Читать книгу The Gate of Lemnos - Francis Jarman - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

IN CUSTODY

Buzz-Click. The strip lighting went on. Burk was already awake, but the sudden light dazzled him. There must be a reason for switching it on. They had let him sleep—probably for hours—but now they wanted something from him.

Burk stretched, got up, and stretched again. The cell was narrow, much narrower than a single room in any of the living units, but the ceiling was high enough to allow him to stretch comfortably. This wasn’t some punishment cell tucked away under the machinery deck. Those cells weren’t pleasant at all. This one was on a main level, he guessed, between one of the outer gangways and the shell. He’d had time to learn the layout of the ship. He was still in the civilized world! And, sure enough, there was even a small porthole window.

He looked out, without expecting to see anything, perhaps just a blur of starlight. The ship was in slide hyperdrive. Its destination, Lemnos in the Zora System, would still be light-years away, and to reach it they would eventually need to go even faster, putting everyone into transportation pods for a final burst of interstellar high slide. So how did Burk know that the ship was only moving at slide, at normal cruising speed? Because if it wasn’t, he would have fragmented into particles long ago. A very messy business, that.

Two low-ranking Guardians had come for him, both of them women, which was normal enough when it was a serious matter. He confirmed his name and number to them. They had asked him to step outside his living unit, and then some comedian had hit him from behind with a sedative taser. Was that last night? Or this morning? On a space flight, concepts like that didn’t mean very much. Hours ago, certainly. The bastards! Why use a taser on him? He wouldn’t have put up a fight—though in retrospect (feeling the soreness) he would have liked to—because there wouldn’t have been any point. Where do you run to, on a space transporter in mid-flight? Where do you hide? And why should he need to hide anyway? He wasn’t aware of having broken any serious regulations. A few recreational misdemeanors. Nothing that he thought they needed to know about.

With a brief whirring sound the door to the cell slid open. A Guardian stood silhouetted against the gangway, a taser of some kind in one hand and a small tray of food in the other. She was quite young, but ugly, slab-faced and expressionless. With a twist of her neck she motioned to Burk to step back. Without taking her eyes off him, she placed the tray down on the sleeping ledge.

Even if Burk hadn’t seen the single red slash on her shoulder, he would have known from the coarseness of the dark green uniform and her slovenly manner and movements that she was only a Grade I—and she would likely never be anything more than that. Hers would be a life of crude, brutal service, yet also of privilege. She would never have her food resources withheld, she would never be triaged. For just a second the image of Milliya flashed through his mind: even younger, that same uniform, also Grade I, though there the resemblance ended. He repressed the thought. Milliya…it was not to be. It was painful to think of her.

Slabface went out, the door whirred shut, and Burk turned to the food tray. They were standard AdPop rations, neither better nor worse than what he had been eating and drinking since the ship left Terra. It wasn’t a diet that you’d want to recommend to your dearest friends. Or serve at a party. But you got the food resources that your classification entitled you to, which was fair enough. That was the way things were. Burk was classified as Additional (not even as Useful) Population, AdPop for short, and he was certainly not a Guardian. When food resources were limited (as they frequently were), the AdPops wouldn’t starve, but they couldn’t expect to do much by way of feasting.

But something was wrong here. He counted the little bars and the tablets of concentrate. They had given him barely half of what he should be getting. Had they already reclassified him, then? Perhaps he was now a SurPop, one of those convict laborers, prisoners, delinquents, addicts and social inadequates who made up the lowest rung, the Surplus Population. Some people said it would have been more honest and more realistic to call them “Superfluous”. The proposal to start triaging them systematically, the repeat offenders at least, came up year after year in Parliament. So far it had always been voted down. Did SurPops routinely get less of the same food resources that the AdPops received? Or did they perhaps get the same quantity, but poorer quality stuff?

He didn’t know. The strata of society weren’t encouraged to mix more than was necessary—his relationship with Milliya, brief as it had been, had been very discreet—and SurPops were always trouble, there was no denying that. Burk didn’t like them, he kept away from them, and he didn’t know much about their official rations. Their preferred (though unofficial) diet was centered on what used to be called “forbidden substances”, before the Government started mass-producing the stuff. In any case, on a space flight the arrangements would likely be different.

Were there any SurPops on board? Burk hadn’t actually seen any. Before the Guardians had come for him, his job had taken him all round the ship and he had had plenty of contact with the crew and the passengers. The Starstretcher was a comfortable people transporter, of fairly new design. It had the ability to go into high slide for quite long bursts, though that did mean putting almost everyone into transportation pods, which was expensive. Lemnos needed quality settlers, though, and the Starstretcher was now bringing several thousand of them. SurPops (if they were needed at all—did Lemnos have mines or quarries, for instance? Or was there a convict settlement there?) could be shipped out cheaply on a non-priority freighter, some ore- or coal-transporter that never went any faster than good old S-mode, standard slide. There was no special hurry to get them anywhere. Making the SurPops spend a couple of years trundling through space in some discomfort and with no access to their precious “substances” could even have been designed as part of their punishment.

Burk didn’t want to be a SurPop, no sirree, anywhere in the Terran Empire.

He nibbled at the food resources, without appetite or enthusiasm. The wrapper on the bar said “DELICIO EXTRA”. Oh dear, they must be joking! Still, who knew when he might next get an even halfway decent meal? And he would need his strength. He didn’t know what they wanted from him, or why the violence, but when the Guardians came for you like that, one thing was sure: it was hardly going to be a lot of fun (at least, not for you).

