Soldier's Duty Read online

  Thimayu smirked and Izramith made a threatening gesture to her.

  She knew what Mother would say. Fighting was not done. It was ugly and primitive. Fighting was how the Coldi people on Asto settled who belonged in which position in their associations. But they didn't do associations at Hedron. They were much more civilised than that.

  Stuff like that. She had heard it so many times before.

  Izramith met her mother's eyes, barely containing the anger. "Whether we fight or not, Thimayu is going to take responsibility for her child."

  Thimayu said, "I've sorted it. I told you I want him to be looked after at the Respite Illness Centre. That's where he's going."

  "What? He's only two days old. He hasn't even done anything."

  Thimayu snorted. "For now. Don't be stupid. You know what it means to be zhadya-born. You know all the trouble he'll get into. You'll know he'll never have a normal life. You know that if he's allowed to bond with us he's likely to try to kill us. I can't look after him. You can't look after him. You're hardly ever here anyway. We can't expect Mother to look after him, either. I don't want any of us to become attached to him and then for him to betray us in some horrible way, or worse."

  Izramith protested weakly. "He's a baby." But he would do all those things. Her argument was slipping and she knew it.

  She turned around and went to the room's door. The anger still burned inside her, but she had become used to that feeling. Thimayu did everything to avoid a fight, and fighting might resolve the issue of who had the right to speak, but it would not help the boy. In fact, she wasn't sure anything could help him.

  She wanted to pick him up and run out with him. She wanted to take him somewhere safe. But that wasn't going to solve the problem. A young boy had faulty genes. And he was going to grow up in a terrible place, and, with time, become a terrible, manipulative person. And there was not a thing she could do to stop it.

  "When?" she asked, feeling weak.

  "He'll be gone by morning."

  Chapter 2

  Drained and defeated, Izramith went back into her room.

  She lay on her bed, staring into the darkness, letting the awful truth seep over her.

  Far too many families were destroyed by the malicious minds of their zhadya-born sons. People who thought they could look after them, and contain the evil streak by giving the boys love, only to have that love used against them, like that awful case of a family of a mother, her sister and a young girl being hacked to death in their sleep. A couple of Izramith's colleagues had caught the boy in a river cavern a few days later, still with the blood on his hands and clothes, rambling and incoherent. He had not changed, or eaten or slept.

  There was no cure. The medicos' most recent advice was not to become too attached to the boys. They were best cared for by strangers with training to spot the precursors of violent behaviour.

  These days, most babies went to the Centre.

  Zhadya-born who managed to escape being taken to the Respite Illness Centre lived in the abandoned second level corridor of the old settlement. Most of those were older, but few lived past middle age. Zhadya-born had a habit of getting killed in violent ways.

  When she was on internal patrol, Izramith had attended suicides and murders that happened with disturbing regularity in that horrible place that had long since been abandoned by the Mines Settlement Authority, its health and maintenance services. No outsider except guards went into that place.

  Every now and then, a man would escape the area by way of a poorly-guarded or disused passage, and then the guards would have hunts all over the settlement, on the inter-settlement trains and sometimes even on the surface, trying to scout him out in the dark, because he was likely to murder someone or worse, tamper with mining equipment or the bio-engineering plants.

  That behaviour endangered the lives of the entire settlement, and they couldn't risk it. For all its strengths, the industrial settlements at Hedron were vulnerable. Without technology, most of its population would not survive for long in perpetual darkness of the planet's surface. The threat of sabotage was huge.

  At the bottom line, zhadya-born could not be trusted.

  Many people made no secret of the fact that they wanted those children killed at birth. No doubt some even were, but the talk went that not even the Asto Coldi were low enough to kill their zhadya-born babies, so no one at Hedron did so either. They just locked them away instead. The difference of course was that Asto's climate made that most zhadya-born never into adulthood and full-blown madness. At Hedron, they did.

  By the time the alarm went off in the morning, Izramith's head resembled a big hollow space filled with packaging foam. She scrambled from the bed—she had no sense of the alarm being an exercise now—and pulled on her clothes, feeling like her arms and legs were held down by heavy weights. The hub next to the door glared the time at her. Shit, she was late.

  By the sounds drifting through the door, someone was already up in the apartment, and when she stepped into the hall, the light in the hall already burned at full strength. It was harsh on her eyes.

  Thimayu stood in the kitchen, with her back to the door, waiting for her porridge to cook.

  Izramith walked around the table, while the heater pinged and Thimayu took her porridge out. Izramith did not meet her sister's eyes, afraid to trigger another urge to fight. There was no time for that sort of thing right now and no point.

  She collected her own porridge from the pantry, pulled the lid off and shoved it in the heater. The apparatus hummed briefly and pinged when it was done. Meanwhile, Thimayu had sat down with her bowl and tongs and started eating.

  Izramith took her porridge out and used the end of the tongs to stir it. She didn't want to sit at the table, because Thimayu would look at her, so she ate while standing up, facing her sister's back.

  The silence was thick.

