gotta talk to Darmczek first; try to square it with him. He deserves that. I’ll find a way to get him alone, so don’t say anything until I do.”
Roger coughed for a while, one of those bad fits that lasted several minutes. The pain in Charlie’s leg began to intensify and he drifted off into a troubled sleep, but the clang of a docking boom jerked him awake as it echoed through the hull of the ship. From the grunts and groans and intensified frequency of scratching going on about him, Charlie knew his comrades were waking.
Charlie happened to be looking in the direction of the cargo hatch when it cycled open, flooding the hold with a white, incandescent glare. After twenty odd days of pitch darkness it blinded him painfully, and he closed his eyes, covering them with one hand. But in that one instant the glare had etched an image in his memory of several figures standing silhouetted in the open cargo bay. He recalled the image, studied it for a moment against the back of his eyelids: half a dozen people. Oddly enough, one of them was apparently wearing the flowing robes of a churchman.
In that first instant after the cargo hatch had opened, the steaming, sweltering air of the hold had flowed around their visitors and he could hear them as they gasped and choked on the stench of urine, feces, unwashed bodies, and death. For Charlie and the other prisoners, though, stench had become a rather academic concept.
They switched on the lights in the hold, filling the entire space with that bright, incandescent glare, forcing all of the prisoners to shield their eyes and cower. Charlie heard their visitors talking among themselves in muffled and distant voices. He squinted through his fingers and tried to catch a glimpse of what they were doing.
To Charlie’s surprise one of them appeared to be a woman. She wore spacer’s coveralls, but there was no mistaking the small waist and curves, and she wore her hair much longer than most men—probably some Syndonese bitch-princess come to gloat over the enemy prisoners.
The whole scene took on a surreal air, the half-dozen figures wandering among the seated and chained prisoners, tendrils of steam rising from the bodies on the chain as they picked their way carefully through the men, their hands cupped over their noses. Charlie looked at Roger, who was also squinting through his fingers. Charlie’s image of tangled, matted, lice-infested hair and beard had been quite correct. “Do I look as bad as you?” Charlie asked.
Roger looked his way and grinned. “Worse. At least I’m usually kind of cute. In any case, the fleas like me.”
He would have smiled, but the pain in Charlie’s leg blossomed into a throbbing, fiery burn. He gritted his teeth and forced his hands away from the open, weeping wound. Seeing it for the first time in days, the sight was almost enough to sap any hope from him. The cycle was beginning again, and soon he’d lose all touch with reality.
Charlie looked back at the silhouettes of their guests. One was definitely a woman—he hadn’t seen a woman in five years—and another definitely a churchman. That was odd, because the Syndonese didn’t embrace the church. And there was something about the churchman too, something familiar, as if he was part of a distant and long ago dream.
“My god, Roacka,” the churchman said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the worst we’ve seen.”
Roacka! Charlie knew that name, and the voice that called it, and he knew then that he was hallucinating, that the delirium had begun again.
“Ya, it’s the worst, churchman, but then every batch is worse than the last.” That voice had the timbre of a crusher turning rock into gravel. Charlie wanted to weep with fear and anger. Roacka, and Paul, such a cruel hallucination.
“Duke Rierma,” the Paul hallucination said—Charlie knew that name too. “Look at this. I can’t believe they’d be so inhumane.”
Charlie removed his hand from his eyes and struggled to see the three men whose voices he knew so well, voices he had thought never to hear again. But his eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the light and all they did was tear and weep. He squinted, blinked frantically, and watched their silhouettes approach as they wove among the prisoners. The Roacka hallucination squatted down to examine one of the bloated corpses on the chain. The churchman squatted down next to him. “This one’s gone,” Roacka said.