EarthRise by William C. Dietz Read Free Book Online Page B

If you doubt me, turn your eyes to the sky.”
    Slowly, as if not quite sure they had heard correctly, the slaves looked up. Manning was no exception. The sky appeared to be clear—so the security chief was confused at first. Then he saw the black dot and heard the low-pitched hum. The lifter, just one of the many types of aircraft that the Saurons had stolen from the Ra ‘Na and adapted for their own use, came in from the north.
    It looked like a single blob at first, but that started to change. The single image morphed into an H-shaped aircraft with something that dangled below. A cargo module? No, it was too small for that. Whatever the thing was it twisted back and forth at the end of its tether and seemed invested with a life of its own.
    “As I said,” Hak-Bin intoned, his slightly stilted words booming out from the pole-mounted speakers, “ no one is exempt from Sauron justice. Not even the stonemaster himself.”
    There was a muted gasp as the H-shaped shadow fell over the crowd, and whatever it was that kept the alien aircraft aloft roared, blasting the hill with jets of hot air. Grit flew, clothes flapped, and hair whipped from side to side. The object was clear to see by then—and it was the Saurons rather than the slaves who stared up in horror.
    The stonemaster, who, only hours before, had been the second or third most powerful being on Earth, now dangled beneath the lifter at the end of a long black cable. It swayed alarmingly as the lifter lost forward motion and hovered above the citadel. “Remember what you are about to witness,” Hak-Bin said gravely. “Remember as you watch over the slaves, remember as you haul stone, and remember when you dream.”
    Then, by means of a prearranged signal, an order was given. The lifter’s copilot touched a switch, a coupling snapped open, and the stonemaster, still struggling to accept his fate, fell free of the cable. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, he never screamed. True to his calling, true to the knowledge inherited from his predecessors, and true to his own nature, the master architect spent the last few seconds of his life admiring what he had built, wondering why he had never thought to view it from that particular perspective before, and hoping his assistants would have the strength to deal with the political pressure from above, would refuse to compromise the citadel’s structural integrity in the name of speed, and would hew to the instructions laid down in the Book of Cycles.
    And that was when the Sauron’s legs shattered against a partially completed dome, when shards of exoskeleton punctured his abdominal cavity, and light exploded before his eyes. The sight of the Sauron’s death affected different beings in different ways.
    Sool winced and closed her eyes.
    Franklin thought about how desperate Hak-Bin must be.
    Dro Tog felt frightened.
    Manning smiled coldly.
    Ji-Hoon frowned.
    And the man named Brian Banes finally snapped. A fact which wasn’t all that surprising in and of itself, especially given the fact that the Saurons had murdered most of the other patients in the mental hospital, sparing Banes because he was big and strong. Very big and very strong.
    Propelled by emotions rather than concrete thoughts, Banes pushed his way through the crowd, sucker punched one of the Kan warriors, and broke through the security cordon. The ex-mental patient pulled the long heavily serrated kitchen knife out of its homemade sheath, held it up over his head, and charged up the hill. The roar of primal outrage turned many heads.
    Strangely enough it was Hak-Bin who first noticed the would-be assassin. His first thought was to escape, to jump out of danger, but he refused to let instinct rule. No, appearances were important, especially then, with so much at stake.
    That being the case, the Sauron resolved to stand his ground, to place himself in the hands of fate, and wait for one of his seemingly dim-witted warriors to kill the oncoming slave.
    The