“This is outrageous!” he bellowed. “A travesty of justice! A mockery of the judiciary!”
He would have continued raving but for the sudden and awed hush that descended on the courtroom like a deathly hand snuffing out a candle. There was a massed scramble to rigid attention. Even the mumbling old man climbed shakily to his feet.
The gaunt, forbidding figure of First Secretary Caudo Inman had appeared in the doorway.
14.
Had colliding air molecules in the courtroom atmosphere been any noisier, they would have been heard as Inman stepped up to the presidential chair. He gathered his cloak about him and sat, the new posture making little difference to his intimidating height. He laid his staff across the desk. The great diamond shone like a beacon. A scornful gesture with a skeletal forefinger and the entire courtroom subsided onto benches and chairs. Before the chairman had a chance to bid him welcome, he snapped imperious fingers for a copy of the revised charge sheet, which was hurriedly passed to him. He glanced at it, and trained the glare from his rimless spectacles first on Ewen, and then on the chairman. When he spoke, the icy contempt in his voice could have been framed and hung on the wall.
“If I am reading this correctly, Mr Chairman, it would seem that no less than an imperial court has been convened to consider the misuse of ten decras worth of gas. Do you not feel that a faculty disciplinary council would be more a appropriate body to deal with such a matter? Preferably a junior council?”
The chairman shifted uncomfortably. Damn Tarant and his mindless baying for blood. “There were other serious charges that have been dropped, your excellency. I shall, of course, refer the remaining charge to the junior disciplinary council.”
“We might as well dispose of it as we’re all here,” said Inman impatiently. His glare sprayed gamma rays around the courtroom. “And the plea being offered in answer to this most heinous misdemeanour?”
Calen rose. He hesitated nervously before addressing Inman direct. “My client has entered a plea of guilty, your excellency. No defence is being offered and no plea of mitigation is being put forward. It only remains for the court to pass sentence.”
Inman drummed skeletal fingers while the bench conferred to determine what punishment they were empowered to inflict for Ewen’s crime. A courageous woman on the public bench risked a quick hologram snap of the First Secretary, and looked in dismay at the fogged image that emerged from her camera.
“Ewen Solant,” said the chairman, fixing a steely gaze on the defendant. “You will please stand.”
Ewen stood, his expression sombre, uncomfortably aware of Inman’s glacier glare.
“It has been decided to sentence you to five days community service, and that you should lose two years-”
“Ten days,” Inman snapped. “I have the power to double any punishment. The sentence is to be fulfilled after the accused has sat his 10th year finals.” He rose suddenly, bringing the entire courtroom to its feet. He snatched up his staff and Ewen’s medallion, and stepped down from his chair. Before striding from the courtroom, he paused near Ewen and regarded him with an icy stare. The hard eyes were intimidating but Ewen stared right back without flinching.
Inman held out Ewen’s medallion. It swung by its chain from a bony forefinger. “Take it!”
Ewen hesitated and took the offering.
“Put it on then!”
Ewen hung the medallion around his neck. As he did so, he thought he saw something else behind those forbidding rimless spectacles. There had been an instant when Inman had lowered his guard and permitted a flicker of compassion to cross his austere face. No - it wasn’t possible. Ewen knew that he had been mistaken. As if to confirm the error of judgement, Inman’s cold expression became even more unforgiving, and he swept abruptly from the courtroom, his swirling cloak emphasising his cold contempt, and creating a blizzard of papers in his wake.
15.
The fruits of Jenine’s raids on every vending machine on the campus for snacks and soft drinks, together with loud music ensured that the party to celebrate Ewen’s victory was a success, and was heard in the chief technician’s penthouse. She didn’t care: the arraignment of Ewen on what she considered trumped-up charges had done much to shake her conservative views on the administration of the campus, and indeed, although she would have vehemently denied it, even her faith in the Centre and its purpose was being unconsciously questioned. Not that that prevented her quarreling with Ewen at every opportunity. But tonight they had called a truce.
