Angolin, p.6
Angolin, page 6
“He does work hard, in ways you couldn’t imagine, Sublieutenant. Or maybe you could.” Dharmen burrowed eyes savagely into him. “And no, I haven’t told you exactly what the assignment is. Last time I checked, I wasn’t required to tell my subordinates anything I didn’t see fit to. Understand that, soldier?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
Dharmen moved in front of the rest of the company. “And I’ll inform all of you further after my superior informs me. Plain, simple direction isn’t a luxury always given in the Guard. We deploy with our orders and do as we’re told, we’re not asked to like it. Am I clear?” he yelled.
In unison and correctly for the first time since he took command, the entire company responded affirmatively.
“Excellent! And while I’m on the subject of following orders—”
A shockwave rumbled beneath his feet. Falling metallic debris pinged in the distance. Port personnel hurried past the company toward the explosion. Dharmen had no time to contemplate. He ordered everyone to follow and assist—and to stay alert.
They arrived at a small, one-story structure with a single broad door. The bunker-like building stood beside what had likely been its twin, completely leveled by the blast. Black smoke poured from the chasm and from flaming material strewn across the ground. The intact structure appeared harmless, but no one was willing to risk venturing inside.
“Everyone keep back!” Dharmen ordered. He turned to a port maintenance attendant dressed in coveralls. “What is this, exactly?”
“It was the entrance to the primary power exchange underground, the control center for this quadrant’s power grid.” He pointed a shaking finger at the intact bunker, panic filling his eyes at the smoke seeping from the doorframe. “That one leads to the backup exchange.”
“The security administrator came this way before the blast. Do you know where he is?” Dharmen asked.
“Last I saw of him, he’d gone down into the backup to—”
“Down in there?”
The other nodded furiously. He and Dharmen tried to contact the administrator. No response, and Rem-E couldn’t locate him. Dharmen ordered his people to a safer distance.
Just as one of them ran heedless toward the bunker door.
“I said back, Shipman!”
“But sir, can’t you hear him screaming? Somebody has to do something,” Irzek said. And before Dharmen could stop him, he bolted for the door and accessed its control panel. It slid open.
Dharmen saw only the recruit’s silhouette when the bright yellow oxygen-seeking flames billowed out at him. The surge sent Irzek stumbling backward. He fell to the ground, gripping his face. Dharmen and Leatra rushed in and pulled him away before he could be engulfed in the fire.
“What have I repeatedly told you about obeying orders, Vinc, especially in an emergency?” Dharmen barked.
Irzek moaned and coughed. “Sir, I was only trying to—”
“Quiet! Getting us shot out of our post on Negara wasn’t enough. You want to get killed here too?”
A harshly berated child could not have clamped shut faster. Irzek pulled his hand from his badly burned skin, yelping in agony.
“Stay calm, Shipman. We’ll get you to the infirmary, stat. Port’s medical facilities are some of the best. This is treatable no matter how bad it looks.” Dharmen forcibly removed the anger from his voice, though roughness aside, Irzek was a soldier, and the kid needed to realize it sooner rather than later.
He left Irzek to his sister and a port staffer to see him safely away. He looked around, eyes narrowed. “This is definitely no accident, someone’s—” He saw them, a short distance away: two small craft rising rapidly above Port. He’d been in enough troop transports and seen enough takeoffs to know these pilots were in a hurry. Their liftoff speeds were far faster than tolerable and their ascent much too steep.
One ship disappeared for a split second, and reappeared far above its initial position. TimeSpace! Dharmen realized as both vessels shot into the sky and out of sight, apparently without the cloak’s undershield raised to stop them. He located a port security officer. “Do you have landing berths over there? I don’t recall any from specs.”
“Negative,” the woman replied.
“Then where did those ships just leave from?”
Her eyes flitted between him and the point where the sky swallowed the vessels. “I’m not sure, unless they took off from—”
“From a rooftop,” he finished for her, “on a weapons store just before activating TS!”
