-7-
On Carme, Nadia Pravda crawled through a claustrophobically tight tunnel. She wore a rebreather with tank and a pressurized slick-suit. A headlamp washed over asteroid-rock with sharp points and dust on the uneven floor.
Nadia stapled a thick power cable into place. Her arms ached from lugging the stapler and her body throbbed with fatigue and desperate lack of sleep.
Out of an original bin of sixty unmodified humans, Nadia was one out of few to have survived this long. Haulers brought in more captured humans, along with needed equipment. The humans withered like leaves. They withered from overwork, undernourishment and despair.
Nadia’s breathing was harsh. Through the rebreather’s ballistic glass mask, there were dark circles around her eyes and a strange, haunted quality. A cyborg had shaved her head and sprayed her with burning chemicals. She had survived this long because she practiced several vile expedients.
She crawled on her elbows, carefully searching the floor and then the tight walls around her. She’d found dead workers before, their slick-suits torn by rock. The slightest cut could kill, allowing vacuum to finish her.
Nadia pressed the stapler against the cable and pulled the trigger. The unit trembled, and it pushed sharply against her hands as it drove a staple over the power-cable and into the rock. She dragged herself another few feet and repeated the process. She’d been in this tunnel for over sixteen hours. She had another eight to go. The cyborgs worked people in twenty-four hour cycles, with a four-hour sleep and eating period.
Nadia had survived because she stole nutrients from the dazed, the dispirited and the dying. When she found a dead worker, she slept for twenty or thirty minute periods. Then she claimed whatever work the dead had accomplished as her own. She did this because the cyborgs killed anyone who failed to reach their work-quota.
Nadia had been here since the
As she pressed the stapler against the cable and pulled the trigger—her hands lifted upward—she frowned. That pained her eyes. They burned all the time, and it hurt to blink. The sound of her breathing—she scraped her armored elbows across the gritty rock floor. She dragged herself over the cable and as she brushed up against the rock walls.
Nadia froze then, and slowly backed up. With blurring eyes, she stared at a sharp, rocky protrusion. Her stomach tightened as she checked her slick-suit. There was a line where the rock had pressed against it. But the suit hadn’t torn—she almost wept in relief.
She realized in a foggy way that she’d almost killed herself. Slowly, she lowered herself onto the floor. She needed to think. She had to collect herself. The cable made it impossible to relax, but she needed a few seconds of peace.
A new thought… it seemed profound as it welled into life. In the escape-pod traveling to Jupiter, she’d given up. Listlessness had been her constant companion. Here, on this hellish surface and with nightmarish overlords, she struggled to live. That didn’t make sense. It was a hundred times more painful here. She ached to sleep. She was hungry all the time. Instant death, it plagued her every move in these horrible tunnels.
This tunnel snaked endlessly into the darkness. She was alone down here, and she could possibly wedge herself at any turn. Here she fought on through mind-numbing horrors. Why hadn’t she fought on with similar courage against the loneliness of the escape-pod?
Her mind was too blurred to understand. With a groan, she forced herself up. She had to keep working or she might fail quota. If that occurred, a cyborg would simply rip off her mask and pitch her quivering body aside. She’d seen cyborgs do it over a hundred times to other unmodified humans.
Why—?
Nadia wondered then if she had the answer to her question. The escape-pod had been bitter loneliness and emptiness. There had not been anything to latch onto. There had been nothing to fight but for nothingness. Here, she saw her demons. She felt the tortures. It was something to endure. Maybe it was easier to endure hateful torture than to endure silence, stillness and aching loneliness and nothingness. That seemed strange.
Nadia listened to her harsh breathing and she squeezed her burning eyes. She wanted to sleep, but she’d have to wait another eight hours for that. Carefully, she slid past the sharp rock. Then she pressed the stapler against the black cable—it also disappeared into the tunnel that seemed to go on forever.
Nadia pressed the trigger. Her hands lifted, and another staple appeared around the power cable. She helped the cyborgs build their planet-wrecker, but Nadia didn’t know that. She endured for endurance sake, a human rat struggling in an alien sewer. If there was one thing life had taught her, it was that things changed. Nothing remained the same forever. On that small truth, she placed every hope, every drive to survive this endless ordeal.
-8-
After a year of desperate travel and weeks of hard deceleration, the
Demeter was a Guardian Fleet outpost, a munitions depot housing several patrol boats. Silvery domes and towers dotted the seven-kilometer moon. Large bots were attached to the
After the missile strike on Callisto, the base personnel had fled Demeter, taking most of the patrol boats. The Praetor had captured one boat. Its sole occupant had been the base’s former Force-Leader. Her interrogation had revealed Demeter, the base’s proximity and function.
At the moment, the Praetor marched through a munitions chamber deep in Demeter. He wore his battleoid- armor, with its heavy hand-cannon mounts. Around him, huge missiles lay in storage. Within his armor-suit, the Praetor grinned as he viewed the lettering on a missile’s nosecone:
Since saving his ship, the Praetor had lost weight, and the glow to his pink eyes had grown even stranger. Radiation poisoning had done the damage, but he was functional again, regaining strength by the hour and sustained by stimulants. With an exoskeleton-powered gauntlet, he gripped a metallic leash. It glittered whenever his headlamps washed over the former commander of Demeter Outpost. The woman’s left eye had puffed shut. She was missing teeth, and by the wincing way she spoke, it was obvious it hurt her to talk.
The Praetor mentally shrugged. The Force-Leader could have saved herself the permanent scarring and the brutalization. But she was a preman, a subhuman. It meant she could only learn through her own mistakes. That was the problem with possessing limited humanity. A Highborn learned through other people’s mistakes, not just his own. A preman was too stupid to use such elementary logic.
The Praetor tugged the leash, making her stumble after him. The empty base now belonged to the Highborn. Soldiers effected repairs and restocked the missile-ship with inferior Zeno drones.
The Praetor jerked the leash. The small Force-Leader bumped up against his armor. Servos whined as he peered down at her. In order to heighten her fear, the Praetor lifted one of his battleoid arms. He put his gauntleted fingers around the top of her head.
“With the twitch of my fingers,” he boomed through the suit’s speakers, “I can crush your skull.”
She whimpered. She was a broken reed, her entire body fleshed with purple and yellow bruises. There hadn’t been time for refinement as speed was critical.
“Show me the secret locations,” he boomed.
He allowed her to look up. She was such a child compared to him. Ah, this was living. This was why he’d been born—born into the world, not hatched from a test-tube as the hateful Social Unity propagandists claimed.
