[Fiction Week continues. Next up: the first chapter of a science-fictiony novella, working title, "The Undercommander's Barbers." It's long--about 4,000 words--so be forewarned.]
I.
The Rotents came in the middle of the night, or perhaps early in the morning before the suns had risen, and took everyone who slept on the left side of the barracks away. Undercommander Rös told those remaining on the right side of the barracks that they were fortunate: “We don't need you for work this morning.” Those who were left tried to ignore Undercommander Rös' unpleasant emphasis. They told themselves that they were fortunate, very fortunate indeed, and tried to go back to sleep in the stifling gloom.
Sometime later, the first sun rose and the heat of the day began to creep through the plastic slatwalls of the barrack, riding along pale beams in the dusty air. The overhead horn blared, once, twice, then three long bursts, and they all fell pell-mell out of the bunks, gathering themselves into a semblance of order. Some of the newer additions straightened out their tattered bedclothes, and even neatened up their rough gray tunics. Cloak scratched at a sore on his arm and watched them. Presentation wouldn't matter one way or the other, he thought. But they didn't know that yet.
Undercommander Rös stepped smartly through the open barrack doorway a while later, dark gray from his mirror-bright boot tips to the thin sharp brim of his cap. Twin vermilion chevrons slashed across each shoulder. His chiseled face was clean-shaven, as was his head, a fact that few people knew because he was never without that cap-but Cloak knew, because he had been the Undercommander's barber for three months when he had first arrived.
It had been a strange game, played with an antiquated straight razor. Razor-burn merited a beating, punctuated by a shiny boot to the ribs. That happened once or twice a week, at first. A smooth shave would grow red and irritated in the day's heat and sweat, hours later, and the Undercommander would come and find him, wherever Cloak happened to be. Yet Cloak had relished the duty. Every day, he got to hold a sliver of sharpened metal against the Undercommander's throat. Every day! Cloak suspected that the Undercommander knew this...suspected his small delight. But Cloak could not take advantage of the vulnerability. Eventually, Cloak became concerned only with avoiding the beatings, and achieved perfection for two weeks: sixteen days straight, no burn, no beatings. Shortly after that, the Undercommander had gotten someone else for the job, and presumably the game began again.
“All of you,” the Undercommander told them in his oddly-accented K'rith, “Will gather in the Eastern Quad immediately after the morning feeding.” The Undercommander had practiced his K'rith with Cloak frequently as he shaved him, explaining that learning the “ugly tongue,” as he called it, helped him to understand the Krith psychology. To more properly motivate them. To Cloak's dismay, he had even taken to reciting memorized passages from the Books, butchering them with his blunt Haddish accent.
The Undercommander selected two of the men from the front of the barrack and left with them, leaving the others to assemble themselves in a ragged line and head for one of the long, narrow mess halls, capable of serving twenty-five thousand meals in a morning. Not that there was much to those meals: automated machinery dispensed precisely measured caloric glop with precision. Starting outside of the hall itself, they all filed in, past a machine that puffed lightweight gray tureens with attached spoons into their hands. They broke the spoons off of the tureen edge as they passed by the glop-nozzles. Blat! One serving. Then they shuffled along the narrow hall in the semi-darkness, eating quickly as they walked. Before passing into the white heat of the morning at the other end they dropped the empty tureens and spoons into open holes in the floor, where the material was quickly re-processed into new tureens and spoons for those at the beginning of the line. All very efficient. So efficient that, if someone kept a spoon or tureen or missed the hole, someone else at the end of the line wouldn't get a fully-formed set.
Cloak dropped his set into the hole and shuffled out into the dry sunlight, head down, contemplating the fine gray dust that his slippered feet kicked up. Behind him, Kalath muttered, lips almost motionless, “Where do you suppose they're putting us today?”
“Don't know,” Cloak replied, equally quiet. “Haven't heard yet.” The column shuffled and shambled in a line along a path made of dirty, extruded plastic, past the endless rows of low barracks, towards one of the vast open areas that looked out onto the distant fences and, beyond them, the dim plains. Ahead of him, one of the marchers-new, Cloak didn't have his name yet-turned his head slightly.
