Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

“I don’t want you to open up shop in front of me, lad,” September spoke softly. “I’ve another reason for wantin’ to get inside that warehouse.”

Ethan eyed him curiously, but the big man had already turned and was moving down the hallway. Ethan hurried to keep up with him.

“Should be a heated tunnel taking us out to the storage complex, once we find the right lift. Warehousing should be above surface like everything else.”

Warehouse Three was a utilitarian rectangle of windowless metal. September was right about its location. Despite the cold, it was cheaper to build above ground on Tran-ky-ky. Easier to put up a prefabricated structure that could withstand the wind than to excavate the permafrost and frozen ground.

The warehouse was insulated but not well heated inside. Ethan would have been shivering without his survival suit. A glance at a wall thermometer indicated the interior temperature was just above freezing. Outside, that would amount to a severe heat wave.

Two guards were posted at the warehouse doorway. When pressed for an explanation of their rather incongruous presence, one explained readily. “There’ve been stories about the natives stealing anything they can get their paws on.” The man looked indifferent. “It’s a cold job, but what the hell ain’t on this world?”

“Have you ever caught a local stealing?” Ethan couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice, and the guard noted it.

“Hey, look, I don’t make policy, friend. I just enforce it, me and Jolene here.” The other guard put a self-important hand on her beamer. “Let’s see your authorization slip.”

“Call the postmaster.” Ethan wasn’t feeling too cooperative. Maybe the Tran weren’t the most outgoing people in the galaxy, but it didn’t seem to him that anyone here was making much of an effort to learn otherwise.

“Oh, dierd! What’s your name or crate code?” Ethan told him. “Yeah, your stuff’s about four rows back, then turn right. Section twenty D.” He stepped aside. September gave him a pleasant smile, his coguard a larger one. She didn’t smile back.

“I don’t understand this,” Ethan grumbled as they made their way back through the tall shelves of crates and packages. “All the Tran we’ve encountered have been honest; in fact, I never heard Hunnar or anyone else even mention thievery in Wannome.”

“They haven’t had sufficient interaction with the corrupting influence of an acquisitive civilization,” September commented half-seriously. They turned right at the fourth row.

Ethan found his three small seamless plastic crates. Only his sealkey could debond the molecular structure of the blue material forming the square shapes. The house of Malaika overseals looked intact and untampered with.

“I can pick them up anytime, Skua. What did you want to look at in here?”

“I’m already looking at it, lad.” September’s gaze was taking in the ceiling-high stacks of crates. “I’ve seen what I wanted to. Time to go.”

They left the chilly chamber, passing under the hostile eyes of the guards. September didn’t speak until they were nearly back to the main port entrance.

“Something bothered me about Xenaxis’ comments concernin’ the local trade,” he explained. “Now that I’ve seen inside, it bothers me more. According to the markings on those crates, the trade going on here strikes me as awfully one-sided.”

“One-sided how?”

“Lad, those crates back there were new moldings, and the markings on them confirmed it. There’s a lot more going off this world than is comin’ in. Course, it’s hard to measure how many duralloy or ceramisteel knives equal one carving. But I don’t think the Tran know the value of their exports. How much is a hundred liters of water worth to a man in a desert? For that matter, how much is a hundred liters of dirt worth to a man in an ocean?

“Someone’s making a lot more than an honest profit here, feller-me-lad. Your packages were the only ones I saw in the whole place with a merchant family crest on ’em. Someone else, maybe unlicensed, is running a fine little monopoly here, and cheating the Tran in the bargain. Of course, they don’t think they’re getting cheated, because they don’t know any better. But I know, and it makes me mad, lad. These folks are my friends.”

“Our friends,” Ethan said quietly.

“Sure, our friends… for another five days.”

“So what can we do about it? No, wait. I do represent the House of Malaika. I’ve never met the old man himself, but from what I know he’s a bit more honest than many of the family heads. The injustice of the situation here wouldn’t move him to action. Profits would. I’m sure he’d be willing to come in and make the Tran a better deal.”

“I’m thinking of something a bit different from spreading the lucre, lad. Tell you about it later.” With that the giant lapsed into introspective silence as they made their way toward the entrance.

Just before reaching the doors they passed a pair of thranx. The meter-tall insects who with mankind co-dominated the Commonwealth were bundled almost beyond recognition in survival suits designed for their eight-limbed bodies. Even within the building they wore specially woven fur-lined sleeves over their feathery antennae. Apparently they were willing to forgo a loss of sensitivity for acceptable warmth.

Hailing from hot, humid worlds, the thranx were especially uncomfortable here on Tran-ky-ky. They walked past, muttering to each other in High Thranx. Ethan wondered what horrible misdemeanor the two had committed to be assigned to this world. Tran-ky-ky would be a fair realization of the thranx concept of Hell.

“Wonder what’s going on?” September pointed outside as they passed the inner set of doors.

A crowd had gathered on the entryway ramp. There seemed to be an argument taking place in its center. The two men hurried through the outer doors.

It seemed as if a million lumens hit Ethan’s eyes photons-on. The exterior doors were chemically tinted to make the outside glare bearable. Passing through, Ethan had neglected to pull down his goggles. Quickly he lowered them, opened his eyes. Gradually his sight returned and he could discern something besides white. It still felt as if someone had taken a file to his optic nerves. He lowered his face mask, not quite fast enough to prevent a couple of tears from freezing solid on his cheeks. The face shield melted them away.

Words of the argument reached him as he followed September forward into the crowd. Some of them he couldn’t translate. The ones he could embarrassed him. A couple of Tran were expressing enormous dislike for one another.

One of them was Hunnar. The other Ethan didn’t recognize. The combatants faced each other in a small open space, exchanging imprecations with unfaltering volubility. Suaxus and Budjir stood nearby, fingering the hilts of their swords nervously, their teeth half showing. Those, in the crowd nearest them were murmuring threateningly.

“… off-spring of a crippled k’nith!” the strange Tran growled at Hunnar. Ethan noted with some surprise that the stranger was taller than the knight, though not nearly as muscular. In fact, he looked soft. Green and gold metal-fabric sashes were draped importantly across his chest in diagonal pattern, shoulder to hip below the dan.

Metal-fabric: imported trade goods, he knew. Strapped to the richly-dressed Tran’s left leg was a short sword made of stelamic instead of the barely adequate local steel that formed Hunnar’s blade. Its handle was made of intricately molded plastic.

“I will not fight with you.” The stranger tried to muster some officious dignity. “I do not fight with…” The last word he used had an ambiguous meaning, one which could identify any outlander, or indicate the lowest form of peasant.