Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (3 page)

‘You gotta remember, boy, a bear’s how you look at him.’

‘Dad, what’s a bear?’

‘You know. Like the Imperial Guard uses to scout with. You saw one in that viddie.’

‘Oh, yeah. It looks like the Counselor.’

‘A little – only it’s a mite hairier and not so dumb. Anyway, when you’re in a scoutcar, looking down at that bear, he don’t look so bad. But when that bear’s standing over you …’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That bear’s like Vulcan. If you was up The Eye, it’d probably look pretty good. But when you’re a Mig, down here …’

Amos Sten nodded and poured himself another half liter of narco-beer.

‘All you got to remember in a bear fight, Karl, is you don’t
ever
want to be second. Most of all, you don’t want to get caught by that bear in the first place.’

That was a lesson Sten had already learned. Through Elmore. Elmore was an old Mig who had the solo apartment at the end of the corridor. But most of the off-shift time Elmore was in the children’s play area telling stories.

They were the never true, always wonderful part of the oral tradition that industrial peasants from a thousand worlds had brought to Vulcan, making their own underground tradition.

The Drop Settling of Ardmore. The Ghost Ship of Capella. The Farmer Who Became King
.

And Vulcan’s own legends.
The Delinqs Who Saved the Company
. The eerie, whispered stories of the warehouses and factory domes that were generations-unused by humans … but still had something living and moving in them.

Sten’s favorite was the one Elmore told least often – about how, one day, things would change. How someone would come from another world, and lead the Migs up, into The Eye. A day of reckoning when the air cycling system would spew the blood of the Execs. The best was the last, when Elmore said slowly that the man who would lead the Migs would be a Mig himself.

The corridor’s parents never minded Elmore. He kept the kids out of their hair, and, very grateful, they all chipped in to card Elmore some kind of present every Founder’s Day. If any of them knew most of Elmore’s stories were anti-Company, they never said anything. Nor would they have cared.

The end was inevitable. Some kid talked around the wrong person. Like the Counselor.

One off-shift, Elmore didn’t return. Everyone wondered what had happened. But the topic became boring, and everyone forgot.

Not Sten. He saw Elmore again, on The Row. The man was a shambling hulk, stumbling behind a street-cleaning machine. He paused beside Sten and looked down at the boy.

Elmore’s mouth opened, and he tried to speak. But his tongue lolled helplessly, and his speech was guttural moans. The machine whistled, and Elmore obediently turned and stumbled away after it. The word crawled out of Sten’s mind: brainburn.

He told his father about what he’d seen. Amos grimaced. ‘That’s the secret you gotta learn, boy. You got to zig when they zag.’

‘What’d I tell you about zigging, son?’

‘I couldn’t, pa. There were four of them, and they was all bigger than me.’

‘Too bad, boy. But there’s gonna be a lot of things bigger than you come along. How you gonna handle this one?’

Sten thought for a minute.

‘They won’t look nigh as big from the back, would they, dad?’

‘That’s a terrible thought, Karl. Terrible. Especially since it’s true.’

Sten got up.

‘Where you headed?’

‘I’m … gonna go play.’

‘Naw. First you’re gonna let that black eye go away. And let people forget.’

Two weeks later, one of the four boys was shinnying up a rope in exercise period when it broke and dropped him twenty feet to the steel deck.

Three days after that, two more of the group were exploring an unfinished corridor. It was probably just their bad luck to be standing under a wallslab when the fasteners broke. After the boys were released from the hospital, the Counselor reprimanded their parents.

The leader of Sten’s attackers was just as unfortunate. Out after curfew, he was jumped from behind and battered into unconsciousness. After an investigation, the Counselor said it had probably been a Delinq – a member of one of the wild gangs that roamed the abandoned sectors of Vulcan, one step ahead of brainburn.

Despite the explanations, Sten was left pretty much alone after that.

‘Karl. Gotta have a word with you.’

‘Uh … yeah, dad?’

‘Me and the other folks been to a meeting with the Counselor.’

‘Oh.’

‘You wonderin’ what he wanted?’

‘Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure I am.’

‘Don’t have any idea, do you?’

‘Nossir.’

‘Didn’t think you did. Seems that some Mig’s kid went and invented something. Some kinda spray. You don’t know anything about that, do you, boy?’

‘Nossir.’

‘Uh-huh. This spray smells just like … well, like when the sewage recycler blew up down on Corridor Eighteen-forty-five. Remember that?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Kinda quiet tonight, aren’t we? Anyway. So somebody went and sprayed this on the Counselor and four of those aides he’s got. Sprayed on their pants where they sit down. Is that a laugh you’re hidin’?’

