Diamond on Your Radar Read online

  *

  A gray uniform had come with my room, so had an alarm clock. When the alarm clock woke me in the morning, I showered and changed into the gray uniform in front of a long wall mirror, pulling the gray pant belt around my middle, buttoning the gray shirt-jacket collar around my neck, and laughing: I’d never worn such a uniform. This definitely wasn’t me. Though my body looked fit in the contraption, it also looked uptight. My right arm twitched and my left hand pulled at the collar.

  Sighing, I adjusted the orange ID badge attached to the belt, yanked the orientation notice off the door, then left the room. I had no time to seek out Brenda’s again for some possible breakfast, so I went straight to where the notice said the conference room was.

  Though I was early, dozens of people were there already. My eyes scanned the crowd, didn’t see Nell. I walked in and spotted food and drinks on a long side table. But I had to sign in first at a front table—and collect a folder, almost as big as the one James had given me.

  The woman handing me the folder said, “There’s a reading schedule on top for how much you should do by the end of today. Get yourself something to eat, then take Seat 54.” She looked down at her table as her bored drooping right forefinger pointed to the room’s right.

  Apparently, that moment was the highlight of the orientation because the next several hours were some of the most boring I’d ever spent in my life. One lecture after another about “how things are always done here,” “what you’re expected to do,” “what you should never do,” “what you must do.” One demand after another, one outline after another of what to expect when working not only inside the mines, but inside the office buildings, and then during The Festival weekend.

  “Everyone works then. No excuses. We anticipate we’ll have problems with disruptions. Your job will be to make sure those disruptions are kept to a minimum,” the latest lecturer said to the room. Then map copies were passed around—of the mines, how they were laid out, the locations of security sensors, entrances, depth measurements….

  We were supposed to study those in silence for half an hour, but I could only barely keep my eyes open during. The room was too hot and too small for the crowd’s size.

  Pulling at my annoying constricting collar, I looked to the left, to where Nell was sitting—or, more correctly, to where Nell was sleeping. Hunched forward in her chair, her mouth dangled open as her chin hover-bobbed near her ample chest.

  A laugh bubbled in my mouth, and that somehow woke me up a bit. Then, a moment later, a lecturer finally said, “Time for a break.” The whole room seemed to sigh.

  I shot from my seat and out the room’s back door, wanting to explore the building alone. I had taken a map of the place from the folder, and now I removed the map from my pocket and glanced down at it from time to time, getting a feel for the layout. Most of the official buildings had the same layout, only this Orientation one didn’t have a records and data area, where all sorts of information was usually kept. Those other official buildings I’d have to scope out at a later date….

  I was thinking of that very thing when I turned a corner just as someone turned the opposite corner and came down the hall toward me. A man, around my age and height. Black hair, black eyes, black brow, all black outfit—black long-sleeved shirt and tight black pants over black shoes. He had the best set of clothed legs I’d ever seen, perfectly shaped supple-looking muscles at a perfect length. My eyes shot upward, then finally found his face again, his smirking face, smirking at me. He sort of nodded suggestively as he came closer, but I shifted my head to ignore him now as I walked faster.

  Once I’d passed him and then turned a corner, I stopped, and took a big breath, finally realizing I’d been holding my breath. And I’d probably been imagining things, had imagined his familiar suggestive look.

  …Or maybe not: I began walking again and he showed up again, coming from the opposite end of this longer hallway, as if he’d taken a circular route so he could run into me again. My step faltered; I was sweating a bit now, my neck and upper lip. Normally, men didn’t make me so nervous, but this man did because my body was responding to him so strongly, which was strange because I was hardly desperate to get laid.

  The night before James had called me in that Sunday, I’d been with someone. He was as tough as I, not my usual type. But he had big hands, and I liked the way they felt on my ass….

