by Patty Jansen
"Do you have authorisation to demand this?"
"Open the fuck up." She shifted to position three, which involved sliding the gun out of its bracket and holding it pointed at the ground in front of the target's feet.
Meeting her eyes, and then looking at the gun, he shrugged. He slid his fingers under the closing flap and ripped the paper. Then he opened the envelope and gave the contents to her. His face still showed no sign of emotion.
The document was a single-page letter, written in the strange blocky Mirani script. Izramith engaged the translator of her helmet comm and read.
The letter was an invitation to some kind of party.
What the actual fuck? "This is private? You make a fuss over a fucking party?" She let the letter drop to the table.
"I make a fuss over principles. I asked and got a promise of confidentiality. These people—" He gestured at the sheet. "—are refugees who have had their lives threatened multiple times. I was assured by the Mines Board that I would be allowed in the settlement with a document bearing the seal of the Barresh Exchange." He pointed at the seal. He was oh so restrained in his anger.
"They did not tell me anything about that."
"Have you entered the number?"
"Don't fucking tell me how to do my job." But she manually entered the number anyway.
A line in her helmet visor said, High level: approved.
Oh, fuck. Was it even possible for her to do anything right today?
She slid his ID in the scanner and hit approved.
With a trembling hand, she took his ID card from the scanner and gave it back to him. "Get the fuck out of here."
He nodded politely, collected his letter and his small travel bag, and left. He didn't smile, or sneer or shout that he would complain. That behaviour would have given her satisfaction. This utter calm did not.
Private and confidential? What the fuck. Which idiot approved of two Mirani Traders meeting each other privately in the Hedron settlement? What had gotten into the Mines Board while she was at Indrahui?
Times have changed, Commander Blue had said on her first day back. We need to become more accountable to visitors. No more threats. No more roughing up.
Indeed.
Chapter 4
Izramith struggled to get through the remaining visitors and then spent the rest of her shift standing at the booth staring into the darkness. Because Hedron was such a long way from the other settled worlds on an outlying and ancient arm of the galaxy, arrivals always happened in batches, because the Exchange network needed to line up eleven jumps from most other destinations and that happened at most twice in a shift so it got very busy for a sort time, and the rest of the shift was mindlessly boring.
So she stared at the sky and counted the gas clouds that people called moonwhirls, since they were disturbances in Hedron's gas cloud cloak caused by the planet's many moons. She counted twelve today. There were seventy-two in all, and the path they described through the sky was called the skyway in the old stories.
Hedron's twin planet Veynu was low over the horizon, a giant fingernail in the sky.
The first time in her life that she'd come outside, the sky had been almost black, but ever since she started working for the guards, it had become more purple with the glow from the distant sun. Already, there was enough light for her to make out the ragged hills that surrounded the airport.
Day by day, the terminator crept over the planet's surface. The sun would soon clear the horizon. At this distance, it would not be more than a pinprick, which no one on the surface could see because of the gas cloak, but it would bring out the colours in the sky, the purples and blues and pinks and reds. The sun would stay above the horizon for the rest of her life and that of the next generation.
Nothing ever changed quickly at the surface of Hedron.
While she stood there, watching her breath steam in the light, there was no getting away from her demons. She was finished with this job. After her tour to Indrahui—where real people fought real wars—this border patrol job was just a licence to be a pedant about rules.
There had been a time, when she first started as guard, when the guards had been feared by all who visited Hedron. There had been stories about foreigners unwilling to believe that all guards were female. There had been tales about chases of smugglers trying to find ways into the Hedron settlements through entries other than the airport. Tall tales of shoot-outs, stand-offs and occasions where real enemies of Hedron had been apprehended.
Not anymore. The Mines Board had become soft, insisting that the emphasis should be on commerce and good relations with all other entities. Basically, the guards were not allowed to frisk anyone anymore, because it might upset relations. Visitors had become customers. What the fuck.
Instead, Hedron lent guards to peacekeeping efforts.
Like Indrahui.
Huh. As if the two sides would ever stop fighting there. The authorities insisted that the rebels disrupted the peace, and the rebels insisted that the authorities repressed them. Except there hadn't been a peace to disrupt for hundreds of years, and yes, the ruling class repressed the rebels. It was in their interest to keep the rebels poor and uneducated so that the land owners could have a supply of cheap labour.
But it was the ruling class that paid for help from outside, so she could either shut up and be paid, or speak out and be declared an enemy. From Hedron's point of view, the exercise was not about peace—what did they care about distant, basket-case Indrahui anyway? It was about arms deals and the sale of weapons. In addition to that, she had very strong suspicions that Hedron not only sold expertise and soldiers to the ruling class, but sold weapons to the rebels as well, so that it could sell even more expertise to the ruling class.
It made her sick.
No. Indrahui was a lost cause. She didn't want to think about it. But out here standing in the cold and dark with nothing else to do, her demons found her anyway. Dead men on the prairie, their bodies blown off below the waist. Drops of blood raining from the sky. The stench of burning flesh. She was sweating under her layers of uniform, and struggling to remain standing motionless in position.
