The sticks pounded rhythmically in the steaming sludge. Jasyn blinked sweat from her eyes. If she stopped, the man with the wand would trigger her collar again. She’d given up fighting it after the first dozen shocks. Each time the pain was greater, her reaction faster. Another few times and she didn’t know if she could survive. A drop of sweat fell in her eye, burning so bad she couldn’t see. She swiped at her eye, keeping up the pounding beat of the heavy stick with one hand.
She worked in a large clearing with several dozen other prisoners and only a dozen guards. Their white tunics stood out against the green jungle, making them easy to count. Each of them held one of the wands. They stood around the edge of the clearing, in the shade, and watched. Distance didn’t seem to matter with the collars. They merely pointed the wand at the unfortunate prisoner, so far only Jasyn, and the prisoner felt the choking pain. The other prisoners warily avoided attracting the guards notice.
The prisoners proved very interesting. Most of them wore shipsuits. Those who didn’t wore large white tunics like the guards except ripped and stained. They ranged in age from one man who was barely out of his teens to a woman so old and stooped she could have easily been a hundred and fifty. Their clothes were worn, evidence of hard living for years. Those who still had boots were lucky, though most of the boots were worn through. She saw ship patches from every type of ship. There were more than a few Patrol uniforms, silver for regular Patrol, tan for Planetary Survey, even one faded pale blue uniform from Exploration. She saw a handful of black Enforcer uniforms when other prisoners delivered new plants to them, carried in awkward bundles. Less than half of the people she saw wore traders’ shipsuits.
The golden men whistled, signal for a break from the pounding. She stepped back, wiping her arm over her face. The cauldrons were wrestled free of the fire pits and trundled on crude carts to a wide opening in a squat metal contraption. It was a featureless blob more than twenty feet on a side and about six high. The cauldrons were emptied into the gaping mouth and put back on the fire pits. The mouth closed and the contraption grumbled.
The guards shouted. The fire tenders raced to gather wood and restoke the pits.
The guards shouted again. Bundles of plants were brought over and pushed into the cauldrons. Jasyn leaned on her stick, too tired to do more than watch. The woman working with her jammed the cauldron full and added water, one heavy bucket at a time.
“Start pounding,” she whispered to Jasyn, her lips barely moving. “Unless you like being shocked.”
Jasyn pushed the stick into the cauldron. She noticed that the others did the same. One person per cauldron pounded the plants with the stick, another kept the water levels right, while a third fed the fire. None of them talked.
“Why are we doing this?” Jasyn whispered.
“Don’t talk,” the woman whispered. “Later.” She hurried to fetch more water.
Jasyn kept pounding. The stuff in the cauldron went from stiff stalks to mushy stalks to thick paste. She pounded the sludge though her arms felt like they were going to fall off. The heat built in the clearing. Jasyn kept pounding, a mindless numbing rhythm. Her arms ached, her feet ached, her whole body ached. Sweat dripped into her eyes. The guards watched her, wands held loosely at their sides.
The orangish light of the sun crept past the clearing and up the far wall of the canyon. The guards came alert and shouted at them to stop. They dumped the cauldrons into the contraption. The woman working with Jasyn pulled her away from the fire pits and the heat. The guards rounded up the prisoners and herded them around the contraption. They were each handed a pale colored brick. The line moved past the giant contraption, trudging into the jungle.
Jasyn sniffed her brick. It didn’t smell of anything much. The woman walking next to her nibbled hers. Jasyn tried a corner. It was crumbly, pasty, and bland. Her belly rumbled, telling her it had been much too long since her last meal. She ate the brick, one thick bite at a time.
The silent line of prisoners marched along a beaten path.
“Better with water,” the woman whispered. She had half her brick still in her hand.
Jasyn tried to swallow and had to agree. The brick wasn’t dry, but the heat had been intense and they had not been given anything to drink.
They were taken to a wall of thick bushes. Thorns grew from each branch and twig. The guards pulled a section free, then herded the prisoners inside. They shoved the bush in place, shutting the prisoners in a wide clearing, maybe thirty feet across. A sluggish stream crawled along one side. The sunlight overhead faded.
The woman pulled Jasyn to one side. “We can talk now, as long as we’re quiet about it. Upstream end of the water is for drinking. If you need to go, use the downstream end.” She pointed.
Someone had rigged a ragged blanket over the end of the stream. That was the only privacy inside the clearing. Jasyn sank down on the ground.
“I’m too tired,” she said.
The woman shrugged before crossing to the stream to drink. Jasyn watched her dip her brick into the stream. The woman nodded to several others as she came back. She wore a faded gray shipsuit without markings or insignia. Her hair was dark where it wasn’t streaked with gray. She wore it pulled back, tied off with what looked like a strip of cloth from her shipsuit. She saw Jasyn watching and gave her a half smile, a quirk of her mouth that had little humor in it.
“Welcome to hell,” she said as she sat by Jasyn.
“Is that what they call it here?” Jasyn rubbed her aching arms.