* * * * * * *

They must have been watching him. They knew the moment Burk had finished eating, and then a whole gang of them came in for him in a rush through the whirring, sliding door. Two of them pinioned him from behind. One of them was probably a male—Burk only caught a glimpse of them as they pushed into the cell, but he got the distinct impression that his left arm was being pinioned by someone less thuggish than the Guardian who was trying to break his right arm (despite their smaller size, the females tended to be more brutal). There was quite a crowd of them in the little cell. Burk must have done something to make himself a celebrity! Slabface was there, too, standing in the background, poised on her toes and looking as though she was simply dying to cause him grievous bodily harm, in an expert and enthusiastic manner, if only her colleagues would step aside for a moment and give her the opportunity to demonstrate her skills. A nasty-looking Grade II (two red slashes) did all the talking, or what there was of it.

“You’ve ’ad yer food. Now you’re gonna answer some questions!”

And before he could respond they bundled him out of the cell, down the gangway, round several corners, through a couple of sliding doors and into a room with a numbered but otherwise unmarked dark green door. On the way, Cruella had squawked “Move it! Yer! Move it! Go! Go!” or something similarly theatrical that she had picked up from lousy old twenty-first century movies. She had also kicked his shins in a perfunctory, Guardian-like way. Perhaps she thought she was up for a promotion, and her superiors were watching? How had she even got to Grade II, with language skills like that?

They went past numerous people, all of them in Guardian uniforms. No attempt was made to disorientate him or hide from him where they were going. They were on the lower administration level of the ship, the door-numbers had told him that. There were larger porthole windows in the gangway, through which he now saw clear starlight. That meant that, for some reason, the ship was completely out of slide and had slowed down to T- (or “terrestrial”) speed. It was good to know that they were in a public area of the Starstretcher. If they had been planning to do him serious harm, some interrogation off the record, or worse, they would have taken him somewhere else on the ship. Somewhere that was much darker and quieter.

The room they were now in was a medium-sized office, with tables, chairs, and all the usual paraphernalia of administration. Lots of communications stuff, but no obvious instruments for inflicting pain, Burk thought to himself. Except the fists, boots and tasers of the Guardians, of course, which were always available.

“Sit there!” Cruella pushed him down onto a simple office chair. Burk was aware of her standing behind him, breathing heavily and shifting her weight from foot to foot. She smelt distinctly unpleasant. She’s nervous! Maybe she really was under supervision for promotion. Or was she simply frightened of the other people in the room? Her thuggish colleagues were now gone, or so Burk thought, though he didn’t want to risk looking round to find out. Instead, he focused on who was sitting in front of him.

They had done him proud: no fewer than three Grade IIIs—the officer class. The uniforms were nicely cut, clean and well-fitting. Directly opposite him sat a fairly young woman with a sternly beautiful face and a look of high but cold intelligence. Burk was immediately reminded of lines from a Yeats poem:

Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head

All the Olympians; a thing never known again.

(Minor subject Literature at college—it had to be good for something.)

On the table in front of her was a bulky dossier with assorted printouts of texts, reports and graphics. Could that be his Main File? He couldn’t see exactly. Whatever the matter was about, it must be serious. Paper was much heavier than electronically stored information. On a crowded people transporter it was a luxury, a valuable resource. Burk remembered the fuss they’d made about the couple of old-fashioned books that he’d included in his luggage. Most things were digitalized for text-readers long ago, but he liked to be holding a proper book in his hands when he read his favorite poets. Athene played with the items, ignoring Burk for the moment.

To her left was a male officer, older than she was, more delicately built, with long, thin artistic hands and a slightly distant expression. He looked vaguely familiar. Burk had once been told, by someone who had painfully good cause to know, that senior Guardian interrogators, the ones who did the more subtle, the more complicatedly unpleasant things to you, often looked like this. And they always smiled while they were doing it. Suddenly the man became aware of Burk, and stared at him in an amused manner. (Though whether the thought that was amusing him would have amused Burk, too, would be rather hard to say.)

The third officer sat away from the table, to her female colleague’s right, as though she were only there as an observer. She was the highest in rank. In addition to the three red slashes, there were two red stars, indicating that she was only one promotion away from Grade IV, the junior leadership cadre—the highest level that was normally allowed to leave Terra, and then only to assume command. If she was being posted to Lemnos on a permanent basis, rather than to carry out a specific and temporary mission, only the Governor of the planet would outrank her, with the military commander and the security chief perhaps her equals in rank. Nobody on the Starstretcher would outrank her, though, except the Commander.

She was also the most physically intimidating of the three Guardians. Her massive body caused the uniform to bulge. She had huge hands, ideal for mending metal bars or cracking open Goro-nuts without a hammer. There was nothing about her figure, as far as Burk could see, that proclaimed incontrovertibly that she was a woman (she didn’t seem to have breasts, for example). Although she was physically impressive, even attractive (in an androgynous way), she couldn’t be an android, because they were not admitted into the ranks of the Guardians. Perhaps she had been genetically modified or enhanced?

Guardians were not allowed to wear jewelry on duty (or encouraged to wear it off), but some of them—Burk thought for a heart-warming second of Milliya—managed to customize their uniforms with discreet little feminine touches. No such touches were evident here. Only two things suggested her sex.

One was the way that her hair was done, in an unmistakably female style, with patient care and immaculate taste, and undoubtedly at great expense.

The other was the Medusa-like gaze that she fixed on Burk when their eyes finally met, a look that told him that here was a woman who had had dealings with men before, and who had her own very personal reasons for wanting to wield power over them, to humiliate them, and to cause them pain.

It was a look that chilled him to the bone.