by Graham Brown
For the next few minutes this group moved among the captives like sharks in a lagoon. All eyes were on them, fearful and trembling. Eventually they grew close to where James and Bethel stood.
James pressed himself back into the shadows as the inspector dropped down beside another man lying on the floor.
After administering his black light test, the inspector shook his head and turned to the thugs helping him. “This one’s got it. We have to remove him.”
The thugs glanced at one another and then began to look around. Whatever the poor bastard had, they didn’t want to touch him.
“You two,” one of the guards shouted, looking at James and Bethel. “Get over here.”
Bethel climbed to his feet but James hesitated, not wanting to be any closer to the thugs than necessary.
“I ain’t gonna ask you twice!”
Reluctantly, James pushed off the wall and stepped forward.
“Pick him up,” they demanded.
James grabbed the man’s feet, while Bethel grabbed the man by his arms. They lifted the man easily. He was emaciated and light as a feather.
“Follow us,” another of the mercenaries ordered as he turned for the door.
With little choice, James and Bethel carried the unconscious man across the large compartment. James could see him sweating and suffering minor tremors. There was odd pallor to his face, jaundiced and yellow.
“Where are we taking him?” Bethel asked.
“Keep moving,” one of the thugs grunted, “and keep your mouth shut.”
They carried the man through the door and out into a hall.
“This way,” the inspector said, heading down the dimly lit passage.
James and Bethel followed him to the far end. A journey of over a hundred yards. As they went, James noticed the markings on the walls and the bundles of power and data conduits. A door with faded stencil marks read Cargo Bay Delta. Another, slightly newer paint job outlined Cargo Bay Gamma and a warning about oxidizers inside.
James was now certain. They were on a huge transport. A ship this big could only be going one place.
At the far end, the inspector stopped and used a keypad to open a door.
“Inside,” he ordered.
James and Bethel made the turn. The room was the size of an average garage. A conveyer belt sat on one side and a sealed door sat a few feet down. Warnings written in three languages and surrounded by attention grabbing diagonal hash marks read “Danger Air-Lock.”
Bethel had gone in backwards. He hadn’t seen it yet. James almost hoped he wouldn’t, but Bethel turned and glanced over his shoulder. Through a small portal three feet in diameter, the blackness of empty space loomed.
“Put him on the belt,” one of the guards demanded.
Bethel hesitated. “Wait,” he said, seeming to grasp what was about to happen.
“This man’s ill,” the guard shouted.
“He has shuddering sickness,” Bethel replied, “which can be cured.”
“Not here it can’t,” the guard shouted. “He’ll infect the whole lot of you. Now put him on the damned belt.”
The man stepped toward Bethel and raised a metal baton.
“No,” Bethel shouted, “Listen to me! It’s a simple treat--”
Before Bethel could finish the guard slammed the baton into his arm. Bethel winced and went to his knees.
“Please!” he shouted again. “All he needs is-”
Another blow landed. This time on Bethel’s back. He cried out in pain but still held on.
A kick from the guard hit him in the face. “Let go of him, you filthy rat!”
The guard raised his baton high as if he would cave Bethel’s head in. But still Bethel tried to protect the sick man in his care.
James reared back and yanked the sick man from Bethel’s grasp. As soon as he’d pulled the man free, James heaved him up and slammed him down on the conveyer.
“He’s on it!” he shouted, hoping to prevent Bethel from being injured further. “He’s on the belt!”
Covering up from a reign of blows, Bethel glanced up, just as a last punch came flying in and knocked him to the floor.
Satisfied with the beating, the mercenaries stepped back. One of them went to the controls and engaged the conveyor belt. The sick man was carried forward into a small compartment designed for compressed waste. A door slammed behind him and was quickly pressure sealed.
A yellow warning light flashed twice and then went green. Without a trace of emotion, the man at the controls pressed the eject button. With a rush of air the sick man was launched out into space. He vanished into the darkness, venting oxygen and a mist of blood, as his body decompressed almost instantly.
In the center of the room, Bethel remained on his knees. His shoulders sagged and his eyes seemed locked on the cold steel deck.
“Get up,” one of the mercenaries grunted.
Bethel didn’t respond; he seemed to have lost the will to stand.
“I said, get up!” the thug yelled, raising his baton again.
Before they could start another beating, James grabbed Bethel by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet.
“Get them out of here,” the airlock operator shouted to the mercenaries. “And finish the assessment before Gault has a fit. We’ll be on Mars in two days.”
The inspector opened the door. James and Bethel were forced out into the hall and marched back to the cargo hold that was their prison.
Bethel stumbled as the door clanged shut behind them. He was in a daze. James grabbed him to keep him from falling. But as soon as he was up, Bethel pulled violently loose from James.
“Why did you help them?” he said sharply. “They just murdered that man and you helped them to do it!”
James steeled himself against the accusation. “I didn’t really have much of a choice, did I?”
“There’s always a choice.”
“Not with people like these,” James insisted.
