“I think about it every day.”
“Well, now you can put a face to it.” The light searched the white mounds, picking out a skull here, a skull there. “How about this one, or this one? Or this one over here?”
“You’re puke, Ransom. Unadulterated puke.”
“We both did what we did, and we got paid for it. I guess that makes you pretty much puke, too.”
“I’m not proud of it.”
“Neither am I, Captain. It might surprise you, but beneath this well-polished exterior is one very miserable dude.”
“These people are beyond help,” Ryan said impatiently. “We should go, and quickly, before the troopers catch up.”
“Cawdor’s right,” Damm said.
“Yeah, I guess so,” the warlord agreed. “Nothing’s quite so disgusting as a couple of old soldiers weeping over their atrocities. What do you say to a truce, Captain?”
“Why not?” Nara replied.
With Thrill Bill in the lead, they worked their way across the avenue of death, kicking a path through the bones, and going around when the bodies were piled too high.
“How did they all die?” Ryan asked Damm.
“They breathed in carniphages,” the mercie said. ‘ ‘Most likely they did it on purpose. They had shelters to hide in. They didn’t use them. From the bullet holes in some of the skulls, it looks like a few of them got impatient and shot themselves. Maybe they thought it wouldn’t hurt as much. None of these people offed themselves before they were two-thirds starved and dying of thirst. FIVE cut off the water supply, too. Carniphages cleaned up all the skeletons, nice and tidy.”
“What’d they do to deserve it?”
“They didn’t surrender fast enough to suit FIVE’S CEOs,” the warlord said over his shoulder.
Thrill Bill took them to the middle of the street. He pointed his light at the ground and said, “There it is.”
In an area surprisingly clear of bones was a circular metal plate about three feet in diameter.
“Help me move it, Damm,” the warlord said as he passed the flashlight to one of his sec men. The mercie bent, and the two of them struggled to shift the plate out of the steel flange inset into the surface of the street.
“What are you doing?” Nara asked.
“This is how we get out,” Thrill Bill told her.
Nara looked dubious.
The job done, Thrill Bill took back his flashlight. “We aren’t the first visitors to this place, Captain. A while back, our friends from Population Control dropped in to see what kind of job their one-celled pets were doing. Guess they must’ve been really pleased. Anyway, the PCS boys came in and went out via the main sewer line.”
“How appropriate,” Nara said.
Thrill Bill put the flashlight between his teeth, eased through the opening feet first and started down. The light from the hole got dimmer and dimmer as he descended, and with each succeeding climber more and more of what little remained was blocked.
By the time it came for Ryan to bring up the rear, he could hardly see the opening. After locating the steel rungs inside with the toe of his boot, he backed partway down the pipe. As he was the last one to enter the manhole, it was his job to pull the grate back in place. This he did, though it took some effort, hampered as he was by the pack and two shoulder-slung blasters. Below him, something faintly flickered and he could hear boot soles scraping on rungs.
He couldn’t see the hand-and footholds, so he descended by feel, one careful rung at a time. A light played over his back as he climbed down the final twenty feet. The vertical feeder pipe he was in emptied into a much wider, horizontal channel, a corrugated steel cylinder about ten feet in diameter. The others stood clustered to one side, around the only source of light.
“We’d better hurry,” Thrill Bill said. “The guys who’re after us know about this, too.” Then he set off down the sewer pipe.
Still at the rear of the file, Ryan sloshed through the stream of evil-smelling liquid that was running down the center of the pipe. The footing was damned slippery, and in the bad light there was no tellingexactly what kind of nastiness a person might be slipping on.