Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) Read Online Free

barracks rooms was one thousand credits a month.
    The time-to-expiration date on their contracts got further away, while Amos and Freed tried to figure a way out. And there were the children. Unplanned, but welcome. Children were encouraged by the Company. The next generation’s labor pool, without the expense of recruiting and transportation.
    Amos and Freed fought the Company’s conditioning processes. But it was hard to explain what open skies and walking an unknown road meant to someone who grew up with curving gray domes and slideways.
    Freed, after a long running battle with Amos, had extended her contract six months for a wall-size muraliv of a snowy landscape on a frontier world.
    Almost eight months passed before the snow stopped drifting down on that lonely cluster of domes, and the door, with the warm, cheery fire behind it, stopped swinging open to greet the returning worker.
    The mural meant more to Amos and Freed than it did to Sten. Even though young Karl didn’t have the slightest idea of what it was like to live without a wall in near-touching distance, he’d already learned that the only goal in his life, no matter what it took, was to get off Vulcan.

Chapter Three
    ‘You gotta remember, boy, a bear’s how you look at him.’
    ‘Dad, what’s a bear?’
    ‘You know. Like the Imperial Guard uses to scout with. You saw one in that viddie.’
    ‘Oh, yeah. It looks like the Counselor.’
    ‘A little – only it’s a mite hairier and not so dumb. Anyway, when you’re in a scoutcar, looking down at that bear, he don’t look so bad. But when that bear’s standing over you …’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘That bear’s like Vulcan. If you was up The Eye, it’d probably look pretty good. But when you’re a Mig, down here …’
    Amos Sten nodded and poured himself another half liter of narco-beer.
    ‘All you got to remember in a bear fight, Karl, is you don’t
ever
want to be second. Most of all, you don’t want to get caught by that bear in the first place.’
    That was a lesson Sten had already learned. Through Elmore. Elmore was an old Mig who had the solo apartment at the end of the corridor. But most of the off-shift time Elmore was in the children’s play area telling stories.
    They were the never true, always wonderful part of the oral tradition that industrial peasants from a thousand worlds had brought to Vulcan, making their own underground tradition.
    The Drop Settling of Ardmore. The Ghost Ship of Capella. The Farmer Who Became King
.
    And Vulcan’s own legends.
The Delinqs Who Saved the Company
. The eerie, whispered stories of the warehouses and factory domes that were generations-unused by humans … but still had something living and moving in them.
    Sten’s favorite was the one Elmore told least often – about how, one day, things would change. How someone would come from another world, and lead the Migs up, into The Eye. A day of reckoning when the air cycling system would spew the blood of the Execs. The best was the last, when Elmore said slowly that the man who would lead the Migs would be a Mig himself.
    The corridor’s parents never minded Elmore. He kept the kids out of their hair, and, very grateful, they all chipped in to card Elmore some kind of present every Founder’s Day. If any of them knew most of Elmore’s stories were anti-Company, they never said anything. Nor would they have cared.
    The end was inevitable. Some kid talked around the wrong person. Like the Counselor.
    One off-shift, Elmore didn’t return. Everyone wondered what had happened. But the topic became boring, and everyone forgot.
    Not Sten. He saw Elmore again, on The Row. The man was a shambling hulk, stumbling behind a street-cleaning machine. He paused beside Sten and looked down at the boy.
    Elmore’s mouth opened, and he tried to speak. But his tongue lolled helplessly, and his speech was guttural moans. The machine whistled, and Elmore obediently turned and stumbled away after it.