“Close enough, those who still talk anyway.” The woman pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “We saw your ship last night. Some of us keep hoping it’s a rescue.” She broke off a piece of the food brick, nibbling it.
“How long have you been here?” Jasyn asked.
“What’s the date?”
Jasyn told her.
The woman shook her head. “Eight years and a bit.”
“You’ve been here over eight years?”
“Some have been here much longer.”
Jasyn gave in to the despair she had held back. If they’d been here years, what hope did she have of ever getting free?
“What’s your name?” the woman asked. “What ship?”
“Jasyn, from the Phoenix Rising.”
“Never heard of it.” She held out one thin hand to Jasyn. “Roz, originally an engineer for the Nueva.”
“Never heard of it,” Jasyn said and took the woman’s hand.
“Trading ship for Hebrides Trading,” Roz said. “We started out with a crew of twenty. I haven’t seen most of them for a couple of years now. At least that long, it’s hard to tell when all the days are the same. What about your ship?”
“There were three of us. Very small independent trader.”
“What brought you on the Kumadai run?”
“Taking medical supplies from Toko to Parrus.”
“Ah,” Roz said. “With a big bonus to get you to even consider it. You haven’t traded in this sector before, have you?”
Jasyn shook her head. “I plotted the course. It looked safe enough.”
“And probably would have been if you’d ignored the distress beacon. We fell for the same trick.”
“So what is this place?”
Roz shrugged. “Hey, Taffer,” she called softly. “Come explain to the newcomer what this place is.”
A thin man, the one in Exploration blue, came over and settled next to them. Some of the people in the clearing followed him. Half of the people in the clearing ignored them, curling up on the bare ground to sleep or just staring at nothing.
“Taffer Jeffs,” the man said, introducing himself to Jasyn. “Off the Exploration ship Deep Water.”
“Jasyn Pai, Phoenix Rising,” she repeated.
Others introduced themselves, stating names and ship names. She was surprised by the number of different ships they represented.
“Tell her your theories, Taffer,” Roz said. “He studied linguistics and culture, though I’m still not sure why the Patrol sent his ship out this way.”
“We were on our way somewhere else,” Taffer said. “Shortcut through the Kumadai run saved us at least a month of travel. What year did you say it was?”
Jasyn told him. There was a collective sigh from the group.
“That long,” Taffer said. “I guess the grant money for Dadilan went somewhere else.”
Jasyn twitched in surprise.
“You know of the place?” Taffer said. “It’s not restricted anymore? I didn’t think they’d open it up for trade that fast.”
“It’s not open,” Jasyn said. “I had a friend who spent some time there.”
“Tell her your theories about this place,” Roz prompted.
Taffer settled back. Overhead the last of the sunset was drowned out by a purplish glow.
“I’m just guessing,” he started. “From what I’ve seen, which isn’t much, this was a colony that went wrong. I haven’t quite figured out how the collars fit in, or some of their other technology.”
He droned on, lecturing. He brought up studies that had been done elsewhere and quoted scientific papers of twenty years ago. Jasyn found herself falling asleep long before he finished.
She dreamed twisted dreams that night. Taffer lectured her while the golden men watched, their wands held ready. The words Taffer said wouldn’t make sense. The golden men raised the wands, one told her she had to understand. She saw Clark beyond them. She lunged for him, hands held her back. And Clark was gone, the dream dissolved into fragments. She woke chilled and aching on the bare ground. The sky overhead was a dull purple. She rolled over and saw Roz watching her.
“Bad dream?” Roz asked. “We all have them. Who’s Clark?”
“My husband.” The word was still new to her, she suppressed a shiver of longing. She wanted Clark here, wanted to know he was still safe. She missed him fiercely. She blinked back sudden hot tears.
“He’s here?” Roz patted her arm.
“They took him away,” Jasyn said, her voice small and full of pain. She wanted to take back the last weeks. She wanted the last day with Clark to have been better. She regretted her stupid, pointless anger.
“I was supposed to be on my last trip,” Roz whispered. “Justen was going to meet me on Parrus. We had the arrangements all made. I wonder what he did when I didn’t come.” She wiped her face with her hand. “I haven’t told anyone that before.”
The camp slowly woke. The purple glow fizzed as it blanked out.
Roz sniffed and wiped her nose. “If you want any privacy at all, you’d better move.” She walked quickly across the clearing to the stream.
Jasyn stood. Her muscles protested each movement. She hobbled to the stream. The water had leaves and twigs floating in it. She was thirsty enough that she made herself ignore them. She drank and splashed water over her face then stood in line to use the curtained part of the stream.
The golden men pulled back the thorny bushes. The prisoners shuffled into line, no one talked. The golden men marched them to the clearing with the pots.
Jasyn bit back a groan as she lifted the heavy pounding stick. Roz was with her at the cauldron. Taffer fed the fire underneath. None of them tried to whisper.
The morning crawled past. Jasyn went from pain to agony to a stupor that blocked out everything except the constant thump of her stick hitting the sludge in the cauldron. She only came out of her daze when Roz grabbed her arm. It was time to dump the cauldrons. She stepped back, her fingers so cramped on the pounding stick that she wasn’t sure she could ever let go of it.