  I started thinking about my ass now, wondering if the man in black would be staring at my ass as I passed him. Did he have big hands? Only one way to find out…. This time when he passed near me, that same suggestive look on his face, but now a smile more, like a knowing one—this time, I glanced down at his hands: normal sized, nice, slender. All of him was slender and sleek and sly.

  That smile was his face’s best and worst part; I both wondered if he was mentally making fun of me and if he liked me….

  He passed me again and I kept walking, rushing toward the other end of the hall. If I remembered the map right, I could take a left, and if he followed me anymore, he’d have to come up behind me. I blushed as I thought of him coming up behind me. But he never did.

  I didn’t see him again during the rest of my self-guided tour, and so about fifteen minutes later, having explored some more of the hallways, I sighed and went back to the conference room.

  *

  Three hours later, the orientation finally over, Nell walked up to me in the hall outside the orientation room. Others were hovering around, and now her head came close to mine as she said, “I thought I signed up to do a job, not be a fucking soldier.”

  “Being a soldier’s a job too,” I said. “But I know what you mean. One of the orientation papers said they had a high guard turnover. Now we know why.”

  *

  “Too much work and too little pay,” I said to my room two hours later.

  Nell and I had gone to Brenda’s to get something to eat. But, according to the outside of that orientation folder, I was expected to report to a training session in fifteen minutes. I’d washed up a bit back in my room here, and now I had to bolt out of my room again.

  It was after seven, I was flushed and full from the food—what on earth was I expected to do now?

  When I reached the training room, the big metal door there was closed and a sign on it said, “Always press the buzzer.” So I did.

  A gravelly voice overhead-by-intercom said, “Come in, Pia Senda.” So I went in, the door automatically closing behind me.

  The room before me looked liked a gymnasium, a pretty empty gymnasium. Mats on the floor, long chair seats on the other end, and no one around but me—

  —Not quite, because next thing I knew, I was attacked from the back by a warm body, a BIG warm body.

  I had no time to react. I fell forward, crushed beneath someone’s immense weight.

  “What the fuck—what the fuck is this?” I screeched, squirming and resisting beneath.

  “This is your first test, Pia,” said that same overhead voice. “Every trainee is tested at some point. No one knows when they will be. For everyone, it’s different.”

  It was also enraging. Finally freeing my right elbow, I promptly jerked it back and toward me, jabbing it hard into my attacker’s soft belly.

  “Ow!” a deeper male voice shouted. My attacker’s voice, and now I felt him instantly relax upward with his weight. “Ow, did you have to hit me so hard? We’re on the same side.”

  “No, we ain’t, asshole. You’re lucky I didn’t have a gun.” I jerked both my elbows at him now, and he finally got off me.

  “You read the rules,” the overhead male voice said. “No guns here. Yet.”

  I got to my feet and spun around and saw the huge guy. Kind of fat but bulbously muscular at the same time, he looked like his own singular humungous species. He was smiling at me.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “No, I’m Andy,” he said, still smiling.

  “Ha ha,” I replied, unsmiling. My heart was pounding furiously.
“How the hell is this fair? Hours of orientation today, I’ve barely had time to eat anything and take a piss. And you attacked me from the back, from that cubicle-looking thing near the door. No way for me to see around it when I stepped in.”

  “In the field, in the mines or even in the buildings, you’ve got to be prepared for anything, Pia Senda. Anyone can jump out from anywhere, looking to destroy property and people,” said that intercom voice.

  “But sometimes people will get hurt anyway. You can’t expect perfection,” I said up at the air, to where the voice sounded as if it had come from.

  “We expect near perfection,” the male voice said, but closer this time, in the room. I spun around—and saw the man in black from yesterday.

  *

  He was in all black once again as he walked toward me, and now his head jerked at the big guy, who then disappeared back into the cubicle. I heard a door slam an instant later.

  The man in black held a folder in his hand; he stopped, opened it, then looked down at it, flipping through the pages as he spoke. “I’m Commander Onyx. You’re Pia Senda from Earth. You’ve worked in UPG security, did a one-year stint as a guard on a high-security space transport.” His dark eyes shifted upward and fixed on my face now.

