Soldier's Duty

Chapter 3-1

3

THE LIFT arrived and, via a couple of stops to let off passengers, it took Izramith up to the surface level.

The featureless arrival hall gave away nothing of the splendour of the settlement below. For many foreign visitors, especially commercial ones, their access to Hedron stopped here. Visitors needed a personal invitation from a resident to enter the rest of the settlement.

It was busy here, with departing travellers waiting for a shuttle. Most of them were Coldi from the Ezmi clan, most of them sales and administration officers.

A few foreign visitors lined up for the accommodation counter, where they would be allocated rooms in this lifeless and dull part of the settlement.

Izramith walked past all those people and pushed open the unmarked door on the other side of the hall. The light on the door blinked in response to the signal from her earring. She stepped into the pitch-dark entry dock. The door shut, plunging her into darkness. A second door ahead provided entry to the guards’ change room, but right now it was too dark to see it. A beam of light intersected the darkness and tracked her body. The scanner hummed. A light on the scanner blinked blue: she could pass. The light came on in the dock and Izramith let herself into the change room.

Inside the base, the mantra was white efficiency. On the white and bare floor stood several rows of metal benches separated by metal racks on which hung the same grey garments as Izramith was wearing. Around the walls stood banks of lockers. The back wall was taken up by a row of change cubicles.

The locker area was busy, with women of the green shift hanging up their guard uniforms.

As per regulation, Izramith passed them without speaking to any of them. Anonymity was the power of the guards. When on duty, no one was supposed to recognise you, and you weren’t supposed to know the names of your colleagues. Nevertheless, after having worked for the guards for so long, Izramith knew most of their names and could match those with their code names. After having come back from Indrahui, it had surprised her how many of the same women still served in exactly the same positions as before.

The only sound in the room was the scuffing of feet.

The side wall of the room was taken up by sets of shelfves on which lay a sea of dark purple clothing. Overalls, jackets, belts, shirts, armour, all stowed in meticulous precision. Izramith took one of each item and went into a change cubicle, and, as she had done since joining the guards barely out of adolescence, left her identity behind and became a nameless, faceless soldier.

First, she put on a grey shirt and tight-fitting leggings. Then the overalls—dark purple. Over that went the body armour, front and back, which clipped together at the sides. Then the jacket, the belt, and from the safe, her weapons—one at the right arm, one on the belt, comms devices, and finally her hood with face veil—which covered everything except her eyes—and helmet. As she left the cubicle through the door on the other side, she switched on the helmet comm. A tiny display sprang into life in the corner of her vision.

She flicked her eyes, and this made the tiny microphone pop out of its recess inside the helmet. “Blue Forty-four reporting to Commander Blue for duty.”

In the small silence that followed, her headphones crackled.

Then a voice belonging to Commander Blue said, “You’re late, Blue Forty-Four.”

“My apologies.”

“That is the second time in three days.”

“Apologies. It won’t happen again.”

“It had better not.” The tone of Commander Blue’s voice masked ill-disguised anger. “You assured me you were ready to assume duty after your debriefing from Indrahui. I’m beginning to think you might need to be referred to the clinic.”

“I’m fine. There are reasons for my lateness. Nothing to do with me.” She was not going to the clinic. That would go on her record and the label stress-affected was only one step away from dishonourable discharge. After leaving the guards, she was planning to work in security or safety patrol and a dishonourable discharge would prevent that.

Worse, she had the feeling that the higher command had been looking to find a label to stick on her ever since she returned.

“We will see, Blue Forty-four. You’re on entry duty, post seven.”

“Copied and out.”

Izramith ran out the change room into the long and bare sloping corridor that linked the arrival hall to the settlement’s entry at the surface. The ramp was empty at the moment, but would hum with activity when a shuttle arrived. It would bring a tide of arriving passengers down the ramp, and then take the departing ones who were waiting in the hall away.

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 quickly 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. A fence surrounded a 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 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 going to 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 a meeting of metal workers in the conference centre started 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 d**k 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 crewmember 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: one layer of four and possibly another of eight. 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 were the ruler of the world.