She crossed her arms, and looked him up and down. "Just like ..." The sentiment trailed off. "Would you like to meet Commodore Jensen? I suppose he'll have to decide what to do with you and your men, in the end."
"I'd be grateful if you could arrange a meeting, if you think you can."
Her lips parted, revealing white teeth as she smiled. "I'm sure of it. I'm his granddaughter."
The ships docked and began to disembark wounded. Valentine said a quick good-bye to Post as attendants carried him and the other injured off and placed them on wheeled litters. The attendants then pushed the litters toward the hospital ship, which in proximity dwarfed even the bulky Thunderbolt.
Then the Jamaican soldiers, then prisoners, and finally sailors came down the gangway Valentine had last climbed a week ago in New Orleans.
Valentine, with nothing to do but wait, watched Jayport's inhabitants. They were for the most part black-skinned, long-limbed, and healthy looking. A messenger boy received a hollow wooden tube from an officer on the Rigel and sprinted off toward the shore like a runner in a relay race. He wondered which building held whatever passed for government headquarters among the low, whitewashed buildings clustered around the bay. Fishing shacks and a few hung nets dotted the beach.
Valentine felt the odd sensation of standing on a firm surface after days at sea. Some of the Grogs sat down hard, holding their heads in their hands at the motionless feel of terra firma. He enjoyed the brassy sunshine-the climatic changes still echoing from the cataclysm of 2022 that cut the amount of sunlight north of the tropics were not so noticeable in the central Caribbean. Farther down the dock, the
"loyal" hands of the Thunderbolt squatted on the bare concrete surface, slapping at flies hardy enough to venture out this far from shore. Some glared in his direction, some looked to him plaintively, but most just contemplated their surroundings with a fatalism bred by a lifetime in the KZ.
Dockside idlers examined the Thunderbolt from behind a rope line that divided the captured ship's part of the dock from the landward extension, where a few armed men in white T-shirts and khaki shorts that looked more like school uniforms than police kept locals and new arrivals apart. Men bearing platters of fruit followed by graceful women with tall wooden tumblers of water were allowed past the line, and they began distributing the island's bounty to Valentine's men and prisoners alike.
"Enjoy, mon, enjoy!" said one, handing out bananas and halves of coconuts.
"No worries, mon! Spring water for now, maybe some rum later," added a woman, her voice bringing out the ca-denced phrases more as if she were singing than speaking. She exchanged a few words and a smile with a dockhand, but Valentine could make no more out of it than he could Ahn-Kha's Grog patois.
One man leaned toward a guard's ear, pointed at Valentine, and spoke. A few others craned their necks, and Valentine wondered what sort of dockside rumors were already floating around about the fight on the Thunderbolt.
Valentine tasted his first fresh banana-he'd had banana bread and a pudding mix in New Orleans, and there was no comparison-and followed it with the meat and milk of a coconut. He strolled over to Ahn-Kha and the Grogs, who were learning to peel their fruit before eating it in imitation of the humans. A knot of the Chief's men crammed down the colorful fruit with Went and Torres.
"What do they have in mind for us, my David?" Ahn-Kha asked, scooping meat from his coconut shell with his strong, flexible lips.
"We're safe for now. It seems they give the royal treat-
ment to prisoners. They'll try to recruit the captain's men, I suppose. They don't know which category we're in. We're not under guard, but I don't think those men at the rope gate will let us just wander into town."
"They left you your weapons. They locked the rest back up in the small-arms room. They are either very trusting or very confident," Ahn-Kha mused.
"Either suits me, for now. We're lucky to be alive, old horse."
"Your race needs to learn to greet every day with those thoughts."
"There's something kind of old-fashionedly formal about the way they've handled us. It's like we've stepped back three hundred years or so. Like letting me keep my guns: a captured officer used to be allowed to retain his sidearms in the days when wars were fought by gentlemen against other gentlemen. I'm half expecting an invitation to dinner, rather than an interrogation."
The invitation to dinner arrived two hours later, waking him from a shaded nap. Like humans, Grogs laugh to indicate amusement, so when a barefoot sprout of a boy in ragged white ducks and a straw hat arrived with a note from the commodore requesting Valentine's presence at the Governor's House for dinner, Ahn-Kha laughed loudly enough to send the flies fleeing in alarm. Carrasca arrived shortly thereafter with an escort, announcing that they were to be moved to more comfortable quarters. They formed up behind her, and the procession of visitors walked the pier toward town.
The wide pier reminded Valentine of an etching of London Bridge he'd seen long ago in a book. Crowded with buildings at the landward end, so much so that it resembled a narrow street for the last hundred yards before it reached the shore, the walkway was where goods from land and sea traded owners. Two-story buildings, making up in floors what they lacked in width and depth, overhung both the
street to the inside and the water to the outside, creating a shaded corridor leading toward the town proper. Carrasca explained that the twentieth-century dock was one of the best-built foundations in the bay, an important consideration on an earthquake-prone island. Valentine's men and their baggage were placed in a series of rooms above a clothing-reclamation shop, next to an empty storage room that would accommodate Ahn-Kha's Grogs. The prisoners from the Thunderbolt were placed alongside the dock in a permanently moored ship, where Carrasca assured him they would be well looked after. Valentine asked to see the wounded who'd been taken to the hospital ship, and Carrasca wrote him a note that would get him on board. He and his men were free to move about the pier as they wished.
"But you might not want to be too visible," she warned. "A lot of characters come into port. We're sure we get spies sent by the Kurians now and then. Once a small fishing ship blew itself up at the pier-perhaps you noticed the big patched-up crack. We depend on trade too much to deny access to the pier to strangers. But even men such as you whom we assume to be friends are not allowed in town, and are searched before going on board the Argus."
Of all the choices Valentine had faced in the last twenty-four hours, the most unexpected was deciding what to wear to dinner at the Governor's House. With the message he had in mind to say to the commodore, he preferred looking like an ally rather than a castaway. Going in his full Coastal Marines uniform would be inappropriate-he no more represented the Kurian Order than the Zulu nation. Lacking anything else presentable, he wore his tailored uniform trousers and good boots, topping it with a simple white shirt. He washed and combed out his thick black hair and drew it back into a tight pigtail. Torres completed the ensemble with the loan of a short black jacket and a strange combination of sash and cummerbund, an item common to what passed for aristocracy in his native part of Texas. Valentine's long arms
dangled from the sleeves of the jacket, but he at least looked properly dressed.
One of the ubiquitous messenger boys-this one had shoes on his feet-arrived at the rooms to escort him off the dock as the sun went down. The breeze had reversed itself with the cooling of the land. What had Carrasca called it? The Undertaker. It smelled of the decay on the seashore rather than the clean ocean.
The boy led him past another watchman's post on the dock and into the first of Jayport's streets. An open carriage rocked back and forth on a heavily patched turnaround at the base of the pier; a single horse shifted impatiently in the traces before an elderly driver. The old man's white hair and whiskers framed a round black face; he gave Valentine a look more like that of a suspicious police officer rather than a taxi driver.
Carrasca waited for him in the carriage, wearing a neat blue uniform tunic with her hair in a tight bun at the back of her head. Oddly, the uniform made her even more feminine, thanks to her wide, dark eyes and portrait-perfect face. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps Carrasca-or the commodore-wanted to make as good an impression on him, mirroring his own efforts in securing proper attire.
Valentine assumed the attitude of one who took her presence there, in a cushioned and polished carriage, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.