Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  “Yeah, we’re walking a fine line there,” Mildred said.

  Doc grinned at her joke; Oscar didn’t catch the sarcasm.

  The butcher widened the cut by gripping the skin with gloved hands and pulling the edges apart. Coils of greasy guts slid out the bottom and into a strategically placed ten-gallon bucket on the floor. There was such a volume of intestine that the bucket was instantly filled to the brim. Oscar slopped the overflow into a second white plastic bucket.

  “Cut here at the gullet and airway,” he said as he made the incisions with his knifepoint, “then pull out the heart, stomach and lungs. The rest will follow—like this.”

  The remaining organs flopped into the backup bucket.

  “Make your last cut just above the poop chute, right here. And that’s that. Gutting is the easy part.”

  A female worker in navy blue hurried over to hoist the heavy buckets onto the metal table. Taking up a knife, she quickly excised the bulging stomach from the rest of the innards, then sliced it open over an empty bucket. Using both hands, she squeezed forth a slimy mess of half-digested herring, anchovy and other unidentifiable small fish and crustaceans. What skin remained on the little fish had a dull, yellowish cast from the animal’s stomach acid. The stench was like being downwind of a gray whale’s blowhole.

  “Are you saving that to make fertilizer?” Mildred asked through the fingers clamped over her nose.

  The worker laughed. She grabbed a gloved handful of the putrid slurry, then squeezed it in her fist, making it squirt into her open mouth. As she chewed, she gave them a thumbs-up.

  A man in black swooped in from behind and whacked her sharply on the back of the skull. “You know better than that,” he said, raising the truncheon again. “Now get back to work.”

  A second reminder wasn’t necessary.

  “Go on, you open up one,” Oscar told Mildred. He handed her the knife and pointed at the next carcass in line. Unlike the others, its head was intact. It had a long black beak, large vacantly staring eyes. Only in overall body shape did it resemble the emperor penguins she’d seen in zoos and in National Geographic. There was a cluster of tightly spaced bullet holes high in the middle of its chest.

  She had to stand on her tiptoes and reach as far as she could to correctly position the knifepoint. Making the first cut was difficult because the breastbone was deceptively massive, evolved to support the powerful wings. Once she got under the bone, the tip slid easily through the skin. She sliced downward as she’d seen Oscar do. Halfway through the cut, dark blood began to pour from the incision, splattering into the waiting bucket. It was the internal bleed from the chest wounds. Mildred held her breath as she yarded out double handfuls of guts.

  Once both carcasses were cleaned of entrails and organs, and the cavities hosed down, Oscar showed them the next step.

  “Can’t pluck off the feathers,” he said. “Too densely packed. Takes forever to do the job with pliers. So we just skin them out. Make sure your blade is hair-splitting sharp. If it isn’t, touch it up on the stone on the table. The idea is to leave the fat on the meat instead of removing it with the cape.”

  He then proceeded to demonstrate the process, starting at the angry stub of neck. The feathered cape peeled away quite easily from the shoulders, riding as it did on a thick layer of brown blubber. He cut around the base of the wings, then throwing his full body weight into the task, ripped the skin of the torso down until it draped in gory folds on the floor. He used a pair of long-handled shears to snip off the webbed, taloned feet at the ankles and dropped them into a bucket of similar clippings. He finished by pulling the skin down over the stumps of wrinkly skinned legs.

  As Oscar rolled up the cape, Mildred felt a nudge from Doc.

  “What pray tell is a ‘clonie’?” he said.

  “Cloned organism is my guess. These bastards must be protein starved. The south pole is a frozen desert.”

  Doc nudged her again, indicating with a nod all the gleaming blades lined up on the table. They had their hands free, edged weapons were within easy reach, but they still didn’t know what they were up against. The fact that the knives were so available bothered her. Why would their captors trust them? Unless they were so outnumbered and outgunned it didn’t matter.

  “Not yet,” she said, taking in the dozens of carcasses in the process of disassembly and the laborers doing the work. “We haven’t seen enough to make our move.”

