The train was silent
as it pulled into the customs station. Mara waited, hand on her
document stick. Calm. Just stay calm. They said the
snakes had sensors that could measure your heart rate...
The wait was
agonizing. Dee fidgeted next to her, and Mara nudged her to stop.
She glanced at the others crammed into the tiny passenger compartment
– a junior diplomat, a pair of trade reps from the Agronomists'
Guild, several men and women in no uniform she recognized. They'd
shared the compartment, bare save for bare steel benches, for the
trip since Ferrograd. Their faces, all of them, were studiously,
precisely indifferent – the same as hers. She wondered how many
of them were wanted.
After twenty
minutes, the MuniDef inspectors entered the compartment, a fat snake
and a thin one, in grey uniforms with the black eyebands and gold
epaulettes of the Internal Security Division. Mara was on the
outside of the bench, so she handed them her docs first – the best
fakes their limited funds could buy. Don't look away, be
confident, look up at him. He waved the plastic stick over a
wand and handed it back, then moved on to Dee, then the junior
diplomat. Thank the spirit.
Ten minutes later
they were on their way again, the train sliding silently out of the
border post, the red landscape flicking by, broken here and there by
roads, pipelines, smokestacks, the turning machinery of the
industrial Guilds. If she craned her neck she could just see
Elysium Mons itself, rising from the plains.
They pulled into
Elysium Depot #3 thirty minutes later. Mara and Dee collected their
duffels and detrained into the swirling crowds of Elysium, home for
the first time in four years.
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