When she tried the wheel, it turned easily. The door wasn’t locked. As soon as she cracked it, a chorus of cluttering noises greeted her and she knew she had found what she had been looking for. The room before her was brightly lit by ceiling strips, and an entire wall was taken up by a bank of electronic instruments and LCD screens. She shut the door and moved closer to the stacked screens.
The images they contained were pictures of Earth taken from space. Not just scans of Deathlands, but the whole planet. Some of the displays used infrared to show temperature gradients of landmasses and ocean currents. Others offered analyses of current weather patterns, rock and soil types and indigenous plant and animal species. Still others pinpointed the locations of scattered human populations. On some of the screens, she could see what looked like individual people walking about between circles of huts, oblivious to the fact that they were being observed.
This unimaginable, all encompassing view of her world made it seem small and vulnerable.
A target.
One screen in particular caught her eye. It showed clusters of bright points of blue light on a flat grid-work. There were four points to a cluster. Some were so tightly overlayed that they could only be distinguished when they moved apart. And the clusters did move, independently, as she watched. The grid squares of the overlay were either lime green or fluorescent red. The green squares formed a path that wound through a field of red; they ended, abruptly, in red. All of the blue dots were inside the green grids.
Red was dead.
The blue pinpoints were the manacles of the individual slaves at Ground Zero.
Krysty looked around for something to smash the comp with, and, finding nothing more suitable, picked up a small chair.
As she raised it over her head, the door to the room opened, and a voice behind her said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“What do you mean your troopers are unable to control the situation?” Dredda yelled in the man’s face. “They have armor and weapons! The workers are defenseless!”
“It looks like the slaves got their hands on some pulse rifles,” the trooper said. “They overpowered a couple of guards, then stripped them of their armor and weapons. At this point things are, well, fluid.”
” ‘Fluid’? You mean they could go either way?”
The man nodded grimly, then braced himself for more verbal attack by his commander.
He wasn’t disappointed.
Dredda put a finger in his face. “I ordered you to maximize output at the mines and instead, you have jeopardized everything. Everything! I should never have put men in charge there. But I figured that slaves—underwatered, unfed, overworked slaves— even you could handle. I underestimated them, and I overestimated you.”
The trooper noncom pulled himself together and said, “To regain control of the mines, we’re going to need reinforcements. We’ve lost men out there. They need to be replaced.”
“So, I’m going to have to spend fuel and time recovering what shouldn’t have been lost in the first place. The question is, should I even bother?” Dredda turned to the lanky man standing quietly to one side. “What is your analysis of the situation?”
“The cost-benefit ratio is difficult to quantify,” Dr. Huth said. “There’s no way of estimating the additional fuel and the time that will be required to retake the mines. Recovering the loss of time is impossible, obviously. Recovering the lost fuel depends on how quickly control is regained. If the expended fuel can’t be recovered in the time remaining, with some considerable extra to boot, there’s no advantage to putting down the slave rebellion. To do so would only mean less energy available before and after the jump.”
“I get the feeling that everything is closing in on me,” Dredda said. “Everywhere I turn I find a dead end, and I don’t like it!”
“The options are definitely narrowing,” Huth agreed. “I suggest an immediate, limited operation. Commit as few irreplaceable resources as possible. If during the confrontation the opposition gives any hint that it can’t sustain itself, throw everything at them.”