  There was a long pause. Then I said, “Yeah? So what about it?”

  “That’s hard to picture.”

  “Don’t be fooled by my slenderness.”

  He didn’t respond. He was staring down at my folder again. Then he pushed it shut, walked over to a table near the room’s front and tossed the file on top.

  “We’ll get to work right now,” he said, turning around. “One-on-one training.”

  “Does everyone get this treatment?”

  “No. Not this early. Most need more general training first than you do.”

  “And how have you determined that about me?”

  “Actually, you did really well just now. Andy’s a fifth-generation Sander, so he’s very strong. Most trainees pass out or freeze up when he jumps on them. You must have lungs and nerves of steel.” He said the last bit with an ironic edge to his voice as he came closer to me.

  “I guess your name is why you’re always in black,” I blurted out now. My face warmed at my stupidity. And he stopped moving, smiled at me similarly to yesterday: slyly, knowingly.

  “You noticed that, eh? Let’s see what else you’ve noticed. Now don’t turn around, but recite the layout of this room’s other side—the back end.”

  I looked at him while I did as he’d asked. “Several long rows of seats, a door on either end in that area. I think a larger door behind the chairs? Red room through that doorway? The ceiling’s a couple of feet lower in the back too.”

  “Very good, except that room is blue.”

  “Like I said: you can’t expect perfection.”

  I heard a door open and close somewhere, saw Andy walk back in. He held something in his hand, passed it to Onyx.

  “Now I want to test your reflexes,” Onyx said. “You’ll be timed by this hand-clock. Andy’ll strike toward you at different angles. You strike back at him as if you’re in danger. Obviously, you may be slower or quicker in real scenarios, but you’ve got to start practicing somewhere.”

  We spent the next hour with Onyx watching while Andy and I did this jab-and-dodge dance, and I did learn something: I was slower than I’d like.

  I was also out of breath by the end. “Dammit…that sucked,” I panted, bending forward, my hands on my knees. This was supposed to be a simple find-someone mission. Yeah, right. Simple. I was too out of shape for this job—why the fuck had I been talked into coming here?

  Andy hadn’t been that fast during the jostling; nevertheless, he’d gotten close to my vital parts too often because I’d been too slow. In the past few years I’d become lazy about hand-to-hand self-defense. I couldn’t always rely on a gun. I had to remember this.

  “You’ll get better,” Andy said now, giving me his big another-species smile.

  Onyx walked up to us; a pen in hand, he made notations in my file. “You’re finished for today. You can go. I think in a few days, we’ll start you on the stun stick.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said a bit sarcastically, looking at him. He was standing pretty close and how truly gorgeous he was finally registered in my brain.

  His image should have been in a museum of the human face. With his skin the color of Diamond sunlight, his dark satiny hair, his perfect short nose, and that sexy expressive wide mouth—someone had pulled him out of my head and stuck him in front of me. He was just my type.

  I’d better stay away from him as much as possible, I thought as I walked out of the room.

  But that staying away proved hard to do. It wasn’t my fault. He was practically fucking everywhere during the training, with his great hair and his great legs, and that damn smile, only as time went on, his smile seemed to become ruder, lewder.

  I was thinking of that very thing two nights later when I walked into Brenda’s Place and spotted him sitting at one end of the bar alone. I was supposed to meet Nell and this other woman Galeta; they were at a table toward the bar’s right end. We’d been eating there morning, noon and night. It had turned out to be where most trainees ate.

  Now, I rushed over to where Nell and Galeta sat, and I plopped down into a chair, avoiding looking to my left, where Onyx sat. Because I could never seem to escape running into him, I finally realized he was probably someone important at The Complex. I now wondered what that importance was. I, like the other trainees, still hadn’t learned all the rules and information the trainers had been throwing at us.

