Revenge of the Damned (10 page)

Sten glanced at Alex, who nodded. Alex would take Colonel Virunga aside and give him a very interesting piece of information that had been learned during his and Sten's pre-Tahn War Mantis training. If that bit of information still applied, those Prisoner's Aid parcels might prove very useful.

Sten, thinking hopeful thoughts about the continuity of sneakiness, saluted Virunga and hurried away. He did indeed have another task.

The two guards snarled at Sten. He kept well back. They unlocked the cell door and snarled once more. A moment later St. Clair walked out, squinting at the light—walked, not tottered or stumbled. During the month of isolation, her bruises had mostly healed. She was even skinnier than before—half rationpaks and water had done that—but, Sten noted, must have maintained some kind of exercise regimen in the cramped isolation cell.

"Next time," the Tahn said, "it'll be worse."

"There won't be a next time," St. Clair said. The guard pushed her away, down the corridor, and banged the cell door closed.

St. Clair stopped in front of Sten. "My welcoming committee."

"Call it that," Sten said.

"What's been happening in the big wide world?"

"Not much worth talking about."

"So the war's still not over. And by the way, why aren't you calling me by my rank, Firecontrolman."

"Sorry. Captain."

"Forget it. I'm just up to here with clottin' screws. Thanks for the welcome. Now I want to see if the 'freshers are on yet."

They were in a deserted section of the corridor.

"We have something to talk about first," Sten said.

"GA."

"You tried to get out solo. A real cowboy move."

"So?"

"No more. Any escape attempt's gotta be registered and approved by the committee."

"Not mine," St. Clair said. "Committees screw things up. Committees start war. I like my own company."

"This isn't a debate, Captain. It's an order."

St. Clair leaned back against the wall. "You're Big X?"

"You have it."

"Nice meeting you. But as I said—"

"Listen to me, Captain. Read my lips. I don't give a damn if you want to try a single run. Anybody who's got any way out of this coffin has my blessings. But I am going to know about it and approve it—before you go."

St. Clair allowed herself six deep breaths before she said anything. She smiled. "Again, my apologies. I'll follow orders. Of course. Whatever you and your committee want."

"Cute, Captain St. Clair. And I think you're blowing smoke at me. Those are my orders. You will follow them!"

"And if I don't?"

Sten spoke very quietly. "Then I'll kill you."

St. Clair's face was impassive.

"One more thing, Captain. Just to keep you out of trouble, I'm appointing you my chief scrounger."

"Scrounger? I'm not familiar—"

"Thief."

St. Clair bristled. "I am a gambler. Not a clotting burglar!"

"I don't see the difference."

Again St. Clair buried her anger. "Is there anything else, Firecontrolman?"

"Not right now."

"Then you're dismissed!"

Sten came to attention and saluted her.

St. Clair waited until Sten had rounded a corner, then gave herself the luxury of a silent snarl of rage. Then her face pokered, and she started looking for her long-overdue shower.

Outside in the courtyard, the distribution of the Prisoner's Aid parcels was under way. Sten noticed that as each crate was opened Alex would remove one or maybe two packs and set them unobtrusively aside. Good. Then he saw, leaning against one of the half-ruined columns, what had to be the Empire's oldest warrant officer. The man looked like the grandfather Sten had never known. He was holding a small pack of what Sten guessed were biscuits and an equally tiny pack of fruit spread. Part of his share from the parcels. The man was crying.

Sten shuddered.

It was time they all went home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

B
ig X was flexing his muscles.

Through his cutouts, Sten had deployed the surveyors. The surveyors were reluctant prisoners who were given improvised metric rules and told to measure everything and anything. Sten was trying to find out what he had to work with and work from. Since there were no plans that he could find or steal for Koldyeze, he would make his own.

The details reported back. A hallway measured so many meters wide, long, and tall. The rooms branching off that hallway measured B meters wide, long, and tall. The wing itself measured C meters wide, long, and tall. And none of the figures matched in Sten's mind. He wished desperately that Alex and his team could move a little faster on the computer. What the clot! Probably wouldn't work, anyway.

