O’Keefe returned to sit beside Lindy. “You shouldn’t do that,” lectured Steenini. “Antagonizing the beasties is bad enough, but they’re solitary by nature. Insulting one is only going to make that particular individual hate you. But I’m telling you, there’s something about those dogs. Offending one of them might be the same thing as offending them all, and I have already seen you go out of your way to irritate one of their number three times since our arrival here. If you keep it up you’re liable to become a marked man in all of their eyes and in a very short time.”
“Yeah, maybe,” O’Keefe said. “But what do you think it was doing in here? I mean, what was the purpose of that visit? It just walked in, stared at me for a minute, and then left. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Who knows,” Steenini said guardedly. “The dogs seem to go where they want whenever they want. It may have come in here simply to intimidate you. Like I said, insulting one of them may be the same as insulting them all. Maybe it was a friend of the one you told to ‘eat shit.’ I don’t know, but if I were you I would be a good boy and start trying to keep my testosterone in check whenever they are around. Continuing to goad them is liable to get you killed.”
Before O’Keefe could retort the sound of approaching diesels echoed in the corridor outside. The roar grew steadily louder until clanking treads came to a halt directly outside the doorway. Seconds later red-eyed men, their clothes heavily soiled and their faces caked with dust, began to totter through the doorway. Most walked like zombies to their bunks and fell or feebly climbed into them. But some could not even traverse the floor. They fell in heaps to the stone, unable to move. No one rose to help them.
“Take a good look, mates,” Steenini said softly. “That’s how we’ll feel in about twenty-four hours.” He sighed heavily. “I need to get some rest,” he muttered to himself, and rolled over in his bunk with his back to Lindy and O’Keefe.
“Come on, Willet,” O’Keefe said, “let’s get these guys up on their beds. We can’t just sit here and leave them on the floor.” They walked over to the nearest collapsed body and hoisted the man to his feet. Then, with one of his arms draped over Lindy’s shoulders and the other around O’Keefe’s waist, they carried him to the bunk that he had indicated, almost incoherently, was his. They returned for the next man, standing him up so O’Keefe could lift him into his arms and carry him to his bunk while Lindy helped another man to his feet. Soon some of the other new inmates were shamed into action as well and were helping others of the fallen. In short order everyone was off the floor. O’Keefe and Lindy returned to Steenini, taking a seat on two lower tier beds, O’Keefe on the one at Steenini’s feet and Lindy directly opposite him. Presently Lindy stretched out while O’Keefe sat brooding with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his chin.
His nose wrinkled involuntarily; the noxious odor of the exhaust fumes the guards had left behind still permeated the air. “How can they have diesels?” he asked absently. Lindy turned his head to look at him as if he needed clarification. “The guard’s engines,” O’Keefe continued. “We have them on Earth. The same thing, the same smell. How can they have them here, and why is there a word in your language for them?”
Lindy propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at O’Keefe. “I think I see what you mean,” he said, “but it’s not out of the ordinary at all. After the Cataclysm, many worlds—totally separate and, with the passage of time, totally unknown to each other—experienced significant parallel development. As far as I know, all worlds that support carbon-based life for a long enough time build up large deposits of fossil fuels. Internal combustion is an almost inevitable technological outgrowth of that fact, but Vazilek technology is still very distinct from your technology just as it is from ours. I think if you were to dismantle one of their power plants you would discover that in a mechanical sense, it would be constructed in a very different manner from your own. It would also be incompatible with your world’s drive systems. Only the most basic principles would be the same.”
O’Keefe swung his legs up into the bunk and lay back, staring at the underside of the bed above him. Momentarily he rolled over onto his side and looked searchingly at Lindy. “What about tactically?” he asked. “Was there parallel development in that area as well?”
“Tactically?” Lindy once again looked perplexed.
“Yeah, tactically. I mean, your fleet of police cruisers must have had some purpose before the Vazileks appeared. What did you guys do?”
“We did, and still do, search and rescue missions. We repair or tow disabled ships. We track down and apprehend smugglers. We patrol shipping lanes and maintain sensor buoys. We fight piracy. We…”
“Okay, there you go,” said O’Keefe, interrupting. “You fight piracy. You have to have tactics to fight pirates. So before the Union became the Union, when you were still bringing lost worlds on board, did different worlds use the same tactics to fight piracy or were their approaches very different?”
Lindy looked past O’Keefe, as if groping through a dark chamber of his mind for an answer. “Well,” he said slowly, still somewhat lost in thought, “that was a very long time ago. It was only in the very early stages of the Reunification that spacefaring worlds renewed contact with each other. The later additions were all societies that had lost the capacity for interstellar travel. And it’s been a couple of hundred years since I was at the academy. But it seems to me that different societies had developed very different ways of dealing with similar problems, in all areas.
