The wind had picked up considerably since the third watch, and she drove skillfully in the gusts, picking her way among rapidly forming snowdrifts. Now, it was she who was strangely silent when they quit the main thoroughfare, this time for a side road crowded with heavily loaded vehicles of all kinds.
She drew to a stop before one of a dozen heavily guarded sentry booths and offered her ID card. It flashed an unusual color passing through their reader (which it did, Brim noticed, with singular ease). "I'm delivering Lieutenant Brim," she said simply as she handed his card through the window after her own.
Both were returned with a half-heard, "Thank you, Princess," then they were waved through into the milling confusion of the loading complex.
"It's been a wonderful evening, Margot," Brim said lamely as she drove carefully through, the crowded system of ramps leading to the 'midships brow. Beyond, a mammoth liner floated on a gravity pool of truly heroic proportions—easily five or six times the size of those in the Eorean starwharves. The Fleet's ebony hullmetal could by no means hide her thoroughbred lines. She was Prosperous, all right.
More than 950 graceful irals of blue riband starliner—with speed and power in her gigantic bull to outrun all but the fastest warships.
Margot stopped the skimmer short of the orderly mob passing through the gate, then turned his way, face softly lighted by the instruments. Her heavy-lidded eyes were moist, and she had a serious appearance that Brim had never seen before.
"It was a wonderful evening, Wilf," she said. She blew her nose softly on a lace handkerchief. "And I think I owe you an apology. I'm afraid I let things get way out of band back there."
"We both did," Brim agreed. "But then, nothing really came of it, either."
"No," she said quietly. "But you don't understand..."
"I don't want to understand anything," Brim asserted suddenly, surprised at the force of his own voice. "I want your lips, Margot—after that, we can reset and start over again. But I want a kiss from you more than anything else in the Universe."
Without a word, she was in his arms, her lips pushing eagerly against his, wet and open—and hungry.
Her breath was sweet in his nostrils as she clung to him, big in his arms; an ample woman. Their teeth touched for an instant, and he opened his eyes—hers opened too, blurred out of focus before they gently closed again. He felt her tremble, then her grip suddenly loosened. She took a great gulp of air, and he released her.
They sat in panting silence for a moment, Brim's heart pounding all out of control.
"I th-think I'd better go right now, Wilf," Margot said in a shaken voice. "My 'reset' is going to be difficult enough as it is."
Opening the door of the skimmer to the noisy bustle and confusion outside, be nodded wordlessly and jumped to the snow, touching his fingers to his lips. She returned the salute as be gently pressed the door closed, then moved off in a cloud of snow and was quickly lost in the throng of vehicles.
With an unaccountably heavy heart, Brim pushed his way through the crowd toward the guard shack where someone who looked very much like Utrillo Barbousse waited with a familiar battered traveling case.
"Barbousse?"
The huge starman saluted as Brim stepped into the lighted area at the entrance to the brow.
"Lieutenant Gallsworthy thought you might need some assistance, Lieutenant, sir," he shouted above the noise of the big ship's generators. "An' I hadn't made plans for the layover, so I took the liberty of signing on the cruise with you." He handed Brim the side-action blaster.
"It's the kind of mission you might be needin' this."
Brim shook his head and grinned with honest appreciation. He clapped the big starman on the shoulder (which felt like Octillian shore granite). "Let's be on our way, then, Barbousse, my friend," he said. "It's becoming very clear I have an awful lot to learn about the Fleet—and everything else as well."
CHAPTER 5
Swept along in the lines of soldiers and military vehicles coursing up the wide lanes of the brow, Brim and Barbousse caught only glimpses of the great starliner as she hovered on her monster gravity pool.
She seemed to stretch for c'lenyts on either side, and lighted only by the weak glow from beneath, she still looked splendid. Her forward deck tapered gently upward from a conoid bow to a high, rakish superstructure surmounted by two enormous KA'PPA beacons and a dwarfed control bridge, the latter providing the ship with a nearsighted and, to some extent, surprised expression overall. The remainder of the wide, shallow hull—at least three-quarters of her overall length—appeared to be covered by cascading Hyperscreen terraces, which gleamed brightly from within as the big ship loaded.
Below, streams of tarpaulin-covered cargo lumbered along under the lights of at least a dozen cargo-level brows—Brim glimpsed giant cargo tractors levitating a line of self-propelled disruptor cannon into an access hatch deep in the hull. Enormous machines. A great turrent squatted on each flattened hull, ridiculously small for the apparent weight it bore, and angular glassed-in driving cabins projected awkwardly like after-thoughts from the forward port and aft starboard corners. Inboard of these, massive cooling systems were ample proof of the prodigious energy required to fire the thick, stubby disruptors that protruded from the turrets.
"What do you make of those?" he asked Barbousse, nodding toward the big vehicles crawling along below.
"Captured fieldpieces, by the looks of 'em, sir," the big I rating answered.
"No wonder they looked strange," Brim remarked. "Won't they be a surprise to a couple of Leaguers somewhere."
Barbousse laughed as they crested the uphill portion of the brow. "Serve Triannic right to have those turned against him, Lieutenant. Nine-Ks are mean weapons, I've heard. Big, but exact for all their size.
Use 'em for knockin' armored vehicles around, as I hear it. Like tanks and things."
Suddenly the whole ship was spread before them. Brim shook his head in wonder, imagining how she might have appeared before the war-hullmetal in brilliant white and the legendary IGL logo shining ostentatiously on her bridge. "She must have been beautiful," he whispered, literally stunned by the immensity of the gigantic machine floating before him.
"Aye, sir," Barbousse agreed beside him. "Another world all by herself, so they say."
"Not a Carescrian's world, you can bet," Brim said as they continued their journey down the other side of the brow toward the main aperture 'midships.
"Nor mine, Lieutenant," Barbousse said, then he chuckled. "But in the Fleet she belongs to all of us, in a manner of speakin'. War has a funny way of redistributing the wealth."
Even stripped of peacetime luxury. Prosperous' Grand Receiving Lobby was everything Brim expected—and more: spacious pillared concourse with wide, arched corridors leading off in all directions to other parts of the ship. Tracks glowed everywhere in the deck, and they guided dozens of hooting trains piled high with military luggage pushing slowly through the noisy crowds. The air was alive with the smell of excitement, and everyone seemed to have somewhere important to go—although it was not at all clear any of them knew precisely where that somewhere might be located.
In the center of the lobby, a crew of harried-looking clericals toiled desperately within the perimeter of a huge circular desk, fielding questions, peering into half a hundred terminals, and generally assisting the mob of newcomers struggling into the ship. It was here Brim and Barbousse found themselves separated, the latter assigned to a damage-control unit, Brim to Flight Operations.