Sten tossed aside the bits of paper he had been figuring on. Later for that drakh. In the meantime, which meant on the morrow, he was on a work detail.

The work detail was commanded by someone who seemed to be the first of the Tahn quislings.

Chief Warrant Officer Rinaldi Hernandes seemed to call everyone "my friend"—except the Tahn guards, whom he referred to, with a completely obsequious bow, as "honorable sirs."

"My friends," he cajoled. "Come, now. Lift together. We can do this."

"Doing this" was muscling a huge generator that should have had a McLean sled to raise it up a ramp into a cargo ship.

"You aren't trying, my friends," he said. "I am disappointed that I shall have to report you to our commandant when we return. Remember, we are being given a fair day's ration, and we should be prepared to deliver a fair day's work."

Sten grunted, along with twenty others, and slowly the generator groaned up the ramp into place. He, like the others on the work crew, hated Hernandes. Suddenly Sten realized that in spite of the constant threat, no one assigned to Mr. Hernandes's work crews had ever been reported for anything.

Interesting.

The generator loaded, the prisoners sagged in exhaustion. Hernandes walked among them, patting, joking, and ignoring the muttered obscenities he heard.

"That wasn't bad, my friends. Come on. The shift's barely begun. Come on. We've got to show our honorable masters we're as good as they are."

The prisoners groaned to their feet. The next task was simpler: loading crates into another offbound ship.

Sten realized he was spending less time watching Hernandes than watching Heath's spaceport. Which ship could be stowed away on? Which ship was outbound for where? What were the security measures taken once a ship was loaded?

He humped a crate up a laddered ramp. Hernandes was standing at the ship's cargo door in his typically baggy oversized coveralls.

"Hi-diddle-diddle," the officer chanted. "Right up the middle, friend. We've got to get this ship loaded and offworld."

Definitely, Sten thought, a traitor. But isn't he a little obvious to be an agent?

"There are troops freezing on an arctic world," Hernandes went on. "We've got to make sure they have what they need."

Sten glowered at the warrant officer and continued on, part of the antlike procession, into the ship's hold, where he dumped the crate he was carrying. And then he stared at the loading slip on its side:
Uniforms, tropical, working dress
.

He quickly scanned some slips on other crates:
Recreational equipment, E-normal environment (low-caloric); Rations, beasts of burden (not for Tahn Consumption); Livies, medical, educational, avoidance of social diseases; Livies, counselatory, what to do when your mate leaves; Spores, seedable, rock garden, for issue to general officers and above
.

That should have had an interesting effect on any Tahn crunchie—on whatever frozen world the ship was bound for—who had to unload or consume any of the crates.

As he made his way back toward the ramp, Sten looked at Mr. Hernandes a bit differently. To make sure, he bumped against him. Mr. Hernandes's coveralls clanked.

"Careful of what you're doing, my friend," the grandfatherly warrant officer cautioned.

"See me tonight," Sten ordered in a low voice.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Big X," Sten said. What the clot. If he was blown, he was now thoroughly blown.

* * *

He was not.

In case Hernandes was wired, Sten had him strip searched and then, finding he was clean, took him for a long and aimless walk down one of the wing's corridors.

Rinaldi Hernandes was a building tradesman, a general contractor who had been a master plumber, carpenter, plas-man, ceramic specialist, and so forth, who had joined the service at the beginning of the conflict. He had been assigned to the Imperial construction units—for once the grinding bureaucracy that was the military had put a square peg into a square hole.

Hernandes desperately hated the Tahn. His only grandchild had been killed at the beginning of the war. Then Hernandes himself had been captured. He had survived and, during the years of his captivity, resisted—resisted in ways that would keep him alive until the time came when he had a weapon in his hands and could kill.

"Although, my friend," he said sheepishly, "since I've never killed anyone in my life, I really don't know what I would do."

In the meantime, he had learned the Tahn worlds and sent shipments intended for garrisons to the front, and vice versa. He had stolen and then destroyed any protruding bits of military hardware that he could. He had surreptitiously tugged connections loose wherever he could when he was permitted aboard any Tahn ship.

