by Chris Bunch
The only measure of respect they had, although none of the prisoners realized it, was that armed Tahn soldiers flanked their passage through the streets of Heath at five-meter intervals. Those guards were the combat element of an entire Tahn assault division whose deployment to a combat zone had been delayed by three weeks merely so that a motley 1,000 scruffy men, women, and beings could be led to their new prison.
Sten clanked forward, head down, hands down, shuffling as the chains clanked—the perfect picture of a properly programmed prisoner. But his eyes flicked from side to side, observing as subtly as Alex's commentary had been delivered.
"Clottin’ Heath,” he whispered.
"Na,” Alex whispered back. “Th’ last time we bein't on this world thae were gladdins an’ parties."
"Try war, you clot."
And Alex observed the city with new eyes.
The last—and only—time they had been on Heath had been under cover, with instructions to find a murderer and extract him. But that had been years before, and just as Sten had suggested, war had ground Heath into grayness.
There were few vehicles to be seen—fuel was restricted to necessary military movements. The streets were deserted. Shops were boarded up or, worse, had few items in their windows. The rare Tahn civilian they saw either disappeared quickly from the streets or, seeing the soldiery, raised one ragged, whining cheer into the cold air and then scurried on about his or her business.
Their route led them through narrow streets, the streets climbing upward.
Sten's psywar mind analyzed: If you have the worst enemy scum in your hands, would you not arrange a triumphal parade? With all your citizens spitting and cheering because we have the barbarians in our hands? With full livie coverage? Of course you would. Why haven't the Tahn done that?
Exploratory thinking: They don't think like I do. Possible.
They can't muster the citizens on call. Wrong—any totalitarian state can do that. Maybe they don't want to show how badly the war is hurting them if they are presenting Heath as being the proud center of their culture and don't want off-worlders to see the reality. Most interesting, and worth considering—Sten's analysis was cut off as the column of prisoners was shouted to a halt and screaming Tahn soldiers ordered them to attention. Sten expected to see a float of combat cars move across the street in front of him. Instead, there was one cloaked officer, with flanking guards on foot, riding some kind of animal transport.
"What's that?"
"Clottin’ hell,” Alex whispered. “A bleedin't horse."
"Horse?"
"Aye. A Earth critter, w’ nae th’ brains ae a Campbell, tha’ bites you an’ is best used ae pet chow."
Sten was about to inquire further, but the officer in charge of the column ordered them forward again, and for the first time he looked up the cobbled narrow street.
His guts clamped shut.
At the top of the rise was a huge stone building. It sat atop the hill like a great gray monster, its towering walls reaching upward, capped by a ruined octagonal pinnacle that still reached some 200 meters toward the overcast sky.
Alex, too, was staring.
"Lad,” he managed. “Ah dinnae think't th’ Tahn are takin’ us to church. Tha’ be't our new home!"
[Back to Table of Contents]
CHAPTER EIGHT
KOLDYEZE CATHEDRAL HAD had not been constructed by the Tahn. Their only religion was a vague sort of belief, unworshiped, in racial identity and racial destiny.
Koldyeze had been the Vatican for the first settlers on Heath, monotheistic, agrarian communards. They had spent nearly two centuries building their church atop the highest hill in their tiny capital.
Those settlers stood less than no chance when the first Tahn, then more roving barbarians than the self-declared culture they later became, smashed down on them. They were forcibly absorbed by the Tahn, their language forbidden to be spoken, written, or taught, their dress ridiculed, and their religion driven underground and finally out of existence.
The Tahn might not have been religious, but they were superstitious. No one quite knew what to do with the looming cathedral, and so it was surrounded with barbed fencing and posted for hundreds of years. Seventy-five years before, an out-of-control tacship had smashed off the spire's crown, and storms had battered the ruins.
But Koldyeze Cathedral was still a mighty work of man.