Up there in the Exchange tower, Commander Blue would have a minion watching her. To check out her "suitability" for her job.
She hadn't expected to move back into her previous position. For one, it was occupied by someone else, but this hostility was a mystery to her. Yes, she didn't want to extend her contract, but she did want to complete her current employment honourably.
And then…
Was there anything for her now that she knew that she carried the zhadya-born gene? Was there anything she could do for her nephew?
Her thoughts went around and around.
As soon as her shift finished and the relief from the Yellow shift arrived, Izramith sprinted to the change room where she left her anonymous guard personality behind and became Izramith again.
On the civilian side of the cubicles, a group of women sat illegally talking on the benches in the change room. They fell quiet when Izramith came out of the cubicle and crossed the floor to hang up her uniform.
The women were all from the Blue shift and a mix of old and new faces. One of them whispered in another's ear and that woman glanced sideways at Izramith.
"Really? How many did it say again? More than a hundred?" She stopped at Izramith's glare and averted her eyes.
She must be a recruit joined at the most recent intake, because Izramith didn't know her. The other, older, woman of course was Nayani or Blue Eight, who never had anything nice to say about anyone.
The women remained quiet while Izramith put her heavy guns in her locker, shut the door with a clang and walked to the entry.
"The rumours are wrong, by the way," she said standing at the door into the security lock. "There were a thousand."
She opened the security lock's door, stepped in and closed the door again.
Leaning against the side wall, she closed her eyes while the s
canner traced her body. Instead of a single beam of light crawling over her skin, she saw a flaming aircraft plummeting from the sky. She heard soldiers screaming. Once again, she was overcome by horror when she realised that the craft would crash in the rebel camp. And she could do nothing to stop it. It fell and fell. A giant chunk broke off. Voices around her cheered. Someone clapped her on the shoulder, but she stared at the unfolding horror, wanting to stop the fall, wanting to move away all those people who had done nothing except to be born to the wrong parents—
The light came on in the security dock. Izramith wiped sweat from her face. She must try harder to keep these awful memories away. Indrahui was in the past, gone, finished. She would never go back there.
She opened the door into the arrival hall, brightly-lit and almost empty. Too normal, too civilised.
While waiting for the lift, a glass wall to the side allowed her to see into the conference centre. One of Hedron's chief civil engineers stood at a dais. The Asto engineers she had processed earlier sat in the audience, a bloc of blues and maroons amongst the greys and purples. On the far wall hung a banner that said Guild of Service Engineers, and a table to the side held a variety of equipment in boxes and tubes that would—she guessed—have something to do with power and water supplies.
* * *
Izramith and Thimayu shared the same father, a man called Deomor who had been contracted by their mother to provide her with his seed and stay the hell out of her life.
Typical of her, Thimayu had no interest in him, but Izramith visited him sometimes when she wanted to talk to someone. He was a relaxed, easy-going man, a crane driver in the steel works.
He lived on the second level in the new settlement behind the shops, where he shared an apartment with a group of other men all of whom worked in the steelworks.
"Izramith." His smile when he came to the door was genuine and his expression welcoming. "I didn't know you were back."
"Haven't been back long," she said and cringed. She didn't care so much about not having told Indor, but her father should have been told. "Do you have a moment? I want to talk."
There was an explosion of laughter in the hall behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. "Sorry, me and my mates have just come off the shift, and they're in a goofy mood. Let's go for a walk, eh?"
She nodded and he came into the corridor, shutting the door on the laughter.
"Anything happened? I heard some stories coming out of Indrahui. You weren't close to that massacre, weren't you?"
It was not a massacre, it was an accident, and if you really have to know, I caused it. She shook her head. Indrahui was finished.
"You know that you're a really bad liar?"
"Have it your way."
Izramith glanced sideways. In the time that she had been away, the lines around his eyes had become deeper and the white streaks at his temples more pronounced.
They walked on in silence.
Not far from the apartment, the artificial corridor ended in an archway, where it continued as a natural tunnel, formed ages ago when, after the collision between Hedron and Veynu the earth turned liquid and water was turned into ice but sheer pressure of the surrounding rock. A path in the middle of the tunnel had been paved, but the sides and walls retained their natural glory. Delicate stalactites made from coloured salts hung from the ceiling, dripping water into multi-coloured ponds. Glittering leaf-crystals encrusted the side walls. All those structures were products of water-diluted salts. Dark moss grew on patches of the wall that were soft or rough enough to provide anchorage for roots. A colony of brown mycelioids spread its hairy fronds into the passage.
The tunnel sloped down to where it came out into a cavern. A few strong spotlights in the ceiling cast a ghostly blue glow over a pool. The water was as smooth as a mirror except for when drops plinked from the ceiling. The disturbance made in the water caused schools of silvery fish to start and swarm away. Their flanks reflected the light in flashes.
