Anyway, I stepped out of an autocab and touched my tapper to the door handle. It drained my accounts of about two hundred credits, and the car whizzed off back to town.
Walking the barren, stained streets I wondered at the sidewalk itself. It was a survivor, that was for sure. A few wars had swept over this place, leaving soot-stains and ragged glossy patches where the old puff-crete had melted a bit. That must have happened when the Skay ship came and bombed us during the Armor World campaign.
“Hey, freak!”
I glanced up. There was a man shouting at me, and he was huddled on the top of a barrel. He wore a jacket with his hands rammed into the pockets. A hoodie covered most of his face, but his nose and scruffy mouth were poking out.
The man wasn’t all that big, so I was kind of surprised he had the balls to address me in such an unpleasant fashion. After all, I had to be a foot taller than he was.
Forcing a friendly smile, I turned toward him. He watched me take a few steps toward him, then suddenly he let his cool-guy façade fade away. He jumped off the barrel and ran.
“Freak!” he shouted over his shoulder. “There’s nothing for you here!”
I considered chasing after him, but I soon thought the better of it. After all, he seemed harmless enough. Maybe he was just a homeless loon. That kind was common enough down around the docks.
Trudging along, I walked closer to the big warehouses. Each one perched on a creaking pier, and together they formed a long row of buildings. The warehouses themselves were a random mix of the old and the new. When the Skay had bombed us, they’d cleaned out half of them at least. You could still see the edge of the devastation down here, and when I passed over that line, there was no more new construction—just dirty pavement and cracked glass.
I came to an open area where the harbor filled my view. The railing had been painted once, but the paint had been worn down to the shiny metal. I put my big hands on the seagull-crap encrusted steel and gazed out at the ships.
Long ago, they’d started building big ships. Supertankers, ocean liners and battleships—stuff like that. But these monsters were something else again.
They were like leviathans from legends past. The very largest was over two kilometers long. They were tall, too. Many swayed gently, their superstructures reaching to a height of twenty stories—sometimes more.
I whistled at the sight, long and low.
“They’re miraculous, aren’t they?” asked a feminine voice to my side.
I’d been unaware anyone was nearby. Oh sure, there were workers in the warehouses. The places were noisy with four-armed haulers tramping around and crowds of bustling men in coveralls. But here at the seagull-poop covered railing, I’d thought I was all alone.
My instinct, as a Varus man, was to whirl around and crouch. If the speaker had been too close and looked threatening, she might have found herself swimming in the oily waters that were just a few meters below.
But I controlled all that. I just slipped my hands into my pockets—gripping my needler—and gave her a friendly nod.
“Miraculous? Yes, Miss. They surely are.”
The woman looked past me toward the towering ships. She walked calmly up to the rail and kept gazing out to sea. She didn’t even let her eyes land on me.
“You know what they’re made of?” she asked. “Or how they can float like that when they’re so big?”
“Uh… I can’t say that I do.”
“They’re made of puff-crete, essentially. A lot of people think puff-crete is only good for making roads and tall buildings—but that’s not true. It’s very versatile stuff.”
“Yeah… I know a man named Bevan. He spent most of his life studying the material.”
For the first time, she looked up at me. “Bevan…? I don’t know him.”
“There’s no reason why you should.”
We gazed at each other for a moment. She was older, thirty-something. She would have been attractive, but her face seemed a trifle too hard. Too careworn.
“Are you just sightseeing down here, soldier?” she asked.
At that moment, I became wary for the first time. How did she know I was a soldier? Sure, there were thousands of us in this town. Central practically crawled with military people of every type, but still…
“How’d you know I’m an off-duty legionnaire?” I asked her.
She seemed to relax a fraction at these words. She looked me over again, nodding. “A legionnaire…? Not Hegemony?”
“Bite your tongue, girl! I’m no hog who’s strayed out here from Central.”
She licked her lips. “Okay. I believe you. You want to know how I can tell you’re military? Well, for one thing, you all walk like you’re marching. For another, your kind is rare down here.”
“Yeah… I bet. These ships are cool, but the docks themselves are kind of dull.”
“What’s your name, soldier?”
I hesitated, but then I decided to go with my instincts.
“I’m Centurion James McGill, ma’am. From Legion Varus.”
She nodded, and she looked me in the eye. Was that a sparkle? Did she like the military type? It was my impression that she did.
At that moment I heard something behind me. Unfortunately for my would-be assailant, the puff-crete walkways out here weren’t what they used to be. They were worn down and crunchy in places. In others, they were outright damaged.
I’d noted that jagged stains had liberally splattered the streets and sidewalks. They’d been created when fragments of burning debris had come to rest from the big city itself, melting a permanent mark into the pavement.
One of those burnt scars happened to be right behind me. When the
