Soldier's Duty

by Patty Jansen

  There were shouts in the guesthouse building, thumping of footsteps down the stairs, and

  Wairin, Dashu and Loxa ran into the courtyard, meeting Izramith while she climbed back over the gate.

  "Did you see who it was?" Dashu asked, still panting.

  "Couldn't see. Too dark. Possibly Pengali." Damn it. She was still angry for missing that step. At Hedron, she should not have had any trouble with catching that man. But the higher gravity and that constant tired feeling played havoc with her.

  Damn it, damn it.

  Loxa said, "It could be one of the residents—"

  Something beeped.

  Dashu glanced at the screen of the comm reader.

  "Shit. It's Eris. He's found something."

  Chapter 18

  In the dark, they ran back to the council building, and found the security room shrouded in semidarkness with only a few lights blinking over the projection of part of the city. By now, Izramith recognised the guesthouse.

  Eris sat on the chair in the middle of the room, his face illuminated from below by greenish light that made him appear like a ghost.

  "Come in, have a look at this."

  The team gathered around the projection.

  Izramith managed to get entangled in leads because she didn't see them in the dark. She almost took a piece of equipment down, but thanks to Wairin's quick reflexes, managed to avoid disaster. Damn, why was it so fucking dark in all these rooms?

  Eris moved his hands over the control panel, and the image of the city buildings zoomed out. Another touch of a button and a bright glowing spot appeared. At the top of the commercial building.

  Izramith asked, "This is a transmission in a frequency outside the Exchange range?"

  Eris nodded.

  "When did you record this?"

  "Just now."

  Izramith told him quickly what had happened at the guesthouse. "We interrupted them signalling to each other. The person at the guesthouse fled into the garden before we got to the balcony, but couldn't warn his mates, so they continued to flash their signals for a while. My screen reflected the sunlight, so they mistook that for their mate signalling at them."

  Loxa nodded. "It seems so."

  There were nods all around.

  "So it also seems that there is little communication activity from the guesthouse via the Exchange because they use other signals, and they use high frequency transmissions from the commercial building. That is starting to look like a highly organised operation. Do they use a specific office?"

  Eris shook his head. "Just the balcony in front of an office."

  "What about the house where we saw the person replying?" Izramith reached over the controls. "May I?"

  "Go ahead." He shifted aside, so that she could reach. She rotated the projection until the viewpoint was almost at ground level. She found the balcony at the back of the guesthouse dorm, and turned the view so that it was the same as that from the dorm. She pointed, the projection distorted over her arm. "Somewhere over there, about two or three houses away."

  "Hmm." Eris moved the projection to the group of houses in question. "The house with the observatory tower in Fountain Street belongs to the Emiru family. It's not their main residence, but a cousin of Emron's lives in it. The unit on the top floor belongs formally to the Semisu family, but it's been more or less vacant for a long time. One of the sons started a business that didn't work out, and as far as I know, nobody has used it for a long time."

  "I think we should go and have a look," Izramith said. She told the team of the night that she'd climbed up there and had seen the two men deliver boxes to the unit. "One of them was golden-haired, but not Mirani. The other was a local and walked with a limp."

  Eris frowned. "Skinny fellow?"

  "No. Quite big, in the usual keihu kind of way. He went into one of the Semisu houses further along Market Street."

  "Ah, that was Jorin, a cousin twice removed of the councillor. He has a limp. He's the official owner of that office."

  "Why would the golden-haired man threaten him?"

  He shrugged. "Jorin tends to get himself involved in dumb situations. We've had to rescue him a few times from dubious characters."

  "Do you know who the golden-haired man could be?"

  He shook his head. "All the golden-haired men I know are Mirani. Did you follow him?"

  "He disappeared before I could see where he was going."

  "There's not that many places to hide in Market Street."

  "I know. One moment he was there, and the next he wasn't. I think we should check out this unit."

  "It's private property. We need approval from the council to investigate."

  "We don't have time for approval. The moment you ask for approval, everyone in town knows about it. Everyone's related in this part of town. I say we should go now."

  "I agree with her," Loxa said. "We should check it out tonight. They might still be there."

  Eris didn't agree with it, but it was one against four, so he packed up some of his surveillance equipment. Dashu and Loxa strapped on guns. Izramith waited, leaning against the door frame. She never went anywhere unarmed and needed no preparation.

  * * *

  Even this late at night, the eating houses in Market Street were still doing good trade. Many people sat at the tables underneath the trees, and the sound of their conversations drifted through a large area surrounding the commercial precinct.

  Izramith and her team kept to the opposite side of the street, mostly in the shadow of the trees.

  The ground floor of the building held a guard station and a few shops, all closed. The group walked past in single file. Eris reached the stairs first, but then stopped.

  "There is a gate here. I don't think that's legal."

  "I don't worry if it's legal, only if we can open it." Izramith remembered the merchant opening it for her.

  Eris protested. "They should have applied to the council to put this gate here. We may need to get in for security or emergency services."

  "I think they preferred to run the risk rather than have homeless people sleep up here and breaking into offices," Dashu said.