Deg Calen arrived late and looked around at the throng crowded into the study apartment as everyone tried to shake his hand at once.
“Deg!” Ewen cried, pushing his way through the revellers. “You disappeared on me! What happened to you?”
“Sorry - had to drive someone home,” Calen replied.
Jenine pushed a drink into Calen’s hand. The tall student looked admiringly at Ewen’s medallion as he returned the warm handshake. “It looks better around your neck than up on that pedestal,” he observed. “Well done, Ewen.”
“Well done!” Ewen echoed. “It was you who did well! I don’t know how to thank you.”
Calen looked pained. “Well if someone had saved my neck, I’m certain I’d be able to think of something.”
Ewen threw back his head and laughed. As he did so, Jenine experienced a momentary desire to throw her arms around him and to shut out the world. Perhaps it was the music, the crowd, the laughter and relaxed conversation. Perhaps it was that sudden sparkle of his blue eyes. She didn’t know. But what she did know was that for a fleeting moment she had wished that she was not in the Centre with her whole life as a technician in the service of the GoD mapped out before her. For a fleeting moment she had pictured herself on the outside as an ordinary citizen with an ordinary citizen’s desires and needs. She had seen herself naked on a bed with a man, touching him, stroking him, and wanting more. The man’s face was hidden in shadows but she was sure it was Ewen. The sensation had lasted less than a couple of seconds, like a light flashing on for an instant in a darkened, forbidden room.
And she hadn’t been afraid or nauseated.
“Wouldn’t you, Jenine?”
Calen was talking to her.
She recovered her composure and smiled at Ewen. “Oh, you shouldn’t expect gratitude from him, Deg.”
“I have none for the first secretary,” said Ewen wryly. “Doubling my sentence like that.”
“Be grateful that he did,” said Calen seriously. “I had a word with the chairman afterwards. Don’t you remember how he interrupted the chairman in mid-sentence? In addition to their five days, you were going to lose two years, but Inman beat them to it. By jumping the gun as he did, he didn’t double your sentence, he effectively slashed it to nothing. As for this ten days community service thing; our erstwhile chief technician has submitted a whole host of ideas to the court. All of them nasty. As he’s lost so much face, they’re going to listen to him. You’ll probably find yourself working on sewage recycling and maintenance.”
Ewen was nonplussed. “Well - I daresay I’ll survive ten days of that. Anyway, I really am most grateful to you, Deg.” He added with a grin, “Your defence was brilliant. You have unsuspected talents.”
Calen sipped his drink. “You should be grateful to my dear old Uncle Trevan. Retired, a bit slow, but still a brilliant lawyer.”
Ewen looked bewildered. “Who?”
“Remember the old man on the public bench? Mumbling to himself all the time?”
“Er… Yes.”
“He wasn’t mumbling to himself, he was mumbling to me.” Calen felt in his pocket and opened his hand. Sitting in the middle of his palm was a tiny earpiece radio transceiver. “Hopeless range these things have got but at least that reduces the risk of them being detected by scanners. That’s why we had to get Uncle Trevan into the courtroom. Bone microphone which means that the audio quality is terrible. Half the time I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I caught
all the important bits.”
Ewen started to laugh.
Jenine looked at the earphone with an expression of astonishment. “Was that a proper thing to do?”
“No,” Calen replied.
“She’s disappointed that I haven’t got a noose around my neck,” said Ewen.
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Jenine retorted angrily.
When Ewen slipped an arm around her waist, her initial reaction was to protest at the contact and pull away, but she suddenly realised that she didn’t mind.
In fact she rather liked it.
PART 3. War!
1.
