"What an asshole," said the red-haired woman. "What do we do now?"
Tristan scanned the side of the highway for anything she could use as shoes. It was like the old joke about being chased by a bear: she didn't have to outrun the bear, just the people she was with.
"At best, we've got a few hours before they find us," Tristan said. "They'd have to be blind to miss our tracks."
"Do we know for sure they aren't?" said the red-haired women.
"You've seen the size of their eyes. Or do you think those things are implants?"
The woman snorted. "What, then? Follow the road?"
The others began to drift back from the field. The bald man wiped sweat from his brow. "He's gone. He just walked right off!"
"I saw that," Tristan said.
"Why would he do that? Let us loose and leave us to die?"
"Because we don't have to die. Not unless your master plan is to stand here all night."
The man flung out his hands, then quickly covered himself back up. "Then what do we do?"
"Split up," Tristan said. "Half one way, half the other."
"How do we decide who goes which way?"
"It doesn't fucking matter!" Anger flooded her nerves, tapping the oceanic reservoir that had gathered in her ever since her capture. It was all she could do to stop herself from driving her elbow straight into the bald man's prissy lips, or from kneeing his shabby little cock. Instead, she turned and strode down the road.
Footsteps rasped behind her. The entire group was following her. Not a single one had turned to try the other way. She clenched her jaw until it ached. She wasn't their leader. Their mother. She wanted to spin on her heel and run the other way, but she knew they'd reverse with her, following like a school of bait fish. She upped her pace. Their steps slapped behind her, keeping up. Such idiots. So, so stupid. Weeks in captivity had stripped them of any ability to choose for themselves.
But if a willingness to follow was their flaw, hers was her frustration. She saw this too clearly not ten minutes later when the alien city across the plain blazed with blue and orange lights. These strobed through the darkness, stirring the creatures from their homes, their hives. Engines blasted through the still night.
Tristan ran. The others ran with her, twenty naked shadows, far too pale beneath the white of the stars.
19
The post stuck from the dust like a warding finger. Ness' mouth was dry. Gulls laughed from way on down the river. Larsen nodded, his face as flat as a tablet. The eyes of the workers urged Ness forward as strongly as a hand to the small of his back. He stepped to the post and raised his arms above his head. Gently, Larsen tied the thin ropes to Ness' wrists. Sweat prickled his back and brow. He twisted his head around. A whip dangled from Larsen's hand.
"No speeches," the tall man said. "You all know what this is about. Don't make me repeat it."
"Do you really think this will make me work harder?" Ness moaned.
"Hell if I know," Larsen said. "Five lashes. I'll keep track if you can't."
The first stroke fell before Ness had time to tell him he was ready. It hit his back like something molten. His knees collapsed and he dangled from the ropes, writhing, spikes of heat searing his spine. He screamed and choked. He had no frame of reference for the pain: a hundred bee stings, followed by a hundred more, followed by a hundred more—pain without end, his back tensing so hard he thought his bones would break. Sweat dripped from him in cataracts, soaking his shorts, pattering to the ground. Blood mingled with it; the crowd was so silent he could hear it hitting the thirsty dust.
On the second stroke, he wet his pants.
The third stroke stole what little strength was left in his legs. He hung there, too dizzy to find his feet, panting without end or ease, white sparks overwhelming his sight. Time became a single awful thing. He forgot to scream. Spit dribbled from his lips.
There was no fourth stroke.
"Looks like enough," he heard Larsen say. A strong arm wrapped around his shoulders. Ropes scratched his wrists and fell away. Larsen carried him to his bed and laid him on his stomach. Someone cleaned his back while he was still too dizzy to speak. Nausea cramped his belly. He emerged from the fog and wished he hadn't. Pain beat his back like a tide, drawing back just enough to think it would soon drain away before surging back in a white-hot roil that left him gasping for breath. The swamp cooler strained at the window. He sweated through his sheet.
"You don't look too hot," Shawn said from behind him.
