Revenge of the Damned (6 page)

The being had no neck, its shoulders flowing into a tapering skull that ended in a dozen pink tendrils that Virunga guessed were its sensory organs. The being had once been fat, with sleek fur. Now its ragged pelt draped down in togalike folds over its body.

Colonel Virunga had been denied access to the prisoners' records aboard ship, and of course there had not been time to meet every one of the purged prisoners. But he wondered how he had missed that one.

"Form up, troop."

"I am not a troop, and I shall not form up," the being squeaked. "I am Lay Reader Cristata, I am a civilian, I endorse neither the Empire nor the Tahn, and I am being unjustly held and forced to be a part of this machinery of death."

Virunga goggled. Did Cristata think that any of them had volunteered to be POWs? Even more wonderment: How had that paragon of resistance managed to survive in a prison camp so long?

The police major trumpeted incoherently, and two guards leapt toward Cristata, batons ready. But before they could pummel him to the ground, a large man wearing the tatters of an infantryman's combat coveralls grabbed Cristata by his harness and dragged him bodily into the formation. Evidently the use of force satisfied Cristata's objections, because he then remained meekly where planted.

"Formation… ten-hut."

Virunga about-faced, leaned on his cane, and stared up at a balcony on the third level. He could see two faces looking down at him from behind the barred, clear plas doors.

He waited for the prisoners' new lords and masters to make their appearance.

CHAPTER TEN

P
olice colonel Derzhin was, in his own mind, despite his rank, neither a cop nor a military officer. Many years before, long before the war with the Empire, he had been a junior lieutenant in the Tahn ranks, assigned to a survey ship. Somehow one of the emergency oxygen containers on the ship's bridge had exploded, killing all four of the ranking officers and, worse, destroying the ship's navcomputer. Derzhin, the sole surviving officer, had taken command and managed—mostly by luck, he thought—to limp to an inhabited world.

The Tahn livies must have been hurting for a hero that week, because they made much of the lieutenant. Derzhin received a couple of hero medals and a promotion, but that did not aim him toward a career in the military. A year later, after the publicity had been forgotten, Derzhin quietly bought his way out of the service. His medals got him a lower-management job in one of Pastour's corporations.

Dezhin was promoted rapidly as he showed a rare talent for the proper utilization of personnel and available resources. Pastour once said that Derzhin could be put on an asteroid with six anthropoids and two hammers and, within a year, would have a prototype ship in the sky and three variant models on the production line.

Derzhin maintained his commission in the inactive reserve for the social clout it gave him in the business community. He was not, of course, antimilitary. He
was
a Tahn. He never questioned his race's moral rectitude or the lightness of the war.

But he would rather not have been brought back into the military by the general call-up at its beginning. Nor was Pastour happy to lose his talents.

When Pastour realized that a very valuable, highly trained resource—the Imperial prisoners—was being wasted through high-principled flummery and saw a proper utilization for that resource, he immediately set out to get Derzhin to run the project.

He recognized that no executive, no matter how qualified, could instantly become a warden, and so he gave Derzhin backup.

His backup was Security Major Avrenti. Avrenti, too, was not a warden—experienced prison administrators were in high demand. Avrenti was one of the Tahn Empire's most skilled countersabotage specialists. Anyone who could prevent the planting of a minuscule bomb or the contamination of a war material or who could identify a potential saboteur long before he became active should have had no trouble keeping known malcontents imprisoned within a known and heavily guarded area.

Avrenti was physically unremarkable. Anyone who met him casually would forget his face minutes after his departure.

He would have made an excellent spy. He was soft-spoken and nonargumentative, preferring to win through reason and persistence. His one affectation was his wearing of archaic eyeglasses. When anyone asked why he had never had corrective surgery, implants, or replacements, he professed a dislike for medicos. Actually, he had vision very close to normal. He used his glasses as a stall, giving him time to consider the proper answer or policy, just as other beings used fingering devices, writing instruments, or the careful preparation and consumption of stimulants.

