Lewis looked shocked. "But the colonel's right! That would be mutiny!"
"That," Shari said, her eyes still closed, "will be the least of our worries!"
"But we still have to consider it," Wal pointed out. "The order and discipline that we received through our military training has been what's kept us alive so far."
"Who do you think you're fooling, Colonel?" Alita asked. "Maybe one in ten of the people in this camp are ... were military when the Masters came. What do we have left of military discipline today? Okay, we organized the barracks and set up latrines and an oroerly procedure for chow call, granted. But the CDF ceased to exist when they whacked Chryse. If we have a chance, I say take it. And if the general doesn't want to go along, then let him stay. But I'll be damned if I
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let his decision not to rock the boat keep me from grabbing my chance at freedom!"
Jack Haley was leaning against the shack just outside the doorway. "I'm with the major and Alita," he said quietly through the curtain. "We fight back with every weapon we have, or we admit we're nothing but spare parts. At least this is a chance for freedom or a clean death, and that's twice as many options as we've got if we stay put!"
Wal looked at each of the military people in turn, measuring them. Moxleyўhe wasn't much more than a kid, really, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four T-standard years oldўwas afraid of turning against established authority. Zhou was more fearful of the consequences if Valhalla should fail. The rest, though, two sergeants with a hell of a lot of experience and Major Graham, all wanted to take the chance. The civilians supported them, too.
The problem was that General Spratly just flat out didn't like Bolos, hadn't liked or trusted them even before the invasion, and he sure as hell didn't trust the things now.
And Wal was caught squarely in the middle. Jaime and the others were right when they said that the surviving humans wouldn't last much longer. They couldn't, not under these conditions, even if the Masters didn't decide to harvest every last slave in the camp. But the fact remained that even with it, Valhalla stood little chance of success.
Wal was forced to admit to himself that his big fear wasn't mutiny or overturning the established authority. It was facing the Masters again. When they'd come for him before, dragging him into the convoluted bowels of the machine they called the Harvester, they hadn't used anesthetics. They'd pinned him to a table while lasers had sliced off his hand and delicately removed his eye, and Wal's shrieks had echoed from
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the cold, metal walls of the machine with none to hear but himself and the unfeeling mechanisms that held him down. He'd healed well enough, but he still had nightmares . . . and the very sight of a floater coming his way could reduce him to trembling, sweating, powerless terror.
No, he couldn't face that again. He couldn't. He would have to side with the general against Jaime, even if he thought that Jaime was right.
The machine with the chirp-whistle-click designator that might have translated as GED9287-8726H Series 95 possessed only three brainsўone for things-as-they-are, one for memory, and a third for anticipationў and was incapable of feeling emotion. The third brain did allow for a measure of curiosity, however, and the input it was receiving now was enough to make the machine quite curious indeed.
GED9287 currently occupied a spacecraft body in low orbit over Cloud and had been tasked with a routine infrared check on several of the camps holding living organics on the planet. The surveillance was routine enough, an ongoing survey in IR wavelengths that allowed the Higher Awarenesses to track overall association and movement patterns among the captive organics.
In infrared, the assembly facility designated Camp 84 showed as a cool mosaic of greens and blues, with pale rectangles marking out the jumble of huts and shacks the organics had erected for protection from the elements. The organics themselves resolved as brighter yellow and orange shapes; from nearly two hundred kilometers up, GED's optics could just distinguish foreshortened legs and arms on the organics' bodies as they moved around the camp, worked in the nearby pits, or sprawled in their nuts in their mysterious between-shifts phases of unconsciousness.
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Not even the pressboard slabs covering the huts, or the roof of the ruined factory itself, could block the IR emissions.
What had captured GED s curiosity was an unexpected anomaly in organic gathering patterns. At that moment, there were 3287 individual organic heat sources in the cold, water-sodden pits southeast of Camp 84 and they, as always, were huddled together in tight-knit groups. Another 2993 organics were in the Camp, most sprawled on the ground in their unconscious phase.
There was one group, however, that broke the pattern. West of the factory, nine individual heat sources were crowded together inside a single small hut. Nowhere else within the camp was there such a concentration.
While the organic species that called itself human was known to gather for many purposes, including meals, recreation, and the dissemination of news, they tended to keep to themselves when possible, erecting separate huts or dividing up the interior of the factory or the structure they used for waste elimination with wooden slabs as they sought something they referred to as "privacy." This gathering seemed atypical... and was, therefore, worthy of note.