  Skinning pengies turned out to be much harder than it looked because of the weight of the wet cape as it was peeled back. She and Doc worked together to tear it down the length of the carcass. Once that was done, Oscar began the next lesson, separating the still feathered wings from the torso. He cut the heavy shoulder joints at just the right angle and the wings dropped off, falling into the bucket.

  “You can’t split the backbone with a knife,” Oscar said. “Too damn thick.” He picked up a handsaw with prominent teeth and stepped onto an overturned bucket. “Start here,” he told them, “get the blade bit into the center of the spinal column. Be careful to stay in the middle of the spine and go slow so you make a clean cut all the way down.”

  It took five or six minutes of concerted effort for him to reach the tailbone. As the cut deepened, the unmeathooked half of pengie began to separate, leaning outward. Oscar directed Mildred and Doc to catch the weight on their shoulders to keep the saw from catching. Bonemeal mixed with blood dripped steadily into the bucket.

  When the carcass was cut clean through, the half pengie, well over 150 pounds, came down on their backs. Oscar waved for them to flop it onto the metal table, which they did. He then picked up cleaver and butcher knife and set about cutting it into chops and roasts. The dense meat was almost black and very slippery because of the fat, which remained soft and wet even in the cold room.

  Mildred and Doc were transferring the final product to a rolling cart when the annoying Muzak was replaced by the sound of buzzer.

  All around, workers put down their tools and headed for the exit.

  “What’s going on?” Mildred asked.

  “It’s lunch break,” Oscar said. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on, the cafeteria is this way.”

  They left their bibfronts and gloves on the hooks in the hall and followed their instructor and the others. As they moved deeper into the center of the complex, Mildred scanned the walls, hoping to see the multilevel, full-scale maps they’d found in other redoubts. That would give them an idea of its size and layout and their position relative to escape routes. But there were no maps. The walls were unbroken expanses of blank gray concrete.

  The throng filed into a sprawling, low-ceilinged room with row upon row of occupied tables, and headed for the serving area at the back. The aromas from the kitchen were complex, semi-industrial and thoroughly off-putting: the bouquet of burning tires mingled with scorched oatmeal and smoking fish grease.

  Roughly two hundred people were already eating. There were men and women, a mixed bag of racial types, but none that Mildred could see were fat or old. There were no children, either. The diners were, if anything, uniformly scrawny. A few wore whitecoats, while the others were dressed in overalls of different colors—navy, green, black, red, orange, khaki. She and Doc were the only yellows in the room, and that drew stares from all sides. Over the piped-in Muzak there was hubbub and clatter, loud conversation and laughter. The setting made her think back to the year 2000, when she had been a guest for lunch at the Microsoft campus outside Seattle. Except the residents here were hunched over their plates, all business, shoveling in grub as fast as they could. She wondered what they all did to earn their keep.

  “Get in line over here,” Oscar told them. “Grab a tray.”

  Mildred and Doc did as they were told, sliding empty trays along belt-high rails toward the serving stations. Behind glass sneeze guards, workers in white wer
e ladling food from a hot table setup—rows of stainless-steel trays—onto plates. As Mildred got closer, she could see what was on offer. There was a purple-black porridge dish. When served it was decorated with a spiky crown of what looked like black potato chips. Next to it in a serving tray was a gellike material—it looked like a mass of clear silicon caulk. Accompanying this were round slices of a compact bread smeared with gray paste.

  As the server, a stick-figure female in a hairnet, spooned a big gob of the black porridge for her, Mildred said, “Uh, what is that?”

  The cafeteria worker looked up from the plate she held and took notice of the yellow overalls. “Sure thing, newbie,” she said, slapping the porridge down dead center. “This is quinoa steamed with pengie blood.” She grabbed a handful of the blackened chips from an adjoining tray and deftly made a little crown of them. “With pengie skin crispies for garnish and a side of anchovy-herring pâté on quinoa bread.” Using a different serving spoon, she scooped up some of the clear stuff and let it ooze onto the plate. “And this is pengie egg soufflé.”

