Ryan looked down at his badge. It was already faintly glowing. There was no need to ask what that signified.
They were in a death zone.
“Bubblehead over there talked about giving us water,” J.B. said, “but he didn’t mention anything about food. I think that means we’re on our own in that area.”
“Might as well hang up a sign—Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,” Mildred said.
“We cannot abandon that!” Doc stated emphatically. “Standing at the gates of hell, it is our only shield.”
The troopers started using their rifle butts to herd the milling slaves in the direction of the mine entrances. At a second checkpoint, the companions were each handed short-handled pickaxes and mesh bags for carrying ore. When all of the new slaves had been given tools, the guards retreated to the outside of the ring. There were no further instructions, and the slaves weren’t forced underground at blasterpoint. Their captors knew that thirst would do that quickly enough.
Ryan and the others filtered over to one of the mine entrances. Beside the round hole was a cut-down oil drum with the words Baron Jolt stenciled on the side. Stuffed inside the drum was a man with matted gray hair. Obviously the victim of laser manacles, he had no hands or feet.
While the companions watched, a slave came out of the mine, walked up to the half drum, unzipped his fly, hauled out his wherewithal and proceeded to empty his bladder. The gray-haired man groaned in protest, raising his wrist stumps to keep the warm spray out of his eyes and mouth.
“Do you know who that is?” J.B. asked. “That’s Baron Doyal himself. From baron to urinal, man, talk about a tough world!”
Ryan was already circling to the other side of the entrance, where a group of slaves squatted in front of a ten-foot-long propane burner that served as a nighttime heat source. They were using two-foot lengths of stiff wire to toast small, elongated objects over the open flames.
The objects had four stumpy little legs and long tails.
Rats.
One of the slaves who was watching the others cook, a big, dirty, bearded man with spiral brands on his forehead and cheeks, slipped in from behind and deftly snatched another’s rat on a stick. There was a brief scuffle for the hot food, which its original owner quickly lost. He seemed in very bad shape and was far too weak to reclaim his meal. The stronger slave gleefully chomped down the well-browned rat, bones, crispy tail and all.
The robbed slave turned away from the barbecue and staggered back toward the mine entrance, presumably with the intent of chasing down another dinner.
Ryan did a double take as the man stumbled past. Though his face and hands covered with weeping rad sores, though he was missing hair in big patches and most of his teeth, there was no mistaking him.
“Colonel Gabhart?” Ryan said.
Chapter Ten
Dredda leaned her head forward and peered over the edge of the abyss. Striated nukeglass lined both sides of the yawning chasm. After a sheer drop of five hundred feet, the almost vertical walls began to curve together, like the folds of a glistening gray wound, one bulging over the other, forming a black crease of impenetrable shadow.
Below the crease, the bottom fell out.
Because of the way the walls overlapped, the maximum depth of the second level of the crevasse couldn’t be accurately measured by overflight sonar; certainly it was in the thousands of feet, more than enough to keep scavenging animals from reaching Kira’s corpse.
Their battlesuit helmets off, their stubble-shaved heads lowered, the ten surviving Level Four females clasped gauntlets in a mourning line along the verge of the Slake City precipice. Their dead comrade lay in a body bag at Dredda’s feet.
As Dredda looked into the plummeting abyss, she flashed back to her father’s state funeral, a miles-long procession with millions of mourners lined up to pay their last respects to the ornate armored coffin that was guarded by a full military escort—tanks, APC wags, combat troops and hovering gyro squadron. She realized that what she had felt as her father’s body rolled past the CEOs’ reviewing stand was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the emotion she was feeling now. At the time, she actually believed that she had suffered a terrible, life shattering loss. At the time, she actually believed that she had loved her father more than she could ever love anyone. Now she knew that she had deluded herself in both cases.