It was absolutely quiet in the cavern, except for the dripping of the water, rippling of the fish and the clicking noises they made when startled, and the faint sound of water running across rocks on the far side of the cavern.
"Did you know that a Damarcian company has asked for permits to bring visitors here?" Her father's voice echoed in the cavern.
"Visitors? Like, tourists? Are you serious?" This was not the Hedron she knew.
"Yup." He nodded.
"What the fuck…"
He laughed. "What the fuck indeed. The hide of them. They wanted to bring exo-biology students to study life as evolved under unfavourable circumstances."
"How do they even know about this place?"
"Guess a Trader might have told them?"
"Would have to be a foreigner." No native from Hedron bragged about Hedron's fragile and subtle nature.
Only outsiders called Hedron's nature one of the wonders of the universe. Natives thought differently. Hedron's nature was like Hedron people: it had survived where no one thought it would. No one had wanted to help Xiya Ezmi and his band of desert rebel the refugees from Asto when they first arrived here, lived on the surface and starved and froze to death. People had watched the Ezmi clan struggle for survival, until they found their new world's metal resources. And now they were all over Hedron because it was suddenly a rich world? Pardon the hypocrisy.
Izramith and her father came to a platform overhanging the creek. On one side, water pooled in a still pond, on the other side, a small stream burbled down a couple of rocks.
Big stalactites of pink salt hung from the ceiling, backlit by a spotlight.
Izramith leaned on the railing, staring into the dark depths of the pool. A couple of fish glided through the water, swimming in relaxed positions. With all their sensor hairs extended they looked like giant balls of hair.
Her father came to stand next to her. "You wanted to talk. What is wrong?" She turned to him— "No, don't look at me like that. You only ever come to see me when there is trouble."
"Sorry." She let a short silence lapse and added, "Mother doesn't like me seeing you."
"You're an adult. Why do you still listen to her?"
Izramith shrugged. Because I want to care for her and I want her to care for me?
"How was Indrahui?"
"All right, I guess."
"I've never heard anyone use the words all right in the same sentence as Indrahui."
She shrugged. "I made it home safely. That's all." She seriously didn't want to talk about it. Because inevitably, the discussion would get back to that crash, because everyone had seen it. Surely he could imagine what it was like to see human figures on fire running towards you in so much agony that they fell on their knees, pleading for you to shoot them. Maybe he could even imagine what it felt like if that awful scene had happened because—like—you had shot the pilot of the aircraft.
"Izramith, horrible things happen in wars. It is OK to talk about it."
"I don't want to fucking talk about it."
"Maybe not now, but when you do—"
"I don't want to talk about it. It's over. I'm home." And the Indrahui rebels and the stupid government could all go to hell as far as she was concerned.
She clasped her hands together and sunk into silence. Fuck it. Now she was angry. This was not why she had come here.
Before he could continue about the subject, she said, "Thimayu has had a baby boy."
"That's nice for her."
"It's not so simple."
He gave her a sharp look.
"He's zhadya-born."
"Shit." He stared ahead, showing no emotion.
"Thimayu has given him to the Respite Illness Centre. He's two days old." She found it hard to keep her anger out of her voice.
"That's the latest advice. What else should she have done?"
Izramith shrugged. "I don't know. Have you ever been there?"
"I'm guessing you have been to the second level corridor in the old settlement? Tell me
which is worse." His gaze was unusually penetrating.
"But he is a baby!"
"It's better this way. He'll be in the care of experienced people."
"And what? Be a prisoner all his life? I can't imagine growing up in that place. It must be—"
"Izramith, why are you telling me this?"
She whirled at him and spread her hands. "Because he's your fucking grandson. Because I was hoping that maybe you know a way to keep him out of that horrible place." Because she was hoping that he cared, but she sensed that he didn't, because he'd gone all closed-up and defensive.
He turned and met her eyes. She knew that her voice sounded too desperate, and if she wasn't careful, he might say things about her to his mates, and those things might reach the authorities, and somehow that sort of information—personal instability, they called it—had a way of finding its way to the guards.
"Don't ask me." There was a strange intensity to his voice. "I don't know how to help these unfortunate people."
"But he's just a little boy. Two days old. There's got to be a better way—"
He shook his head, his lips pressed together. "There is not. Believe me."
The tone in his voice gave her the chills. "Why? What—"
"I couldn't even save my own brother."
"Brother?" He had a zhadya-born brother? Why did no one know about this?
He folded his hands and leaned forward on the railing, pressing his lips together as if repressing emotion. In the light from the side, he looked old. He was silent, and just when she thought he wasn't going to tell her, he said, "His name is Reyar. He was born with this condition. We were great mates when we were young. I didn't see him as different, he was just my brother. He did my school work and I protected him from bullies. I taught him how to behave. We made pacts and promises. And one day, he betrayed me and when I confronted him, he tried to kill me." His expression was distant.
"Is he still alive?"
He turned his head abruptly to her. "You're not going to talk to him. He's dangerous."
