Lawrence turned a putty pallor, his eyelids trembling. Gripping his mind now was the dreadful truth: for certain, he was here forever. This was a callous pit of evil from which no escape could be tolerated. Death in pitch darkness, face rammed against steel plate, lips pouting to suck the last inch of air before it escaped to freedom and life above, then the wait, lungs burning... What happened in those last minutes? The snarled limbs and torn fingernails answered that question—Nature took its course.
Disaster being what it is, one seeks palliatives. Lawrence breathed deeply. Now he knew the worst. From here, it had to be upwards, getting established as a respected member of the gang.
“There is something I have to tell you,” Tricky Fingers said. “Unloading is not the worst part of the process. You’ve had a fairly gentle introduction, believe it or not. It’ll probably be something less savoury this afternoon.”
Chapter 4
Despite all the direct experiences of your career, none will have even remotely prepared you for the extreme economic logic I have pioneered in my Value System. After now having experienced Goods Inwards of the Value System, Lawrence was struggling to grasp what in God’s name could have provoked such extreme economic logic. It was hard to accept The Captain’s time as a top killer alone could have spawned it.
Most glory troopers never killed so much as a rat in their entire twenty-year service—and never achieved much rank either. Seventeen-year-old Lawrence observed that only one type of trooper got rank fast, the top killer. No one—that is, no one except the most despicable pen-pushing sycophants—reached senior rank who had not served time in the ‘hard’ units. It was all a matter of choices.
After training, Probationary Basic ‘Wee Larry’ Aldingford served in a hygiene unit on a sovereign land in the Thames Valley. The duty of a hygiene unit was the enforcement of Frite (Full Rights of Territorial Exclusion), one of the two fundamental principles of sovereign privacy (the other being Naclaski). The unit patrolled the frontier searching for smugglers and nests of infestation. The Great West Drain ran within a mile of the frontier so boredom was not a problem. Light entertainment gave relief between shoot-outs with smugglers and rounding up infestations for discharge to the public drains.
There was an old guy who sneaked through a culvert under the local frontier to steal milk from grazing cattle. Lawrence’s section leader, a sarcastic tough called Kalchelik, sent off a couple of basics to fetch Long Tall Sally. She turned out to be a monster rifle with a bipod stand and telescopic sight. She fired a 20mm explosive round about the size of a man’s thumb. Kalchelik took aim at the old git hobbling off with his tin of warm milk.... Long Tall Sally fired with a bang like a sledgehammer whacking a barn door. The old man burst. Everything above the waist vanished in a red cloud of tatters. When the unit went down to look, they found two legs and part of a torso issuing raw guts surrounded by an area the size of a squash court plastered in blood, lumps of flesh and splinters of bone. Someone found the head in a ditch and retrieved it dangling by the white beard with six inches of spinal column drooping from the ragged stump of the neck. At the sight of it, Lawrence doubled over and puked up. Whereupon, Kalchelik kicked him in the arse and told him not to be such a soggy-hearted woosy—this was a hygiene unit, for fuck’s sake.
“You OK, Zeta729?” Tricky Fingers said. “You’re very quiet.”
Lawrence found himself sitting with a piece of rye bread poised in front of his mouth. He took a bite and chewed without relish.
“I’ve plenty to be quiet about.” All through lunch, Lawrence had been sieving his memory for any clue as to why he had been singled out at Chatham camp for doom in extreme economic logic. He was absolutely certain he had never met The Captain, nor did he recognise any of the ultramarine guards or the population of value. Yet, he was convinced there was something personal about it.
“Be happy,” Tricky Fingers said.
This brought a round of snorts from Yip-Dog, Ugly Toes and Spiderman. Lawrence had been keeping half an eye on Spiderman, while they ate a full lunch of vegetable soup, rye bread and French fries washed down with a surprisingly good tea made from dandelions. Spiderman sat with his dark eyes all inward, grinding and mashing over some unknown outrage. Tricky Fingers continued:
“It could be worse. Think of all the poor saps going deaf beating iron plates, or getting blinded in the acid plants, or coughing their lungs up sorting cotton. Then there’s the surplus flow, starving to death on the public drains. Our food is good. The work is varied.”
The truly alarming thing was that he actually sounded serious.
Lawrence glanced up to find Spiderman eyeing him, now with a surprising kindliness, such a change as if the sun had come out.
“I know how you feel, it’ll pass,” Spiderman said.
Lawrence shook his head.
“It never will.”
Tricky Fingers gave him an impatient look.
“Then you won’t last.”
Lawrence tasted bitter realities. He had no idea where this place was. He had no idea what lay around it. Everyone told him escape was impossible. He fidgeted with the metal tag.
“Let’s agree our new arrival’s moniker,” Tricky Fingers said. “He wants to be called Wee Larry.”
This of course, absolutely guaranteed his moniker was not going to be Wee Larry. Ugly Toes suggested ‘Machine’, as Lawrence worked so hard. Tricky Fingers scratched his throat, thinking.
“It’s always an asset for the gang to have gutsy types. It puts the undead rubbish to shame. How about ‘Big Stak’, after Stakhanov? Do you know who he was?”
“A hero of the Soviet Union,” Lawrence said.
Ugly Toes had never heard of the Soviet Union. When he further asked