  Izramith's throat felt tight. She knew that any day she put off a confrontation was a day she allowed this situation to fester, and she knew that her sister didn't understand it and possibly didn't even see it that way. She would rather hide, and keep doing things the way they had always been done before.

  But that way wasn't working. You didn't solve anything with long, protracted silences or shutting yourself in a room and not talking to anyone. What was the point of a family if you were going to live like that?

  Thimayu finished, rose and put her bowl in the cleaning cabinet, where the next water cycle would spray boiling water over it as soon as the breakfast timeslot was over.

  "So. When I come back he'll be gone, right?" Izramith said when her sister was at the door.

  Thimayu turned sharply. "What worry is it of yours? You're not going to look after him either."

  It was a plain challenge, and Izramith had to do all she could to remain outwardly calm while her sister turned, crossed the hall and went back to her room. The door shut.

  Izramith glared at it, clenching her fists.

  Selfish brat.

  Stupid family.

  She had rushed to come back here—for this?

  Izramith finished her porridge, put her bowl away and went into her room to change into the grey pants and tunic that was the general utilitarian uniform of the Hedron residents.

  She eyed herself in the mirror. Her eyelids were puffy. If she kept feeling as tired as she looked, today was going to be a long day standing still and looking scary at the airport.

  Izramith left the apartment.

  She strode through the maze of the underground settlement as fast as she could without running. Winding passages flowed into community courtyards with planter boxes in which grew multi-hued mycelioids of all shapes, sizes and colours. Spotlights on the ceiling accentuated their grotesque shapes and sometimes fluorescent colours.

  Often, Izramith would stop to admire the many weird structures—you could goad them into producing almost any shape out of the fibre that they grew for their fruiting bodies—but today, the winding corridors and pla
ying children only provided an impediment to getting to work in time. This was not hurrying-up territory.

  She came out into the large central hall of the settlement and joined the group of people waiting for the lift.

  They were mostly people who lived on the higher levels in the settlement. Parents with children going to school, people with parcels of food from the lower floor cafes.

  The atmosphere in the hall was one of relaxation.

  There was a pond in the middle of the hall and water trickled from another set of living rocks covered in red moss. A colony of mycelioids grew on an artificial wall that was at least two floors high. The fruiting bodies were orange and flask-shaped and they mingled with blue ones that looked like hands with lots of fingers. They were about the same size as hands, too. Blue lighting made the edges glow fluorescent pink.

  People sat at tables around the pond. The netted mycelioid that was owned by one of the cafes was flowering again. It was a huge thing, with a pink, fleshy-looking stem and tendrils hanging over several tables. There were shops around the outside of the hall, underneath the overhang of the balcony on the floor above.

  Someone yelled behind her, "Hey.' And a bit later, "Hey, Izramith!"

  She turned.

  The man walking towards her wore administrative uniform with the lilac shirt and the mines emblem on his chest, two triangles, one grey one purple. He wore his hair in the standard tight ponytail, but a curly strand had escaped it and hung over his forehead.

  Several of the other people waiting for the lift—workers in all-grey—raised their eyebrows.

  "Hello Indor."

  Damn, was there a more inconvenient time and place to meet him?

  He smiled. "I didn't know you were back. I would have come earlier to say hello."

  "It's been really busy. With de-briefing and…" Izramith shrugged. What the hell would she say about her sister's baby?

  "How was Indrahui? I heard it's pretty nasty out there. We've been getting so much news from there recently and I've been following it, because of you. That war lord at Pataniti was quite a nasty piece of work. So glad that you got him. That was really good work."

  "Yeah." Seriously? Why would anyone at Hedron care about the tribal wars of Indrahui? A war lord died and another rose immediately. For the little people nothing changed. The news services wrote their beat-up, semi-heroic shit to justify the continued spending of money on a conflict that was a long-running vendetta that would never be solved.

  He continued, "I heard they might be giving distinctions to all of those who served. That would be awesome and is the right thing to do to honour all those who fought. The people don't appreciate the work you do."

  If there was one thing Izramith hated more than a disregard for her service, it was unbridled adulation from people who didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.

  "There is nothing heroic about war."

  "Oh, but because of you, a lot of people will be safe at night."

  Because of me, a lot of people are dead. She glanced sideways at the closing lift doors, wondering if she could say Look, I have to run, but the lift was only up to the floor immediately above so even if she ran, she wouldn't be going anywhere.

  "You're not working today?" Time to change the subject.

  "I am, but I was on my way to get some food—look, why don't we meet in the next couple of days? We can continue our contract discussion where we left off."

  "Sure."

  "I'm really looking forward to it. I think it will be a very good thing for both of us."

  "Sure," Izramith said again. Why was that lift taking so long? It was on the second floor now. Between the cage and the balcony railing she could see the silhouettes of people walking off.

  "You're sure you're all right?"

  "Yes, why?"

  "You seem distracted."

  "Just tired." She dragged a hand over her face to illustrate it. "I'm on my way to work." She glanced at the lift as if to make her point. Next time that lift came, she had better be on it. She was probably already too late.

