Janet Edwards - Earth Flight

I couldn’t believe it either. The Adonis Knights were descendants of the first colonists on Adonis. Humanity learned a lot from that first colony. Mostly about all the things that could go wrong when people tried to live on an alien world with its own abundant life and intricate ecology and the portal link failed. After that, the Military Charter was written to establish what later became the cross-sector Military. Their first job was to clean up Adonis and make it safe, then their fledgling Planet First teams moved on to open up other colony worlds.

Playdon shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine Colonel Leveque would …’

He broke off because a man in a Captain’s uniform had just come out of our dome. The new arrival couldn’t be much more than twenty years old. He was slim, with short, dark hair, and had what would have been a very ordinary face if it wasn’t for the thin, horizontal, black and white stripes on his right cheek.

I frantically counted the stripes and made it ten. Chaos take it, I wasn’t just looking at an Adonis Knight. This man had completed the legendary set of ordeals based on the first colonists’ struggle to survive, including a desert trek, fighting predatory animals, a week without food, and two days without water.

The title of an Adonis Knight only meant you were a rich aristocrat with heroic ancestors, but completing all ten trials of Adonis … Respect!

I had my eyes closed and my face lifted, glorying in the sensation of warm water cascading over my skin. I ran my fingers through strands of squeaky-clean hair and inhaled the faint fragrance of shower spray. This was blizz. Utter ecstatic blizz!

Someone hammered on the bathroom door, and I heard Amalie shouting. ‘Jarra, there’s a queue out here. For chaos sake, come out of there before you dissolve!’

I groaned and reluctantly switched the shower to dry mode. Amalie must have heard the shower change note, because the hammering stopped. A couple of minutes later, I stepped out of the shower and stood gloating at the sight of my wonderfully unblemished face in the mirror. The hammering on the door started again.

‘I’m coming!’ I tugged on my robe, picked up my gun and my lookup from the shelf, opened the door, and faced a queue of three impatient people.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I wanted to make sure I got rid of all the Osiris lily smell.’

Amalie groaned. ‘You had an hour-long shower yesterday afternoon. We all told you the smell was gone afterwards. You still insisted on having two more showers and a swim in the pool. The. Smell. Has. Gone.’

‘I could still smell it this morning.’ I sniffed. ‘I think it’s gone now. I’m not sure.’

Amalie sighed and went into the bathroom. His Excellency Captain Draven Fedorov Seti Raven had been leaning casually against the corridor wall waiting for me. Now he escorted me to my room, checking for threats with the tiny sensor in his left hand, while his right hand hovered close to his gun.

I went into the room, found Fian already dressed in his uniform, and got dressed myself. When we went back out into the corridor, we discovered our bodyguard was talking to himself.

‘… understand that but I’m not happy. She’s a potential threat!’

‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with it, Birdy,’ said a disembodied male voice.

I frowned. ‘Where’s that voice coming from, Raven? It’s not your lookup.’

‘It’s coming from the implant bonded to my skull,’ said Raven. ‘It’s SECOP talking.’

‘SECOP? Does that stand for Security Operations?’ I asked.

‘It does, Commander,’ said the voice of SECOP.

I was startled. ‘You can hear me?’

‘In emergency mode, they can see and hear everything I can,’ said Raven. ‘In normal mode, my implant selectively relays statements prefixed with SECOP. Everything else remains private, but my implant has rolling two-hour recordings of everything I see and hear. In the event of my death, or traumatic injury, that data is automatically dumped to SECOP.’

‘It is?’ Fian pulled a face. ‘Next time you stick your nose into something private, I’ll have to remember not to kill you for two hours.’

‘Sorry again,’ said Raven. ‘It sounded like an intruder was attacking you.’

I smothered a giggle. The previous night, Fian and I had celebrated my recovery from the skunk juice by watching a new episode of Fian’s favourite vid series, Stalea of the Jungle . It ended with Stalea throwing her boyfriend across a jungle clearing, pinning him to the ground, and forcibly kissing him. Fian and I were happily re-enacting this scene for our personal entertainment, when an Adonis Knight heroically charged into the room to save us from being murdered.

In the interests of peace, I tried a random change of conversation. ‘Don’t the protection of humanity laws apply to implants?’

‘Implants aren’t banned like robots or clones,’ said Raven, ‘just restricted by the same rules as gene therapy. You can use them to treat medical and cosmetic problems as long as they don’t enhance someone’s abilities beyond the normal human range.’

‘You’re claiming an internal comms system is normal for humans?’ asked Fian.

‘No,’ said Raven, ‘but when Military Security agents are undercover on assignment, a visible external comms unit can get them killed. I’m claiming that’s a cosmetic problem that justifies using implants instead.’

Fian frowned. ‘You’re bending rules that exist for very good reasons. I’ve been arguing with my father for years about this, because my great-grandfather was a member of Cioni’s Apprentices. A huge amount of scientific knowledge was lost in the Earth data net crash. We’re still blindly accepting many things as facts because records state they were once proved. Cioni’s Apprentices were trying to recreate the lost science and proofs, find out what was true or not for themselves.’

He shrugged. ‘I agree with my father that’s a good thing to do, and totally support other scientists working on it, but Cioni’s Apprentices went to inhuman extremes. They didn’t just cause the Freya conflict, and the Persephone incident, but the horror of what happened on Gymir. We need the protection of humanity laws to stop that sort of thing happening again.’

Raven gave Fian a startled look. ‘Your great-grandfather was an Apprentice? Well, yes, I agree the Apprentices took things too far, but plenty of things bend the rules a little. Look at the dome cleaning system. The autovacs break the rules on both robots and artificial intelligence.’

‘No they don’t,’ said Fian. ‘They can’t create another robot, they fail the Owusu intelligence ratings, and they have no digits capable of manipulating …’

I knew the real disagreement here was still about Stalea of the Jungle and privacy, so I gave a pointed cough. ‘I’m starving to death.’

The other two abandoned their argument and we headed to the hall. Raven stopped just inside the doorway, following his regular morning routine of tensely surveying the room for a few minutes, presumably checking to see if any of the class showed signs of having turned into psychotic killers overnight. Fian and I carried on walking to the food dispensers, collected our breakfasts, and went to join Dalmora, Amalie, and Krath at our usual table.

Krath shook his head at us. ‘I still don’t understand why you’ve got an Adonis Knight as a bodyguard.’

I shrugged. ‘Colonel Leveque said he picked Raven because it would be impossible for anyone to bribe him.’

Krath sighed. ‘Yes, the families of the first Adonis colonists all got land grants in perpetuity, so Raven must be stinking rich. I wish I was. All the girls would throw themselves at me.’