Chapter Sixteen

A second thermite explosion rocked the wag. When the vehicle crashed back down, the wheels on Ryan's side dropped to the rims as the roasted tires blew out. Inside the passenger compartment it was pure chaos. Some of the sec men not harnessed in scrambled to regain their feet, while othersthose who had broken bones bouncing off the ceiling and walls writhed and moaned on the floor. Everything in the wag that could burnwire insulation, plastic pipe, duct tapewas burning. Dense smoke started pouring up from the floorboards between Ryan's feet. He slapped his harness's release buckle.
"Bail, goddammit, or we're all gonna fry!" the driver shouted through his plastic hood. Beside him, the gunner sat slumped, chin resting on his chest, blood pouring from his ears and pooling at the tightly cinched neck of his yellow breather bag.
There would be no return of fire.
Booting the rear doors open, four of the uninjured sec men jumped out with their weapons raised.
"Go! Go!" Nara shouted at Ryan, shoving him hard in the shoulder. She, too, had grabbed up a tri-barreled blaster.
Ryan hopped out onto the tarmac and sprinted after the sec men who were deserting the wag. Nara ran right on his heels.
The world outside was bleak, and it was still inside . Bathed in hard artificial light, a vast, tunnellike freeway easily fifty lanes wide, stretched out before him. More than half the lanes were blocked by vehicles obviously wrecked, stripped, abandoned. Other wags appeared to be undamaged except for numerous sideswipes, perhaps left by their drivers because they had run out of fuel. The wailing alarm horns had turned this high-speed obstacle course into a parking lot. The operational vehicles, those with drivers, had stopped, too, waiting for the danger to pass; evidently, there was no way to escape from it, whatever it was.
Most of the wags looked nonmilitary. They had transparent windshields and side windows, and no heavy armor plate. Behind their yellow plastic hoods, wide-eyed drivers sucked on green canisters and stared as Ryan ran between the lines of bumper-to-bumper vehicles.
The sec men paused just ahead, beside an occupied civilian wag. Ryan was closing the gap when the front windshield exploded in hard, bright light and the roof peeled back like the lid of a predark can. The shock wave sent the sec men crashing to the deck.
With bits of metal debris screaming past their ears, Ryan and Nara took cover behind a rear bumper. Then something much, much larger swooshed overhead.
Ryan cranked his head around in time to catch the glint of the freeway floodlights off a thin wire suspended in the air. In the same instant, he saw a guy in a yellow bubble and white coat leap from the wag's rear doors. Huth jumped a fraction of a second before the wire-guided rocket burrowed inside the opening.
No one else got out.
With a terrific thunderclap the wag flew apart. Its dismantled side panels clobbered the vehicles on either side. Before Ryan could blink, there were more explosions, a chain reaction of them as one after another, fuel tanks in the parked vehicles blew. Orange balls of gasoline fire blossomed, blackening the freeway's low ceiling, then dying back to envelop wag roofs and driver compartments.
Beyond the burning wreckage, Ryan got a glimpse of Hum's bobbing yellow hood as he raced in the opposite direction. It was easy to disappear among the thousands of stopped cars. Likewise, it was hard to see where the enemy fire was coming from.
Then the ear-splitting siren stopped. After a pause, it was replaced by a long, steady tone.
"That's the all clear," Nara told him. She stripped off her breathing device and discarded it.
Ryan and the sec men crouched ahead of them did the same. Even without the hood, he couldn't see where the attack had come from. "How about a blaster for me?" he said, pointing at the black grip of the spare side arm she had stuffed in her lab coat pocket.
"No, let's move," Nara said. Sec men didn't need an invitation from her. Some seventy-five feet away, they were already up and running through the maze of parked and destroyed vehicles. Ryan and Nara ran after them.
After the all clear, the operational wags didn't stay parked for long. Drivers peeled their tires to get clear of the free-fire zone. They had no intention of stopping or even slowing for pedestrians in jeopardy.
As Ryan started across a lane of freeway, Nara grabbed him by the arm, jerking him back as a monster truck roared down on them. The long trailer it towed momentarily blocked their escape route and separated them from their supposed protectors.
"Hey! Wait!" Nara yelled at the sec men as the rear of the truck swept by.
Ryan saw them running down the row of dead wags. They didn't slow; they didn't turn. The air was split by a loud boom. Backlit by blooming orange fire, the four small figures disintegrated along with a row of ruined vehicles.
