Context (108 page)

And, finally, it had burned out
totally, and Tom had left the ‘bug collapsed and smouldering, as he tugged his
sled behind him—smoothplate underneath, but still heavy, and hard to manoeuvre
across the shale—and began the long trek on foot towards his destination.

The planet’s surface had not
featured yet during the war, but Tom knew its use was inevitable: if the allied
forces did not use it first, the Dark Fire’s would. And the Enemy’s people
could more easily lose their normal mental conditioning, for human restraints
within their minds had long since been snapped by the power which had
overwhelmed and then subsumed them. For Tom, it was a journey through mankind’s
history on the homeworld. Surely nomad wanderers, hauling their few belongings
with them, had travelled and lived off the land like this. On Terra, they would
not have needed a lab-kit for converting transplanted vegetation into food;
luckily the apparatus was low-tech, unlikely to alert whatever surveillance
systems the Blight might have in place above the surface.

One tiny being, in this wild and
endless landscape, was effectively invisible.

There
had been heathland, with long grasses whipped like waves by the wind. A range
of low purple hills, harder to cross than Tom had thought; he lost half of his
supplies down a ravine when the sled tipped and strapping tore.

Finally, he was reduced to
carrying his dwindling food supply in a cloak tied packwise behind his back.

His body fat, already low, melted
away with the long endurance exercise. Soon, he was sinew and bone, a
starvation victim to anyone who looked—had there been anyone, in this lost,
forgotten world.

But it was partly an illusion,
for the figures went like this: his daily energy deficit was huge—a deficit
which would match that of any dying famine victim—but those victims
(ipso
facto,
as his tutor, Mistress eh’Nalephi, would have said) neither ate nor
exercised.

But Tom’s energy expenditure grew
to twelve thousand kilocalories a day, and two-thirds of that was replenished
by his ration bricks. He could survive drops in blood sugar and body fat which
would kill someone who was eating nothing.

He was not in the peak of health;
but he was nowhere near as close to death as his fat-stripped appearance might
suggest.

And, in extremis, it is the mind
which rules.

Tom’s will—forged in hate, now
focused on his lost love—had grown implacable.

There
were clear, pale-yellow skies; there were days when creamy clouds covered the
sky’s vast dome from horizon to horizon. And once, amid the cloud cover, he
glimpsed a high dark shape, tiny at that altitude, which might have been a
floating terraformer.

But he trekked onward at ground
level, alone and undisturbed.

And finally, starved and
exhausted, he came to the green and purple dell which he had been aiming for,
where the membrane covering the abandoned vent shaft had denatured to milky
stringiness, unravelled by its own chemical decline. It revealed a shadowed
opening which led to Nulapeiron’s habitable depths, in the heart of Blight
territory.

Slowly, shaking, Tom began his
downwards climb.

And
now the death train.

Time to take his place among the
prisoners.

With no other access into the
death camp itself, this was his only plan. He climbed through a gap between
carriages, up onto the platform, and shuffled into the group’s centre,
inserting himself amid starved-looking children and adults who had aged decades
in a matter of days: gaunt, emaciated and grimy. An air of hopelessness hung
over them, heavy and unbreakable.

Tom’s clothes, too, were torn and
ragged, and his cheekbones, like theirs, showed gauntly through stretched skin.
Even so, there was a minute ripple of motion away from him, as though they
sensed that he was different.

Soon they would be too weak to
care even that much.

Guards stood overhead on
lev-platforms, and surrounded them on ground level, armoured and with graser
rifles held at port-arms: on armed watch everywhere. The rows of prisoners
moved slowly forwards, half stumbling towards a square black tunnel mouth,
where even the air seemed too thick and solid to breathe.

‘Faster, animals!’

Crack of nerve-whip, and someone
fell, but no-one helped. Already they had learned that the price of humanity
was death.

‘Come on.’

Beside Tom, a little girl stared
straight ahead, her eyes big and round and grey. Her lips parted slightly, but
she neither turned around nor looked up at Tom. A child, but nearing her life’s
end.

Another crack and another. The
fallen man would never rise again.

‘Move!’

They shuffled into darkness.

They
found themselves in a long grey cavern divided into open barracks by
toxin-laden membranes which glistened with putrescent, liquid malevolence.
There were graser-blasted slit-trench latrines, their foul smells hanging
heavily upon the fetid air.

Blood-red drones, armed and
armoured, circled overhead, beneath the jagged ceiling.

The prisoners were segregated by
gender, and Tom moved with broken gait amid a group of fifty men whose hopeless
stares tracked the progress of their wives and children into other parts of the
camp.

One of the women dropped,
suddenly, like a pile of sticks. A beefy guard laughed, putting his
micro-graser back into his pocket, while the other prisoners moved on, avoiding
the corpse: now merely an obstacle in their path, a discarded object whose
human spirit had been shorn away long before this moment of physical death.

Ignore it.

Tom was trembling, but that was
so very dangerous when he was among captives too stunned to care, too hungry to
think, too battered to feel emotion. If the guards spotted one who was
different, they would single him out immediately, and that would be the end.

That could
not
happen now.
Not with Elva so near, after all this time.

Slowly, he turned, head drooping
forward with feigned weakness, disguising his careful scan of the surroundings.
Far back from the newly arrived prisoners, the incumbents—captives who looked
as if they had been here for decades, though it might only have been days—stood
or sat upon the hard broken ground, their faces sunken where flesh had
collapsed, their eyes too big and dull within prominent sockets. The skull
behind each human face was obvious, an indication of the state to come.

Ignore...

Beneath their torn, ragged
clothing, their limbs were narrow rods or sticks, and their shoulders were
sharp corners, devoid of tissue.

One figure moved a finger, made a
rattling sound in his throat before lying still. Tom knew he was looking at
another corpse, a carcass.

...
but don’t ever forget.

The
allocation of barracks by gender was arbitrary, designed to sunder remaining
family bonds. The prisoners themselves were sexless, in that their wasted,
skeletal bodies could no longer generate or accept desire; only an aching
dullness, which drew fatigued eyelids down over too-prominent eyes, and a
deadened memory of hunger survived in their moribund nervous systems. They were
shutting down, accepting the inevitability of death because it takes energy to
believe in life, and they had none.

‘There.’ A grey-haired man with
tangled beard raised a thin, trembling arm, pointing to the next barracks. ‘A
way out for... some.’