He opened his gummy eyes. He'd somehow been asleep. The light from the window was the yellow of late afternoon. "Feels like I was left in the oven too long."
"They said you haven't been working. I'm shocked, man."
Ness rolled a couple inches on his side, back burning. It was worth it to sneer at Shawn. "Why are we here?"
"To kill the aliens. As long as they're on our dirt, that's the only duty we got."
"I'm not sure how many aliens I'm going to kill by growing corn for the tailors of Spokane."
"Shit." Shawn sighed and sat on the neighboring bed. "We all got to do work we don't want to, Ness. That's what life is all about. I thought you'd turned that corner already."
Ness shut his eyes. "That's such bullshit."
"Maybe you never noticed, living under Mom's teat all your life, but none of us liked our jobs."
"I liked it in the mountains."
"Me too. Right up until the plague-lobsters rode up in their jets."
Ness closed his eyes. He hurt too badly to argue. Even if he were fit, whole, he doubted he could express what he felt to Shawn. He could feel the shape of the lie being passed from the people across the river, but Ness didn't yet know it well enough to describe.
"What do they have you doing over there?" he said.
"Wiring stuff," Shawn said. "I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"Nope. The less I know, the less I have to understand."
Ness shook his head into his pillow. "You don't even sound mad. That would be a first."
"I heard they warned you."
"They did."
"Well, then you got to take responsibility for what happened, don't you?" Shawn stood, mattress springs creaking. "This won't last forever. You just need to buckle down and ride it out."
His boots clomped across the wooden floor. Ness drank the last of his water and napped again, woken a couple hours later by his roommates returning to change out of their work clothes and towel off. No one spoke to or looked at him. Nick showed up after dinner, gazing at the floor.
"You okay?"
"I'll live," Ness said. It was a cliché, but the words slapped his awareness like an open hand. He tried to sit up, but a wave of pain arrested him as soon as he tensed his back.
"That's cool." Nick picked up a book from Ness' bedside table and ruffled the pages. "Man, I tried to warn you."
"It's not your fault. I didn't think anything would actually happen."
"That shit was crazy. That was like something out of the Bible. A lot of the guys are actually mad at Larsen."
Ness eased onto his stomach. His pillow was stained with sweat and drool. "I'm not."
"You kidding me?" Nick laughed. "I'd want to stab the guy. With his own bones. That's what I'd do—cut off Larsen's arm, carve the bone into a knife, and stab him."
Ness laughed, pain pulsing through his back. "What do you expect him to do while you're whittling his ulna? Stand there and wait?"
"I don't know, man. He looks pretty dumb. If they weren't stuck to his legs, I think he'd forget which feet were his."
Nick left. Past the window, people laughed, clanked dishes. Ness was hungry but had no appetite. He napped more, waking to snores and the wash of moonlight through the window. The air conditioner blattered on. Ness rolled slowly from bed and walked stiffly to the bathroom. He could feel himself bleeding beneath his bandages.
After he peed, he stood outside in the dust, shirtless and barefoot. The night wa
s dry and just this side of cool. He could smell the river. Crickets chirped from all sides. His back ached dully. But he was alive. He had been whipped—literally whipped, like a slave or an old English criminal—yet here he was, not twelve hours later, and he could walk. That knowledge seemed to turn a key in him. He had expected to wallow in bed for days, soaking in the soothing bath of his self-pity, but the notion repulsed him. When Larsen came to his room in the morning, hours after the others had left for the fields, Ness looked the man in the eyes.
"Come to finish the job?" Ness said.
"To make sure you're alive. Never whipped a man before."
"Could have fooled me."
"But you're all right."
Ness stretched gingerly, stopping as soon as the lash-wounds began to sear. He still felt sick, weak, and woozy, but he knew it would pass. "I question the wisdom of your methods. How long do you think it'll be before I can swing a hoe again?"
Larsen gazed into his thick hands. "Is there something you'd like to do better?"
"Win the lottery. Exist without hurting."
"I am asking you if there is another job you'd rather do."
Ness cocked his head. "You're serious?"
