Skida looked at Two-knife, then took the girl’s chin between thumb and forefinger for a moment to examine her injuries. A slight nod and the guards stepped away from Carter, who smiled and stood taller. Skida was wearing a Walther in a cross-draw holster below her left breast, with the butt turned in. Her hand did not seem to move with any particular haste, but the echoing crack of the first shot rang out before Carter’s eyes had time to do more than widen. He jerked back, folding as if an invisible horse had kicked him in the gut. The flat slap of the 10mm bullet hitting the muscle of his stomach was just audible under the gunshot, and she held the second until he clapped his hands to the spreading red patch and moaned in shock. The next bullet left a black hole in the middle of his forehead and snapped him erect again for an instant while the back of his skull blew out in a shower of bone-chips and pink-gray jelly.
“Take this shit away and throw it down a hole,” she said, holstering the weapon.
“First lesson!” she continued to the recruits. “Only two ways out of this army!” Skida held up a fist. One finger shot up. “One, when we marches down the Sacred Way in the victory parade.” Another finger. “Two—feet first. This the Revolution. The Revolution not a tea party; it not so kind, so gentle, so reasonable as that.”
She paused to let the recruits absorb that; one was retching, and a few were looking shaky. Most of the rest sat stock-still, but the smell of their fear was rank. After a moment she tapped herself on the chest.
“Skilly—that Field Prime to you—Skilly knows you. Knows all the secret of you dirty little souls. You think you baaad, eh? Think the world give you a hard time, think the world owe you something. Now you going to go take it, eh?” Mutters of approval. The tall woman sneered.
“Well, Skilly tells you something; you half right. Yes, the world shit on you all your lives. The Welfare officers, the CoDo, the rich, the taxpayers back on Earth, Citizens here—all of them fuck you over from the day you born. What does that make you?”
She paused, then spoke in a tone thick with scorn. “Shit yourselves, is what.” Another murmur, hostile this time and quickly dying under her glare. “Yes! You everything the bossman ever tell you you are. You worthless, you useless, no good to yourself or anybody. They laughing at you, mon.”
“But here”—she tapped a booted toe against the rocky earth—”here, you maybe become something. Here you learn how to take what the world owe you.” She crossed her arms. “How? Not by sitting in a bar, talking wit’ you friends about how you do something next month, for sure. Not by rolling drunks and beating up on tourists and cutting each other. Not by pushing shit into your arm or up your nose.
“Here, you learn to fight. Here, you learn to be an army. That is power, mon! Who wants that? Who wants power, who wants to fuck the people that been up your ass all your life?” They cheered at that, a raw savage sound. Niles felt his stomach clench with the sudden realization that it was directed at him and people like him.
Alarming, he thought. And exhilarating, the same wild excitement you got on a fast powder-snow slope.
“Shut up! Shouting won’t get it for you; lying under a tree won’t, nohow. Work get it for you.” There was dead silence now; Skida’s grin was gaunt and knowing. “Yes, compadres, here you work. You work harder than field-hands cutting cane, you work until the brains run out your nose like sweat. And you learn.” She stooped, and caught up a glob of semiliquid gray. A tuft of hair and bone was still attached to the glistening string of matter. Skida swung her arm in an arc, spattering it at the feet of the crowd, grimly amused as they shrank back.
“Look at that! Brains, and never used for anything but holding two deaf ears apart. Brains that wouldn’t learn, wouldn’t listen. At least now the ants eat them, get some use out of them. You want to be like that? No? So that the next thing you do here, you learn to use the brains. You stupid, now. Too stupid to know you stupid; now, we fix that.
“One last thing. Look at each other.” She waited a moment, until their heads turned uncertainly from side to side. “These people your compadres. These are the peoples you live with, eat with, work with, fight beside from now. Field Prime isn’t your mother; Field Prime doesn’t care if you love each other. You can hate each other like brothers. But when we finished with you, you will be tighter than brothers—you will save your compadre’s ass, because you know he will save yours.
“And when you’ve done all that, then you’ll have the power. The power of an army. Do you understand?”
“Answer, Yes, Field Prime!” Two-knife shouted; it was an astonishing sound, loud enough for a powered megaphone.
“Yes, Field Prime!”
“Louder, so Field Prime can hear you.”
“YES, FIELD PRIME!”
* * *
“And this your place, right next to mine,” Skilly said.
Niles nodded, a little dazed. The tour had been exhaustive, and combined with a running staff meeting and a series of introductions; he sensed that was a test too, of his ability to assimilate information quickly and not lose his feet. The network of caverns was enormous; on Earth it would have been a famous tourist attraction. Here it was being put to more practical use: stables, armories, kitchens, barracks, infirmary, machine-shop, a hydro-generator running on an underground stream, classrooms, even a small computer room with a commercial optical-disk system capable of holding almost unlimited data. The Meijians had been setting up shop next to that; farther back were caves stacked high with hides and tallow and jerky, part of the operation that provided cover and additional funds.
“This . . . must have taken years,” he said.
“Near ten years. Skilly found it just after she got here”—over a decade—”but she was really running a hide-hunting business then.” She waved a hand into the darkness. This stretch of corridor was lit by fluorescent tubes stapled to the rock. “Plenty more place like this in the Dales. About four hundred Helots here now, most training, and then we push them out to the other bases, keep everything dispersed. Duplicate all the facilities here, too, stuff in various place, if we ever have to move out fast. Building up the numbers now, got the framework and just need the warm bodies.”
“Well, ah, yes, Field Prime,” he said. She was leaning against the doorway of her quarters, set into the fissured rock, smiling slightly.
“Field problem in the morning,” she said, looking at the chronometer-compass on her wrist. “Oh,” she added, just as she closed the door. “Connecting door from your place inside. Not locked.”
* * *
This is ridiculous, Geoffrey Niles thought, staring at the doorknob.
His room was a simple bubble in the rock, roughly shaped with pneumatic hammers; the floor was covered with mats of woven quasibamboo, and there was simple furniture of wood and metal that looked as if it had been knocked together in one of the workshops and doubtless had been. There was a jug and bowl on the dresser and a field phone beside the bed, which was covered in furs that would have been worth a fortune on Earth and were probably what the poor used on Sparta. Someone had unpacked his gear and stowed it neatly in the dressers: there were four sets of Helot uniforms in his size with Senior Group Leader’s rank-badges—about equivalent to Major—hanging from the wooden rod that served as a closet, a complete set of web gear, and boots that fitted him. No excuse to linger beyond washing up and changing his clothes.
Also a bottle of brandy and some glasses in a cupboard. For a moment he considered taking a shot . . . Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself again. You’re twenty-four years old, not some schoolboy virgin. You’ve had plenty of experience with women. His palms were sweating; he wiped them, and looked at the door again. Saw Skilly’s face as she shot the man in the stomach this morning, bored disinterest. Saw it as they ran down the stairs in Sparta city, laughing as the grenade blew and shrapnel licked at their heels amid the screams and curses. He shivered slightly with a complex emotion he could not have named, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“So she’s not a debutante,” he muttered.
The door swung open noiselessly. There were two chambers on the other side; the first was an office, tables of neatly stacked papers, filing cabinets, a retrieval system and desk; all dim, lit only by the reflected light of a small lamp in the next. The only ornament was something that looked like an Indian figurine about six inches high, a six-armed goddess dancing.