Read Starfist: Lazarus Rising Online
Authors: David Sherman; Dan Cragg
Tags: #Military science fiction
"I'm sorry. I lost control. Thank you. Thank you, Charles."
"Don't mention it, old friend. Look, I'm sorry I hit you like that. I couldn't think of what else to do."
Zechariah rubbed the side of his head were Bass had struck him. "Next time, try bribing me with a cold bottle of beer." He chuckled. Then he groaned. "God forgive me for that. I shouldn't be talking like that with my beloved wife and my beautiful daughter dead."
"I don't think Comfort's dead, Zechariah." The Avenging Angel roared away.
"Let's just stay here for a while."
"Not dead?"
"No. I think they captured her, Zechariah."
"Oh, thank God! I pray you're right Charles! Alleluia! Praise the Lord!" Zechariah began to weep again, this time tears of joy. Immediately, he got control of himself.
"I'm sorry, Charles, it's just so—"
"You don't need to apologize to me. Hell, who could keep a dry eye after what's just happened?" He thought of Comfort and had to exert an effort to control his breathing.
"What do we do now, Charles?"
"Now?" Bass laid a hand on Zechariah's shoulder. "Right now we're going back to the caves and get your people organized. And then, Zechariah, I am going to get Comfort back for you."
The doctor's examination was perfunctory and consisted of asking 9639 routine questions about her medical history. He was an older man, much older than the commandant. His face was thin and narrow and his expression sour. He wore an immaculate white lab coat over his black SG uniform. His black boots shined like mirrors. He was very diffident in his physical exam, such as it was, as if reluctant to get his hands dirty touching his patient.
"You may dress now." Quickly, 9639 slipped back into her prison garb. "You'll do. You can work," he said at last, as he made a note in her dossier, which he handed to the guard. He leaned back, put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat and grinned. "You had a fight with your barracks chief last night? But you have no marks on your body, 9639. Who won?"
She gasped in surprise.
How did he know about that?
"It was nothing, er—" She hesitated because with that lab coat over his uniform she couldn't see his rank. "—
Mister
Doctor."
"I am Understormleader Shirbaz, 9639. I could not care less what happens in the barracks. All I do is patch you up so you can return to work or bury you, whichever occurs first. Ah, 9639, I see you are surprised! You have studied the rank chart in the barracks, haven't you, and you are wondering why an understormleader, who comes between overstormer and overstormleader, is not
himself
the camp commandant? It is a question that has occurred to many. That is because I am a
medical
officer, and medical officers
never
command anything but a medical unit.
So I sit here, day in and day out, looking up your dirty behinds, and take orders from people with half the education and experience I have."
Having had no idea of the doctor's relative rank, she really was surprised now. He was the first staff member so far to talk to her as if she was a real person. Despite the way he'd lewdly gazed at her nakedness during the "exam," she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. And it was evident to her that this was a sore point with him and that he'd given that speech many times before.
"Well, 9639, good luck. If you learn to fight like an animal, you may be barracks chief someday. Take her to the commandant's office," the doctor ordered.
Once again 9639 stood before the commandant. "Sit," he said, reading her file and not bothering to look up at her. She sat. He looked up. "Now, 9639, the doctor says you are fit to work. Since your ultimate fate has not yet been resolved, I cannot assign you somewhere permanently. All my staff are screaming for prison help. You have no particular skills. So, you will work in the kitchen until ultimate disposition of your case." He slammed her dossier shut. She expected to be dismissed, but he kept her sitting there for a long moment and then reopened her dossier. "I want to go over some things with you."
"Yes, Overstormer."
"During the initial interview with the Special Group personnel who captured you, you stated that you were one of the sole survivors of the demons' attack on your sect at the Sea of Gerizim. You said that, let's see, um, sixteen of you, all told, out of those thousands, survived the attack. Tell me how that came to be. Did you know that the Special Group identified only ten bodies in the ruins of the village after their attack?"
"No, Overstormer, I did not know that. I saw the Judahs killed and—and my mother. I don't know what happened to the Rowleys and my father. My brother, I told them, had been killed earlier. Perhaps the other bodies are in the ruins somewhere?"
