“You women,

They special do parts—

Me women,

Until all we gone—

all we gone to stardust arts…

…come Clay-skin Man,

Give to Papaloi He hand.”

Phenyl engaged her tactile socks and jogged off toward Aquifer Sigma. She was on a steady descent, sticking to Accessway Alpha which wound directly around the Hierarchal Core. There were various linkages that could have taken her to Aquifer Sigma more quickly, but they were possibly unsecure. Alpha was exclusively for security movement. Only males, females and hierarchs had access imprints. Drones and andys did not, and therefore ferals and dregs had no breaching opportunities.

She stopped and looked over her shoulder, the spongeform floor hesitating beneath her socked feet. She could not shake the sensation that she was being followed by some furtive-footed creature. The flooring seemed impatient and urged her forward in stuttering waves.

As she began to stalk back along the corridor the flooring resisted and Accessway Alpha came online, “Phenyl, you are twenty-one seconds off pace to relieve Captain Sienna.”

“Please monitor my backway Alpha—I’m making up pace!”

She leaped to the wall with her left foot and pushed off toward the floor which caught her heel and accelerated her speed as she broke into a sprint, determined now to beat her call pace. But still, as she ran in unison with the interactive floor, she felt a haunting sense that she was being tracked.

She was deep, well below the subfloor of Habitat Syra, when she bottomed out into the sublevel octechute. Something in her wanted to bolt into Accessway Omega and make for the outside world through the sewage vectors. But she still had 8.8 hours to live and Captain Sienna was in need of assistance. She slowed to a jog. She was entering dreg-accessible linkage and did not want to be ambushed.

Twenty paces in she saw a blood stain that was not fully processed by the flooring, and some spatter that was still dissolving on the wall. She knelt and checked the faded impression where a body had lain not an hour past. She listened carefully for any feral or dreg sounds and came up clear. She then whispered in secure tone, “Sigma, forensic records.”

Accessway Sigma whispered back, “Displaying now, Phenyl.”

As she stepped back a hologram of a female in operations attire lay in a crooked fetal orientation, her neck at a twisted angle, blood running from her groin, her eyes gone! The wall splatter had trajectories assigned in yellow lettering. The blood stained-blonde hair, the plump cheeks, and the collar of the suit-top, indicated that Captain Sienna had fallen here. Her body, however, was nowhere to be found. It would have taken a full twenty hours for Accessway Sigma to absorb and record her corpse. Only blood had been left.

Her whisper felt hoarse, “Foot impressions please.”

“Online Inspector.”

Captain Sienna’s impressions were red as she was the victim, and of a pale shade as she was underweight. Her progress was toward the aquifer at a jog and stopped abruptly here, where she apparently turned of her own volition, and was then felled.

A wide set of dreg prints coded deep green indicating the heavy impressions of a devolved drone with deteriorating traction socks came from the aquifer, stopped, became heavier, and then returned to the aquifer, indicating that a dreg removed the body.

A smaller set of feral [having never been socked or shoed] prints—the sight of which sent a chill down her spine as they reminded her of those in her apartment—that were of andy- or female-size, yet male based on weight distribution, followed the Captain’s prints like a shadow, and then returned back toward the octechute.

She then sensed the presence behind her again, but more closely, and froze, listening for any tell tale sign. Accessway Sigma inquired in her hushed tone, “Inspector, are you well?”

“Sigma am I alone in this segment.”

The aqualight in the translucent jell-ceiling brightened somewhat as the accessway did a real-time scan, “Absolutely, Inspector.”

“Thank you,” she whispered with some relief.

“Inspector,” whispered the accessway, “should I schedule you for an intuit upgrade?”

“Absolutely,” she whispered, as she turned to smile at the empty segment behind her, and came face-to-face with a small, naked dusky-skinned feral male. He had complete genitalia, so must have been a gestationally liberated drone somehow released by a dreg infiltrator up on the birthing ward. His eyes were large white rims filled with massive black pupils, within which danced a red mote, like the spark of some organic sim-fire. He had a broad forehead beneath a hairless dome of a head, which came to a point below his wide nose and black-lipped slit of a mouth in a pointy chin, which gave the impression of a bald rat of vast intellect. His ears were somehow inverted with the lobe above and the round rim below. His hands, tipped as they were with pointed, black, razor-sharp fingernails, danced before her face like two five-headed children swaying in the breeze.

Mesmerized she opened her mouth to demand his compliance. When she did so he held up an open palm, which had an eye apparently imbedded in it, an eye that blinked like a mascara-wearing one-eyed she-devil. This froze her momentarily as the strange little black man bit his own tongue, savored the blood, and then launched a bloody wad of spit into her open mouth.

She wanted to call out in horror, to kick him and run.

As the acidic iron-tainted blood and the sickeningly sweat saliva of this little man spread across her own tongue like a creeping menace seizing her soul—that thing they told you in the acclimatization forum that you did not possess, despite the rumors to the contrary—she fell, fell back, fell forever it seemed, or what forever would seem like to someone who had just now died in Accessway Sigma.

He stalked into the rebel camp, so inexpertly placed on the beach beneath the overgrown rocks and the lapping sea. The British man-of-war lay lonely and menacingly off the coast, like some wooden sentinel of the Whiteman swaying beneath a canvas awning hung from the sky. He stopped for a moment to consider that distant menace—a world-strangling menace to him and his kind despite the seeming neutrality of the British Navy.

