by F P Adriani
“I’m a Miscellaneous. I find people, lose them. Move things, start some things, end others—I’ve done it all. Whatever’s needed. As long as I get paid what I think a job’s worth in danger dollars, I’ll do it.”
He was frowning now as he said, “I see. That’s surprising. What a little assassin you are.”
Blood shot into my face as I shot out my seat. “I’m no assassin. I’m here to help stop the violence. To find Arlene Hu and bring her back.”
Now, I watched as his mouth shook and his dark eyes narrowed into little dashes—at me. He shot up from his seat. “So that’s who this is about. Well, you’re on your own then.” He leaned forward and yanked his ID from my grasp.
Breathing hard, he stood there glaring at me; then he turned to the mountain again. A mixture of emotions contorted his face; I saw mostly anger, but also surprise, and sadness too. That’s what shocked me the most, that sadness….
“Oh, I see,” I said finally, and I did. I also clenched my teeth together.
His head spun back to me. “No, I don’t think you do.”
“So when were you involved with her?”
“Who says I was?”
“Your face.”
There was a tense silence. And then, “Twelve years ago. I was really young.”
“So where is she now?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if you did, you wouldn’t tell me anyway.”
“You got it.” He straightened up more. “I think dinner’s over.”
“I guess the baby-making offer is over too?” I said, and then I shot away from the table and rushed back through the house and out the front door.
*
“Just like that—everything with him suddenly turns to crap!” I yelled this to myself as I rushed up to his car. I pulled the key card from my pocket and opened the trunk, removing my case.
Out of the corner of my right eye, I first saw the stoop light come on, and then I saw Tan step onto and off his stoop.
I slammed the trunk door shut. “You asshole!” I shouted toward him. “These people do harm here. You should be helping me.”
“Who do you think got you the security clearance so fast? I thought you were here for getting insight into the sabotage in general. If I knew what you were really here for, I wouldn’t have helped get you here. I’m sorry you are here. In a way.”
“You asshole!” I said again, and I threw his key card at him.
Bending forward fast, he snatched it from the ground, saying, “Do you mind not destroying my property?” He straightened up, pulled another key card from his pocket. “Here’s the key to the official car over there—use it to get back.”
“No fucking way. Fuck you. I’ll walk.”
And I started doing just that. Only he jumped in front of me, and I almost crashed into him. I stopped moving, stood dead still, staring at his face as he talked.
“At night—in the damn dark? Look, Pia, I’m sorry. If you were here to help shut their shit down on this end, I’d help you. But I don’t trust you. I think you’re here to hurt her. And I’m not helping you hurt a woman I’ve had sex with.”
My lips shook at his sincere face. Why the hell did he have to say that? That he was so devoted to protecting a woman he clearly had cared for only made the whole situation even harder. I felt a strange pressure in my chest, a heaviness there.
When I could finally collect my thoughts together better, I said slowly, “Wow. You must think I’m a monster.”
“No, not a monster. A liar.”
“You think I like doing this? I do it because someone’s got to. Pirates, political thugs, galactic gangsters! You name it and wherever humans go, they bring it. Thousands of years of evolution, multiple planets, and humans are still the same-old shit. Nothing changes there. I don’t want to live like this all the time, being false, running around and cleaning up messes, but I also don’t want to live in messes.”
“Neither do I. Maybe we want the same things, but our methods are different.”
“Not so different,” I said.
“You ever killed anyone?”
I didn’t respond.
“See what I mean?”
“Well, maybe you’ve never been in a position where you had to.”
“I’d like an answer to my question, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll try anything once. Some things only once. One time. I’m not saying who exactly. It’s classified. But he was someone who should have been killed a long time ago. He would have killed me anyway if the situation was reversed, so that was that.”
“Christ, you’re cold.”
Now I yelled in a sing-song sarcastic voice as I began walking away again, “Bye-bye, Tan—thanks for the excellent dinner! But I feel nauseous now, so I must split!”
“I expect you to show up for your first day of work tomorrow—two on the dot!” he shouted at my back.
*
I struggled down the dark road, cursing him the whole way, and cursing my fucking dress shoes. They had too high a heel; three times I almost broke my goddamn leg tripping on some rock—or on some something. How the hell cars drove on such a bumpy road was beyond me, and how the hell I hadn’t noticed the bumpiness while I’d been driving was also beyond me. But then some things required a closer inspection to really gauge.
I pressed on in the dark on my increasingly achy feet. I finally saw lights up ahead: a gas station. When I got there, a diner sat along one side—where the lights had come from.
A moment later I burst through the diner’s metal double doors and said loudly, “I’ve got fifty bucks. And I need a ride.”
*
A completely bald skinny old man was the only person who’d help me. I sat in the front of his car, had secretly pulled my gun from my case, hiding it between my right leg and the door. Not that hiding it mattered because he probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: I suspected he’d either been drinking or he just plain had trouble seeing because, twice, he almost veered off the roadside.