“The fellow in front of me said that he heard that the number twenty-six transporter misfired last night,” he told Cloak, louder than was strictly necessary. Loud enough so that Cloak could hear the quaver in his voice. “What's that mean?”
It meant, Cloak knew, that the one hundred remaining men of Barrack D-F had grim work ahead of them. “I don't know,” he told the man. “Keep your head down and your lips still when you talk.” The man snapped his head back down as though expecting to be struck down immediately. As he did so, they passed a body, laid out face down in the pale dust among a scattering of tiny button cacti, the arms outstretched as though the person had been flying, fast and high, and had been brought down to earth suddenly. It was Bal, Cloak saw: the man had lost two fingers and part of his left hand several months ago, giving him a distinctive, pincer-like appendage. Bal had been one of the men the Undercommander tad taken from the barracks earlier. The back of his head was gone. Shortly they passed another body, also missing most of its head-the other man. Ninety-eight remaining men, Cloak amended.
“What did they do?” the man ahead of Cloak wanted to know.
“I don't know,” Cloak repeated. The man didn't ask again. Eventually, they came to the tall, black obelisks that demarcated the corners of the East Quad. Waiting for them there were two dozen gray-helmeted Rotents and Sub-Rotents, wearing their deep vermilion tunics and ready with their prodding sticks-dark gray shafts, a meter and a half long, tipped by small blackened prongs that could hurl a man 10 meters with the force of kinetic impact, bursting him, or merely jolt the skin painfully. They used them judiciously and efficiently, herding the men into an even square, twenty-two men by twenty-two. Cloak made sure he was near the center of the square, even pushing one man outside of its bounds so that he had to run around behind it and scoot into the last row. When they were done, there were fourteen men milling around outside of the square, confused-mostly new, and some older fellows who couldn't move fast enough or didn't care anymore. The Rotents went to work with their sticks, shouting Haddish obscenities at the stragglers and, one by one, sending irresistible bolts of kinetic energy into faces, hearts, and guts, dropping the men where they stood. One tried to run to somewhere, and the Rotents let him get almost twenty meters away before they all lined up and, at a gutteral command, fired at once. The man exploded, meat dropping into the pale dust.
“Why did they do that?” hissed a voice behind him. It was the fellow who had been just ahead of him in line.
“Shut up,” Cloak told him.
“Why did they do that?” The man repeated, louder. Cloak could hear him shuffling.
“Shut the hell up,” Cloak said, echoed by others nearby. Then, to avoid panicking the man with the simple unknowability of it all, he gave him some more information. “They always do that. Always an even square, with some left over. Don't get left over.”
“Sh'if täv, Sh'if täv, Sh'if täv…” Cloak heard the man muttering, swaying. The opening verse of the Prayer for the Dead. “Män kände sachlanii, Sh'if täv...” Cloak tensed, ready to silence him, but the man kept it barely above a whisper, rhythmically sibilant. Cloak let him pray, but did not join him. He waited with all the others, while the blood of those left over quickly dried behind them in the ever-increasing heat of the day. Both suns were in the sky, now; the deep red furnace of Sachiim and the smaller, yellow disk of Sakliith bore down on them. Ahead of them, in a neat row, the twenty-four Rotents stood at the ready, prods at their sides, faces invisible behind darkened visors, brows cooled by small units within their helmets. So they all waited, baking, until the suns had risen another two degrees into the whitening sky. Eventually, a lone figure strode through the dust behind them, and took his place in front of the Rotents: Undercommander Rös.
“There has been an unfortunate accident,” he told them without preamble in his stilted K'rith. “The transporter unit numbered twenty and six has been misfired in the early morning. Before these required repairs can be performed, this unit a thorough cleaning requires. That is your task for all of the hours of this day.” Cloak glanced up from beneath his lowered brows, over the shoulders of the men in front of him, and noted immediately the two small neat adhesive bandages on the Undercommander's face, one on his left cheek, the other just below the line of his jaw on the right. One nick per body, Cloak guessed. Bal, with his pincer-hand, never had a chance.
