Outcasts Read Online Free PDF Page B

dig beneath the fence again, but she still watched the
hovercraft when it arrived.
    By the time she reached her place of concealment on the bank
above the fence, the hovercraft had already climbed the ramp and settled. The
gate was locked behind it. Kylis watched the new prisoners being unloaded. The
cargo bay door swung Open. The people staggered out on deck and down the
gangway, disoriented by the long journey in heat and darkness. One of the
prisoners stumbled and fell to his knees, retching.
    Kylis remembered how she had felt after so many hours in the
pitch-dark hold. Even talking was impossible, for the engines were on the other
side of the hold’s interior bulkhead and the fans were immediately below.
She was too keyed up to go into a trance, and a trance would be dangerous while
she was crowded in with so many people.
    The noise was what Kylis remembered most about coming to
Screwtop — incessant, penetrating noise, the high whine of the engines
and the roar of the fans. She had been half deaf for days afterward. The
compartment was small. Despite the heat the prisoners could not avoid sitting
and leaning against each other, and as soon as the engines started the
temperature began to rise. By the time the hovercraft reached the prison, the
hold was thick with the stench of human misery. Kylis hardly noticed when the
craft’s sickening swaying ceased. When the hatch opened and red light
spilled in, faintly dissipating the blackness, Kylis looked up with all the
others, and, like all the others, blinked like a frightened animal.
    The guards had no sympathy for cramped muscles or nausea.
Their shouted commands faded like faraway echoes through Kylis’ abused
hearing. She pushed herself up, using the wall as support. Her legs and feet
were asleep. They began regaining sensation, and she felt as if she were
walking on tiny knives. She hobbled out, but at the bottom of the gangway she,
too, had stumbled. A guard’s curse and the prod of his club brought her
to her feet in a fury, fists clenched, but she quelled her violent temper
instantly. The guard watched with a smile, waiting. But Kylis had been to
Earth, where one of the few animals left outside the game preserves and zoos
was the possum. She had learned its lesson well.
    Now she crouched on the bank and watched the new prisoners
realize, as she had, that the end of the trip did not end the terrible heat.
Screwtop was almost on the equator of Redsun, and the heat and humidity never
lessened. Even the rain was lukewarm.
    The guards prodded the captives into a compact group and
turned hoses on them, spraying off filth and sweat. Afterward the new people
plodded through the mud to the processing dome. Kylis watched each one pass
through the doorway. She had never defined what she looked for when she watched
the new arrivals, but whatever it was, she did not find it today. Even more of
them were terribly young, and they all had the look of hopelessness that would
make them nothing more than fresh meat, new bodies for the work to use up.
Screwtop would grind them down and throw them away. They would die of disease
or exhaustion or carelessness. Kylis did not see in one of them the spark of
defiance that might get them through their sentences intact in body or spirit.
But sometimes the spark only came out later, exposed by the real adversity of
the work.
    The hatch swung shut and the hovercraft’s engines
roared to full power. No one at all had been taken on board for release on
North Continent.
    The boat quivered on its skirts and floated back down the
ramp, through the entrance, onto the glassy gray surface of the water. The gate
sparked shut. Kylis was vaguely disappointed, for the landing was no different
from any she had seen since she was brought to Screwtop herself. There was no
way to get on board the boat. The familiar admission still annoyed her. For a
spaceport rat, admitting defeat to the safeguards of an earthbound vehicle was
humiliating. She could not