before, save for a rumpled and red-eyed look that argued sleeplessness. She was wearing a tight black uniform, cloth and gleaming leather, pistol and dagger at belt, and the stylized letters GSF on the shoulder. Despite himself, he looked her up and down and quirked an eyebrow.

“Don't blame me,” she said with a shrug. “
Sturmbanführer
Otto von Traupitz had a big hand in designing the uniform—nobody else paid attention until it was too late to change things without offending him, and he
had
done a lot of the gruntwork setting up Gate Security.”

Then she turned one leg. “You'll have to admit we have really, really spiffy boots, though.”

Tully chuckled openly. Tom gave a snort and looked away. His stomach was beginning to clench; he knew what was coming, and it was starting to feel real. The people mover slid forward, to where tall metal doors gave on to another warehouselike building. Armed guards waited at the junction; one covered them while another shone a handheld retina scanner into their eyes.

“What have we here?” the guard with the machine carbine said, looking at the men in the restraints.

“Couple of IS,” Adrienne said. “Off to help build our beloved Commonwealth.”

“Haven't seen any Involuntaries in a while, Miss Rolfe,” the man said.

“Do you have much longer on your tour?” she said.

“A month, miss. I will be
so
glad to get back to the real world. I understand why furloughs home aren't practical, but it gets pretty boring never leaving these buildings . . . pass, then.”

Tom looked up; the metal-stringer ceiling above was frosted with lights, surveillance cameras and an occasional guard platform. Below was an expanse of concrete, bare except for notional roadways outlined in yellow paint; everything converged at the far wall, where a big glass-walled control room hung from the ceiling, and below it a long paved ramp. Trains of flatbed trolleys drawn by electric carts waited or moved to the promptings of the control room, loaded with boxed computers, digitally controlled machine tools, diesel engines, knocked-down cars and trucks, tires, ball bearings, tractors, carboys of industrial chemicals, flats of designer clothing and French perfume, DVDs, MRI scanners. . . .

Everything necessary to keep a civilization going,
he thought, fascinated despite himself. Imperious beeps brought trains forward, down the ramp and out of sight—and then others emerged upward, loaded with gleaming stacks of gold and silver ingots, small steel boxes of diamonds or emeralds or tanzanite, rare earths. . . .

“At least we smell better than we did before the shower,” Tully muttered.

It sounded as if the situation was getting to him, at least a little. Tom felt alert enough; very thirsty, and his bladder was painfully full again, but he could take in his surroundings.

“That's us,” Adrienne said, as a green light flashed and a
beep-beep-beep
sounded from the dashboard of the electric cart.

He licked dry lips as it whined into motion. It was one thing to read about a gate between worlds, or talk about it, or even reluctantly believe in one. Seeing one was something else. And this . . .

As they came to the bottom of the ramp it looked like a basement, of all things. There was steel tracking laid down over synthetic sheeting over flagstones, running straight to—

“What's
that?
”he burst out involuntarily, at the sight of the rectangle of silvery light.

Adrienne grinned. “That, my friends, is nothing less than the
Gate.
” Her voice put the italics in the word; she added quotation marks with her fingers. “The Gate to the Commonwealth of New Virginia.” The capitals came across well too.

The big dark Afrikaner gunsel smiled unpleasantly. “Take a good look at the Gate Chamber,
jong,
because this is the last time you see it.”

He ignored the possible threat and did as he was told; he intended to see it again, in his official capacity, and the information might be valuable in getting that done. The wall opposite the . . . Gate . . . was solid and smooth; sandwich armor lifted from a M1 tank, from the look of it. Blisters mounted heavy machine guns and a flamethrower, and compact unmanned armored turrets with video pickups and more machine guns peered in from four spots around the ceiling. A clear plastic enclosure in one corner held a wooden table, with some archaic-looking electronic equipment on it.

Adrienne saw where his eyes fell. “That's what started it all,” she said. “As of April 17, 1946. It's just what it looks like; a modified forties shortwave set. How does it do what it does? We have thousands of guesses—some by physicists—and not one goddamned shred of proof. All we know is that if everything connected to the circuit is kept connected and in roughly the same relative and absolute positions, it goes on happening. The Commission bought up the factories that made all the components, just so we could get identical replacement parts. Interrupt the circuit or move things more than a couple of inches, and the Gate closes . . . and someday I'll tell you about the panic
that's
caused, the times it's happened. For a week once, after the 'eighty-nine quake. Ah, here we go. Don't worry—you won't feel a thing. I've done the trip to the Commonwealth and back hundreds of times.”