The two men looked down at their charges.

"I imagine," Derzhin said finally, "that I am expected to make some kind of speech."

"That seems to be requisite for a warden," Avrenti agreed.

Derzhin smiled slightly. "You know, Major, that part of business requires an ability to speak publicly."

"One of the many reasons I preferred to remain what I am," Avrenti said.

"Yes. I have spoken to lords and drunken roustabouts, but I cannot recollect ever having addressed war prisoners."

Avrenti did not comment.

"Actually," Derzhin mused, "it should be quite simple. All I need to do is suggest that they are here to work for the greater glory of the Tahn. If they perform, they shall be rewarded with seeing the next sunrise. If they resist, or attempt to escape… even an Imperial should see the logic in that."

Again Avrenti was silent.

"Do you agree, Major? Is that the correct approach? You are more familiar with military thinking than I."

"I can be of little assistance," the major said. "I do not understand the mind of a soldier who can find himself in the hands of the enemy and not seek self-extinction at the first opportunity."

Derzhin kept his expression and tone of voice quite neutral. "There is that, of course."

And he opened the balcony doors and stepped out.

Police Major Genrikh slammed back into his quarters, wanting to feel out of control.

He held the solid wood door ready to crash closed—then caught himself. He pushed it shut softly. Then he tore off his Sam Browne belt, intending to hurl it. Again he stopped.

He had just witnessed a nightmare.

But should he give in to it? What was the likelihood that his quarters were not bugged? None. Genrikh would have bugged himself.

Instead, he carefully hung his harness over a chair, opened a cabinet, extracted a bottle, checked the bottle to see whether its level had been marked, drank deeply, and sank back on his bunk.

This was going to be a disaster.

Then he cheered himself. Hadn't he been warned? Hadn't he been told, first by Lord Wichman's cutout, then when he was duly if privately honored by a presence with the lord himself?

But still.

Genrikh ground his teeth against his bottleneck, producing a singularly unpleasant noise. He had spent half a lifetime as an expert penologist. He knew the way to handle the subbeings that committed crimes. Crime to him was anything that contradicted the Way of the Tahn, which he defined as anything that his current superior ordered.

Genrikh's mother was a whore; his father was a question mark. He had fantasized, growing up, that his father was a rising officer whose forced marriage had made him seek happiness in other quarters. That did not mean that he saw his mother as a fairy princess—but Genrikh's dreams were never very coherent.

Genrikh grew up feeling himself an outcast and fearing that someday he would be revealed for what he was and scorned. He was indeed scorned by his compatriots—scorned for being the first to toady to the newest bully, for being the first to inform on any minor offense, for being the first to volunteer for any superior-suggested idea.

He was the ideal prison official.

Genrikh, in spite of his obsessive concern with others' morals, had no problem acquiring anything and everything he could within the prison system. He was in his own dim-witted way a truly immoral being.

Needless to say, he rose rapidly in the Tahn prison system, so rapidly that he was chosen for greater things. Before the war, the Tahn Council had seen the emergence of unions among their exploited workers and had instantly realized the necessity to destroy anybody that did not represent their own best interests.

Genrikh was a natural choice to head company unions or to act as a strikebreaker or an informer.

But even the embryonic unions within the Tahn systems had eventually put out the word: Anyone matching Genrikh's description was pure trouble—trouble that, if it was convenient, should be deposited in the nearest paddy with many, many puncture wounds.

Genrikh's ultimate controller, Lord Wichman, chose not to discard his thug. Instead, he made him head of his personal bodyguard while trying to find a new place to deploy the man. Wichman knew that Genrikh was absolutely loyal to him. The man was ideal to insert into Pastour's scheme, no matter what it
really
was.

Genrikh, now calm, sipped from his bottle and considered what he would have done had he been appointed commandant of the prison. A good thing to think about. He smiled to himself. Because very, very soon he
would
be the commandant.

Yes.

You are in front of an assemblage of not only criminals but cowards and traitors, he told himself. Genrikh thought that anyone who did not kowtow to the Tahn was a traitor.

