“Keep them occupied!” he shouted to his men, heading for the cockpit ladder of the Buffel. It had a 25mm Gatling in its chin turret; if he could reach that . . .
“Keep them occupied!” a voice shouted. Yolande ignored it, braced behind an overturned supply cart.
“Myfwany?” she called, looking over to where the other Draka had snap-fired last. “Hey, Myfwany?”
There was no movement. A long shape lying motionless on the concrete, impossible to see detail at this distance. Machine pistol resting on the ground, no movement.
“Myfwany?” Yolande said, this time a whisper. Then she was moving, a sprint that leaned her almost horizontal to the ground. She forward-rolled the last five meters, rolling in beside her friend. “Myfwany?”
The body moved into her hands, infinitely familiar, utterly strange. Moving loosely, slack. Blood flowing down her hands from the band of black wetness across Myfwany’s chest. Bits of soft armor, bits of bone and flesh; something bubbling and wheezing. Yolande tore off her own helmet, to see by natural light. There was enough to show the lashes flutter across the amber eyes, focus on her. The lips below moved, beneath the rills of blood that covered them. Perhaps to say a name, but there was no breath left for it. She slumped, with a total relaxation as the wheezing stopped. Yolande felt a sound building in her throat, and she knew that everything would end when she uttered it.
The firefight hammered through the darkness; Lefarge flipped his visor up for better depth perception and ran crouching. He was almost on the two Draka before he saw them. Lying on the pavement, one with the utter limpness of the newly dead, the other holding her. His rifle swung round, clicked empty; the magazine ejected itself and dropped to the runway with a hollow plastic clatter. For a moment only the eyes held him. Huge, completely dark in a stark-white elfin face daubed with blood, framed in hair turned silver by the moonlight. They saw him; somehow he knew they were recording every detail, but it was as if no active mind lived behind them. Then he was past, his feet pounding up the aluminum treads of the transport’s gangway.
“Hunh!” Marya jerked awake, surprised that she had slept at all. Dawn was showing rosy through the window; the air smelled of cool earth, explosives and fire and dead humans. And the door had swung open.
A Draka stood there. One of the ones who had looked her over in the prisoner pen earlier. Short, slender, and blond. Different; her uniform was smoke-stained, grimy; there were speckles of dried blood across her face. The face . . . the eyes were huge, pupils distended with shock. The American felt a clammy sensation—not quite fear, although that was in it. As if she was in the presence of something that should not be seen . . . The dead-alive eyes focused on her, and Marya saw a spray injector in the other’s hand.
“It’s you fault.” The words came in a light, soft voice. Almost a whisper, and in utter monotone. “I was weak, squeamish. She wanted to play with you, and I didn’t, so I got her to go fo’ a walk, thought she’d forget the idea. She’s dead. I saw his face . . . he’s not here. They got some of the planes, but she’s dd—” A brief stutter, and the marble perfection of the face writhed for an instant, then settled back. “Dead.”
The Draka touched the controls of the injector, held it to her own neck and pulled the trigger. Shuddered. A degree of life returned to the locked muscles of her face as she lowered it and changed the controls.
“This is fo’ you,” she said, her voice slightly thick now. “Relaxant, muscle weakener, maximum safe dosage of aphrodizine.” The cold metal touched Marya on the arm, but she scarcely felt the sting of the injection. It was impossible even to look away from those eyes, like windows into a wound. Something flowed across her mind, warm and sticky, pushing consciousness back into a room at the rear of her head. Fingers as strong as wire flipped her onto her stomach and began to unfasten the restraints.
“We’re goin’ to have a sort of celebration in memory of her, just this once,” the Draka said. “And then I can think up somethin’ else for you to do.”
Chapter Eleven
TRANSIT STATION SEVENTEEN
MASHAD, PROVINCE OF HYRCANIA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
JANUARY 23, 1976
About three hundred of us, Marya estimated. It had taken an hour for the big room to fill; this one was square, under the same warehouse roof. Absolutely blank, except for a waist-high dais and comp terminal at one end. Four of the big steel-mesh doors, one in each wall. No chairs, of course. No talking allowed; one prisoner had persisted, and the guards had picked her up and thrown her into the wall, just hard enough to stun, and the shockrods were always there. There was another white line around them on the floor; the prisoners had learned enough to treat it like a minefield. Marya had worked her way to the second line from the front with slow, careful movements. They’re going to give us some sort of information, she decided. I’ll get it all, and make my own use of it.
This place had the depressing regularity of a factory; it was designed to make you feel like sausage meat. That is information, too. The door behind the dais opened, and two more Orpos stepped up on it, one going to the terminal; she laid a hand on the screen, then made a few keystrokes. A tall woman, hard to tell age with the shaven head. The uniform was a little more elaborate, with a sidearm and complicated equipment on a webbing belt; she had the traditional metal gorget around her neck on a chain. Chain-dog, Marya remembered. That’s what the serfs call the Order Police. Appropriate.
“All of them supposed to understand talk,” Marya heard her say to her companion. Talk must mean English. She filed the datum away.
“Right.” The voice, amplified now, boomed out over the huddled crowd. “Listen up, cattle.” The face scanned them; tight shin stretched over bone, a white smile. “Y’all are serfs. I’m a serf. There are serfs and serfs; y’all are cattle, I’m you god, understand?” An uneasy silence. “Yaz all from India. Yaz here because our noble mastahs—” Marya’s ears pricked. Was that a note of sarcasm? Listen. Wait. “—are souvenir hunters. That what yaz are. Trinkets. We shippin’ yaz fo’ that. Sometimes, trinkets get broke.”
The Orpo jerked a thumb toward one of the crowd. Marya recognized the young man she had helped earlier, with dried blood caked on his lower face and the nose swollen. A Bengali, slight and dark and with a nervous handsomeness apart from the injury, about twenty. A junior officer in the Indian ground forces, from his mannerisms. The crowd parted to leave him in a bubble of space as the guards closed in, shoved him roughly to the edge of the dais. The Orpo noncom had lit a cigarette; now she flicked ash off the end and looked down at the Indian.
“Just in case yaz thinkin’ y’all too valuable to hurt,” she said, and nodded.
The guards moved in; Marya could see their elbows moving, hear the heavy thuds of fists striking flesh. A moment, and the young man was hunched over when they parted, dazed. The Orpo with the cigarette nodded again, and her companion on the dais stepped forward, pulled a wire loop from his belt and bent to throw it around the man’s neck. Marya drove her teeth into her lower lip and made herself watch.