  “Hey, Pia!” Nell said now. “I’ve got to leave by ten tonight—and go for more training. Do you believe this?”

  “Yeah, I believe it,” I said dryly.

  “Nell, maybe you’ll be tested tonight,” said Galeta with her usual sour-looking mouth. She had already passed through the training and was a full guard now, but she still lived in the barracks, in the room beside Nell’s. Nell had first run into her in the hall there.

  Now, I nodded at Nell. “It’s gonna happen sometime.”

  Nell hadn’t been doing too well in the training. And, at my words, she bunched a fist on the tabletop, her round face twisting in distress. “Why?”

  “It’s the way it is,” said Galeta, picking up her bottle of booze and taking a drink.

  Nell’s fist pounded the tabletop now—only once, but hard. “How am I going to get through this? I should have taken an administrative job. I haven’t even had two hours to myself to go visit my family….”

  I turned my head away, to the left, found Onyx again. He mostly sat in profile to me, and he still sat alone. There were others at the bar, but he didn’t even look their way. He was eating something, slowly. I watched his mouth opening and closing around a fork….

  I must have been staring for some time, because I heard Galeta finally say, “Who’s got your attention there, Pia?” Her back faced the bar opposite me, and now she looked right where I’d been staring, leaning forward toward me but keeping her eyes in the same bar area. “Oh, is it Tan? Tan Onyx?”

  My head shot away from him, and my eyes fell on Galeta’s face. Her mouth twisted sourly again; she was still staring over at Tan. I couldn’t help looking at him too now, at his slim curved-toward-the-bar back, at those bent black legs of his, his black shoes pressed against his stool’s base.

  And now Galeta added, “Yeah, that’s Tan. Where Tan’s heart should be he’s got a hard diamond.”

  “How hard his heart is doesn’t matter. Only how hard his cock is,” I said. And there were two loud hoots of laugher, one from Nell, the other from Galeta.

  Others must have heard the noise, including Tan. His head had turned, and he seemed to be staring right at me, his mouth doing a good imitation of Galeta’s sour one. Had he heard what I said?!?!?

  “Oooo, look. He’s annoyed now,” Nell said quickly. But then right after she’d spoken, Tan turned bac
k to his meal, as if he’d instantly forgotten everyone else in the room existed.

  Galeta’s eyes rolled upward. “Who cares if he’s annoyed?”

  “Men are always annoyed,” said Nell.

  I looked down at the table. “They’re not all the same. And I don’t hate men,” I said. “I just like being a pain in the ass to them sometimes. They certainly have been to us.”

  “Too right,” said Nell, her bottom lip jutting out as she nodded at me.

  “There used to be a woman here,” Galeta said, “a woman Council-leader. Times were really good then. They haven’t been that good since we lost Arlene Hu.”

  My head shot up to Galeta. “What happened to her?”

  She shrugged, took another sip of her drink, turned her head left as if she were losing interest in the conversation. “She quit, disappeared. She’s somewhere now—nobody knows where. She’s supposedly responsible for the attacks here.”

  I wondered why she’d said “supposedly.”

  And, just then, Nell elbowed my elbow. “He’s finished his meal—look, Pia! He’s looking over here. I’m waving at him!” she finished, doing just that waving.

  Tan’s head bobbed once at us, and then he slipped off his seat and moved away in the opposite direction.

  “Nice going, Nell,” said Galeta.

  But Nell only laughed. “Who the hell is he anyway?”

  “He’s one of the Commanders here. In charge of the guard training, scheduling, security clearances—you list it and he’s probably working on it. There isn’t much he doesn’t do around here. Sometimes I wonder if he sleeps or eats, if he has a life.”

  “I always see him around,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining about the view,” I added in my mind.

  *

  The next morning, before I had to report to training, I went to the Communications Building to send a text-only message to James: “Hey! Got here safe, been busier with training than I thought I would. Haven’t had any time for anything else. Will talk soon. Pia.”