slaughterhouse world
a tale of the human-knacker war
ardath mayhar
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2010 by Ardath Mayhar
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Rob Reginald,
Who gave this unpublished tale a chance
After it had been languishing in the files for years
PROLOGUE
I always loved science fiction and wrote quite a bit, though usually not what I call “gadgety” sf. This was one of the last pure sf stories I wrote. I’ve always thought it was fun, though it really needed to be turned into a full-length book, I think. Unfortunately, about that time things happened to turn off my “switch,” and I never had the energy to expand it into a longer narrative. It’s complete as it stands, however.
—Ardath Mayhar
Chireno, Texas
Nov., 2009
CHAPTER ONE
Joel held his breath as he watched Sergeant Gumble put one cautious foot onto the grass-patch and ease his weight down with great care. Once the noncom reassured himself that he had a foothold clear of any lurking dingballs, he knelt and ran his scanner over the entire plot, pinpointing the minute bits of instant death and pointing them out to the Tech carrying the Extractor.
“Gumboil’s getting slower every day,” one of the newer replacements grumbled.
The Tech corporal turned and glared. “You better be glad of it,” he said, his voice grim. “I know men that’ve been in their graves for years, because their sergeant wasn’t a stickler like Gumboil—Gumble,” he corrected himself hastily.
“You might get by with a slacker back at HQ or with the desk-pushers on the third moon, but here you’re dealing with the Knackers, and that is no game. Now shut your mouths and be glad of a chance to rest.”
Joel said nothing. He had seen some of those men blown to bloody bits. More than once, he’d narrowly missed being one of those scattered to the winds of this hostile world. Now he just hunkered onto a patch of solid rock, obviously clear of antipersonnel devices, and waited, hoping hard that this was going to be one of the easy times. One of the good times...but he knew that was too much to wish for.
Around him, the craggy landscape rose, mostly rock, the cliff at the left scored with small runnels. Some of those had worn the stone from the heights into soil that lined their lower, flatter reaches.
If all had been solid granite, it would have been a snap. Unfortunately, the Knackers used those frequent grassy stretches, which led from the sheer cliffs to the Rift away to the east, for setting their nasty little traps.
He shifted his weight to the other heel and pulled out a twist of hard rations to chew while he waited. Stopping for a meal was something unknown in this particular war. Anyone who developed regular habits and thought he had to stick to them found himself dead before his first week was out. He’d seen a lot of those come and go.
The Forces had learned that, even before he had been conscripted from his shocked and frightened home world. They’d counted their losses from their first Knacker raid, panicked, and sent a hundred thousand young men and women to die for the glory of saving humankind from the Enemy.
He’d been skeptical, for a while, after he arrived on-planet. Then old “Gumboil” over there had led him into his first attack on a Knacker installation, and he had seen what was inside one of their processing plants. It still made him gag.
Knackers weren’t human. Didn’t even look human. Technically, they weren’t cannibals, for that meant eating your own kind. But he had staggered after Gumble through a processing factory filled with men and women and children, in various stages of being skinned, butchered, cooked, and canned. He’d thought, for a while afterward, that he would never be able to eat anything out of a can again, especially pink meat.
That made you forget such nit-picking quibbles. As far as he was concerned, he was helping to make the Cosmos safe from cannibalism, and that was good enough for him.
Even as he thought that, there was a swift hissing. He flung himself flat behind the rock on which he had perched and covered his head with his arms. A muted explosion shook the ground, and he hugged it even more firmly.
Bits of reddish debris came spattering down among the platoon members, raining onto his back and neck. Joel wiped a red-stained hand against the big rock beside him, feeling his gorge rise in horror and disgust. No matter how many times you got a friend’s guts blown all over you, it never got to be easy to handle.
He squinted through the dust and dead grass now drifting downward. It wasn’t Gumboil who had been killed, he was grateful to find. But it was Greeley, and he had been a companion for a long time, as such things went on 3G 789. Six weeks was a lifetime friendship here.
He had an evil feeling that...yes, here it came.
“Karsh! Come up here and bring a spare Extractor. There must have been something wrong with that one. Sent Greeley all over the map.”
Gumboil was covered with a dreadful sort of camouflage, done in shades of brown and red and mucus-gray. From his expression—what you could see of it—he might have been discussing the weather. Joel had been with the sergeant long enough to know that he would be sick for two days after the platoon managed to get back to the drop-point and up to Base, but for as long as the job took, Gumble would seem to be completely unaffected.
Joel swallowed bile and turned to Cleery, the supply corporal, who pulled the last spare Extractor out of its notch in the pack and handed it over with a sympathetic shrug. They had lost four Techs so far, and they had only been on patrol for two days.
When this Extractor went, they would be left with nothing to use to pull out the dingballs. That would mean either returning to base or risking their skins every time they tried crossing grass.
