by F P Adriani
Diamond On Your Radar
By F. P. Adriani
Copyright © 2019 by F. P. Adriani
Diamond Sand, Diamond Sphere and Diamond Deception are all Copyrighted © by F. P. Adriani
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, without express written permission from the author and publisher.
Published by F. P. Adriani
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*
Diamond Sand
The last time I was on Earth, my boss called me into his office for a Sunday meeting when he normally never worked on Sundays.
I arrived exactly on time at ten in the morning, and he started talking-ordering as soon as I planted my yawning ass in the armchair opposite his desk.
“There’s an opening for security personnel in the North Pine Mine Complex on Diamond,” he said. “It’s already arranged that you’ll take the opening. You’ll be looking for Princess Hu.”
“Who?” I said, my brow lowering and my heart pounding harder.
“No, Hu. Spelled H-U, sounds like H-U-E,” he replied.
“James, I meant who—as in, who the hell is she?”
He raised a fat file folder. “Here’s the info—”
“Hold on! Late night last night and I’ve barely woken up, and now you’re throwing all this at me?” He tossed the file over his desk; the papers and e-drives began sliding off the edge, but I grabbed the whole mound before it could spill, finally dumping it on my lap. “Diamond—are you kidding me?”
“No. I thought you in particular would want this case.” He stared at me for a long moment, then he added, “Lately the sabotage problems have been increasing, and the contractors are forced to import more security than they use Sanders. And now you’re one of the imports. You’ll need to bring Hu back immediately—when you find her. She’d moved to Hera, but now we think she’s been underground on Diamond for a few years. The specific trail’s suddenly gone cold though. Too many hiding places, too many sympathizers. The UPG’s Diamond Sand Festival is in three months, and the place must be under control before then. For the guard job you’ll go through some security training like the inner file explains, but it’ll be a breeze for you.”
“It seems you’ve made up my mind for me about taking the job,” I said, sneering. I looked down, glanced over some of the folder’s contents. Near the mound’s top sat a photo; I saw a red-headed woman with a cupid-like heart-shaped face staring back at me, her brown eyes serious, her mouth unsmiling. “‘Princess’ Arlene Hu five years ago” said the caption below the photo. A gray Summary paper behind it said:
Age: 40. Born: Earth. Moved to: Diamond at five. Political history: born to professor parents. At eighteen Hu became the youngest Second-Level New Councilmember. Noted for being critical of The Council throughout her position there. Thirteen years later before the Second Rebellion, her Council peers voted that the Unified Planetary Government would take over and outside contract-out the Diamond mining operations. Hu then warned that many Sanders would resist the takeover. “They’ll fight this corrupt invasion with all the physical strength they’re used for in the mines” were the last official words she said as a Councilmember. She resigned the next day. Derailments of mine operations and office break-ins have been on the increase ever since. Hu is wanted for murder, attempted murder, inciting terrorist acts….
“You leave Wednesday under your Pia Senda identity,” I heard James say now. “You’ll get double your usual rate for this kind of job.”
Raising my head, I stared at his face, at the old-fashioned eyeglasses he wore but didn’t need to wear, at the false mustache he wore but hated wearing, at the bleached-to-blond hair on his head. He was a fake snake, as was I.
“And then what?” I asked him.
He shrugged, as if he were discussing finishing a simple household task. “And then back here with her and to doing whatever else I’ve got for you. Like I said, you’ve got about three months—hopefully, this mess there can be fixed once and for all.”
“In a few months? When it’s been going on for decades? Keep dreaming.”
*
Several hours later in my apartment, I began packing up my stuff. I liked being very prepared ahead of time. This was the way I’d always worked: proactively. Yet with this job, I hadn’t been given much time to get proactive.
Frowning, I shoved clothing into my suitcases, I shoved in major toiletries, whatever I thought I’d need in a practical sense. Anything else I’d be better off acquiring on Diamond. Having local items in my living space would look better.
The trip would take a week, a week on a tightly-sealed-against-space ship. Enclosed spaces weren’t my favorite places….
As I was packing, I passed the top of my bedroom dresser, my eye catching the small picture of a child-me and my parents. I picked up the photo, stared down at it, at their dark hair, at their smiling faces. One of the last pictures of us together before we were never together again. My heart tightened into a bitter knot, my arms started shaking with rage.
I pushed the photo down into one of my suitcases, then I moved to my slim metal bedroom closet where I kept my weapons. I pulled out several guns, checked the fuel gauges, checked the safeties, my fingers carefully sliding levers this way and that way.
According to the file James had given me, guns weren’t allowed in the mines. But then there was the rest of the planet, and there was no way I’d be there—or anywhere—unarmed. I carefully pushed the weapons along with extra ammo into a scanner-proof mirage-coated suitcase.
James had said I’d have a high-security clearance on the flight; he’d better be right.
