Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [43]
Christian appeared on his viewer, scowling. ‘Si?’
‘An emergency call has come in. The caller says the grain silos are on fire. It has come in from the right vicinity.’
‘Can you smell anything?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Get outside and sniff the air. Can you smell anything?’
Trin left Christian’s impatient glare and walked the few steps to the rear coldlock. He cracked it open and waited for his senses to stretch past the nullifying blast of the heat. Yes. It was there. The acrid taste of smoke settling on the back of his tongue like burned food.
He returned to the shortcast. ‘Si. I can taste something.’
Christian swore in another language. He lifted his arms above his head and stretched himself awake. The movement of his body revealed a figure in bed behind him. Her armour-like skin and neck frills were unmistakably Balol. Trin had seen such females at Dockside, in the transit lounges, and once, as he procured bravura in the oily shadows of a freight bay, he had observed one overseeing the docking of a luxury ship.
The men had called Faja Fedor a ‘ginko lover’—what, then, did they make of their Capitano?
‘. . . I’ll meet the duty crew there. Come with them,’ Christian was saying.
Trin forced himself to listen to the Capitano’s instructions. ‘But—’
‘That is not an invitation, Pellegrini!’
Christian ended the shortcast, leaving Trin to stare at the blank film.
Trin’s insides trembled with a mixture of fear and excitement: he had not been close to a fire before. Because of the high oxygen quotient in Araldis’s air, and as a future Principe, it had always been forbidden for him to take such a risk. A sudden frisson of liberation took him; perhaps there was some small compensation to be found in the indignity of his denouncement.
Following the Emergency Directive, he switched the shortcast to the Emergency Vehicle Frequency and let himself out through the coldlock into the compound.
The duty crew were already dressed and loading their vehicles.
‘Capitano says I should come,’ he said to a man he thought to be Seb Malocchi.
Malocchi inclined his flash hood towards the workshop office. ‘Find a firesuit in there. We’ll be gone in a few minutes. We won’t wait,’ he shouted.
Trin struggled into the suit with no assistance—and no hindrance. Where were the Cavaliere? Why were they not here?
‘Last chance to catch a ride, Pellegrini,’ a voice crackled through the flash hood’s transceiver.
Trin squashed all the seals tight and went back out into the workshop.
‘The Cavaliere have been recalled to Pell,’ added Seb Malocchi, as if reading his mind. ‘They have a situation up there as well.’ He was piling kitbags on top of each other.
Trin climbed into the back of the remaining TerV as Malocchi secured them under webbing. ‘What situation?’ he asked.
Malocchi didn’t answer. The vehicle swung out onto the bare redcrete viuzza and took several fast sharp turns to orient itself north. Trin banged his head against the window slits as he tried to peer out.
The TerV sped past the dust-white villettes of the Nobiles and into the non-familia section of Loisa where row upon row of cramped mud-and-cellulose cabins huddled together creating shade for each other.
‘You know how to use these?’ Malocchi again.
Trin turned awkwardly, half swinging from the holding straps.
Malocchi slid a crate across the floor, then himself after it, wedging in alongside Trin. He popped the crate’s lid and pulled out several items. ‘First Responder Kit—you take one of these when we stop and help anyone you come across that’s hurt. See: burn-gel, cold compress, trauma pads, valve shield, infection swipes, skin-restore, blood-stopper roll.’ He tucked each item back inside as he listed it.
Trin heard the words without comprehension. He did not deal with people like this: not with their blood and their wounds and their panic.
‘You