  “Looks like uncooked egg white to me,” Mildred said.

  “It’s pengie egg,” the server said, as if that information explained everything.

  “So?”

  The woman shot Mildred an exasperated look. “Pengie egg,” she repeated slowly as if to a small child. “The white never sets. It always looks like that, no matter how long you cook it or at how high a temperature. It’s protected by some kind of natural antifreeze. Don’t worry it’s fresh...”

  Her words were lost in a sudden, grinding roar. Then everything began to shake. A Klaxon blasted a series of hair-raising pulses, obliterating the symphonic version of a Barry Manilow classic.

  “Hang on!” the server shouted at them.

  Mildred and Doc grabbed for the serving rails to keep from being thrown to the floor, which undulated in waves, as if it had turned to liquid. Gray dust rained down from the ceiling. The glass counter windows rattled violently in their steel frames. No one screamed, no one abandoned their food. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.

  “Just a little icequake,” Oscar said. “Nothing to worry about. You’ll get used to them.”

  Then he turned to the server and said, “Give them each a full portion. They’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  Mildred protested the show of generosity, but to no avail. A full portion is what she was handed.

  When Doc received his plate, he stared in horror at the pâté of glistening, smashed, predigested fish.

  The man in line behind them had to have read Doc’s expression because he leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re not going to eat that...”

  Chapter Three

  Doubled over from the sucker kick to the groin and gasping for air, Ryan didn’t hear the door shut behind Lima and his entourage. The pain would have dropped him to his knees but for the fact that his wrists were tethered behind his back to the wall.

  “You okay, lover?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute.”

  “Bastards,” Jak gritted, his red eyes flashing with hate.

  “Only thing you can trust them to do,” J.B. said, “is stab you in the back. And they’ll do it every time.”

  Backstabbing was only one in a long list of their crimes. With their soft, uncallused hands, whitecoats had engineered and facilitated the destruction of civilization. They were the cause of suffering on an unimaginable scale, despised by all Deathlanders, norm and mutie. These spineless puppet masters hid behind their high principles—objectivity, accuracy and the search for pure knowledge—like their shit didn’t stink, but in reality they were no different from any other lying, thieving coldheart scum. They had promised humanity a glorious, ever-expanding future, but it was a sham, a carny hoax to suck up power, resources and wealth. It turned out what the population prior to 2001 had bought and paid for was murder and devastation on a global scale. Ryan slowly straightened up, grimacing.

  “Do you believe we’ve been changed by something triple bad like Lima said?” Krysty asked him. “Something we could pass on?”

  “Who knows?” Ryan replied. “If you think about it, the head whitecoat didn’t tell us much. He never explained why we’re here. Or how they got us here. He changed the subject right away to what’s wrong with us.”

  “Did you notice he gave us his name but didn’t ask for ours?” Krysty asked. “Like we weren’t going to be around long enough for it to matter.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, “not a good sign.”

  “What are they going to do to us now?” Ricky asked.

  “We don’t know what the ‘treatment’ Lima has in mind is all about,” Krysty said. “Or how long it will take. And if we’re lucky enough to survive it, we don’t know what they’ll do to us afterward.”

  “Or even if there is a nukin’ treatment,” J.B. said. “Could be a way to keep us cowed until they get what they want out of us.”

  Ryan nodded his agreement. It was just more of the same as far as he was concerned, telling people what they wanted to hear. Work less. Cheaper food. Cheaper housing. Longer life. If you get sick, no worries, we’ll fix you. Why change the line of bullshit when it always worked?

  “I think there’s a good chance we’ll be separated,” he told the others. “That would make us a lot easier to control. If it happens, remember that Mildred and Doc are already in the redoubt, and if they haven’t freed themselves by now they soon will. You can bet on that. If we just hang tight, even if we’re separated they’ll find us. And no matter what these bastards put you through, remember you’re not alone. Everyone else is looking for a way to regroup and escape. We survived Oracle and sailing around the Horn. If we bide our time and stay sharp, we’ll survive this.”

