Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (4 page)

The on-shift warning shrilled and Sten sourly sat up. He’d already been awake for nearly two hours. Waiting.

Even after four cycles the three-room apartment was empty. But Sten had learned that the dead must mourn for themselves. That part had been walled off, though sometimes he’d slip, and some of the grief would show itself.

But mostly he was successful at turning himself into the quiet, obedient Mig the Company wanted. Or at least at faking it.

The wallslot clicked, and a tray slid out with the usual quick-shot energy drink, various hangover remedies, and antidepressants.

Sten took a handful at random and dumped them down the waste tube. He didn’t want or need any, but he knew better than to ignore the tray.

After a few hours, it would retract and self-inventory. Then some computer would report up the line on Sten’s lack of consumption. Which would rate a reprimand from the Counselor.

Sten sighed. There was a quota on everything.

Far up at the head of the line a worker touched his card to the med-clock. The machine blinked and the man shoved his arm into its maw. It bleeped his vital signs, noted he was free of alcohol or drugs that might be left over from last off-shift’s routine brawl, and clocked him in.

The man disappeared into the factory and the line moved two steps forward.

Sten moved forward with the rest, gossip buzzing around him.

‘Considerin’ Fran was the loosest man with a quota on the bench, I think it was clottin’ fine of the Company – so he lost an arm; only
thing he ever did with it is pinch joygirls. They gave him a month’s credit, didn’t they? …’

‘You know me, not a man on Vulcan can match me drink for drink – and next shift I’m rarin’ for the line – I’m a quota fool! Bring ’em on, I says, and look out down the line …’

It was Sten’s turn. He slotted his card, stared at the machine dully as it inspected and approved him, and then walked reluctantly into the factory.

The assembly building was enormous, honeycombed from floor to ceiling with belts, tracks, giant gears, and machines. The Migs had to inch along narrow catwalks to keep from falling or being jerked into the innards of some machine and pounded, pressed, and rolled into some nameless device that would eventually be rejected at the end of the line because it contained odd impurities.

After nearly two months in the factory, Sten had learned to hate his partner almost as much as the job. The robot was a squat gray ovoid with a huge array of sensors bunched into a large insect eye that moved on a combination of wheels and leg stalks that it let down for stairs. Only the eye cluster and the waggling tentacles seemed alive.

Most of all, he hated its high-pitched and nagging voice. Like an old microlibrarian that Sten remembered from his Basic Creche.

‘Hurry,’ it fussed, ‘we’re running behind quota. A good worker never runs behind quota. Last cycle, in the third sector, one Myal Thorkenson actually doubled his quota. Now, isn’t that an ideal worth emulating?’

Sten looked at the machine and thought about kicking it. Last time he’d tried that, he’d limped for two days.

Sten’s robot prodded him with its voice.

‘Hurry now. Another chair.’

He picked up another seat from the pile in front of the long silver tube. Then he carried it back to where the robot squatted, waiting.

Sten and his robot were at the tail end of a long assembly line of movers, the capsules used in the pneumatic transit systems common to most industrial worlds.

The robot was the technician. Sten was the dot-and-carry man. His job was to pick up a seat from the pile, lug it inside the tube to the properly marked slot, and then position it while the robot heat-sealed the seat to the frame. It was a mind-numbing job that he never seemed to do quite right for his mechanical straw boss.

‘Not there,’ the robot said. ‘You always do it wrong. The position is clearly marked. Slide it up now. Slide it up.’

The robot’s heatgun flashed.

‘Quickly, now. Another.’

Sten lumbered back down the aisle, where he was met by a worker whose name he couldn’t remember. ‘Hey. You hear? I just got promoted!’

‘Congratulations.’

The man was beaming. ‘Thanks. I’m throwing a big bash after shift. Everyone’s invited. All on me.’

Sten looked up at the fellow. ‘Uh, won’t that set you back – I mean, put you even with the promotion?’

The man shrugged.

‘So I card it. It’ll only add another six months or so to my contract.’

Sten considered asking him why it was so important to rush right out and spend every credit – and then some – of his raise. How he could throw away another six months of his life on … He already knew the answer. So he didn’t bother.

‘That’s right,’ he sighed. ‘You can card it.’

The Mig rushed on.

Leta was about the only bright spot in Sten’s life those days.

In many ways, she was the typical joygirl. Hired on the same kind of backwater planet Sten’s parents had come from, Leta just knew that when her contract ran out and she immigrated to one of the Empire’s leisure worlds, she’d meet and sign a life-contract with a member of the royal family. Or at least a merchant prince.

