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much against a shredder.
"You can keep the pack. Now get in there, and don't cause any trouble. Or you
end up like that." He gestured toward what I thought was a stump, before I saw
the flies and coagulated blood around the shredded flesh and bone.
"... uuuggghh..." Somehow, I managed not to lose what little was in my
stomach, but the remaining bitterness burned my throat.
"That's what happens if you don't follow orders, swamp rat."
Click.
He had opened the gate while I was trying not to retch my guts out. None of
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the other three men even looked toward the gate, although all three stared
momentarily at me.
Three steps, and I was inside, clutching my tattered pack.
Clunk.
"No talking. Any of you.'
I sat down and ate the good half of the chyst and another onion. After one
look at what I was eating, the three others lost interest. Had I still been at
the Academy, I probably would have lost interest too. If not all my appetite
and then some. But I needed to keep up what strength I had left, and enough
energy for one emergency escape.
After finishing off the onion, I stretched out and used the pack to cushion my
head. Besides food, I needed sleep. My days in the damps had been short on
both. The ConFeds weren't out catching people for an execution, which meant
they had something in mind. At the worst it was probably slave labor I hoped.
XVIII.
"None of you are good enough to be ConFed Marines! You're not even good enough
to be second-rate Secos! You aren't even..."
Too tired to ignore the thin man with the hard eyes, I listened to him.
Standing at attention with me were the others that the ConFeds had rounded up,
perhaps a score in all. Hard bread and water that was all we had been given,
but with my onions, it hadn't been too bad. The hard-eyed man and the others
had rousted us from the stockade at dawn and marched us into town. Esterly, I
think, though I had never been that far east of Bremarlyn before.
"...but you're all we've got left, and it's my job to turn you into an
imitation of the real thing. If you live long enough, you just might make
second-rate Marines, and that's twice as good as anything else!"
Why we needed more military personnel after the unseen enemy had turned so
much of Westron into dust was still unclear to me. The forcer in front of the
ranks kept screaming about the need for discipline and the need for order, but
most of the others would have scuttled back into the damps right then except
for the five ConFeds with their shredders and hard eyes ranging up and down
our ranks. So we listened and hoped for some bread, perhaps a ground apple.
"We can beat the Enemy if we work at it! But looters, scroungers and drifters
don't work. You aren't looters, scroungers, and drifters anymore. You're the
property of the ConFed Marines, and you're going back to work, and you're
going to like it.''
Somehow I still couldn't see how more ConFeds in uniform, toting shredders,
taking food at weapon-point, and screaming at people, were going to defeat the
Enemy. Hell, the Enemy thought we were ants if the Enemy bothered to think
about us at all.
"Any questions?"
I had plenty. All they'd get me was trouble. So my mouth stayed shut.
"No brains here? Any questions? Last chance for questions, you dullards."
"Why... why us?" stammered a thin youngster. "What good will more soldiers
do?"
"Step forward, boy!" screamed the ConFed Forcer. His olive-colored singlesuit
was dusty. So was his blotchy face.
where it wasn't dirt-streaked with sweat.
The kid who asked the question didn't move.
"Bring him forward!"
One guard handed his shredder to another and walked up to the pale-faced
youth. Yanked him right out of line and threw him into the mud in the middle
of the road. The dust that seemed everywhere and the intermittent and un-
predictable rains left mud puddles everywhere, even on the once-spotless
Imperial highways.
The youngster, not even as old as I was, lay there for a second, then
scrambled up and started to run.
Scrut... scrut... scrut... scrut...
The shredders were as terrible as they sounded. He didn't even look like
chopped meat more like blood pudding sprayed on the ground. If I'd had
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anything in my stomach, it couldn't have stayed there.
"That's the first rule, you worthless bodies.
No questions. Not ever."
At least three of my companions were retching their guts out, but the forcer
let them without even commenting. He just waited for them to finish. My
stomach stayed knotted tight.
"Now line up. Double file. Double file, two abreast. Move it, and make an [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]