With hot shrapnel pelting down all around them, Ryan turned to Nara and snarled, "Give me a fucking blaster."
The blonde put her free hand on her backup side arm, but didn't pull it from her coat pocket. It was a defensive move on her part, to keep him from grabbing it for himself. To drive home her point, she leveled the longblaster's muzzle at his chest.
"Put your weapons down," a deep voice growled from behind them. "We've got you surrounded."
Ryan dropped down and put his cheek to the pavement, looking under the chassis of the wag they were hiding behind. Past the wheels, on the other side, he could see black boots and black-armored shin guards. "You want to get your ass cooked?" the deep voice said. "I'm not going to ask you again." Nara carefully set her weapons on the concrete. "If you'd let me," Ryan told her angrily, "I would have made a fight of it."
"Then I guess we're lucky you're not the one in charge."
"Stand up," came the command, "hands in the air."
Ryan did so; Nara rose beside him. Leaning on the hoods and over the roofs of vehicles, black ski-masked figures ringed them with blasters. Ryan counted eleven. Though they wore hoods and body armor, he could tell that two of them were women by the size of their bare arms and their general builds. The armor was battle-scarred, mismatched and in some cases incomplete.
Almost at once, a long metal-armored four-by-four vehicle screeched to a stop in front of them. Like the assortment of body armor, it looked as if it had seen plenty of action. It had a wedge of thick, blast-proof glass for a front windshield and rectangular side windows. Two of the hooded men jumped forward and jerked the side doors open.
"Okay, Jurascik. You and Mr. Wonderful get into the van."
The ski-masked speaker was barrel-chested, with huge biceps and forearms. Stun, frag and flash grens dangled from the straps of his combat harness. Along with the grens was a wicked-looking, ten-inch killing dagger, which hung in a ballistic nylon clip sheath just below his shoulder, with the rubber-clad handle pointing down. He carried a beat-up tribarrel, which he used to underscore his request. "In!" he said.
Ryan got a good look at the dark eyes behind the mask. No fear there. No anger, either. They were all business.
A mercenary.
After he and Nara piled into the van, they were immediately shoved toward the middle bench seat. He slid in first, all the way to the wall, which had a window, but no door. The only doors were at the side and rear of the wag. Three of the masked mercies climbed into the seat behind them; the rest took the seats in front. The wag was moving before the side doors slammed shut.
"How come he knows your name?" Ryan asked Nara as the van rapidly picked up speed. She didn't respond.
"And what's with this Mr. Wonderful crap?" Something hard poked him in the back of the head. He half turned. It was the rainbow-discolored flash-hider of a triblaster. "Look up there," said the mercie sitting directly behind him. The hooded man used the weapon to point out a series of widely spaced, eight-by-eight-foot video screens suspended from the concrete ceiling and hanging down over the traffic lanes. Most of the screens were dark and out of service; a few were lit up in full color.
"Eat FIVES, they're Beefie-tastic!" one of them proclaimed. Under the flashing words, a man and woman, naked to the waist, ecstatically munched sandwiches in a love-tangled bed.
"We call them tell-yous," the mercie behind him said "Because they tell you what to want."
As the van zoomed past, the laughing couple on the screen pulled the sheet over their heads. The next billboard said All Good News, All the Time. Your 24-hour Joy Source. Channel 128.
"Up ahead," the mercie told him. "That's the one."
The familiar words Hope Lives filled the screen, along with an image of Ryan's face, scanned from what looked like a sec video shot in the whitecoat hallway. As they raced toward the electronic sign, the catchphrase melted away, and was replaced by another It Won't Be Long.
The mercie behind him gave him another jab in the back of the head. "No fucking lie," he said.
Ryan looked at Nara. "What won't be long?"
"Milk and honey, motherfucker," the mercie answered for her. "Milk and honey."
The driver of the van veered around a mass of wrecked vehicles and continued to cut left across a dozen lanes of traffic, toward an off-ramp on that side.
Ryan felt Nara tense up beside him as the driver exited the freeway. Until this point, she hadn't seemed very concerned about their kidnapping.
"Why are we going this way?" she asked the mercie leader.
"Relax," the man said, "everything's under control."
There were no overhead lights on the one-lane ramp, so the driver hit his high beams. Ahead of them, the ramp circled down in a broad arc. Outside his window, Ryan saw walls of concrete and concrete block, broken only by small, glassless, gun turret-like slits. A look across the van told Ryan it was the same story on the other side of the rampsheer gray walls.
