Eric Flint: The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly

He was not too sure how much later someone turned him over. He was not sure he cared. Not even when he realized that it was Van Klomp's big ugly face looking down on him.

It was almost two hours later that Fitz began to recover some movement. After that he had a couple of wild, almost epileptic muscle spasms, and found that he could at least begin to sit up. He was weak, and wretched.

Van Klomp came into the aid station.

"Boeta, I thought you were dead. I should have known it was too good to be true."

"Ariel's dead, Bobby. She tried to protect me. Stood over my body. And the bastards killed her. I even couldn't move to help her." Fitz knew there was heartbreak in his voice. But Bobby Van Klomp was more than a friend. He was more of a father than his own father had ever been.

"Oh, hell's teeth. I'm sorry, Fitzy. She loved you, that mad rat of yours."

"She loved me enough to stand and defend me, when her soft-cyber was programmed to make her obey the Korozhet. I think that's why they shot her. But I wish they'd at least left me her body."

"Fitzy… I don't know what to say, boykie. All I can say is your lot did a hell of a lot better ambush than we had prepared on the other side of the canal. You made them pay a very high price for her. You got two kids free. One's got a concussion and the other a broken leg, but they're alive and free. You killed twenty-seven and destroyed one of their hovercraft-and you only lost three of yours."

"Only thanks to your lot getting there. I wish I'd known where the hell you were."

"I moved my boys into the assault course grounds, except for the ones in that first chopper those bastards shot down. They're dug in there. Then we set up a sort of 'combined arms' group-the new recruits without slowshields and with as much firepower as we could manage to scavenge, the vets with bangsticks and explosives-and went and scouted Webb Fields. We dropped a few smoke-rounds on the crowd, in order to chase them out of that trap. But then we got our mortars taken out, and we've been scouting for an opportunity since."

Fitz's stood up. "Be ready for lots of opportunity. I plan to kill every single stinking Pricklepuss on this planet before I'm done. I'll give Ariel a funeral pyre worthy of a goddess."

Van Klomp smiled crookedly. "I don't think the rats have 'goddesses,' Fitzy."

"They do now."

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

The ship of slaves and the new slave compounds, outside.

Yetteth had long since lost track of the time that he'd been a prisoner. In all that time he'd never been outside the ship. Very few of the thousands of Korozhet on the ship ever left the vessel, and, from what he could gather, slaves never did.

That made sense, of course. Until the Magh'-clients had finished clearing away the humans and the new world was open for Korozhet settlement-or, at least, until all subterfuge had been abandoned-the Korozhet didn't want the humans seeing their existing slaves of many species, or they might just guess what the Korozhet were up to.

It appeared that all pretense had now been abandoned. Yetteth was one of a group that were ordered to go out to the slave preprocessing station where the humans were being mindwiped. Someone had to move the empty and comatose bodies across to the implant station. It was not an easily mechanized task, and Korozhet did not do manual labor. That was for the lower phyla.

The alien air smelled sweet. After the naphthalene reek of the ship any air would have smelled sweet, but this was really pleasant. A little dry and rather warm, but certainly something to set the scent tendrils tingling. Yetteth fluffed them out slightly, picking up every nuance as the second force field was dropped and they walked across to the preprocessing station.

Yetteth nearly earned himself a nerve-lashing. He stopped… His scent tendrils flared, nearly doubling in size.

The breeze brought him a scent he never ever expected to smell again.

One of the People.

Female. And she was within a relatively short swing or swim.

Hastily he walked on, seeing that the overseer was heading back this way on its floater.

The cage was full of humans. They were still clothed, and their eyes were open. But there was nothing behind those empty eyes. Korozhet mindwiping techniques scoured all traces of memory and existing personality from the brain. For all practical purposes, these "people" were newborn babes. Not even that-fetuses, in a nonexistent womb.

With a sigh, he began the work he was ordered to do. In low gravity like this, carrying a human was an easy thing for a Jampad. He picked up the first one, a female with yellow head-filaments, and carried her across to the implant-station. Then he came back for the next one. And then the next one.

A Korozhet hovertank came hurtling drunkenly across the open field. There was smoke trailing from it. The plex-dome was shattered-and Yetteth knew from his own combat experience that it took a huge force to even damage it. Of the normal crew of fifteen Korozhet with dozens of Nerba to man the paralyzers and do the heavy lifting, there was very little sign.

The hovertank dropped clumsily in front of the preprocessing station. One of the masters got out with a dripping, small, longnosed creature balanced on two spines.

Yetteth dared not wait and watch, much as he wanted to. He carried the next human across. This was another female, with lips of a peculiar color-like the ice fens of his home planet. Odd. He'd never seen another human with that color lips. Perhaps that was an the result of the mindscrub. The effects of the process were sometimes extreme. Some of the mindwiped humans weren't just comatose, they were dead. He remembered the human woman who had died in the slave quarters. Her lips had gone blue.

Inside the preprocessing station he was told to put her onto the work surface.

"Strip the false integuments off her, slave," snapped the inserter.

As he did so, Yetteth saw that the remains of the small creature lay on one side of the workslab. It had been split in half and the soft-cyber implant was being removed from its brain.

The Third-instar who had brought the creature in was still talking, clacking its spines in agitation. "… ambush. All of Fourth-instar Cattat's crew were killed. This is one of the rebels…"

"I understand that," said the inserter impatiently. "That is why I am removing the implant." The Korozhet pointed a spine at the human female with the odd-colored lips. "I will insert it in this creature, so we can begin an interrogation."

The inserter noticed Yetteth had finished preparing the human female. "Take this filth away." He pointed a spine at the small, stumpy-tailed creature.

Yetteth picked up the small creature's remains. Despite many scars on the body, the fur was still very soft.

Once outside he took a chance, and put it down, gently, in the gathering dark. Nothing that had fought such a fight and managed to inflict such damage on the… Crotchets, should be tossed in with the regurgitated remains of Korozhet dinners. He would have burned it with honor, if he could.

Obviously the Third-instar's concern had been relayed to the High-spine, because Yetteth found himself and the other slaves being whipped and sent back to the ship in haste. The cages of humans were left to their own devices as the hovertank and the Korozhet retreated back into their force-fielded ship.

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

All life can be expressed as a stream of machine-code.

This scene is, too.

"I'd like to test it," said the pimply-faced programmer. "There might be a bug."