From the very worried looks he got from Priss and Dex as they piled out of the van it was clear to Lang that he looked every bit as tired and haggard as he felt. After locking Aubrey and Sean in the van for nearly two hours and then yelling for most of that time, he’d finally bulldozed the two of them into going with his line of reasoning. More than ever he was convinced that only idiots and psychopaths actually wanted positions of leadership because it was proving to be the most draining thing he’d ever had to do in his life. If the destruction of the Armstrong had somehow created new officer’s positions in the fleet he was going to recommend his two corporals for them just to get even.
And also hopefully so he wouldn’t be considered for them.
So, after drawing a blood sample from Aubrey, the spacers had piled everything back into the van and driven most of the way up to the city limits, then parked under an overpass and worked their way in on foot. Finally they crossed into the city proper and merged with the crowds, watching their prisoners and the surrounding people warily, Lang uncomfortably fingering the small nanolathe he’d cobbled together using Priss’s notes. He’d ultimately chosen to do all the work himself, and carried both samples on his person, in order to make sure as much of the responsibility as possible rested with him.
If Aubrey and Sam were content to with UNIGOV leaving killswitches in their bloodstream then Lang was not above using them himself if they crossed a line.
The potential ramifications of using such a cold blooded weapon weren’t something he wanted to think about. Unfortunately, entering the city didn’t give a lot of other things to keep his mind occupied.
Earth cities were boring.
After five years of service with the Spacer corps, Lang had managed to visit cities on three different worlds. The low gravity of Minerva lent itself to a wild, almost organic style of architecture that swooped and curved, full of brightly colored hangings and garnished with hydroponic vines. Copernican architecture ran a gamut of styles but all drew inspiration from the classical styles known as the Italian and Spanish schools. The buildings of Rodenberry were very flat, rarely more than two or three stories, and favored large windows, buttresses and colonnades.
Earth buildings were tall, boxy and pushed close together. There had been parts of the empty city they’d landed in that were similar but in this populated city almost as soon as they hit the maintained portions of the sidewalks they were walking in the shadows of towering, eight to ten story monoliths with few to no defining exterior features. It was like walking between giant concrete building blocks. His long distance observations hadn’t done justice to how depressing it was to have all that concrete looming over your head.
There were people everywhere. Even in the most built up portions of Copernicus population density rarely topped a thousand people per square mile. At a guess Lang was willing to bet the density here was ten or fifteen times that. And it felt like none of them were at work.
The streets around them swarmed with people, again far more than it had looked like from a distance. The number of pedestrians picked up rapidly as they worked their way in from the outskirts. At first there were only a handful of people in view at any one time but within five minutes of spotting the first new Terran since the crash they were practically surrounded by a mob of them. It was a bit unnerving. Lang hadn’t seen a crowd like this since basic training and he could tell by the looks Priss and Dex were giving each other they felt the same. He couldn’t help but notice he got left out of the moment of spacer solidarity – in their minds he had definitely moved up the ladder to officer territory at some point. He kept his attention focused out on the crowd and off of his disappointment and picked up on a few things.
The crowd didn’t bother Aubrey and Sean, a sign that they probably dealt with this kind of crush every day. Lang really wanted to ask why no one was at work but didn’t want to ask something so patently ignorant of the situation where it could be overheard. Sounding stupid was fine, but sounding like a martian was unacceptable. And they were already drawing more attention than he was comfortable with.
Clothes had been the obvious give away to worry about so, after some thought, he’d ordered everyone out of their evac suits, figuring it was better to go in shipboard slops that looked somewhat like what Aubrey and Sean wore than show up in clothes chock full of nanofiber armor and vacuum seals. And, while this did make them look superficially like their Terran prisoners, it didn’t do anything to reduce their profile in town because no one they saw on the streets was dressed remotely like the five of them.
The trend on the street was towards long, loose, flowing clothes of very thin, almost see-through fabric with a much briefer layer beneath to maintain a modicum of decency. It wasn’t a very practical style of clothing but then no one in town seemed to be on their way to work so that might have been a factor. Perhaps their Terrans were just wearing work clothes suited to their little excursion when the spacers found them. They certainly didn’t seem surprised by the local mode of dress.
