Terminus by John Lydecker

Author:John Lydecker [Lydecker, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780426193852
Publisher: Target
Published: 1983-11-14T08:00:00+00:00

When he moved towards Sigurd with his hand outstretched, there was no question about what he wanted. Sigurd handed over the Hydromel case.

Eirak hefted it expertly, testing its weight against his memory of countless earlier consignments.

‘It’s light,’ he said.

Sigurd was taken aback. ‘They can’t cut us down again,’ he said.

‘This stuff’s expensive. They won’t send us any more than the minimum.’

‘We could all die, and they wouldn’t even know it,’

Sigurd said bitterly.

‘They’d know it,’ Eirak assured him. ‘They’ve got ways of knowing. Has anyone warned the Garm about Bor?’

This last question was mainly aimed at Valgard, but he stood with a tight grip on the arm of the last girl out of the shuttle and seemed to be making a point of ignoring his watch-commander. Sigurd said, ‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘We’ll need the body back for the armour. Valgard!’

So now Valgard couldn’t help but turn and listen.

Eirak went on, ‘It’s your job. Sigurd can see to the girl.’

Valgard reluctantly released his grip, and Sigurd took over. ‘It’s just as well,’ he said to Valgard in a lowered voice that wasn’t entirely serious. ‘She might take another crack at you.’

But it was impossible to make any kind of a private remark, not with helmet amplifications. ‘What does that mean?’ Eirak said sharply.

‘Nothing,’ Sigurd said, but the damage was done.

Eirak was needling him, Valgard was sure of it. He already had other duties, as Eirak well knew – after all, he’d been the one who had assigned them. Now in addition he had to go back to the storeyard, the very place where he’d seen Bor walk off into the zone, and there he had to call the Garm.

The storeyard was exactly what its name implied, an area where the leftovers and spare units of the builders’-yard junk that cluttered the Terminus had been heaped. It had been set up by whoever had carried out the conversion a long time before. In those days the boundary to the zone had been a lot further away, but it had since been redefined to run straight across the middle of the yard’s open area. It was to this spot that they brought the Lazars when it was time for them to be taken into the zone. Nobody visited the place otherwise – from the radiation point of view it was too ‘hot’ to be comfortable for long – unless it was to perform a periodic check on the zone monitoring gear, as he and Bor had been doing, or to call the Garm.

There was a switchbox bolted to one of the girder uprights near the edge of the zone. Valgard passed his hand before the sensor plate and felt the gut-trembling hum of the subsonic signal as it went out. The Garm would be with him soon. It didn’t have a choice.

The Garm was Terminus Incorporated’s answer to the difficulties of deploying any kind of workforce in the zone. It wasn’t that they had any moral hesitation over the matter. If the company thought

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