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 u