“All he needed was basic treatment,” Bethel insisted. “A few days of antibiotics and he’d be fine.”
“Antibiotics?” James said. “Are you kidding me? Look around you. We’re just cargo to these people. Not even worth the cost of a bullet. You’re lucky they didn’t throw your ass out that airlock for fighting with them.”
“And would you have let them?”
James leaned in close. Either Bethel was living in some delusion or he was deliberately antagonizing James. “Get this straight,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “I wouldn’t have been able to stop them if I tried. And I’m not about to get myself killed for something as pointless as a losing battle.”
Bethel continued to stare back at James. “Sometimes you have to act no matter what the consequences are.”
“And sometimes you have stay alive first and worry about everything else later.”
Bethel looked away. He seemed hurt by the words. His face portrayed a type of sadness and disappointment, reminding James of the look his father often wore.
When he turned back to James, the look was gone. Perhaps the reality of the situation had set in. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand any of this. Can we really be two days from Mars?”
James nodded. He ran a hand over his own scruffy face. “We’ve been on this ship for weeks.”
“You think they’ve kept us asleep?”
James nodded. “Reduces the chances of a rebellion. Saves them money too. We eat less, drink less.”
“But now they’re giving us liquid protein,” Bethel noted.
James thought about that. “They must want us to have some strength,” he said. “They’ll probably feed us for the next few days and then, when we set down on the planet, they’ll put us to work.”
“Doing what?”
“Building pyramids for the new Pharaoh.”
Bethel nodded. He seemed to understand what James was saying.
James grabbed one of the protein mixtures, broke the seal and
took a swig. It was horrid, but he choked it down.
He thought of the argument in the cemetery, his father’s warnings about the Cartel and their designs on Mars. They’d fallen on deaf ears and now… now it seemed like the Cartel had won. They had everything they wanted: the dying Earth, the blossoming planet of Mars, and the only man who’d ever stood in their way was gone.
James looked around at the others. They were sick and weak. The disposable members of society, the very ones his father had insisted mattered. And James was now one of them. He felt small and worthless. Defeated like he’d never been before.
He wondered how many others had died in the coup, if all his father’s allies had been wiped out, and if the military had been splintered or a new civil war had begun. These questions were too big for him, too big for a captive. He needed to focus on smaller things. For now all he could do was survive.
Determined that he would at least do that, James took another gulp of the awful liquid and prayed it would give him strength. As he drank it down, he felt sick to his stomach but it wasn’t the liquid meal that got him. It was the irony of life.
Had he listened to his father, he could have come to Mars as a prince, as the chosen one, a military governor and de-facto ruler of Earth’s only hope. Instead, he would arrive as a slave.
CHAPTER 18
Olympia City, Mars
Hannah sat in Cassini’s office, a chamber that had once been Chief Councilman Aaron’s before his arrest. In the month since then, Cassini had given the office a military flavor, like everything else in the city.
While she sat and waited, he paced, dictating an order to one of his aides. Only when that was finished did he address her. “A pleasure to see you again, Dr. Ankaris.”
“The pleasure is mine,” she said. “I’d hoped we could talk about the prisoners. Schedule an examination so that I can assure the rest of the colonists that they’re being treated well and are in good health.”
She sounded both earnest and excited. She was a good liar.
“No need for you to see them,” Cassini replied, flippantly. “I can assure you they’re being well taken care of.”
She nodded. There was nothing to be gained by pushing at this point.
He came around to the front of the desk and took a seat on the edge a little too close for Hannah’s liking. The way his eyes lingered on her, Hannah guessed it wasn’t accidental.
“But there is something I need from you,” he said.
“What might that be?”
“We’re trying desperately to speed up the Terra-forming work,” he said. “To do that, President Collins has issued an executive order. New laborers are on their way. Ten thousand of them. They will land in a few days.”
“Laborers?”
“Convicted criminals,” Cassini said. “Itinerants, vagrants, the homeless.”
Slaves. She almost let it slip. Somehow she managed to keep her disgust bottled up inside her.
“Forced labor?” she asked.
“In a way,” Cassini pontificated, “but you shouldn’t think of it like that. More like a second chance for these people. They are the poorest of the poor. The very souls who will starve first if we do not rapidly begin shipping more grain to Earth. Back home they live like parasites, but here they can contribute.”
“How?”
“They can work out beyond the shelter of the shielding array, do the grunt work that must be done before we can expand; building new shelters, grading new fields and digging trenches for the aqueducts and the foundations of the new cities we need to create. Tasks that would give them a purpose, a reason for living, unlike their miserable existence on Earth.”
He made it sound so noble. “They won’t survive long out there.”
“They’ll work at night,” he explained. “They’ll live underground during the day.”
