by Patty Jansen
She smiled and he kissed her softly.
"Do you think you'd want to go back to Miran?"
"Not a for a while," he said. "Not while that idiot runs the council. Besides, if even most of our Trader colleagues don't support us, what is there for us?"
"Well, we have this." Mikandra dug under the tunic and pulled out the chain with the Foundation stone.
His eyes widened. "I thought it was lost in the fire."
"No, I thought it was too important to let it fall in the hands of the army. We have the stone and we have the oldest son of the oldest son. Think of what we could do with those things, if the time was right." Walk into the council at a crucial voting time, and send them all home.
Rehan's face spilt into a wide smile and then he started laughing. "You are priceless."
"I'd like to see that law changed to include the oldest daughter in a family, but for the time being, we'll abuse this particular law."
"When we have enough support to make real changes in Miran."
"Yes, we can wait." The change required in Miran would be slow, potentially violent and costly.
* * *
They spent the next days getting the business up and running. As Isandra said, the most important part was to start working again.
The application for a Barresh Trading office was rushed through the Trader Assembly.
Mikandra found out how much Taerzo was attached to fashion when they discussed uniforms. They eventually settled on a wide tunic and trousers like the locals wore, and made sea green and turquoise their colours. Rehan went the full hog and had his hair braided and cut in local fashion, with the stepwise lengths and beaded braids. The Guild granted the new Barresh chapter two other licences for the city and they selected a young Barresh merchant by the name of Tedris Havaru to take one of the places in the academy. It was harder to find a Pengali to take the other place, but they finally chose a female cousin of Bakimay's.
They rented an office above the shop in Market Street whose owner had been rude to Mikandra, although he conveniently seemed to have forgotten. Every day, she walked past the large guesthouse, wondering if Jocassa would still be there.
Taerzo set up desks and painted the walls. Braedon installed all their communication systems. There was an aircraft maintenance shed to be built and administration to be done, and aircraft to be maintained, and a new aircraft to be bought, although Taerzo was so busy with the office set-up that Rehan used his for the time being.
"We need people," Braedon said two days before Mikandra was to leave to Kedras. "There are hardly any locals who speak Mirani well enough to maintain our administration, and we could use some runners. Not to speak of an engineer."
"I don't know about the engineer, but I think I know of others you could train," Mikandra said.
So the next morning, they went to the guesthouse. Rehan was rather dubious looking at its moss-covered facade. "You said these men are ex-army?"
"Just ignore the accent and let me do the talking. There are three men I owe deeply."
It was the end of the day, and the courtyard was filling up with people.
When Mikandra came in, a silence rippled over the crowd, which included a lot of the regulars, scruffy, poorly-dressed, but familiar.
Someone said, "Youz are in th' wrong place, lady."
Several men laughed.
But then there was another voice from somewhere at the back. "Youz kidding? That's our Eydrina."
Rehan frowned at her. "Eydrina?"
"I could hardly tell them my real name, could I?"
"You sure get points for originality."
"Shut up, and let me talk to them."
She walked through the courtyard to the familiar table next to the fountain. Jocassa sat at his usual spot, and Dalit and Thasep were with him.
He looked up at her with open mouth.
"Wow, youz look different," Jocassa said.
Dalit nodded at her; he'd seen her in uniform.
Mikandra said, "When I came here, and fled from my parents, and was robbed, you helped me out. I wanted to pay you back, but you would not accept my money even when I had some. I saw in your eyes that you really wanted to be given a chance to improve your lives." She spoke loud enough that everyone in the courtyard could hear.
"The man who has come with me in his smart-looking uniform is the man who will one day be my husband, Rehan Andrahar. You may already have heard that the Andrahar Traders of Miran have relocated to Barresh. You may not care. We're hiring people, preferably those who can speak Mirani, preferably those who can write. But, if you can't, we will teach you."
The courtyard erupted in talk. Jocassa pointed at Dalit. "Youz be wanting him. He can write," he said. "He's really smart." Even now, he thought of others first.
"Jocassa, you idiot. I want you both."
"Me?" Jocassa's eyes were wide.
"You and Dalit and we can probably find something to do for Thasep. You're going to start dressing and speaking properly, and you'll learn to read Mirani, keihu and Coldi. I said I'd pay you back, and this is how."
Jocassa opened his mouth, but said nothing and closed it again. And then he did the same thing again. For the first time since Mikandra had met him, it seemed he had nothing to say.
* * *
"I'll miss you a lot," Rehan said when they sat at the upstairs balcony overlooking the sunset. "You are the most lovely and generous person I've come across. I think you totally made those ex-soldiers' day."
"They saved my life. When all my money and ID were stolen, they all pitched in and gave me some. They wanted no payment when I got a job. Their generosity is something we could learn from. I've seen too many of these people end up in the hospital stuck in hopeless cycles of abuse and drunken-ness. They drink themselves to death and cannot see another path because life in Miran encourages them to wait for handouts. It's spelled out in the Mirani Foundation that it is our task to look after them. That's rubbish. These people can look after themselves well enough, but what Miran seems to have forgotten is that the key to better lives is something useful to do and education. That, and not handouts, is what we can give them."
