Soldier's Duty

by Patty Jansen

  Fall back position: none.

  Secondary command: none.

  Secondary sources: none.

  Well, crap.

  This was not a plan, it was nothing more than a work sketch. What was more, she lacked the information to fill in the missing parts.

  * * *

  Of course Izramith couldn't sleep. Her stomach was churning and gurgling again.

  And the same images re-played in her head. A fireball. Screaming people. Burnt bodies in the sand.

  It was still dark when she had enough of staring at the ceiling, got up and dressed in her grey gear. The guesthouse's courtyard was deserted. Great. No one to stare at her or complain about what she looked like. She left through the entrance arch, into the street and settled into a jog. Slowly at first. The humid air was unfamiliar and sweat already broke out under her shirt. Slowly, she increased her pace and in her mind, she raced over the plain at Indrahui, jumping over tussocks of vegetation. Abbasi, her local training partner, would be behind her trying to keep up—which he couldn't.

  That was in the days after she first arrived, before the siege, when she had no idea what was in store.

  She jogged down Market Street and over the square, where merchants and couriers were carting deliveries to the markets. The next street down was Fountain Street and she ran the length of it, turned around where it ended in area full of trees and walled mansions and ran back. By now, people started coming out of their houses, most of them Pengali house staff. She almost collided with one of them, so she thought to cut back to Market Street through a quiet alley.

  It was narrow and wound behind big houses with large walled yards on either side. Huge trees grew in the middle of the path, their roots pushing up the pavement. Over the roofs of the houses on her left, she could see the dome of the council building catching the first rays of light—

  Hey what was that?

  At the base of a tree, between the trunk and the high wall of a yard, lay a dark, disturbingly human shape.

  Izramith stopped. Yes, there was someone on the ground. Dark curly hair, dark clothing, his back to the alley. She had seen homeless people sit in the streets yesterday, but this seemed a really odd place to sleep.

  "Uhm. Excuse me."

  There was no reaction.

  She inched closer. A breeze stroked her sweaty skin, making her shiver. The man lay much too still to be asleep, his back facing her, his head uncomfortably hanging down. And where his side touched the paving there was a dark stain.

  She crouched next to him. On the side facing towards the wall, his clothing was slashed, blood-soaked. His cheek was slashed open so that she could see his teeth. His eyes stared unseeing into the distance. They didn't blink or move when she touched his shoulder. Various creatures crawled over his face, leaving bloody trails.

  Damn.

  This was not the same man she'd seen dangled over the balcony last night, wasn't it? She didn't think so. This man looked more skinny, and he couldn't possibly have lived with any of the rich families, not wearing that tatty robe and scabbed arms. In fact, he looked to have been in poor health even before meeting his grisly fate.

  She grabbed her comm. Let Eris know. He'd know who to notify.

  Eris answered, sounding sleepy.

  "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I'm in an alley between Market Street and Fountain Street and there is a dead body here."

  "What?" That was the end of Eris' sleepiness.

  He told her not to touch anything and wait until the guards turned up. So she waited in increasing daylight. A Pengali man came out of a gate and walked past, merely glancing at her and the body on the ground. She used her comm to take pictures of the man's face, but the face recognition didn't know him, probably thrown off-course by the slashed cheeks. Face recognition never did a good job on dead people.

  Not much later, a couple of guards in black came into the alley. They asked her questions, but didn't speak any Coldi, and she didn't speak any keihu, so that was the end of their conversation. She repeated Eris' name a few times and hoped they understood that she'd tell him what she knew—which wasn't much.

  When they looked like being in control of the situation, she went back to the guesthouse, changed into one of her new shirts, and met Eris not much later at the entrance to the council building. He looked clean and crisp in his council uniform. "Sorry that you had to experience that."

  They turned into the entrance. A lot of other people were going in the same direction, most of them wearing robes or other forms of formal clothing.

  "Is that sort of thing common?"

