Free Fleet of the Damned by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Page B

among themselves and waved the gravcar through.

    Mahoney came awake to blinding sunlight piercing the barred windows of his room, and loud, barked shouts. His head was thumping from last night's excess—he hadn't been able to get away from bending elbows with Frehda for hours.
    There were more shouts. They had a peculiar quality to them. Like commands? Giving an automatic snort that burned his delicate nose membranes, Mahoney got out of his cot and started dressing. Let us see, Ian, what we can see.
    Mahoney blinked out of Frehda's portion of the barracks. And the first thing he noted surprised even him.
    Several men were putting twenty or more teenage Tahn through what seemed to be a very militarylike obstacle course. Ho, ho, Mahoney, me lad. Ho, clotting ho. He wandered over by one of the men and watched the kids go at it. Whenever any of them slowed or got tangled in an obstacle, there were immediate shouts of derision from the adults.
    "Whatcha got here, friend?"
    The man looked at him. "Oh, you the salesman guy staying with Frehda, right?"
    Mahoney snorted an affirmative.
    "To answer your question, mister, we're just givin' the kids a little physical training. Whittle off some of the baby fat."
    Riiight, Mahoney thought.
    "Good idea," Mahoney said. "Kids these days are lazy little devils. Gotta keep the boot up."
    He looked over at a coiled barbed-wire fence that a large farm boy was vaulting over.
    "What's that contraption?" he asked.
    "Oh, that's a hedgehog. About the same size as all the fencing around here."
    Mahoney had to grab himself by the throat to keep from reacting in some obvious way. So, you call it a hedgehog, do you, mate? Mahoney knew that the man standing next to him was no poor Tahn farmhand. He was a professional soldier sent out by the Tahn military to train young meat for the slaughter to come.
    "Must be hell on the britches," Mahoney joked, rubbing an imaginary sore spot on his behind.
    The man thought this was pretty funny. "Least you can sew up pants," he said.
    Mahoney spent the next two days lazily touring the farm—which was well off even by Imperial settler standards—making casual talk and casual friends and wolfing down the enormous meals the communal farm kitchen shoveled out.
    Except for that first obvious soldier he had met and possibly one or two others, everyone seemed to be exactly as he appeared. What he had here were several hundred hardworking Tahn farmers who had gotten tired of the poverty imposed on them by the Imperial majority. So they had pooled their talent and funds to make a life of it.
    From some of the stories he heard over the table, their success had not set well with the local gentry and rich Imperial farmers. There had been many attacks, some of them quite nasty.
    Mahoney could understand why the farmers had fallen so easily for the infiltrating soldier boys. Now they could protect themselves. Also, from their comments, Mahoney realized that they saw this as only a temporary solution. Sooner or later, unless events intervened, the commune would fall. Mahoney got the idea that the Tahn soldiers were promising an eventual rescue by their empire system. Tahn warships would someday come screaming in over the horizon, and the settlers would all rise up in support of their genetic friends of the cradle.
    Mahoney knew from experience that in reality all those kids and their fathers and mothers would be used as a bloody shield for the pros.
    Hadn't he done it himself back in his Mantis Section days?
    The farmers had given him free rein. He was allowed to go anywhere he wanted—except one place. Every time he had come near it, he had been edged away. About half a klick from the pig crèches was a large, fairly modern—for the Fringe Worlds—grain silo. It was prefab, but still, it was an expensive thing to import and then to build.
    At first Mahoney expressed interest in it, just to keep up his role. Actually he didn't give a clot.
    "Oh, that," his guide had said. "Just