The transporters were located far away from the Quad and the barracks, nearly ten kilometers. The detachment of Rotents split down to a dozen men, and herded the men from Barrack D-F onto a pair of floating skiffs for transport across the camp to the transporters. With a bowel-shuddering thrum! the skiffs rose above the ground and, kicking up great sheets of powdery gray, sliced across the camp with their laborer cargo. Along the way, Kalath carefully moved among the packed crowd until he was next to Cloak. “This will be bad, won't it.” It wasn't really a question. Kalath tugged at his scraggled beard fitfully.
“I expect so,” Cloak said. “But what is ‘bad'?” He gestured up at the suns, and wiped a thin mud of dust and sweat off his brow. “I can't tell anymore.”
“The new man, the one who prayed the Sh'if täv,” Kalath continued above the hum of the skiffs. “Who is he?” Cloak shrugged.
“I don't know.” He craned his head, looking for the man. “I think he's on the other skiff.” Kalath made a noncommittal noise, and joined Cloak in staring ahead at the flat landscape. They passed by columns of other men, being herded along to one place or another by groups of Rotents. At the farthest edge of the Quad, gangs of workers in sweat-darkened tunics dug trenches and laid liquid plastic foundations for the floors and walls of small factory-units. Eventually, they left this area, and the distant transporters slowly came into view. Huge, low structures, topped with thick, heavy machinery and fronted with wide, yawning doors. A symmetrical forest of tall black spires topped each one. The skiffs passed by twenty of the vast structures before stopping and settling to rest near one. The Rotents prodded the men off of the skiffs, and made them form a square before the vast open space of the transporter. A Rotent with a pair of bright yellow bars at his uniform shoulders stepped to the front and spoke loudly to them in thick Haddish, which was translated into K'rith by a tall, thin man from the Barrack with a scratchy voice, named Klim. “Each of you will be issued the necessary tools,” Klim screeched at them all. “When heavy equipment is required, it will be brought to the site. Go inside now, and begin your work.” The Rotents stepped to either side of the transporter, and dim overhead lighting buzzed into life, casting sickly yellow radiance, illuminating the darkness within.
Cloak peered inside as he awaited the issuance of his tool belt. It appeared as though the gray dust had drifted into the transporter from outside; thick drifts of it coated the glimmering floor of the low, cavernous space. Towards the back wall of the enclosure, in the distance, some sort of debris lay piled in low heaps. Cloak peered at the pile, and then put it out of his mind. First they'd want the dust cleared. The rest would come later.
The Rotents pushed, prodded, and jolted them into two lines two meters apart, each man two arms' lengths apart from his fellow. As luck-or, Cloak thought later, perhaps intention-would have it, the new man, the prayer, was immediately to his left. All of the men now wore belts holding various cleaning implements-scrapers, rotating brushes, solvent sprayers, baling hooks. But for now, they were to use vacuum devices tipped by wide, flat soft bristles that gently dislodged the layer of gray dust and swept it into the sacks each man carried slung over one shoulder. The floor of the transporter, beneath its powdery coating, was a fine grid of mirror-bright metal, thin but strong, that yielded slightly beneath their feet with spring-like tension. The walls and ceiling were covered with the same silver mesh. As the men slowly stepped forward into the transporter, sweeping the vacuums in careful arcs, they exposed the intricate, coppery-blue piping, very small, that lay packed tightly just beneath the grid's surface. After they had progressed a few meters in, the new man began to speak, as Cloak knew he would. “My name is Yeshula,” he said, raising his voice slightly above the noise of the cleaning machines. Cloak nodded, saying nothing, and they moved a few more meters. “Will you tell me your name?” Yeshula asked eventually.
“Cloak. You missed a sliver there, on your right.” Yeshula dutifully swung the whirring device, sweeping the mesh floor clean. They progressed deeper into the transporter.
“How long have you been here?” Yeshula asked.
“Nine months, I think.” Cloak shrugged. “I don't know, really. Body rhythms are all off, here. Lunar cycle's different. There are no seasons to speak of.”