*
Good Old James turned out to be right: I had no problem getting on the ship. My cases passed through the ship-port scanners just as I’d intended: without their ever requiring opening.
The rest of the flight, however, was a problem. I hated flying. Not the flight part as much as that damn being-enclosed part. In space you couldn’t open a window. You had to breathe the same damn recycled air, over and over and over again. This grossed me out, made me feel like I was choking on other people’s carbon-dioxided diseases.
I took sleeping aids, walked around half a zombie in my cabin, but made sure I was more aware when I left to eat in the cafeteria.
I was sitting in there enjoying a salad when we passed through the final space flume. They’d been discovered over three-hundred years ago: at least some parts of the Universe were composed of striations, like a space layer cake, with flumes of superfast-moving space between some of the more static layers. Navigating those was how humans found Diamond and Hera, beside each other yet quite different. Diamond so full of dense solid resources, Hera so full of dense gaseous ones….
My salad uncomfortably bounced around my stomach as I felt the flume finally fart the ship through to the next layer where Diamond lay. There was a great rumbling all around as if the ship’s shell would break apart into a gazillion brittle pieces and hurl everyone into space.
My skull vibrated, so did my eye sockets. I looked at a few of the faces around me. One jump-rushed up from the table with his hand over his mouth, another had her hands clasped around her forehead. All the scientific advances over the centuries, and still no one had gotten this part of the trip right; humans had yet to make
spaceflight very comfortable for humans. The inconsistencies of human technological advances were such a pain in the ass, and, this time, a pain in the head too.
I sighed heavily. Diamond was only two days away, and now I had that new worry to grapple.
*
I avoided gazing out the portholes; I didn’t look at Diamond until the ship had docked in port and I was on my way out the port’s big building, pulling my cases on a cart behind me.
Finally I yanked the cart over a doorjamb, and then—there. I was outside. Diamond.
My eyes had forgotten the beauty, but my mind hadn’t. There was that same white-tinted air floating around me, that same glistening sheen, that same strong sharp sunlight. In the distance a forest of red native palella trees grew like straight fingers beside giant coiling gray oaks; the oaks had narrow yellow-green canopies only at the very tops of the trees—unlike Earth oaks, as anything brought here usually became. Unlike Earth.
My skin tingled, could feel the strangeness that Diamond was. When humans had found it, no animals existed on the planet, only Diamond’s versions of single-celled organisms and plants, which latter were highly mineralized, often growing as hard as petrified in their normal state. They got so much from the rich-in-minerals soil that they could grow to enormous unseen-before heights. Matter of all kinds here—the packing density of both the electrons and whole atoms in crystalline structures was incredibly high. And the probability space among electrons—something else lurked in there, some type of strong glue-like force unseen on any other planet.
At least this was all I knew about it technically. I had been lots of things, but never a scientist. And even scientists had yet to figure out how Diamond existed the way it did….
I remembered photos from the very beginning of Diamond’s discovery, the planet looking as if it had been through a nuclear war, the great cavernous land-seas of shimmering pale diamond sand like pulverized war waste and interspersed with the giant stick-like plants, seeming shorn of their leaves by some powerful unknown blast.
But that was the Diamond way: hard and bare.
My whole body shook now as I took deep breaths, the unique atmosphere filling my lungs, expanding them, with heavy energy. My spine straightened sharply, my body felt as if I hadn’t taken a proper breath in years, since I’d last been here….
My head jerked to the right at the sound of a loudspeaker, “Five-thirty transport to North Pine Mine!”
I rushed in that direction and finally reached the transport’s long silver rail car. A porter pulled my bags onto the lower level, and then five minutes later, my weapon’s case between my legs, I was sitting inside, on the way to my new job.
*
When I got off near where the guard trainee barracks supposedly were, a few other people got off with me. One woman had only a single suitcase.
I held three of my cases in my arms and pulled another behind me. After I showed my security pass to the guard at the gate and began walking again inside The Complex, the woman with the suitcase strode up beside me and said, “Hi.”
I nodded and purposefully kept walking. But she only followed me. “Hello,” I finally said.
“Are you one of the new guard trainees?” she asked then.
“Yeah,” I said, but kind of coldly. I had to make contacts, gain information, but making friends was never on my life’s radar.
She was persistent though. She began talking—about herself. She was a Sander, lived in Silver City, had never done this kind of work before. It would just be a temporary guard job while she visited relatives here for half the year.
“Let me help you with your bags,” she said finally.
But I told her a firm, “No.”
She stopped walking then and said, “You’re not too friendly, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” I admitted, stopping walking now myself. Then a part of me felt bad, sad really, because things shouldn’t be the way they were. I knew this.
I looked up at her. Probably around my age, she towered over me height-wise. She wore a pale-green sleeveless jumpsuit; she had short black hair, a dimple in her dark right cheek, and muscular shoulders and arms. She was the strongest-looking person I’d ever seen.
