Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [81]
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MIRA
‘You’re the last in,’ a voice shouted.
Mira and Cass peered out through the dirt-smeared windows. Ipo was only a few mesurs ahead of them. A small TerV pulled up alongside where they had stopped between huge hydroponic tents and an ‘esque with crimson skin and gold miner’s tattoos across the bridge of his nose leaned out of the open door. He wore no protective suit, only a thin insulating robe with an open hood.
‘We’re sealing off the town—bunkering in. Then we saw youse coming. We only got a few minutes.’ He gestured back over his shoulder. ‘Anyone outside the fence’s on their own. What you got in the back?’
‘Nothin’ ‘cept a couple of women,’ said Innis.
Marrat opened the doorbridge for him to inspect the vehicle’s interior and Cass and Mira climbed out of the barge to stand next to Marrat.
‘What fence are you talking about?’ asked Innis.
The ‘esque pointed to the array of tripods posted at intervals to their left and right. ‘We’ve rigged a laser around the town, using the mining levels.’
‘But half of Loisa is behind us on foot. What about them?’ Mira protested.
He gave her a hard look and then shrugged. ‘Count yourselves too lucky.’
Too lucky? Too lucky—to see a child crushed under the tracks of a TerV? Too lucky—to lose mia sorella? ‘The Saqr will kill them.’ Mira looked for Cass to add force to her protest but the woman avoided her gaze, fussing with the seals of her ‘bino’s oversuit.
‘You cannot deny them entry,’ persisted Mira.
‘Shut ‘em out or die, Rast says. Pretty straightforward. Now youse best go further in to town now. Gonna be some bazoom out here,’ said the ‘esque.
Behind them a dull glow sprang to life across the road—a tinted distortion of the dawn like a not-quite fire. It spread in a wide circle around the town and high into the air.
‘All the way around.’ He laughed. ‘They won’t even know it’s there until they’re on it.’
As they watched the fence flicker, the wind gusted, blasting them with dust and grit. Another TerV pulled alongside and its driver leaned out. This one wore a full but hard-worn protective suit.
‘These are the last ones, Catchut,’ said their escort.
‘Get ‘em into town.’
Mira glimpsed Catchut’s face behind the film. It was pale and space-soft. An un-native who hasn’t bothered with melanin therapy. Not a miner. Not a farmer. A soldier, perhaps? But there were no soldiers on Araldis, only cowardly Carabinere.
‘Yessir.’ The miner slapped his fingers to his leathery forehead in mock salute.
‘Now, Rast says. Everyone away from the fence,’ said Catchut. He drove off.
Mira and Cass climbed back into the barge and Mira checked on the korm. Vito was asleep, tucked against the large alien’s forearm. The scar bubbles left by the Saqr wound seemed smaller today, and the korm seemed content to lie and let its body self-heal. It needed food, though, like they all did.
As the barge drove past the rows of hydroponic tents the guide wires sang in the wind. Mira pressed against the window. How much food is in them? Enough to feed the town? For how long?
They wound along Ipo’s well-compacted dirt roads, so different from the redcrete viuzzas of Loisa, and skirted a small rectangular bore-field before entering the town’s centre. Mira knew of Ipo’s reputation as the harshest of the plains towns, a place where the hydro-farmers and the miners lived in uneasy proximity. The miners were mostly ‘esque but not familia, not Cip. Like Cass and Innis they came from planets all through the Orion system. They’d built their shanties—gumes, they called them—from materials discarded from the larger mines like Pellegrini A and B. In Ipo, the shanties outnumbered the catoplasma buildings and the mud-and-cellulose casas tenfold.
It was easy to spot where the few familia lived. Their villas, though crude in comparison to those in Loisa, were solid, comforting outlines in the flat red-brown townscape.
As they