“I arrived two days ago,” Yeshula told him, and coughed. Fine dust, kicked up by the vacuums, filled the space around them. It left a burnt taste in the back of their throats, and coated their tongues and teeth, drying out their mouths. “The Haddish took Sestre, and rounded up all of the Krith they could find. I hid for a week in the capital, but…” Cloak blinked, hard, almost a twitch.
“Sestre?” he asked numbly. “The Haddish have taken Sestre?”
“Oh yes,” Yeshula continued, his vacuum arcing to cover spots that Cloak was now missing as he staggered heavily forward, his arm barely moving. “Sestre, Daidono, Kellisch…in the past six months they've pushed beyond the System and well into the outer worlds.” Yeshula sighed, and coughed again. “The war goes badly for the Allied Worlds.” Yeshula glanced over at Cloak. “Did you have people on Sestre?”
After a moment, Hakiin said, “My wife. My daughters. I sent them there three years ago, before…things progressed. I didn't think that…” He stopped and began sweeping the vacuum with renewed vigor, exposing bright silver mesh beneath the thick dust.
“No one did, friend,” Yeshula said quietly.
“I'm not your friend,” Cloak said. “There are no friends, here.”
Yeshula, blessedly, let that lie, and concentrated on his sweeping, back and forth, progressing deeper into the transporter along with the rest of them. After an hour, they had cleared half of the distance between the entrance and the pile of debris that lay towards the back wall. Now, underlying the dry, acrid smell and taste of the dust, there was another odor, rising in the increasing heat of the enclosed metal space…cooked, slightly cloying. Unmistakably organic. It clung to them with oily persistence. Yeshula abruptly staggered, his whirling brush swinging wide, his throat working visibly. “Don't puke,” Cloak warned him. “Just don't. If they have to pry up any more of the floor than they already do they'll beat the lot of us. Breath through your mouth, look at your brush head, and keep moving.” He risked a glance back over his shoulders, towards that harsh light of the wide doorway. The Rotents lounged there, just inside the shadowed entrance, leaning against the walls. One of them idly twirled his prod, as though it were a baton. Yeshula had attracted no notice.
“Tell me about Sestre,” Cloak said. “How did it happen? What about the perimeter defenses?” Sestre, a neutral planet near the final outposts of the colonized sectors, possessed the most effective planetary defenses in the System. Of all the places in the System, Cloak had thought that Sestre was the safest for his family. Securing clearance for immigration to the planet had cost him everything he had.
Yeshula swallowed hard, his spinning brush whirring and waving erratically. “They were deactivated. The Haddish fleet was unopposed.”
Unopposed? “Traitors!” Cloak spat. Others in the brush-line glanced up, startled. “Who? Who deactivated them?” He pushed hard at his brush, causing the spinning motor within it to protest, sending humming vibrations up the shaft and into his elbow and shoulder.
Yeshula shrugged slightly. “We did not know. The first we knew of it was when the Haddish troop carriers landed in D'nab and occupied the Parliament complex.” Cloak's jaw clenched, so forcefully that the roots of his molars hurt. He forced himself to relax, to keep sweeping, back and forth, to suck the pale dust up into the ever-heavier bag slung onto his back.
“What of the K'rith,” he asked, quietly.
“They took all that they found. I was brought here.” Yeshula swept, carefully, with measured strokes. “I have not seen anyone else that I know from Sestre.” Cloak's heart leapt. Perhaps they had escaped into the countryside. Perhaps the Haddish had only swept the capital D'nab, and had not bothered with the Southern continents at all. Most of the major information processing centers, with their vast arrays of polyhumans and crystalline machinery, were located within D'nab. “I think that perhaps the Sestrian government hoped for leniency if it did not resist,” Yeshula continued. “But many cities were burned from orbit.”
“What cities?” Cloak strove to keep his voice low, and it emerged a strangled whisper. He compelled his arms anew: sweep…sweep…sweep.
“Kash. Dengahb. Tristan, and Jericho.” Yeshula, too, measured the effort of the muscles in his arms, scooting the soft whirling bristles of his wand over to remove an arc of powder that Cloak had missed. “There were others. Many were killed.”
“What of Tol,” Cloak pressed Yeshula.