  "Not a lot. At least not when there's keihu involved."

  "Did you know him?"

  He hesitated. "He didn't have ID on him. No one seems to know who he is…"

  "But?"

  They started walking up the stairs.

  "It's strange. He reminds me of a boy who used to live a few houses up. He went funny when he hit adolescence and I stopped playing with him. Then, after a while, I realised that I hadn't seen him for a long time. I asked around and apparently he fought with his family, left home, lived on the streets and then went missing."

  The familiarity in that story chilled her. "Was he living in a bad part of the city?"

  Eris spread his hands. "I'm not sure. I was only a kid and he was a few years older than me. I remember a huge search party gathering the gate to his house. There were rumours about how much his father spent trying to find his son. Then again…" He shrugged. "I was a boy. It was years ago. This man is probably someone completely different. He just… reminds me of him. His name was Jaris."

  His expression was distant, mourning for a friend he wasn't sure he'd found. "You speak excellent Coldi, by the way."

  "Thank you." He gave a small smile.

  Upstairs, Daya was in the large foyer, talking to a man who was at least as tall and lanky as he. Apart from his height, his most distinguishing feature was his shoulder-length silver-white hair. A Mirani Endri. When Daya noticed her, he gestured her to come over.

  Izramith did, while Eris went into the communication room.

  Both Daya and the Mirani man were a head taller than her. The Mirani man's light blue eyes met hers in an intense and sincere look. His face was narrow, his nose straight and his mouth curved and more expressive than she would have expected. Strangely familiar.

  From the back she hadn't seen that he was wearing a Trading uniform, light turquoise blue and made of thin material, with on his chest the medallion that bore the emblem of the Trader Guild. Licence 1101.

  Crap. She remembered that. And she remembered the calm way in which the man had dealt with her inappropriate questions at the entry booth into the Hedron settlement. But had gone to Ydana with his complaint anyway.

  Daya said, "I'd like you to meet Braedon Andrahar, the brother of the groom. He will be your contact with the family."

  Oh, crap. The one considered by Dashu as her zhayma.

  And the invitation he'd come to bring to Hedron, the one she opened against regulations, that would be for the wedding party that she had come here to protect.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  He bowed and Izramith returned the greeting, feeling like her face glowed strong enough to give off light in the dark. "I'm Izramith Ezmi."

  Of course he wouldn’t recognise her without the helmet and veil. Just as well that other people were not as attuned to recognising people by voice as Hedron guards.

  "Pleased to meet you." His expression remained distant. Seriously, whoever still used the formal chi form of the second person pronoun? Coldi had enough pronouns without all the archaic ones being kept alive.

  "Braedon is here because there has been a development overnight." Daya's voice sounded grave. "I understand that you and your team were going to talk to the family today?"

  Izramith nodded. At least she thought so. Dashu had said something about that, but her head still felt woolly, and days and nights mashed into one continuous stream of memories. And
dead bodies in the street.

  "I suggest you wait until the others are here and go with him straight away."

  "Sure."

  An uneasy silence followed, in which she wanted to ask him about the zhadya-born but couldn't because of the Trader.

  Daya said, "I have to go. The council is sitting this morning and I've got to be there. We're voting on the next lot of reforms." He left Izramith and the Trader facing each other in the foyer in awkward silence.

  He eyed her new shirt. A small frown passed over his face.

  Izramith had never seen Mirani Endri hair in daylight, and his looked like a waterfall of silver. She wondered if it was as soft as it looked. And because it was kind of embarrassing to stare at his hair, she said, "So, that's why it was so busy downstairs, right, because of the council?"

  "Correct."

  "You don't have to attend?" She used the chya form of pronoun to address him, and even that sounded far too formal to her ears. At home, she didn't even use that to address Commander Blue.

  "Our mother occupies our seat."

