Penumbra

He fetched a beer from the cooler, stepped out on to the veranda, and watched the sun going down over the desert.

6

Ezekiel Klien stood before the wraparound screen of the security tower and stared out across the simmering expanse of Calcutta spaceport.

As the chief of security at the port, and king of his domain, Klien felt invincible. He had been at the port for thirteen years now, thirteen lucky years, working his way up from lowly security officer to his present lofty position.

His communicator buzzed. “The captain of the freighter is in the interrogation room, sir.”

“I told you I wanted his name and the name of his ship, Frazer.”

“Yes, sir!”

For the past five years, as chief of security, he had ruled with absolute and unwavering authority. He knew that his team hated him, but this only served to assure him that he was doing his job with clinical efficiency. His orders had to be obeyed to the letter and anyone who showed less than one hundred per cent dedication to Klien and his objectives would find themselves out of work.

“Ah…” Frazer said, “he’s Vitaly Kozinsky and his ship is the…’ Klien could almost sense Frazer’s panic as he checked his com-board. “The Petrograd.”

“Very good. I’ll be down immediately.”

He cut the connection and stared through the viewscreen at the squat, toad-like shape of the Russian freighter sitting on the tarmac. The ship had violated Indian airspace, phasing in without warning or clearance and claiming main drive failure. Klien had authorised landing and scrambled his team. In all likelihood the captain’s claim was genuine and the ship was damaged, but Klien was taking no risks.

He stepped into the elevator and rode to the ground floor. He smiled at his reflection in the polished steel door. Physically and facially he bore little resemblance to the young man who had left the world of Homefall almost fourteen years ago. He had lived indulgently over the years, dined well and overfed himself with the express purpose of gaining weight and radically changing his appearance. His face was padded with fat and he wore his hair in black, shoulder-length ringlets. He had taken bromides for the past ten years, both to suppress his sexual urges and so allow ultimate concentration on what was important in his life, and to change his appearance further. His team called him the Eunuch. He knew this because he had planted surveillance devices in their changing rooms. There was very little that happened at the port of which Ezekiel Klien was not aware.

Frazer was waiting for him outside the interrogation room.

“Have you got the crew out of the ship?”

Frazer nodded. “They’re waiting in quarantine, sir.”

“Good. Keep them there until I say so. And get the team aboard the Petrograd. I want the ship stripped and a full report in my terminal in one hour. Also, I want the flight program examined and relayed to me. That will be all.”

“Yes, sir.” Frazer saluted, something like fear and hatred in his eyes.

Klien’s draconian regime had paid dividends over the years. Security at the port was the envy of business organisations and governments. National and even colonial concerns had tried to lure him away from the job, tempting him with talk of fabulous wealth, but he had refused all offers. He had joined the port security staff with one aim in mind, and he did not intend to be distracted from that aim.

He touched the sensor on the door and stepped into the interrogation room.

Kozinsky was a big man in scarred radiation silvers. His hair was dishevelled and his face unshaven, and he stank. It was the peculiar body odour of men in a failing ship, the rank stench of fear and unwashed flesh.

“Klien, chief of security.”

Kozinsky stood quickly and held out a hand. “Vitaly Kozinsky, captain of the Petrograd.”

Klien ignored the hand. “Sit down, Captain.”

Kozinsky nodded, sat down uncomfortably. He was fidgety after too long in space. Klien could tell that he wanted to stand and stride about. Intuition told him that the man was almost certainly genuine, and not the ringleader of some anti-Indian faction out to bomb the port.

But Klien was not about to trust intuition. He remained standing, maintaining a psychological advantage over the seated spacer, and for the next hour fired a barrage of questions at the bemused Russian.

Kozinsky was a freelance spacer who would take any in-system job between the planets if the price was right; he was paid well to fly tubs that no other self-respecting spacer would go anywhere near. The Petrograd was an Earth-Mars cargo freighter of the Cosmoflot Line, on the return leg to Kazakhstan from Mars with a hold full of iron ore.

“Why did you choose to come down here, Captain? Surely you could have made it to Kazakhstan?”

“I tried, but there was no way we could have lasted.”

“Auxiliary engine failure?”

Kozinsky looked up. “No—main drive dysfunction.”

Klien smiled to himself. “And you came down on the auxiliaries?”

The captain nodded. “But we had trouble with those, too. I decided to land at the first port.”

Klien stared at the man, considering. “What we’ll do, Captain,” he said at last, “is contact Cosmoflot and arrange payment for repairs to the ship. You’ll be accommodated here in the meantime at your employer’s expense.”

He nodded briefly and left the room.

From time to time he liked to take a look around the ships himself, less to check the diligence of his team than to reacquaint himself with the interior of a void-going vessel. He left the tower and walked across the tarmac to the damaged Petrograd. A ramp gave access to a foul-smelling interior. More than just the drive had failed: the air system and ventilation had laboured to keep the atmosphere clean and breathable.

He made his way to the flight-deck and watched Frazer and the team at work, sensing their unease at his presence. He touched the back of the worn command couch, his gaze moving over the control console. Technology had moved on a lot over the years, since he had piloted the scout ship away from Homefall to Madrigal. He would be unable to pilot these more modern vessels, though he daily dreamed of returning to the planet of his birth, of appropriating a void-ship and heading away from the corruption and filth that was the Expansion.

He smiled to himself. A man needed his dreams.

“Frazer?”

The officer turned from examining the ship’s flight program, saluted. “Sir.”

“Your findings?”

“The system shows a routine Earth-Mars run, sir. Nothing untoward at all. There was a main drive dysfunction picked up by the on-board computers on initial orbital approach. The main drive shut down and they came in on the auxiliary system.”

Klien nodded. “Contact Cosmoflot for credit rating and have the crew transferred to temporary lodging.”

Klien left his team and crossed the tarmac to the security tower. Once back in his office he went through the flight programs of the many other ships occupying the holding berths and blast-pads across the port. Shortly after his appointment as chief of security, he had ordered the installation of a computer system that would enable him to check on the flight programs of every ship that used the port; he had also arranged a reciprocal facility with Security at Los Angeles spaceport, so that he could check on their ships too.

There was always the chance that his home planet had sent another ship after his own. He had to be ready for his fellow colonists in the event of their arrival, either to eliminate the crew should they be from the opposition, or to greet fellow members of the Council of Elders.

He had been waiting for such a long time now that he had almost given up hope. He had come to accept that he was stranded on Earth, an Earth corrupt beyond his ability to accept or to change.

For the rest of the afternoon, Klien processed routine security matters and studied Frazer’s report on