Elliot spread his hands. "How could I prove such a thing? All I can do is assure you that I mean him well, and that I must talk with you. Believe me, it's not only Kendric's welfare that concerns me, but your welfare as well, and that of every citizen of the Gael Cluster!" He cast another glance around the concourse, then gazed at a pair of inconspicuously dressed civilians lounging in a waiting area across the concourse. "I've been here too long. I must go."
Morganen watched the man turn and walk down the concourse, then cursed softly and followed. His longer legs brought him up to Elliot's side in a few paces. "O.K., Elliot. Where to?" he said, just loud enough so that only the other man could hear him above the noise of the crowd.
"Level Twelve of this facility...Concourse Five, a lounge across from a bar called the 'High Side'. Ten minutes."
The man who called himself Caius Elliot turned sharply and was immediately lost in a crowd of starmen just debarking from the Reannruadh. Morganen stood there a moment against the stream of men, wondering if he was entirely in his right mind.
Kendric gasped as the heat hit him in a glowing, stink-laden wave. He stood in the relative coolness of the shuttle's cargo lock, hands chained behind his back, and joined by short lengths of wire rope at the collar to two other prisoners from his compartment aboard the star freighter. It was almost chilly in the cargo bay, but when a centurion opened the outer lock and dropped the loading ramp, the heat rolled in like spill from a blast furnace.
A babble broke out among the prisoners, voices raised in fear and protest or in gasps of surprise at the sudden heat, like Kendric's.
"Quiet in the ranks," the centurion bellowed. "You're all home now, like it or not! Out you go!"
Prodded by Legionnaires who used their ceremonial pilums as goads, the prisoners began milling down the ramp and onto the surface of Haetai-Aleph.
The number of prisoners surprised Kendric. Aboard the freighter, he had seen only the fifty-odd men and women in his own compartment. Not until those fifty and many more were packed like grunfels into the large cargo bay of the shuttle that brought them from orbit to the surface did he begin to guess at how many there might be. Now, from the top of his own shuttle's ramp, he could see at least five other shuttles unloading their own cargos of misery and fear. Assuming that all were from the same ship, there must have been at least two thousand aboard that one transport.
Slaves, he corrected himself. Slaves, not prisoners. The idea of "prisoner" carried with it some hope of eventual release, of parole, or of a commuted sentence at some future time. Overlord Gracchi had gone to great lengths to assure Kendric that his exile to the crystal mines of Grod was permanent. From the shuttle landing pad, he could see little of his new home.
Haetai-Aleph was the name of the world. As the inner, major satellite of the brown dwarf, Haetai, Haetai-Aleph was one of those curious substellar objects too large to be properly classified as a planet, but too small by a factor of ten for gravitational collapse to trigger hydrogen-helium fusion and let the object burn as a star. Gravitational energy alone provided the heat that made the giant glow a sullen, blood red, though darker browns picked out the characteristic atmospheric bands of a typical gas giant. Haetai's sun Narbon was a distant, shrunken disk against a deep violet sky, too far to offer more than token heat to the miniature solar system of Haetai and its moons circling a half-billion kilometers out.
The name of the mountain on which they had landed was Grod. Through the linguistic inversion that so frequently scrambles the names of places discovered or built by men, the word now applied both to the mountain and to the small city of huts, domes, and stacked transport containers that filled its broad, volcanic crater.
Most of the blast-furnace heat that bathed Kendric as he walked across the spaceport came from the substar in the sky, and from Haetai-Aleph itself. The moon was close to the gas giant, close enough that it was locked in step with the same side, forever facing its primary. Its orbit was not perfectly circular, however, and that minor eccentricity caused the worldlet to swing slightly from side to side. This resulted in the ponderous swinging of Haetai back and forth across the sky. It also created the tidal stresses within Haetai-Aleph's crust and mantle that generated far more internal heat than it ever received from its distant sun.
