Читать книгу Revenge of the Damned (Sten #5) - Allan Cole - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

THE PRISONER OF-war camps had two command structures. The guards were the most visible. But the camp was actually run by the prisoners. In some camps the commanders were the strong and the brutal. Those anarchies were deathcamps, where a prisoner was as likely to die at the hands of his fellows as by a guard.

Sten’s camp was still military. He and Alex were at least partially responsible for that.

The two had fought their way back to health during long delirium months. Then one day Sten was well enough to make a major discovery—not only was he known by the rather clottish name of Horatio, but Warrant Officer Kilgour outranked him. Somehow, he knew that had been carefully plotted by Alex back in the CIC of the Swampscott.

But regardless, rank would prevail. Those who felt the “war is over” or they “don’t have to listen to any clottin’ sojers who got us in the drakh in the first place” were reasoned with. If that did not work, other methods were applied. Sten might have been a skeleton, but he was one who knew many, many degrees beyond the third. And Kilgour, from the three-gee world of Edinburgh, was still the strongest being in the camp—even including the camp executive officer, Battery Commander (Lieutenant Colonel) Virunga.

The N’Ranya were not particularly civilized-looking primates who had developed as tree-dwelling carnivores. They had recently been recognized as the Empire’s preeminent artillery experts—their ancestry had given them an instinctual understanding of geometry and trigonometry. Their 300-kilo-plus body weight did not hurt their ability to handle heavy shells, either.

Colonel Virunga had been badly wounded before he was captured and still hulked around the compound with a limp and a cane. Very few people who survived Sten and Alex thought it wise to argue with the colonel’s orders. The Imperial camp commander was a thin, wispy woman, General Bridger, who had reactivated herself out of retirement when her world was invaded and led the last-ditch stand. Her only goal was to stay alive long enough to see the Imperial standard raised over the camp, and then she would allow herself to die.

At dusk, after Sten and Alex had forced down the appalling evening ration, she and Colonel Virunga said their good-byes.

“Mr. Kilgour, Horatio,” she said, “I hope I shall never see either of you again.”

Kilgour grinned. “Ah hae th’ sam’t dream, ma’am.”

Virunga stepped forward. It took a while to understand the N’Ranya speech patterns—they thought speech mostly a waste of time and so verbalized only enough words to make the meaning clear.

“Hope… luck… When… free… do not forget.”

They would not. Sten and Alex saluted, then began their moves.

Under orders, without explanation, other prisoners had begun what Sten called “two in, one out, one in, three out.” In small groups they filtered toward one of the camp’s few privies, one that “coincidentally” sat less than three meters from the inner perimeter. Sten and Alex joined them; the small box with the reek inside hung around Sten’s neck, concealed by a ragged towel. It would be impossible for either of the guards in the towers nearby to keep track of how many prisoners went into the privy and how many came out.

The privy sat over a deep and dank excrement-filled pit. The building itself was a shed, with a water trough down one side and the privy seats—circular holes cut into a long slab-cut lumber box—on the other. Sten and Alex clambered into one of those holes. On either side of the box, on the inside, they had hammered in spikes a few days earlier.

Both of them had root fiber nose plugs stuffed in place. The plugs did no good whatsoever. Just hang on, Sten thought. Do not faint. Do not think whether that arachnid that’s crawling up your arm is poisonous. Just hang on.

Finally the curfew siren shrieked, and the prisoner sounds subsided. Footsteps thudded, and one privy door opened. The guards, for olfactory reasons, only checked cursorily.

It would have been best for Sten and Alex to wait until the middle of the night before moving, but they had kilometers to travel before dawn. At full dark, they levered themselves out of their hiding places and grimaced at each other.

The next step was up to Colonel Virunga.

It started with shouts and screams and laughter. Sten and Alex saw the searchlight sweep over the cracks in the privy roof, toward one of the barracks. They slid out the privy door.

In theory, they should not have been able to go any farther. The camp was sealed with an inner barrier of wire, a ten-meter-wide “no-go” passage, and then the outer wire.

The tower guards swept the compound with visual searchlights, far more dangerous light-amplification scopes, and focused-noise sensors. By assignment, one guard should have been on each detector.

But the guards were lazy. Why, after all, was it necessary for three men to work a tower, especially at night? There was no escape from the camp. Even if one of the Imperials managed to get out, there was nowhere for him to go—the peasants surrounding the camp were promised large rewards for the return of any escapees in any condition, no questions to be asked. And even if an Imperial managed to slip past the farmers, where would he go? He was still marooned on a world far inside the Tahn galaxies.

And so a bright guard had figured a way to slave all three sensors to a single unit. Only one guard was required to monitor all three of them.

So when Virunga ordered the carefully orchestrated ruckus to start inside one of the barracks and a guard swung his spotlight, all sensors on that tower pointed away from the two scuttling blobs of darkness that went to the wire.

There were three strands of wire to cut before Sten and Alex could slip through into the no-go passage, three razored strips of plas. Sten’s knife would make that simple. But those dangling strands would be spotted within a few minutes. And so, very carefully, Alex had collected over the past several cycles twelve metalloid spikes.

Sten’s knife nerve-twitched out of its fleshy sheath. Very gently he punched two holes side by side on a razor strip. Alex pushed the spikes through them, then used his enormous strength to force the spikes into the plas barrier posts. With the strip thus nailed in place, Sten cut the wire. One… two… three… slip through the gap… repin the wire… and they were in the no-go passageway.

Across that, and again they cut and replaced the wire.

For the first time in three years Sten and Alex were outside the prison camp, without guards.

The temptation to leap up and run was almost overwhelming. But instead they crawled slowly onward, fingers feathering in front of them, expecting sensors and screaming alarms.

There were none.

They had escaped.

All that remained was getting offworld.