Even though Sten knew better than to believe in the whore with the heart of gold, he felt that she got real pleasure from their talk and sex.

Sten lay silently on the far side of the bed.

The girl slid over to him and stroked his body slowly with her fingertips.

Sten rolled over and looked up at her.

Leta’s face was gentle, her pupils wide with pleasure drugs.

‘Ssswrong,’ she muttered.

‘Contracts. Contracts and quotas and Migs.’

She giggled.

‘Nothin’ wrong with you. An’ you’re a Mig.’

Sten sat up.

‘I won’t be forever. When my contract’s up, I’ll get off this clottin’ world and learn what it is to be a free man.’

Leta laughed.

‘I mean it. No carding it. No contract extensions. No more nights on the dome drinking. I’m just gonna put in my time. Period.’

Leta shook her head and got up.

She took several deep breaths, trying to clear her mind.

‘You can’t do it.’

‘Why not?’ Sten asked. ‘Hell. Even nineteen years isn’t forever.’

‘You can’t do it because its rigged. The whole thing. Controlled. Like your job. Like the games. Like … like even this. They set it up so you never get off … so you’re always tied down to them. And they do it any way they can.’

Sten was puzzled.

‘But if it’s rigged, and nobody ever gets off Vulcan, what about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘You’re always talking about what you’ll do when you leave, and the planets you want to see and the men you want to meet who don’t smell like machine oil and sweat and … and all that.’

Leta put a hand over Sten’s mouth.

‘That’s me, Sten. Not you. I’m leaving. I’ve got a contract, and that gives me money and the drugs and whatever I eat or drink. I can’t even gamble at the tables. They won’t take my card. It doesn’t matter what else I do. Just as long as I stay alive, I’ve got a guarantee that I’ll get off of Vulcan. Just like all the other joygirls. Or the shills and the carders. They’re all leaving. So are the Techs and the patrolmen. But not the Migs. Migs never leave.’

Sten shook his head, not believing a word she said.

‘You’re a sweet boy, Sten, but you’re gonna die on Vulcan.’

He stayed away from Leta’s place for a while, telling himself that he didn’t need her. He didn’t want somebody around that was going to tell him those kinds of … well, they had to be lies, didn’t they?

But the longer he stayed away, the more he thought and the more he wondered. Finally he decided that he had to talk to her. To show her that maybe she was right about all the other Migs. But not about him.

At first, the people at the joyhouse pretended they’d never heard of her. Then they remembered. Oh,
Leta
. She was transferred or something. Yeah. Kind of sudden. But she seemed real happy about it when they came for her. Must’ve been a shift over at that new rec area in The Eye, for the Execs. Or something like that.

Sten wondered.

But he didn’t wonder anymore when, late that off-shift, he stole
into what had been Leta’s cubicle and found the tiny mike planted in the ceiling.

He always wondered what they’d done to her for talking.

Sten checked the balance column on the screen for the tenth time. He’d budgeted to the bone. Cut out all recreation, and worked on the near-starvation basic diet. But it always came out the same. At twenty-five credits a month, he wouldn’t be able to shorten his contract time at all, not by so much as six months. And if he kept on living the way he’d been, he’d go crazy in five years.

Sten decided to go over it one more time. Perhaps there was something he’d missed. Sten tapped the console keys and called up the Company’s
Work Guidelines Manual
. He scrolled paragraph after paragraph, looking for an out.

‘Clot!’ He almost passed it. Sten rolled back up to the paragraph, and read and reread it:

He slammed his fist on the keys and the vid screen did several fast flip-flops, then went blank.

They had you. No matter how you shaved it, every Mig would always be in the hole.

Sten paced back and forth.

The robot finished the mover and dropped out the exit, waiting for the next cigar tube to be on-lined. The completed car whooshed away, into the pneumatic freight tube and away toward the shipping terminal. But there’d been some error. Something or someone didn’t have the next pile of seats ready.

Sten yawned as his robot whined at another machine about quotas. The second machine wasn’t about to take the blame. They bickered back and forth electronically until, eventually, the ceiling crane slammed a seat consignment down between them. The robot slid into the mover. Sten hoisted a seat to his shoulder and lugged it aboard.

He set the chair in position and listened to the robot natter while he moved the seat back and forth.

The robot bent forward, heatgun ready. Sten felt a sudden bout of nausea wash over him. This would be it for the rest of his life, listening to the gray blob preach.

Sten lurched forward. The seat slid into the robot, and the machine yowled as it welded itself to seat and mover frame.

‘Help! Help! I’m trapped,’ it whined. ‘Notify master control.’

Sten blinked. Then hid a grin.

