Rollo himself had slung a reinforced jacket over his ship clothes. Old miners’ gear, his one concession to a night on the town. None of them were carrying obvious weapons, because Roshu had strict regulations about anything that could punch a hole in the dome.
As the hatch opened, revealing a quicksilver-coloured sky dotted with toxic clouds, Kris rapped Idris on the shoulder.
‘Eyes open.’
‘Like they cut off the lids,’ he agreed, and then the crew were going their separate ways.
‘Got a call from a Cheeseman,’ Rollo explained to Idris. ‘Deep void work. Wants to see if we’ve got what it takes.’ Cheesemen were fixers who matched jobs to skills. They claimed the name came from ‘chessmen’， after their legendary logistical skills. Everyone else said it came from ‘cheese-paring’ after their legendary tight-fistedness.
Idris nodded glumly. Intermediaries were rare, so being exhibited like some human curio was part of the deal.
They were pushing down a narrow corridor, cluttered with spacers, miners and colony staff. Here tawdry establishments sought to bilk the impatient of their currency before they reached the main dens of vice on the lower levels. And Idris had an itch between his shoulder blades. His paranoia told him someone was following them, but then paranoia was one of the things you ended up with if you kept your eyes open through unspace. He shook off the feeling irritably.
The crowds had blinded Idris and Rollo to trouble, so they practically bounced off the two large men who stepped in front of them. Idris was just making apologies when one of them said, ‘Idris Telemmier. You come with us now.’
He froze. Strangers knowing his name was never auspicious, especially when it preceded an order and not an invitation. The voice wasn’t the nasal Roshu twang either, but something heavier with rolled consonants, from a planet less cosmopolitan than this.
‘He’s going nowhere with you, friend,’ Rollo started and got slammed against the corridor wall for his trouble, with a whoof of lost breath. The other man seized Idris’s arm in a vice hold. The two heavies were just that. Most people who’d come out of the lean war generations were small, clawing to their majorities out of half-starved childhoods. This pair’s ancestors hadn’t had any worries on that score. They were each a good two metres tall and broad across the shoulders. They wore bottle-green uniform jackets, busy with gold trimming about the shoulders and cuffs. Their long faces had bristly moustaches, and hair worn in wire-bound braids that reached to their chins. Everything about them screamed money and casual violence, and there was only one place that really did the two together so well: Magda.
‘We don’t need any trouble!’ Idris proclaimed loudly. But everyone was just rushing past, in a hurry not to see any trouble either, in case it was contagious.
‘Detaining you under “Liaison Board Order Three, Rogue Intermediaries”，’ one of the Magdan heavies grunted, like someone reading the words with difficulty from a book.
‘Kris.’ Idris tried the radio, but they’d hit a complete dead zone. Worse and worse.
‘Whose authority?’ Rollo choked out, more for the form of it.
‘Our lord desires justice,’ one of them said. ‘A fugitive Intermediary. Very dangerous. To be repatriated to Colonial service. And you talk too much, fat man. Accessory, we think.’ His friend flashed a slate that might or might not display some manner of permit.
Idris got as far as ‘I’m not—’ before his arm was wrenched behind his back, hard. Then he and Rollo were being frogmarched away.
Solace
Partheni weren’t renowned for travelling incognito. When she stepped off the passenger-hauler at Roshu, Solace was followed by a fair-sized a-grav trunk that held her armour and weapons. The sight of her Parthenon greatcoat put a good metre of clear space around her, which had its pluses and minuses. The long military coat, marked with her company badges and rank, attracted a lot of foul looks these days. The last few decades had seen the rise of an ugly subculture of ‘Nativists’ in the Colonies, who were dead against anything except ‘natural-born humans’ on their worlds. At the same time, the uniform was notorious enough that nobody dared to give her any trouble. Worst came to worst, the intimidation factor might just start opening doors for her purely so that their owners could get rid of her more quickly.
It struck her that the phrase Parthenon diplomacy might become Colvul parlance to describe exactly the way she was behaving, and she wasn’t sure if that was funny or not.