They'd made six or seven complete circles when the headlights flashed on red. The walls from ground level to head height had been painted with a band of color. Then came the warning, in two-foot-high white letters, repeated at intervals along the wall Danger! You Are About to Enter a No-Response Zone. No Police. No Emergency Services. No Reentry without Authorization. Energized Lethal Security Systems.
The headlamps caught the cross-hatching of hurricane fence across the road, floor to ceiling, ahead. The driver leaned on his horn without slowing. Reacting to the sound, automatic gates retracted into the walls. The van rushed past them and continued to spiral down, tires squealing. Ryan counted eight more complete 360s. With every turn, Nara looked less and less pleased. The van stopped at the foot of the ramp. Right away, Ryan noticed how much hotter it was, and how the air was heavy and smelled of open fires and burning plastic.
The driver crept forward onto a flat roadway. He kept his high beams on. Seeping down through the haze of smoke, the light from mercury vapor lamps set in the concrete superstructure two stories overhead was yellow and weak. Likewise dimmed were the flashing messages on more of the huge billboards. The gridwork ceiling appeared to be the underside of an identical street directly above.
Ryan stared out at an endless sea of dirty faces. Dressed in rags and plastic bags, the mass of humanity overflowed the sidewalks and spilled into the wide street, which their sheer numbers had reduced to a single, winding lane. Ryan caught glimpses of still, limp forms on the ground at the forefront. Alive or dead, they were thoughtlessly trodden upon and kicked by those standingthere was simply no room to step around. Behind the encircling mob, both sides of the street were lined with concrete building fronts, and there wasn't an inch of space between them.
There were plenty of windows in the otherwise featureless, gray facades, and every window was lit by erratic strobe flashes.
The mercie tour guide saw his puzzled frown and leaned forward. "The winking lights are from the tell-yous inside," he explained. When Ryan's expression didn't change, he added, "Can't get away from them, and you can't turn them off."
The explanation was cut short by a raucous clatter outside. From the windows on either side of the street, conventional weapons fire rained on them. The hail of bullets pelted into the van's armored roof and sides.
"Welcome to Gloomtown," the mercie said over the din.
Through his window, Ryan could see ragged figures dropping from the ricochets and near misses. No one bent to help them.
As the van rolled along, the blasterfire petered out, but didn't entirely stop. Every once in a while another burst of slugs whacked into them.
"What the fuck is this place?" Ryan said to Nara.
"Hell on Earth," she replied.
"For most people, Jurascik," the leader of the mercies said as he turned around in his seat, "this is Earth."
Then he addressed Ryan's question. "We're on Thrill Bill Ransom's turf right now. Turned himself into a self-styled warlord, thanks to FIVE'S Population Control Service."
"I hate to break the news," Ryan said, "but your population doesn't look all that controlled."
"Yeah, tell me about it. PCS's approach to the problem has always been consistent. That is, scattergun and harebrained. One of their most brilliant ideas was to pass out free projectile-firing guns and ammunition to the underclasses, who were doing most of the baby making. The idea being, since the FIVE troops protecting the CEOs and upper-level managers were immune to lead poisoning, and since the CEOs and upper-level managers were separated from the masses by miles of concrete, the underclasses could only do the world a favor and kill one another.
"Ransom's just one of thousands of Consumer Rebellion vets who jumped on the PCS gun giveaway as an opportunity to set up private armies and carve out their own kingdoms. Below the red line, warlords like Thrill Bill are the only law." He gestured toward the window. "And what's out there stretches on forever."
Ryan had never seen so many people in one place. Or such uniform expressions of despair and defeat. "High-list gloomers," the merc behind him said. "Dead before their numbers come up." An explanation that explained nothing. The van's driver crept around a semitractor trailer stopped in the middle of the available road. The trailer's side and rear doors were open and mobbed by people with outstretched arms. As they passed, Ryan saw a man inside throwing out armfuls of foil-wrapped packets. Painted on the side of trailer were the words Eat FIVES Fine Foods. Beefie Cheesie. Tater Cheesie.
"Let them eat rock!" the mercie leader pronounced.
A remark that made all the hooded soldiers-for-hire laugh. When the driver turned again, heading out of the center of the street and toward the narrow entrance to another ramp, the tension bottled up inside Nara finally exploded. "This isn't the way to the safe-house!" she yelled at the mercie leader. "What the fuck are you trying to pull, Damm?"
