Эрик Флинт - The Service of the Sword

Coming in the opposite direction from John was another prole. This one was a female and fairly good-looking. In fact, too good-looking. She didn't have the sallow skin from low-quality food that proles generally sported and her prole walk wasn't quite right. There was just a bit too much of the bounce to it.

Ergo, not a prole. Maybe a hooker or dancer dressing up as a prole, but unlikely.

Confirmation that the prole wasn't came when the woman, probably a StateSec officer, brushed against him and subjected him to a fairly professional patting down.

He apparently passed since she continued on her way but as he turned the corner to head back to the safehouse his heart sank; there was a group of local police waiting around the corner, their air car grounded on the sidewalk.

"You!" One of the patrolmen, faceless in heavy body armor and helmet, waved him over as two more took up positions on either side.

"Name," the officer said. It wasn't a question, it was a demand.

"Gunther Orafson," Mullins replied in badly accented French. He proffered his ID tag then spread his legs, placed his right hand behind his head and held the left out, palm up; it was a position that proles learned early.

The officer put the tag in a slot, then waved the pad in front of Mullins' face and over his outstretched hand.

What the system thought it was doing was reading personal information of one Gunther Orafson, assistant boom operator at the Krupp Metal Works factory. It took a retina scan, surveyed fourteen points on his fingers and palm, compared his facial infrared topography to its database and took a DNA scan, all in under two seconds.

What it was actually looking at was some very advanced Manticoran technology.

Gunther Orafson had been stopped years before by someone very like John Mullins, except at the time the Mullins counterpart had been dressed like a local police officer.

Using a device that looked identical to the one this officer was using, he had taken all of Gunther Orafson's vital statistics and put them into a database. One checkpoint, fifteen minutes on a busy day, could garner dozens of identities, and the CIT teams had access to all of them.

Now the results of all that labor bore fruit. The police officer's pad looked at Mullins' eyes, and adjustable implants reflected an excellent facsimile of Gunther Orafson's retinas. The pad scanned his face and a thin membrane reflected Gunther Orafson's IR patterns.

The rest was the same. DNA patterns on fingerprint gloves and even a pheromone emitter for the more advanced detectors, everything screamed "Gunther Orafson."

Except his face. And the Peep system was so "advanced" they didn't even bother with a picture on the ID tag.

All of it was dissected and spit back to central headquarters. There it was compared with Gunther Orafson's data and accepted or denied.

The system apparently liked what it saw because it quickly clucked green and spit out the tag.

"What are you doing here?" the officer asked.

It was an abnormal question so Mullins let a bit more nervousness enter his voice. "I live in the seventeenth block of Kurferdam Street. I went to the market on Gellon because I had heard they had meat. But they were out. I am returning to my flat."

"I know where you live you idiot," the officer said, handing the tag back. "Get home. There will be a curfew tonight."

"Yes, Sir," Mullins said with a duck of his head. He continued on his way immediately; despite the fact the cop-thug had probably come from a prole background, proles didn't talk to cops and vice versa.

It had seemed like a routine stop but given the proximity to Meda's it was unlikely. A pity, really. For all her personal . . . quirks, Meda had been a lady.

And, worst of all, it only left Tommy Two-Time; every other contact had been taken down by StateSec.

"Hiya, Tommy," Mullins said, trying not to breathe as he walked in the door. Among the many reasons not to deal with Tommy Two-Time, the regular fecal smell from his overloaded bathroom had to be high on the list. It had to be the worst smelling "herb" shop in the universe.

Thomas Totim was an herbalist. Often that was a high profile profession; in a society where "universal medical care" meant waiting four hours for a drunken doctor to look at your skull fracture, herbalists and midwives were the most medicine that many proles saw in their lives.

The shelves were sparsely populated with a variety of inexpensive herbal remedies while along the left wall a locked case held "harder" or more valuable materials. The far wall was lined with refrigerators, cases and aquariums; many of the odder materials available to the modern herbal doctor had to be used "fresh" from any of thousands of species alien to humanity's home planet.

But Tommy wasn't that kind of an herbalist. He had all the herbs, and he could do a pretty good herbalist patter. But people came to Tommy when they needed something harder than St. John's Wort; the shelves were covered in dust and most of the aquariums were filled with the dying remnants of their original populations.

"Oh, shit," Tommy said looking out the door. "I can't believe you just walked into my shop."

"Long time," Mullins replied fingering a dangling root that was covered in mold. It might be the way it was supposed to be, but with Tommy it was more likely to just be neglect. "What are you scamming this week? Spank? Rock?"

Under the early Legislaturalists many common soft drugs had been legalized. The technical reason was to reduce the rationale for street crime but the unspoken rallying cry was "A drugged prole is a happy prole." There was even a Basic Living Stipend entry for "pharmaceutical drug use."

However, even the Legislaturalists, and later the People's Government, weren't stupid enough to legalize Spank, which turned a male into a tunnel-borer rapist then drove him insane after about five uses, or Rock which turned a person so inward that addicts commonly drifted off and never came back. There were others that inquisitive researchers had developed over the millennia, and Tommy could get them all.

"What, you join StateSec, 'Johnny'?" the drug dealer asked. "I don't think so. You and your buddy are the hottest thing on the planet."

"That what you're hearing, Tommy?" Mullins replied, looking around at the dust-covered sundries on the shelves and tapping on the glass of an aquarium. It was the only one that wasn't filled with gunk. Instead, five Gilgamesh River Devils looked back at him. Each of the semi-sentient, highly-carnivorous "fish"—actually a dual-breathing amphibian—followed his hand with all six eyes, clearly hoping he would get close enough to remove a nibble with their three centimeter teeth.

The river devils were piscine shaped, with sucker tipped "arms" in place of pectoral fins that they used for locomotion in their terrestrial mode. They were all flashing through a dozen colors as chromatospores changed the hue of their skin through all the colors of the rainbow. Some scientists theorized that the color changes were a primitive form of communication. Having seen a group of river devils first distract and then surround a cow on a Gilgamesh riverbank, Johnny was pretty sure the scientists were right. Except for the "primitive" part. "Who's looking for me?"

"You, your buddy and some admiral. And everybody," the dealer continued nervously. He had the shoulder-length hair that was practically the badge of the professional herbalist but the circular bald patch on the top ruined the look. Now he rubbed the top of his head nervously and looked out the door again. "I do mean everybody . StateSec has flipped; the admiral's got some of their codes and secret information. And the Manties are pissed; their whole network in Prague City is just gone and according to them you did it."