One tentacle slithered out, then snapped like a bullwhip, sparkling in the light as it wrapped around Rahni's wrist and yanked back hard. Rahni's feet flew out from under him, and he landed flat on his back with a loud splash.
Thrashing wildly, he tugged at the tentacle, as though trying to drag the floater out of the sky. The other floaters closed in, tentacles slithering out to embrace the frantically struggling human. His shriek echoed from the stark, blank walls of the shattered
ruins.
Other clackers, including a monstrous three-meter walker on five sliding, blade-edged legs, closed in swiftly from different directions, breaking up the crowd of milling slaves, isolating and surrounding the frantically struggling human.
A trusty was there as well, a fat and oily man named Sykes who'd been, it was rumored, a lawyer before the Great Killing. If so, he'd put his powers of persuasion to good use, convincing the invaders that he was of more use as an intermediary between the slaves and their Masters than he was on his hands and knees in a pit. His appearance set him apart from the other humansўclothing more complete than rags
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William H. Keith, Jr.
and shreds, a clean-shaven face, a shockstick, and a band of dull silver about his head.
"The rest of you slaves, back to work!" Sykes snapped. He slapped his left palm with the heavy length of his shockstick. "Fun's over! Get back to work!"
Rahni's screams continued, fading gradually as the floater dragged him out of the pit, carrying him suspended by a forest of tentacles. They were floating toward the Harvester crouched on the crater rim in the distance. Its great, black maw was already slowly opening to receive this new sacrifice.
Jaime slowly sat up, blinking back hot tears. The stupidity, the sheer waste of it all was sickening. Surely an intelligence as technically advanced as the !*7"! could manufacture eyes, hands, livers, kidneys, and all of the other organs they periodically harvested from their slaves, manufacture them to order, mechanical devices better than mere organics. If machines were so superior to mere organics, what the hell did they need organic body parts for, anyway?
Sykes prodded Jaime's burning, half-numb arm with his shockstick; mercifully, he didn't trigger it, but the nudge sent fresh agony rippling up Jaime's arm and across his shoulders. "Let's go, you. Back to work, and thank whatever gods you still have left that the Speaker didn't decide to fry you ... or worse!"
As Jaime dropped back to hands and knees next to Wal, the colonel shook his head. "Jaime, that had to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my life."
"He didn't. . . know what... he was doin'," Jaime mumbled.
"Not him. You. Standing up to a Master that way! I thought you had better sense!"
"Couldn't. . . just let them . . . take him. . . ." He was having trouble making his lips and tongue work. The pain was growing worse as the numbness wore
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off; there was an angry, jagged black stripe on his arm where the flesh had charred, and blisters were forming around it.
"Well, there wasn't much you could do about it, was there?" Wal retorted. "Hell, there's not a damned thing any of us can do. Except die, I suppose. C'mon, Major, start working, or they'll change their minds and harvest you too."
The use of his former rank, and the whipcrack of command in Wal's voice, dragged Jaime into compliance. The pain in his arm grew worse, but he ignored it, continuing to harvest the shards of humanity's civilization on Cloud for Cloud's hew Masters.
Time passed, measured only by the slow crawl of the stars across the sky. Eventually, trusties and tripod clackers appeared, cutting out small groups of slaves and shepherding them back to the barracks compound, while fresh slaves were brought in to replace them. Jaime and Wal's group were led from the pit by Sykes and a dozen other truncheon-wielding humans, who herded them north past the shattered stumps of the Celestial Towers, through the gap in the power fence, and into the hole that was home.
They called it the Barracks, but it was both more and less than that. Before the Killing, there'd been a sprawling manufactory here, a robotic assembly plant housed inside a long, low building the size of a football field. Half of that building had been swept away by the firestorm; what was left, stripped bare by the Invaders and open to the elements, still provided some shelter from weather and mud, at least for some of the survivors. The building wasn't big enough for all, and makeshift tents and shanties made of sheet metal, canvas, and even cardboard surrounded the old manufactory complex inside the encircling, invisible walls of the power fence. Here, the several thousand slaves surviving in and near Celeste had been gathered
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William H. Keith, Jr.