"There's been a change in plans," Damm said as he removed his ski mask. His wiry brown hair was shaved to stubble. What had to be a laser scar wrapped around his meaty chin, like a chunk of twisted purple rope.
The other eleven mercies took their masks off, too. All of them, the women included, had buzz cuts. Their eyes had a look that Ryan had seen before, somewhere beyond exhaustion.
"You can't do this," Nara told him. "We had a deal."
"Considering how important Mr. Wonderful is, it seemed like me and my people were getting the short end of the stick. Why should Mitsuki have the only chance to bid on what's in his head? There are four other Globals who deserve an equal shot at the prize."
"How much more do you want?"
"It's not a question of more, Jurascik. It's a question of different. We don't want drugs, money or guns. We want transport."
"Armored personnel carriers?"
"No. Transport. As in, forget FIVE'S fucking fixed lottery, we want immediate passage to Shadow World. As in, today. With weapons, a lifetime supply of power packs, full battle kitsand since you're offering, we'll take a pair of APCs, too."
Nara didn't consider the request for more than a second. "I think all that's doable," she snapped back. But only if you dont call in the rest of the Globals. You cant play them one against another to get their price. And once the other four find out whats happened, you wont be able to deal with Mitsuki either. The FIVE will band together and stomp you flat. Theyll never allow just one of their conglomerates to control Ryan. Rather than give up that kind of advantage, theyd prefer to see him dead, his information destroyed and the playing field leveled for all.
The mercie leader rubbed the scar on his chin thoughtfully.
Damm, stop the van right here, Nara said. Let me contact my superiors and see what we can work out.
You can do that once we arrive at our destination. I dont want any surprises from the Mitsuki Tactical Unit.
As the van closed on the ramp entrance, the crowds blocking its path scattered, revealing those who were beyond scattering. Piles of bodies lay on the ground, both around the entrance and some distance down the ramp where they had been tossed.
The driver revved his engine and shifted into four-wheel to plow through the mounds of obstacles. Beyond the mounds there were no more people, alive or dead, just a long gray, sloping tunnel.
After a few minutes of travel, more red-painted walls appeared in the high beams. This time they were decorated with black and white skulls and crossbones. No security gate blocked their way, just a big sign hanging from the ceiling that warned Slime Zone 100 Yards.
"You can't take us below condensation level!" Nara protested. "We don't have biohazard suits."
"Relax, Jurascik," Damm said. "We've got an environment already prepared and waiting. As long as we arrive there in under seven minutes, no one will die."
"This is insane."
"Yeah, that's what I'm counting on."
Ahead, a dense white fog filled the tunnel. The driver slowed to a crawl. As he entered the cloud, visibility dropped to zero and the air became so heavy it was difficult for Ryan to breathe. When they emerged on the other side of the fog, the heat and humidity jumped off the scale. As sweat squirted from Ryan's face, he choked on the overwhelming smell of ammonia.
The van's headlamps lit up the end of the ramp below red walls, gray floor and ceiling turning into a rectangle of pitch-black. As they rolled beyond the foot of the ramp, into a gallery of tremendous width, if not height, the tires made wet, squishing sounds.
The glistening heaps of green-black covered everything.
Bulging masses of it clung to the walls; it hung in colossal drapes from the roof, and between the green on the ground, and the green swaying from the ceiling, airspace was at a premium.
"What is that shit?" Ryan asked.
"It's the only fellow traveler on the planet that we haven't found a way to kill," Damm said.
"It's cyanobacteria, genetically tailored to function in low levels of light," Nara told Ryan. "We've relied on it for food production for a decade, since our other forms of agriculture collapsed. Three years ago, the bacteria got out of control. After it escaped from the processing plants, it spread through all the megacities and we've had to abandon huge areas to it."
"People, too," Damm said. "Sealed them off behind concrete walls trying to stop the spread. Didn't do any good, though. The stuff eventually eats right through concrete. The only thing that kept it from taking over Gloomtown and the CEO level was the condensation layer we passed through back there. Above that, the climate's not optimum for agrobacteria."
Ryan watched a world of green slide by. The van slushed and wallowed through drifts that were four-foot-deep in places. There were no other signs of life. "Pretty deadly, huh?" he said.
