by Jake Elwood
The corners of Amar's eyes crinkled ever so slightly in cold amusement. "You'll get your ship. Prove yourself here, be patient, and your time will come."
Ganbold nodded. "Yes, Commander."
"Come with me," Amar said, and led the way into the corridor. "You'll be leading a team of prisoners to Work Site Epsilon. We'll get an engineer out there once the site is cleared. In the meantime, your job is to cut down trees and clear fallen timber."
Ganbold nodded his understanding, following the camp commander out of the prefabricated building and into the compound. A light rain fell, and Ganbold shivered. By the time the sun was fully up the heat would be uncomfortable, and by mid-day it would be intolerable. At the moment, however, he was chilly.
Prisoners milled around on the far side of the barbed wire fence that separated the two compounds. They were a scruffy, unimpressive lot.
"You mustn't feel any sympathy for the prisoners," Amar said. "Don't be intimidated by them, either. They will outnumber you, but you have nothing to fear."
Ganbold bristled. "I'm not afraid."
Amar ignored his comment. "They are not entitled to our respect. They disgraced themselves when they surrendered. Now they are tools, deserving no more consideration than you would give to a shovel or a pickax."
Ganbold nodded.
"I advise you to be ruthless," Amar went on. "If you have to kill a man to bring the rest into line, don't hesitate."
Ganbold nodded again, feeling suddenly less sure of himself. He would be alone in the jungle with dozens of prisoners and only a handful of guards.
"They have no backbone," Amar said. "No courage. You might have to kill two or three of them, but the rest will be cowed. They will fall in line."
"Yes, Commander."
"You're doing important work." Amar's thick eyebrows drew together. "We need this wide sensor array." He gestured at the sky. "Our ships come and go. Most of the time there’s nothing up there but a supply ship. We can't be secure until we have our own scanning equipment in place."
A network of automated sensor stations, scattered across dozens or even hundreds of kilometers, plus similar stations on the far side of the planet, would allow the camp to spot incursions by even the smallest ships, long before they reached the planet. Until such a network was in place, the prison was vulnerable to raids or rescue missions from the United Worlds.
"But, Commander."
Amar raised an eyebrow, giving him permission to speak.
"Why are we using manual labor?" He gestured at the prisoners on the other side of the fence. "Unreliable labor, at that. Why not bring in heavy equipment and get the sensor array installed quickly?"
Amar shook his head, looking weary and cynical. "If they would send us the equipment, which they won't, we could prepare the ground for a dozen sensor installations in a couple of weeks. But the dishes and towers don't exist yet. We have to wait on the factories back home to manufacture them, and then we have to wait on the ships that will deliver them. No," he said, shaking his head again, "heavy equipment won't help us. And if we had heavy equipment, we would have no use for our prisoners. And no way for ambitious young officers like you to prove their worth."
Half a dozen more unit leaders came over to join the two of them, and Ganbold moved away from Amar, joining his fellow junior officers in a perfect line, shoulder to shoulder. Amar watched the prisoners for a moment, then turned, examining his officers. “You look nervous, Gan-Erdene.”
The man beside Ganbold swallowed. “I’m prepared to do my duty, Sir.”
“Of course.” Amar shook his head. “There is nothing to fear from these prisoners.” Gan-Erdene flinched as if he’d been accused of cowardice. Amar ignored his reaction. “They are frightened. They are broken men with no combat experience except one battle, which they lost.” His eyes swept the line of officers. “The United Worlds have been at peace for a generation. Most of these men were captured during the first and only battle they have ever been in. They have failed the only test they ever faced, and they know it.”
He paced in front of the junior officers, looking each man in the eye. “Some of you have been here since we first captured the Strads at New Sheffield. But some of you are new.” He looked at Ganbold, and at Gan-Erdene. “Some of you are fresh from military college. You haven’t seen combat. But you are far ahead of this rabble.” His arm swept out, indicating the prisoners in their compound.
“These men have no experience with truly difficult choices. They have not found their strength, and they won’t find it here. Each time they begin to lift their heads we smack them back down, and we will continue to do so. You may have to shoot one or two of them, but I promise you, they will crumple.”