  She nodded, unsure what else to say. As high-born, privileged rich boy he couldn't have less in common with her had she tried. She couldn't decide if he spoke so formally because that was the way Traders spoke or because he thought she was a speck of dirt. Both, probably. At Hedron, everyone used informal pronouns, even when speaking to Edyamor and his family. And now she started to doubt whether she should have addressed Dashu and Loxa in chya forms as well, and if the fact that she hadn't done was part of the reason why she felt so uneasy with them. Why couldn't the Asto Coldi be sensible and, like the Hedron Coldi, drop the stupid pronouns?

  He flicked his eyebrows. "Nice shirt."

  "This? I got it at a shop last night, I—" Wait. There'd been a joking tone in his voice.

  At that moment, there were voices and footstep on the stairs and the rest of the team emerged, Dashu and Loxa in front, followed by Wairin.

  "Hey, Braedon," Dashu said, smiling. She held up her hand and he slapped it, palm against palm, and grasped her hand in a brief grip.

  Oh. So the stand-off-ish behaviour was only reserved for her.

  Typical.

  Loxa came up from behind and put an arm around Izramith's shoulders. She stiffened. He was not going to fight again, was he?

  "Hey, you got a new shirt," Dashu looped her arms around both of them. "What do they teach you at Hedron, huh? To be afraid of another person's touch? Come on, if you're going to be polite, you're supposed to touch us here." She brushed the part of Izramith's cheek near her ear with her fingertips.

  Who said that she was supposed to do that? She'd come here to do a job, not to take part in silly schemes.

  Over Loxa's shoulder, she spotted Eris and Wairin talking to each other and Braedon, and she wished she could be with them, but because she was Coldi, Dashu and Loxa seemed to think that she needed to take part in these rituals.

  She almost wished for her clear, if blunt, brief when she arrived at Indrahui: here is a gun, there are the bad guys. Shoot.

  Dashu retreated with an irritated sniff. "You have a lot to learn." She used informal pronouns that one would use to a boss.

  "Let's go," Braedon said. His eyes met Izramith's and while she felt glad that he defused the situation, she didn't want anyone to rescue her, especially not a Mirani rich boy.

  She just wanted to start the actual work, instead of all this talk.

  They left the foyer for the stairs, into the passage below, where people now queued up to get into a set of double doors that stood open at the far end.

  "Council chambers?" Izramith asked Braedon who walked next to her.

  "Correct."

  "What are they discussing?" Daya had said it was important.

  "Barresh only became independent a few years ago. The council is still working to align the constitution with gamra requirements so they can step up from provisional to full member."

  "Do they have to make a lot of changes?"

  "They're dealing with two overall issues. One is equal rights and treatment for the Pengali. Traditionally, Pengali have had few rights, have never sat on the council and have worked in keihu households as housekeepers, but have never received regular pay or have had rights of employment."

  More like slavery she had heard. Izramith understood rights of employment. Hedron hung together with those agreements.

  "This means that we now have Pengali councillors. It's not easy because Pengali don't treat ownership in the same manner as the keihu section. The function as group, not as family unit. The group owns property or ideas or businesses. The groups are not well-defined, and some Pengali insist on maintaining tribal law rather than council law. It's a big mess."

  "And the other issue?"

  "Polygamy."

  What the heck did that mean?

  "Sorry. It's where one gender, in this case the men, can legally marry more than one partner. For years, most rich keihu men have had multiple wives."

  More than one contracted partner at the same time? But that was disgusting.

  The corner of his mouth lifted at her expression. "Polygamy is disallowed under gamra law, and no entity whose laws allow it can be absorbed into gamra."

  She nodded, feeling sick. "So that's why their houses are so big." And why there were so many adult women listed per house.

  "Correct. Every disadvantage has an advantage." His blue eyes met hers, as if he was issuing a challenge.

  Thought he was smart, huh?

  She knew that saying. "Coldi proverb, most often used, appropriately and inappropriately, by Xiya Ezmi."

  He smiled in a way that reminded her of a teacher's smile to a student.