"Unprotected out there," Damm said, "you would grow a nice, furry green coat in about half an hour. You would vanish from sight shortly thereafter. Of course you wouldn't notice it because you'd already be long dead. We can breathe the concentrated spores for only a few minutes before lung and heart damage begins. After that, the bacterial reproduction cycle really kicks off. It's pretty hard to suck air with twenty pounds of slime packing each lung."
"After that siren alarm started, a sec man in the first wag coughed his lungs up all over me," Ryan said. "He didn't have anything green in him that I could see."
"Different bug," Damm said. "That was a carniphage. It was developed from a naturally occurring beastie that normally lives in the deep ocean offshore. The species first started showing up in our industrialized salt marshes when I was a kid. Turns out, the carniphage can be either a plant or an animal, depending on the living conditions it finds. It really liked the nitrite pollution from our industrial outflow. Once it was settled in nicely along our coastal shorelines, it started hatching out on a daily basis. And when it hatched out, it killed and ate plants, fish, birds, land animals, everything it came in contact with.
"For a long time, the problem was confined to the Eastern Seaboard. Then the bright boys at PCS decided to make a human population control weapon out of it. They tinkered around with its genetics, and ended up spreading it even further afield. Camiphages are everywhere now. They can't be controlled, so we have to adapt to them."
"And the sirens?" Ryan asked him.
"Only good thing PCS did was to stumble on a way to detect the start of their reproduction cycle. That alert siren goes off whenever cell concentrations reach critical mass. Which is pretty much like clockwork twice a dayit's keyed to the tidal cycle. When the siren sounds, everyone heads for pressurized shelters. Of course, PCS made sure there is never enough shelter space to go around. If you don't get inside, you die. The agrobacteria down here on Slime Level just drown you with their wet weight, but if you suck in a lungful of carniphages, they eat you from the inside out. Takes about a minute to kill you. Then they really get to work. They are busy little fuckers."
Ryan looked at the backs of his hands, which were dotted with tiny red spots.
"That's nothing," Damm assured him. "When they get on the skin surface in low concentrations they can cause rashes and boils, and in some cases, even temporary blindness. All of which goes away in a few hours. Carniphages are really only deadly during the reproductive stage of their life cycle, when there's lots and lots of them. They hatch out, eat, multiply and either die or go dormant, all on their own timetable. The whole thing lasts half an hour, from start to finish."
"I saw the guys in black armor use something like that in Deathlands, only it ate flesh from the outside in."
"You must mean the milweapon. Those aren't airborne bacteria. They're held in supersaturated concentrations in a foam suspension."
The van's high beams caught the outline of something ahead that wasn't all green.
Ryan recognized the rear of a semitrailer, parked in the middle of nowhere. Its silver sides were striped with slimy, wet fronds.
"You've got to be kidding!" Nara exclaimed. "That's not going to protect us!"
"It's all been taken care of," Damm said. When the driver sounded his horn, the rear double doors of the trailer swung open, revealing a brightly lit ulterior. The two men waiting inside quickly lowered a metal ramp. The driver turned and reversed the van up and into the trailer.
Ryan and Nara climbed out of the van along with everyone else. The driver and three others donned black plastic boots, rain suits and gauntlets before pulling the protective yellow plastic bags over their heads. Picking up laser rifles, the four of them hopped off the trailer's tailgate. Ryan got a good look outside before they shut the doors. Beyond range of the trailer's interior lights, it was blacker than the tenth level of hell out there. The long compartment was lined, floor, ceiling, walls, with an envelope of taped together sheet plastic, which was inflated by air pumps spaced along the floor. After ushering Ryan and Nara to the front of the box, the others completely covered the van with a clear plastic tarp and secured it on the floor with sandbags.
It was even hotter inside the trailer. Through the clear plastic, it looked like the walls were insulated with a silver material.
"The van's contaminated," Nara told the mercie leader. "Covering it over like that's not going to keep the inside of this placeand usfrom turning green. And what about the agrobacteria that's seeping in from the outside through the seams in the envelope?"
"You're right," Damm said, "eventually this interior space is going to become a solid mass of slime, but long before that happens we'll be out of here and on our way to Shadow World. In the meantime, don't worry. Pressure from those air pumps should keep most of the spores out. Now, why don't you have a seat and get your thoughts together." He indicated the stack of plastic crates along the trailer wall.
As Ryan and Nara took seats, the mercies started passing around foil packets.