‘Sure. Right away.’

He ambled slowly off the mover to the line control panel, took a deep breath, and punched the
TASK COMPLETE
button. The doors of the tube slid closed, and the mover slid toward the freight tube.

‘Notify … control … help … help …’

And for the first time since he’d been promoted to full worker, Sten felt the satisfaction of a job well done.

Sten had been ‘sick’ for over a week before the Counselor showed up.

Actually, he really had been sick the first day. Scared sick that somebody might have discovered his little game with the robot. It’d be considered outright sabotage, he was sure. If he was lucky, they’d put him under a mindprobe and just burn away any areas that didn’t seem to fit the Ideal Worker Profile.

But there probably was something worse. There usually was on Vulcan. Sten wasn’t sure what something worse could be. He had heard stories about hellshops, where incorrigibles were sent. But nobody knew anybody who’d actually been sent to such a shop. Maybe the stories were just that – or maybe nobody ever came back from those places. Sten wondered sometimes if he wouldn’t rather just be brainburned and turned into a vegetable.

The second day, Sten woke up smiling. He realized that nobody’d ever figure out what had happened to the robot. So he celebrated by staying home again, lounging in bed until two hours past shift-start. Then he dug out a few of the luxury food items his parents had saved and just stared at the non-snowing wall mural. He knew better than to stick his card in the vid and watch a reel, or to go out to a rec area. That’d make it even easier for the Company to figure out that he was malingering.

The flakes hanging in the air on the mural fascinated Sten. Frozen water, falling from the sky. It didn’t seem very sanitary. Sten wondered if there was any way at all that he could get offworld. Even though those snowflakes didn’t look very practical, they might be something to see. Anything might be something to see – as long as it was away from the Company and Vulcan.

By the third day, he’d decided he wasn’t going to work anymore. Sten didn’t know how long he was going to get away with malingering. Or what would happen to him when they caught him. He just sat. Thinking about the snowflakes and what it would be like to walk in them, with no card in his pocket that said where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do when he got there.

He’d just learned that if he squinched his eyes a bit, the snowflakes would almost move again, when the door buzzer went off.

He didn’t move. The door buzzed again.

‘Sten,’ the Counselor shouted through the panel, ‘I know you’re there. Let me in. Everything is fine. We’ll work it out. Together. Just open the door. Everything is fine.’

Sten knew it wasn’t. But finally he pulled himself up and walked toward the door. The buzzer sounded again. Then something started fumbling in the Identilock. Sten waited at the door.

Then he hesitated, and moved to one side. The Identilock clicked, and the door slid open. The Counselor stepped inside. His mouth was already open, saying something. Sten leaped, both hands clubbed high above him. The blow caught the Counselor on the side of his head, slamming him into the wall. The Counselor slid down the panel and thumped to the floor. He didn’t move. His mouth was still open.

Sten began to shake.

But suddenly, he felt calm; he’d eliminated all the possibilities now. He could do only one thing. He stooped over the unconscious Counselor and riffled quickly through his pockets. Sten found and pocketed the man’s card. If he used that instead of his own, it might take Control a little longer to track him down. It’d also give him entry into areas forbidden by Sten’s Mig card.

Sten turned and looked around the three bare rooms. Whatever happened next, it would be the last time he’d ever see them. Then he ran out the door, heading for the slideway, the spaceport, and some way off Vulcan.

He felt out of place the moment he stepped off the slideway. The people had begun to change. Only a few Migs were visible, conspicuous in their drab coveralls. The rest were richer and flashier: Techs, clerks, administrators, and here and there the sparkle of strange off-world costumes.

Sten hurried over to a clothes-dispensing machine, slid the Counselor’s card into the slot and held his breath. Would the alarms go off now? Were Sociopatrolmen already hurrying to the platform?

The machine burped at him and began displaying its choices. Sten punched the first thing in his size that looked male, and a package plopped into a tray. He grabbed it and pushed his way through the crowd into a rest area.

Sten carded his way into the spaceport administration center, trying to look as if he belonged there. He had to do something about the Counselor’s card soon. Everywhere he went, he was leaving a trail as wide as a computer printout sheet.

Nearby, an old, fat clerk was banging at a narcobeer dispenser. ‘Clotting machine. Telling me I don’t have the clotting credits to …’

Sten ambled up to him, bored but slightly curious. The man was drunk and probably so broke that the central computer was cutting him off.

‘It’s sunspots,’ Sten said.

The clerk bleared up at him. ‘Think so?’

‘Sure. Same thing happened to me last off-shift. Here. Try my card. Maybe a different one will unjam it.’