All right. You want technicians, he mused. But first you must bring them under control. Yes. Bring them into the courtyard at attention. Then select, at random, 100 of the Imperials—there were a thousand in that courtyard—and have them beaten to death.

No, he corrected himself. Select that 100 and then require the
others
to kill them. Kill them or be killed. Yes. That would produce the correct attitude.

Housing? Food? Nonsense. Let them live in fields and eat roots. Wasn't the clotting Empire rich with people, none of whom would
really
fight until they died? The resource should be exploited like cattle—use them until they drop, because there are many, many possible replacements.

Ah, well. Very soon Colonel Derzhin would learn his error and disappear.

Major Genrikh closed his eyes and began planning just exactly how he would be arranging
his
prison.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
fter colonel Derzhin's speech, the prisoners were marched from the guards' courtyard through the shattered sanctuary into their own area, brought to attention, and dismissed. They exploded out into the cathedral, exploring their new home.

For the first time in their long captivity, they were in a prison too large for them. The worst thing about jail to noninstitutionalized beings was the complete lack of privacy. There was never a moment to be alone. But now 1,000 malnourished beings, quartered in a complex intended to house 15,000 individuals, scattered to the winds.

Sten and Alex held a conference in the courtyard.

"Mr. Kilgour?"

"Aye, Firecontrolman Home?"

"Where's the best way to get out of this tomb?"

"Ah hae nae certainty. But Ah'd hazard th' east or west wing, or aught near th' sanctuary. Best luck, th' west wing, bein't near'st th' cliff edge."

"Right."

And they started looking for their own quarters in the southernmost, longest arm of the cathedral.

Escapers they were. Experienced escapers. Experienced enough to realize that under no circumstances did they want to have their own living quarters near the center of activities. They had once started a tunnel in their own bunkroom and learned the impossibility of peace and quiet when every twenty minutes bags of dirt, tunnelers, or guards were busting through.

After some searching, they found the place.

"Dinnae tha' be bonnie?" Alex asked happily.

Sten looked around the room. It was perfect. He mentally wrote the "For Rent" ad:

LARGE ROOM. 20 meters x 15 meters. Room to swing a cat. Bring own cat. Rats provided. Formerly office of moderate-level religious official of probably now-defunct order. Room includes VU, but without intrusive searchlights at night. SECOND STORY, avoiding prospective tunnelers, sports players from floor below, yet also two floors below roof, preventing annoyances from guards on roof, escapers on roof, rats on roof, or rain, considering roof only semipresent. INCLUDES: Remains of four beds, which possibly may be reconstructed into two bunks. Various dangling pieces of plas and metal. Ruins of desk. V/thick walls, not only soundproofed but may contain interesting passageways. POWER: Single bulb from ceiling, apparently wired into circuit. WATER: A close walk to nearby dispersing point. A REAL FIXER-UPPER.
Once visited, never left
.

Yes, Sten thought, and stopped being cute. Now, how the clot are we gonna get out of here? Alex was tapping the walls, checking for bugs. There were obviously none, and there was no way a shotgun mike could be trained on them through the chamber's tiny windows.

"Hae y' a call, Horrie, on our wee head screw?"

"Not yet."

"Ah. Noo, thae's why Ah be't a' warrant an y' be't a low firecontrolman. Ah ken th' man."

"I never argued you've got a future career in prisons," Sten said.

"Ah'm wee, nae slickit nae cowerin't, an Ah can still smash y'," Alex said. "Close th' yap, an listen: We're goin't't' be treated nice, ae long a' we dot-an'-carry f'r th' man. Now, m' question be: Do we cooperate?"

Kilgour was suddenly serious, and Sten was no longer a firecontrolman named Horatio. And he spoke as a commander and as Alex's CO.

"Yes," he said. "The clot is talking about using us in war industry. That's the stupidest idea I've heard lately."

"We can hae fun wi' that," Alex agreed.

"And as soon as we can, we're going out."

"We?"