Captain Lyaute, who was commanding the convoy, ordered the vehicles to draw up in the town's central square. By the time they'd parked in a circle and the squaddies jumped out they'd gathered quite a crowd. It was the first time Z-B had visited the plateau; people were curious. They were also suspicious and sullen, standing well back from the Skins.
Lawrence hoped they weren't going to have to demonstrate the weapons capability of their Skin. It had taken several unpleasant days to convince the citizens of Memu Bay that they were invincible and everyone should just knuckle under and cooperate. But this bunch were tough engineers working hard for a living. They also had a quantity of hardware and tools that could damage Skin if correctly and creatively misapplied.
Lyaute snapped out a few quick orders, and three Skins snatched a civilian each. Before anyone could react, they'd been fitted with collateral necklaces. The captain started to speak to the crowd; he quickly had to crank up the volume on his Skin's speaker as the crowd shouted abuse and insults back at him. They were furious at what they were being told, that the squaddies were going to go through their town and help themselves to anything remotely valuable. Any resistance would result in the collateral necklaces being activated.
After walking just a couple of streets, Lawrence decided the convoy was a waste of time. There really wasn't much in Dixon worth taking. Not that the town saw it that way. As soon as the Skins went into the cavernous maintenance sheds they found the articulated trucks that brought the aluminum down to Memu Bay. Except they hadn't been used since the day the starships flew into orbit overhead. Every one of the big trailers was filled to capacity. But that was only a fraction of the hoard. Lawrence and Amersy walked into the first of the big sheds, only to stop in amazement. Aluminum ingots were piled up as high as the roof. Nobody was going to send the town's one product to the coast where it could well be stolen by the invaders and taken away on their pirate star-ships. Amersy laughed at the metal mountain. "What kind of idiot thinks we can afford to transport a shitload of aluminum on a starship?" he asked.
Lawrence didn't share his mockery. Thallspring had never heard of asset realization before this first campaign had arrived. Out here in the hinterland they certainly didn't know what was regarded as valuable. They were playing safe, trying to protect what they'd worked for. He could appreciate that.
When Dixon's AS was scrutinized, the logs showed that the excavator processors were operating at minimum capacity, and had been for weeks. The only reason the operators hadn't stopped them altogether was that it was more trouble to start them up again than keep them ticking over like this.
Captain Lyaute explained the financial reality of asset realization to the mine managers, trying to tell them they were wasting their time by the go-slow. They just glared at him.
A jeep was sent over to the hospital. Some of the more advanced medicines and vaccines were loaded into it. A truck was driven out to the fusion plant, where it could stock up with expensive spare components. Lawrence and Amersy helped shift excavator cutting heads from their storage racks in one of the big sheds, heaving them into the back of a truck. The bulky cones were studded with long compression-bonded diamond blades that Z-B would strip off back in Memu Bay before boosting them up to the waiting starships.
"That's our livelihood you're killing," one incensed technician yelled at them. "How can we buy food if we can't work, you bastards?"
Lawrence ignored him.
"The guy's got a point," Kibbo said. "This does seem kind of petty. The blades, okay, they're high-tech and expensive. But medicines from the hospital?"
"It's the same deal for everyone on the planet," Lawrence said. "They'll produce replacements as soon as we leave. We're not taking the factories with us."
"Still not quite what I thought we were about"
"Being seen up here is what we're about," Ntoko told them. "We're flag-waving, that's all. The hinterlands have to know we're here, and we're real. It happens on every campaign. You send a convoy round all the backwoods settlements to prove they're not immune. If we didn't, places like this would be a haven for refugees and resistance movements. And the way to pay for these convoys is—"
"Is with valuable goods," Amersy finished. "Asset realization in miniature."
"You got it."
Lyaute decided that the convoy wouldn't be spending the night in Dixon. Anger was running on high voltage through the townspeople, and there were too many of those tempting heavy tools available.
When he got back into the jeep, Lawrence watched several Skins from the other platoons stuffing jewelry and household cards into their personal bags.
The convoy camped out on the plain that night, thirty kilometers past Dixon. They got to Stanlake Province the next day, where waterside villages were strung out all along the shores of the lake itself. They harvested strange aquatic weeds for their complex organic compounds, which were used down in Memu Bay's biomedical factories. Assets here were even scarcer than in Dixon. All the villages used solar panels and wind turbines to generate their electricity; there was no fusion plant. Only three of them had a doctor's office—serious patients were taken to Dixon, or air-ambulanced out to Memu Bay. Electronic systems were years out of date. In their raw form, the organic compounds were worthless. Lyaute did check that all of the harvest was being sent to Memu Bay. It was.
They drove on past the lake, deeper into the high plain. On the third day they reached Arnoon Province. Several of the Mitchell peaks were clustered together here, creating deep, meandering valleys between them. Dense forest had colonized the sheltered saddles between the high slopes. Slim curlicues of white cloud poured down from the craggy snow-covered peaks to writhe amid the treetops. The Great Loop Highway led straight through the thickest section of vegetation. Trees and vines blotted out the sun for long periods. Flat tree stumps lined the route where the highway robots had cut the path, with bulbous fans of bright coral-pink fungus growing out of the damp, rotting wood. But not even the robots could cope with the creepers that twined across the gap. Despite the jeep's all-terrain suspension, the journey began to get rough.
"What do this load of hillbillies do?" Kibbo asked as they rocked and shook their way through yet another tunnel of vegetation. Two hours in the cool forest, and they still hadn't seen any sign of human habitation.
"I think they grow tigercotton," Amersy said.
"That's Laeti Province," Lawrence said. "Arnoon collects willow webs. It's a vine that only grows in this forest, similar to wool apparently. They have a load of cybernetic looms that churn out clothes and rugs. The cities pay a premium for it" He grunted at the sudden echoes of memory. Isolated crofters living amid the mountains, selling their crafts to the rich city folk so they could buy the few items necessary to maintain their independence.
Either Great Loop Highway marker posts were being stolen, or the transport office had decided to space them farther apart in the forest. Up in the lead jeep, Ntoko was relying heavily on his inertial guidance and maps uploaded from the Memu Bay Town Hall, which were at least a decade out of date. They kept coming across junctions and forks in the muddy road that simply didn't exist in the old files.