The warmth meant that Haetai-Aleph supported an ecology of its own, one that Humans had been exploiting for at least three thousand years. It also meant that there were volcanos, that the world's rugged mountains were still growing.
The ground suddenly trembled beneath Kendric's booted feet. A chorus of cries rose from among the crowd of slaves, but the Legionnaires cuffed and shouted them to silence and urged them on. Off to the right, far in the distance, gray ash billowed tens of thousands of meters into the sky from three separate mountain peaks, the clouds mingling at high altitude to stain the purple sky brown. The hot air was thick with the smells of burning sulfur and hydrogen sulfide gas. As the wind veered, brown clouds boiled across the sky. In moments, a stinging rain of hot ash mingled with water began to pelt the company, urging them from a rapid walk to a plodding run. Someone stumbled and fell, provoking a new chorus of yells as the fallen man dragged the slaves shackled on either side of him to the ground. For a moment, the entire company threatened to collapse into a panic-stricken tangle of thrashing legs, arms, and cables, but the Legionnaire's prods soon had the group moving again.
Kendric took a deep breath as he started to run and then nearly fell down himself as the air burned his throat and lungs. The burnt sulfur smell was overpowering, and there was something in the air that made his eyes smart and sting. He noticed that all the Legionnaires had their helmet visors tightly sealed and their environmental packs running full blast.
So where does that leave us? Kendric wondered.
He could see little of the lay of the land. The spaceport was obviously a makeshift thing, the field a crudely shaped disk of packed cinders instead of poured ferriplast or carcrete. They appeared to be in the middle of a large crater, for a raw, jagged wall of black rock cut off the horizon in a 360-degree sweep around them. Only the tips of distant mountains and the ash clouds spilling from them were visible in the far distance.
The buildings were primitive affairs as well, ramshackle structures of sheet metal and corrugated iron stained in the colors of rust and encrusting sulfur. At the edge of the field was a low, square building that looked as though it once had been a hangar for small air- or spacecraft. It was large enough for several hundred slaves and the Legionnaires who herded them in and remained to guard them. Kendric did not see where the rest of the freighter's cargo was taken, but assumed the others had vanished into the other numerous squat buildings around the port area.
A kind of makeshift stage had been erected at one end of the building, converting it into an auditorium. There were no seats and no room to sit. Kendric stood shoulder to shoulder with those around him. Though the air was sour with the sweat of fear and heat from so many bodies and rank with traces of the gases and various chemicals in the outer air, it was cool and relatively fresh compared to the stink outside. Kendric spent several moments simply enjoying the sensation of
breathing.
There was an expectant rustle among the people around him, and he looked up toward the stage in time to see a grossly fat man wearing a slick, protective garment of some kind. The hood was thrown back, revealing the man's completely hairless head, which was puckered in places by old scars. He lifted a short, ornate staff like a baton over his head until the crowd grew silent.
"I am Lynch," the man said. His voice was soft with fat and carried the suggestion of a wheeze, but an unseen amplification system carried it to every listener in the hall. "I am the man you work for.. .your boss. You will obey me, obey every order I give you, immediately and without question. This..."—he brandished the baton—•" is a virga, a rod of authority. You will obey any man who carries one, as you would obey me."
He exposed teeth in his fleshy face, a car
icature of a smile. "Failure to instantly obey me or my men usually results in death. Those who don't die will wish they had. I want every one of you to understand me clearly, right from the start. You have no rights here...no rights whatsoever. The food you eat, the air you breathe, the fact that you get to live out the day... these are yours because / say so... and for no other reason! Understand that, and we'll get along fine."
Lynch paused and looked around the room, as if daring someone to protest. When no one did, he continued. "This facility is an Imperial gennarium mine. We mine naturally occurring gennium-arsenide ore here. The ore we dig is loaded aboard barges and transported to zero-G facilities, where it is processed into crystals. This is valuable work... good work. By your cooperation, you are performing an inestimable service to TOG, and perhaps, in some small sense, atoning for the crimes that brought you here.
