Soldier's Duty Page 3

  Post seven was the first-level entry to the settlement, the most likely to see action from disgruntled or frustrated foreign visitors who didn't understand all the restrictions that came with travelling to Hedron. She'd been on post seven for four days in a row. That couldn't just be bad luck either. The command was doing it on purpose to test her, to get her to make a mistake that would lead to her retirement.

  Wouldn't it be nice if they could just bring themselves to say the reasons out loud? Returned service personnel are too cocky, too aggressive, too impatient. Once they've been away, they don't fit into our structure anymore.

  She'd heard it before, and never believed it would apply to her.

  Well, guess what?

  At the top of the ramp, there were two sets of sliding doors beyond which darkness loomed. The first door opened at her approach, letting her into the heat trap: a small area of fast-circulating warm air. Her footsteps clanged on the metal grate in the floor and the corners of her jacket stirred in the hot air. The second door let her out of the settlement into the darkness of Hedron's eternal night. She clamped down her visor, to shelter her face from the stinging cold and dry air.

  The airport's landing field was a square piece of compacted dirt, most of which invisible in the dark. The brightly-lit entrance to the access ramp created a half-circle of lit ground radiating out from the entrance, beyond which all was dark except for a few light markers that indicated important locations: the corners of the field, the security zone and the direction of the flight path. Overhead was nothing except murky, dark purple sky with a few lighter-coloured swirls.

  The guard station post seven was directly outside this entrance, and consisted of a small cubicle that held the scanner set in front of a single-room station. There was also a fenced-in waiting area, where people who were not locals and didn't have an earring with an ID chip were assessed for further processing.

  The guard on duty waited behind the scanner in Pose 1, with her hands behind her back and her legs slightly apart. She was one of the Green group, Green Twelve, the helmet comm informed Izramith.

  Her head turned in Izramith's direction, but with the visor down, Izramith could not even see her eyes.

  "Blue Forty-four reporting for duty," Izramith said to her own reflection.

  The other guard bowed slightly and stepped back from her position. Her behaviour and manner gave nothing away, but Izramith thought she would have to be angry. She herself would be angry herself if her relief was late. That made her feel ashamed and angry in turn. Problems at home were no excuse to be late for duty and she would not let it influence the quality of her work ever again.

  She would not give anyone a reason to dismiss her.

  Green Twelve gave some brief handover instructions.

  The Asto shuttle had entered the system and was expected to land soon. A few smaller craft may or may not be given priority to land first, or soon thereafter.

  Izramith nodded and copied the information. "Thank you." And then she added, "Sorry for being late." It was not standard practice and personal contact between guards was not encouraged. Hedron guards were, above all, anonymous.

  Green Twelve raised her visor. Gold-flecked eyes met Izramith's in a hard look. Then she turned on her heel and strode off.

  Izramith took a few deep breaths.

  Right. No more of this nonsense. She was not let Mother and Thimayu get under her skin. That wasn't worth the trouble.

  She went to the scanner cubicle and pressed her comm unit against the screen. It lit up and showed her an image of the expected arriving craft. The Asto shuttle had been given priority, as expected. The craft was larger than usual. They were using a Rhion craft that seated about two hundred. There must be some sort of industry meeting going on.

  She brought the passenger list up on the screen. There were a lot of people travelling alone, and a lot of them who listed their place of origin as Beratha, which was on the second continent of Asto, and a hot-as-hell industrial city.

  In the public diary of the visitor section of the settlement she found that there was a meeting of metal workers in the conference centre starting later that day. The passengers of that shuttle would be mostly engineers, mostly on their first trip here and maybe on their first trip away from Asto.

  There went her hopes for a quiet shift.

  A line of text sprang into her vision.

  Blue Eighteen reported, They got downlights on. Judging by her coordinates, Blue Eighteen was at post two, under the approach flight path.

  Blue Three, a section commander in the Exchange tower shot back, Warning issued to the pilot.

  The faint whine of the engine was already audible.

  She waited at the door to the cubicle, scanning the sky.

  Bright lights from the shuttle were now coming over the horizon. Damn it, they still hadn't turned off the downlights. That craft coming down was a Hedron-built Rhion which was perfectly capable of landing safely without lights. Those lights interfered with the precision lasers of surface mining operations, and she bet the Exchange control room up there was getting some very unimpressed complaints about lost calibrations and missed production targets. So either the pilot was a self-righteous dick or inexperienced. Or both. The craft was from Asto after all.

  The shuttle hovered to a mid-air stop above the stony ground, amid a cloud of grit and dust thrown up by the downward jets. The roar of the engines echoed over the barren and mostly unseen landscape.

  The shuttle settled on the ground with a shudder, and not much later, the doors opened. A crew member in Pilot Guild uniform climbed down the steps and operated the mechanism to extend the ramp.

  The Blue guards Seventeen and Fifty-two materialised out of the darkness where Izramith's visor had shown them standing. They took up their positions on either side at the bottom of the ramp. The Pilot Guild crew member didn't look at them and didn't acknowledge them, but scurried up the ramp into the craft.