The people mover jerked forward. Tom's mind accepted the reassurance, but his gut lurched involuntarily. Passage through the sheet of rippling silver turned out to be exactly as advertised. One instant he was
here;
the next he was
there,
wherever the Commonwealth was. The first glimpse turned out to be fairly boring; it was pretty much like the place he'd just come from, although he didn't think it was underground. A glance upward showed frosted-glass skylights. Another showed that the four corners of the huge room were armor-and-concrete pillboxes mounting General Electric six-barreled Gatling miniguns, and that the overhead gridwork included a complete net of surveillance equipment.

The people mover scooted off to the side, out of the path of the two-way traffic; it stopped before something like an airport security setup crossed with a pillbox—except for the squad in black uniforms that looked as if they covered spider-silk-soft body armor, armed with assault rifles—slab-sided German G36 models, with laser sights plugged into Land Warrior-style helmet computers with VR-display optics over the left eye. You didn't have to aim with that gear; you just moved the muzzle until the crosshairs in the optic rested on what you wanted to hit.

Somebody's been selling Uncle Sam's latest toys,
Tom thought.

There were a few more of the black uniforms sitting at desks, and those included two women and a stout man in his forties, with a graying mustache. The troopers were all male, all young, all fit, with an arrogance he recognized from his time in the Rangers, that of men who thought themselves the best.

The sign above their station read:

“Friendly bunch,” he murmured.

“All sarcasm and most bullets just bounce off Gate Security,” Adrienne said cheerfully. She hopped down as the people mover slowed, undid the restraints on the two Americans, then spoke to the man behind the first desk. “Gate Security Agent Adrienne Rolfe. GS Operative Piet Botha. We've been cleared through FirstSide decon. Thomas Christiansen and Roy Tully, Invol-fours, and they should be in the databank. You can skip sending them to the familiarization hostel; I'm taking custody.”

Tom, Roy and the silent Afrikaner came down from the little vehicle, and it scooted away. All of them had to pass through the scanner arch, and then put a palm on a plate and look into a fitted eyepiece; it was all familiar enough biometric ID machinery, retina scan, DNA print and fingerprint. It even had the Hitachi logo. The big Afrikaner walked off after exchanging polite good-byes with Adrienne, ignoring the two Americans as if they didn't exist.

I love you too, Piet,
he thought.

He steadied Tully; Roy still looked a little woozy, but he was coming to fast. A machine on a bench whirred and hummed, and extruded ID cards. The technician extended them between finger and thumb. Tom took his; it had his face, name, a number, and coded machine-readable data. At a guess, his data was burned into a file with some sort of read-only central databank; people had talked about that for years during the war, especially after the Charleston disaster, but the ACLU had always killed it. Evidently they thought differently here.

“These are your probationary Settler's ID cards,” the tech said, in a bored bureaucratic singsong. “It's your driver's license, your Social Security card, your debit and credit card, and all your other ID rolled into one. Don't lose it. There's a heavy fine for replacement. Carry it on your person at all times. There's a heavy fine for not producing it when requested by a law-enforcement officer. Don't try to tamper with it. That never works—the scanners check it against Nostradamus' central files and your biometric data every time you use it—and it gets you five years at hard labor in the mines. Here is your wallet. It contains one hundred dollars in local currency; remember that prices here are much lower than on FirstSide. Here's your brochure. Welcome to the Commonwealth of New Virginia, and may you have many productive years as law-abiding citizens.”

“New Virginia?” Tom asked, stuffing the wallet and card into the pocket of his sweatpants.

His voice was calm, but tension sent a slight sour taste into the back of his mouth as they went out into a corridor in institutional beige, with overhead fluorescent lights. Waiting rooms stretched off to either side, very much like an airport, and were full of people in overalls or business suits or family groups—those last looking very much like first-class passengers, and sitting in bubbles of social space. The surveillance cameras were airport-like too, except that no attempt had been made to disguise them.

“Formally, the Commonwealth of New Virginia is what this country—the Pacific coast of North America and inland for a ways, plus Hawaii and a few other bits—is called,” Adrienne said. “Wait a minute and it'll start to become clear.”

She looked up at the cameras, checked her angles, and then winked at him, holding a finger to her lips in the
shhhhh!
gesture for a moment.

He grunted and swung his head toward the men's room sign. She nodded and leaned against the back of a row of chairs to wait, elegantly hipshot in the sleek black uniform.

Tully paused to splash water on his face before joining him at the row of urinals. “So, looks like we're in the hands of the Bad Guys, who rescued us from the Even Badder Guys?”

“Looks like,” Tom said.

Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Tully's face changed; Tom felt a moment's warm comfort.
At least I have
some
backup. And Roy doesn't need me to dot all the I's; this place is probably sewn up tighter than the Gaza Strip.