to serve the Masters' glory; here was where they lived when they weren't in the city, toiling on their hands and knees.
Groaning their exhaustion, the men and women of the incoming shift staggered to their allotted places and collapsed in muddy neaps. The workday was long, eleven or twelve hours, and was followed by about eight hours of downtime before the next stint in the pits. No one was sure of the exact times, of course, since none of the slaves had been allowed to retain fmgerwatches or personal comps, and the only means of telling time was by estimations drawn from the movements of suns and stars through the course of Cloud's long, long thirty-five-hour day. Tamas Reuter, who'd been an astronomer before The Killing, had tried building a water clock for the small community once, calibrating it by the movements of the suns. The trusties had destroyed it before it had been completed, though, with dire warnings about what would happen if the Masters found out... as if the Masters didn't already know everything that the trusties did. Dieter HolUnsworth, once a high-energy physicist at New Aberdeen University, had rigged a sundial on the old factory roof, disguising it as stray bits of wood and stone, but that only worked when the suns were up, when it wasn't cloudy, and when someone could actually get up there to look at the thing.
Jaime's assigned place was on the west side of the building, Block Seven. For a long time, he lay on his spot on the floor, trying to marshal his strength and wondering if the effort was even worthwhile. A lonely gong sounded in the darkness, and the men and women crowded into the damp shadows around him began rising to their feet and trudging toward the open end of the factory. Many were naked, save for the accumulated layers of caked-on mud and
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grime or perhaps a breechclout of dirty rags. Any nudity taboo had long ago vanished; they moved like silent, emaciated, muddy ghosts, each clutching his or her sole possession, a bowl or plate or other container scavenged from the surrounding ruins.
Chowtime.
"C'mon, Jaime," Wal told him, giving him a nudge in the ribs with a bare foot. "Gotta keep your strength up, right?"
Jaime considered the alternative. Lots of slaves had starved to death in the past year; malnutrition was probably the greatest killer there was in the camp, after pneumonia and random harvestings by the Masters. The trouble was, it took so damned long to die that way, and if you became so weak that you couldn't get up and work, then you were harvested, and that was tie one form of death here that no one welcomed.
"Come on, Major," another voice, a woman's voice, told him in the darkness. "There wasn't anything you could have done for Rahni."
Like Wal, Senior Tech Sergeant Alita Kyle had been in the CDF before The Killing, a power systems technician, and a good one. He'd known her then; she'd been a crew chief for the Bolo. Back then, of course, she'd been someone Jaime had thought of as an attractive young woman, a potential but never-realized conquest. The social gulf between officers and enlisted personnel in the CDF frowned on such liaisons.
Now, her warm but no-nonsense voice was enough to force notions of suicide-by-starvation from his fuzzy thoughts. Her lean, labor-hardened body roused thoughts not of beauty or sex, but of simple camaraderie and the service they'd once shared, a precious feeling in this place of nightmare. Fumbling in the darkness beneath the scattering of stinking
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William H. Keith, Jr.
rags that were his bed, he found the cracked, ceramic bowl he called his own, struggled to his feet, and made his way to the chow line.
"Hey, Jaime," another voice called to him as he stepped into the line.
"Hi, Dieter."
Hollinsworth, impossibly scrawny in his mud-plastered nakedness, took his place behind Jaime. He scratched at the unkempt tangle of his beard. "Saw what you tried t' do out there today, Major. That was ... brave."
"Stupid, you mean."
Dieters teeth showed briefly in his dirty face. "Well, that too. But it's always nice t' know someone cares."
Eventually, the line snaked up to one of the big, steel troughs from which the slaves' meals were served. Each person dipped out their measure as they walked past, usually boiled rice or potato soup or a nameless, sticky gruel. Sometimes there was meat in the stuff.
Many survivors shunned those scraps of meat, for rumor said that it came from harvested humans. Jaime didn't listen to the rumors, and he didn't look too closely at the meat. Yeah, tonight's rations might have a few bits of Rahni Singh mixed in, sure, but he simply closed off his thinking mind and ate it. He'd also eaten cockroaches when he could find them, and rats, and crollygogs, anything he could catch, anything to add protein to his diet, to keep body and mind intact.
He was interested in the rice, however. Rice was a labor-intensive crop both in the planting and the harvesting. Machines didn't need food, and the rice meant that someone, somewhere on Cloud was still growing it. He found a dry spot outside, against the old factory's eastern wall, with Dieter and Wal to
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