"Um. How did you survive all those months?"
She told him about the night the devils attacked and how they managed to get by after that. She omitted everything else that had happened over the last months. She was confident that the rest of the survivors were safely hiding in the caves. She prayed silently this interrogation was not a trick, that she was the only prisoner, that there was no one to contradict the story she had told. Then she thought, So what?
What are they going to do if they find out? Send me to jail?
Overstormer Rudolf listened attentively. "How did you kill the soldiers who attacked your village? They reported you were in fortified positions some distance from the village and that you used acid weapons on them." Evidently someone had just passed this information to Rudolf, or he would have asked it earlier.
She thought fast. The interrogation the Special Group men had given her just after her capture had been only perfunctory. She remembered them, highly excited men, slapping each other on the back and laughing as if they'd just come through a tremendous battle safely. They acted like drunks, she thought at the time. She could see that clearly through her fear and pain.
"Many years ago we built a water catchment in a ravine outside the village, to trap runoff for our cattle, and we hid in there during the bombing. It was not a fort, Overstormer. We used shot rifles, old-fashioned things like shotguns that we found in the abandoned camp above the Sea of Gerizim, after the devils attacked it. They were not expecting resistance. It was easy to kill them. I don't know what they mean by acid guns, Overstormer." She paused. "We came out in the night to get things from the homes that were not destroyed. Then these other soldiers came."
"Um. You're lying, 9639." Rudolf slammed her dossier closed with a bang. "I know that. You know that. But who cares about a bunch of ragtag Bible-thumpers? I don't give a good goddamn. I'm a jailer, not an intelligence officer. You will write down your statement in full. Here is writing material. I am leaving you with your guard. When you finish, leave your statement on the desk and he will take you to the kitchen."
"Oh, dear God, have mercy on us!" Hannah Flood groaned when Zechariah told her about the attack.
"Charles," Spencer Maynard pleaded, "we didn't dare come out. We heard the shooting and could see the aircraft hovering and we were really scared! We were afraid they'd come down here to investigate. The reconnaissance car would be plain to see. I don't know why they didn't come here."
"It was night, Spencer, and there was a lot of shooting—anyway, they may not even have known about the car," Bass answered. He surveyed the faces of the people anxiously gathered inside the cave. They reflected horror, fear, and anger.
They were on the edge of breaking down.
"We thought you were all dead," Samuel Sewall croaked. He came forward and embraced Zechariah, tears in his rheumy old eyes. The others crowded around Zechariah and offered him their condolences.
Bass took Raipur aside. "Those men were wearing black uniforms, body armor, shooting everything in sight. Who were they?"
"Special Group men," Raipur answered at once. "Not our bunch, Charles. Do you know who the Special Group are?"
"Something to do with enforcing orthodoxy, like an inquisition. I haven't had much time to study your culture since coming here."
Raipur briefly filled him in on recent events.
"They took Comfort—that's Zechariah Brattle's daughter. They may have captured some of the Rowley family, we don't know. But if they did, it won't be very long before they come back for the rest of us."
"If they have the girl, aren't we already done for?"
Bass thought for a moment. "Maybe not. Comfort's a tough and smart little lady, and she's as brave as any man among us. I think she could hold up under interrogation."
"Well, if the Special Group comes back out here, I won't be of any help to you, Charles. And I know my platoon commander. He won't be back without heavy reinforcements, and obviously it was decided not to send them. So there goes your peace overture. But Charles, I hate those people as much as you do, and I think most of the men in my army feel the same way about them. But what do we do now?"
"Well, not everything's come back to me yet, but I'm pretty sure I am a citizen of the Confederation and was here as part of its military force. The Confederation has an embassy or something at Haven, right?"
"Yes. At Interstellar City."
"Then that's where I'm headed. I'm going to find out just who the hell I am, and then I'm going to find out where Comfort Brattle is and I'm going to get her back."
"How will you do that?" Raipur asked, astonished. "I mean, how are you going to get there? It's far, far away. And—And what'll you do once you get there, assuming you do?"
"I'll walk. And I'll free Comfort with my bare hands, if I have to."
