Revenge of the Damned (2 page)

"Tha' dinnae be braw nor kosher," he muttered. Kilgour wove his way to a sprawled body, unsealed the suit, and tore away the corpse's ID tags. He checked a wall-mounted pressure readout. There were still a few pounds of atmosphere remaining in the CIC. Sten's suit came open, air hissing out, and his ID tags were replaced. Kilgour heard/felt the crashing as the Tahn blew a lock open and decided that it might be expedient for him to be unconscious as well.

Fewer than thirty gore-spattered, shocked Imperial sailors were transferred from the wreck of the
Swampscott
to the hold of a Tahn assault transport. Among them was one Firecontrol-man 1st Class Samuel Horatio.

Sten.

Fed and watered only as an afterthought, their wounds left untreated, twenty-seven survived to be unloaded on a swamp-world that the Tahn had grudgingly decided would be a war prisoner planet.

The Tahn believed that the highest death a being could find was in a battle. Cowardice or surrender were unthinkable. According to their belief, any Imperial soldier or sailor unlucky enough to be captured should have begged for instant death. But they were also sophisticated enough to realize grudgingly that other cultures felt differently and that such assistance to the dishonored might be misinterpreted. And so they let their captives live. For a while.

The Tahn saw no reason why, if prisoners were a burden to the Tahn, that burden should not be repaid. Repaid in sweat: slave labor.

Medical care: If the prisoners included med personnel, they had a medic. No supplies were provided. Any Imperial medical supplies captured were confiscated.

Shelter: Prisoners were permitted, on their own time, using any nonessential items permitted by the camp officers, to build shelter.

Working hours: At any task assigned, no limitations on hours or numbers of shifts.

Food: For humans, a tasteless slab that purported to provide the necessary nutrients. Except that a hardworking human needed about 3,600 calories per day. Prisoners were provided less than 1,000. Similar ratios and lack of taste were followed for the ET prisoners.

Since the prisoners were shamed beings, of course their guards were also soldiers in disgrace. Some of them were the crafty, who reasoned that shame in a guard unit was better than death in an assault regiment. There were a few—a very few—guards who had previously been trusties on one of the Tahn's own prison worlds.

The rules for prisoners were simple: Stand at attention when any guard talks to you, even if you were a general and he or she was a private. Run to obey any order. Failure to obey: death. Failure to complete a task in the time and manner assigned: death. Minor infractions: beatings, solitary confinement, starvation.

In the Tahn POW camps, only the hard survived.

Sten and Alex had been prisoners for over three years.

Their rules were simple:

Never forget that the war cannot last forever.

Never forget you are a soldier.

Always help your fellow prisoner.

Always eat anything offered.

Both of them wished they had been brought up religious—faith in any or all gods kept prisoners alive. They had seen what happened to other prisoners, those who had given up hope, those who thought they could not filter through animal excrement for bits of grain, those who rebelled, and those who thought they could lone-wolf it.

After three years, all of them were long dead.

Sten and Alex had survived.

Their previous training in the supersecret, survive-anything Mantis Section of the Empire's Mercury Corps might have helped. Sten also knew clotting well that having Alex to back his act had saved him. Kilgour privately felt the same. And there was a third item: Sten was armed.

Years earlier, before he had entered Imperial service, Sten had constructed a weapon—a tiny knife. Double-edged and needle-sharp, hand-formed from an exotic crystal, its edge would cut through any known metal or mineral. The knife was sheathed
in
Sten's arm, its release muscle-controlled. It was a very deadly weapon—although, in their captivity, it had been used mostly as a tool.

That night it would assist in their escape.

There had been very few escapes from the Tahn POW camps. At first those who had tried had been executed after recapture, and recaptured they almost always were. The first problem—getting out of a camp or fleeing from a work gang—was not that hard. Getting off the world itself was almost insurmountable. Some had made it as stowaways—or at least the prisoners hoped the escapees had succeeded. Others escaped and went to ground, living an outlaw existence only marginally better than life in the camps, hoping that the war would eventually end and they would be rescued.