CHAPTER TWO
Well, it had been an interesting war. He’d lasted longer than he ever thought he would, and perhaps he had done some good. Probably not, of course, since the Knackers seemed never to be where they were expected and always appeared wherever the Rescue Force was least prepared to cope with them.
They raided worlds near the hub of the Cluster, taking people like cattle. They struck the Rim as well, always in an area considered safe, and took their captives, alive, back to this useless lump of rock, where they had set up their processing plants, without being detected for decades.
Their depredations spurred human interstellar warp technology to match their own superb capabilities. And that allowed the raided worlds to track them down and send troops after them. Not that they were doing much good, but at least they were trying.
Once the Force discovered that 3G 789 was the factory area for their activities, they struck the Knackers hard and often. The war so far had been a disaster, and Joel suspected that only the desperation of the situation kept the worlds sending their young people there to be ground up in its mill.
Nobody in his right mind could bear the thought of being eaten. Even less could he stand the idea of being canned for shipment to a world of Knackers, who considered human flesh a delicacy unparalleled in the universe.
Joel moved up carefully beside the sergeant, stepping only on the cleared patches. He looked down intently and knelt to wait for the signal to Extract. If they could cross this patch and two more, they could get into position to call down strikes from the third moon onto the Knacker position beyond the cliff.
He thought longingly of air drops, but the terrible up- and downdrafts forbade that method of putting men into position. More than one Lifter had been dashed to bits a
gainst the cliff or cast down into the Rift, never to rise again.
It seemed that nothing men had invented to use for warfare was quite suitable for use on the surface of this world. Only a strike from the moon, called down upon precise coordinates at exactly the right point in the satellite’s transit, had proved devastating to the Knackers. Getting into position to report such coordinates had been fatal to thousands of his kind already.
He shook his head and kept his eyes on the Scanner. Gumboil was working steadily, calmly, without sign of nerves. He hadn’t any, Joel had decided long before. Even his emotional spells after losing friends were controlled, as if he were purging himself of the pain.
Behind them, the lieutenant was chewing his moustache. Joel could hear the grit of hair between the boy’s teeth. Without Gumboil, poor Harries would be in a bind, for this was his first assignment.
Gumble grunted, without words. Joel squinted through the finder and spotted the dingball trace that the Scanner had detected. He slid the Extractor beneath the wide flange of the instrument. It gave a quiet click, and the trace disappeared. One more dingball had been deactivated and discarded, now harmless.
They worked forward across the grass strip, making a pathway some meter and a half wide. Clearing more than that took too long; stringing the men out into a line was safer, in the long run.
They were within six yards of the rock beyond the strip when Joel turned his head. This was something he never did when working the Extractor, for he had noted, over the months of his tour, that those who lost their concentration usually lost their lives along with it.
But something compelled him, and he looked back across the strip, past the squatting men, toward the angle of the cliff around which they had come some hours before. Then he yelled. The platoon scrambled into crevices in the rock wall beside them, but it was too late.
The detachment of Knackers, sweeping along on their multiple limbs like an army of man-bodied spiders, were on them. They’d come straight down the cliffside, and it had been motion in that unusual place that caught the corner of Joel’s eye.
The neurogas from their tubes enveloped the men in the cliff notches. Joel, without stopping to think, rose onto his toes and jumped as far as he could from a standing start.
For a wonder, he did not land on a dingball. Another spring took him almost to the edge of the grass and a third carried him beyond it.
He turned on his heel and stared back across the deadly patch. One figure was leaping wildly down the cleared path, past Gumble, who was stretched forward, his head on his arm as if he had fallen asleep. Cleery, the supply Corp, was coming to join him, his pack still on his back.
The corporal left the safe portion of the grass and leaped, as Joel had done, trying to land in the flattened grass of his tracks. Joel waited, though he knew he should be running, for the Knackers were milling around, trying to find all the bodies beyond the strip.
They never wasted any of their kills, that being the reason for the neurogas, which left the meat untainted. They wanted human flesh when it was freshly killed. Until they had secured the bodies back there, they would not trouble to follow two that were obviously doomed. They would keep, fresh and on the hoof, until the Knackers could catch up with them later.
Once Cleery was beside him, he turned and ran full out toward the next knee of cliff that jutted onto the stony flat. He could hear the Corp’s breath panting along behind him, and it was a comfort to know that he wasn’t completely alone.
He had no idea how they might survive or what they could do to find their way to the drop-point again, but he was alive, and that was something. Too many, back there, were dead.
CHAPTER THREE
They rounded the cliff at last, and Joel felt his lungs burning, his heart about to burst with effort and fear. Once out of eyeshot of the scene of slaughter, both paused to catch their breath, and Joel felt the scope of the disaster catching up with him. His fear was making him stink with its own desperate tang.
The anger was almost worse.
“We’ve got to do something,” he said to Cleery. “They’ll get us, sooner or later, but we can do them some damage, surely, if we think hard enough.”