"I don't like to mismanage my resources."
"I don't know," Ness said. "I'm not really sure how this place runs yet. I don't know what I can do that you need."
Larsen cracked his knuckles. "Think on it. I'll be across the river."
"When should I go back to work?"
"When you're ready." The laconic man nodded at him and left. Ness eased himself back into bed. Everything hurt. Even walking to the bathroom left him sore and exhausted. Nick brought him meals, water. It was several days before he could walk well enough to fetch his own food. He spent a few days shuffling along the fringes of the fields, doing what he could to regain his strength. Men glanced up from the rows of tall green shoots. Ness wanted to get back beside them, prove he belonged.
He didn't know what they were doing across the river—besides keeping the power plant operational and overseeing the safety and resources of the community, of course—but the structure on this side was simple enough. Some twenty percent of the citizens managed the workers and the logistics of their labor while the rest cultivated the fields. Sometimes they were allowed to use combines and tractors and trucks, but for the most part labor was done by hand. Ness sent a letter to Larsen asking for a chat. Larsen crossed the river two days later.
"Why don't we run the tractors all day long?" Ness gestured at the tall green corn. "There must be thousands of gallons of gasoline back in town."
"Less than you'd think," Larsen said.
"Even so."
"One day, the tractors would stop."
"And one day we'll all drop dead."
Larsen eyed him. "Sustainability. Don't do anything we can't still be doing in a hundred years. No bad habits. No crutches. That's how we survive."
Ness leaned on the stick he'd taken to carrying. "Then why are we trading with Spokane?"
"To get what we don't make for ourselves."
"I thought we want to make everything for ourselves."
"Once the silos are full." Larsen pointed his thick finger to the high, steely grain elevators projecting from the eastern fields. "We're producing more than we consume. That's good. Once we have enough to outlast disaster, we can start peeling people off to work on other things."
It made sense. Ness went to the old woman at the warehouse and requisitioned a pen and a notebook. As he rested in his room or in the shade of the trees by the river, he wrote to himself, thinking things through. When it came down to it, the Hanford colony ran a very simple economy. Ness had participated in one of those once. Before finally giving up on it, he'd played the Star Wars Galaxies MMO for far too long, sticking with it more out of a loyalty to its half-assed universe than to the mechanics of the game itself. Its biggest virtue was its economy: while enemy NPCs dropped loot like any other game, a sizable portion of its weapons, armor, spaceships, clothing, and vehicles were craftable by players—in some cases, such as housing, exclusively so. Ness had started life as a smuggler, sticking with it despite the thorough shittiness of the class, but once they introduced spaceships to the game, he became addicted. Soon, he dropped more and more combat skills in favor of the newest crafting class: the shipwright.
At first he sold nothing. Despite two years of play, he only had a couple million credits, and he could barely afford the mines to begin extracting resources needed to craft his parts. Meanwhile, established weapon- and armorsmiths literally hopped ship, investing tens of millions into new factories and resources to immediately crank out the best TIE Fighters and blasters and engines.
Bit by bit, Ness grew his business. Got better resources. Made better parts. Soon, a few people dropped by his shop. He tracked resources obsessively, relocating his few extractors as soon as rich new veins opened. Every credit he made went back into the business. Soon, he was relocating entire fleets of extractors weekly. He hit his limit on the number of buildings he could set down at once and hired more spots from players who didn't use them. People flocked to his store. He spent less time in his ship PVPing and more time combining parts from his factories. He upped his prices, but still couldn't keep up with demand. By the time he retired from the game a year later, he was the server's top shipwright, with nearly a billion liquid credits to his name and untold wealth in his parts, buildings, and resources.
But if he'd had the credits to start with, he could have skipped months of development.
The currency of Hanford was labor. Labor produced the food they needed to survive. If he could expedite the food-creation process, they could skip months or years of development, peeling off farmhands to learn other trades. They had more electricity than they could ever use, but gasoline was limited. Unrenewable. Without it, the labor-saving devices of old civilization—the tractors, cultipackers, backhoes, and flatbeds—sat idle.
