The haunt was at the screens at the end of the tunnel. It had already twisted aside the first set, was prying at the second. It was silhouetted against the thin grey daylight. Thousands of white flakes—snow—blew around it.
It turned on her with a swift liquid grace, opening its mandibles wide. It was as tall as the boss and thinner than Doc. Its long body was articulated in a dozen places. Its carapace was red and gold. Fringes of bronze hair grew thickly at the joints and at the bases of its spines. Its dozen limbs were as thin as wire, and impossibly long.
It had a terrible beauty.
17 froze, one hand on her utility belt. Flares, the proximity radar, a flash gun useless in daylight, her whistle. Nothing else, not even a pry bar. She could have burnt it with a flare, but she knew that would only enrage it, not kill it. It didn’t matter if a few bait-runners were killed as long as the bosses got their sport. When she did not move, the haunt turned back and started to pry at the screen again. It was working at the bolts, she saw, trying to turn them against beds of corrosion. It was trying to get out.
Pipes hung from the ceiling in an overhead maze. Rotten lagging hung from them in leprous sheets. 17 ran forward, jumped as the haunt whirled again, grabbed a pipe with both hands, and swung through 90 degrees, right over the thing’s head. The soles of her boots crashed into the screen, and it bowed outward with a squeal. The haunt slashed at her, catching several of its wire-thin claw-tipped limbs in her wet suit. Frantic with fear, she twisted free, while it squalled below, got a leg free and kicked and kicked at rusted mesh. The haunt dropped to a crouch and threw itself at the screen.
Screen and haunt tumbled away. Hanging upside down from the pipe, 17 saw the haunt fall, but she could not believe it was gone. Snow and wind blew around her. She was still hanging there when the boss came back and found her.
He helped her down. He saw the signs of the haunt and leaned at the edge of the broken screen, looking down. 17 trembled with cold and spent fear. She was convinced that the boss would kill her, but when he turned, he was grinning. He said that the hunt itself was more fun than killing some poor bug, and then he was gone, running into the darkness beneath the Factory. 17 followed as best she could. She had twisted her ankle when she had kicked out the screen.
She didn’t see him again. By the time she got back to the mustering point, the bosses were flying back to the city. She racked her equipment and went to find Doc to tell him that she had failed, and found the worst thing of all.
Doc was lying battered and bloody in his broken and battered exoframe amidst the ruin of his indoor garden. He was dead. A motor in the exoframe kept trying to lift his left arm, whining and relaxing, whining and relaxing. 17 tore out wires until it stopped. Books lay everywhere, torn and soaked with water leaking from a broken irrigation pipe. All the sunlamps had been smashed. The glass front of the pharmacy cabinet was smashed; the shelves were empty.
17 saved a few of the books, picking them at random, and left Doc for the Factory cops to find. They came for her a few hours later, but she knew they couldn’t pin Doc’s death on her because she had been down in the tunnels. They questioned her anyway—Doc had been a citizen after all—but the beating was routine, and in the end they let her go. One told her that Doc had probably been killed by some junky looking for a high, but she knew better.
She knew even before she saw Dim. It was the next day. He was whistling and hooting amongst his jacks while she waited with the other laborers.
After a shift spent reaming out pipes that carried cellulose sludge from one settling tank to another, she paid to get real clean, bought gloss and perfume from the store. The perfume stung her skin. It smelt more strongly of roses than any rose had ever smelt.
Dim was hanging with his jacks in his usual bar. She ignored him but knew he’d come over.
He did.
“I hear some junky did your cripple-man lover, girly-girl. You don’t worry. Dim’ll see to all your needs!”
17 endured the touch of saliva spray on her face, the smell and heat of him. She found it amazingly easy to smile.
Dim said, “How did the cripple-man do you? Not good, I bet. I bet you come looking for me to show you how all over again.” This last said loudly, for his jacks to hear. He acknowledged their whistles and hoots with a casual wave. “I got what you want,” he told 17, his voice close and hoarse in her ear. “Prime worker meat, hot and hard.”
17 put her hand between his legs, squeezed what was there and walked right out, her heart beating as quickly as it had when the haunt had turned to face her.
Dim followed her through the market, shoved her into a service entrance behind one of the stalls. “Not here,” she said. “I know a place.”
“I bet you do. But we ain’t going to any of your secret places.”
He was breathing heavily. She let his hands do things.
“You didn’t come armed,” he said. “You know what’s right for you.”
“I know.”
“That junky who did your cripple-man did you a favor. You wait here.”
He was back two minutes later with tubes of vodka. “We go to my place,” he said, and held her wrist tight. She didn’t resist.
It was an upper bunk in the men’s dorm. She felt the brush of the eyes of every man who turned to watch as Dim walked her down the narrow aisle. She got up on the bunk. The mattress stank of Dim and stale marijuana. There was a TV hung on a stay in one comer, a locker at the foot of the mattress.
She started to pull at her belt while Dim velcroed the curtains together. When he turned, she snapped her wrist and at the same time thrust her hand forward; the long sliver of plastic she’d ripped from her belt stiffened when she snapped it, went into his eye, and punched through the thin bone behind it. Blood burst hotly over her fingers. He shivered and fell on her with all his weight, dead as poor Doc. She found the card that opened the locker, shoved his body through the curtains and dropped all the vials and capsules and hypos on top of it, swung down, and walked out, looking straight ahead.
No one tried to stop her.
Thirty days later, she was five thousand kilometers away, under a hot blue sky on the roof of the Service induction building. She was in a line with two hundred fresh recruits, waiting for the shuttle copters that would take them out to boot camp. She was wearing the cleanest dungarees she had ever worn, crisp and sky blue, polished boots, a padded impact helmet with its silvered visor up.
Doc Roberts had wanted her to change her orbit by a close encounter with one of the bosses, the way ships gained delta vee by swinging past a planet, but she knew that this was her true vector. She would fly it as true and straight as she could, climb as high as she could. She had only her hunger. The rest she had left behind. She was no longer 17. She was a recruit, newly born into the world.
The sergeant addressed the line. He was a veteran, his face like a leathery mask, one eye socket empty. His exoframe was just like Doc’s. “You’re in the Service now!” he yelled. His amplified voice echoed off into the sky. “You’re going up and out, beyond the ken of mortal men! You’re meat in a can. Everything human will be burnt away. You don’t want that, then step out of line now!”
No one did. The Service’s psych profiling was good.
“Close up and straighten up,” the sergeant yelled.
Moving in unison with her fellow recruits, she snapped down the visor of her helmet. She was no longer 17. She had left that behind with her true name. 518972 was stenciled in black above her visor. That was her number now.