  Izramith extracted her comm unit and by the light of the screen, studied the door. It looked sturdy, but the door locked in only one position. She dug in her belt pouch where she usually kept a thin strip of metal just for this purpose. When she stuck her hands through the latticework and pushed the metal strip into the space between the gate and the frame, it hit something that wouldn't budge.

  Damn.

  "I can blow up," Wairin said.

  Sure, he could, but she preferred to keep that option if there truly was no other way in. For one, everyone would hear the explosion.

  Izramith grabbed the bars in the gate and pushed. There was a surprising amount of movement in the frame.

  Maybe…

  "Stand back."

  The others retreated a few steps. Izramith kicked the gate. It bulged inwards, but didn't budge. She kicked again. A small metal object fell out and bounced down the stairs. She kicked again. Something in the lock broke with a snap. And again. The entire door fell inwards. She caught the metal framework before it could slide down the stairs and alert the entire neighbourhood.

  "There."

  She set the broken door against the wall where it slid sideways until it leaned against the remaining gate structure.

  Dashu led the team up the stairs to the top balcony. All the windows in the units were dark on both sides of the building, including the one where Izramith had spotted the two men. A board covered the inside of the front window.

  Loxa shone a light in through a narrow gap between it and the windowframe.

  "Can you see anything?" Dashu asked.

  "Just a lot of mess," he said, his voice muffled against the window.

  "I can break the door," Izramith said.

  "No," Eris said. "We can remove illegal fencing without a problem, but we can't break into private property without
good reason."

  "Isn't the suspicion of involvement in something and the illegal use of transmission equipment good enough reason?"

  "We don't have authority from the council."

  "Fuck authority. Either Daya wants us to do something or he—"

  "You don't have to live in the same town as these people."

  "Then Daya should have appointed only local people. If he wanted us for show, he shouldn't have appointed a Hedron guard. If he wanted someone to stare themselves blind on his precious fucking guesthouse making pretty lists of people he doesn't like… what's his point anyway? He's trying to score points against the family that owns the guesthouse because they won't submit to a full audit? Is that why we're here? To prove some sort of political view? And we aren't actually meant to discover anything, just to frighten the pants off Daya's local enemies? Well, he's chosen the wrong person. Permission or no, I'm going to bash this door in."

  Eris made a strangled noise, but no one else protested.

  Hmmm, that was a sign.

  Izramith put her shoulder to the door and pushed hard. The wooden frame splintered.

  "There. Not very secure, isn't it?"

  The inside of the unit smelled musty and unused. Lines of boxes were stacked up against the walls, covered in dust. Wairin poked at a box.

  "Heavy," he said. "I open?"

  Eris' face looked dubious. "Don't know that we can. We'll get into an awful lot of trouble. The Semisu family owns a lot of businesses in town."

  Dashu snorted. "Aw come on, we've broken into the place now, might as well finish what we came for."

  "Your legal system is not the same as ours."

  "We're looking for criminal behaviour. Since when have they ever stuck to the laws?"

  She ripped the top off a box. Eris' face showed horror, but said nothing. Seriously, what was all this shit about rules? She had enough of trying not to offend the locals.

  "What the heck's this?" Dashu had lifted a small bag out of the box. She ripped the top and upended the contents on her palm. A couple of round objects, each the size of her fingertip, fell out.

  "Oh, I remember those," Eris said. "It's some sort of game that's popular at Kedras. Jorin Semisu was trying to sell them."

  "Hmph." Dashu put the bag and contents back in the box.

  "Are these all like that?" Loxa said. There was disappointment in his voice.

  Izramith was sure that this was the unit where the two men had gone with their boxes. All the stuff in this room looked like it had been here for a long time.

  An arched doorway led to a second room, where it was pitch dark without any light. She used her comm unit to find her way.

  This room was also full of boxes of the same type as the ones in the front room. Yes, she saw why the business hadn't been successful.

  A couple of boxes had been pushed together to make a table in the middle of the room. On top of the sheet that covered them lay a few pens, the empty case of a datastick, and a timer. Not the ocarion type which Traders used and which told dates and times for all known entities, but a cheaper version. When attached to a comm unit, as they usually were, the device kept track of conversations and, most importantly, the location of those conversations.

  A few commands brought a list of past connections on the screen. Most of the coordinates Izramith recognised as being in the city, but there was one outlying point that came up quite a few times. The owner of the unit had communicated with that location as recently as early in the evening.

  "Come and check this out." She held up the unit.

  "Where is that?" Dashu asked, squinting at the screen.

  "I'll check." Eris entered the numbers in his scanner as she read them out. His screen displayed a map. "It's not in town, but at the edge of the escarpment."

  "What is there?" Izramith remembered seeing the escarpment: a sheer rock cliff with forest at the top and marshlands at the bottom.

  "Uhm. Nothing. Forest."

  Izramith met Wairin's eyes across the dark room. She saw in his dark face an expression she recognised. This sounded very much like some organisation's secret base, set up in a way similar to the Indrahui rebel camps. Those rebels communicated through a network of illegal satellites, and, like the Andrahar transmitter, independent of the Exchange.

