Revenge of the Damned (Sten #5). Allan Cole
was about to inquire further, but the officer in charge of the column ordered them forward again, and for the first time he looked up the cobbled narrow street.
His guts clamped shut.
At the top of the rise was a huge stone building. It sat atop the hill like a great gray monster, its towering walls reaching upward, capped by a ruined octagonal pinnacle that still reached some 200 meters toward the overcast sky.
Alex, too, was staring.
“Lad,” he managed. “Ah dinnae think’t th’ Tahn are takin’ us to church. Tha’ be’t our new home!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
KOLDYEZE CATHEDRAL HAD had not been constructed by the Tahn. Their only religion was a vague sort of belief, unworshiped, in racial identity and racial destiny.
Koldyeze had been the Vatican for the first settlers on Heath, monotheistic, agrarian communards. They had spent nearly two centuries building their church atop the highest hill in their tiny capital.
Those settlers stood less than no chance when the first Tahn, then more roving barbarians than the self-declared culture they later became, smashed down on them. They were forcibly absorbed by the Tahn, their language forbidden to be spoken, written, or taught, their dress ridiculed, and their religion driven underground and finally out of existence.
The Tahn might not have been religious, but they were superstitious. No one quite knew what to do with the looming cathedral, and so it was surrounded with barbed fencing and posted for hundreds of years. Seventy-five years before, an out-of-control tacship had smashed off the spire’s crown, and storms had battered the ruins.
But Koldyeze Cathedral was still a mighty work of man.
It was cruciform in design, stretching along its longer axis nearly two kilometers and along the shorter axis one kilometer. The center of the cross was the sanctuary and, above it, the remains of the bell tower. The shorter arms of the cross were roofed, but the longer arms held courtyards in their centers.
Koldyeze had been built as a self-sufficient religious community, even though the churchmen were not at all withdrawn from their society. When the Tahn had ordered Koldyeze abandoned, the pacifistic communards had systematically closed it down, sealing passageways and chambers as they went.
To the Tahn, Koldyeze seemed ideally suited to become a prison. Activating it required no drain on scarce building materials. The power drain from Heath’s grid should be minimal. The assigned prisoners would provide the work crews to make the complex livable.
The northernmost short arm, where the main entrance to Koldyeze had been located, was sealed off from the other wings, and the chambers around its courtyard were set up as guard and administration quarters. The passage from the guard courtyard into the center sanctuary was set with detectors and triple gates.
Four rows of fencing with mines and detectors between each row surrounded Koldyeze.
Then, even though the security precautions were not complete, Koldyeze was ready for prisoners. The outer perimeter, after all, was sealed—and none of the Imperials could fly. Further antiescape measures would be added as time went by.
The Tahn believed that Koldyeze was escape proof.
The Imperial prisoners straggling through the thick stone and steel gates looked about them and believed that somehow, somewhere, a clever being could manage to find freedom.
And there was no reason at all why it could not be one of them.
CHAPTER NINE
INSIDE THE COURTYARD, the Imperial prisoners were shouted and pummeled into a formation. Most interesting, Sten thought, as he analyzed the guards.
They looked much as he had expected and experienced in his previous camp: over muscled bullyboys, semicrippled ex-combatants, and soldiers too old or too young to be assigned to the front.
Their obscenities and threats were also the same.
But none of them carried whips. They were armed with truncheons or stun rods—which seemed mere patty aw weapons to the thoroughly brutalized prisoners. No projectile weapons were being waved about. And no one had been slammed to the ground with a rifle butt, which was the standard Tahn request for attention.
The main shouter wore the rank tabs of a police major. He was a hulk of a man whose broad leather belt was losing its battle with his paunch. As he roared orders, one hand kept creeping toward his holstered pistol, then was forced away. The man’s face was amazingly scarred.
“Tha’ be’t ae screw,” Alex whispered, lips motionless, “thae hae plac’d second in a wee brawl wi’ ae bear.”
Eventually the formation looked adequate, and Colonel Virunga limped to his place at its front. That had been one of the few cheery notes of the long crawl through space on the prison ship: Virunga was senior Imperial officer and would therefore be in command of the prisoners in the new camp.
Virunga eyed his command and started to bring them to attention. Then he caught 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 the 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
POLICE 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.
Derzhin