The dirty white sergeant stepped up to him, next to his tall black captain, Miacca, of the Maroons, his chief man-hunter, one time Leopard-cultist of Congo—a man he should fear, but did not. The sergeant spoke, “General, shall I inspect the pickets, in case the British dogs set down marines on our flanks, or the Maroons prove untrustworthy in our rear.”

He nodded affirmatively to the sergeant, and the nasty little fellow, a master of murder in his own right, hobbled off among the rocks.

Miacca stood like black stone, naked and scarified after his cult, awaiting instructions.

He often lacked confidence when not in the act of war. However, when his deep voice resonated with a command, he regained his sense of destiny as he did now. “Slaughter and prepare the children for the men’s feast. Rape the women again and cast them to the sharks for a sacrifice to keep the British at sea. The men, stake them out by their opened bowels in the circle as I see to the old boy—let them all see as they die, with crabs and gulls ripping at their entrails, what becomes of my enemies.”

He approached the staked man—a little man really, small and wasted like a fevered white—whose eyes had already been fed to the birds, his legs and feet broken, his arms broken, his chest skinned so that his blood had sizzled to a crust under the noon sun, his hands tied to the top of the stake above his scorched head. The wiry little man with the head of an elephant and the chin of a rat yet lived, seemingly looking into the sky with his empty pits.

He approached the small staked figure and looked down into the empty blood-crusted sockets. His mouth opened to rumble a question, but the little man began to sing…and, as the day died, sang many long songs, mesmerizing the General as the weeping sun fell into the sea. The groans of the dying witnesses all about came to him as he listened to the witch-doctor’s songs. He was entranced. Then the staked man, his defeated rival, looked into him with those empty sockets and said, “Oh Great Chief, drink of Me you!”

The wicked little man, Jeannot, ‘Eater of the Whites,’ then bit his own tongue deeply, and spit his blood into the General’s mouth, which he had not known was open, though it was his own. As the sun fell The Life of The World unfolded before his mind’s eye, from the killing of the Clay-skin Men to the coming of the Whites. His mind rang with a cacophony of languages, and the cries of victims innumerable. The moans of the dying behind him, their guts clawed on by crabs and pecked at by gulls, were drowned like cursed sailors on the Sea of Time, washed forever beneath the tidal Song of The Ages.

At last, his mouth closed, his eyes opened to the here, the now; the moonlit beach where fearless Miacca knelt and shivered in terror at his side. He could hear clearly in minute detail the crawling of crabs over reeking dead bodies, washed by the incoming tide that wet his General’s boots, made by the American Whites for his great feet. He could hear, echoed from the rocks to his left, the creak of the British vessel barely illuminated under the moon out to sea to his right. He could hear like a dog hears, and he felt now, like the dog to this master that yet clung to life on the terrible stake, a stake sunken here at his own accursed command. He was overcome with grief for having captured his master, thinking him a mere mortal all along.

He heard his deep voice croak low, “Oh Papaloi, I thought you merely the witch-doctor Jeannot, for I did not know!”

The evil face grinned narrowly in the moonlight, the hollow sockets winking to slits, as Miacca burst into trembling sobs where he knelt in the surf. The thin little wrists of the black man creaked, and then snapped, breaking themselves so that the long-fingered black hands, so big for such a small man, could craw around at the end of their ruined length like so many crabs. The sound of this deep-toned skittering entranced him as the razor sharp needle-point black nails on those long fingers slashed open the dried rawhide cords that had bound those wrists so cruelly.

Miacca defecated in the surf and squealed like a girl.

The General was moved to deepest remorse, not through fear, but through penance. “Oh Papaloi, how can I repay, how to apologize for your eyes?”

Jeannot’s eyeless—but not sightless—pits leered up into his own darkly oiled face, and his rat mouth whispered coarsely, “Oh Dessalines—you My Boy, this you land, these Me eyes eternal.”

The broken wrists creaked and the fingers opened to reveal an eye in each palm, a darkly-lined eye imbedded in each pale palm, one darting, the other piercing. Jeannot continued as he stepped away from the stake and brought his eyeless face to the General’s chest, his flopping hands to his broad shoulders, and sang into his quaking barrel chest,

“Oh, My Boy,

I much like Me

The blood of the Whites,

So sweet to Me,

Me must have some—

floating Whites;

wine sacks to wet Me dead!”

With that, the hideous eye-gouged cadaver of a man walked broken-legged and broken-armed past the most feared Maroon of Hispaniola, who cried and relieved himself like a baby in the moonlit surf. Only Dessalines, ‘Butcher of the Blacks’, and the dead that gathered around, watched as the broken body of Jeannot lurched painlessly, and ever so hungrily, into the deepening surf, toward the far off lantern on the stern of the British frigate that bobbed like a beacon out to sea.

At last, after many wondrous moments, the figure of Jeannot sank into the surf, with only a hand left bobbing above the moonlit water as it made its way out to sea. Eventually even the hand disappeared.

Some long disorienting time after, Miacca quavered, “General is the Devil gone? Is it safe to rise?”

Dessalines found his commanding voice, more commanding than it had ever been, even as he savored the lingering taste of iron-rich blood in his mouth. He now knew that he had but one master, and that master was not a mere man. He felt reborn, and sounded it, “Leopard Man, on this night, I would not be a White on that ship for all the machetes in the mountains.”

As his captain rose unsteadily to his feet, and clouds slid beneath the moon, they looked out to sea toward the bobbing lantern. That light flickered as behind a passing shadow, and was snuffed out, revealing nothing but a black shadowed mass of heaving sea, now only faintly streaked by the silver light of the moon.