“Think?” Cleery’s voice was thin with terror. “So you stand here and think at those man-eaters. I’m going to run and keep on running until....”
“They run you down and can you as Grade A Human Meat.” Joel stared at him with all the anger that was in him. “So you get eaten anyway, and you’re exhausted too. I intend to go someplace where they don’t expect me.”
He was thinking of those hairy feet at the ends of the multiple legs, clinging to the cliff as if it might be a flat road. They had supplementary arms too, with hook-like claws that could grasp the smoothest surface.
“We are going up. Straight up. And if you don’t want to, you can try to outrun them, all by yourself. But I want half of what’s in your pack. You won’t need any of it, of course, once they catch you, but I couldn’t take everything and feel right about it.”
The Corp stared at him, his face greeny-white, his eyes dark and wild. But what he saw in Joel’s face seemed to steady him a bit, and his breathing eased. He shrugged off the pack and put it on the rocky soil.
“You take what you want...unless...you really think we can get up that thing?” He stared up the cliff, which slanted slightly inward above them, obviously impossible to climb without specialized equipment or the sort of feet the Knackers had.
“I’m going up. If those creatures can do it, I can figure out a way to. And they’re never going to think we went up, because nobody ever has tried out-climbing them before. Not and lived to tell about it.” Joel was already shifting part of the contents of the pack into his own gear, so as to lighten Cleery’s load.
He tucked the Extractor back into its notch. They might find their lives depending on that tool, before everything was over. It was light enough not to matter, though now both packs were a bit bulkier than was comfortable on such a difficult climb.
It was late afternoon. There was a good chance they could move up to some ledge that would give them a place to stop before it became totally dark. If the Knackers finished harvesting their kill back there in time to come after them before the sun went down, it would be that much harder for them to see anyone high up the cliffside. Everything told Joel to start at once and not to stop until he had to.
“Come on,” he said to Cleery. “Put your hands and feet where you see mine go, if you can. Ever done any rock climbing?”
“Scared of heights,” Cleery said. He sounded resigned, which was better than desperate, Joel hoped fervently.
The cliff was sheer, but it was weathered and broken into cracks and crannies by the severe winters and the harsh summers of this uninviting world. He found he could manage to jam a toe here, a finger there, enough to begin inching his way upward.
From time to time, he found himself stuck, with seemingly no place to go. This put Cleery, below him, into a bind, for he would have to go back down in order to let Joel backtrack to find another route.
His fingers went numb, of course, and also began bleeding, but the thought of hungry Knackers coming along the path below kept him at it. Before the sky grew entirely dark, he located a narrow slot, extending to left and right for a considerable distance, into which he could push himself.
He called down softly to Cleery, “Found something. If it’s as deep as it looks, we can both fit into it. If not, half of each of us can go in, and we won’t sleep much. Keep coming before it gets too dark to see. I’m going in to see what we have here.”
There came a muffled grunt from below, and he knew the Corp was still climbing, frightened as he must be. Joel reached into the slot, searching for a handhold that would make it easy to pull himself in. It was smooth and gritty, like the rest of the cliff. He sighed and worked his right leg upward, straining to keep his weig
ht on the toe precariously tucked into a cranny in the rock face.
When his foot cleared the edge, he sighed with relief...just as the other boot slipped free from its hold. But he had both hands and a foot still over the rim of the ledge, and it was enough.
He heaved himself inside, lying flat and feeling the cold stone above him against his back as he slithered forward up the crack, feeling before him with both hands.
Something ahead of him hissed. Not a reptile—they had found none on this ball of rock—but something with a nasty temper. He stopped and worked a hand back down past his hip to the pack, which was dangling along down the side of the drop. He found the halogen torch, tiny and long-lasting, and twisted the rim.
Raw white light blazed down the cranny, and four scarlet eyes glared at him from an even narrower crack leading deeper into the cliff. He scrabbled together a handful of grit and flung it awkwardly toward the creatures, whatever they might be.
There came a hissing snarl, and the eyes disappeared. Creatures small enough to fit into that space couldn’t be dangerous, unless they had poison teeth, he decided. But he kept the torch in his leading hand, lighting his way forward.
The notch grew no taller, but it did widen a bit, so he could pull up his pack to slide along beside him. He heard Cleery trying to make it into the crevice and called back, “Get a foot in, Corp. Then if the other one goes, you’ll be in good shape.”
A growl and a couple of groans answered him, but he heard the unmistakable sounds of someone bellying along behind him and knew his companion had made it safely. He sighed, realizing for the first time that he had been holding his breath while Cleery climbed.
The crack was very long, not very wide, and extremely shallow. Once he was on his face, as he had to be to crawl, there was no turning over without going out onto the face of the cliff again to reorient himself. It was going to get very old, lying with his face in the grit all night.
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