“The conditions are still too harsh,” she pointed out. “The air is too thin. It takes weeks to get used to it. You know that. Not to mention the possibility of them bringing disease or other contaminants here. “
“Yes,” he said as if annoyed by these trifles. “And that’s where you and your staff come in. You will set up a checkpoint of sorts. We have no time for quarantine, just a screening process. Your staff will give them hemoglobin boosters that will help them deal with the thin air. You’ll also scan them for infectious diseases. Because we’ll need to be able to track them, you’ll implant identification and tracking sensors and then you’ll clear them through. My people will take it from there.”
She looked away, not replying for the moment. She knew it wasn’t a request. Cassini had imprisoned anyone who defied him.
He stepped forward and crouched before her putting a hand on her shoulder as if to comfort her. Her stomach turned at his touch, but she didn’t show it.
“It’s necessary,” he said. “You understand that… right?”
“I understand the goal,” she said. “But you must know most of them will die, no matter what I give them.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about that. The president will be sending more to replace them.”
She forced a smile, but she knew for a fact that Collins would not approve of this. Not after he’d sent her here to chase down rumors that the Cartel was already using slave labor.
The order gave her a sense of clarity. It meant the president was dead or at least no longer in power. The Cartel had taken over. There was no longer any doubt.
She stared Cassini in the eye and forced a sad but understanding look. “A cost-benefit analysis would suggest that you’re right. Billions will die on Earth if we don’t hurry. I’ll get my people ready.”
He smiled, a wicked and lusty smile all at the same time. He was enjoying this. “Good,” he said. “I knew I could trust you.”
CHAPTER 19
Empress Transport, Mars Orbit
As the nine hundred foot transport approached the curved red surface of Mars, it began to slow and descend toward the planet with the firing of retro rockets. They remained on until the huge vessel entered the atmosphere and its hull began heating up.
Continued use of the thrusters became dangerous at this point. Instead, a dozen air-brakes were deployed. Huge, metallic wings that increased the drag on the ship and slowed it to a velocity at which the heat from re-entry would no longer be an issue.
Seen from the surface, it crossed the night sky trailing a wake of smoke and fire like a meteorite or an angel cast out from heaven. When it had finally slowed to a manageable speed, the retro-thrusters were reactivated and the ship slowed to a stop before descending the last hundred feet vertically and slamming down on a landing pad made of packed gravel.
The gravel compressed and was pushed sideways like water on the ocean, spreading the ship’s weight out evenly. Huge landing struts extended at a thirty-degree angle from a dozen spots on the side of the transport. Reaching the gravel, they wedged themselves into the surface like outriggers on a canoe.
With the struts in place the ship was stable, rock solid on its keel.
Inside the vessel that stability was welcomed. The descent had been a nightmare for the men, women and children in the cargo bays. The shape of the bay amplified the shuddering of the huge vessel. There were no seats or straps or hand holds to grab, and the hundreds of people in each bay were tossed around like loose change. Several ended up with broken arms or legs. Many more received nasty bruises.
Then came the heat of re-entry. Unlike the crew compartments, the cargo bay was not well shielded from the heat. In thirty seconds, the frost on the walls had melted and run down the plates as if the bulkheads were bleeding.
Thirty seconds later the walls had become too hot to touch and the huge bays became steam rooms as the water evaporated. The temperature peaked at one hundred fifty degrees, just before the loud bang of the air-brakes deploying could be heard.
From there the ship shook and shuddered as what sounded like a hurricane raged outside. The noise was horrendous, and
the screams and cries of those who thought they were dying or descending into hell only made it worse.
When the retro-thrusters came back on James knew they were almost down.
“Brace yourself,” he said to Bethel.
Using the rag of his shirt to wrap his hands, Bethel tried to hold on to one of the support beams. It was too hot.
“Easier said than done,” he said.
James nodded and sensed the ship stopping and sinking. The final touchdown was abrupt and painful and sent those who were still standing tumbling back to the floor.
There they waited, sweating in the stifling heat, listening to the clanking sounds of the struts extending and the ratcheting noise of the air-brakes being retracted. All around them the hull creaked and popped as it shed the heat of re-entry.
With a final bang that reverberated through the hull, silence returned.
“Now what?” Bethel said.
“I’m not sure we want to know.”
It took a while, but eventually the interior doors were opened. Cool air swept in followed by several dozen mercenaries. They pointed to the nearest of the prisoners, grabbing a few and sending them through the door.
“Let’s go!” one shouted to the crowd. “Come on, move.”
With ruthless efficiency, they began pushing and shoving the captives through the doors like cattle being separated in the pen.
James could see a type of fear in Bethel’s eyes. He grabbed Bethel by the shoulder as the mercenaries closed in. “Stay with me,” he said.
Bethel nodded and soon they were in the line being pushed and shoved forward, as much by the human wave of the other captives as by the mercenaries.
A woman stumbled a few yards ahead and was half trampled by the time James and Bethel reached her. James tried to help her up, but she fell again, her leg was broken. Bethel tried to reach back but the surging line kept moving, pushing him along like the current of a strong river.
The crowd swept over her and she disappeared from view.
“Stay on your feet,” James urged.