Not for the first time, he considered the Hector Option. It would be quick, almost easy ... and without the agony of vivisection if the Masters came for him. Others had taken the Hector Option, lots of them . . . with more and more attempting it each week.
Not yet. There has to be a way. . ..
His hands slid an ooze of slick mud aside, and he reeled back on his haunches as a fetid stench broke the surface. "Uh oh," he said. "We got one here."
Wal moved closer, reaching in to help. The foul death-stink grew sharper, sweeter, and more eye-watering as they exposed the body, or what was left of it, lying in the wet muck next to a toppled, squared-off pillar from a shattered building.
After almost a T-standard year in the flooded grounds behind Celeste's waterfront, the body had been reduced to little more than a skeleton, with wet-paper skin still molded to the face and some of the longer, flatter bones, and colorless hair still clinging to the skull. It lay on its back, skull turned to one side, the fingers of the right hand crammed between gaping jaws, as though in a deliberate and desperate attempt to stifle a dying scream. From the length of the remaining hair, and the rags of cloth still clinging to
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the ribcage, Jaime guessed that it had been a woman. Only the top half of her body was accessible; the spool-train of her lower vertebrae vanished beneath the fallen pillar, and her pelvis and legs were hidden somewhere beneath the multiton block of stone.
No matter. Her organic parts could no longer be harvested in any case, and there was plenty of pure metal here, within easy reach. A gold ring encrusted with tiny gems still encircled the fourth finger of her left hand, a fingerwatch the fifth. A black-stained necklace of flattened chain links that might be gold but were probably gold-plate circled her neck. A pin of some kind, an ornament of some heavy, silvery metal worked into a lozenge shape centered by an exquisite, emerald-cut heliodore, lay on her ribs above what had been her left breast. Stardrop pendants next to the skull had probably been earrings.
Working swiftly, he plucked each article of jewelry from the bones and transferred them all to Wal's bag. The necklace clasp had corroded into an unworkable lump of oxide, so he had to work the skull free from the vertebrae to get at it. With the skull free in his hand, he checked the teeth for gold or gemstones. Gold dental fillings were a curiosity of the remote Dark Ages, of course, a medico-historical footnote, but some Ckmdwellers had affected gold or silver teeth as cosmetic statements. This nameless woman, though, still had all of her original teeth, and no body prosthetics. There were some tiny catches and hooks here and there, however, that might have been part of her clothing. Each of these was carefully rescued from the muck and placed in the bag.
And through it all, Jaime carefully ignored the stink, ignored the emotions welling up in his throat as he stripped the skeleton of every scrap of metal he could find, and somehow buried the very thought of what he was doing far beneath the reach of his conscious
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mind. He knew from long experience that it simply didn't pay to dwell too much on what the Masters forced him to do each day.
"That's it," he said at last, the thing done. He wiped at his beard and mouth with the back of his arm, then pointed. "Let's move up that way."
They continued their sweep of the plaza, moving past the toppled pillar, inching along on hands and knees, feeling through the mud for any recyclable materialsўpure metals, especially, but also gemstones, plastics, and even shards of ceramic or glass. The !*!*! used it all, forcing their human slaves to salvage every scrap. Around Jaime and Wal, filling the entire, stadium-sized pit, thousands of other ragged, filthy, half-starved, half-naked humans, slowly widened the dig, exploring for the bits and scraps of their own shattered technology with bare and mud-caked hands.
Life had become a nearly unendurable nightmare, an unending torture turned monotonous by the routine of slave labor that went on for day after day, punctuated all too frequently by moments of intense terror each time the Harvesters appeared. According to the calendar they'd been scratching out on one wall of the barracks, they'd been here for just under a T-standard year.
Had it only been a year? Existence now was a damned good recreation of an eternity in Hell, lacking, perhaps, in fire and brimstone, but more than adequate in the pain.
His probing fingers found a crumpled wad of metal, the surface so corroded he couldn't even tell what it was ... an appliance of some sort, he thought, maybe half of a power defroster, or possibly a piece of a hand sterilizer. He worked it free and passed it to Wal; the relic filled the nylon bag, so Wal struggled to his feet and started off across the dig, to the brooding presence of the Collector squatting in the midst of the slave-filled pit.
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Jaime kept working. To stop was to die, and while death was welcome, most of the slaves preferred to wait and endure, knowing that there were far better ways to end this hell than to submit to the hot blades and microlasers of the Harvesters.
Has it really been only a year?
One year ago, Celeste had been the largest, the grandest of human cities on the blue and temperate world of Cloud, a white and sweeping growth of crystal-shining arcologies and polished, needle-slim skypiercers rising along the blue curve of Celeste Harbor and the nearby coastlines of the Tamarynth Sea. The city's population had numbered something just over one hundred thousand, and the population of the planet as a whole had been nearly ten million.
Cloudўnamed for the Sagittarian starclouds so prominent in the night skies of the northern hemisphere's spring and summerўhad been colonized some two centuries ago by people fleeing the horrors and uncertainties of the Melconian Wars. Those pioneers had purchased a dozen large transports and abandoned several of the war-torn worlds near fair, lost Terra, seeking a new homeworld somewhere among the teeming billions of suns swarming in and around the star-thick reaches of the Galactic Core. They'd come from a dozen different worlds, from Destry and Lockhaven and Aldo Cerise, from New Devonshire and Alphacent and from Terra herself. They'd come with a single goal uniting them, the dream of a world where they could put down roots, raise crops and families, and in general get on with life . . . in peace.
While the founders of Cloud had certainly included pacifists among their number, they'd not allowed pacifistic principles to blind them to the dangers of colonizing a world some tens of thousands of light years beyond human space; they'd brought both a
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William H. Keith, Jr.