Emergency crews in protective suits and helmets appeared in force, armed with portable deoxygenators to douse the power exchange entrance’s flames and extract the security administrator’s body. Dharmen had no time to think about that. Via his internal, he summoned Guard reinforcements from the mainland to augment Port’s pursuit vessels. Whoever was on those fleeing ships couldn’t be allowed to escape.
Irzek’s teeth chattered as he walked the South Centrum’s wet ways. His bare hands were shoved into his pockets, and his shoulders hunched nearly up to his ears. The rain had stopped, and the fog had retreated beneath a damp, frigid first winter night, bathed in the faint silver light of Tentim’s outer moons.
Young couples passed him, absorbed in each other and seemingly oblivious to the weather. He watched the mood pavers glow in peaceful shades beneath their passing feet. The hues beneath his were more anxious. He was far from content, which the whimsical sidewalks announced.
Irzek pulled out his hands and blew into them, thinking of the elderly woman who had stopped him minutes before to inquire about his facial biopress and lack of gloves.
“I have gloves,” he had replied.
“Where are they, then?” she had pressed.
“Um . . . in my bag.”
“Oh,” she had said with raised eyebrows and pursed lips, “they’ll be very warm there!”
He snorted. Why does everybody, even strangers, pick at me? I already have three parents: an uptight mother, grumpy father, and increasingly nosy sister. Who needs more than that? Frustration quickened his pace. “Meddling old meler, two teats short of a . . .” He stopped muttering. Comparing the woman to a bovine kept him no warmer than sounding like his father complaining about his livestock, the grochlaroot harvest, unwanted relations visiting from distant farms, and whatever else occupied the old man’s bother stream on any given day.
He refocused so hard on reaching the rendezvous point that his feet found every cold puddle along the way. Images of the spaceport bunker, that taroc’s ass Ciros, and the whole Bemin incident flashed through his mind like a mad synth circus. Even after four days, he could no more dodge the montage of events than escape the damp chill frosting his breath, drenching his hatless head, and seeping through his flimsy, unheated jacket to find his thin bones.
And what does Ciros have against Lieutenant Commander Tate? He’s not such a bad CO to work under, he thought as he wiped rainwater from his face. The sky had cleared, but overhead traffic continued to spray him. “He’s deadlier than the Abyss if you make him angry. Even Lord Krone must notice. But he’s always been fair to me and my sister. Well, mostly my sister.”
A passing woman eyed him curiously.
He was talking to himself again. Something more penetrating than the dropping temperature gnawed at him: he had been yelled at in front of everyone when he thought he was helping, and insulted by Ciros beginning to end. He appreciated neither. Is this what military service and honor are about? he thought. A man’s life needed saving. Doesn’t my superior get that? Doesn’t anybody? He wondered how he had become Seventh’s punching synth in less than a year’s enlistment.
He scanned the way as he walked, taking in the mix of stately pod house clusters sprinkled among some of Angolin’s tallest towers. It was a fascinating neighborhood. He usually liked these walks. He liked anything that let him escape the Westermeer’s farmlands and, lately, Seventh. But tonight was different. Second autumn’s ubiquitous flowers had shriveled on the trees, and once-fiery leaves, now morbid dark purple, hung limply in the cold, wet wind. No warmth, no color, no energy, nothing. Just dark limbs creaking in the dampness to make him feel as empty on the outside as he did within, alone in a place that was small and shrouded, but right now felt too big for him.
Even his sister was changing. Since the day they enlisted together, they seemed further and further apart to him. Leatra was doing well in the Guard. Irzek wasn’t, and he could feel it even if he couldn’t admit it. To make things worse, she was becoming inquisitive, and at times, critical of his every move. She had asked him where he was off to on such a miserable night.
“Nowhere,” he had told her. “And what’s it to you, anyway?”
“Don’t lie, Irz. You’re going someplace,” Leatra had insisted. “Someplace you shouldn’t be. We’ve grown up with the same face and nearly the same mind. You think I don’t know you by now?”