“It’s hard to talk to people when you’re new somewhere,” I said as a consolation to my earlier coldness. And then she nodded.
*
Her name was Nell and her room turned out to be down the hall from mine in the barracks. From the outside everyone’s room looked the same bland way, and, apparently, from the inside they weren’t much to look at either. At least mine wasn’t. There was a bed, a dresser, a closet. Basically, it was an adorned box, adorned with a tiny box-bathroom of its own that sat beside the main box. At least I could take a shit in private. Always a plus.
After I’d pulled in my bags, I closed and locked the electronic door to the hall. I carefully examined the walls, the ceiling panels, to see what could be moved, where things could be hidden, where I could hide things.
*
Later, I noticed an official notice taped on the inside of my door. There were visual directions to a conference room, and on the bottom of the paper, it said, “Trainees must report to orientation at 9:00 AM—sharp—tomorrow,” which was fine. But what was I supposed to do before then? Where could I eat? I hadn’t eaten anything since early in the morning; I was starving. And I had nothing with me.
That was stupid. I should have planned this better. This had all happened too fast….
A knock on my door; I looked out the peephole: Nell.
When I opened the door, her frowning mouth said, “What a dump this place is.”
I laughed, realized that I would like her, that, somehow, I already did.
“Did you expect something grand?” I asked her, my arm motioning for her to come inside.
“No. But hey, Pia—wait. You hungry? In the hall I heard someone say there’s a cafeteria around here somewhere. Who the hell knows where, but maybe we could ask someone?”
“No maybe about it,” I said. “I’m so hungry right now, I could eat my own leg—and enjoy it.”
*
Unfortunately, we found no one outside in the hall or outside the barracks TO ask about a cafeteria.
In the darkness out there, it seemed the North Pine operation contained enough buildings for a small city. The buildings were tall, boxy and sharp-sided, and the paths between them were often winding. Nell and I wandered around below them for over half an hour, repeatedly trying to open doors that wouldn’t open.
We stopped wandering when I finally shouted at the night air, “Where the hell are we!” Then I looked at Nell. “Did you get a map when you got the job?”
Her dark head shook from side to side. “Nope. Maybe we get that tomorrow.”
“This is shoddy. You’d think we’d get this information sooner.”
Suddenly I noticed some lights in the distance; I started walking in that direction. So did Nell.
“Where you from?” she asked as we moved.
“Earth. I just got into Diamond.”
“Ahhh. No wonder you look tired. Ship-lag. And then Diamond-lag on top of that. Been here all my life, but I’ve vacationed elsewhere, and even I slow down here a bit as soon as I get back in the air.”
“And this was all last-minute for me. Didn’t think I’d get the position.”
“Me either, but then I had a relative working here once, so maybe that helped. It’s not easy getting in here. They investigate you, you know. You need a high-level clearance.”
“I know,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. You wouldn’t be here otherwise…. Okay! This place is open,” she said on a sigh as her bulging right arm pulled open a big metal door. I saw lights, heard glasses clinking, smelled food cooking—onions and tomato sauce. I almost howled.
*
When we walked inside, the place was big, but it looked more like a bar than a restaurant. A bunch of calm people sat eating and drinking at the small
tables, a few at the bar did the same. Half-loud music blared from speakers somewhere, and the atmosphere seemed very brown, very warm.
My nose twitched delightfully at that pungent oniony aroma, and I said to Nell, “Thank the ever-shining stars that we found this place. My breath’s been stinking for hours, and I can’t stand the smell anymore.”
Nell’s big shoulders shook with laughter. “O…kay. I haven’t noticed any stench coming from your way, but I guess we need to get some food into you fast.”
“Hello—and welcome to Brenda’s Place!” a chipper voice said an instant later. My head shot round to that direction, and a young woman in a knee-length beige jumper walked up to us.
“Hi, Brenda,” I said.
She laughed and started walking back the way she’d come, motioning with her arm for us to follow. “I’m not Brenda, but this is Brenda’s Place! Come take a seat.”
We pulled out chairs at a small table, and Not Brenda said, “Any idea what you’d like—something to drink first maybe?”
“Actually, what’s that I smell? Cooked tomatoes?” I asked, my nose twitching again.
Not Brenda nodded quickly. “It’s tomatoes and rice—Spanish rice. The rice is field rice from the western swamp farms. Shall I get one order of that?”
“Two!” said Nell.
*
We both ate the Spanish rice and got drunk, or at least Nell got drunk. Apparently, she couldn’t hold much alcohol inside her without certain consequences.
As we walked back to the barracks, she had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. I held her up a bit at one point, and she threw an arm around me, smiled a wet smile and said, “You’re nice.”
“No, not really, Nell,” I replied.
I got her back to her room, and then I went back to mine. The long day was over. But then I was pretty sure that tomorrow another long day would follow.