Relentless by Richard Williams

Author:Richard Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-22T09:36:44.588106+00:00

Becket opened his eyes. He had not been asleep; he had been waiting. Around him the decimated shift grudgingly started to clamber to its feet. Brand did not miss the looks they stole at him.

“Lost some of your mates, did ya? Lost some of your pals? You scunning dirtfeet! You stupid whoresons! Didn’t you realise that you’re all dead already? Your filthy mates, they got off easy!

Easy, you hear me? By the end of today you’ll wish you were flash-boiled with the rest of ’em!” The crewbosses were taking no chances. There were only half the number that there were in the steam room, the rest had been reassigned. There simply weren’t enough conscripts left on the shift to make their presence worthwhile. Becket stepped out of the holding cell and was instantly chained up to the conscript line. Only then was he handed his hard bread and smear of slop.

With so few of them, the shift moved out far quicker than usual. However, that did not stop Brand bawling each one of them out. They were marched off, and the chain headed down, straight down, to the arse of the ship, to the refuse reclamators.

The shift knew this duty well. It was where they were sent every time they had done something wrong. Every time they showed a little too much spirit, they were sent down here to have it broken anew. Each reclamator was little more than a giant vat buried down into the deck. Refuse from the entire ship flowed in. The conscripts sorted through it and picked out anything and everything that could be sterilised, reforged or reused that had been missed by the automatic filters. The ship could not afford to waste a scrap of it. When they were done, the conscripts climbed out. “The load was 74

drained down to be burned and compressed, and the final useless debris ejected into space. Then the gates above opened, another load dropped, and the conscripts climbed back in to start the process again.

Rancid waste from the gastromo’s dens, material from the medicae decks too soiled for cleaning, the less toxic byproducts of the experiments of the Mechanicus, all of it drenched in human effluence, were carried from every deck of the ship. The stench for the crewbosses standing on the edge of the vat was appalling; for the conscripts digging through the sludge with their bare hands it was indescribable. It was not long before the food they had just consumed added to the sewage they waded through. They worked though, damn, they worked. For those long hours, the only thing to live for was the few minutes out of the vat you got as one load went and another load came in.

There was little for the crewbosses to do. The conscripts were all down in the vat, with only a small ladder for them to use to climb out, which the crewbosses could lower in. Some of them sloped away, ostensibly taking messages, checking on other shifts; any reason they could find.

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