Their route led them through narrow streets, the streets climbing upward.
Sten's psywar mind analyzed: If you have the worst enemy scum in your hands, would you not arrange a triumphal parade? With all your citizens spitting and cheering because we have the barbarians in our hands? With full livie coverage? Of course you would. Why haven't the Tahn done that?
Exploratory thinking: They don't think like I do. Possible.
They can't muster the citizens on call. Wrong—any totalitarian state can do that. Maybe they don't want to show how badly the war is hurting them if they are presenting Heath as being the proud center of their culture and don't want off-worlders to see the reality. Most interesting, and worth considering—
Sten's analysis was cut off as the column of prisoners was shouted to a halt and screaming Tahn soldiers ordered them to attention. Sten expected to see a float of combat cars move across the street in front of him. Instead, there was one cloaked officer, with flanking guards on foot, riding some kind of animal transport.
"What's that?"
"Clottin' hell," Alex whispered. "A bleedin't horse."
"Horse?"
"Aye. A Earth critter, w' nae th' brains ae a Campbell, tha' bites you an' is best used ae pet chow."
Sten was about to inquire further, but the officer in charge of the column ordered them forward again, and for the first time he looked up the cobbled narrow street.
His guts clamped shut.
At the top of the rise was a huge stone building. It sat atop the hill like a great gray monster, its towering walls reaching upward, capped by a ruined octagonal pinnacle that still reached some 200 meters toward the overcast sky.
Alex, too, was staring.
"Lad," he managed. "Ah dinnae think't th' Tahn are takin' us to church. Tha' be't our new home!"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Koldyeze cathedral had not been constructed by the Tahn. Their only religion was a vague sort of belief, unworshiped, in racial identity and racial destiny.
Koldyeze had been the Vatican for the first settlers on Heath, monotheistic, agrarian communards. They had spent nearly two centuries building their church atop the highest hill in their tiny capital.
Those settlers stood less than no chance when the first Tahn, then more roving barbarians than the self-declared culture they later became, smashed down on them. They were forcibly absorbed by the Tahn, their language forbidden to be spoken, written, or taught, their dress ridiculed, and their religion driven underground and finally out of existence.
The Tahn might not have been religious, but they were superstitious. No one quite knew what to do with the looming cathedral, and so it was surrounded with barbed fencing and posted for hundreds of years. Seventy-five years before, an out-of-control tacship had smashed off the spire's crown, and storms had battered the ruins.
But Koldyeze Cathedral was still a mighty work of man.
It was cruciform in design, stretching along its longer axis nearly two kilometers and along the shorter axis one kilometer. The center of the cross was the sanctuary and, above it, the remains of the bell tower. The shorter arms of the cross were roofed, but the longer arms held courtyards in their centers.
Koldyeze had been built as a self-sufficient religious community, even though the churchmen were not at all withdrawn from their society. When the Tahn had ordered Koldyeze abandoned, the pacifistic communards had systematically closed it down, sealing passageways and chambers as they went.
To the Tahn, Koldyeze seemed ideally suited to become a prison. Activating it required no drain on scarce building materials. The power drain from Heath's grid should be minimal. The assigned prisoners would provide the work crews to make the complex livable.
The northernmost short arm, where the main entrance to Koldyeze had been located, was sealed off from the other wings, and the chambers around its courtyard were set up as guard and administration quarters. The passage from the guard courtyard into the center sanctuary was set with detectors and triple gates.
Four rows of fencing with mines and detectors between each row surrounded Koldyeze.
Then, even though the security precautions were not complete, Koldyeze was ready for prisoners. The outer perimeter, after all, was sealed—and none of the Imperials could fly. Further antiescape measures would be added as time went by.
The Tahn believed that Koldyeze was escapeproof.
The Imperial prisoners straggling through the thick stone and steel gates looked about them and believed that somehow, somewhere, a clever being could manage to find freedom.
And there was no reason at all why it could not be one of them.
CHAPTER NINE
Inside the courtyard, the Imperial prisoners were shouted and pummeled into a formation. Most interesting, Sten thought, as he analyzed the guards.
They looked much as he had expected and experienced in his previous camp: overmuscled bullyboys, semicrippled ex-combatants, and soldiers too old or too young to be assigned to the front.
Their obscenities and threats were also the same.
But none of them carried whips. They were armed with truncheons or stun rods—which seemed mere pattypaw weapons to the thoroughly brutalized prisoners. No projectile weapons were being waved about. And no one had been slammed to the ground with a rifle butt, which was the standard Tahn request for attention.
The main shouter wore the rank tabs of a police major. He was a hulk of a man whose broad leather belt was losing its battle with his paunch. As he roared orders, one hand kept creeping toward his holstered pistol, then was forced away. The man's face was amazingly scarred.
"Tha' be't ae screw," Alex whispered, lips motionless, "thae hae plac'd second in a wee brawl wi' ae bear."
Eventually the formation looked adequate, and Colonel Virunga limped to his place at its front. That had been one of the few cheery notes of the long crawl through space on the prison ship: Virunga was senior Imperial officer and would therefore be in command of the prisoners in the new camp.
Virunga eyed his command and started to bring them to attention. Then he caught himself.
Standing ostentatiously away from the prisoners was a single defiant being. He—she? it?—was about a meter and a half in height and squatted on his thick lower legs as if early in his race's evolution there had been a tail provided for tripodal security. His upper arms were almost as large as his lower legs, ending in enormous bone-appearing gauntlets and incongruously slender fingers.
The being had no neck, its shoulders flowing into a tapering skull that ended in a dozen pink tendrils that Virunga guessed were its sensory organs. The being had once been fat, with sleek fur. Now its ragged pelt draped down in togalike folds over its body.
Colonel Virunga had been denied access to the prisoners' records aboard ship, and of course there had not been time to meet every one of the purged prisoners. But he wondered how he had missed that one.
"Form up, troop."
"I am not a troop, and I shall not form up," the being squeaked. "I am Lay Reader Cristata, I am a civilian, I endorse neither the Empire nor the Tahn, and I am being unjustly held and forced to be a part of this machinery of death."
Virunga goggled. Did Cristata think that any of them had volunteered to be POWs? Even more wonderment: How had that paragon of resistance managed to survive in a prison camp so long?