"Damn, I love you, and I'll miss you."
"I know. You've only said that about a thousand times today."
"Because it's true. I am already dreaming of the day that we can go out into the corners of the settled space together."
"Me, too, especially if you end up buying that Gazion."
He laughed, closed her in his arms and kissed her once more, and he had done that about a thousand times that day, too.
The last rays of sunlight vanished from the room. Rehan sighed. "We better go to that farewell dinner now."
Holding hands, they went downstairs into the happy talk of the family.
* * *
*
A word of thanks
Thank you very much for reading Trader's Honour.
As author of this book, I would appreciate it very much if you could return to the place where you purchased this book and leave a review. Reviews are important to me, because they help readers decide if the book is for them.
Also be sure to put your name on my mailing list (http://eepurl.com/qqlAb), which I use exclusively to notify subscribers of new fiction. All other chat about my writing or worldbuilding and interaction with readers happens on my blog Must Use Bigger Elephants (http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/), which you are welcome to follow.
About the author
Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.
Her novels (available at ebook venues) include Shifting Reality (hard SF), The Far Horizon (middle grade SF), Charlotte’s Army (military SF) and Fire & Ice, Dust & Rain a
nd Blood & Tears (Icefire Trilogy) (dark fantasy). Her novel Ambassador will be published by Ticonderoga Publication in 2013.
Patty is a member of SFWA, and the cooperative that makes up Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and she has also written non-fiction.
Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/
Shifting Reality
A few years ago, a military doctor walking the corridors of New Jakarta Station saved Melati's life. She signed up for the International Space Force to pay back her moral debt to him. But her family thinks she has betrayed her people. It was ISF who forcefully removed their grandmothers and grandfathers from the crowded slums of Jakarta to work in interstellar space stations.
It is Melati's job to teach six-year old construct soldiers, artificial humans grown in labs and activated with programmed minds. Her latest cohort has one student who claims that he is not a little boy, but a mindbase traveller whose swap partner took off with his body. It soon becomes clear that a lot of people are scouring the station for this fugitive, a scientist with dangerous knowledge.
The best place to hide in the station is amongst the many cultures and subcultures of the expat Indonesian B-sector. Looking for him brings Melati into direct conflict with her people. She does not want to be seen as one of the enemy, but if the scientist's knowledge falls in the wrong hands, war will come to the station.
Shifting Reality Chapter 1
"Thirty minutes," Lt. Laura Jennings said into the silence of the Construct Activation Unit.
A digital clock on the wall counted down the seconds in big blue letters. Tick, tick, tick.
Melati sat up in her chair, eyes on her monitor—still blank—and her hands poised over the keys. "I’m ready."
In the ward, nine cribs stood in three lines of three and within the cribs lay nine boys, each surrounded by banks of equipment. The glow from little LED lights in the machinery made a multi-coloured fuzz over their peachy skin. Their eyes were still closed. So peaceful.
As usual, the C-shift had prepped the room, taken the heavy covers off the cribs, removed the breathing apparatus, so the boys only remained encased in their spidery immobilisation harnesses, and pads and snaking leads of BCI—Brain-Computer Interface—electronics.
Air hissed out of ceiling vents against the background of the usual station noises: the rumbling of lifts through the station’s spokes, the clicking of expanding or contracting metal as the station rotated and parts of it moved in and out of sunlight, and the distant clangs of dockings and undockings of ships, the churning of ore-processing machines and other industries that went on in the station’s bowels.
"Initiate wake-up sequence," Dr. Chee said into this microphone, without looking up from the computer. "Cohort Grimshaw152."
Laura Jennings typed on her workstation.
Melati hit "initiate" on her screen. The central computer hub responded with a subtle increase in humming frequency that would never be noticed if it was not for the intense silence in the room. A line of green lights blinked into life on the large display above Dr Chee's head.
Nine dispensers stopped delivering sedative. Nine slow waves on the screen became intermittent wriggly waves.
Nine heart rate monitors increased their soft beeping. Nine heartbeats in perfect unison. Melati loved that moment when heartbeats synchronised for the first time.
Some people believed it was the moment a construct cohort truly came alive, and the nine children became aware, thinking humans.
Forty beats per minute.
Nine brain activity sensors recorded spikes of activity. Nine pairs of hands twitched. Chests went up-down-up-down in increasing frequency. In her mind, Melati already saw these boys in her classroom. Young Grimshaw constructs were usually boisterous, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stop talking, had to do stuff with their hands—
Fifty beats per minute.
Data streamed across the screen, large blocks of mindbase code, in verb-noun shorthand, organised in neat blocks of lines roughly the same length. Melati recognised many of the lines, since she had helped design a lot of the code. This was the Prep module, everything the boys needed to know about their situation at awakening. Their names, that they were six years old, that they were students, that they had eight brothers, that they were male, and that they were to be ordnance specialists.