Within the last year there had been a policy change—prisoners attempting an escape were not immediately murdered. Instead they were purged to a mining world, a world where, the guards gleefully told them, a prisoner's life span was measured in hours.

Sten and Alex had made four escape attempts in the three years they had been prisoners. Two tunnels had been discovered in the digging, a third attempt to go over the camp wire had been aborted when their ladder was found, and the most recent had been abandoned when no one could come up with what to do once they were beyond the wire.

This one, however, would succeed.

There was movement in the reeds nearby. Alex pounced and came up with a muddy, squirming, squealing rodent. Instantly Sten had the small box he held open, and the water animal was popped inside and closed into darkness. Very good.

"You two! Up!" a guard's voice boomed.

Sten and Alex came to attention.

"Making love? Sloughing?"

"Nossir. We're hunting, sir."

"Hunting? For reeks?"

"Yessir."

"We shoulda killed you all," the guard observed, and spat accurately and automatically in Sten's face. "Form up."

Sten didn't bother to wipe the spittle. He and Alex waded out of the paddy to the dike, into line with ten other prisoners. The column stumbled into motion, heading back toward the camp. There were three guards, only one of whom was carrying a projectile weapon; they knew that none of those walking dead were a threat. Sten held the box as steady as possible and made soothing noises. He did not want his new pet to go off before it was time.

The reek—an odoriferous water animal with unusable fur, rank flesh, and spray musk glands below its tail—was the final tool for their escape.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he prisoner-of-war camps had two command structures. The guards were the most visible. But the camp was actually run by the prisoners. In some camps the commanders were the strong and the brutal. Those anarchies were deathcamps, where a prisoner was as likely to die at the hands of his fellows as by a guard.

Sten's camp was still military. He and Alex were at least partially responsible for that.

The two had fought their way back to health during long delirium months. Then one day Sten was well enough to make a major discovery—not only was he known by the rather clottish name of Horatio, but Warrant Officer Kilgour outranked him. Somehow, he knew that had been carefully plotted by Alex back in the CIC of the
Swampscott
.

But regardless, rank would prevail. Those who felt the "war is over" or they "don't have to listen to any clottin' sojers who got us in the drakh in the first place" were reasoned with. If that did not work, other methods were applied. Sten might have been a skeleton, but he was one who knew many, many degrees beyond the third. And Kilgour, from the three-gee world of Edinburgh, was still the strongest being in the camp—even including the camp executive officer, Battery Commander (Lieutenant Colonel) Virunga.

The N'Ranya were not particularly civilized-looking primates who had developed as tree-dwelling carnivores. They had recently been recognized as the Empire's preeminent artillery experts—their ancestry had given them an instinctual understanding of geometry and trigonometry. Their 300-kilo-plus body weight did not hurt their ability to handle heavy shells, either.

Colonel Virunga had been badly wounded before he was captured and still hulked around the compound with a limp and a cane. Very few people who survived Sten and Alex thought it wise to argue with the colonel's orders. The Imperial camp commander was a thin, wispy woman, General Bridger, who had reactivated herself out of retirement when her world was invaded and led the last-ditch stand. Her only goal was to stay alive long enough to see the Imperial standard raised over the camp, and then she would allow herself to die.

At dusk, after Sten and Alex had forced down the appalling evening ration, she and Colonel Virunga said their good-byes.

"Mr. Kilgour, Horatio," she said, "I hope I shall never see either of you again."

Kilgour grinned. "Ah hae th' sam't dream, ma'am."

Virunga stepped forward. It took a while to understand the N'Ranya speech patterns—they thought speech mostly a waste of time and so verbalized only enough words to make the meaning clear.

"Hope… luck… When… free… do not forget."

They would not. Sten and Alex saluted, then began their moves.

Under orders, without explanation, other prisoners had begun what Sten called "two in, one out, one in, three out." In small groups they filtered toward one of the camp's few privies, one that "coincidentally" sat less than three meters from the inner perimeter. Sten and Alex joined them; the small box with the reek inside hung around Sten's neck, concealed by a ragged towel. It would be impossible for either of the guards in the towers nearby to keep track of how many prisoners went into the privy and how many came out.