  That was typical Asto Coldi behaviour, which was all about self-preservation to avoid triggering of the sheya instinct that could lead to damaging and unnecessary fights.

  The crew of the ship would be a complete association with the pilot at the top, co-pilot and communicator below that and one or two layers of crew below that. Under the co-pilot and communicator, there would be one layer of four or a layer of four and another of eight, depending on the size of the crew. The crew would not interact with any other Coldi person unless properly introduced by whichever pilot stood at the top of the pyramid.

  It was always creepy and alien to see this system at work. Fancy not being allowed to even greet another person. Coldi from Asto were impossible to work with.

  The craft was now fully powered down.

  A light in her visor screen showed the location of Blue Twenty-six who had gone to the cargo door to oversee the unloading of luggage and other items.

  In the glow of the cabin lights inside the cabin, passengers were moving. First off the craft was a father holding the hand of a little girl barely old enough to walk. He carried a big pack in one hand, and the girl carried a toy. They were cast in silhouettes and their shadows extended all the way down the ramp and onto the stony ground. The girl walked in big-important-looking steps as if she was the ruler of the world.

  Thimayu would never walk like that with her son. Cold and dark and uninviting as it was, the boy would never experience the surface unless he escaped his captors. He would never travel, and would be a prisoner of the Respite Illness Centre for the rest of his life.

  And people called that the best way of dealing with him.

  While watching the pair make slow progress towards her, Izramith tried to repress the feelings, but couldn't stop them. Her eyes clouded over. She had expected a bunch of rowdy engineers, or just regular passengers. Except passengers had children. Suppose she had never noticed the children that much, but now they seemed everywhere.

  Now that she knew she could never have any.

  Behind the
pair came another couple of civilian travellers. Text scrolled over the side of her visor. Blue Seventeen and Fifty-two stood at attention on both sides of the ramp, sending through anything they observed. A man in a black jacket looked nervous. A woman with a large bag—needs checking.

  Izramith acknowledged this. People smuggled the most ridiculous things.

  The man and his little daughter had arrived at the checkpoint. The light revealed them to be locals, dressed in Hedron's lilacs and purples. The man was probably some kind of administrator. The scanner registered their entry via the chip in the man's earring, and they went on their way down the ramp, the child pointing and babbling.

  Izramith couldn't stop looking at them until a mass of other people blocked her view of the pair.

  Oh, damn, she'd missed the man who was nervous, and the woman with the bag. They were already on the ramp into the settlement. All locals, since any locals on board came off first and could walk straight past.

  There were indeed visiting engineers on board, a whole group of them, and they stood in the check-in queue at her scanner booth, talking and laughing in Asto accents. She knew the types of men. When they were out with mates, they tried to be smart and funny. Trying to show off. Since none of them wore earrings with ID chips, they had to be scanned manually.

  She asked for the first man's ID. He passed. He was talking to a colleague while she scanned the colleague's ID. He passed, too, but he could produce only the one piece of luggage out of the two marked on his ticket.

  "My mate has the other one," he said, and she had trouble understanding his accent.

  The mate in question was at the back of the queue and had to be brought forward. Yes, he had the bag, but despite being told to keep each bag's contents the same at check-in and arrival, there was a weight discrepancy. Apparently, he had brought something for another associate, a piece of surveying equipment, which he located, she examined and passed.

  As the line shuffled forward, people grumbled about why this mattered anyway. Several complained that they were cold.

  When getting their tickets, they had been given information that the waiting area was outside. They knew Hedron had no sunlight. Why did these dumb people ignore all communication they had been sent through the Pilot's Guild with their bookings?

  Similarly, the engineers had all given different reasons for coming here, while they were here for the same purpose and had applied for entry as a group. They would have been told to streamline their entries, and they had ignored those instructions. On purpose or not, it was always the same.

  Damn, she hated dumb people who didn't stick to instructions.

  All their luggage had to be checked and could not be processed until it was reunited with the owners. The men in the queue waited and complained.

  It seemed like the meeting was some kind of trade fair. Many of them had brought lots of items of tech equipment. Unpacking took ages. What the hell was up with all these rolls of wire? The mens' irritation was palpable. And no, Izramith could not just let them pass as some suggested. Some of the bags contained illegal technology, which she took inside, unpacked and placed on the table inside the guard station room.

  "You will have to leave these here," she said to the merchant who had claimed ownership of the offending items.

  "But I need those for my demonstration."

  "The rules to entry state clearly that you cannot take long-range transmitters. That would have been a condition to buying your ticket. Our mining equipment uses long range frequencies. Our ventilation units, our transport units, our reactors use them. You do not want to be on a train that gets stuck between here are the northern shafts because your equipment disrupts its communication back to base and disables the ventilation to the tunnel. And do I mention you'll be sitting on top of our largest reactor?"

  The man gave her an angry eye.

  "You're in luck. I'm kinder than most of my colleagues. They wouldn't explain, but just take the equipment off you." In the past, she would have done that, too, but Indrahui had changed her. At Indrahui, what civilians carried was the only thing they owned. At Indrahui, a simple roll of wire or a half-broken piece of equipment, no matter how illegal, could make the difference between having money to feed your family or not. But her temper was quickly heating up. The insufferable idiots. Did they even look at what they signed?

