Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  Oscar joined them in the hallway. “You’ll be sorry you gave up your meals,” he said, pausing to pick something from between his teeth with a fingernail—perhaps a fragment of fish bone or a stray pengie pinfeather. “We’re on restricted rations until further notice. You’re not going to get any more food until the day after tomorrow. No doubt what’s on the menu will be more appealing by then.”

  After Doc and Mildred had climbed into their bibfronts and donned their gloves, Oscar escorted them back to the butchering room, where they resumed work on the remaining hanging carcasses. The shock of the stench faded after twenty minutes or so; as Mildred explained it, their nasal receptors had simply thrown in the towel.

  With a bit more practice, the gutting, skinning and dissecting of the giant, flightless birds went much faster. It was still grueling, heavy work, and the opportunity to use the blades to escape and free their companions did not materialize. Doc knew they had more than just the few men in black to deal with—if he and Mildred, clad in high visibility yellow, tried to take them out, the other workers would see it and turn on them with their knives and cleavers.

  Doc scissored the long-handled shears, straining to cut through a leg bone almost two inches thick. With a wet snick the jaws finally slid shut, and a second pengie foot slapped to the concrete beside the first. He carried the matched pair over to the container Oscar had identified as “the foot bucket.” As he was about to drop them in, Doc saw something that made him pause. He called Mildred over to his side.

  Pointing down at the top of the pile, he said, “My dear Mildred, I bow to your expertise. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that a human appendage?”

  “You’re not wrong,” Mildred said. She reached in and fished out a gory foot severed just above the ankle. It had long toenails, sprouts of black hair on the toe joints and thick callouses on the sole. “A righty, no less.”

  “By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said with disgust. “It would appear these blasted Antarcticans eat their own.” He looked down the line of ceiling hooks, fully expecting to see a suspended human corpse in some stage of disassembly. But the cadavers in view were all avian.

  “Better watch your step, Doc,” Mildred said, “or you’ll end up in a casserole, too.” She tossed the foot back in the bucket with a thunk. “I’m glad we gave lunch a miss.”

  “What about the children we saw?” Doc asked with a scowl.

  “You mean the kids eating dad, or them being eaten by dad?”

  “Either way, it is vile and unspeakable.”

  “From our standpoint, yes, but it certainly isn’t unheard-of,” Mildred said. “When high quality protein is in short supply, human beings have always made concessions to the moral niceties. The foot in the bucket doesn’t tell us everything. We don’t know that they are killing each other for food, only that they are eating each other. If someone dies of natural causes or an accident, does it matter to the corpse how it’s treated? Whether it receives a decent burial or a slow roasting with a savory sauce?”

  “I would have thought you of all people would be more sensitive to the implications of the horrid practice—you who have actually tasted human flesh.”

  “Brains,” Mildred said. “To be precise, I’ve tasted them twice, and they were cannie brains, uncooked and steaming fresh right from the skull. The circumstances were entirely different from what appears to be going on here. I was forced against my will into eating the first brain, which was infected with oozies. I had to eat the second one or I would have turned into a ravening cannibal myself.”

  “Ironic,” Doc said, shaking his head. “To keep from turning cannibal you had to become one.”

  “It was a matter of a desperate, last-ditch cure, not a lifestyle choice on my part.”

  “These people are desperate, too, it seems. Would you eat human flesh again if the situation called for it?”

  “Once a cannibal, always a cannibal? Before it comes to that, I’m hoping we get the hell out of here—or find some century-old C rations.”

  “Why have you two stopped work?” Oscar asked as he stepped up.

  “Whose foot is that?” Doc pointed at it.

  “Dunno. That bucket is moved up and down the line until it fills up. Then it gets emptied.”

  Although he was curious as to what culinary delights could be made from the leathery, wrinkled, black-taloned appendages, Doc thought better of asking what happened to the feet after that.

  “Where’s the other one?” Mildred asked.

  “Not in the bucket? Aw, somebody probably filched it. Bunch of thieves in here, even with the guards watching. You better not try anything like that. Get caught and you’ll be ground into hamburger.”

  “How long has the food situation been this bad?” Mildred asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re eating each other,” she replied.

  “You don’t understand anything,” Oscar said. “You don’t know how good you’ve got it in Deathlands.”

  “I’m beginning to get a sense of it, believe me.”

  “We’ve lived here more than a hundred years, surrounded by ice. We have taught ourselves to survive on anything and everything. And that has made us hard as steel. There is nothing we can’t do, nowhere we can’t thrive.”

  “But you are eating every other day,” Doc said. “Surely you cannot thrive for long like that.”

  “We’re used to suffering,” Oscar said. “And we can endure anything because we know we won’t be suffering much longer. The food rationing is part of a plan, the last sacrifice. After a century of waiting, our time has finally come. We are leaving this redoubt and moving north to the land across the sea. Your world is ours for the taking.”

  “You might find some scattered resistance to that concept,” Doc said.

  “You mean Deathlanders?” Oscar asked, his ruddy face turning even ruddier. “While you skip around in little pink dresses picking flower buds, we will take your bread and honey, crush your bones and make soup.”