It was cruciform in design, stretching along its longer axis nearly two kilometers and along the shorter axis one kilometer. The center of the cross was the sanctuary and, above it, the remains of the bell tower. The shorter arms of the cross were roofed, but the longer arms held courtyards in their centers.
Koldyeze had been built as a self-sufficient religious community, even though the churchmen were not at all withdrawn from their society. When the Tahn had ordered Koldyeze abandoned, the pacifistic communards had systematically closed it down, sealing passageways and chambers as they went.
To the Tahn, Koldyeze seemed ideally suited to become a prison. Activating it required no drain on scarce building materials. The power drain from Heath's grid should be minimal. The assigned prisoners would provide the work crews to make the complex livable.
The northernmost short arm, where the main entrance to Koldyeze had been located, was sealed off from the other wings, and the chambers around its courtyard were set up as guard and administration quarters. The passage from the guard courtyard into the center sanctuary was set with detectors and triple gates.
Four rows of fencing with mines and detectors between each row surrounded Koldyeze.
Then, even though the security precautions were not complete, Koldyeze was ready for prisoners. The outer perimeter, after all, was sealed—and none of the Imperials could fly. Further antiescape measures would be added as time went by.
The Tahn believed that Koldyeze was escape proof.
The Imperial prisoners straggling through the thick stone and steel gates looked about them and believed that somehow, somewhere, a clever being could manage to find freedom.
And there was no reason at all why it could not be one of them.
[Back to Table of Contents]
CHAPTER NINE
INSIDE THE COURTYARD, the Imperial prisoners were shouted and pummeled into a formation. Most interesting, Sten thought, as he analyzed the guards.
They looked much as he had expected and experienced in his previous camp: over muscled bullyboys, semicrippled ex-combatants, and soldiers too old or too young to be assigned to the front.
Their obscenities and threats were also the same.
But none of them carried whips. They were armed with truncheons or stun rods—which seemed mere patty aw weapons to the thoroughly brutalized prisoners. No projectile weapons were being waved about. And no one had been slammed to the ground with a rifle butt, which was the standard Tahn request for attention.
The main shouter wore the rank tabs of a police major. He was a hulk of a man whose broad leather belt was losing its battle with his paunch. As he roared orders, one hand kept creeping toward his holstered pistol, then was forced away. The man's face was amazingly scarred.
"Tha’ be't ae screw,” Alex whispered, lips motionless, “thae hae plac'd second in a wee brawl wi’ ae bear."
Eventually the formation looked adequate, and Colonel Virunga limped to his place at its front. That had been one of the few cheery notes of the long crawl through space on the prison ship: Virunga was senior Imperial officer and would therefore be in command of the prisoners in the new camp.
Virunga eyed his command and started to bring them to attention. Then he caught himself.
Standing ostentatiously away from the prisoners was a single defiant being. He—she? it?—was about a meter and a half in height and squatted on his thick lower legs as if early in his race's evolution there had been a tail provided for tripodal security. His upper arms were almost as large as his lower legs, ending in enormous bone-appearing gauntlets and incongruously sle
nder fingers.
The being had no neck, its shoulders flowing into a tapering skull that ended in a dozen pink tendrils that Virunga guessed were its sensory organs. The being had once been fat, with sleek fur. Now the ragged pelt draped down in togalike folds over its body.
Colonel Virunga had been denied access to the prisoners’ records aboard ship, and of course there had not been time to meet every one of the purged prisoners. But he wondered how he had missed that one.
"Form up, troop."
"I am not a troop, and I shall not form up,” the being squeaked. “I am Lay Reader Cristata, I am a civilian, I endorse neither the Empire nor the Tahn, and I am being unjustly held and forced to be a part of this machinery of death."
Virunga goggled. Did Cristata think that any of them had volunteered to be POWs? Even more wonderment: How had that paragon of resistance managed to survive in a prison camp so long?