Sergeant Jode Altir of the 3rd Battalion, Imperial Light Infantry, had seen three years of front line combat in the vast labyrinth of the battle caverns. His lot had been three years of the stink of the battleground; three years of seeing his comrades blown to pieces in the unrelenting and unending war against the Diablons; three years of squalor, deprivation, lice and flies, and, when food supply pallets couldn’t get through, hunger. The result of this unremitting exposure to carnage and suffering was that he was not easily impressed. He was unimpressed by Ewen’s technician-student’s medallion; he was unimpressed by the fact that Ewen was in his final year at the Centre. And he was singularly unimpressed by the physique of the slightly-built, blue-eyed, nervous-looking young man standing before him. Araman regulars were huge and muscular.
He leaned across his desk so that his unshaven face was a palm width from Ewen, and regarded him with eyes bloodshot from a thousand plasma blasts. “We get something straight, tekkie. I’m a professional soldier and I have a deep-rooted, implacable loathing of over-privileged, weedy little conscripts, and see no reason why I shouldn’t extend that deep-rooted, implacable loathing to over-privileged weedy, beardless little technicians. Looking at you, I’ve decided that you are a worthy candidate for a large measure of my deep-rooted, implacable loathing. Do we understand each other?”
Ewen decided that to point out that he wasn’t a technician yet was a clarification that the battle-hardened veteran would not appreciate. He opted for a diplomatic nod.
Sergeant Altir continued. “Now I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this community service order, tekkie, and I don’t care, and I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve having you foisted on me…”
A plasma ball impacted near the front-line bunker that served as a command post. The ground shook, rattling the wall picture of the emperor. Ewen jumped at the nearness of the explosion, but Sergeant Altir remained unperturbed. Dust flaked down from the bunker’s patched reinforced plastron roof onto both men.
“But what I do know,” the soldier continued, “is that for some obscure reason, your unmarked, pretty skin is regarded as precious.” He crashed a massive fist on the desk to underline his point. “Which means you will do exactly as you’re told! You will respond to orders so smartly that you’ll carry them out before they’re given. You will rise at 0600 with the rest of the men in your maintenance unit. You will help round up ordnance and equipment abandoned on the battleground, help spray the killing zones with fly-killer, and you’re to be back, behind the yellow markers, before 0800 when the day’s war starts. Understood?”
Ewen nodded again and remained silent. Sergeant Altir was an intimidating giant of a man.
“And if I catch you beyond the yellow markers after 0800, you’ll end up thinking that what a Diablon plasma blast can do to you must be heaven compared with what I’ll do to you. The nasty, vicious rumour circulating around this battalion that I once caught, killed, cooked, and ate a conscript, is absolutely true.”
Ewen decided that it was time to assert himself. “Then what are my duties the rest of the time, sergeant?”
The NCO tossed a fireman onto the desk. It was a plasma discharge weapon with a bloated cylinder made of high-density plastron below the muzzle that gave it an extended capacity of fifty blasts. It was a crude, sightless weapon with a wide flare angle, designed for close-quarters combat, which was what the daily Diablon wars mainly consisted of.
“You will help collect and repair PD weapons. They’re simple and they’re standard on both sides. Anything we can’t fix at the front line depot goes back to industry. As a tekkie, you’re to repair any other faulty equipment that comes your way. Corporal Nive will sort you out a uniform and show you what’s what. You’ll work with him. Now move!”
Ewen moved.
2.
The still shape lying face down was the first dead man that Ewen had ever seen.
It was his third day in the war zone and the first time he had been allowed to round up firearms on the battleground with a booty buggy. This was Cavern 7 - the main battleground; rubble-strewn, riddled with smoking craters and piles of boulders from overhead rockfalls, and was largest open area that Ewen had ever experienced. Cavern 7 was truly vast. As near as he could judge it would take 20-minutes to cross it in the booty buggy. It occupied a strategic position at the intersection of several smaller caverns. It had been won and lost so many times over the years that even the longest-serving men in his maintenance detail had lost count. Today it was being held by the Araman forces and had been for several weeks.