“Well, yes, of course that’s true,” he said as old memories flooded back into his awareness. “That’s the reason it took so long to enact the Constitution after the Principles of Cooperation were ratified. It took several millennia of negotiation for everyone to agree on a single format to follow because each individual society had spent centuries evolving their own rules concerning governance, justice, law enforcement, legislation, and every other component of society. In the beginning no one could agree on anything, they simply decided to cooperate in the effort to find common ground. So I would have to say that, based on the fact that different worlds came up with so many different ways to solve problems common to them all, that there wasn’t much parallel development tactically at all, except in the most general sense.” Lindy set his jaw and nodded once, smugly satisfied that he had been able to dredge up an answer from the long unused corridors of his mind.
“Good,” said O’Keefe, nodding in return. “That may give us an edge in dealing the Vazileks. They’ve apparently been studying you Akadeans, but according to what High Commissioner Burkeer told me they’ve elected to leave the Earth alone, at least for the moment. If that’s true I may be able to come up with a few wrinkles that they’ve no idea how to deal with. But I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First of all we’ve got to find a way out of this place.” He rolled onto his back once again and stared pensively at the bottom of the bunk above him. He hardly noticed other Akadeans, all of them cleaner and less depleted than the mine workers, entering the barracks at random intervals. Exhaustion began to take its toll, and his eyelids drooped as the minutes wound past.
But as he lay on the bunk close to sleep, creaking sounds of slow rolling wheels out in the corridor lightly touched his tympanic nerve. He was immediately alert, and rose to investigate. Steenini turned in his bunk and beckoned him back as he passed, explaining that it was only the food carts and that anyone caught leaning out of the entry was eligible for punishment. A few seconds later two men, one of them pushing a handcart, entered the room. The cart looked much like any street vendor’s, except it was dirty and ragged from overuse, while the men who had brought it in were dressed like every other inmate in Ashawzut. But compared to the workers that O’Keefe and Lindy had so recently carried to their bunks, these prisoner’s attire was infinitely less soiled and their stomachs not nearly as constricted.
“All right men, dinner time,” announced the one who had been walking rather
than pushing. “Let’s all line up now.” The other, a man small even by Akadean standards, busied himself pulling metal bowls from inside the cart.
The events of the day had hardly been conducive toward developing an appetite, and as a result O’Keefe had not realized just how ravenous he was. But just the mention of food was enough to instantly place his empty stomach at priority one. He started to help Steenini up, but the man pushed him away. “I’m going to have to get used to this, so stop helping me,” he grumbled. Lindy followed the two of them as they took their places in a rapidly forming line. A couple of men were still too weak to get off their bunks and others had to go back and retrieve them, holding them up in the queue, before the two delivery men would begin serving.
As the line progressed, each man was handed a bowl by the underling, while the boss ladled out portions of thin gruel. Into each bowl of the gruel he carefully placed a small brick of sustenance. The cleaner men amongst the rabble, who must have had better jobs than working in the mines and who also, much to O’Keefe’s aggravation, had the status to break into the front of the line, were handed small paper bags as well, apparently containing extra rations.
When O’Keefe received his metalware, it was readily apparent that it had been used at least once since the last time it had been washed, if it had ever been washed. The smallish man handed him the bowl, and made a mark on a notepad he held as he did so. The gruel ladled into the bowl was tepid and nearly tasteless, but it was filling to a degree and as O’Keefe was utterly famished he drained the bowl in seconds. The brick, on the other hand, was a fibrous and bland block of chewiness, and took a bit longer to devour, but devour it he did. The other men ate with similar enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, it was not long before the leader of the two-man crew became impatient. “Okay men, eat up,” he barked. “We don’t have all night. Let’s down the food and turn in the bowls. Come on, hurry up!” O’Keefe, with Lindy and Steenini trailing him, walked over to the underling and handed him back the bowl. He could see that, on his notepad, the man had started another set of marks below the first. He was going to great pains to be sure that no bowls were left behind. O’Keefe idly wondered what would happen to the drudge should he return to the kitchen with one less bowl than he had left with. He would probably be breaking rocks again in the morning, O’Keefe thought, that is if he lived to see the morning.
O’Keefe waited for his two friends to turn in their bowls, then all three of them returned to the bunks. “Well, Bart,” he said, “I think I’ll lay claim to this bed right above you. That way if the bottom falls out at least you’ll wind up in bed with someone you know.” He retrieved his bundle of clothing from the floor where he had dropped it and tossed it onto the mattress. “How about you, Willet?” he asked.
“I like this one right here,” the man said, patting the stiff mattress directly across from Steenini. “Not that it makes much difference. There seems to be very little disparity between one and any other. They all look to be equally uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right there,” O’Keefe said. “So what happens now, Bart? Do we lie around all night and tell ghost stories, or what?”
“That’d be nice, mate,” Steenini said wistfully. “But unfortunately not. As soon as the servers finish their rounds and everyone gets fed, its lights out.” He looked up, briefly scanning the long lines of fluorescents that were bolted to the ceiling and cast stark, bright light over the whole of the barracks. “By the way, if you need to use the toilet, and you’re not shy, I’d go for the bucket now. It gets busy over there right after the lights go down. And once it is dark, don’t go anywhere but to the latrine. The hallways are dimmer at night, but there is still some light out there and the guards still patrol, along with the dogs. If one is caught outside the barracks at night it means death—sometimes immediate, and sometimes in the arena. Just try to get as much sleep as you can, because you’ll need it tomorrow. About ten hours after lights out the morning officially starts and a few minutes later the guards will be here to collect us. After that it will be over twelve hours of work with only two breaks for meals.
