Radix

The cargo hatches winged open, and a crowd of wildly garbed corsairs leaped howling and laughing onto the parade ground waving rifles and torch pistols. By the watery light of the flares Sumner could see that many of them were dis-torted: clawed hands, crusted lizard faces, milky eyes. Half were women.
"Let's go, you bulldogs!" the amplifier of a pirate ship bellowed. "Foc slavery! You're not shackled to the Pillars anymore! Come out and run with us!"
Gunshots caromed from the jungleline where most of the guards had retreated, and half the corsairs crouched and returned fire. The other half assaulted the barracks, torching the timbers and running the prisoners out of their cots.
Broux was dashing around the guards' barracks, two pistols flaring in his hands, shouting his men out of their shock. The ground was twitching and jumping at his feet, but he ran tall. Then the gun turrets of the other two pirate ships swivelled and roared into fire at the same instant. The guards' barracks rolled away like thunder, and Broux crawled in the dirt with his head under his arms. By the time he looked up, the men who wanted to run were being pulled into the holds of the pirate ships. Those who knew their time in Meat City was almost up cowered behind the barracks and the water troughs.
Sumner was tempted to run, but as he tightened his sarong a figure scrambled to his side and took his arm. Dice looked up at him with fervent eyes. "Take me with you."
Sumner shrugged off his grip. "I'm not going anywhere."
"The Pillars don't hold up anything," the pirate amplifi-ers blared. "They crush the people beneath them. Topple the Pillars!"
"Kagan, let's go," Dice urged him with a whine.
"You want to run with those things?" Sumner chinpointed to the spiderhaired faces of the corsairs' helping the last runaways clamber aboard.
"We can skip on them later. Come on—this is our chance."
Sumner shook his head no. "We'd just be trading one master for another."
Dice slumped and watched disconsolately as the ships began to rise, cargo doors still open. "Topple the Pillars!" The cry wobbled in the air, chopped by the bawl of thrusting engines. Guns sparked, dawnlight flashed on the flight vanes, and the pirate ships leaned into the darkness and drifted away over the jungle.
Dice was depressed. For days after the corsair raid he sulked. Sumner, who had become accustomed to the boy's constant prattle, looked about for a way to cheer him up. He found a large hive deep in the forest, and one evening he returned to camp swollen with bee stings.
The men laughed at him silently that night as he ate his bean paste and roots with swollen fingers and lips. Later he called Dice aside and led him behind the barracks to a knoll surrounded by raspberry canes. From there they could see the night-lights on the strohlkraft field and that day's latrine crew laboring in the dark, burying the old ditches.
"What do you want, Thick?" Dice muttered, looking about to see if Broux was in sight. "You'd better ask Iron Face for some althea salve. You're not going to sleep tonight with those stings."
Sumner's puffed face smiled vaguely. "Taste this, grump." He parted the raspberry canes and revealed several thick amber combs of honey. "If we keep this out of sight, we'll have power food for the next two weeks."
Dice's pupils expanded with wonder.
Sumner picked off the ants and handed him a thumb-piece of honeycomb. "We'll have to put some hawkweed around here to keep the bugs off. I don't think the guards or anybody else will be prowling this close to the latrines."
"This isn't real." Dice chewed on the honey with closed eyes, and the joy in his face brightened Sumner's blood.
A Masseboth strohlkraft idled on the flight field, its wiry shape black against the belly of twilight. The pilot squatted beneath a flame tree at the edge of the field, chatting with Broux, while Sumner and eight others unloaded the cargo hold. Sumner's mind was tight with exhaustion. All day he had been stooped over, cutting cassava, and he lumbered thoughtlessly beneath the ponderous crates, his eyes loosely following the leech-scarred legs of the man before him. Dice, trailing loose-kneed beneath his load, was too wearied to speak.
Unexpectedly, the man Sumner was following dropped his load and skipped out of sight. Sumner shoved back the wooden crate on his shoulders in time to see him scrambling up the hull of the strohlkraft and into the open hatch of the flight pod. The crate dropped from Sumner's back, and he and the seven other men watched with gawking amazement as the runaway dropped into the pod-sling and sparked the shutdown engine.
The pilot, Broux, and several guards were dashing across the field, shouting for them to seize the hijacker. Any one of them could have done it: The man was only three paces away, working the controls, charging the thrusters, angling the altitude vanes. But the jittery-faced renegade obviously knew the strohlkraft, and excitement paralyzed everybody.
The dust of the field billowed, pebbles clattered against the ship's bottom, sand grit stung their faces and limbs, and with a wildcat scream the strohlkraft lifted. Two of the near-est men jumped into the cargo hold. A third clung to a landing strut and was lifted into the air.
"Mutra." Dice found his voice. "They're going to make it!"
For a few moments the men watched as the strohlkraft rose into the night, disappearing into the rhythm of skyfires, the spin noise of its engines falling down the sky toward the last wet light of the day.
Sumner swayed with a surge of wonder. Then Broux and the guards were on them, and someone clubbed Sumner on the side of his head, and he went down. When he shook the numbness from his eyes he saw the guards pushing the men he was with to the ground. Dice dropped with a whimper and covered his head. At Broux's nod the guards opened fire, their machine-pistols flaring in the blue-shadowed dusk.
Sumner staggered to his feet, and one of the guards put a gun to his head, the heat of the muzzle singeing the hairs of his temple. "Not him!" Broux shouted, and the gun barrel fell away.
Sumner stared with horror at the sprawled bodies among the scattered crates, the smell of gunfire thickening. The pain of what he saw seared through his eyes to the back of his head and almost knocked him out. Dice lay with the white of his brains splattered in the gravel.
"Shoot me!" Sumner cried, and the guards looked quickly to Broux.
"Get back to the barracks," Broux ordered him. But Kagan didn't move.
"Shoot me!" he cried again, louder, seizing the arm of one of the guards. The guard shook off his hold and leveled his pistol at him.
"Leave him be," Broux commanded. "Sumner, fall back!"
Sumner's eyes had hardened in his face. "Why are you keeping me alive?"
Broux strode over to him and sharply belted him across the face, twice. "Go to the barracks."
Sumner had gone rigid, rage wreathing his heart. For an instant he thought of unraveling into violence—but all the guards had their guns out, and the abandoned pilot was cursing Broux under his breath to shoot him. Suddenly it just seemed right to walk away. His stance broke, and he shuffled toward the barracks, hearing Broux's barked commands, call-ing for men to bury the executed. Distantly, at the furthest orbit of hearing, the drone of a strohlkraft was fading into the north.
Sumner lay in his cot awake and unmoving all night. All his thoughts were voided, and he felt an acid hate for every-thing Masseboth. Toward dawn, images of Dice rose in him with memories of the simple jokes and the shared work they had known. During roll call, he moved on line like a deadwalker, and though Broux told him through the guards that he could take the day off, he collected his machete and slumped into the jungle.