The men on either side of Ganbold shifted ever so slightly, holding themselves with confidence rather than stiffness. He could feel a subtle change in his own posture, some of the nagging worry trickling away. Today he would at last face the enemy for whom he had trained for so long. And he was ready.
The gate swung open and the first group of prisoners streamed out. There was very little difference in uniforms; Ganbold identified the officer by his bearing, and his position at the head of the ragged column.
“Name!” shouted Amar.
“Dawkins.”
A unit leader stepped forward. “Come with me.” He led Dawkins and the platoon of prisoners along the fence line, a handful of guards joining the prisoners as they walked.
Another column of prisoners came out, and another unit leader stepped forward. This group headed straight for the nearest wall of jungle, and Ganbold watched the prisoners go past. They were an unimpressive sight, with ill-fitting clothes and blank, confused faces. He curled his lip as he took in their poorly hidden anger and the frightened desperation in their eyes when they looked toward the jungle.
The sheer diversity of the prisoners astonished him. The United Worlds people seemed to come from every race of humanity. The platoon held every skin tone imaginable. The shortest man in the group didn't quite reach the armpit of the tallest man. For Ganbold, who for twenty-five years had seen other races only in pictures, it was almost surreal.
A red, scabby rash furred the side of one man’s face. Another man had lines of dark red along his hairline and spreading behind one ear. It was some local parasite, and although the sight of it disgusted him, Ganbold knew it wasn’t dangerous. The guards, who had proper nutrition and access to soap, were never infected.
Still, he wished he could stay farther from the prisoners.
“Name!” said Amar, and a calm voice said, “Thrush.” Ganbold stepped forward. He was assigned to Thrush’s platoon. The men were the usual mongrel rabble, and Thrush, his officer’s uniform just a bit paler than the others, looked just as sloppy and unkempt as the rest. Ganbold looked him over, feeling a cheerful sense of contempt. We were so worried about the mighty United Worlds Navy. And look at you.
Thrush met his gaze calmly, and Ganbold felt his confidence slip, ever so slightly. This wasn’t a defeated, broken man.
Bah. It’s a veneer. He’s putting on a brave face, that’s all. “This way. Follow me!”
Thrush stared at him, not moving. His eyebrows rose quizzically.
Damn it. Not in front of Commander Amar. “Lieutenant Thrush.” His tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar words. “You will bring your men and follow me.”
“Sorry?” Thrush’s face was bland and innocent. “I can’t understand you.” Thrush, like all the prisoners, had a dialect so thick he was almost incomprehensible. Could he truly not understand Ganbold?
“You.” Ganbold pointed at him. “Follow me.” He pointed to himself. “Bring your men.” He gestured at the column behind the young officer.
“You want me to bring four men?” Thrush’s eyebrows rose further. “What about the others?”
Was that a hint of amusement in the man’s face? Ganbold, all too aware of Amar just a few paces away, put a hand on the butt of his pistol and marched up to Thrush. The
young lieutenant seemed less exotic up close. He had straight dark hair, brown eyes, and high cheekbones. He would have blended into a squad of Dawn Alliance soldiers almost perfectly. It was only his eyes that didn't quite fit. They weren't quite the right shape.
But the expression in those eyes, the serene confidence, matched the guards, not the other prisoners.
Ganbold stared into those eyes at a range of less than a meter. “I don’t know if you actually don’t understand me, or if you’re winding me up,” he said. “I don’t really care. You will follow me. Your men will follow me. Right now.”
Thrush’s forehead puckered. “Sorry, can you repeat that?”
“Squad leader!” Ganbold shouted, turning away. A soldier with a squad leader’s rank circle on his shoulders hurried up. “This platoon will be coming with us. We are leaving now. In thirty seconds, I want you to shoot every man who fails to keep up.”
