by Chris Ward
Lia
Hopeful was an inappropriate name for a settlement of totalitarian gray monoliths inhabited by people whose faces reflected the bleakness of life in such an inhospitable outpost. The domed city was larger than it appeared from above due to being three-parts subterranean, but as Lia disembarked the shuttle and stood waiting in an airlock for whatever constituted a landing party, she found the spaceport deserted apart from several automated droids.
One such droid, a remote-operated buggy which carried her from the airlock across a rocky field of landing pads to a customs house adjoining the main city-dome, turned out to double as the security officer, so she was inside the city before she saw another living person.
Using an old GMP code to announce her presence as a customs investigation officer of the Galactic Military Police, she was given automatic authorization clearance to all non-restricted areas. Passing through the security checks, she found her way to a traveler’s dormitory where she used her code to log a room, ensuring an electronic trail that would arouse no suspicions.
Under her guise, her clearance gave her authorization to inspect any docked ship that she chose flying under a trader’s flag or aligned to any system other than Phevius. Phevian military or political vessels would require a further level of clearance, one that would risk her discovery as an imposter. Instead, as soon as she was safely in her room, she activated a device on her belt which she had found in the shuttle. It was a signal scrambler, used during important meetings to scramble the signals or any hidden bugs or bots that might compromise the information being discussed. Caladan, however, had once taught her a little trick with such devices. If you adjusted the settings in a certain way, it would scramble video feeds of internal cameras, allowing you to pass through a surveyed area in effective invisibility.
‘Fingers crossed,’ she muttered, switching the device on and heading out.
The spaceport was nearly deserted. Not far from the airlocks leading out to the docks stood a line of trader’s establishments, bars, and restaurants, but many had their lights off, their doors closed. So close to one of the last wormholes into Trill System, Lia had expected a flood of battered transports carrying refugees, but there was no sign of any upheaval at all.
She went into one of the few bars that was open, sat and ordered a drink.
‘You seen a man named Cole out of Trill System carrying machine parts for cannon emplacements?’ she asked the bartender, picking a name and cargo out of the air. ‘I’ve been waiting nine Earth-days but no one’s coming in or out.’
The bartender, a human-Lork, a heavyset, hairier subspecies with overlarge ears that twitched as Lia spoke, shrugged big shoulders. ‘Not much of anything’s happening. Word from the traders coming in is that they military are impounding any ships out of Trill, taking them to one of the orbiting prison ships.’
‘Prison ships? But isn’t that breaking ICC protocol?’
The Lork shrugged again. ‘Not my problem, is it?’
Lia finished her drink and ordered another. When the bartender offered her the payment scanner, Lia used her card to authorize a noticeably large charge. She turned the scanner back to the bartender, fixing his eyes for a second too long to be casual. ‘What else have you heard?’
The bartender poured her drink as though nothing untoward had passed between them. He leaned over as he set it down.
‘There’s a compound around the curve,’ he said. ‘An old chemical mine. They’ve opened it up, set them to work. Trill System citizens are taken there, along with anyone else who can’t prove otherwise. I hear some traders are bribing their way through the blockade, but for most, their ships are impounded, the possessions confiscated. Sure, there’s some talk about contamination out of Trill, but between you and me…’
‘That’s rubbish.’
The bartender nodded. ‘You said it, not me.’
Lia gave a thoughtful nod. ‘Phevius System is part of the Estron Quadrant Alliance. Refugees out of any war zone in the system should be given safe haven. Imprisoning them is a breach of the alliance’s protocol.’
The bartender waved a hand. ‘Why do you care? You’re just a parts dealer.’
Lia, remembering her ruse, nodded. ‘Except I’m owed a lot of money by a man from Trill System. If he’s in a prison compound, so is my money.’
The bartender came over. ‘If I was you, I’d get out of here. Get yourself into the inner system, away from the wormholes into Trill. We’re only two days of deep-space travel from only the eternal gods know what. I’m stuck here, you’re not.’
Lia downed her drink and stood up. ‘That’s good advice. I’ll be seeing you.’
‘Safe travels.’
Outside, with the great glass dome glittering under its own lights high overhead, Lia headed back into the town, passing through the traders’ district into the industrial area. A few factories, mostly recycling plants processing components which would patch up battered spacecraft, hummed with activity, but many holdings were quiet and dark. Lia began to feel like she had shown up at the end of a mass exodus. Perhaps the fear of what was happening at the other end of a wormhole had driven people out, but at the same time she knew that outlying moons such as Steer were hardly a draw for people. You ended up in a gray hellhole like this because nowhere else wanted you.
She smiled. It had been somewhere like this where she had met Caladan.
‘Keep safe,’ she whispered.
The administrative district had more signs of life. Phevian military stood at guard, more than she would have expected for such an out-of-the-way outpost. Lia spotted a line of civilians awaiting access, but the rigorous checks they were undertaking put her off joining the queue.
Instead, she headed into the bowels of the city, taking a wide escalator which whizzed her past three levels of private homes and traveler’s living quarters into the main business district.
