She cleared one of our four small monitors and activated the controls of an exterior camera so that we could see the visitors at our door. Foreshortened by the camera’s overhead lens into macrocephalic dwarves, two Komm-service guards stood seeking entrance to the hangar, each carrying an armful of plants. They each bore weapons, too.
A heavy-jowled, olive-complexioned man and a pale woman with bright, hawklike eyes. The woman, against regulations, was using the butt of her half rifle to knock on the door. She wore a violet scarf around her neck, an optional piece of uniform for the idiosyncratically debonair. The set of her brow revealed her distaste for the duty she was performing, and the slammings of her rifle butt against the door occasionally buffeted a skein of roots or a few flower cuttings out of the crook of her other arm.
‘Bojangles isn’t going to eat,’ I told Elegy irritably. ‘I don’t know why we’re still bothering trying to supply him.’
Elegy gestured at the monitor. ‘They’re the ones who’re supplying him, Ben. And whether Bojangles eats or not, you’re going to have to go down there to open the door. There’s no automatic release, unfortunately.’
‘Do we even want to let them in?’
‘I don’t, not really – but they’re obeying orders and we’d better not alienate the ones who still have the good sense to do that.’
So I went. The poundings came at about five-second intervals, the echoes reminding me of depth charges. Negotiating the catwalk, I saw that Kretzoi and Bojangles still hadn’t resumed their dialogue. Their heads were tilted quizzically.
Once down, I reached the recreation area’s door and cast aside its sequence of heavy metal bolts – only to find myself looking square at the drawn-back butt of the woman’s half rifle.
‘Today’s food supply,’ she announced, expertly recradling her weapon. In the place on her sleeve where her name should have been there were only a few frayed tufts, of purple thread. The man’s embroidered name was right where it was supposed to be – but in Arabic characters I was unable to decipher. Although these anomalies registered, they didn’t set off in me a chain reaction of increasingly more insightful suspicions.
As soon as they had entered the hangar, the young woman dropped her bouquet of vegetables into my arms, just as if I had asked for them, and closed and secured the door. Its bolts fired shut like a battery of pneumatic nutcrackers. My first thought was that this woman knew to take every conceivable security precaution to protect us. Hence, her conscientious bolting of the door.
‘I’m Jaafar’s friend,’ the raptor-eyed woman told me suddenly, confirming me in my opinion of her motives. ‘E-3 Filly Deuel.’
‘Technically,’ I told her, glancing at her sleeve, ‘you’re out of uniform, E-3 Deuel. Your name’s no longer legible there.’
‘She only recently made her new rank,’ the man said in a well-modulated, faintly accented baritone. ‘Yesterday the blouse belonged to an E-3 who has also just gone up a grade. That’s why Deuel hasn’t stitched her own name in yet. You wouldn’t report such a minor infraction of the GKR’s, sir.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked the man abruptly.
‘E-5 Spenser Pettijohn.’
‘Pettijohn? Why have you rendered your name in Arabic characters, then? That’s a right reserved for ethnic personnel, isn’t it?’
‘My mother was a Hindustani, sir, and before coming to BoskVeld I pulled a five-year tour on GK-world Quattara II in the Veil. I exercise the option by right of both ethnic derivation and past service, you see.’
We stood appraising one another with an uneasiness I couldn’t identify. Something seemed wrong. Deuel’s face in particular betrayed a hint of repressed hysteria. Her lips were slightly open and her cheeks glowed. At that moment, I tentatively began to wonder if Pettijohn and Deuel were really Pettijohn and Deuel.
‘Have you had any trouble, sir?’ Pettijohn asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘That’s good.’ He gestured with his bouquet. ‘Why don’t you let us take these to the Asadi? I know your previous deliveries were all made earlier in the morning, but last night’s arrangements for a permanent detail here at the hangar played havoc with our schedule. If you’ll show us the way, then, we’ll drop these goodies off and get out of your hair.’
My own arms laden, I led Deuel and Pettijohn into the recreation area, through a labyrinth of tubbed plants and carpeted pathways to the clearing where our bright-yellow fence made its kidney-shaped circuit around the swimming pool. Elegy watched us from the catwalk, but I kept my head down and instinctively avoided pointing out her position to the Komm-service guards.
Once beside the fence I unceremoniously heaved the roots, flowers, and fronds in my hands up and over. They landed on the other side with an audible thump, although a few cascaded back down the wall onto my feet. Deuel, more duty-conscious than she’d been outside the hangar, helped me pick them up.
Pettijohn, however, simply stood beside us. His jowls had begun to glisten with sweat, and his eyes now resembled those of a thetrode addict.
‘I’d like to take mine inside,’ he said sweetly, distantly.
‘Why?’
‘They bruise when you drop them like that, sir. They’re fragile. The cell walls collapse. The nutrients spill out. It’s simple common sense, if you think about it.’
‘Pettijohn, you’re overestimating the frailty of these plants. I’ve studied several dozen varieties from the Wild, and there just don’t happen to be that many goddamn shrinking violets among them.’
‘I’d like to take mine inside,’ Pettijohn insisted sweetly.
‘That won’t be necessary. You’ll disrupt the progress of our experiment. You’re disrupting it right now.’
‘I’d like to take mine inside.’
‘Give ’em to me,’ I said, with as much artificial patience as I could muster, ‘I’ll do the dirty work you’re too fastidious to do yourself.’
Upon a warning flash of Pettijohn’s cold, stoned eyes, E-3 Filly Deuel used the butt of her half rifle on my head. A whip cracked through the convolutions of my grey matter, and my eyes bulged like a hooked trout’s. I fell sidelong, plunged in