The squad leader turned away, calling to his men, and Ganbold wheeled. He marched toward the distant wall of jungle, and with every scrap of willpower he could muster he kept himself from turning his head to look behind him. In his imagination the prisoners stared blankly at one another before dying in a hail of gunfire, and Ganbold, with no prisoners left to lead, slunk back to the compound in disgrace.
For ten endless strides he marched, listening for footsteps, bracing himself for gunshots. Ten more strides, and finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He looked back over his shoulder.
Thrush walked a couple of meters behind him, face expressionless. The rest of the platoon followed, a couple of guards on either side of the straggling column of men, the squad leader bringing up the rear.
Ganbold hid his relief as he returned his gaze to the jungle ahead.
An hour later all sense of relief was gone, replaced by a towering frustration. The platoon was doing a brilliant job of pretending to be buffoons and half-wits. They bumped into each other, dropped tools, tried to cut trees outside the marked area they were supposed to clear, and shaved away such fine tiny scraps of wood from the trunks of standing trees that it would take a week for a tree to actually fall. A round-cheeked, red-haired man had even managed to shove the blade of a shovel into a laser cutter. He stood with the remains of the shovel in his hands, staring at the destroyed blade as if he’d never seen something so astonishing in his life.
Ganbold stomped over to him, shoving gawking prisoners out of the way. The man stared at him, doing a poor job of hiding a smirk, and said, “Sorry, Boss. I don’t know what-”
Ganbold hit him. He nailed the man with a clean right cross that knocked him sprawling on the ground, the ruined shovel landing in the dirt beside him. A couple of guards hurried over, stopping out of arm’s reach of the knot of prisoners, rifles coming up.
The red-haired man glared up at Ganbold. His mask of bemused innocence was gone now, replaced by fury. He started to push himself up.
Then sank back, eyes wide, as Ganbold drew his pistol.
“I can see you are not much use to me as a worker.” Ganbold took careful aim at the man’s round, freckled face. “You can still be useful, though. As an example.” He raised his voice. “Watch carefully, all of you. This is what happens when you push me too far.” He took a deep breath, pushed down a despairing voice inside him, wailing that he was about to do something monstrous, and tightened his finger on the trigger.
Lieutenant Thrush stepped in front of the pistol, and Ganbold managed – barely – not to shoot him.
“Whoah. Hang on, Unit Leader. That’s not necessary.”
A wave of relief washed over Ganbold, replaced a moment later by frustration. I still have my duty. I need to regain control. I have to do this. There is no other way. “I can shoot this man,” he said. “Or I can shoot you first, and then shoot him. The choice is yours.”
Men moved in his peripheral vision, prisoners stepping closer, lifting tools. The soldiers brought rifles to their shoulders and took aim. Men froze.
“Now, you see, there’s a problem with that approach.” Thrush sounded … not relaxed exactly, but not terrified, either. Not like a man with a gun barrel a handspan from his face. “Some of these men served with me on my last command. We went through a lot together. We bonded.” His eyes didn’t leave Ganbold’s. “If you shoot me, well, they won’t stand for it.”
“I’ll kill them too!”
Thrush nodded. “I know. But that will get the rest of the platoon going. They might stand back and watch one man die, or two. But six or eight? They won’t just watch.”
Ganbold’s finger tightened, and the trigger moved ever so slightly. A flare of the lieutenant’s nostrils showed that he’d noticed, but he still looked almost relaxed. Ganbold said, “Are you threatening me?”
Thrush shrugged. “No, not really. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen.”
“You’ll all die.”
The man nodded. “I know. And then you’ll have to go back to the compound and tell that guy Amar that you didn’t get any work done, and you ran out of prisoners. You’ll have to tell him that, even with a pistol and five armed soldiers, you couldn’t keep control of a platoon with nothing but spades and laser cutters.” Thrush shook his head. “It won’t be a good day for your career.”
Ganbold stared at him, flummoxed. Amar’s words echoed in his head, mocking him. This was not a cowed man, a man who’d never faced combat, or death. Ganbold had the pistol, he had the armed soldiers, but he suddenly wondered who was really in command.