  “I’m trying hard,” Mildred said, “but I just can’t see it.”

  “You want proof? I’ll give you proof,” Oscar said. He pulled off a glove, inserted his index finger in his nose, and corkscrewed it around until he had what he was looking for. He showed Doc and Mildred the gray squiggle perched on his finger tip.

  “This here is twenty grams of protein,” he said, waggling his finger. “Point zero four percent of the daily requirement. And this is why we will rule the Earth...”

  Then he ate his little treasure.

  “Well, that sure convinced me,” Mildred said. “You definitely rule.”

  “I heartily concur,” Doc said, stifling the urge to smile. In his head he tried to calculate just how many little treasures it would take to make up the entire daily requirement of a human adult.

  Mildred had to have been thinking along the same lines because out of the blue she said, “Five thousand.”

  “Get back to work,” Oscar told them. “There is much more to do after you finish the butchering.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The dissection was just the beginning. After they had made their last cut, Oscar took away the knives, cleavers and saws, counting them to make sure he had them all. A forklift came through the shop’s back entrance carrying a double stack of 55-gallon drums on pallets. The lidded drums turned out to be empty. At Oscar’s direction, Doc, Mildred and the other workers began carefully packing the pengie meat into the drums. Before each chunk of meat went in, it was bagged in plastic. Oscar said that made it easier to remove individual packages when the whole barrel was frozen solid.

  There was a lot of meat to pack and a lot of bending and awkward angles involved—Oscar insisted they leave as little air space as possible between the bags. Before the work was through, Doc could feel the strain in his lower back,
and his fingers were numbed despite the heavy gloves.

  When filled, the barrels were so heavy that it took three workers to muscle each one onto low-wheeled carts. With six barrels on a cart, one person could barely budge it. Doc and Mildred pushed the rear handle side by side. They moved in a convoy through the butcher shop and out a rear exit.

  Their destination turned out to be just a ragged hole in the corridor’s concrete wall. On the other side of the wall was a cave complex chipped or melted into the glacier—floor, walls and ceiling were solid ice. Lights were strung along the ceiling. The passage of countless carts had worn deep tracks into the floor. In the doorless side chambers, Doc could see what looked like hundreds of barrels lined up.

  There was enough stored food to last a lot of people a long time. He realized it had to have taken many months to collect. And many months of near-starvation for adults and children of the redoubt. It was a testament to their determination, and to their delusions. Doc knew in his bones they would fail, utterly and tragically. Theirs was the certainty of life in a closed system, a tape loop, life that appeared to function by rules of human logic and design. It was the illusion of control and its ugly twin, hubris.

  The events of his own life had taught him otherwise—the only certainty in the wider world was that there was no certainty. The universe was unpredictable and random. Anything could happen at any time; and if humans, because of the hardwiring of their brains, saw cause and effect in everything, it was nothing but a cosmic joke on them.

  Case in point: The Antarcticans thought because they ate their own feet and mucus they were by extension superhuman in their resolve, undefeatable, that all their goals were within reach. Despite the fact that these people were enemies, a sadness closed on Doc’s heart. They were enemies, but they were also human kin. All their effort, all their sacrifice, all their striving was for naught. What awaited them in the hellscape was chaos and annihilation on a scale and with a violence they could never imagine.

  When the unloading was completed, they pushed the carts back to the butcher shop. Waiting for them just inside the doorway were the black-clad enforcers. Before they were allowed to pass, one by one they were patted down.

  “What is this about?” Doc asked, raising his arms high as he was frisked from head to foot.

  “Someone walked off with a foot,” the man in black told him. “Count came up one short. You’re clear. Go on, move along.”

  When they had all passed through the checkpoint, Oscar led them out the front door and down the corridor. They made two turns before arriving at a wide doorway, over which hung a sign that read: Hydroponics.

  “This level seems entirely devoted to food preparation and production,” Doc said to Mildred.

  They walked through the doorway and into a series of wide, interconnected rooms that stretched on, one after another. It was much warmer inside due to the banks of grow lights suspended from the ceiling. To trap and focus the heat and light, the walls and ceiling were insulated with silver foil walls. Fans moved the hot air about. Agricultural workers in green coveralls tended raised plant beds positioned under the lights.

  “Smells like crap in here,” Mildred said.

  “Indeed,” Doc said. The stench was eye-watering. He didn’t recognize the crop under cultivation. It was more than four feet tall and looked like a reddish bush. “What is that?” he asked Mildred.

  “It looks like quinoa, a species of goosefoot related to spinach and tumbleweed that was first harvested by pre-Columbian people in the Andes. It’s a pseudocereal, the seeds are very high in protein, but they have to be treated to remove toxics that give it a bitter taste. ”

  Doc looked down the line, from room to room. “They must be very fond of it,” he said.

  “Over here,” Oscar called. He was standing next to a massive stainless-steel tank. There was machinery beneath it and it was running; something inside the tank was churning around and around. From the concentrated stink in the area, the tank had to be the source of the bad smell.

  Mildred pointed to a big pipe that exited the ceiling and entered the top of the tank. “End of the road, toilet-wise,” she said.

  Doc didn’t understand what she meant.