Ryan got three. They were about the size of his palm and warm to the touch. When he opened the one labeled Beefie Cheesie, a puff of steam came out. Even in the ammonia-laced air, the aroma was noticeably sharp and bitter. Inside the foil, a pair of spongy white layers bracketed a densely compacted brown layer. Ryan lifted the edge of the white and discovered a thin coating of orange goo on top of the brown.
"This is supposed to be food?" he said in disbelief. He and Nara were the only ones not eating.
"It's what passes for it nowadays," Damm said as he chewed the round, pale sandwich, "unless you're a CEO."
Nara took the packets away from Ryan and put them on the floor. "If this is what you've been living on, Damm, it explains a lot," she said. "You've got to know better than this."
"A few beefies won't kill us."
"Damm, do you realize you're starting to quote their fucking tell-yous?"
"What is that shit?" Ryan said.
"Stone burger with cheese," Damm said, smacking his lips as he opened a second packet.
"After the collapse of global agriculture," Nara told Ryan, "as a stopgap measure, FIVE tailored bacteria that could turn an inorganic material, in this case rock flour, into a product with some nutritional value. They then reprocessed it to look and taste like familiar foods. It's possible for a person to live on beefie cheesies, but it's not recommended unless you have access to a complete arterial flush. After three days the side effects of some of the component minerals, primarily peridotite and olivine, cause violent mental aberrations and hallucinations."
Damm tossed a small, black plastic object into the woman's lap. "Just make the fucking call, Jurascik," he said, "and don't worry about our state of mind."
Nara stood and walked a few yards away. She pushed a series of illuminated circles on the front of the unit, held it to the side of her face and began to talk in low tones.
Damm said to her back, "Remember, Nara, if we don't get out of here, you don't get out of here."
The blonde moved farther away, so she could speak in privacy.
This is tough duty for Juracsik,'' he said to Ryan. "She and Mitsuki had worked out this scheme to steal you away from the other Globals. Now she's got to explain how she royally fucked up."
As Ryan sat there, waiting for a deal to be cut that would either kill him or move him to a different prison, many of the things that he had seen and heard over the past few hours were starting to come together in his head, and the considerable load of bullshit had begun to fall out.
"My value to these Globals of yours is precisely what?" he asked Damm. "Do they really expect me to help them colonize my world?"
"You win the prize!" the mercie said. "Hand our Mr. Wonderful another Tater Cheesie."
Ryan wasn't amused. "I asked you a question. I need a better answer than that."
"Okay, listen close," Damm said, "because I'm only going to run this down once. Ever since the Big Shakedowns, there's been low-level conflict between members of the FIVE. They should never have privatized the fucking military, because all that accomplished in the end was to militarize the entire private sector. Every Global's got its own standing army to police and enforce economic operations. Even though the FIVE divided up the planet between them, made it all nice and legal with treaties, the sparks still fly when they get into each other's business. Bottom line, despite the truce, the agreements, each of the FIVE is fighting like hell to increase its market share. Mitsuki, being low Global on the totem pole, is extra-eager to move up.
"Problem for all of them is, there's nothing left here to divvy. Nothing but people and bacteria. We've poisoned or eaten everything else. Oh, we've still got plenty of rock, but like Jurascik says, you can't live on it for very long without going apeshit. The writing is on the wall for everyone to see pretty soon the one-celled fuckers are going to win. And one hundred billion humans are going to lose." It was a number too large for Ryan to comprehend. "The CEOs on top of the heap spend all their time shuffling data," Damm went on, "trading the last few million containers of product back and forth, moving their cargo ships around the world, trying to make it look like business as usual. Nobody's buying it, though. What they are buying is you. The Globals have been planting the seeds for months on the tell-yous. In the past few weeks, they've been promoting the possibility of a mass exodus to a new and virgin world. Today, they stuck that knife-cut, one-eyed mug of yours on the sales package." The mercie grinned wolfishly at him. "Hope Lives, motherfucker."
When Nara had completed her negotiations, she handed Damm back the comm device. "Mitsuki's agreed to all of it," she said. "They're making arrangements for the transport of you and your people, with the gear you requested."
"Hear that?" Damm shouted to the others, "What'd I tell you! We're getting the hell out of here!"
The mercies sent up a ragged cheer and started slapping one another on the back.
"It should take about two hours to get everything together," Nara said. "How long can we live in here?"
Damm said, "Long enough."