"By yourself?"
"No, I may need a few good men. Are you with me?"
"Yes, I am, Charles."
The woman in charge of the kitchen was a huge mountain of flesh. When she moved, her several chins jiggled. She was always huffing and puffing and perspiring, and her face was constantly red from exertion. She had a pronounced mustache on her upper lip that she constantly brushed with the back of her hand. A cigarette butt always stuck out one side of her mouth, sometimes lit, sometimes not. And she laughed a lot.
"You are a KP, that's kitchen police, dearie," she told 9639 as soon as the guard dropped her off at the kitchen. She draped one enormous arm around 9639's shoulders. "Everywhere in Human Space machines do all the hard work, dearie. But not here. Everywhere else you press a button, I'm told, and machines wash your clothes; press another set, and they clean your house; a third, and they prepare your food. For all I know they have buttons to make machines do their fucking for them too. But at Castle Hurse we do our work the old-fashioned way, with our hands.
Hard work is good for us, 9639. Takes our minds off things like oh, sex, food, escape, the usual.
"We start work here at three hours every morning, seven days a week, and all of us work until after nineteen hours, sometimes even as late as twenty-three or even 01, depending on the availability of rations and the preparation we need to get the following day's stuff ready. But we have it good in here, 9639. It's always warm, we get good rations—hell's bells, how do you think I maintain this girlish figure?" She shook with laughter. "And the work is easy. You work hard for me, show you're willing to learn, and in time I'll teach you how to be a cook. But for now you're a KP
and
do I have a job for you
!"
She shuddered. "Yes, 8372?"
"Come on." Prisoner 8372 led her to the back of the kitchen. She stooped and with one enormous hand removed an iron grating in the floor. "Do you know what this is?"
"No, 8372," she answered as she peered cautiously into the floor. An oily substance gleamed back at her.
"It's the grease trap, honey! It has to be cleaned daily. You dip it out and put the stuff in cans out back to be picked up. Over there on the wall are some rubber gloves, a ladle, and a container. The galvanized can out back is marked ‘Grease.’ If the outside girl is screwing off somewhere, don't get it confused with the ‘Edible’
and ‘Nonedible’ garbage cans, Okay? When you're done with that, find me and I'll give you something else to do. Maybe pots and pans?" She laughed enormously and waddled off singing a nonsensical ditty, "—and his ghost may be heard, a-singing in the grease trap, ‘You come a-peeling potatoes with me, peeling potatoes, peeling potatoes, you come a-peeling potatoes with me!’"
Prisoner 9639 pulled on the gloves and knelt on the floor. Her stomach churned uncomfortably at the task before her. She got to work.
The next days passed quickly and relatively pleasantly, for life at Castle Hurse.
Barracks Chief Patti studiously ignored 9639. "But," 9606 warned her, "she'll get you for what you did to her, so watch your back."
Prisoner 9639 found her companions in the kitchen to be mostly a very tight-knit, hospitable group, reflecting 8372's attitude, which was easygoing. She knew that 8372 was also a "political" prisoner. Her crime had been to join a small protest group that was formed shortly after de Tomas assassinated the Convocation of Ecumenical Ministers. For that she'd gotten life. She said she was lucky—the other members of her group had just disappeared.
Early one morning a few days later, the entire barracks was awakened by 9606's coughing, which had gotten steadily worse. "I'm not long for this world," she confided to 9639 at supper. Prisoner 9639 recalled how she'd coughed up blood into her soup bowl, and then, in the pale moonlight streaming in through the windows, 9606 lay drenched in perspiration and gasping for air. Large quantities of blood stained the bedclothes.
"We must get her to the dispensary," 9639 pleaded with the other women standing around 9606's bunk.
"You idiot," Barracks Chief Patti said. It was the first time she'd addressed 9639
directly in days. She smiled in the wan moonlight, knowing 9606 was friends with 9639. "You don't leave the barracks for any reason after lights out. And sick call is only held between 06 and 08 hours in the mornings! The doctor doesn't make house calls in here!"
"But we can't just stand here and do nothing!" 9639 protested in tears.