Pushing Reeth aside, he carefully toed the door open. It swung inward on squealing, rust-eaten hinges. His Copperhead held at waist level, Kane took a cautious step over the threshold and into the holding cell. Initially he saw only shapes shifting in the shadows. Then the outlanders moved toward the light of the corridor.
First one, then another shuffled from the dark corner of the cell. Without ville immunity boosters, the elements of the hellzone had ravaged their limbs and features. Their skin was scabbed and peeling, with many open, running sores. Kane saw women with patchy bald spots in their lank hair, men with eyes covered by milky cataracts, children with stick-thin limbs and bellies swollen from malnutrition. The stink of their unwashed bodies clogged his nostrils. He recoiled from the contact of their touch, even against his armor.
These were the Dregs, the outlanders who were shunned even by other outlanders. The legacy of the nukecaust and the doctrines of the villes had bred an absolute horror of deviates. Those with severe birth defects were terminated as soon as they were found. Muties, once very numerous, had been eradicated from most of the ville territories. But the Dregs weren’t muties. In some ways, they were worse. They were diseased, genetically ruined from generations of exposure to toxic environments and radioactive hot spots, eking out hellish existences as scavengers.
Before they got too close, Kane stepped hastily back into the corridor, pulling the door shut, dropping the locking bar back into place with a thud. Whirling on Reeth, he snarled between bared teeth, “You sick bastard! These are Dregs! You had no intention of smuggling them into the ville. What were you going to do with them?”
“I have buyers in other places,” Reeth replied, voice quavering.
“Other villes?” Grant rumbled.
“No, not exactly.”
“How do you transport the merchandise to these ‘other buyers’?” Kane demanded.
Reeth shook his head and droplets of blood mixed with sweat flew from his face. “Don’t ask me that, sec man. You really don’t want to know.”
Kane’s hand darted for Reeth’s throat, closed around it and he shoved the man against the wall, bouncing the back of his skull against the stone.
“I’m sick of this,” he hissed. “I’m under orders to serve a termination warrant on you, and you’ve given me no reason to delay it another second”
“No, wait!” Reeth lifted a pair of trembling, conciliatory hands. “Listen to me, goddamn it!”
Reeth’s words tripped over each other in their haste to leave his lips. “I’m talking with a straight tongue now. You don’t want to know! You find out, and one night you’ll have termination warrant served on you !”
“You forget who we are,” Kane said in a low, deadly monotone.
“You’re a Mag, just another of the baron’s sec men. There are forces a lot more powerful than you.”
“Show us.”
Snatching a gloveful of dreadlocks, Kane wrenched Reeth away from the wall and down the corridor. The man dug in his heels and tried to resist, but Kane jammed the bore of the Copperhead into his kidneys to turn him down the bend in the passageway.
The corridor ended abruptly at a barrier. Kane, using the dreadlocks like reins, yanked Reeth to a jolting halt. They faced a door made of what looked like silvery smoked glass. There was a square panel beside the door with several rows of numbered and lettered buttons, some glowing brightly. A metal handle was affixed to the center of the door.
Kane recognized the composition of the door panel as armaglass, a predark invention sharing the properties of both normal glass and steel. It was rare but not unknown. He prodded Reeth with the Copperhead.
“Open it.”
Reeth groaned, put both hands on the handle, gave it an upward pull and the door swung outward. Kane peered around Reeth, looking into the chamber. It was circular, perhaps ten feet in diameter, with an eight-foot-high ceiling. He and Grant stared. It took him a silent, confused moment to realize he had no idea what he was looking at.
The chamber was six sided, all the walls featuring the same smoke-tinted armaglass. The floor was patterned with interlocking, hexagonal, raised metallic disks. The pattern was repeated in the ceiling. A few of the disks shimmered faintly, a silvery, moonlight hue. Kane heard the most distant of electronic humming sounds, like a buried generator.