  “Night soil, human excreta, midden moussaka,” she said impatiently. “I’ll bet every toilet in the redoubt empties into that tank. They liquefy their own waste to fertilize their crops.”

  “No turd unturned,” Doc said. “A philosophy to live by.”

  Mildred pointed at the tank. “We’re going to need respirators if you expect us to work with that stuff,” she told Oscar.

  “No, your job is this way.”

  He led them through a doorway into an adjoining room. Workers in green were shoveling quinoa seeds into 55-gallon drums lined up on long rows of pallets. The seeds were piled in front of them in chest-high, red mountains, apparently dropped from chutes set at intervals in the ceiling above.

  “Grab a shovel and start filling up the drums,” Oscar instructed them. “Get a move on.”

  They had only been working a few minutes when the room was rocked by another quake, this one far more violent. The shaking was so intense that it sent bolts flying out of the walls and the workers diving to the floor to avoid being hit by ricochets. Doc and Mildred joined them, belly down, hands protecting the backs of their heads. Before the temblor ended, water gushed from a spreading wall crack, spraying across the floor and turning the bases of the piles of grain into a slippery red slurry.

  “Broken water line!” Oscar shouted. “Seal up those barrels of grain and get them out of here, quick. Take them to hangar level.”

  The workers in green knew just what to do; Doc and Mildred followed them and the convoy of forklifts out of the hydroponics section, along what seemed a confusing and circuitous route, to a pair of freight elevators. The door to one of them stood open.

  Doc turned as they entered the car and looked back at the damage the second quake had caused: big chunks of concrete rubble from fallen sections of ceiling littered the floor of the hallway. Workers were already struggling to drag it aside, but there were gaping holes overhead. When the doors closed, it occurred to him that an elevator wasn’t exactly the best place to be in an earthquake. Then the car began to rise at terrific speed and all he could think about was bracing his legs and hanging on. They climbed for a good seven or eight minutes—which seemed like an eternity—before the elevator jolted to a stop.

  When the doors opened, the cold that rushed in made him cringe. They stepped out into a cavernous structure with a towering ceiling. From the sound of the polar wind howling across the roof some seventy-five feet above them, he knew at once they were on the surface. It was blowing a gale outside. There were no windows or doors that Doc could see, but the frigid air was somehow seeping through the solid side walls. The windchill was what made it feel so much colder, he decided.

  A man in black—apparently the boss—stood outside the elevator, waiting for them when the doors opened. Tall and broad across the chest, he wore gloves, and a balaclava was pulled down over his face so only his eyes, nose and mouth were visible. He had a semiauto handblaster strapped to his hip and a truncheon in his fist.

  “Come on,” he said, waving the truncheon. “Get the fuck out of there.”

  When the greeter stepped aside to let them pass, Doc got a better view of their new surroundings. The floor gleamed dully in the overhead lights. It was covered with thick white frost and stretched off a hundred yards or so, to the opposite end of the structure. Lined up on either side of a long central aisle were wag-like machines, but without visible wheels, forty of them, total. All were painted bright red. They came in two sizes: immense and small. Clearly the storage facility had been designed around them. Down the line here and there beside some of the larger machines, Doc could see forklifts, workers struggling with heavy barrels, and men in
black overseeing the procedure.

  “Are those vehicles terrestrial or aquatic?” Doc asked Mildred, who stood shivering beside him. “Or both?”

  “They look like some sort of hovercraft,” Mildred said. “Same sort of craft that used to cross the English Channel before nukeday.”

  “Move it!” the boss man shouted.

  As the loaded forklifts and workers in green began to advance down the aisle, so did Doc and Mildred.

  “They’ve got no propellers on them,” Mildred said. “Those big housings in the tails must be the engines that supply forward thrust. I think they must fly. Check out the short, back-angled wings—they all have them.”

  “How do they fly them out of here? There are no doors that I can see.”

  “They go straight up is my guess.” Mildred indicated a broad gap in the spacing of the craft ahead. The circle was outlined in a stripe of black paint. “That’s probably the takeoff pad. Propellers or turbines hidden below the fuselage provide vertical lift. The roof must open in some way. Maybe it slides back.”

  “What about the snowpack? And the ice buildup? Would that not foul the mechanism?”

  “They must have figured it out,” Mildred said. “What’s the point of building so many aircraft if you can’t fly them?”

  “There are other possibilities, my dear Mildred.”

  “And they are?”

  “This might not be the only hangar they have.”

  “Okay, that’s reasonable. What’s the other?”

  “Maybe when they’re ready to leave they’re going to blow the roof off this one and fly out all at once.”

  “Doc, sometimes your brain works like a steel trap.”

  As they walked past the flying wags, Doc took a discreet closer look. The smaller of the two types was about twenty-five-feet long and appeared to be an attack craft. Machine gun or cannon barrels stuck out from under the stubby wings and the middle of the nose cone. There were also opaque plastic holding tanks bolted beneath both wings, near their join with the fuselage. The tanks had double rows of nozzles along their undersides. Through the clear bubble of the ship’s canopy, Doc could see a pair of high-backed seats, set one in front of the other.