“The way to survive is to work steadily, but at a pace just fast enough to keep the guards satisfied. I can’t describe exactly how fast a pace that is, because it will change depending on which of the beasties are watching over us. Yes,” he mused, in answer to the unspoken question, “as hard as it is to believe the guards do have personalities. Some of them are more sadistic than others. But none of them are sparing of the whip, so you’ll get an idea of the least they will demand pretty quickly. Once you do, do no more work than you can get away with. But never stop working, and obey every order promptly, or they will tear your back to shreds, and medical care is hard to come by here.”
Steenini droned on, going over every detail of what they might expect on the morrow. O’Keefe politely pretended to listen, but his mind was elsewhere. The problems they faced seemed insurmountable. They did have a great advantage in numbers, but even were it possible to rally the prisoners to unified action without traitors within learning of the plot, their opponents’ advantage in technology was daunting, to say the least. Any overt conflict would be like Spartan phalanxes attacking a modern tank platoon; courage and numbers wouldn’t count for much.
Even a strategy of going after the Vazilek command and control seemed outrageously reckless. There was only one person with any power here, and she seemed impossible to get to. Still there had to be something, some exploitable flaw buried somewhere in Elorak’s myriad security measures. It might take some time, but O’Keefe was certain that in the end he would find it.
Shortly, more men, cleaner and in better condition than anyone O’Keefe had yet seen, besides Elorak’s lackeys, began to filter into the barracks. He guessed that they were the ones with the softest jobs, probably kitchen help, a notion that Steenini confirmed. They seemed standoffish though, speaking to no one outside their group, most of them bunking down together in the far corner of the barracks. O’Keefe quickly decided that he did not trust any of them. Shortly thereafter the lights flickered out.
O’Keefe lay in his bunk, eyes wide open, and was surprised to find that after a short period of adjustment he could see quite well. Although the barracks itself was left completely unlit, enough illumination filtered in from the corridor for him to see most everything in the chamber, if only in silhouette. Steenini had been correct in his assertion that after lights out there would be a steady stream of men to the latrine. Their bodily noises and later the rumbling of the guards in the corridor as they periodically clanked slowly past the open doorway kept O’Keefe awake for hours into the artificial night. He was only aware that he had slept at all because he could remember dreaming. He had dreamt of lazy nights on Sefforia with all the food he could eat and a pitcher of icy cold emerdal within easy reach. Yet despite the dreams, when the lights flickered on it still seemed as if he had been awake every moment since he had stretched out on his bunk.
Some of the men, mostly those who had been the last to arrive back at the barracks and had jobs they were afraid to lose, were up and out the door almost immediately, and at a quick trot. The rest lolled about in their bunks until a few minutes later, when several of the dogs entered the chamber accompanied by the roar of diesels outside. The dogs barked loudly, and the men began to roll out of bed, pulling on their boots and slowly lacing them up. Those who did not rise were wrenched rudely out of their bunks by the iron grip of canine jaws wrapped around their arms. A few were even dumped to the floor from top row beds by dogs that stood on their hind legs and balanced their forepaws against the framework of the bunks, enabling them to reach almost to the ceiling. All the slackers were roundly chastened by their comrades who had been forced to dive pell mell into whatever spaces availed themselves, often on top of one another, in order to avoid the canines barging into the narrow aisles between the bunk rows.
When everyone was dressed, the dogs herded them into the corridor, barking
fiercely enough to spray droplets of saliva from their chops while they ranged to and fro around the men, snapping and snarling at even the slightest hesitancy or lack of cooperation. A few men who strayed slightly were nipped by the hounds and, although very little blood was spilt, the experience of enormous jaws snapping shut over even the most insignificant amount of flesh was enough to send the offenders dancing forward as deep into the crowd of fellow inmates as they could manage. Once outside, O’Keefe found the group to be cornered between two lizard tanks. The front one rolled away down the corridor while the rear one pushed forward, brandishing its whip and cracking it menacingly over the heads of the men, forcing them to follow the lead guard. Soon the men were moving at a slow jog between the two lizards while the dogs flanked the group on either side. The men trotted for something on the order of ten minutes, through several turns and intersections, until finally the corridor widened dramatically and they began to move downward, farther into the bowels of Ashawzut, trotting through numerous, slowly arcing switchbacks until they reached the end of the passageway.
There, before a wall of solid rock, sat a massive tunneling machine. It was roughly the same shape as a diesel locomotive but was more than twice the size. It rested on wide treads and mounted enormous, rotating drill heads around its anterior face. An inverted shield covered the drill heads from the back side, channeling the rubble it dug out into chutes which in turn dumped the broken rock out onto conveyors that ran down the machine’s length and emptied behind it. Thick metal shafts sprouted from the tunneler, their bases anchored in grooves that ran the length of the machine and their tips embedded deeply into the surrounding rock above and to the sides, their function apparently to keep the rotational torque of the drills from toppling the machine to one side and yet still allowing it to move forward into the rock face.
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