The clerk nodded and Sten pushed a button and the man’s card slid out. He took it and inserted the Counselor’s card. A minute later the clerk was happily on his way, chugging a narcobeer.

Three hours later they grabbed him. The clerk was sitting in his favorite hangout, getting pleasantly potted when what seemed like six regiments of Sociopatrolmen burst in. Before he had time to lower his glass, he was beaten, trussed, and on his way to an interrogation center.

In front, the chief Sociopatrolman peered victoriously at the clerk’s ID card. Except, of course, it wasn’t his. It was the Counselor’s.

Sten could feel it as soon as he entered the spaceport Visitor’s Center. Even on the run, there was a sense of – well, what it was exactly, he couldn’t tell. But he thought it might be freedom.

He moved through the exotic crowd – everything from aliens and diplomats to stocky merchantmen and deep-space sailors. Even the talk was strange: star systems and warp drive, antimatter engines and Imperial intrigue.

Sten edged past a joygirl into a seedy tavern. He elbowed his way through the sailors and found an empty space at the bar. A sailor next to him was griping to a buddy.

‘The nerf lieutenant just ignores me. Can you believe that? Me! A projector with fifteen damned years at the clotting sig-board.’

His friend shook his head. ‘They’re all the same. Two years in the baby brass academy and they think they know it all.’

‘So get this,’ said the first man. ‘I report blips and he says no reason there should be blips. I tell him there’s blips anyway. Few minutes later we hit the meteor swarm. We had junk in our teeth and junk comin’ out our drive tubes.

‘Pilot pulled us out just in time. Slammed us into an evasion spiral almost took the captain’s drawers off.’

Sten got his drink – paying with one of his few credit tokens – and moved down the bar. A group of sailors caught his eye. They were huddled around a table, talking quietly and sipping at their drinks instead of knocking them back like the others. They were in fresh clothes, clean-shaven, and had the look of men trying to shake off hangovers in a hurry.

They had the look of men going home.

‘Time to hoist ’em,’ one of them said.

In unison, they finished their drinks and rose. Sten pushed in behind them as they moved through the crowd and out the door.

Sten huddled in the nose section of the shuttle. A panel hid him from the sailors. They lifted off from Vulcan, and moments later Sten could see the freighter through the clear bubble nose as the shuttle floated up toward it.

The deep-space freighter – an enormous multi-segmented insect – stretched out for kilometers. A swarm of beetlelike tugs towed still more sections into line and nudged them into place. The drive section of the freighter was squat and ugly with horn projections bristling around the face. As the shuttle neared the face, it grinned open.

Just before it swallowed him, Sten thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He barely heard the judge as the man droned on, listing Sten’s crimes against the Company. Sten was surrounded by Sociopatrolmen. In front of the judge, the Counselor loomed, his head nearly invisible in plastibandages, nodding painfully as the judge made each legal point.

They had found Sten in the shuttle, huddled under some blankets, stolen ship’s stores stacked around him. Even as he messaged Vulcan for someone to pick Sten up, the captain kept apologizing. He had heard stories.

‘We can’t help you,’ he said. ‘Vulcan security sends snoopers on every freighter before it clears, looking for people like you.’

Sten was silent.

‘Listen,’ the captain went on, ‘I can’t take the chance. If I tried to help and got caught, the Company’d pull my trading papers. And I’d be done. It’s not just me. I gotta think of my crew …’

Sten came awake as a Sociopatrolman pushed him forward. The judge had finished. It was time for sentencing. What was it going to be? Brainburn? If that was it, Sten hoped he had enough mind left to kill himself.

Then the judge was talking. ‘You are aware, I hope, of the enormity of your crimes?’

Sten thought about doing the Mig humility. Be damned, he thought. He didn’t have anything to lose. He stared back at the judge.

‘I see. Counselor, do you have anything of an ameliorative nature to add to these proceedings?’

The Counselor started to say something, and then abruptly shook his head.

‘Very well. Karl Sten, since you, at your young age, are capable of providing many years of service to the Company and we do not wish to appear unmerciful, recognizing the possibility of redemption, I will merely reassign you.’

For a moment, Sten felt hopeful.

‘Your new work assignment will be in the Exotics Section. For an indeterminate period. If – ahem – circumstances warrant, after a suitable length of time I will review your sentence.’

The judge nodded, and touched the input button on his justice panel. The Sociopatrolmen led Sten away. He wasn’t sure what the judge meant. Or what his sentence was. Except his mind was intact, and he was alive.

He turned at the door, and realized, from the grin on the Counselor’s face, he might not be for very long.