‘Nossir.’

‘Didn’t think so. The Counselor wanted all of us parents to find out who’s got themselves an antisocial kid and turn him in.’

‘What’re you gonna do, dad?’

‘Already done it. Dropped by the microfiles. Your ma talked to the librarian, while I sort of looked at who’s been reading books on chemistry.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. Oh. Unfortunately, I went and forgot to give them records back.’

Sten didn’t say anything.

‘My pa told me once – before you go setting a man’s foot on fire, you best make sure there’s at least six other people with torches in their tool kits. You follow what I mean?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Thought you might.’

One of the best times was what Sten always thought of as the Off-shift Xypaca.

Xypacas were incredibly nasty little carnivores that had been discovered on some hellworld by the Company’s probeships. Nobody knew why the crew had brought back specimens of the psychopathic little reptiles. But they did.

Measuring barely twenty centimeters in height, the Xypaca had a willingness to use its claws and teeth on anything up to a hundred times its own height. One of Sten’s teachers, originally from Prime World, said Xypacas looked like mini-tyrannosaurs, whatever they were.

If the Xypaca hated almost everything equally, it had a special hard place in what passed for its heart for its own species. Except during the brief breeding cycle, the Xypaca loved nothing more than tearing its fellow Xypaca apart. Which made them ideal pit-fighting animals.

Amos had just been rewarded by the Company for figuring out his mill would run an extra thousand hours between servicing if the clearing exhaust didn’t exit just above the computer’s cooling intake. With great ceremony, they knocked a full year off Amos’ contract.

Amos, always one for the grand parlay, used that year’s credit to buy a Xypaca.

Sten hated the reptile from the first moment, when a lightninglike snap of its jaws almost took off his little finger.

So Amos explained it to him. ‘I ain’t real fond of that critter either. I don’t like the way it looks, the way it smells or the way it eats. But it’s gonna be our ticket off of Vulcan.’

His spiel was convincing. Amos planned to fight his Xypaca in small-time preliminary fights only, betting light. ‘We win small – a month off the contract here, a week there. But sooner or later it’ll be our ticket out of here.’ Even Sten’s mother was convinced there was something to this latest of Amos’ dreams.

And Sten, by fifteen, wanted off Vulcan more than anything else he could imagine. So he fed the Xypaca cheerfully, lived with its rank smell, and tried not to yell too loudly when he was a little slow in getting his hand out of its cage after feeding.

And it seemed, for a while, as if Amos’ big plan was going to work. Until the night the Counselor showed up at the fights, held in an unused corridor a few rows away.

Sten was carrying the Xypaca’s cage into the arena, following Amos.

From across the ring, The Counselor spotted them and hurried around. ‘Well, Amos,’ he said heartily, ‘didn’t know you were a Xyman.’

Amos nodded warily.

The Counselor inspected the hissing brute under Sten’s arm. ‘Looks like a fine animal you’ve got there, Amos. What say we pitch it against mine in the first match?’

Sten looked across the ring and saw the obese, oversized Xypaca one of the Counselor’s toadies was handling. ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘We can’t. It’ll—’

The Counselor frowned at Sten.

‘You letting your boy decide what you do now, Amos?’

Amos shook his head.

‘Well then. We’ll show them we’re the best sportsmen of all. Show the other corridors that we’re so bored with the lizards they’ve got that we’d rather fight our own, right?’

He waited. Amos took several deep breaths. ‘I guess you haven’t decided about the transfers over to the wire mill yet, have you, sir?’ he finally asked.

The Counselor smiled. ‘Exactly.’

Even Sten knew that handling the mile-long coils of white-hot metal was the deadliest job on Amos’ shift.

‘We – me and my boy – we’d be proud to fight your Xy, Mister Counselor.’

‘Fine, fine,’ the Counselor said. ‘Let’s give them a real good show.’

He hurried back around the makeshift ring.

‘Dad,’ Sten managed, ‘his Xy – it’s twice the size of ours. We don’t stand a chance.’

Amos nodded. ‘Sure looks that way, don’t it? But you remember what I told you, time back, about not handling things the way people expect you to? Well – you take my card. Nip on out to that soystand, and buy all you can hide under your tunic.’

Sten grabbed his father’s card and wriggled off through the crowd.

The Counselor was too busy bragging to his cronies about what his Xy would do to notice Sten shoving strands of raw soy into the large Xypaca’s cage.

After a few moments of haggling, bragging, and bet-placing, the Xy cages were brought into the ring, tipped over, and quickly opened.

The Counselor’s thoroughly glutted Xypaca stumbled from his cage, yawned once, and curled up to go to sleep. By the time he was jolted awake, Amos’ Xypaca had him half digested.

