Ric Locke - Temporary Duty

“I’ll bet,” Cade snarled. “Get him in the wagon.” A pair of goons in bulletproofs grabbed him by the upper arms and began hustling him down the hall, and Cade followed, mouth set in a grim line. When they turned to go down the stairs Peters looked back. Harold Carstairs was standing, gaping a little, watching them leave, and another of the agents was looking at the young man who’d performed the arrest, face a study in speculation.

They half-pushed, half-threw him into a boxy vehicle and slammed the door. He’d barely had time to seat himself on the unpadded bench when the vehicle started up, turning right, left, right, then abruptly left before descending into an underground parking lot. Then it was more comealong holds and a fast shuffle down corridors covering what seemed like a kilometer before stopping at a steel door with a single thick window.

“Stand still,” Cade snapped. The two goons produced a handweapon each and pointed them at his head, staying away from direct contact; no doubt the precise distance was specified in the regulations. Laura Cade expertly stripped off the wrapstrap, pulled the door open, and said, “Inside.” She shoved him, hard, and he half-fell through the door, which closed with a final-sounding thud and a multiple click of locks going home.

This was the fourth prison he’d been in, and for a prison it wasn’t too bad. It was cold, but that was a common feature of prisons and lockups in his experience; the temperature was set by regulation, no doubt. He wished he had his kathir suit, but that had been taken the morning after his arrest. They’d threatened to cut it off; at that point he’d still had some dim hope of eventual release, and being at the epicenter of what amounted to an atomic explosion would have made that moot at best. He’d skinned out of the suit and handed it over, receiving in exchange the first of a series of loose, sloppy, orange boiler suits like what he was now wearing.

The bunk had a mattress and linens, the toilet had a seat, and there was a mirror over the washbasin. It was as good as many of the quarters he’d had in the Navy, and better than most shipboard ones, bar the guard outside; the door wasn’t even locked. He lay on the bunk, trying to remember every word anyone had said in his presence in ferassi, searching for cognates and similarities in the Trade and puzzling out the meaning. The exercise also served to call back Ander and Alper’s faces as he’d first seen them, still and unresponsive as statues and with less expression. By now he could almost react coldly to the memory.

The television, a panel set into the wall behind bulletproof glass, flashed images that Peters ignored. The programming was a mixture of “news” and “business information”, pornography that seemed aimed primarily at male homosexuals, and depictions of people whose lives included cars, telephones, computers, running water, and full-time electrical power. The first category he found occasionally diverting, though it was carefully screened to keep him from finding out anything he wanted to know; the second totally failed to engage his interest; and the third served only to emphasize that he had less in common with the people behind the screen than he did with lusi Velix. Another prisoner had shown him how to bugger the earphones so that they looked OK to casual inspection but didn’t work; after that he wasn’t even distracted by the sound.

The speakers over the screen squawked an attention tone and began issuing a litany in several languages, and simultaneously the screen cleared and showed text. None of the languages was anything he wanted to hear, but the third or fourth one was English: “John Peters, you have a visitor. Report to the visitation room, John Peters.” The screen said the same thing, and the synthesized voice went on to what he guessed was French.

He did get visitors occasionally. Mannix had come once, two prisons ago; Tom Goetz and Vanessa, neè Williams, had dropped by, a surprise, and he’d seen Warnocki twice, one of them at the last place. They’d all told him flatly that they weren’t allowed to talk about anything currently going on, and had chatted about the voyage and Llapaaloapalla with an eye to where they thought the cameras were. From hints and subtext he gathered that the ship had left a few weeks after Agent Cade had tossed him in the slammer. From the trend of recent interrogations he thought it was back. Nobody at all had come for at least a week. Be interesting—well, less than totally boring—to see who this was.

“Mornin’, Miz Cade,” he said to the hall guard. The woman—not Laura Cade—scowled behind her face mask but said nothing, and Peters walked briskly, head high, toward the visitation room. “Mornin’, Mr. Briggs,” he told the sharply-dressed middle-aged man waiting on the other side of the armor glass.

The man’s chuckle came through the speaker. “Actually, it’s a little after three in the afternoon, John,” he said.

Peters shrugged. “It’s always mornin’ of a new day for me.”

“You always say that.” Briggs smiled and shifted in his chair. “This time you may have some reason for your optimism.”

Help, or at least amelioration, had come from an unexpected source. Harold Carstairs had, in fact, gotten promoted; legal fiction or no, he’d “captured” Peters before witnesses, and the regulations required it. Carstairs had an uncle whose wife’s maiden name was Briggs; her brother’s son Sheldon was an attorney living in Hartford, Connecticut, specializing in tax law. Sheldon Briggs’s brother and his wife had died while sailboating in the Bahamas, and Sheldon was guardian to their daughter, Evelyn, who had joined the Navy and become a fighter pilot. This unlikely chain of circumstances had resulted, to Peters’s astonishment, in his having both expert legal representation and a little medium-weight political influence.

“You said that before,” Peters remarked as he took his seat. He liked Briggs, keeping in mind that as a lawyer the man had probably had special training in how to be liked.

Briggs smiled. “Got something for you,” he said, and held up a rolled paper with a red-white-and-blue ribbon around it. He put it in the passthrough and closed the lid, and after an interval—during which it was probably inspected by radar, IR, visual, X-ray, and Y and Z rays if they were available—the latch on Peters’s side clicked.

“What’s this?” Peters asked as he took it out.

“Have a look.”

The ribbon slipped off easily. The paper was thick and luxurious-feeling, really high-class stuff. At the top, centered, was a round shield Peters recognized, and below was a short paragraph, which Peters read aloud: “‘To all before whom these presents may come: John Howland Peters, Taxpayer Identification Number 1457-96-2307, is hereby pardoned for any and all offenses against the peace and good order of the United States of America.’ Then there’s a scrawl, an’ after that it says ‘Eugene V. Hansen, President of the United States’. Well, ain’t that spiffy. Reckon these folks’ll let me frame it and hang it on the wall?”

“You don’t sound impressed,” Briggs noted. “Hansen just got sworn in. That was his first official act. Ought to tell you something.”

“We talked about it already, can’t remember when that was. I ain’t accused of much against the peace and good order of the United States. Violatin’ air traffic regulations is about it.”

Tax offenses weren’t criminal offenses. The IRS attorneys made a big point of that, but as far as Peters could see the only effect it had was that the Feds didn’t have to worry about criminal-law rules of evidence. The penalties were, if anything, worse, except that it seemed they couldn’t just take him out and shoot him, despite several individuals who apparently would have preferred to do just that. He wasn’t a criminal; he just owed one Hell of a tax bill.