The police major trumpeted incoherently, and two guards leapt toward Cristata, batons ready. But before they could pummel him to the ground, a large man wearing the tatters of an infantryman's combat coveralls grabbed Cristata by his harness and dragged him bodily into the formation. Evidently the use of force satisfied Cristata's objections, because he then remained meekly where planted.
"Formation ... ten-hut."
Virunga about-faced, leaned on his cane, and stared up at a balcony on the third level. He could see two faces looking down at him from behind the barred, clear plas doors.
He waited for the prisoners’ new lords and masters to make their appearance.
[Back to Table of Contents]
CHAPTER TEN
POLICE COLONEL DERZHIN was, in his own mind, despite his rank, neither a cop nor a military officer. Many years before, long before the war with the Empire, he had been a junior lieutenant in the Tahn ranks, assigned to a survey ship. Somehow one of the emergency oxygen containers on the ship's bridge had exploded, killing all four of the ranking officers and, worse, destroying the ship's navcomputer. Derzhin, the sole surviving officer, had taken command and managed—mostly by luck, he thought—to limp to an inhabited world.
The Tahn livies must have been hurting for a hero that week, because they made much of the lieutenant. Derzhin received a couple of hero medals and a promotion, but that did not aim him toward a career in the military. A year later, after the publicity had been forgotten, Derzhin quietly bought his way out of the service. His medals got him a lower-management job in one of Pastour's corporations.
Derzhin was promoted rapidly as he showed a rare talent for the proper utilization of personnel and available resources. Pastour once said that Derzhin could be put on an asteroid with six anthropoids and two hammers and, within a year, would have a priority E ship in the sky and three variant models on the production line.
Derzhin maintained his commission in the inactive reserve for the social clout it gave him in the business community. He was not, of course, antimilitary. He was a Tahn. He never questioned his race's moral rectitude or the lightness of the war.
But he would rather not have been brought back into the military by the general call-up at its beginning. Nor was Pastour happy to lose his talents.
When Pastour realized that a very valuable, highly trained resource—the Imperial prisoners—was being wasted through high-principled flummery and saw a proper utilization for that resource, he immediately set out to get Derzhin to run the project.
He recognized that no executive, no matter how qualified, could instantly become a warden, and so he gave Derzhin backup.
His backup was Security Major Avrenti. Avrenti, too, was not a warden—experienced prison administrators were in high demand. Avrenti was one of the Tahn Empire's most skilled countersabotage specialists. Anyone who could prevent the planting of a minuscule bomb or the contamination of a war material or who could identify a potential saboteur long before he became active should have had no trouble keeping known malcontents imprisoned within a known and heavily guarded area.
Avrenti was physically unremarkable. Anyone who met him casually would forget his face minutes after his departure.
He would have made an excellent spy. He was soft-spoken and nonargumentative, preferring to win through reason and persistence. His one affectation was his wearing of archaic eyeglasses. When anyone asked why he had never had corrective surgery, implants, or replacements, he professed a dislike for medicos. Actually, he had vision very close to normal. He used his glasses as a stall, giving him time to consider the proper answer or policy, just as other beings used fingering devices, writing instruments, or the careful preparation and consumption of stimulants.
The two men looked down at their charges.
"I imagine,” Derzhin said finally, “that I am expected to make some kind of speech."
"That seems to be requisite for a warden,” Avrenti agreed.
Derzhin smiled slightly. “You know, Major, that part of business requires an ability to speak publicly."
"One of the many reasons I preferred to remain what I am,” Avrenti said.
"Yes. I have spoken to lords and drunken roustabouts, but I cannot recollect ever having addressed war prisoners."
Avrenti did not comment.
"Actually,” Derzhin mused, “it should be quite simple. All I need to do is suggest that they are here to work for the greater glory of the Tahn. If they perform, they shall be rewarded with seeing the next sunrise. If they resist, or attempt to escape ... even an Imperial should see the logic in that."