  “Where’s the food they promise?” Ricky asked.

  Like most teenaged boys, Ricky Morales’s stomach was a bottomless pit.

  “They’re holding out the carrot,” Ryan said, “which keeps us off-balance. Like there’s a chance they’re still going to play nice.”

  “And mebbe not chill us,” J.B. added.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten,” Ricky said. “Carrots sound good to me.”

  By Ryan’s reckoning they shared a meal a little over twelve hours ago. They had stopped for a quick bite before checking out a redoubt near White Sands, New Mex. There was only one item on the menu: jackrabbit. The critters had screamed like scalded babies when struck by Jak’s throwing knives, jumping six feet in the air, turning mad somersaults and pinwheeling sprays of blood. Ryan and J.B. had cut off the heads so no one had to look at their faces, which were pink and hairless save for long whiskers and bushy eyebrows. Their two-foot-long ears were likewise off-putting, so riddled with needle wormholes they looked like brown lace.

  Skinned out and roasted on spits the jackrabbits were a bit gamy and tough, but the companions laid into them until there was nothing left but a pile of stripped bones. After they had finished eating, they lit their torches and headed for the redoubt’s mountainside entrance. Some nameless, probably long dead joker had scratched a message into the stone above the gaping entrance: For Sale by Owner, Needs Work. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen graffiti; the same kind of message had decorated the entrances of one or two other plundered redoubts across the hellscape. Because the joke was so old, none of the companions bothered to comment.

  It turned out the place was occupied by squatters—a colony of stickies had taken up residence; the corridors were crawling with the spindly pale creatures. The companions descended five floors beneath the surface and stumbled on a writhing, ten-deep, stickie clusterfuck. Something had triggered a mating frenzy. There were too many to chill, and they couldn’t reverse course because the way out was blocked by arm-waving bodies, sucker fingers and needle teeth.

  A running
fight to the death ensued, down the dark corridors and seemingly endless staircases. Before they were overrun, they managed to find and reach the redoubt’s mat-trans unit. If it had been out of commission, the game of survival they had played for so long would have been over.

  Permanently.

  But the mat-trans had powered up, and they slammed and sealed the door behind them. Faint shadows on the armaglass walls indicated that the anteroom on the other side of the chamber was packed with leaping, shrieking muties. The last thing Ryan saw before jump sleep overtook him were what he took to be the smears of sucker juice on the opaque armaglass.

  From frying pan into fire, he thought.

  The door opened and Lima reentered, this time with two men in black coveralls at his side. They all wore respirators.

  The whitecoat kept his distance from Ryan, apparently fearing reprisal. “Each of you will be quarantined and receive separate treatment,” he told them. “The procedure is necessary to avoid accidental recontamination.”

  Lima turned to his lackeys and said, “The one-eyed man will go first.”

  The black suits quickly unshackled Ryan from the wall. As they led him out, he glanced back at Krysty. Her prehensile mutie hair had once again curled into tight ringlets of alarm.

  They didn’t bother to hood him this time, which was something Ryan saw as another bad sign: they didn’t give a damn what he saw. One way or another, alive or dead, they figured he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Lima brought up the rear as they moved down the corridor. At the end of the long hall they made a left turn onto another straightaway, at the end of which they made another left turn. To Ryan it seemed as though they were tracing the perimeter of the redoubt. There were doors on both sides, but they were unmarked. What he presumed was the exterior wall was cracked in places, and there were puddles of standing water on the floor. The air so reeked of ammonia that it made the inside of his nose and the back of his throat burn. The caustic fumes were another reason the residents wore respirators. What wasn’t clear was whether the ammonia was some naturally occurring irritant, or whether it had been introduced into the corridors as a sterilizing agent. The lights overhead flickered occasionally, but the power plant’s hum remained steady. He was looking hard for some wiggle room, a weak spot that could be exploited, and so far there wasn’t any.