Even masked by the storm, the base was a tiny oasis of green grass in the middle of a hellish vista. The wall encircling the ville held off the worst of the wind, but the ash peppered the buildings with brutal force, shoving sec men along the ground. The blues walking patrol tied themselves to posts driven into the ground to keep from tumbling away. With their faces wrapped in multiple layers of cloth for protection, the sec men could breath in the thick air, but no sounds or words would carry beyond a few feet, with visibility stopping at a few yards. If the orange clouds above flashed with lightning or rumbled with thunder, they had no idea. Even though they knew for a fact that the huge predark dish antenna rose above the ville, taller than a hundred men and wider than a twenty-minute run, they couldn’t even see the concrete blockhouse it used as a support base for its massive steel girders and reinforcing struts. Ten men died walking off the cliff near the abandoned stone quarry before Major Sheffield, rather, Baron Sheffield, forbade any more patrols outside the wall. The ash storm utterly ruled the Shiloh ville.
Shifting weight from foot to foot, the sec men at the wall endured the raging storm, wishing they were stationed at the front gate. Those lucky bastards were safe inside a brick kiosk with windows and a stove. Probably had a dancing slave and were drinking beer, too. Then one of the guards jerked his head around, and took a half step forward.
“I just heard that weird noise again!” the private shouted, sliding his longblaster off a shoulder and clumsily working the bolt. Advancing to the end of the rope, he tried to see into the howling maelstrom. Ash and dust. Nothing else.
“Hey, me too!” added another.
“It’s nothing,” Tucholka muttered, hunched beside the burned wreck of a predark tank. Its thick armor was badly warped from the slave revolt, but the titanic wag still offered some degree of protection from the stinging debris. “Just the freaking wind! Told you that already!”
The second private stared at the hole in the wall. “You sure?”
“Shut up! I was trying to sleep!”
“You moron!” a corporal shouted in disdain. “That’s how you got in trouble in the first place!”
Tucholka sneered at the man, then realized he couldn’t be seen. “Stuff it, asshole!” the sergeant roared. “That’s an order!”
The corporal yelled something that he couldn’t hear and turned his back on the man. Saying nothing, the privates merely shifted position to keep a closer watch on the vulnerable gap in the ville defenses. Under the iron leadership of Silas Jamaisvous, the blues had captured hundreds of people from the surrounding communities, farms, hamlets and just people passing through Tennessee, forcing the slaves to dig huge stone blocks from the side of a nearby hill and build the great wall. The rock was only limestone, not granite, but it took power tools to carve granite and wags to move the massive loads. Nobody sane would give such things to slaves, no matter how well they were chained and watched.
The slaves had tried to get free anyway and had been dealt with harshly. Lacking any more workers, the wall remained unfinished with a single fifty-foot-wide gap in its expanse, a doorway perfect for cold-hearts and mercies, although muties were the real danger these days. The creatures seemed to be attracted to the dish for some reason. Maybe it was the soft hum of the transformers, or maybe they could see the microwaves beaming down from space to feed the ville electricity. Nobody knew for sure, and the muties weren’t talking.
The hole was blocked as best as possible, stuffed solid with barbed wire and electrified with enough current to chill a horse. But armed men still had to stand vigil at the weak point of the perimeter. It was punishment duty, and they knew it. The sarge was guilty of sleeping on duty, the corporal stole shine from the kitchen and both privates had traded food to slaves for sex. Each of them had been caught in the act, whipped for disobeying orders, reduced in rank and assigned here as a last chance. One more mistake and they would be put in chains as the first of the new replacement slaves.
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