Deathwatch by Steve Parker

Raising thumb and forefinger to his right eye, he pressed inwards at the corners. After a second, a rubbery skin – the white of the eye, the brown iris, the black pupil – came away in his hand. Beneath this overlay, sitting deep in the eye socket, was an orb of gunmetal-grey. In the centre of the orb glowed a red lens about half the diameter of a one-centim coin.
    He hunched forwards to bring his optical implant in line with the unit’s scan-lens. The machine spent a moment acquiring him before a pencil-thin beam of red light formed a bridge between them. This was the data-stream, and Ordimas committed all the day’s relevant observations to it. Smells, sights, sounds, even those elements that only his subconscious had noted; everything was transferred to the machine’s crystal matrix memory drive.
    It took less than a minute.
    When it was done, Ordimas leaned back and fitted his false eye-cover into place.
    ‘Save entry and transmit,’ he told the machine.
    Entry saved. Beginning transmission…
    Several minutes passed.
    Transmission sent. Select next function.
    ‘Stand by,’ said Ordimas.
    If he judged right, and he usually did, Nedra wouldn’t return for another forty minutes. Ordimas left the machine on the table. He was thirsty. He was always thirsty after a transfer. He walked to the tiny kitchen, turned on the noisy, flickering lume-strip in the ceiling and poured himself a cup of watered wine. He drank half on the spot, the cold liquid soothing his throat, then returned to the table. There he sat, thinking and sipping from the cup.
    He wouldn’t miss this filthy cesspit of a city. Part of him wasn’t looking forward to leaving, but only because of the boy. He remembered the sorrow he’d felt at leaving the others. It always lessened in time, but he never forgot them, not any of them. Despite his hopes, the realist in him knew most of those children were probably dead by now. His Lordship didn’t send Ordimas Arujo to safe, healthy places. His arrival anywhere meant a cancer had developed already, something deeply wrong, something that the Great and the Powerful needed him to observe on their behalf.
    Chiaro was no different. The whole planet was like a giant workhouse. The Imperium’s rapacious hunger for resources had forced two different peoples to settle this hellish world – the Hasmiri, or Daysiders, and the Garrahym, known here on Chiaro as the Nightsiders. And how they hated each other for all their religious and genetic differences. Both were Imperial loyalists, of course. They worshipped the Emperor as the Ecclesiarchy demanded of them. But the writings of their patron saints were, in places, at great odds. The Daysiders mined provium, darksilver and carzum – all of which were used in the Geller field projectors so important to warp transit. They toiled beneath the heat-blistered rock of the baking sunward hemisphere. The Nightsiders, on the other hand, worked far beneath the deep-frozen surface of the void-facing hemisphere where no sunlight ever reached the ground. They searched for veins of soledite and margonite, both of which were found only on a scattered two-dozen or so Imperial worlds. Ordimas didn’t know what these materials were used for. Very few did.
    For all their differences, both peoples endured the same daily reality. Life on Chiaro was only possible in the Twilight Band. That meant living in the canyon, the Nystarean Gorge, and one of the two cities built within it: Cholixe or Najra.
    I can’t take him with me. That hasn’t changed. I can’t stop working for His Lordship, either. Old Ordimas knows too much by half. There’s no retirement for the likes of me, unless I count death a retirement, which I guess it is.
    A winking glyph on the little screen caught his eye, and he wondered how long it had been flashing at him while he sat there thinking.
    One message , it said. Priority A-2.
    Ordimas’s breath caught in his throat. It was the first A-2 communiqué he had