  A look of understanding came over his face. "Ah. I see. Protecting our settlement, eh? Doing all the good work." He laughed. "Oh, well, I better leave you to the important job to protect all us rule-pushers. I'll be in contact. Let's go out for dinner."

  "Sure." She attempted to smile back at him, but every fibre of her being screamed with the agony of what she knew and he didn't.

  And he was gone, leaving her to look at his retreating back.

  Oh, damn.

  Indor was a good man. Really, she meant that, because she wouldn't have selected him from the matchmaker database if he wasn't. She didn't want just anyone as father for her children, and he was intelligent and not unattractive.

  Meeting her in a few days' time? To do what?

  The only thing she could do was tear up the agreement between them. There would be no children, no matter how much she wanted them, no matter how jealous she was of the ex-guards who came into the guards' change room to show their initiation scars and brought their cute toddlers. They complained how hard life was outside the guards and how uncomfortable it was to be pregnant. Izramith saw through them: those women were happy.

  But there would be no happiness for her. Once Indor found out that she carried the zhadya gene, he wouldn't want her anymore. No one would want her anymore.

  No one wanted to add to the population of crazy and deranged men.

  Chapter 3

  The lift arrived and, via a couple of stops to let off passengers, it took Izramith up to the surface level.

  The featureless arrival hall gave away nothing of the splendour of the settlement below. For many foreign visitors, especially commercial ones, their access to Hedron stopped here. Visitors needed a personal invitation from a resident to enter the rest of the settlement.

  It was busy here, with departing travellers waiting for a shuttle. Most of them were Coldi from the Ezmi clan, most of them sales and administration officers.

  A few foreign visitors lined up for the accommodation counter, where they would be allocated rooms in this lifeless and dull part of the settlement.

  Izramith walked past all those people and pushed open the unmarked door on the other side of the hall. The light on the door blinked in response to the signal from her earring. She stepped into the pitch dark entry dock. The door shut, plunging her into darkness. There was a second door ahead which provided entry to the guards' change room, but right now it was too dark to see it. A beam of light intersected the darkness and tracked her body. The scanner hummed. A light on the scanner blinked blue: she could pass. The light came on in the dock and Izramith let herself into the change room.

  Inside the base, the mantra was white efficiency. On the white and bare floor stood several rows of metal benches separated by metal racks on which hung the same grey garments as Izramith was wearing. Around the walls stood banks of lockers. The back wall was taken up by a row of change cubicles.

  The locker area was busy, with women of the green shift hanging up their guard uniforms.

  As per regulation, Izramith passed them without speaking to any of them. Anonymity was the power of the guards. When on duty, no one was supposed to recognise you, and you weren't supposed to know the names of your colleagues. Nevertheless, after having worked for the guards for so long, Izramith knew most of their names and could match those with their code names. After having come back from Indrahui, it had surprised her how many of the same women still served in exactly the same positions as before.

  The only sound in the room was the scuffing of feet.

  The side wall of the room was taken up by sets of shelfs on which lay a sea of dark purple clothing. Overalls, jackets, belts, shirts, armour, all stowed in meticulous precision. Izramith took one of each item and went into a change cubicle, and, as she had done since joining the guards barely out of adolescence, left her identity behind and became a nameless, faceless soldier.

  First, she pu
t on a grey shirt and tight-fitting leggings. Then the overalls—dark purple. Over that went the body armour, front and back, which clipped together at the sides. Then the jacket, the belt, and from the safe, her weapons—one at the right arm, one on the belt, comms devices, and finally her hood with face veil—which covered everything except her eyes—and helmet. As she left the cubicle through the door on the other side, she switched on the helmet comm. A tiny display sprang into life in the corner of her vision.

  She flicked her eyes, and this made the tiny microphone pop out of its recess inside the helmet. "Blue Forty-four reporting to Commander Blue for duty."

  There was a small silence in which her headphones crackled.

  Then a voice belonging to Commander Blue said, "You're late, Blue Forty-Four."

  "My apologies."

  "That is the second time in three days."

  "Apologies. It won't happen again."

  "It had better not." The tone of Commander Blue's voice masked ill-disguised anger. "You assured me you were ready to assume duty after your debriefing from Indrahui. I'm beginning to think you might need to be referred to the clinic."

  "I'm fine. There are reasons for my lateness. Nothing to do with me." She was not going to the clinic. That would go on her record and the label stress-affected was only one step away from dishonourable discharge. After leaving the guards, she was planning to work in security or safety patrol and a dishonourable discharge was the least she could use.

  Worse, she had the feeling that the higher command had been looking to find a label to stick on her ever since she returned.

  "We will see, Blue Forty-four. You're on entry duty, post seven."

  "Copied and out."

  Izramith ran out the change room into the long and bare sloping corridor that linked the arrival hall to the settlement's entry at the surface. The ramp was empty at the moment, but would hum with activity when a shuttle arrived. It would bring a tide of arriving passengers down the ramp, and then take the departing ones who were waiting in the hall away.