There was a dead silence around the ring. Amos looked as humble as he knew how. ‘Yessir. You were right, sir. We showed them we’re sure the best sportsmen, didn’t we. Sir?’

The Counselor said nothing. Just turned and pushed his way through the crowd.

After that, Amos couldn’t get a fight for his Xypaca in any match at any odds. Nobody mourned that much when the Xypaca died – along with all the others – after a month or two. Lack of necessary trace elements, somebody said.

By that time, Amos was already busy figuring out another scheme to get himself and his family off Vulcan.

He was still scheming when Thoresen dumped the air on The Row.

The Baron’s words rolled and bounced around the high-roofed tube junction. Sten could pick out an occasional phrase:

‘Brave souls … Vulcan pioneers … died for the good of the Company … names not to be forgotten … our thirty million citizens will always remember …’

Sten still felt numb.

A citizen, coming off shift, elbowed his way through the crowd of about fifty mourning Migs, scowling. Then he realized what was going on. He pulled what he hoped was a sorrowful look in his face and ducked down a tube opening.

Sten didn’t notice.

He was staring up at the roof, at the many-times-magnified picture of the Baron projected on the ceiling. The man stood in his garden, wearing the flowing robes that Execs put on for ceremonial occasions.

The Baron had carefully picked his clothes for the funeral ceremony. He thought the Migs would be impressed and touched by his concern. To Sten he was nothing more than a beefier, more hypocritical version of the Counselor.

Sten had made it through the first week … survived the shock. Still, his mind kept fingering the loss, like an amputee who can ghost-feel a limb he no longer owns.

Sten had holed up in the apartment for most of the time. At intervals the delivery flap had clicked and every now and then he’d walked over and eaten something from the pneumatiqued trays of food.

Sten had even been duly grateful to the Company for leaving him alone. He didn’t realize until years later that the Company was just
following the procedure outlined in ‘Industrial Accidents (Fatal), Treatment of Surviving Relatives of.’

From the quickly vidded expressions of sympathy from Amos’ and Freed’s supervisors and the children’s teachers, to the Sympathy Wake Credits good at the nearest rec center, the process of channeling the grief of the bereaved was all very well calculated. Especially the isolation – the last thing the Company wanted was a mourning relative haunting the corridors, reminding people just how thin was the margin between life and death in their artificial, profit-run world.

The Baron’s booming words suddenly were nothing but noise to Sten. He turned away. Someone fell in beside him. Sten turned his head, and then froze. It was the Counselor.

‘Moving ceremony,’ the man said. ‘Touching. Quite touching.’

He motioned Sten toward a slideway bibshop and into a chair. The Counselor pushed his card into a slot and punched. The server spat two drinks. The Counselor took a sip of his drink and rolled it around his mouth. Sten just stared at the container before him.

‘I realize your sorrow, young Sten,’ the Counselor said. ‘But all things grow from ashes.’

He took something from his pocket and put it in front of Sten. It was a placard, with
KARL STEN, 03857-CON19-2-MIG-UNSK
across the top. Sten wondered when they’d snapped the picture of him on the card’s face.

‘I knew that your great concern was, after the inevitable mourning period, what would happen to you next. After all, you have no job. No credits, no means of support. And so forth.’

He paused and sipped his drink.

‘We have examined your record and decided that you deserve special treatment.’ The Counselor smiled and tapped the card with a yellow fingernail.

‘We have decided to allow you full worker’s citizenship rights with all of the benefits that entails. A man-size monthly credit. Full access to all recreational facilities. Your own home – the one, in fact, in which you grew up.’

The Counselor leaned forward for the final touch. ‘Beginning tomorrow, Karl Sten, you take your father’s place on the proud assembly lines of Vulcan.’

Sten sat silent. Possibly the Counselor thought he was grateful. ‘Of course, that means you will have to serve out the few years left on your father’s contract – nineteen, I believe it was. But the Company has waived the time remaining on your mother’s obligation.’

‘That’s very generous of the Company,’ Sten managed.

‘Certainly. Certainly. But as Baron Thoresen has so often pointed out to me in our frequent chats – in
his
garden, I might add – the welfare of our workers must come before all other things. “A happy worker is a productive worker,” he often says.’

‘I’m sure he does.’

The Counselor smiled again. He patted Sten’s hand and rose. Then he hesitated, inserted his card in the slot again and punched buttons. Another drink appeared from the slot. ‘Have another, Citizen Sten. On me. And let me be the first to offer my congratulations.’

He patted Sten again, then turned and walked down the street. Sten stared after him. He picked up the drinks, and slowly poured them on the deck.