But they did seem interested in matching it, seeing as how the first place they stopped was a clothes factory. In another reminder of how far advanced Earth nanotech was compared to its colonies someone had figured out how to build synthetic fabrics using nanolathes and who knows what base materials. The “factory” was actually little more than a small section in a long row of businesses where they could get scanned for their dimensions, watch their clothes assembled in a nanovat then take them to a row of changing rooms to try them on. They were strange looking and more than a little embarrassing but change they did, packing their old clothes into the should bags they’d brought along for the food and other supplies they were hoping to gather. Lang didn’t intend for the stop to take more than a few minutes, especially once he realized how quickly they could get clothes and get out. Unfortunately as they were preparing to leave Priss stopped them, wanting to stay a little longer and pick up a few other things. Aubrey volunteered to stay and authorize any acquisitions. As Lang prepared to get comfortable with another ten minutes stay Priss added, mostly through tone and meaningful looks, that this was a stop for feminine needs.
And so, in spite of his own misgivings about leaving the two of them alone together, with Aubrey’s failsafe still in his possession, Lang found himself outside the factory with the other two men, looking for a grocery store. He was reasonably confident Priss would be fine. She had a plasma pistol that could blow through the walls of most of the buildings he’d seen on planet and the will to use it. He couldn’t say the same for anyone he’d met since coming to Earth. After ten minutes of walking he was more worried about whether they could get the food back to the van without a robocrate than he was about Priss’ safety.
“Hey, Sean,” Dex said, mopping at his forehead with the flimsy sleeve of his new shirt. “How do you know where we’re going? I thought you hadn’t been to this place before.”
“I work with traffic,” he answered with a smirk. “It’s just a matter of knowing what to look for. Otherwise we’d have to hit an info display, like that.”
Sean was pointing to one of the few things that Lang had seen which immediately made sense on earth, a simple holodisplay with a scattering of public information available. Lang looked over at Dex and said, “Wait here for a second, would you?”
He headed over to the display and tried to access it. At first the interface seemed stubbornly resistant to his actions but, remembering what Sean had said about the medinano being his form of ID, he fished out the nanolathe with the sample they’d gotten from Sean back at the library and held it in his hand as he tried to use the display. That seemed to be enough for whatever method UNIGOV used to detect their citizens nanotech, he now had one hand he could use the display with. A little fiddling later he was able to figure out the menu – quite intuitive – and pull up a map of the city, confirming they could find a grocery in the general direction they were heading.
He copied that into his AI as surreptitiously as he was able then scanned for anything like a local news feed. No such luck there, the information station wasn’t regularly updated, which surprised him. It did list places to find lodgings, places to seek employment and a bunch of demographic information like city population that didn’t seem terribly useful. After another few minutes of fiddling he abandoned the display and headed back to the other two, tucking Sean’s blood sample back into his pocket.
“Anything interesting?” Dex asked as he got close.
“Not much. A map and a name for the city.”
“And where are we?”
“Pheonix, Arizona,” Sean said, watching the exchange with bemusement. “You’re awful proud of how much shit you supposedly know about Earth but you didn’t know that?”
“Geography of planets I wasn’t expecting to visit wasn’t a mandatory course.” Although a small voice in the back of his mind pointed out it was strange that they’d never covered Earth geography in mission briefings, even as they closed on the planet. They’d covered basics like that even on his visit to Rodenberry, and that planet was founded by antiwar radicals. Why not Earth? Did they really know so little about it?
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Dex said with a frown. “We didn’t pass any smaller towns or settlements on our way here. I know there’s more than one major city in Arizona and Texas.”
“We did go around one place late last night,” Lang said.
“Everyone else has been resettled,” Sean added.
He said it so matter of factly that it took a moment for Lang to process. “Resettled why?”
Sean shook his head. “Again, ignorant of the strangest things. Environmental collapse was a concern before homo martians went extinct – at least on this planet – and once UNIGOV was established they took definitive steps to scale back sapiens contributions to the problem. Most smaller population centers were merged with the largest nearby city and the structures were disassembled. Larger population centers were evacuated, but no one was sure what the consequences of just picking up that large a chunk of terrain with nothing to replace it, so the buildings were left behind.”
And with that bit of information a lot more of the last three days made sense.
Not that any of it was helpful in their immediate circumstances. It was time to stop acting like stupid, gawking tourists who didn’t know local history and try to blend again. “Fascinating stuff. Let’s talk about groceries, shall we? Dex, you and I need to split up and grab this stuff as fast as possible…”
Nate Chen Publications 