  Chapter 19

  Izramith jerked awake at the sound of splashing water. She sat, leaning against something that poked into her back, on a hard surface that turned out to be the bottom of a boat, with her knees drawn up to her chest.

  The boat glided through marshland, water interspersed with clumps of vegetation and the occasional tree. Ahead, golden sunlight hit the sheer cliffs of the escarpment.

  She rubbed her cheek, sweaty from where it had leaned on her left knee, and a trail of wetness ran down her leg. Great. She'd been drooling on herself.

  Eris and Wairin sat in the front of the boat, talking in soft voices while playing some sort of game.

  Braedon kneeled in the pointy end, bent over and trailing something in the water. She remembered the preparations for this trip. They needed someone trustworthy who knew about the routes to get to the location and about camping out. Braedon said he knew and offered to come.

  A glance over her shoulder revealed Loxa standing at the back of a boat pushing off the bottom with a long stick. His strong, rhythmic movements created a gentle rocking motion.

  Dashu sat on the bench behind her.

  Izramith stretched, working kinks out of her back. "How far away are we?"

  "Should arrive just before dusk," Loxa said. She wondered if he had been pushing the boat all the way. The escarpment looked close on the map, but reality was different. They'd left from the jetty close to the airport this morning and had been sitting in this damn boat all day.

  "Do you want me to take a turn?" Her butt felt like it was made of stone.

  "If you want." He pulled the stick up. The boat slowed.

  With the rhythmic forward movement gone, the boat became more wobbly. Izramith stumbled to her feet and awkwardly clambered over the benches to the back.

  "You stand here." Loxa indicated a platform wide enough to stand with feet apart. "This bar is for bracing yourself so that that you don't fall off." There was a faded and frayed cushion tied to it.

  Izramith took the stick, which was surprisingly heavy, and plunged it into the water. At first she moved awkwardly, afraid to upset the boat or lose her balance, but then she got the hang of it. She was taken back to her youth, when she and a friend had made rafts and punted down Hedron's underground streams and their wondrous caverns filled with pale mycelioids with fronds that hung down like curtains and made your face slimy when you touched them.

  Her friend's mother got extremely angry when she heard of these trips and had forbidden her daughter to go. Typically, Mother had never cared much whether Izramith lived or died, so she'd gone alone, ridden the streams until they met with the hot vents into the steam-filled caverns. Getting back upstream wasn't always easy, and it was probably where she'd developed her penchant for bodily punishment, in the hot, steam-filled caves where you either used your strength or died.

  She settled into the rhythm. Splash—push—pull—heave—splash.

  Fancy all the times that she'd come home with bruises of being bashed by her own raft in rapids, or scalds from too-hot water.

  Mother had never asked about any of those.

  Splash—push—pull—heave—splash.

  And she had never wondered where Izramith had been, and why Ennathi never came around to their apartment anymore.

  Splash—push—pull—heave—splash.

  No one else had a stupid family like hers. Just look at the Andrahar family. One big rambling group of people, laughing and talking, always helping each other and anyone who stepped through their gates. Look at Loxa and Dashu, sharing little jokes while they sat on the bench in front of her.

  Splash—push—pull—heave—splash.

  None of these people would
ever understand her.

  Braedon yanked at the string he'd been dangling off the boat's stern. A silvery fish flew from the water into the boat, threshing violently. He slammed it against the side of the boat and held it up.

  "Looks like we'll have something for dinner tonight." It was still twitching.

  The animal was much smoother than Hedron's hairy fish. It also had a pair of prominent orange eyes.

  "You have to do better than that," Wairin said. "One tiny little fish is not enough for us. I could eat that by myself."

  Dashu pulled a face. Like most Asto Coldi, she didn't eat meat of vertebrate animals.

  "The reeds are getting too dense." Braedon rolled up his fishing line and joined Wairin in playing his game, because Eris had abandoned his position and was watching the sky. He had pulled the receiver on the bench next to him, and from where she stood in the back of the boat, Izramith could see it looping through all frequencies. The line on the screen remained flat.

  "Anything going on?" She asked him, over the heads of Loxa and Dashu, who looked up.

  "No. Just being cautious. We're entering Pengali land. They should know that we're here, but should doesn't always mean that they do know, especially their scouting parties."

  As to whether Pengali used radio equipment, she let that question unasked. Obviously they did, even though their traditional dress suggested otherwise.

  She'd been warned not to underestimate Pengali use and access to technology.

  "So, being on Pengali land a big deal, huh?"

  "If you think being killed is a big deal, yes, it is. The area where this signal comes from is in a disputed border section. The Pengali main settlement is to the south of here. This is where visitors are most likely to go. During Mirani occupation, there were bands of Pengali who used to roam the forest and round up anyone who wasn't supposed to be here. They'd get paid by the Mirani to deliver those people to the city. Because the main tribe shunned them, because they didn't agree with any engagement with the occupying force. At first, there were only groups of young and angry men, but they took away some women and now there is a second village up there somewhere to the north. The salt baths area, where we're going, is considered to be the border of their territory. All Pengali value and harvest salts, so there are often disputes."