He looked down at his soaked shoes, wishing his sister would live her new, near-adult life on her own and stay out of his. And everybody else, too, for that matter. He crossed a canal, passed beneath a broad metal arch between two enormous, beam-stabilized megatall towers, and reached the appointed intersection. He looked up at the holographic way signs: “Ursula” and “Niro,” they glowed. He waited, shivering more now that he was standing still. He hopped up and down in place—Thaeg, Lord of Winters, was busy tonight!
He peered down Niro Way for some sign of his friend. It seemed dimmer than normal, and not from the night’s lifelessness or the micro season. Darkness enveloped the street in a way that public lighting seemingly couldn’t penetrate. Dull, nondescript houses lined both sides. They were definitely pod types; he could see the interlock clamps and antigrav propulsors at their bases. But they were separated, arranged not in clusters of a few to a few hundred like the rest of the neighborhood’s residences, but oddly side by side behind untended, immotile bushes.
Beneath their anciently styled bell and step-gabled rooflines, they revealed nothing to the Outside World. Most of South C’s buildings stood in resplendent pride as if declaring their right to exist on their prominent avenues. These hid in plain sight. He stood staring. He had been through here often. How had he not noticed them before?
“Where is he?” Irzek and Kerbentha Duraan had grown up together, and it was great to still have a friend outside the Guard. But he was always late, and it didn’t help that he’d made the evening sound so mysterious.
“Adventures better than anything the Hidden Realm can give are coming,” Kerbentha had said.
Irzek wondered who put such grand talk into his silly, idle mouth.
A blazing red glow approached beneath a trio of shady-looking young males. Kerbentha’s yearlong growth spurt gave the only indication of who they were. “Ho, Irzek!” he called from between the other two.
One hushed him and muttered something about keeping a low profile, too loudly for his own request.
Irzek’s stomach sank. Kerbi did say they might come, but he had hoped to Krone not. Damn! “Ciros, Narond,” he greeted civilly.
“I’m still Sublieutenant to you,” Ciros said. “Tate tried to bust me back to ensign, but he couldn’t get authorization for it. He said I insulted him and challenged his authority on Bemin. Damned faggot has no sense of humor.”
Irzek blinked. “Damned what? What’s a—”
“Nothing, Vinc. Forget it. Just an ancient term I picked up from Lieutenant Commander Armetrian,” Ciros replied. “So you’re here after all. I s’pose that’s good. Didn’t think you had it in you.”
“We just came from a rally in the Falconerplein!” Kerbentha excitedly interrupted. “A big one. It filled half the square. It’s the very first in a whole series they have planned and . . . Irz, what happened to your face?”
“They? Who’s they?” Irzek asked.
“Students for a New Angolin, that’s who. And they’ve got some great ideas,” Narond said. “The government’s kept us holed up here for centuries, but no more. We’re going out there to experience the real world and turn this place upside down if the Kraal interferes.”
Irzek’s heart raced. “Sounds like some kind of anarchy movement.” And not what Kerbi alluded to at all. He backed away from the whiff of stale sweat coming from the three of them.
“If it has to be,” said Narond. “And don’t look at us like we’re crazy, Vinc. Those old has-beens have run our lives long enough. It’s time we controlled our own destiny. Krone knows we’re young and more than ready for it.”
“And gain the power that’s rightfully ours,” Ciros added.
“I thought this was about ending isolation,” Irzek said. “You planning to overthrow the government, too, Sublieutenant?”
“Only if Parliament stands in our way, in which case the Guard can settle things,” Ciros said. “There’s already plenty of support through the ranks, and more will come with so many students behind us.”
Irzek felt his face flush, even in the cold. “But that’s treason. That’s not what I signed up for.”
“It’s not treason, you idiot,” Ciros spat. “It’s money. It’s status. It’s leadership change, or it will be if we don’t get what we demand. We three intend to be part of it. You’ll make four if you know what’s good for you.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Irz. This is for everyone’s benefit,” Kerbentha half-assured. “Angolin should be part of the world, not hide from it. Don’t you think?”
