Slavemakers by Joseph Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

handle, he swung open the rusty metal hatch. Hot air flooded out, hitting Jason like a slap. He took an involuntary step back, and noticed—as he had before—that the ridden slave did as well. Whatever was going on behind that expressionless face, and regardless of its great tolerance for pain, it did still have nerve endings.
    Just as the rider that had retreated out of the range of the wave of heat had nerve endings. It could definitely feel pain even if pain didn’t stop it.
    And even if its death didn’t make a bit of difference to the hive.
    The thick bed of coals popped and roared at the influx of oxygen. With a familiar motion, Jason slung the monkey’s body onto the bed. The smells of burning hair and cooking meat immediately wafted out on the waves of heat. Flames rose and wreathed around the corpse, which twitched in the pyre as its muscles and tendons shriveled.
    Stepping aside, Jason waited while the slave tossed its own burden onto the flames. Then, as quickly as he could, he closed the oven door and stepped away.
    Turning his head, he looked out over the fort’s stone ramparts, as he always did when he was up here. Looking for just the slightest possibility that his world wasn’t the only world that existed. Hoping to see something—just a sign—that his future, the planet’s future, had more than one inevitable course to run.
    Hoping for rescue. A squadron of Navy ships coming up the channel, shining steel blue in the afternoon sunlight, the roar of their engines splitting the air and sending the clouds of thieves spinning upward in a whirlwind of fear. An invading force of soldiers in full hazmat gear, safe from thief stingers and jaws, bearing weapons that would set the air aflame with gouts of liquid fire and turn the whirlwind into ash. And machine guns to tear apart the ridden slaves and the born ones where they stood, as they ran.
    Or maybe drones. Jason remembered all the controversy over drones, over remote warfare, in those last years before the world ended. Now he dreamed of looking up to see a streak of light through the sky, like a shooting star in daylight but getting closer and larger with every passing instant. Then the shooting star, the missile, would slam into the fort, the impact and explosion reducing it and all it contained to rubble.
    The born and ridden slaves would have no chance to take more than a single step. And the thieves would be unable to rise even into a whirlwind before being incinerated.
    And if the humans who lived here, the still-human slaves, died in the assault as well, that would be all right. That would be fine. The kind of collateral damage not even worth thinking about.
    And Jason? As the missile approached, Jason would do nothing more than throw his arms wide and wait for oblivion. Wait for it, and welcome it.
    But when he scanned his surroundings, he saw only the same things he always saw: the corn and taro and soy fields and palm-oil plantations that fed the slaves, human and animal alike. And, as usual, Chloe supervising a group of born slaves working the fields.
    Chloe, who, like Jason, had stayed human by proving herself useful from the very beginning. By planting the fields in the first place, by showing she knew how to cook for a crowd.
    Chloe, with her long, lanky form—so skinny now—darkly tanned face and limbs, and mass of blond hair tied back in a ragged ponytail, was the reason Jason was still here. The reason, many times over, that he was still alive.
    Chloe, his blessing and his curse.
    As he was hers.
    *   *   *
    ON MOST DAYS, Jason and Chloe’s paths barely crossed until night had fallen and the slaves were all heading to the sleeping quarters. These were chambers buried deep within the stone walls, separate from but not much different than the cells where the animals were kept—rectangular, stone-walled rooms, their dirt floors covered with dirty straw, a single small glassless