The trooper standing beside the ore truck looked into their cart. There was no way to gauge his surprise through the opaque visor, but he paused for a long moment before he said, “We don’t give water in exchange for heads. Only ore.”
“Fuck that!” said one of the slaves whose sledge was waiting to be unloaded. He reached into the companions’ cart, grabbed a bald head for himself and quickly placed a double armload of ore on the ground beside the cart.
The idea caught on quickly.
Everyone with a sledge waiting to be unloaded did the same thing. In a matter of minutes, their cart was empty of heads and a pile of ore stood beside the cart.
“How about some water now?” Ryan said to the trooper.
Another cheer went up as he waved them over to the water tank. “Give water to sledge number seven,” he said.
The slaves who had traded seemed delighted with the deal they had made. Hooting and hollering, they began booting the stickie heads around Ground Zero like soccer balls. Even the rad sick ones, too weak to stand, managed smiles at the ghoulish antics. The major horrors of the slaves everyday existence had been reduced to kick toys.
Ryan ignored the raised pulse rifle of the trooper guarding the water tank, opened the tap, stuck his head under it and rinsed the blood off his hair and face. There was so much blood that it stained the wide puddle beneath the spout a rosy pink. After he had cleaned himself off, Ryan filled a cup and took it over to Gabhart, who had been moved to one of the shallow depressions in the glass. He and Krysty got the colonel to swallow a few tiny sips.
“Damned guards can’t do a rad blasted thing!” J.B. said, slapping his thigh in delight. “Whoa! Dean, look at that kick! That one’s outta here!”
The troopers were unprepared to deal with death sentenced slaves having fun on their own killing ground. They didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing.
“Ryan, lover,” Krysty said, “you just opened the floodgates of hope. Life in Hell is never going to be the same.”
Chapter Fourteen
Dredda entered the doctor’s quarters without knocking. “You have something for me?” she said to Jann, who sat at a small desk.
“Yes,” Jann said, pushing up from her chair. “I took some scrapings from Mero’s neck. And I found a similar patch of discoloration on myself, which I also sampled. Before giving you my analysis, I’d like to examine you, as well, if I could.”
“Of course,” Dredda said. She immediately unbuckled the torso plates of her battlesuit. They came away in two halves, front and back. They were overlapping and airtight. Underneath the armor, she wore a sleeveless gray T-shirt. She pulled the T-shirt off over her head, the hard muscles of her back outlined and jumping under her pale skin.
Jann used a magnifying loop to look at the area of redness on her right shoulder, which had spread from a small patch on her shoulder cap to cover half of her shoulder blade. The entire area was tender to the touch, and the edges of the patch, where they contacted normal looking skin, had a slight yellowish crust on them.
After a moment or two, Jann said, “I’ll want a scraping from you, too. If you don’t mind.”
“Fine. Do it.”
With the point of a fine-edged scalpel, the doctor teased some of the irritated tissue onto a slip of plastic. She took the sample over to the microscope on her desk and examined it more closely. When she drew back from the binocular eyepiece, Jann said, “It looks like we’re all infected with the same creature.”
“Infected?”
“Come over here and see for yourself.”
Dredda bent over the microscope. What she saw were clusters of single cell organisms, like stars on a midnight-black field. They all looked pretty much the same to her. They were oblong and globular in shape. They had waving, whiplike strands at either end. These strands seemed to propel them around—all of the creatures were jumping about erratically. If she looked hard, she could see right through their outer skin or cell wall. Tiny gobs of indefinable stuff moved around inside of them.