“No, Kerbi, I don’t think. Not like this. And you know why we hide from it. It’s evil. My father says he’s heard—”
“Your father’s never left this rise and neither has mine, Vinc,” Ciros said. “And if he did hear about the Outside World, who told him? His melers? Do they moo these things in his ear while he milks them? Our parents don’t know a thing, and they ought to spend more time freeing Angolin and less time talking up nothing. They never will, so it’s up to us.”
Irzek couldn’t find a rebuttal. Venom aside, Ciros had a point. The four of them stood in silence, waiting uncomfortably for who knew what.
“So when’s he coming?” Narond asked. “It’s brutal out here. Hard to believe Angolin is surrounded by boiling gases when it’s this cold. And where’s all that Carmogen pollution that’s supposed to rip holes in the ozone layer and fry the planet? I could use some of that right about now.”
“Buck up and find some patience, soldier,” said Ciros.
“He who? Who are we waiting for?” Irzek demanded. “I thought it was only going to be us four.”
“You’ll be disappointed then. We’re meeting our fifth,” Ciros replied. “He’ll come past. We’ll follow. Simple.”
“F-follow him to where?” said Irzek.
“If you’re this scared of everything, Vinc, why even bother to show up?” said Ciros. “You should have stayed back on base with your equally mouthy sister.”
“Leave her out of this.” Irzek didn’t like where this was going, especially with Ciros and Narond in whatever it was. And the fresh raindrops weren’t helping. “We’ve been here a while now. Are you sure he’s coming? It’s week’s end, let’s go to the gamers’ centers up in Mid Realm. The AirTransit terminal is up the next way.” He looked to Kerbentha. “Wouldn’t that be better than standing here getting wet?”
“I’m bored with all that. Who needs SynthWorld games when reality’s about to give us so much more?” Ciros said past Irzek to the others. “You two heard everything in the Falconerplein tonight. Do you want to have at it or keep wasting your youth on kid games?”
“I have a better idea!” Kerbentha beamed. “Forget fantasy worlds. Let’s go to East Vales for something truly real, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ll go for that,” Irzek chimed in.
Ciros gave them a vacant look.
“Oh, come oooon!” Irzek said. “Every man in the Guard’s been to the brothels. It’s all I’ve heard about since I enlisted. Now it’s my turn. We’d just have to keep General Gennet and Lieutenant Commander Tate from finding out.”
“Kerbi’s too young,” said Ciros.
“I’m seventeen. I could pass for eighteen easily,” Kerbentha protested.
“You could, but your ID nano couldn’t,” Narond said. “We’d be detained the minute we stepped off the transport, and that the general would find out, not that he’s all that apt.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Our general is one of the Guard’s best leaders. He commands an order,” Irzek said.
“And his latest command decision was to hand Bemin to Tate?” Ciros countered. “Look what happened over there. The best assignment we could’ve hoped for, and he bollixed it for us.”
“The station was saboed, probably from inside, Sublieutenant. It wasn’t our CO’s fault. He’s a good leader,” Irzek said.
“Really, Vinc? You up in his ass just like that?” Narond said with the tenderness of a razor-tooth high-mountain borbol. “And who other than our man-loving CO said anything about sabotage? It’s a new spaceport with a lot going on. Anything can happen.”
“And in case you’ve forgotten, we’re meeting someone here,” Ciros said. “He’ll have more than games and prostitutes for us, I promise you that!” He added Kerbentha to his peruse. “And the East Vales wouldn’t do you two any good, anyway. Scrawny farm boy twigs with no money—what woman would have either of you? Though maybe Tate would be willing if you are.”
“Willing for what, Sublieutenant. What are you saying, exactly?” Irzek asked, annoyed.
“I’m saying people like him don’t belong in the Guard or anywhere else in decent society, period,” Ciros came back.
“That one come from Lieutenant Commander Armetrian too, or did you conjure it up all on your own?” Irzek said.
“You’re lucky we’re on week’s end leave, Shipman. I could put you on report easily.”
“And add yourself to it for treason, sir.”