He walked the cornfields, pushing himself until his back burned. Amid the swaying green crops and their waving yellow heads, he found his solution.
He asked and received Larsen's permission to go into town. The driver took him to the abandoned library at the WSU Tri-Cities branch. The agricultural department was extensive. Without computers, it took several hours to find his material, but once he collected his texts, he discovered that producing corn-derived ethanol was shockingly simple.
He scheduled a meeting with Larsen and Daniel.
They met him at a conference room inside the white-capped building that controlled the reactor. The air conditioning calmed Ness' nerves. He laid out his plan very simply. Begin immediate experimentation of ethanol fermentation. Set aside a percentage of their corn yield for the production of fuel. Once their production methods were sound, start widescale fermentation at once. Devote that fuel to the harvest of this year's crops and the growth of next year's, increasing production several-fold over their projections.
Daniel removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. "That is...ambitious."
"It fits your philosophy to a T," Ness said. "How much food are you shipping to Spokane? Why not use that food to create our own fuel? Their gasoline won't last forever. As long as we depend on them, we won't be independent."
"This makes sense," Larsen said.
Daniel raised his gray brows. "How long before this investment begins yielding results? What if we're struck by crisis while our food stores are tied up in the production process?"
Ness pushed a paper across the table. "Fermentation only takes a few days. All we need is yeast, ammonia, a couple other things. They'll have yeast at the wineries. Ammonia anywhere there's farm stuff."
"Farm stuff," Daniel muttered. "And what expertise do you have to oversee this endeavor?"
"None."
"A ringing endorsement."
"That's why I'll need a few of your people. You've got some chemists here, don't you?"
Larsen drew his thick lips into a smile. "
A few."
Daniel gestured at the walls, the rumble that permeated every inch of the plant. "We're short-staffed as it is. I propose our limited pool of labor is best spent ensuring the nuclear reaction going on beneath us continues to react as intended."
Ness scratched his neck. He hadn't shaved in days. "Ask for volunteers. All they have to do is teach me how to do it myself. I'll pick a couple of farmhands to help me over the long-term."
Daniel shifted in his chair. "Well."
"I'll ask," Larsen said. "We'll see."
Ness rode home with a smile. Across the river, the workers ate at the tables beneath the tarps. Ness hobbled up to Nick. "Well, I'm now an ethanol baron. Want to help me run my empire?"
Nick wiped salsa from his mouth. "You sit on your ass all day and they promote you to baron? Man, I thought this was a meritocracy."
He got his volunteers two days later: Brandon, a man in his forties who walked with a sway to his shoulders and looked more like a surfer than a chemist, and Kristin, a woman who didn't look much older than Ness and whose quick eyes flew to every caw of the crows or sway of the wind. The three of them drove to the college and filled the pickup with a still, bags of chemicals, glassware, hydrometers. Brandon guided them to a winery across town and they combed through the warehouse with flashlights for yeast.
"So what's your background, Ness?" Brandon asked on the drive back.
"Computers," Ness said.
"Programming? Web stuff?"
"Games, mostly."
"Design?"
"Playing."
Brandon glanced across the cab. "And now you're in charge of our fuel supply. Brave new world."
"Ever play EVE?" Kristin said.
Ness laughed. "For like two straight years."
"Oh my God." She sat in the middle. Her slim leg jostled his. "The scams I used to pull. They hated me."
The process was as simple as it sounded. They mashed up corn still in the husk and dumped the lumpy meal into a watery drum, then boiled it for about an hour, keeping careful track of the temperature. After it cooled, they stirred in the yeast and moved the drum to the corner of Ness' room, where the straining air conditioner would keep the heat from getting lethal. Brandon was a chronic over-explainer, breaking down every part of the process no matter how trivial or tangential; Kristin spoke up rarely, augmenting and contradicting Brandon's points. Ness kept a close watch on the drum. Even at room temperature, bubbles churned constantly, toiling viscous mash to the surface.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 52