  They left the building through a side entrance that looked like it could be used as exit only into Market Street. They came out under the trees directly opposite the large guesthouse. Its stained façade was still in shadow and the arched entryway deserted.

  Eris came to walk on Braedon's other side and the two started talking politics. Izramith was quite happy just to listen, but Braedon insisted in explaining the workings of the council to her. Apparently, there were three sections in the council assembly: one for keihu, one for Pengali and one for non-natives. Daya was Chief Councillor, and had an inner council of eleven.

  Apparently, the current structure had only come into place after the Two Day war, and before that, the council had consisted only of keihu heads of family.

  "None of my family," Eris was quick to assure her. "We weren't important enough."

  Dashu said from behind, "Eris, every single member of your family is too mangy to sit in the council. You'd get lost in the seat."

  Eris, Loxa and Dashu all laughed loudly. Braedon's eyes met Izramith's and his expression said, inappropriate and crude joke.

  Izramith didn't understand why they thought it was funny.

  "It's because the old keihu councillors tended to be a certain—uhm—size," Braedon explained. "All the seats are wide to accommodate the dimensions of their backsides."

  Oh. Was it funny? People always made fun of the size of the women guards. She was still waiting for Dashu or Loxa to say something about her ripped shirt. Admittedly her shoulder size was not related to laziness, but she had grown very tired of those not-jokes.

  They arrived at the house.

  As soon as Braedon opened the gate, he made a strange and sudden movement and grabbed something out of the air that flew over their heads.

  A boy stood on the porch holding the handle of a flat piece of wood. Braedon spoke some stern words to him in Mirani. The boy's cheerful expression sagged from his face. He went inside, dropping his piece of wood with a clang on the veranda. He was followed by a second boy who could have been his mirror image.

  "Sorry, just my brother's sons being reckless," Braedon said. He tossed up the ball he had plucked from the air.

  Izramith followed Braedon through the yard, past a fountain and clipped bushes and a bench underneath a creeper growi
ng on a wire frame. The vine's big and floppy pink flowers had fallen all over the seat and the surrounding ground.

  They went up a few steps to the veranda and through the front door which led into a huge two-storey hall with a shallow pool, all paved in white stone. Coloured light fell in through the ceiling window and sparkled in the water, where a toddler was playing. The little girl wore nothing except a curtain of silken white hair. A young woman sat at the edge of the pool with her feet in the water. The twin boys looked on from the upstairs gallery.

  Braedon led the group into a living room on the ground floor. Closest to the door were a couple of couches and low tables. Behind those, a steaming in-ground pool, its sides covered with a coloured mosaic of tiles.

  The far wall of the room was made entirely from glass and looked out over the marshland between the shapes of three aircraft as Izramith had seen last night. Closest to the house was a low, matte black Mirani craft, behind that a utilitarian Asto-made model, and next to that, a craft she recognised well: a Hedron-made Gazion. At Hedron these were used only by Edyamor and Ydana and a few other people on the board. Some people had entirely too much money.

  Izramith glanced at Wairin, wondering what he made of this opulence in contrast to the stark destruction and poverty of his home world.

  But he was staring at a cupboard on the right-hand wall, where lights blinked and a screen displayed five lines, four of which said, status: home and the fifth status: leave.

  What the fuck, they even had their own hub.

  A couple of people sat at a table at the far end of the room. Two were in Trader uniform: a tall man with a strong and angular face. He wore his white hair in local style, cut in sections of different lengths, with plaits and silver beads. The woman's hair was shorter, unadorned, but her neck bore a green tattoo.

  "Sit down," Braedon said. "While the rest of the family arrives. This is my brother Rehan and his bride-to-be, Mikandra." They both wore Trader medallions displaying the same licence number, 1101. These two, and Braedon, accounted for three of the "home" reports on the screen.

  Another man entered the room, also in Trader uniform, followed on the heels by the twin boys and a woman Izramith hadn't yet seen, carrying the toddler girl.