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Page 12.
 Amela tried to make herself small. There were, after all, ten thousand women arrayed in long files by barracks and labor unit. Of those, nearly 900 were capors rushing about with their pads. Sekurita officers clustered around Major Texel, and more Sekurita police manned watchtowers on the periphery. Unlike some camps, this one had only a periphery of stone markers. With thousands of square kliks of hostile snow fields all around, this aerag needed no barbed, electrified wire fences. As Major Texel liked to boast in her weekly bulletins, the outer marches of the camp were guarded by wolvines. Try and run, bitches. Make my day.
Amela had been here long enough to grasp the cryptic message on her bracelet. AF meant airfield. The number 45 must refer to a specific building along the row of warehouses (Building 45) along the south edge of the skimmer pads. Prisoners were not allowed on the flight pads under pain of instant death by shooting. Vikri must have arranged something, since she knew everyone and everything in the Aerag.
Vikri must have known that Amela's battalion would be filing past the airfield, into the frozen marshes, to raid bird nests that day, in deep corkscrew holes, high up in trees where wolvines and other scavengers including big screech-birds could not reach. The eggs would complement the prison diet, and provide a welcome boost to spirits.
As the gray battalion of 500 women and their overseers marched, Amela kept to the left. She dropped back to the second-last rank across. That would bring her closest to the long alley of dark brown walls and gates of the supply barracks.
She thought about the logistics, particularly on the airfield side opposite the back with its marching path. Cargo coming in by air would be off-handled on the landing pads by trusties. This cargo would be carried to the warehouses for holding, until prisoner details could be dispatched to bring the many different goods to the sleeping barracks. Some of it was medicine, dropped from space by humanian contractor ships. Much of it was native-grown Manaul lumber, food, power broadcasting cells, and a thousand small parts and tools for prisoner experts to keep the camp going. Also included were vacuum sealed, dried vegetables, fruits, and farmed carcasses.
Funding came from patient and generous Old Humansh Dominion government sources, who were extorted zillions by the Kaarrk for POW maintenance. Eventually, those same human foundations would be coerced into the final humanitarian gesture of buying back their lost people. The Kaarrk only seemed to cooperate when the supply of humans was overflowing the camps, so that they could sell back the latter half, and keep the younger prisoners until the swelling ranks made them the newly old prisoners. Someone had guessed that the average incarceration could last up to ten standard years.
On the other hand, the Kaarrk coldly abandoned their own fellow lizarsh to die on human prison worlds. People said it was the difference between hot and cold bloodedness.
With the Old Humansh Dominion collapsing gradually across the star fields, the Kaarrk were dishing out fierce punishment, but the Treaty Marches seemed to be holding their own.
Amela's heart beat for fear that she would miss some sign or signal, and be condemned to spend the rest of her miserable existence trudging in this smelly place. What if Vikri had been caught? After all, the woman was frail and ancient…
But there she was, a face in a second story window. She caugh a flash of gray in a dark window above, and there was Vikri. A seemingly random gate stood partially open, and a faded blue cloth hung from its rusty iron latch. It was the same cloth as that she'd found on the leather thong this morning. And yes, there was a barracks marker—#45, in black Humansh lettering—painted on a white square above the door.
The capors took no notice as the long column trudged past the open door. Maybe people were salivating at the thought of those eggs waiting in the forest beyond camp.
Amela darted away from her file into the darkness. She heard a shout, and froze. Her heart beat in her throat. Terror blinded her, making red and black clouds float across a burning sky in her head. Had the guards following at the rear spotted her? Was it over? Was she about to die?
The shouting turned out to be laughter, as three brawny capor women in blue-gray padding marched past at the end of the column. Busy sharing a racy joke, they had not noticed the flash as a figure separated from the long train and vanished into a dark, empty hangar that smelled of exotic woods and foods. Amela waited with pounding heart and raspy breath until the column was gone.
In the silence, Amela felt a new excitement—she could almost taste her freedom already. Those lingering aromas inside here spoke of the south, of warmth, of oceans glittering with sunlight and free of ice packs.
Before she could call out Vikri's name, however, a steely fist grabbed her arm, and she found herself roughly shoved and kneed into darkness. Was this the end of her bid for freedom, so soon?
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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