He switched off the buggy’s fly spray nozzles and stopped the laden two-man vehicle near the edge of the gully where Corporal Nive had told him to wait, and stared down at the still form that was sprawled face down halfway down the slope, the arms and legs lying at an unnatural angle. The air was thick with the smell of fly-killer. Behind him Araman troopers in their grey uniforms and full-face anti-flash helmets were reoccupying the positions they had held the previous night when the fighting had stopped. The war ended at the same time each night. After the cease fire sirens had sounded off, there was a 30-minute body count period, and then the mobile zargon light batteries, positioned far behind the yellow marker line, were closed down.
Ewen scrambled clumsily down the gully, dislodging loose rocks because his combat boots were two sizes too large. The morning lights brightened and he saw that he was near the yawning opening of a smaller cavern that was held by Diablons. He cautiously neared the body and realised that the reddish discoloration of the man’s uniform was not due to dust as he had supposed, but because the uniform was red.
The dead man was a Diablon.
Ewen froze. His orders were strict - don’t go near Diablon bodies. Normally all the dead from both sides were collected during the evening body count and disposed of in the brigade recycling plant so that there were no bodies lying about the following morning. This one in the gully must have been overlooked. Had the man been alive, an Araman trooper would have to be called to finish him off. Neither side took prisoners.
He glanced quickly around. The gully was deserted. Corporal Nive was some way off, building a pile of abandoned weapons to be collected on their next trip. He crept nearer the dead soldier. The stories he had heard about the Diablons were that most of them were degenerate pygmies, yet the proportions of this man looked normal. Apart from their colour, the dead man’s helmet and uniform looked remarkably similar to those of the Araman forces.
Questions crowded into Ewen’s mind that had never troubled him before. Who were the Diablons? Who were these mysterious people and where did they come from? What sort of society did they have? What did they eat? And if they were as degenerate as was claimed, how was it that Arama had never defeated them outright after centuries of conflict? He glanced with some trepidation at the opening to the cavern that was held by the Diablons. But, as always with Ewen, curiosity was stronger than fear.
He edged nearer and saw the terrible wound that had torn out the man’s back and lower spine. The plasma discharge weapon the man was lying across looked undamaged, and he was still wearing his helmet. Ewen gave the body a tentative push with his boot. The body lolled but the man remained face down. A half-dead fly rose up in protest and fell buzzing into the dust. A harder push. This time the dead man rolled over. Something fell from a fold in his uniform.
“Look out!” yelled a voice.
Ewen had just registered that the object was an anti-personnel mine when a heavy shape crashed into him. The pebble-size mine exploded with an ear-numbing WHUMMPPP! just as Corporal Nive and Ewen rolled down the gully’s steep slope. They tumbled the short distance to the bottom and were covered in a rain of flesh, stones, and debris that rattled off their helmets.
“Idiot!” Corporal Nive snarled, standing up and brushing himself down. “Stupid, stupid idiot! I thought you tekkies had brains?” He helped Ewen to his feet.
“What happened?”
“Before they pull out at ceasefire, the little bastards sometimes booby-trap corpses - even their own.”
“I didn’t know,” said Ewen shakily.
The corporal’s tone became conciliatory. “You all right?”
“Yes, fine,” said Ewen, supporting his weight against the soldier for a moment while the ringing in his ears faded. “Thank you. You’re right - it was stupid of me. Are you going to report me?”
The corporal shrugged and then grinned. “No harm done so what is there to report? Can you walk?”
“Yes, I’m okay now.”
“Okay let’s get back before the plasma starts flying.”
Ewen’s foot kicked against something as he was about to scramble up the slope. He looked down. It was the Diablon’s head, still encased in its scarlet helmet. The force of the explosion had blown the man’s flash shield away. He caught a glimpse of black beard before Corporal Nive swung a savage kick at the head and sent it bouncing along the gully.
“You don’t ever look at their faces,” he said harshly. “They say their stare can drive a man mad, even after they’re dead.”
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