"Now, to matters of security. You will meet your guards at the back of the room. They are called custos, and they are here to keep order. There will be no fighting, no riots, no disturbances of any kind. They will see to that. You might be interested to know that they are not here to keep you in. If you tire of our hospitality, be assured that you are perfectly free to leave, any time you wish.
"You should keep in mind, however, that we are on top of a 2,000-meter-high mountain. The climb down is across rugged, razor-sharp volcanic rock that will slice a man's feet to ribbons in seconds. And... if you think it's hot and stuffy up here, you should taste the air down below, in the valley!
"If you make it down the mountain, you'll find that there is native life here. Unfortunately, Humans cannot survive on the local flora and fauna. It's not poisonous, exactly—at least most of it isn't—but the nutrients won't do a Human any good. If you want to eat, you'd better stick with the mess halls here in the camp.
"That fact, incidentally, does not prevent the local flora and fauna from at least trying to make a meal of any escaped slaves they might find wandering in the wilderness below. This is a savage, violent world, and the lifeforms here are well-adapted to it. Think about that.
"If you do escape, you ought to know that the only Human facilities on this world are other mining centers like this one, plus a scattering of military bases where you will be shot on sight on approach. Most of the terrain is volcanic, and there's always the danger of poisonous gas, of acid water pools, of lava flows, of sulfur storms. Let's not forget heat stroke, for the average temperature over most of Aleph is around 45 degrees Centigrade."
There was a commotion toward the front of the crowd, not far from where Lynch stood. Kendric could not see what was happening over the heads of the crowd, but he could hear someone screaming. "They've sent us hereto die! They've sent us here to die! Come on... there's only a few of them! Come on! We..."
One of the custos stepped to the edge of the stage, drawing a weapon from a holster. Kendric had only an instant to see the weapon, but noted that it connected to the man's body harness by a cable that might have been a power feed, and that would certainly prevent the gun from being stolen. The harness appeared to be welded around the man, though Kendric was sure there must be some sort of locking mechanism.
The system definitely made acquiring weapons something of a problem for the slaves.
The crowd around Kendric was already surging back from the point of the disturbance. The custos raised the ugly, stubby weapon in his hand with an almost negligent gesture. Lightning barked, and then there were only screams, groans, and the acrid scent of burned meat in the air. Two men in gray work coveralls came onto the stage, stepped down into the crowd, and began working at something Kendric could not see. Unlinking the dead and dying from the living, he presumed. The shock of the incident left Kendric weak. He had heard one man protest, but the bolt from the custos' s power gun had swept a wide area. How many had died or been maimed?
Lynch waited with an air of bored patience, hands on hips, until the screams died away.
"We always have a demonstration or two like that with every new shipment," he said finally. "It's good, really...weeds out the troublemakers...and shows the rest of you that stubbornness, resistance, protest, all are useless. You're here, now.. .and there is no appeal. You can make the best of it, or you can die. That is the one free choice each of you can make now.. .Life, on my terms, or death.
"So long as you work and behave yourselves, you will be fed and given shelter. Now, you may have heard stories that the average life expectancy of slaves at facilities such as this one is two days, or some such nonsense. Don't believe it. The Terran Empire went to considerable trouble and expense to ship you here, and you can believe me when I say they intend to get their money's worth out of you. You weren't shipped all the way here just to die in two days!
"So! Work hard, obey your bosses and the custos, obey the rules, and obey your team leaders. You'll be shown the rules and regulations here, and it won't take you long to learn what's expected of you." The teeth exposed themselves again. "If you do what you're told and don't cause trouble, you may even live to enjoy a nice, safe job...in administration, say, or maintenance."
The virga slapped down into the man's open palm, the sound startling in the near-silence. "Cross me, and you'll regret it, I promise you! Take a close look on either side of you on your way to the shafthead, and remember what I've said. Custos! Take them out!"