“Whoa there!” I said, grabbing onto the door handle after the second near-veer. “Walking the whole way would have been safer on my body,” I added in my mind.
At my exclamation, the old man managed to pull himself together and drive better, and then it wasn’t long before I was paying him then rushing into the hotel and back to my room.
The next morning I took the local land transport back to Pineview to rent a car. Then, with my new car, I went back to the barracks.
In the hallway I ran into Nell and Galeta.
“Pia!” said Nell. “I had a great time at my family’s—so great that I’ll be living there while I work here.”
“That affliction seems to be spreading,” I said. “I had a great time at a hotel yesterday, and now I’ll be living there.”
“No kidding! What’d you do there?”
“Nell, I was joking about the great time. Actually, if you must know, I had dinner at Tan Onyx’s house.”
Galeta’s usual twisted mouth quickly smoothed into a large O. “What!?! Are you still joking?”
“Nope.”
“But he’d never invite anyone near where he is! He must really like you,” she said, that sourness back around her mouth.
“Believe me, that’s not the case. It didn’t go well at all. There won’t be a repeat. So, if you like him, go for it!” I said breezily.
And Galeta’s round face flushed. “I didn’t say I like him.” As if she had to say it?
“I’ll soooo miss seeing you off-hours here, Pia,” said Nell then, throwing a big arm around my shoulders.
I smiled up at her. “We’ll still see each other—at work. Who you with today and where? I’m on the perimeter later—with a Sergeant Wilkes, I think is the name?”
*
For our first few weeks as guards, we’d be on probation where we each had to work alongside a more experienced guard, as I would do today.
I’d also move my stuff out of my barracks
room later that night after my shift, but, for now, I got dressed in there, putting on my new official gray uniform, my official stun stick in its holder on my belt’s right side, and then my official gun in its holster on my belt’s left side.
After I adjusted my official collar, I looked at myself in the long mirror.
“Holy shit,” I said, “I look like a cop.” And, truthfully, cop looked good on me.
*
The first two hours of my first real shift at the North Entrance went by fast as it seemed everyone on the planet needed entry or exit through the electronic gate. Before that day, I had no concept of the numerous people passing through parts of The Complex on their way to and from either the buildings or the mines.
The mine workers, the administrative workers, the ore-truck drivers, the food-delivery drivers, the medical-supply delivery drivers—all these people and more needed their IDs checked and cursory glances from either me or Derek Wilkes or both. We didn’t always have to leave the North Entrance booth-house because we had cameras and scanners for doing some of the work, but, sometimes, one of us had to leave there and do a quick visual search of the trucks.
Now I understood why the guards were needed: what a complicated ongoing mess! At any time, someone could slip something in that shouldn’t be slipped in, but that also meant the security could probably never be effective enough, maybe no security could in any scenario anywhere.
Finally that day, there was a late afternoon lull in the traffic. I plopped down into one of the two booth chairs, took off my wide-brimmed hat, and ran a hand across my sweaty forehead.
Derek sat down in the other chair and looked at me with smiling blue eyes. “It’s tough, eh?”
“I had no idea it was so crowded here.”
“When you’re in training, you’re in a bubble. It’s harder being on the actual job, more random then. But most times on the perimeter, it’s kind of boring and nothing happens. It’s inside where the trouble starts.”
I twitched a little in my seat. “So then at the perimeter here, we’re responsible for letting that trouble in.”
“You’ve got to keep your eyes open, but you’ve only got two. We all do. But, yeah, the job here is very important. I need to show you more of what to look for. Like, only certain cartons come in and out—they’re marked with special pens.” He pointed to the screen beside him. “If the scanner doesn’t show blue, don’t let the carton through. That vehicle’s gotta go down to the East Entrance for inspection. That’s where things get dicey. It could be it’s not labeled properly because it’s something bad.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s so dangerous here. I don’t understand it,” I said, intentionally twisting my face up a bit as if I were confused.
“Well, you see, Pia, you’ve got different people wanting different things. I don’t fully understand it myself because I don’t come from here. I grew up on Hera. But, when you’ve got so many resources in one place, surely many people would like to control that space? But I guess all of them can’t.”
“It’s like a turf war over the mines.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Well, someone must be behind it, no? They didn’t discuss any of that in the training; the whole focus was on ‘what to do in case of’. But it seems like if you can find the source, you can turn off the spigot of attacks, no? Why isn’t anyone doing that?”
Now, he shrugged, his longish blond hair briefly touching his shoulders. Earlier he’d mentioned he was twenty-eight, and, really, he was quite cute. I wasn’t keeping him talking just for business reasons. He had a smooth voice to go with his smooth face. And the biggest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen.
Post-shrug, he leaned back in his seat. “A couple of times, I saw some of the famous baddies. There’s one guy Stefan Mollino—saw him working at one of the factories. He got arrested.”
“Because of you spotting him?”
He laughed a big laugh, shook his head fast. “No, no. I wish! Later he just got a little too big for his britches selling drugs; some got into the mines—the miners get tested. That stuff makes a dangerous situation even more dangerous.”