Here at last she found people, milling through gray-cubicled market stalls selling imported produce from five dozen planets, replacement ship parts, clothing, equipment, discount tickets on transport liners heading out in the next few Earth-days. Lia, no longer wearing her uniform, walked anonymously among them, picking up vibes and occasional snippets of conversation, looking for any sense that life here was no longer as it should have been. There was a grimness to everything that suggested business was struggling, that trade was down, but also a pervading sense of fear.
She was just thinking to risk starting a conversation with two off-duty guards sitting in a corner restaurant-bar when she heard a cry.
Farther up the street, a commotion caused the sparse crowd to part as someone came running out of a shop, making a break for an alley on the other side. Guards appeared from out of the shadows as though they had been waiting there the whole time, guns rising.
‘Help! They’re killing—’
Two cannon blasts hit the young man at the same time, jerking his body one way then the other. He struck the ground almost horizontally, one leg bouncing comically up into the air before a third blast caught him in the chest.
‘Nothing to see,’ one guard snapped, waving his gun in a circle as two others dragged the man up. One withdrew an electronically folding stretcher from a backpack and they loaded the inert figure on to it. Walking quickly beside the stretcher, they disappeared up the street, vanishing into the gloom.
Lia waited where she had crouched until people started to drift back out on to the street. A handful of people nearby commented on what had happened, but when she turned, the two off-duty guards had vanished, their food and drinks still where they had sat, unfinished.
As a GMP officer, she’d once had the authorization to request to see the captured man’s body. Now, though, it was too much of a risk. If one of her codes was discovered to be out-of-date, she’d be imprisoned herself.
She could follow, though. Pulling up a city map on a data screen attached to her belt, she found a confinement compound just a couple of streets away. When she reache
d it, she found only a featureless stone block, a single, guarded door giving access. If the body had been taken inside, she had no way to get to it.
Or did she?
She backed off, giving herself a little steeling time, then broke into a light jog as she came out of a side street. She waved at the guards before she reached them, getting their attention, keeping their guns lowered.
‘That man you caught … there’s another. He had friends,’ she said, hoping they even knew what had gone on. ‘I saw him back there. He had… he had a gun.’
The two guards looked at each other. They both appeared human, but Lia caught something in their eyes which suggested modification or enhancement. Likely they were former convicts realigned to work as common guards.
‘You stay here,’ one said to the other. ‘Watch her.’
The second guard drew his gun as the first headed off. He slipped back into his position but kept his eyes on hers.
‘You should go with him,’ Lia said, trying to muster the old GMP authority she had once wielded without thought. You’re both new, aren’t you?’
‘Show some respect,’ the guard growled.
‘I can see you are,’ Lia said. ‘Go after him. He can’t handle it alone. That man, he was dangerous.’
The doubt had slipped in. The guard looked at her then glanced at his feet as though considering the value of his position.
‘I’m going nowhere,’ Lia said. ‘No where’s safe but here. Go. I’ll be all right.’
The guard took off, running after his companion.
Lia waited only until he was out of sight. As the footsteps receded, she moved closer to the door and slipped a hand into her pocket, withdrawing a small device about the size of her palm. She activated it and held it close to the door. Inside, she heard the clicking of an automatic door faced with an unfamiliar override. For a moment it sounded like something would snap, then the heavy steel door opened a crack. Lia slipped inside, shutting the door behind her.
The door opened on to a quiet corridor. Up ahead, strip lights lit a wide atrium with tall ceilings and a fake glass roof.
Not far from the door was an office room. Lia heard voices inside as she leaned against the door. Pulling her blaster, she adjusted it to a stun setting, her old GMP ideals unwilling to shed innocent blood. Then with a sudden hard kick, she broke the door open and stepped inside.
Three human women in their middle years crashed back over tables and chairs as Lia shot them down. A tear slid down her face as the noise settled, and despite the twitching of their feet and hands, Lia struggled to convince herself they weren’t dead.
She pulled up the nearest chair and leaned over a computer terminal. The program was unfamiliar, but she was trained at dealing with foreign tech, and in a few minutes had figured out how to access the information she needed.
Third floor. That was where she would find it.
Back out in the hall, she found a fuse box near the end of the corridor and blasted it until the lights overhead went out, plunging her into darkness. Then, feeling her way using her memory of the building map, she stumbled to an elevator shaft and prized the doors open.
The elevator had stopped below her. Lia pulled on a pair of gloves then swung herself out among the wires.
She had brought too much equipment for the climb to be easy, but it was only a couple of floors. By the time she made it to the required doors, her shoulders were burning and her back felt full of needles. She sat for a few minutes, getting her strength back. Then, pulling her blaster, she prized open the doors.
Irate voices came from farther down the corridor, someone demanding the power be restored. The voice carried authority and menace. Lia crept closer until a bend in the corridor revealed two figures illuminated by handheld flashlights.
One wore a Phevian military uniform, the other a delegate’s robes.
Lia readjusted her blaster, took aim, and took them out. She remembered the guilt at firing on the officer workers downstairs but felt none of that now. She felt an affiliation with the common man, with the foot soldier forced into war, but higher-ranking officials in the system which had made her mother into a criminal deserved no mercy.