Sixty beats per minute—wait, one monitor was two beats ahead of the others, no make that three beats, no five, nine.
The boy already had his eyes open. He stared at the ceiling, blinking.
Melati's monitor showed a spike of activity in one of the nine columns. His heart rate was almost a hundred beats per minute and the mindbase modules that scrolled over Melati's screen were irregular and full of long and short lines.
She definitely had not written this code.
"Laura, have a look at this. There's something odd going on with this module."
Melati spoke softly, because too much noise disturbed the constructs at waking time.
Laura frowned, pushed her screen back into the recess and rose.
While she crossed the room in Melati's direction, the boy raised a hand and pulled at the heart rate sensor taped to his chest. It wouldn’t come off and his fingers found the corner of the tape that held it down and started pulling at it.
Laura went to his crib and pushed the boy’s hand away gently. "Shh, you can’t take that off yet."
The boy raised his head and looked around. His eyes met Melati's. He frowned.
Laura said, "Doctor, can you come here? There’s something wro—Hey!"
The boy pushed her away and sat up, but stopped halfway because he still had most of the BCI patches stuck to his head and the leads weren’t long enough for him to sit. He twisted around, his face a mask of frustration. The drip tube attached to his arm was too short for this action and the stand wobbled ominously.
"Doctor," Laura said again.
"Quiet," Dr Chee said, lifting one half of his headphones where he had been listening to recorded procedural instructions. His voice sounded calm and authoritative. He glanced at the boy, and went back to his work. "Dial up the sedative."
Laura did.
But the boy had already ripped the tape from around his wrist and yanked out the drip. So much for the sedative. He pulled at the BCI patches stuck to his head. Clumps of soft cherub-like hair came out.
Laura groped around to stop him. "Hey, leave that on. Stay down. You're not ready yet. Get assistance, Melati."
Melati half-rose, hesitated, and looked at Dr Chee. She’d been allowed to watch this procedure under specific instructions not to interfere with the med staff.
Dr Chee slipped his headphones off and rose quietly, taking an injector gun from the bench against the wall.
Melati mouthed, "Do you need help?" But he gestured at her to keep monitoring the wake-up module’s progress.
The boy sat in his crib, looking over the edge to the floor as if contemplating how to get down, muttering, "Got to get out, got to get out . . ." He pulled at the hospital gown, smearing blood over the front. "Where are my clothes?"
Laura said, "We’ll give you clothes in a minute. Please stay down. Let me re-attach your drip. You’re not ready to get up—"
The boy ducked under her grasping arms and in a surprising display of agility, jumped out of his crib, tangled in the remaining BCI wires and tubes, and tripped, dragging the drip stand to the floor. It fell, taking down a tray of small equipment from an adjacent table. Syringes and other implements bounced over the floor. A bottle smashed in an explosion of glass and fluid.
"Please stay in your bed." Laura managed to grab his arm, but he twisted himself loose and ran towards the unit's door. He looked for a door handle—the door didn't have one; it was controlled through staff passes—and banged on the metal surface. "Where is he? Where is the fucking bastard?"
At that moment, the door opened from the outside and as
the boy charged through, two emergency nurses came the other way. The two of them, Laura Jennings and Dr Chee restrained the boy. In between their uniformed bodies, Melati glimpsed the doctor’s gloved hand jamming the injector gun against the boy’s arm.
Moments later, he collapsed and the two emergency nurses carried him to his cot.
Meanwhile the other boys had woken up.
One of them sat in his cot, looking wide-eyed at nurses re-attaching leads to his unconscious brother. As if in slow motion, he opened his mouth and produced a long, animal-like wail.
To hell with not interfering. Melati ran to the bed and put an arm around his shoulders. He felt hot and thin under her touch. Shivering.
"It’s all right," she said, stroking his arm.
His brother in the next crib tried to reach him. His arm tangled in the drip tube and his face distorted with distress. He gave an anguished cry, yanking at the tube.
"Shhh," Melati said, one eye on the large display on the wall. The modules had finished loading, but his brain activity showed huge spikes and valleys instead of the usual steady line.
Another boy was trying to untangle himself from the surrounding equipment.
Laura looked over her shoulder. "Get them to stay down before they ruin my entire lab."
One nurse grabbed the boy closest to Melati by the shoulders so he remained in his crib while Laura detached him from his patches, muttering and cursing. As soon as the nurses let him go, the boy clambered from the crib, stumbled—the first time on his feet—and joined Melati and the crying boy on the cot, wrapping his arms around both of them.
The other boys were crying, too, and Dr Chee and the nurses went from one to the other trying to keep all of them in their cribs. Laura, bleeding from a glass cut in her forearm, was running around detaching them from their patches and drips. But there were four med personnel and eight conscious boys. Some of the boys managed to free themselves. Two were running around in nothing more than recyclable gowns, stepping in glass.