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Cat, gesturing to the blockhouse behind him.
The concrete pad holding the barrier of steel girders began sinking into the
roadbed, lowered by hydraulics controlled from the bunker. As it sank beneath
the surface, a thick slab of rust-streaked metal slid from a slot and spanned
the aperture.
Grant took his foot off the brake and steered the Cat over it with a loud
clanking of the metal tracks.
Neither man spoke as they headed for the gate.
Fifteen feet high by twenty wide, with a two foot thickness of rockcrete
sheathed by cross-braced iron, the portal groaned aside, pulled by huge gears
and cables the thickness of Grant's wrists.
The Sandcat entered a walled compound topped by coils of razor wire. Parked
beneath an overhang were a number of vehicles, Land Rovers, personnel-carrying
AMACs, and two other Sandcats. Grant pulled the wag into an open space between
the other Cats and keyed off the engine.
An attendant hurried up, his leather belt weighted down by various hand tools.
Despite the grease and grime smearing his face, both Grant and Kane saw his
expression of surprise when he looked through the ob ports. They were not the
Mags he expected to
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return the Cat to the vehicle depot, but he was intelligent enough not to
bring it to their attention.
Grant left the keys in the ignition as he opened the gull-wing door. Tersely,
he said to the attendant, "Fuel her up and give her a once-over, but leave the
keys inside. We may need her again in a hurry and I don't want to have to hunt
your oily ass down." The man nodded. "Yes, sir." They crossed the compound to
the door on the far side. Kane tapped in the control numbers on the keypad and
pulled up on the control lever. The door squeaked to one side, and he stepped
out into the outskirts of Ragnarville's Tartarus
Pits. Grant joined him and stood silently for a moment, trying not to recoil
from the overpowering stench.
The air was redolent with the mixed odors of cookfires, rotting meat, open
cesspits, unwashed bodies, urine, human and animal droppings. Both of them
experienced a momentary pang of nostalgia, but when a dank breeze wafted a
singularly repulsive stink over them, they struggled to hold their gorges
down.
"Did the Pits in Cobaltville smell like this?" Grant asked.
"They all smell the same," replied Kane. "Remember the old saying."
"Yeah," Grant muttered. "Leopards can't change their spots, and the Pits can't
change their phew."
They headed for the inner sanctums of the ville, assuming that the procedures
for Magistrates return-
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ing from the field would be the same in all the villes. A narrow footpath,
more like a channel, wended its way around the outer limits of Tartarus
proper, leading to the impregnable base of the monolith. The pathway was
strictly forbidden to anyone but Magistrates. Vid spy-eyes affixed to posts
made sure no
Pit denizen planted a muddy foot on it.
Nothing could be done to avoid the surveillance, so they ignored it. When the
walkway jogged to the left, near the broad shadow cast by a warehouse, Kane
and Grant slipped smoothly into it.
They marched through the muddy, squalid alleys between ramshackle buildings
and hovels, following them into the deepest parts of the Pits, where they
weren't spy-wired. Only the main avenues were under video surveillance.
Although the population of the Pits of any ville was ruthlessly controlled,
they usually roared with lusty life, but these streets seemed less crowded
than they expected. A pall of gloom hung over the shacks and squats.
The planned ghettos of the villes were named after Tartarus, a lower section
of Hades where Zeus had confined his enemies. Kane always thought they were
well named.
The Pits were melting-pots, swarming with slag-gers and cheap labor. Movement
between the Enclaves and Pits was tightly controlled only a Magistrate on
official business could enter the Pits, and only a Pit dweller with a
legitimate work order could even approach the cellar of an Enclave tower.
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The barons had decreed that the villes could support no more than five
thousand residents, and the number of Pit dwellers wasn't allowed to exceed
one thousand. Both Grant and Kane retained vivid memories of making Pit
sweeps, seeking out outlanders, infants and even pregnant women. They didn't
relish those memories.
Despite the ruthless treatment of the Pit dwellers, the one constant, in any
version of any ville, was a Pit boss. By no means an official title or
position, Pit bosses nevertheless served a purpose of varying degrees of
importance, depending on the ville.
Part crime lords, part information conduits and part procurers of luxuries,
the Pit bosses were tolerated in most villes as long as they knew and kept
their place. If the bosses maintained a certain order among the seething
masses, Magistrates were inclined to look the other way if they engaged in
limited black-marketing or the elimination of troublesome elements.
According to the Intel they remembered from their Mag days, Boss Klaw had been
the overlord of the
Ragnarville pits longer than anyone else, but that was all they knew.
Presumably, Klaw had proved useful to the ville elite on more than one
occasion or he wouldn't have enjoyed such a lengthy reign.
As they walked the slushy back alleys, they encountered only a few people,
most of them rooting through heaps of garbage. When they caught sight of the
black-armored figures, they froze, hunkering
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down like rabbits, trying not to draw any notice. Kane and Grant paid no
attention to them, though inwardly they were alert to every nuance of their
surroundings. It was tactically unwise to become too relaxed in the Pits,
regardless of how cowed the citizenry appeared to be. Both kept a wary eye out
for other Mags.
Magistrates in full battle armor weren't commonplace sights in Tartarus, and
their presence portended any number of awful events. As both men strode along,
they unconsciously reverted to their Mag per-sonas, swaggering in step, heads
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held at prideful angles, mouths drawn in grim, slightly superior smiles as the
lesser breeds scrambled out of their path.
Old habits and customs died hard with Magistrates, particularly because of the
rigorous discipline to which they had submitted themselves. Casting aside
their identities as Mags and accepting new roles as outlanders and exiles
hadn't been easy for either Kane or Grant. Although they never admitted it to
each other, sometimes they yearned to return to their former lives. If nothing
else, the world had made more sense back then.
Some of the more flimsy buildings showed recent signs of fire damage, the
smell of charred, scorched wood still fairly strong. Remembering the
checkpoint guard's words, Kane said, "Burning hail. Think that's what did it?"
Grant shrugged. "Who the hell knows. All Pits are tinderboxes."
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I?
At rustling sounds from a pile of maggot-infested meat scraps behind a
butcher's shop, Kane and Grant stopped. The scavenger was a middle-aged man
with a milky cataract over his left eye. Leathery warts sprouted around his
bewhiskered chin and cheeks. Because their approach had been on his blind
side, the man hadn't noticed them, the sound of his pawing through the bones
and strips of reeking fat masking their footfalls.
"You! Slagger!" Kane barked, employing the command voice.
The scavenger's head came up and around so swiftly, it was a wonder he didn't
dislocate his neck vertebrae. When he glimpsed the pair of black, red-visored
figures looming not more than six feet away, he uttered a strained squeal of
pure, undiluted terror. Staggering half-erect, toothless mouth gaping open, he
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