The delegate’s office was open. Lia went inside, pulled the door shut, and then switched on a tiny flashlight of her own.
The delegate’s chair stood back from a dark computer terminal. Lia plugged in a portable auxiliary battery and it flickered into life.
Her luck was in. The delegate had left his private server open. Lia understood the Phevian’s native language well enough to figure out the meaning of the message on the screen. As she read it through, sweat broke out on her back, soaking her shirt.
It pertained to an attached document with full details. Lia opened it and skim read the information, even as voices came from out in the corridor. The battery contained a memory disc, so Lia downloaded the file, pulled it out of the computer and slipped it into a compartment on her belt.
She reached the door just as guards appeared out of the gloom of auxiliary lighting flickering on overhead. Lia broke from the doorway, firing as she moved. Something grazed her ankle, knocking her legs out from under her. Experience and muscle memory helped her turn as she struck the ground, pulling her blaster up to fire back into the gloom.
The guards had assumed defensive positions. Lia backed off, firing as she went, limping on her injured leg. She felt the breeze from the elevator shaft and rolled over the ledge, trusting her luck as she fell into the dark. Closing her eyes, she reached out, found the shaft wires whipping past, and wrapped her arms around them, breaking her fall.
She gritted her teeth to hold in a scream as the wires cut into her skin. From overhead came the sounds of a commotion. Then a spotlight was illuminating where she clung to the elevator wires.
The elevator itself was worrying far below. The metallic rustle of photon cannons made her decision for her, and she let go, again trusting her luck.
GMP training had taught her a lot, even though in the intervening decade she had drunk most of her skills away. She landed on the most flexible part of the elevator’s roof, crashing through it as lights came on around her and the elevator began to rise.
Lia fired into the gap she had broken as return fire came down, crashing into the floor around her. She crouched in the farthest corner she could, then fired on the doors, blasting them open. As the elevator rose past a corridor, she dived forward, the elevator floor scraping her boot as she landed.
She sat up, breathing hard. Her arms had a couple of superficial cuts, but she was otherwise unharmed. She checked the charge on her blaster, lowering the setting to conserve power.
The lights had come on again, but dimmer than before, an auxiliary generator providing backup power. Lia crossed the corridor and ran up a set of steps into a dimmer, low-ceilinged area she immediately guessed was for storage. It was likely to be a dead end, but by now guards would be combing the facility in search of her.
She kicked through a door and found herself in a room filled with metal storage containers. Something was humming behind everything, and when she pushed her way through, she found a coolant unit haphazardly blocked by junk. A tall vent rose into the ceiling. Lia searched her utility belt, looking for something that might help her, but nothing would do. She had her blaster and her hands.
She took out the unit with a single blast and opened a hole in the vent with another. As she had hoped, the vent exited on the building’s roof. She squeezed inside, using the grips on her boots to shimmy up a square tube barely wide enough to fit her.
It ended at a grate. Her legs and arms ached from the awkward climb, but Lia was stuck, unable even to lift her blaster and shoot her way through. Instead, she gritted her teeth and head-butted the grate as hard as she could. It didn’t open, but she felt a little give, its fittings old, corroded by years of coolant escaping. She butted it again and again until her eyes watered, and she felt blood run down the side of her face.
With on
e last butt it broke free. Lia, barely conscious, shimmied through, landing in an unceremonious heap on the surface of a flat roof.
She wanted to lie down and sleep, but soon the guards would discover her escape and come looking for her. With her blaster’s charge low, and near the end of her strength, she staggered to the building’s edge and looked for something nearby.
On three sides the building was encircled by roadways, but on the fourth a thin alley separated it from the adjacent building. Lia mustered her last strength and took a running jump. Her front leg gave way as she kicked off, and she only just made it, catching on to a balustrade and pulling herself up with her last strength.
From behind her came a shout. She turned, saw two guards on top of the compound building with their blasters raised. Lia dived behind another coolant unit as it exploded beneath blaster fire. She fumbled with her blaster, lifting it and taking them out before they could follow her.
There would be more. She scrambled across the roof, found another lower adjacent roof and jumped. From this building, she found a couple of ledges to climb to the ground. She was limping, blood pouring from a wound in her thigh she couldn’t remember getting, as well as from a gash on her forehead.
They might catch her anyway, but if she stayed nearby she had no chance. Hobbling on shaking legs, she staggered back toward the merchant district, eventually finding a maintenance stairway leading to the upper levels.
She was nearly there when a distant explosion came from somewhere below. Unsure if she had caused it or not, she hoped it would prove a worthwhile distraction. Lia paused for a moment, crouching in a cubbyhole behind a set of stairs, listening to distant sirens followed by blaster fire. More people like the young man she had seen? Something was amiss, she could tell, but if she didn’t find cover, eventually she would be caught and thrown among them.
The walk back to her lodging felt like forever. The room had a high-powered air-shower which she used to clean herself off, then using a small medical kit of her own, she dressed her wounds as best she could.