The privy sat over a deep and dank excrement-filled pit. The building itself was a shed, with a water trough down one side and the privy seats—circular holes cut into a long slab-cut lumber box—on the other. Sten and Alex clambered
into
one of those holes. On either side of the box, on the inside, they had hammered in spikes a few days earlier.

Both of them had root fiber nose plugs stuffed in place. The plugs did no good whatsoever. Just hang on, Sten thought. Do not faint. Do not think whether that arachnid that's crawling up your arm is poisonous. Just hang on.

Finally the curfew siren shrieked, and the prisoner sounds subsided. Footsteps thudded, and one privy door opened. The guards, for olfactory reasons, only checked cursorily.

It would have been best for Sten and Alex to wait until the middle of the night before moving, but they had kilometers to travel before dawn. At full dark, they levered themselves out of their hiding places and grimaced at each other.

The next step was up to Colonel Virunga.

It started with shouts and screams and laughter. Sten and Alex saw the searchlight sweep over the cracks in the privy roof, toward one of the barracks. They slid out the privy door.

In theory, they should not have been able to go any farther. The camp was sealed with an inner barrier of wire, a ten-meter-wide "no-go" passage, and then the outer wire.

The tower guards swept the compound with visual searchlights, far more dangerous light-amplification scopes, and focused-noise sensors. By assignment, one guard should have been on each detector.

But the guards were lazy. Why, after all, was it necessary for three men to work a tower, especially at night? There was no escape from the camp. Even if one of the Imperials managed to get out, there was nowhere for him to go—the peasants surrounding the camp were promised large rewards for the return of any escapees in any condition, no questions to be asked. And even if an Imperial managed to slip past the farmers, where would he go? He was still marooned on a world far inside the Tahn galaxies.

And so a bright guard had figured a way to slave all three sensors to a single unit. Only one guard was required to monitor all three of them.

So when Virunga ordered the carefully orchestrated ruckus to start inside one of the barracks and a guard swung his spotlight, all sensors on that tower pointed away from the two scuttling blobs of darkness that went to the wire.

There were three strands of wire to cut before Sten and Alex could slip through into the no-go passage, three razored strips of plas. Sten's knife would make that simple. But those dangling strands would be spotted within a few minutes. And so, very carefully, Alex had collected over the past several cycles twelve metalloid spikes.

Sten's knife nerve-twitched out of its fleshy sheath. Very gently he punched two holes side by side on a razor strip. Alex pushed the spikes through them, then used his enormous strength to force the spikes into the plas barrier posts. With the strip thus nailed in place, Sten cut the wire. One… two… three… slip through the gap… repin the wire… and they were in the no-go passageway.

Across that, and again they cut and replaced the wire.

For the first time in three years Sten and Alex were outside the prison camp, without guards.

The temptation to leap up and run was almost overwhelming. But instead they crawled slowly onward, fingers feathering in front of them, expecting sensors and screaming alarms.

There were none.

They had escaped.

All that remained was getting offworld.

CHAPTER FOUR

"N
ow…where the hell is that clottin' sentry?" Sten whispered.

"Dinna be fashin' Horrie, m' lad," Alex growled.

Horrie. Somehow Alex not only had managed to make Sten a lower-rank but had found a diminutive for Horatio.

"You'll pay."

"Aye," Alex said. "But th' repayment ae a' obligation dinna be ae gay ae th' incurrin't ae it."

Sten did not answer. He stared at the dispatch ship, sitting less than 100 meters from their hilltop hiding place.

Sten and Alex had discovered a potential way off the planet when they were assigned to a work detail on the prison world's landing field. They had both observed and noted a small four-man dispatch ship, once state of the art but now used for shuttle missions between worlds. The ship might have been obsolete, but it had both Yukawa and Anti-Matter Two drives. All they had to do was steal the ship.