The Terrorists of Irustan Read Online Free PDF

working with arms and legs bare, the slightest breeze tickling sweat-damp skin. At home, it was insanity to go uncovered under the sun. Here, under an intact atmosphere, Jin-Li and the others were tanned, the rounded muscles of their profession gleaming darkly against their pale uniforms. Everything, uniforms, caps, carts, bore the circled star logo of the ExtraSolar Corporation.
    “Here, Johnnie!” Rocky was a massive man, with legs like the struts that steadied the shuttle. He leaned out of the open cargo bay as Jin-Li, pulling on thermal gloves, approached. “Medicines—that’s you!” Rocky had opened the controlled atmosphere compartment, a thickly lined cubicle near the front bulkhead. He directed the robot arm to lift a small vacuum barrel and bring it to the edge of the cargo bay.
    Jin-Li assisted the remote as it descended, flexing its triple joints to transfer the barrel to the cart. One of these little barrels had slipped and cracked once, spoiling heinously expensive supplies, valuable drugs manufactured on Earth and made even more costly by the space they had required on the transport and the shuttle. This one was light, but its grooved metal sides were cold and slippery in the metal fingers of the robotic arm. Jin-Li popped hinged handles out of their niches to secure them with corresponding latches in the CA compartment of the cart.
    Tony, a dark man with black curls showing under his cap, was new to Irustan. His cart was pulled up next to Jin-Li s, and another of the remotes was piling it with softpacks stretched taut with Earth materials the colony couldn’t manufacture. Tony grunted as he arranged the containers to fit into his cart. He looked over at Jin-Li, dark glasses gleaming. “Hey,” he said. “He gets all the light ones? Because he’s smaller, or what?”
    Rocky laughed, reaching to adjust a remote as it swung the barrels, canisters, and cartons full of spaceborne cargo. He answered Tony as he ran the wand of his portable over a label, checking and cross-referencing every container. “His name is on ’em because we have to deliver ’em to the Medah. No Irustani’ll touch ’em. And Johnnie handles the medical stuff.”
    “What’s the problem with medical stuff?” Tony asked. “The Irustani afraid of medicines?”
    “More or less,” Jin-Li said. The cart was filling now, vacuum barrels locked into the CA compartment, smaller canisters and dry cartons strapped into the slatted shelves. The conveyor was kept full of containers for the other carts, and a steady stream of longshoremen came to meet it.
    “Why him?” Tony persisted. “Don’t we go down to the Medah?”
    “Yeah,” Rocky answered. “But Johnnie knows how to talk to ’em, how to deal with those medicants. It’s risky business.”
    “Risky for him?” Tony asked.
    “Probably not,” Rocky said. He stood still for a moment, leaning against the outer hull, portable dangling from his thick fingers. “But you can get some poor woman in big trouble if you do it wrong, Men here aren’t too forgiving about their women.”
    Tony lifted his eyebrows above his glasses. “So, Johnnie—you get to meet Irustani women—lucky. Must be an expert.”
    Jin-Li chuckled. “Hardly.”
    “Fascinating,” Tony said. “The women, I mean. Veils, all that. But the way they live! God.”
    Jin-Li nodded. “Just like they lived on Earth. But”—another carton— “we’re just as strange to them.”
    “Here, Johnnie, one more,” Rocky said. He placed a softpack on the conveyor. Jin-Li caught it at the bottom of the ramp.
    “That’s all, Rocky?”
    “That’s it. You’re done.”
    Tony waved his arm at the stacks of containers stretching off into the bay. “With all that still to go?”
    “Saved it for you.” Jin-Li spread a quilted sheet of gray photoresistant plastic over the cargo, then waved one hand in the air as the little motor of the cart sputtered to life. “Have fun!” Jin-Li spun away with one finger on the