Dancers in the Afterglow (8 page)

She groaned and rubbed her aching calves.

"I don't think I can go on," she said softly. "They're going to shoot me, I think."

Genji was about to reply when he heard a cracking sound nearby, and they looked up to see a woman's figure suddenly outlined in a light blue glow, then dissolve into the air as a soldier holstered his weapon. The former press agent sighed. "It would be quick that way. My God! Who would have thought it would come to this?"

But when the guards came along, urging everyone up, to the response of moans, groans, complaints, and protests, Genji and the former model managed to stand with the rest

The march began anew. As it progressed, more people had problems, and some were now being helped along by others. But more segments of the line of marchers seemed to break off and be led into the woods.

Soon they would run out of paths, out of places where the little trucks could service them.

By midday they were in the deep woods. From near the middle of the column, the people from the hotel were now almost the front. There was no indication as to where the others had gone, but they knew that their own time was coming. There were more soldiers ahead of them than civilians.

Then, suddenly, a dozen soldiers broke off and stood to either side of them. A few people filed past, then the man and the girl, then a few more, including Moira and Genji. Without warning, the soldiers broke the group of perhaps fifty off and ordered them into the woods.

They marched into the dark forest, crunching over leaves and stepping over fallen logs, which was tough going for those who had brought only sandals or cloth shoes.

After what seemed like hours, they broke into a pleasant meadow, panicking a few antelope. It was a small island in the forest, with rolling green hills and yellow flowers. In the distance they could see the mountains. A small stream burbled through the center of the meadow. They were marched to the stream, then told to stop and relax.

"End of the line!" announced one of the soldiers with a nasty grin, and they halted, some washing their faces in the stream's clear waters, others just sprawling out on the grass.

Six of the soldiers sat in a circle around the group, weapons ready, while the other six drank in the stream and generally surveyed the area.

"What the hell do we do now?" the man wondered aloud. None of the soldiers seemed bothered by the conversation, and this emboldened others.

"Looks like they're waiting for something, or someone," another man with a low, gravelly voice responded. "As for me, I don't give a damn anymore."

Others murmured agreement with that.

Moira sprawled on the grass and looked around. A pretty spot, she decided. And the march was obviously over for them. A good thing, too, she knew. This was about her limit. Had it not been for Genji, she might have given up before this.

But she wasn't going to quit as long as he still carried on.

Ironically, the same level of pride and ego had been what kept Genji alive and going. As long as she kept going, he damned well would, too.

The day suddenly grew dark due to something other than the lateness of the hour; the clouds were turning from their usual light gray to very dark, near-black. Thunder rolled across the meadow, and a wind came up and caused the trees in the distance to start a whisper-roar, while a thinner swishing sound arose around them from the movement of the grasses and yellow flowers. The temperature began dropping rapidly.

The soldiers jumped up and spread around them quickly, weapons at the ready. "You will stay there!" one of them ordered, and they waited for the rain.

A torrential downpour that was so intense it almost hurt came shortly after. The noise and the spectacular display of lightning so close around them terrified some, but any movement away from the tight group was met by a stolid soldier with his threatening pistol.

Then, just as suddenly as it had come upon them, the storm was over. The ground was a sea of mud, and they were all soaked to the skin and feeling the chill of the afterstorm breeze against water-soaked clothing and skin.

The soldier's uniforms hardly seemed touched; there was, it appeared, a seal that kept them dry. One of them broke open a pack and took out a couple of towels, and they took turns wiping their faces and hair. No towels were offered the group.

It was well past dark now, but the group still huddled wet and mud-caked from Ondine's humidity. Flashes and rumbles had threatened more rain, but what fell missed them, cause for only small thanks. The little stream had become a raging torrent, which some had used to clean at least a little of the muck off. Others just didn't bother.

Near darkness, the soldiers had broken out what looked to be a glowing rope. It was flexible, about thirty centimeters around, and easily a hundred meters long. Giving off a dull yellow glow that yielded a little light and no heat, it was looped around the spot where they rested and waited, with warnings that anyone who crossed the line would be shot Moira shook her head and tried to wake up from a bad dream. She peered around in the gloomy rope-glow at the misery in the faces of the others, and knew that she must look much the same. It humiliated her; all the worse because she had been reduced to
their
level, the common people's level, with no way to change things. Even Genji, the little nebbish. She'd told him to bring her some water and he'd told her to get it herself. She felt as if she were sulking, alone, helpless, friendless.

And she was scared to death.

The man thought the girl was asleep, and he leaned over and brushed some mud from her forehead and pushed back her hair. She smiled and opened her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he started, but she cut him off.

"Don't be silly. I hurt too much to sleep."

He chuckled. Strange, he thought, chuckling now. The human race seems to adapt to almost anything.

She had a sudden, quizzical look on her face. "You know—it's funny, but I don't even know your name."

He smiled. "Doesn't matter. For the record, it's Yuri. Yuri Alban. And you're Azure."

Her eyebrows went up. "You remembered! Now I feel doubly guilty." She paused for a minute, thinking. "Yuri. That's a nice name." She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I'm glad you were with me through this, Yuri."

"I'm glad, too," he whispered softly. He leaned back on the grass.
Funny,
he thought to himself,
how these things go. Here we are, torn from the lives and civilization that we know, sitting in the middle of the wilderness in the muck, guarded by creatures of unknown motives
—
yet this is the most human I've felt in fifteen years. I know I should be crying, like that hysterical man over there, or in shock, or despairing, but I'm not.
He looked around at the dim figures nearby.

The ones with something to lose.

A whirring, whining sound woke them up. The guards had let them sleep long and late. They were still sore, still tired, and still starving, but it had been a welcome respite.

