Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

straight for it with his hands outstretched. Random and Ruby joined him, though a little less quickly, for pride's sake. They both kept one hand at a time unobtrusively near hidden weapons. Random hadn't lasted this long by trusting people who just happened to turn up at a meeting place. He should have insisted on a password, but there hadn't been time. Random liked passwords. They appealed to his sense of the dramatic.
    Tall John stripped off an outer layer of furs to reveal a tall rangy man with long dark hair, a steady gaze and a mouth set in a stern line. Beside him stood another of the figures from the storm, pulling open her furs to reveal a short, chunky woman with a great mane of knotted dark hair above a pale, round face.
    She flashed the three newcomers a broad smile and nodded to them amiably. Like Tall John, time and the world had used her hard, and she could have been any age
    at all.
    "I'm Throat-slitter Mary. Don't mind Tall John. When you get to know him, he's really a pain in the ass. He and I will speak for the others. You'll meet them later. You're welcome here, but I have to say you're not what we were hoping for. We need reinforcements, weapons, supplies, and lots of them."
    "We didn't expect two old men and a bounty hunter," said Tall John.
    Random shrugged, not upset. "There's more to us than meets the eye. And if you can convince us of the strategic importance of your needs, you'll get everything you could hope for. So talk to us. Fill us in on what's been happening on Technos III. Your initial contact was intriguing, but short on detail."
    "All right," said Throat-slitter Mary. "Short and to the point. Like me. We're fighting a trench and tunnel war with the Empire forces. At the center of everything is the factory, getting ready to mass produce the new stardrive.
    Around the factory lies a series of trench circles. The Empire controls the inner trenches, we control the outer, and we spend most of our time fighting over the ones in the middle. There's maybe fifteen thousand of us left. There used to be a lot more, but the years have whittled us away.
    "We're all that remains of the original colonists of Technos III. Our ancestors were indentured workers, paying off the cost of their transport by terraforming the planet and establishing industries. Theoretically, once all the debts were paid off, Technos III was theirs. Only somehow there were always more debts for each new generation.
    "The original company in charge went broke. Others came in and took over, running the planet as a business while they asset-stripped it. The companies came and went, but we stayed. We had to. Our ancestors had been genetically altered to enable them to survive on this world. Terraforming can only do so
    much. If you three stay here long enough, this planet will kill you in a dozen subtle ways. We can't leave this world without some pretty basic changes in our body chemistry, which we've always been denied. Officially, because it would be too expensive. Besides, where else were they going to find such a useful, trapped, workforce?
    "As companies came and went, each more cheapjack than the one before, leaving their failures behind them to poison the land, the whole surface of the planet gradually disappeared under deserted factories, installations, and other high-tech junk. Right up until today. The Campbells were a bunch of bastards, but the Wolfes are worse. They don't give a damn for this planet. All they care about is their precious factory. Everything else has been left to rust and rot.
    We've inherited a world dominated by deserted mile-long factories, abandoned construction sites, and worked-out mines. The Wolfes, and the Campbells before them, chose this planet precisely because it's such a mess. They could do anything they liked here, and no one would give a damn. Who's going to care about pollution on a world like this? It's already been poisoned so thoroughly that only native life like us could survive here. And no one cares about us. At first we were an embarrassment. Now, we're rebel terrorists. Life on this planet has been driven underground. We survive, together. We live off the remaining flora and fauna, and they live off us, when we're not fast enough. But our time is running out.
    "Once the Wolfes have got their factory up and running, they'll be able to afford armies of mercenaries to force us back, so they can build more factories.
    And once that happens, they won't stop till we're extinct. We