“I have heard nothing of Tol,” Yeshula told him, and glanced up from the shining mesh exposed by his efforts. “You sent your family to Tol, didn't you?”
“I did.” Cloak said no more, and Yeshula respected his silence. The line of men advanced, meter by meter, until their shoulderbags were full of dust. Then, poked and prodded by the Rotents, they emerged from the transporter into the oven of the double-sunned day. The men were forced into a rough circle, a crowd, really, and then they sat in the dust while their guards tossed soft transparent pouches of water back and forth among themselves. The water sloshed and ploomped as the Rotents caught the containers in their fists, laughing and joking to each other in staccato Haddish as they drank.
“Hok, priest!” one of them called out, poking at Yeshula, who sat next to Cloak at the edge of the crowd. “Hok, you want some water, eh?” Yeshula froze; every muscle in his body drew taught and tense. His left hand pulled fitfully at the tiny leather vegetation that grew like scrub at his side. Abruptly the Rotent drew back and let fly with his fist, the water pouch smacked into Yeshula's face and fell into the dust. “Have some water!” The Rotent laughed robustly and moved on. Yeshula remained motionless, the water pouch by his side.
“I'd drink that if I were you,” Cloak advised him quietly. Yeshula, as though in a daze, shook his head to clear it. He pushed the pouch over to Cloak.
“You take it.” Cloak didn't argue and squeezed the half empty pouch into his mouth, washing out the burned metallic taste of the taste with barely disguised relief. Eventually, the Rotents pelted nearly everyone in the group with water pouches; they all drank, with the greed of necessity. Then they were led some distance away from the open doors of the transporters to empty their dust-bags, so that their mouths were once again filled with the stuff and clouds of it rose into the shimmering air. Halkiin had saved one swallow from his pouch, and now took it, swirling it into his caked mouth and spitting mud to the cracked ground. He tossed the empty pouch after it.
Once back inside the transporter the work began again, slow, careful, and monotonous. The clinging organic odor was much stronger now, overpowering even the omnipresent burnt metal of the dust. The men breathed through their mouths, trading even the ineffective dust-filtering of their noses for the chance to muffle the smell. Each arc of the whirring vacuum tube brought them closer to the undifferentiated debris that lay heaped against the back wall of the transporter. There came a muffled exclamation from the one end of the line, and the steady pace of the work faltered. At once, a half-dozen Rotents rushed in after them, their noses covered with small filters that depended from their darkened visors, giving them the appearance of birds with nut-cracking beaks. Klim was dragged from his place and translated new instructions for them. “When you come across material that cannot be removed by the vacuums, you are to use the scrapers and brushes,” he wheezed. “Do not damage the material of the floor. Such damage will be punished. While men are scraping, those on either side of them must vacuum the scrapers' path as he works. Failure to do so will be punished. Work!” Klim was pushed roughly back into his place in line.
And so they proceeded, ever closer to the back wall of the transporter. Yeshula came across pieces of charred or melted material, unidentifiable, every three or four meters. Each time, he stopped his sweeping, stooped on one knee and produced the flat scraper and wire brush, prying the resilient stuff away from the wire mesh and depositing it in a separate bag, slung from his belt. Others in the line advanced without him, clearing his path of dust.
And then they were upon it: the thick, charred debris of the pile. It wasn't very high-about to the waist-but the terrible familiarity of some of the protruding shapes caused it to loom as a tremendous mountain. Here, a black hand beckoned, fused to the floor. There, half of a pale face peered out with one milky eye from within a tangled grotesque of multiple legs and torsos, truncated with almost surgical precision. The shapes and forms were all cooked to some degree…some to charred carbon, others to split, raw pink. All bore the marks of exposure to intense, plasma-like heat.
The pile was nearly ninety meters wide, and stretched five meters before them. Cloak calmly surveyed its bulk, noting the degree to which the material had adhered to the floor, while beside him Yeshula began to tremble violently. “Mind yourself,” Cloak told him. “Think of it as the scene of a terrible accident.”
“I…I thought that this was an accident,” Yeshula managed.
“A terrible accident,” Cloak repeated, almost to himself.
