Revenge of the Damned by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Read Free Book Online Page A

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 its 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.

    CHAPTER TEN
    P olice colonel Derzhin was, in his own mind, despite his rank, neither a cop nor a military officer. Many years before, long before the war with the Empire, he had been a junior lieutenant in the Tahn ranks, assigned to a survey ship. Somehow one of the emergency oxygen containers on the ship's bridge had exploded, killing all four of the ranking officers and, worse, destroying the ship's navcomputer. Derzhin, the sole surviving officer, had taken command and managed—mostly by luck, he thought—to limp to an inhabited world.
    The Tahn livies must have been hurting for a hero that week, because they made much of the lieutenant. Derzhin received a couple of hero medals and a promotion, but that did not aim him toward a career in the military. A year later, after the publicity had been forgotten, Derzhin quietly bought his way out of the service. His medals got him a lower-management job in one of Pastour's corporations.
    Dezhin was promoted rapidly as he showed a rare talent for the proper utilization of personnel and available resources. Pastour once said that Derzhin could be put on an asteroid with six anthropoids and two hammers and, within a year, would have a prototype ship in the sky and three variant models on the production line.
    Derzhin maintained his commission in the inactive reserve for the social clout it gave him in the business community. He was not, of course, antimilitary. He was a Tahn. He never questioned his race's moral rectitude or the lightness of the war.
    But he would rather not have been brought back into the military by the general call-up at its beginning. Nor was Pastour happy to lose his talents.
    When Pastour realized that a very valuable, highly trained resource—the Imperial prisoners—was being wasted through high-principled flummery and saw a proper utilization for that resource, he immediately set out to get Derzhin to run the project.
    He recognized that no executive, no matter how qualified, could instantly become a warden, and so he