  The man grumpily agreed to have his machine disabled until he left the settlement. And then the group could finally leave. Izramith watched them go with anger building in her. If this behaviour was anything to go by, she wouldn't be surprised if the guards would be called a few times during the conference to break up fights of these men with security or deal with loutish behaviour. Asto thought they owned the universe.

  Well, guess what?

  The hold-up with the conference delegates had caused a log jam in the processing area. At least twenty more non-local passengers stood waiting in the dark. They must have come on smaller shuttles that she hadn't even noticed landing.

  There were a couple of private people, mostly merchants. Two from Asto, but they were regulars. They had all their permits in order and she waved them through without much fuss. Next was a Trader.

  He stood in the queue waiting calmly, reading something on a pad that lit his face with a soft blue glow.

  Not just any Trader, a Mirani Trader, and those were usually trouble. Acted like they owned the world. Like the father and son team she had inspected a few days ago—on the day her sister's baby was born in fact—who had tried to conceal and smuggle a whole case of undeclared electronics out of the settlement. She had no idea where they even got the material, because certainly no local resident would give this sort of stuff illegally to Mirani Traders.

  When she called the next traveller forward, he lifted his head. She met his eyes, which were so light blue as to be almost colour-less. His hair, almost white, was tied at the back of his neck with a blue ribbon. It was, most un-Mirani-like, decorated with coloured ribbons and plaits. One of them dangled free when he moved his head. A couple of trinkets tied to the end made a soft tinkling noise.

  A pretty boy.

  He wore a thick Mirani fur cloak—and as such was the only traveller who had come prepared for the wait. When he stepped into the light of her booth she noticed that underneath his cloak he wore a uniform that she had never seen before.

  The shirt and trousers were light blue and ornamental jacket was turquoise blue and made of the thinnest sheer material that had to have cost a fortune. It was fastened on his chest with golden clips.

  The Trader Guild registration on his medallion was 1101. The scanner told her that was the number of a major Mirani Trading family, except the uniform he wore was not Mirani—and to her surprise the helmet comm visual showed his ID in the place where only Hedron residents would display an entry.

  So, what? He was going to be a mysterious enigma, right?

  He bowed when he came to her booth. Not in a subservient way, but very patient and politely.

  For some reason, that annoyed her even more than the Asto engineers' ignorance and petulance.

  She asked him for his ID and he patiently gave her the black card. She shoved it in the scanner and it told her that he was from Barresh. Did they even have Traders there? Why did his details come up in the scanner? He wore simple hoop earrings without tag, as far as she could see, but he had to have a tag somewhere, and one that was synchronised to the Hedron system to boot. Where was the damn tag? Who had authorised it?

  "Your business at Hedron?" she said in the most curt voice she could manage.

  "I have a personal item to be delivered to a resident. It's confidential, urgent and time sensitive."

  He held up an envelope which was bare on the outside except for an Exchange tag. Since when did Traders do delivery jobs?

  "Leave it here with instructions and it will be delivered."

  "I would prefer to deliver this in person. The recipient is a good friend of mine."

  "Hav
e you got a personal invitation?"

  "I understand that the confidential tag should let me in."

  Not that she had heard. Izramith took the envelope from him and passed it over the scanner. It was addressed to Trader Amandra Bisumar.

  "Is this the person you want to visit?" What the fuck was someone with such a Mirani name doing at Hedron anyway?

  "Correct."

  Izramith turned the envelope over once more. Then turned to her scanner.

  Amandra Bisumar turned out to be Mirani Trader who had changed her allegiance from Miran to Hedron. Changed colours, Traders called this. According to the system, she had lived in the settlement for a number of cycles.

  And now another Mirani Trader who had also changed colours wanted to speak to her personally. Never mind that Miran and Ceren, the Mirani home world, was often referred to as the next Indrahui, presuming the war at Indrahui was ever going to end. Her suspicion grew. The Traders they had caught trying to smuggle equipment were Mirani. There might be a connection.

  She might have missed the man who was nervous and the woman with the bag, she sure as hell wasn't going to let this guy pass without checking.

  "What's in this document?"

  "It's private, approved by the Exchange." He pointed at the label. Yes, she hadn't missed that, but what were those Exchange guarantees worth anyway? The Hedron Exchange hadn't approved this, and other places couldn't care less what happened at Hedron.

  The rule at Hedron was: no entry into the settlement unless there was a personal invitation.

  "Open it up." She tried to make her voice as threatening as possible.

  "I don't think that's necessary. This matter is of a personal nature—" Still, he showed no sign of being intimidated or of an intention to back down.

  "Those are our rules. If you want to enter the settlement, I need to see the contents of that letter." Especially if it was from one Mirani Trader to another. Commander Blue would have her head, especially after that episode with the smuggling a few days ago. Mirani didn't allow foreigners into their cities either. And when foreign people did get in, they were likely to be murdered on the streets.