“I must admit that coming upon a man of your obvious culture and erudition, in the midst of this barbaric waste, is lots like finding a pearl in a midden heap,” the General remarked.
Doc tried to stifle a wince. Owing to a saw that was old when he was young, he associated pearls with swine, and swine… He shook himself delicately. The memories didn’t bear touching upon, however lightly. Especially since Cort Strasser had already been called to mind.
“The General is too kind,” he said. He pushed his plate away; his appetite had vanished. “And since you are a man who clearly appreciates quality when he encounters it, I feel it is incumbent upon me to point out a valuable resource that your subordinates are running a shocking risk of simply throwing away.”
The General leaned forward with an eagerness that surprised Doc, and a hunger in his gray eyes that shocked the other man. Obviously he’d probed a nerve, he thought.
He nodded and forged ahead. “Certain of my associates, who were…detained along with myself, are men and women of remarkable attributes. To employ them as mere manual laborers constitutes a shocking waste of valuable resources, and a truly unforgivable oversight on the part of your subordinates, I fear.”
Slowly the General leaned back. Doc watched the tautness in his face sag into disappointment, and anger flare in his eyes. He braced himself for doom.
The General looked aside for a moment, scowling. When he turned back to Doc his expression was returning to neutrality.
“Very well, Professor,” he said, “tell me more.”
“NUKEBLAST IT!” the guard howled as Jak sank sharp teeth into his wrist. He battered the youth’s head and shoulders with his free hand. Jak hung on, as tenacious as a weasel. “Leggo, you rad-sucking son of a mutie gutter slut!”
Taking advantage of the distraction to lean on his shovel as he watched, J.B. shook his head.
Another guard came running up and swatted Jak in the head with the butt of his M-16. Whatever its merits as a longblaster, the M-16 was reputed to have been made originally by a toy company. In any event it didn’t weigh much, having been designed not to, and its butt was mostly nylon. It was a piss-poor piece to buttstroke a body with. Without so much as flinching, Jak back-kicked the guard in the balls. The man sat down hard on a red-ant hill, then rolled onto his side, moaning and clutching himself.
Guards converged. Along with the blasters, the soldiers overseeing the work gang carried truncheons, some actual scavenged PR-25 side-handle batons, others simply sawed out of either table legs or baseball bats—J.B. couldn’t tell which. They rained blows upon Jak’s head and shoulders until he let go and fell to the ground, grinning at them with a mouth red with blood that wasn’t his. Then they commenced to stomp him.
J.B. sighed. The boy clearly had some hard lessons to learn about when to kick back and when to just bow your head and take what was coming and bide your time. But he couldn’t just stand by and watch his longtime comrade-in-arms get kicked to death. He was going to have to do something, which likely meant his getting stomped, as well.
He was just shifting his grip on his shovel when the situation escalated. A young and probably fresh-minted sec man ran up and shouldered his M-16. As serious as a multiple stomping was, it was nothing to being in the way of a sleet of nasty jacketed 5.56 mm bullets. And the new arrival seemed blissfully unaware that no matter what angle he chose there was no way to shoot the miscreant without ventilating three or four of his buddies as well.
“That’s enough! Stand down there, you men.” Banner’s voice was like the roar of an enraged gravel crusher as he strode toward the altercation.
The guards fell back from the prostrate Jak. The boy with the M-16 stiffened like a dog pointing the grouse. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Bledsoe! If you don’t lower that piece right now, I’ll ram it so far up your ass you’ll be looking at the front sight cross-eyed. Do I make myself clear, you polyp on a mutant salamander’s asshole?”
The newby hastily lowered the rifle and snapped to. J.B. nodded in appreciation of the sec man’s unexpected eloquence. An asshole Banner might be, but an asshole with style.
The others fell back from Jak’s well-trampled form. The youth had been lying in a fetal curl, with his face hugged into his knees, protecting himself as well as he could. He rolled to his belly, got to hands and knees and shook his head.
The guard whose wrist he had bloodied pulled out a Beretta and aimed it at Jak’s head.
“Moredock, what’s wrong with you?” Banner shouted. “Secure that weapon.”
“But, Sarge, we gotta make an example—”
“Now.”
Moredock holstered his blaster. It took him only three tries.
“What we ‘gotta do,’ skunk ape, is get the damned railbed built up again so we can lay new rails before we all die of old age. We can’t go shooting our whole labor force just because you’re too fuckwitted to keep order. Unless you want to take his place swinging a pick, Corporal?”
Moredock hit a brace. “Sir, no sir!”
“Pick him up.”
A couple of the guards who had been thundering on Jak now dragged him to his feet by his biceps. One red eye was puffing shut, but aside from a thin trickle out of his left nostril, the blood on his face still wasn’t his own.
“Ah, the albino.” Banner nodded. “You were with the bunch I helped scoop up yesterday. You listen to me, boy. We need you to do a job of work. But don’t get the idea we can’t fix the track without you. Act up again and I’ll stomp your brains out your nose myself.”
The sergeant glared around at the onlookers, guards and captives alike. “Don’t you all have things to do?” Everyone turned away, suddenly eager to be doing those things.
With dark looks, the guards let Jak go and backed away warily. He stood panting like a winded dog, still grinning defiance.
J.B. scooped up a shovelful of earth and walked over to Jak, to look as if he intended doing something useful with it. Then he dumped the dirt and grounded the tool again.
“That’s no way to do it, Jak,” he said. “That’s way too hard a road to see to the end. Take an old man’s word for it.”
Jak shook his head so that his snowy mane flew wildly, then hawked and spit a blood loogie in the sand. “Kill sergeant.”
“If you live long enough. Keep up the way you been, though, you’ll be staring at the sky when the stars come out.”
Anger flared like a lasing ruby in Jak’s eyes.
“All right, party time’s over!” a guard yelled at them. “Get back to work.”
Jak turned away. J.B. moved on to join other laborers shoveling dirt into barrows.
Some time later Mildred approached. Across her shoulders she carried a pole with a water bucket at either end. She knelt and set down the buckets, then stood back as the thirsty laborers crowded around to ladle up water.
She looked angry. J.B. reckoned he knew why.
“Don’t none of us like it, Millie,” he said quietly, “but the one thing it ain’t is personal.”
She glared at him, then shook her head. “Yeah, I know. Slavery’s an equal-employment opportunity these days. But that wasn’t how I was raised.”
She looked around. There was still water, and the workers were still jostling one another to drink.
“Bastards almost killed Jak,” she said. “I wish I could look at him.”
“Boy’s tough. Knows how to handle himself, too. I don’t reckon they hurt him much.”
“We’ve