“How long have you been here, Colonel?” Ryan asked.
“Twelve days.” He nodded in the direction of the trooper standing guard at the water tank. “The fuckers won’t give out extra water. When you start to get the nuke sickness, you get so damned thirsty.”
“What about Captain Jurascik?” Krysty said. “Is she here, too?”
Gabhart shook his head. “She died the day before yesterday. It was horrible.”
“Was it from the radiation?” Mildred asked.
“No,” Gabhart said, “it was from the stickies. The geniuses from my world who are running this operation captured a big group of stickies to help work the mines.”
“They’re trying to put stickies to work?” J.B. said. “That’s crazy! You can’t train stickies to do anything.”
“They didn’t figure that out until it was too late,” Gabhart said, “after they’d already let them loose in the mines. They actually thought they’d scared the sucker-fisted bastards into cooperating. Must be close to a hundred roaming free underground. They can’t get rid of them now. It’s a maze of crevices, side tunnels and air shafts down there.”
“Stickies can squeeze through some mighty small spaces,” J.B. agreed. “Got weird mutie cartilage. It lets them squash down their skeletons. Even their skulls compress a little.”
“But the laser cuffs…?” Ryan said.
“They only activate after you run a certain distance from the center of the road,” Gabhart said. “The stickies aren’t running away from anything. They like it in the mines.”
“The lasers can’t be selectively activated?” Ryan said.
“There’s no way to target individual slaves, if that’s what you mean. The only way to get rid of the stickies now that they’re loose is to trigger all of the cuffs on all the slaves, which would make the entire work force useless. The stickies are hiding deep in the mines. That’s where they jumped me and Jurascik. There was nothing I could do to help her. Nara was weak from the rad sickness, much worse off than me—most of her hair had fallen out, and she was coughing up blood. Stickies attacked and separated us, and then they dragged her off.”
“Killed her,” J.B. said.
“Fucking ate her,” Gabhart stated, bitterly. “There’s nothing to eat around here, except whatever you catch yourself under the glass. That’s why the stickies like it down there. The food comes to them. As you get weaker, you make easy meat. Easier than rats, because the mutie bastards have to chase them. Believe me, the stickies are the only ones getting fat around here.”
With a great effort, the colonel forced himself to his feet. “Got to get back down there,” he said. “Got to make my ore quota or no more water today. Thirsty. I’m so damned thirsty.”
“We’ll go with you,” Ryan said. “What do we have to do?”
“Pick an empty sledge from over by the mine entrance,” Gabhart said, “and push it down the hole.”
The ore carts consisted of battered metal boxes, five feet by three feet, that sat on pairs of crude, ski-like, metal runners. Each box had a number scribed into the side. Ryan and the companions chose one of the sledges. Shoving it ahead of them, they followed the colonel down into the mine.
“He’s not long for this world,” Mildred whispered to Ryan. “He’s in the terminal stages of radiation exposure. The linings of his intestines and lungs will start to slough off soon. The internal bleeding will be massive. Then he’ll collapse and he’ll never get up.”
That was pretty much what Ryan had figured.
“Be sure and keep your bandannas on,” Mildred told the others. “We’ve got to try to keep from inhaling the radioactive dust.”
The entrance angled down steeply between gray glass walls for about twenty-five feet, then the floor leveled out. The companions used a rope tied to the rear of the box to brake the empty cart on the way down the slope. As they descended, another cart, this one fully loaded, was being hauled up by four slaves using a rope tied to its front end. There was just enough room for the two sledges to pass side by side.
A short distance farther on, the main shaft branched in two, and the fork was guarded by a pair of troopers. The area where they stood was brightly illuminated by klieg lights on tripods.