Soldier's Duty

Chapter 2

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 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 the 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 meant that most zhadya-born never made it 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. s**t, 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 into 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 every 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.

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 playing children only provided an impediment to getting to work on 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.

A pond occupied 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 an 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 debriefing 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 warlord 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 warlord died and another rose immediately. For the little people nothing changed. The news services wrote their beat-up, semi-heroic s**t 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.”

One thing Izramith hated more than a disregard for her service: unbridled adulation from people who didn’t know what the f**k 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 weren’t. She didn’t want just anyone as father for her children, and he was intelligent and not unattractive.

But 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.