The sound came from an enormous flyer, perhaps eighty meters around, wedge-shaped with a command bubble. The figures in the bubble were impossible to make out, but the flyer was Ondinian, a long-haul cargo craft.

They watched the vehicle as it stirred the grass some fifty meters away, hovering just a few meters above the ground. Hatches opened underneath, and three conveyor belts lowered and touched the ground. Almost immediately, large cartons began offloading. The flyer continued moving slightly forward, leaving the cargo in rows. In just a few minutes perhaps fifteen crates, several extremely large, had been deposited. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the flyer was gone.

One of the soldiers came over to them, picking up the light-rope and handing it to another to take in.

"All right!" he yelled. "Everybody up! Lots of work to be done!"

"What about food?" somebody grumbled. "Any food in that cargo?"

The soldier showed no expression, but neither did he seem irritated or taken aback by the question or its tone. "Plenty of food for those who work," he replied. "First you break down the crates. Then we eat."

They moved off toward the supplies. The boxes were of unfamiliar design, but easy to disassemble without tools. You just pulled a set of handles in each corner and the outer cartons folded neatly back, revealing the close-packed contents: more of those blue loaves—a lot of them.

After the crates were unlatched the soldiers let them eat. Then the work really began.

The crates were prefabricated structures that needed only to be fitted and locked together, much like a puzzle. It took only two hours, with the soldiers' instructions, to assemble a squat little building that used an unfolded crate as its floor. A heavy-duty generator of some sort fit snugly inside, and there were lights, bunks, desks, some communications gear, and even what appeared to be a shower and chemical toilet The guards, at least, were going to have things reasonably comfortable. Some large, heavy boxes marked with strange symbols were moved inside, but the prisoners didn't know what was in them.

A few of the people refused to work at first. The guards allowed this, but when food time came again they were pointedly excluded, and they were also herded off, away from the river, and denied water as well. The message was clear soon enough: no work, no food or water. Within only a few hours, there were no more holdouts.

A mild modesty crisis that seemed to amuse the soldiers arose that afternoon. Some people had taken advantage of the night to relieve themselves
au naturel,
but the situation was now different.

Pleas to use the chemical toilet were ignored, and the prisoners were told that such provisions hadn't been completed as yet. One woman used that as an excuse to start running for the trees. Then they were forty-nine.

A second building was more complex than the first. A barren little place at first, its floor was later lined with cushions in regular rows, and there seemed to be a platform at the front like a stage. They also moved a lot more heavy boxes inside, but the building's function remained a puzzle.

Next came a tentlike structure. Wooden poles unfolded and interlocked to provide side supports, over which a heavy cloth cap was stretched and locked, providing a roof but no floor or walls. A network of slender poles was evenly spaced at about two-meter intervals beneath the cap. They fitted into locking supports in the slightly arched fabric top, and were then driven into the soft ground. When the poles were in as far as a mark etched into their surfaces the press of a stud sent out anchor supports beneath the ground. They were solid as a rock, and could support a good deal of weight despite their thinness.

The next box provided them with a rude awakening. When it unfolded at the release of the last corner latch, someone said, "Oh, my God! Hammocks!" Yuri nodded numbly, looking back at the open structure. "That open thing—that's for us," he said. A detachment, meanwhile, had been working under a soldier's supervision digging a pit toilet and dumping lime in the bottom. It wasn't the pit toilet that upset the prisoners, but its location.

The guard's quarters were to the left, the other enclosed building was perhaps a hundred meters to the right, and equidistant from the two, forming a triangle was the hammock-barracks. The pit toilet was in the center of the triangle. One thing the soldiers did themselves. Five of them unpacked a net woven of the lighted rope material and strung it, fencelike, from guard's quarters to a post a few meters behind the open building, then to the other structure, and back to the guard's quarters. The hammock-building and the mysterious structure were completely inside the perimeter, while the guard's shack was outside but for the little corner with the generator, to either side of which the ends of the rope barrier were attached and interlocked. An additional rope barrier sealed off that corner and the generator from the diamond.

The rope fence was barely a meter high. It did not look intimidating, and the guards knew it.

One of them nodded to another across the way, and the generator hummed into life, lighting the fence. It was far brighter than the temporary barrier of the night before; even in total darkness, the infield would be lit with an eerie yellow glow. Additional lights were affixed atop all three structures in the diamond. The prisoners had surprised themselves, even though there were a lot of them and the materials were obviously designed to be assembled by novices.

The job appeared to be done before dark. The prisoners were all called together for dinner and given more of the loaves they were now used to.

Then a hose was connected from the stream to the generator, and from there to a pipe which reached over the fence at a little over a meter's height. There was a small push-valve on it, and this was how you could release the water.

"You did a good job," one of the soldiers approved. They could never be certain if the same one was always talking and in charge or not, since they all looked and sounded exactly alike. "We are ahead of schedule. That is good. Now we must wait until they are ready to proceed. There are many, many, many camps like this. It takes time to get set up."

"What comes next?" a woman asked. The guard smiled. "You will see. All in good time. Only one more thing to show you, and a few more things to do, and we can all get some sleep." With that he turned and approached the glowing, meter-high fence. "Watch!" he called, and they did as he jumped easily over it. Satisfied, he jumped back.

"Doesn't hurt us," he noted. Then he picked up one of the loaves and threw it just over the fence.

The loaf got almost directly over, then burst into flame in midair and vanished.

"The same happens to you if you try and jump it, or even touch it," he warned. "If you don't believe that, then you might try it It would make a more effective demonstration."

They sat in silence for a while, considering it, as the guard again vaulted the fence. A couple of other guards were bringing out portable soft yellow lighting and setting it up just outside the perimeter, near the open building. They played with the fixtures in the gloom until they had eliminated just about all shadow.