They lined up and were issued a brick of food and given a short few minutes to eat it. The whole process with the pots and plants was repeated. The day wore on in an agony of constant pounding. By the time the golden men called a halt for the day, Jasyn was so tired she could barely move. Her muscles burned with pain. She shuffled into line and got her brick of food. They were driven back to the thorny barricade and shut in for the night.
Jasyn stumbled, more tired than she could ever remember. She forced herself to drink and wash her face in the sluggish stream. She waited her turn behind the blanket, then settled next to Roz.
“I don’t want to ever move again."
“You’ll get used to it,” Roz said. “The first few weeks are the hardest.”
“I don’t want to get used to it. I want to go home.” I want Clark, she added to herself. And Dace. And her ship. “Hasn’t anyone ever tried to escape?”
“Quite often. There were three of them just a few months ago. They were caught and staked out in the main clearing. They made us walk extra miles every day just to see them. It took a week for them to die.”
“But if we all—”
“Do you think it hasn’t been tried? At night, they aren’t there, yes. There’s only a thick wall of thorns. But where would you go? The force shield keeps us in the canyon until morning. And even if you did get loose and managed to keep away from them until the shield opened, where would you go then? The ships can’t lift. We landed at evening. We tried to take off and burned out the main core. It’s hopeless. All we can do is wait.”
“I’m not spending my life here,” Jasyn said.
“The rest of us felt the same way, at first. You’ll either adapt or you’ll die.”
“Roz, leave her alone,” Taffer said, joining them. “She’s right. We have to keep trying.”
“And keep dying.”
“The three they staked out were part of her crew,” Taffer said to Jasyn. “We’ve been trying to find a way to communicate with the other groups. Downstream a ways is where they grow the plants. I’ve been trying to send messages to them by floating them in the stream.” He settled on the ground. “As far as I can tell, we now outnumber them about ten to one. There have been more ships the last few years than ever before. So our biggest problem is finding a way to deactivate the collars. Without them, we could overpower the guards and steal the wands.”
“You still have to find a way to lift off,” Jasyn said. “Our preliminary scans showed some kind of tractor beam that kept us pinned here. The coms were all jammed, too.”
“Well, then.” Taffer picked up a stick and started marking in the dirt. Others crowded closer. Roz snorted and moved back.
“First,” Taffer said. “We find a way to remove or disable the collars. No, first we find a way to communicate with the other groups. So we can coordinate things. Then we deal with the collars. After that we have time to figure out how to shut off the beams. And then we can go home.”
“You’ve been trying for years to find a way to communicate,” Roz said. “Why should it be different now?”
“Don’t give up, Roz.” Taffer shot a glance at the handful that hadn’t joined them. They sat hunched and staring at nothing. “You either keep hoping or you become like them. Most of them die within a few months,” he added to Jasyn. He dangled his stick between his knees, looking at the scratches he’d made in the dirt. “Maybe if we could find something to write messages with, it would help.”
Jasyn reached in her pockets. She had started carrying things around, a habit of Dace’s she had picked up without meaning to. The golden men hadn’t gone through her pockets. She pulled out a handful of assorted things and spread them on the ground.
Taffer grinned. He picked up her short nail file and turned it over in his hands. “They’re getting sloppy, Roz. Look what they didn’t take.”
It wasn’t much, the nail file, a tube of lipstick, a handful of small coins, a comb, three elastics from her hair, and her pocket com unit.
Taffer picked up the com unit. “Ruttie, see what you can do with this.”
A thin grizzled man crawled over to them. Taffer handed him the com. Ruttie turned it over in his hands. He flipped it on and scanned through the frequencies. There was nothing but thick static. Ruttie popped off the back.
“He doesn’t talk much anymore, but he can do anything with equipment,” Taffer said to Jasyn. He opened the tube of lipstick and frowned. “Linna, do you still have that bark?”
A blond woman nodded and fished under a scrawny bush that somehow managed to live in the clearing. She pulled out a roll of rough bark.
“It’s waterproof,” Jasyn said. Taffer rewarded her with a wide smile.
Jasyn forgot how tired she was. Within a few minutes, Taffer had anyone willing to help busy with something. Several worked on peeling apart the bark into thin sheets. The woman, Linna, wrote careful messages on the sheets with the lipstick. Several others found thicker sheets and carvied messages in them with Jasyn’s nail file. Ruttie had the com unit dismantled and spread over the ground. Taffer handed off the coins and two of the elastics to another group. Jasyn kept the last elastic and her comb. Her hair was a mess.
“The light will be gone soon,” Roz said.
Jasyn moved closer to the other woman. She held up her comb. “How long has it been since you’ve actually had one to use?”
Roz looked away.
“Tell me about your crew.” Jasyn waited until Roz started talking, then quietly combed the other woman’s hair. Any escape would have to include everyone, Jasyn decided. Nobody should have to live as a slave.