'Don't worry, baby. That is our friend. He is gonna take us for a ride is all.'
'That thing is gonna eat us, Daddy!' Deanna said with her eyes wide.
'Deanna, listen to Mommy.' Sehera knelt beside her daughter and put her hand on her shoulders to calm her. 'That is just a robot that carries garbage around from one place to another. It is not going to eat anybody. And, who knows, you might like him once you get to know him.' Sehera smiled at her daughter and looked her in the eye.
'Okay, Mommy. But I bet he stinks . . . bad.'
'Aw, don't worry, little one, I will not harm you. My name is BIL Seventy One Sixteen. What is yours?' the odd- looking garbage robot asked.
'This fucking stinks, Vince.' Rod stumbled as the line of Mons City refugees crowded forward into the central open court area. The Separatist troops had rounded up any of the stragglers that hadn't made it to the shelters and were moving them into the large open court. Rod couldn't figure out why, but he didn't like it.
'You're telling me, bud. I don't like this. I'm beginning to think we should've gone with that senator guy and Reyez.' Vincent's cigarette end hung out the open face of his e-suit helmet and the white smoke twirled upward around his head whirling with each new drag he took. Occasionally, he would puff out a smoke ring.
'Why are they gathering us up like this, I wonder?' a woman to Rod's right and one step in front of them asked to nobody in particular.
'It is quite obvious ain't it?' the fat mealymouthed man from the adventure shop said.
'If it is so fuckin' obvious, then why don't you tell us then,' the woman replied in a panicky voice.
'They need to keep track of us so they will know where we are. This way we are all in one place and they don't have to worry about us sneaking up behind them,' the fat man said knowingly.
'What do you think, Vince? He right?' Rod turned and looked at his friend, hoping that was the only reason, but at the same time was pretty certain that it wasn't.
'Hmm. Could be, but I don't think so.' Vince pulled the cigarette down to the filter with a deep inhale the end glowing red with the embers.
'Then what?' the panicky woman looked back at him.
'Am I wearing a Seppy e-suit? Can I read freakin' minds? No, I can't. I don't know what they are doing.' Vince shook his head and then slowly scanned around the open court at the thousands of people that were being crowded in. 'But I've got a bad feeling that somebody is wanting to make a point with us.' He spit the cigarette filter onto the ground in front of him and twisted his e-suit jumpboot heel on it.
'Hell, if they want to make a point they have tens of thousands of people in the shelters they can use,' Rod disagreed.
'And I'm sure they will, bud. I'm sure they will.' Vincent felt through the breast pocket for his pack of cigarettes.
'Shavi, Kira Shavi. Anti-aircraft Defense Unit Technician, Elysium,' Kira told the guard at the underground train station entrance and held up her arms as if in a stickup. The guard only slightly raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Elysium unit a sign that he had to know how hard the Americans had hit the place. Kira kept her arms raised so the guard could hose her down. 'How hot am I?' she asked the man.
'You took a pretty good dose, Sergeant Shavi.' The man obviously understood the rank markings on Kira's Separatist military e-suit. 'Were you able to take anti-rad meds in time?' The guard whistled at the readings on his radiation monitor. Her suit was covered with fallout and was reading off the scale.
'Yes. We all did. Unfortunately for my brothers the meds do nothing for the shockwave or the fireball.' She maintained the idle conversation with the train portal guard.
'I didn't realize there were still any troops that far out in the city. How did you manage to survive? Turn around,' he instructed, and then motioned her to turn again so he could hose down the back of her e-suit. He whistled again at the sight of all the scratches and dings in the rear of her armor. 'You took quite a beating too.'
'I was down in the silo, venting launch coolant, when the bomb went off. My youngest brother kicked the silo door shut and triggered the coolant flood. I was trapped inside the silo submerged in cryogel for more than twenty minutes before the outside environment cooled off enough for the silo autodrain switch to throw. I had to crawl out through the coolant drains. A few times I had to set off demo charges to blow out the drain grates or to widen an opening large enough to get through. A couple of times I used a little, uh, too much,' Kira explained. 'I was lucky, I guess. But my brothers were not.'
'Ahmi was served. You were very resourceful and the Free People are fortunate to have brave ones like you.' He switched off the hose and the white foam stream dribbled to a stop. The man nodded and looked at his monitor again. 'You're green.'
'Thanks. Ahmi was served,' she replied. The white anti-radiation foam dissipated and drained from her suit slowly in the low Martian gravity.
'Blower vents are around the corner just before the air locks.'
'Got it.'
'Next!' the train portal guard shouted.
The wait and then the loading process for the train hadn't been that bad. Kira and her newfound friends kept each other company to pass the time. Kira was beginning to connect with the little girl if not her parents. The fifteen-car subway train floated to a stop at the loading ramp. It bobbled up and down with a swish, and then the doors opened. There were only a handful of people getting off the train. In fact, it was mostly empty; all of the cars were. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, on the other hand waiting to get on. Some of them seemed calm, others panicky, with all ranges of moods and hysteria in between.