Again Avrenti was silent.
"Do you agree, Major? Is that the correct approach? You are more familiar with military thinking than I."
"I can be of little assistance,” the major said. “I do not understand the mind of a soldier who can find himself in the hands of the enemy and not seek self-extinction at the first opportunity."
Derzhin kept his expression and tone of voice quite neutral. “There is that, of course."
And he opened the balcony doors and stepped out.
* * * *
Police Major Genrikh slammed back into his quarters, wanting to feel out of control.
He held the solid wood door ready to crash closed—then caught himself. He pushed it shut softly. Then he tore off his Sam Browne belt, intending to hurl it. Again he stopped.
He had just witnessed a nightmare.
But should he give in to it? What was the likelihood that his quarters were not bugged? None. Genrikh would have bugged himself.
Instead, he carefully hung his harness over a chair, opened a cabinet, extracted a bottle, checked the bottle to see whether its level had been marked, drank deeply, and sank back on his bunk.
This was going to be a disaster.
Then he cheered himself. Hadn't he been warned? Hadn't he been told, first by Lord Wichman's cutout, then when he was duly if privately honored by a presence with the lord himself?
But still.
Genrikh ground his teeth against his bottleneck, producing a singularly unpleasant noise. He had spent half a lifetime as an expert penologist. He knew the way to handle the subbeings that committed crimes. Crime to him was anything that contradicted the Way of the Tahn, which he defined as anything that his current superior ordered.
Genrikh's mother was a whore; his father was a question mark. He had fantasized, growing up, that his father was a rising officer whose forced marriage had made him seek happiness in other quarters. That did not mean that he saw his mother as a fairy princess—but Genrikh's dreams were never very coherent.
Genrikh grew up feeling himself an outcast and fearing that someday he would be revealed for what he was and scorned. He was indeed scorned by his compatriots—scorned for being the first to toady to the newest bully, for being the first to inform on any minor offense, for being the first to volunteer for any superior-suggested idea.
He was the ideal prison official.
Genrikh, in spite of his obsessive concern with others’ morals, had no problem acquiring anything and every
thing he could within the prison system. He was in his own dim-witted way a truly immoral being.
Needless to say, he rose rapidly in the Tahn prison system, so rapidly that he was chosen for greater things. Before the war, the Tahn Council had seen the emergence of unions among their exploited workers and had instantly realized the necessity to destroy anybody that did not represent their own best interests.
Genrikh was a natural choice to head company unions or to act as a strikebreaker or an informer.
But even the embryonic unions within the Tahn systems had eventually put out the word: Anyone matching Genrikh's description was pure trouble—trouble that, if it was convenient, should be deposited in the nearest paddy with many, many puncture wounds.
Genrikh's ultimate controller, Lord Wichman, chose not to discard his thug. Instead, he made him head of his personal bodyguard while trying to find a new place to deploy the man. Wichman knew that Genrikh was absolutely loyal to him. The man was ideal to insert into Pastour's scheme, no matter what it really was.
Genrikh, now calm, sipped from his bottle and considered what he would have done had he been appointed commandant of the prison. A good thing to think about. He smiled to himself. Because very, very soon he would be the commandant.
Yes.
You are in front of an assemblage of not only criminals but cowards and traitors, he told himself. Genrikh thought that anyone who did not kowtow to the Tahn was a traitor.
All right. You want technicians, he mused. But first you must bring them under control. Yes. Bring them into the courtyard at attention. Then select, at random, 100 of the Imperials—there were a thousand in that courtyard—and have them beaten to death.
No, he corrected himself. Select that 100 and then require the others to kill them. Kill them or be killed. Yes. That would produce the correct attitude.
Housing? Food? Nonsense. Let them live in fields and eat roots. Wasn't the clotting Empire rich with people, none of whom would really fight until they died? The resource should be exploited like cattle—use them until they drop, because there are many, many possible replacements.