Читать книгу Revenge of the Damned (Sten #5) - Allan Cole - Страница 14

CHAPTER NINE

INSIDE THE COURTYARD, the Imperial prisoners were shouted and pummeled into a formation. Most interesting, Sten thought, as he analyzed the guards.

They looked much as he had expected and experienced in his previous camp: over muscled bullyboys, semicrippled ex-combatants, and soldiers too old or too young to be assigned to the front.

Their obscenities and threats were also the same.

But none of them carried whips. They were armed with truncheons or stun rods—which seemed mere patty aw weapons to the thoroughly brutalized prisoners. No projectile weapons were being waved about. And no one had been slammed to the ground with a rifle butt, which was the standard Tahn request for attention.

The main shouter wore the rank tabs of a police major. He was a hulk of a man whose broad leather belt was losing its battle with his paunch. As he roared orders, one hand kept creeping toward his holstered pistol, then was forced away. The man’s face was amazingly scarred.

“Tha’ be’t ae screw,” Alex whispered, lips motionless, “thae hae plac’d second in a wee brawl wi’ ae bear.”

Eventually the formation looked adequate, and Colonel Virunga limped to his place at its front. That had been one of the few cheery notes of the long crawl through space on the prison ship: Virunga was senior Imperial officer and would therefore be in command of the prisoners in the new camp.

Virunga eyed his command and started to bring them to attention. Then he caught himself.

Standing ostentatiously away from the prisoners was a single defiant being. He—she? it?—was about a meter and a half in height and squatted on his thick lower legs as if early in his race’s evolution there had been a tail provided for tripodal security. His upper arms were almost as large as his lower legs, ending in enormous bone-appearing gauntlets and incongruously slender fingers.

The being had no neck, its shoulders flowing into a tapering skull that ended in a dozen pink tendrils that Virunga guessed were its sensory organs. The being had once been fat, with sleek fur. Now the ragged pelt draped down in togalike folds over its body.

Colonel Virunga had been denied access to the prisoners’ records aboard ship, and of course there had not been time to meet every one of the purged prisoners. But he wondered how he had missed that one.

“Form up, troop.”

“I am not a troop, and I shall not form up,” the being squeaked. “I am Lay Reader Cristata, I am a civilian, I endorse neither the Empire nor the Tahn, and I am being unjustly held and forced to be a part of this machinery of death.”

Virunga goggled. Did Cristata think that any of them had volunteered to be POWs? Even more wonderment: How had that paragon of resistance managed to survive in a prison camp so long?

The police major trumpeted incoherently, and two guards leapt toward Cristata, batons ready. But before they could pummel him to the ground, a large man wearing the tatters of an infantryman’s combat coveralls grabbed Cristata by his harness and dragged him bodily into the formation. Evidently the use of force satisfied Cristata’s objections, because he then remained meekly where planted.

“Formation… ten-hut.”

Virunga about-faced, leaned on his cane, and stared up at a balcony on the third level. He could see two faces looking down at him from behind the barred, clear plas doors.

He waited for the prisoners’ new lords and masters to make their appearance.