Hernandes hated the Tahn so thoroughly that he was willing to sacrifice the opinion of his fellow prisoners. So they believed he was a quisling, a traitor, a double. Perhaps they might even kill him. That was the risk that Hernandes was willing to take. In the meantime, he was as trusted by the Tahn as any Imperial prisoner could be. He often wondered, he told Sten, how many—if any—Tahn he had killed. He had never seen any of them die.

Maybe he was not really accomplishing anything.

Sten thought that perhaps Mr. Rinaldi Hernandes had killed more Tahn than any Imperial battleship.

And now he had his jack-of-all-trades.

Big clottin' deal, Sten thought. I'm assembling all these troopies. Giving them a mission.

But so far I haven't come up with any mission.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

L
'n thumbed back on the joystick. There was a soft whirr as the feeder machine came to life and then two sharp clicks as the tubes dropped into the slots in front of her. She gave a quick double-check glance to make sure there was a pos and neg symbol on each of them, then toggled the joystick forward. The tubes slid slowly toward each other, then gave a quick jump as they mated.

She bent closer to look at the seal. It was so apparently perfect that she could barely see the nth of a hairline where the tubes joined.

All those movements were accomplished in nearly absolute darkness. In fact, it was so dark in the testing room that any other being would have started feeling like a claustrophobe after a few minutes. He would have felt completely cut off from the rest of the world, sensing only the form of his own body. To L'n it was a little bit better than twilight.

She toggled left to apply stress to the seal, pressing down to activate an electric field. Outwardly the seam was still apparently perfect, but L'n's light-actinic eyes could see a dark red stain. The seam was badly flawed. L'n giggled and toggled right to drop the tubes into the discard bin. After only a few hours on shift, the bin was nearly full of rejects. So much for the Tahn's boasts of superefficiency.

L'n liked to think that someday far in the future a really bright historian would trace the Tahn's eventual defeat at the hands of the Emperor right back to the discard bin under her worktable. For the hundredth time L'n smiled at her little private joke, then toggled back to call for the next two pipes. Her small, delicately pointed left ear turned to catch the sound of the machine whirring into life. Instead, there was a loud shout just outside the room. Her ear curled back on itself in pain. What the clot? The shouting went on. It was Cloric, the Tahn work boss. She could not hear what was being said, but somebody was definitely getting it. If Cloric held to form—and she had no reason to believe that he would not—the shouts would eventually lapse into incoherence, followed by heavy blows.

Whoever it was, L'n felt very sorry for him. Still, what could she do about it? She turned back to her work, trying to push the sounds outside her mind. It was a process that seemed to be getting easier every day. That frightened L'n more than anything else—more than Cloric, or the other Tahn, or the war itself. Because until a few years before, violence had not even been a word in L'n's vocabulary.

It was not that L'n came from a race of pacifists. On the contrary, on a scale of amoebic jelly to outright beasts, the Kerrs rated fairly high on the fierce side. They were a slender, soft-furred folk with large, limpid eyes; delicate, highly sensitive ears; and a long, agile balancing tail. The Kerrs' original homeworld was mostly covered by dense forests. They inhabited the middle levels, where light was as scarce as the food supply on the top tier.

Like many forest beings, L'n's forebearers were intensely jealous of their privacy. The only time a Kerr experienced a feeling even close to loneliness was during estrus. It was a trait that would stay with them through the ages, just like their passion for light.

An artist, L'n had been nearing the height of her powers when she decided to emigrate from her home system. It was a very bold—or foolish—thing for a Kerr to do. She was abandoning the warmth of personal privacy for what seemed to her friends and family a hostile and patently ugly life on the outside. But the artist side of L'n knew—as sure as she knew the conceptual beauty of polarized light—that the price of continued privacy was too high. To reach the next level in her art, she needed knowledge, a knowledge that could be found only in the great "outside."

L'n thought she was just on the verge of finding her way, when the Tahn struck. She was in her biaxial period, and her strange light paintings were beginning to find a wider audience.