“And some other times—who’ve you seen?” I asked eagerly.
Now, he looked up, frowning a bit as if trying to remember. “Oh I—oh yeah. There was one time I saw Princess Hu in a bar.”
“No kidding!” I said. “Where?”
Derek shook his head fast again and slapped a hand at the air. “Oh, this was years ago. Just one time at The Space Mariner. This dive down in the Blue Sand County. I go there occasionally when I’m visiting relatives in the County. Can’t afford fancy on this shit salary here.” He laughed at himself.
I smiled at him. “You’ve got a good easy-going attitude about the job.”
“Been doing it a long time. Six years. Most everyone I started working with—they aren’t here anymore. Though, some have been here longer—of course they’re higher-ups. People like Commander Christine Moore and then Commander Tan Onyx. At ten years here, they’re like dinosaurs.”
Secretly in my mind, I had a good laugh, wondering what Tan would say about his being called a dinosaur. Somehow, I didn’t think he’d care for that description, no matter that it fitted him.
I said to Derek now, “I don’t know Moore, but I know Onyx.”
“Yeah, he was your training boss.” Derek glanced down at his watch. “Actually, he should be showing up soon, to check up on how you’re doing.”
I sat up a little straighter in my seat, darting a glance over my shoulder.
“Don’t get nervous or anything,” Derek said. “It’s routine the first few days. Tan does things by the book; it’s his way of working now. I think after the attacks five years ago, he didn’t want anymore mistakes made, deadly ones especially. He lost a good friend then in one of the mines. You know, when someone set a bomb in one of the North shafts and several people died.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, thinking all this was an interesting development I hadn’t expected. Today it seemed as if Tan didn’t have friends or didn’t even want them. The Tan Derek’s description implied—that seemed an alien Tan.
“I’m pretty sure analyzing that attack’s parameters was part of the training,” Derek said now.
I blushed. “Oh—I know. It was. I meant about Tan Onyx, his losing a friend.”
“Yeah, they’d gone to school together. Tan helped get him the job here…. Well, maybe I shouldn’t be saying all this. I work alone too much, so when someone’s around, I take advantage of that, can’t stop talking then.” He laughed at his own words again, harder this time.
Then he said, “But then I’m not really telling you anything others don’t know. I’m surprised they don’t talk about this stuff, the trainees and the newer guards, the gossiping.”
“Oh yeah, there’s gossip all right,” I said. “Gossip makes the day go faster.”
“Is that so?” someone said from behind me. And what a shock—that someone was Tan.
I wouldn’t even turn around to look at him.
Derek stood up and nodded. “Commander.” He looked down at me, purposefully, and I finally got up, turned Tan’s way a bit.
He nodded his dark head at me, saying, “Guard Senda.” Nothing in his placid face indicated a recollection of what passed between us the night before. He turned to Derek. “I need to talk to Senda—she’ll take her break now. Sergeant Amici will relieve you in about ten minutes—take your break then.”
*
“Why did you do that?” I asked Tan’s back as I followed him farther into The Complex. “I wasn’t due for a break.”
When we reached a between-buildings more desolate area, he stopped walking, turned around, and said in a flat voice, “You’re leaving the barracks.”
“Yeah? So? How the hell did you know?”
He stared hard at me. “Knowing everything here is my job.” When I didn’t respond, but only stared back at him with an equally hard look, he
sighed and said, “Every movement of every guard is written in a file. Daily. Abe, my secretary, alerted me to your news,” he finished in a dry voice.
And then I said, “I don’t need to live here. Shit, I don’t need to work here! I’ve got nothing to learn here and” —I spread my arms at the area around us— “this is just holding me back.”
Now, his brow twisted angrily. “The job’s been changing you for the better, but now you’re gonna take off and chase your bogey?”
“How do you know she’s a bogey? And what’s that ‘better’ supposed to mean? Who says anything was wrong with me before I came to this place?”
The anger laced his voice now. “What about your friends? What about the Sanders here, The Festival? Families’ll be here—you want to see violence then? Your job here is important—who else will do it? We can barely retain people.”
“Wow, what a surprise that is. The training’s too hard and the job too dangerous. There are things you can do to fix that—”
“What things? See, this is what I mean. You’ve got ideas and we could use them.”
“I’m not obligated to help you, Tan. I’m obligated to my contract with you-know-who.”
“Actually, I don’t know who. I’m not sure how connected you and I are.”
I sensed he was fishing for information, but I kept my mouth shut—tight, my teeth pressing hard into my lips.
He exhaled loudly, rolled his eyes a bit. “Pia, I’m tired of arguing with you. You want to quit? Then quit. I think that’s a mistake though.”
“Well maybe I wouldn’t quit if you’d fucking help me. Last night you hated my being here, now today you want me to stay? I just wanna know whose side you’re on here.”
I almost punched him when he suddenly yanked me by the arm and pulled me away from the buildings. Then he stopped moving; apparently, we were out of earshot now.