“There’s a better way,” Thrush said softly. “Macalister here has learned his lesson. They’ve all learned. They understand that they have to get some work done.” He raised his voice. “They’ll give you no more trouble. Isn’t that right, men?”
No one answered, but some of the tension went out of the closest prisoners. They no longer looked ready to fight and die. They looked abashed.
“So what will it be?” Thrush lifted an eyebrow. “Do you want a bloodbath? Or shall we get to work?”
For several endless, crawling seconds Ganbold stared at Thrush. He’d already made up his mind, but a dark instinct made him yearn to pull the trigger. Thrush, he sensed, was dangerous.
Instead, he lowered the pistol. “There will be no more dramatics,” he said, pitching his voice so every prisoner could hear. “No more delays. Get to work.”
Thrush nodded, then turned his back. “You heard the man. Let’s get a couple of trees down, shall we?” He helped Macalister to his feet. “Got it out of your system, Mac?”
“Yes, Sir.” The red-haired man’s voice was subdued.
“Good, because next time I’m letting him shoot you.”
The platoon went to work, tackling the trees and surrounding underbrush with real enthusiasm, and Ganbold got out of their way. He found a spot where no falling tree could hit him and he watched Thrush work. As he watched he thought about leadership, and strength, and the way that prisons could make prisoners out of the men who were supposed to be in charge.
Chapter 11
For once, Gamor hardly felt like a prison.
Tom stood on a high ridge, bare rock beneath his feet, the jungle falling away in an endless vista on either side. A steady wind blew, reducing the constant heat to a palatable level. He could even imagine it was less humid.
The perpetual overcast remained, but the clouds were tattered and thin, with patches of blue showing here and there. It wasn't the blue of Earth's sky. It was darker, with reddish hints, but it was pretty, and it lifted his spirits.
A hundred meters or so below, a crude road made a dark line along the slope. That road, constructed by Strad prisoners before the United Worlds entered the war, kept washing out, dirt and rocks swept away by the torrential rainfall that constantly battered the jungle. Tom and his platoon had been tasked with reducing erosion.
The ridge jutted above the jungle canopy. Most of the ridge was covered in waist-high brush, but water had dug channels in the thin layer of soil in places where the roc
k beneath made a natural trough. The platoon was supposed to stake down a layer of netting over the worst channels, dispersing the water and giving plants a chance to take root and stabilize the soil on their own.
First, though, stakes had to be cut. Men with machetes roamed the jungle below, cutting arm-long spikes from branches and young trees. Others unrolled bundles of netting they'd carried from Camp One. The bundles were brutally heavy, and the men were cheerful, knowing the worst part of the job was now behind them.
Sunlight glittered on the blade of a machete just inside the tree line below. It had to be a new tool. Most of the big knives were so pitted with rust you could hardly see the color of the original metal. Not only do they give us primitive hand tools, they aren't even good primitive hand tools.
One part of each machete was, however, perfectly modern. There was a radio tracking chip in the handle of every knife. A machete was an excellent potential weapon, and the guards kept them under careful control.
Of course, now that the prisoners knew there was a delicate electronic component in the hilt of each machete, the hilts were getting almost as much battering as the blades. Men used the hilts as hammers, used them to crack the shells of nuts they scrounged when the blade would have made a better tool. They used the blade of one machete to hack apart the hilt of another machete. They smashed the hilts between rocks, then feigned astonishment when annoyed guards asked them about the damage.
There was a rumor that a guard had been murdered with some of these very machetes, by prisoners working on the road below. The story said a handful of Strads had hacked a luckless guard limb from limb, then buried his remains in the mud. They'd gotten away with it, too. The soldiers had supposedly conducted an exhaustive search, then given up and written the man off as a deserter.
Tom doubted the story was true. It was the kind of fantasy men invented to keep themselves sane, to persuade themselves that someone, somehow, had managed to fight back. It was a great story. He just didn't think it had actually happened.
O'Reilly and another man unrolled a bundle of netting along the top of the ridge. The guards were all down near the tree line, so the other man flopped himself down on the netting for a rest while O'Reilly walked over to join Tom. “Morning, Lieutenant.”