The Legionnaires who had escorted the prisoners into the building were gone. In their place was a line of custos wearing protective slickers and the massive steel and duraleath harnesses that secured their weapons. It took a few minutes to get the slaves lined up and moving. Still joined by cables and restraint collars, the new slaves tended to get tangled in the shoulder-to-shoulder press and confusion.
What would happen if a bunch of slaves panicked? Kendric wondered. Would those custos just blast all of us ? Or watch while a few hundred people trampled one another to death?
The march to the mine entry was a kilometer long, once the slaves were herded and prodded into a single-file line that could uncoil in reasonable order out of the auditorium. After the air-conditioned comfort of the building, the rotten-egg stench, humidity, and heat outdoors were almost overpowering.
Kendric wondered at first what Lynch had meant about looking to either side on the way to the shafthead. There was little to see but volcanic cinders, broken rock, and the squalid sprawl of domes and huts that made up the base's surface construction. The shuttles that had brought them, he noted, were already gone—probably as fast as their Legionnaire guards could get back on board.
Halfway to a low mound of rubble under tangled struts and girders at the center of the crater, he began to hear the moans. It sounded like the wind, at first, rather than anything Human, but moments later, the line of slaves was winding along a trail through a forest of tripods. Each was a simple construct, three lengths of pipe welded to create a tripod three meters tall, well-braced against the seismic tremors that wracked this place. Most bore Human cargo, naked and suffering, chained by wrists or ankles, exposed to the alien elements and the humor of the custos who wandered among them.
The horror of the place nearly overcame Kendric then. He had been revolted by the casual cruelty of the soldiers who had crippled KessRith captives on Trothas in the name of expedience, by the wanton waste and callousness of Naval officers who could sentence the population of a world to death for no good reason.
What he saw here was worse, somehow, because the cruelty was more personal. Many of the captives bore fresh powergun scars. The weapons could probably be adjusted to deliver anything from a mild burn to the lightning bolt he'd seen demonstrated in the auditorium. Kendric saw that the custos had employed them with considerable inventiveness here. Worse were the scars from agencies native to the planet. Evidently, there were things that fed or bred in human flesh, despite the differences in body chemistries. Some of the wounds were fresh and still alive. The creatures that caused them had apparently not yet been poisoned by their Human hosts. In the distance, he
saw bodies already cut down, stacked in rows, awaiting disposal.
Though Kendric wanted to avert his eyes, he couldn't. Despite horror upon horror, none of the victims had the strength to scream. The low, grinding moaning was the ever-present background to a hellish scene.
The line stumbled on, those who faltered driven on by prods from the custos's virgas. Many were sick. Kendric retched against a stomach already emptied, his vision blurring until he could scarcely see the shadowy forms of the tripods and their Human burdens.
After a long, long time, they entered the shafthead. In a haze of weakness and nausea, Kendric's only thought was that he must find a way to escape from this place. If enough of them rose up in revolt...
The faces around him showed a blank numbness that seemed to mock his thoughts. Yet things could only get worse once they were transported into the bowels of this mountain. If they couldn't organize a revolt now, what hope would there be later, underground?
But what had Lynch said? That they could walk away at any time? How, if they were to be kept underground?
No matter how unlikely escape seemed, Kendric knew it was the only thought that would keep him from going mad. Then again, perhaps he would do better to simply walk away from the encampment some evening and start down the side of the mountain. Would not starvation, volcanic terrain, and dangerous predators be more worthy adversaries than the slow death of the will that would keep him enslaved?
The Imperial experiment within the Gael Confederation may have failed. The Gael Squadron has returned from Trothas, hut there is evidence of morale problems among the crew, rumors that something terrible has happened to the Flag Captain. There is open talk of mutiny.
If Imperial sources should learn of this, the situation could become explosive. They may, in fact, already know. There are rumors that Alba Port is being cleared of civilians
William Keith Renegades Honor Page 16
