EarthRise Read Free Page A

efforts of her brother Jack, would almost certainly have killed Alexander Franklin.
    But six remained, which by either coincidence or divine intent was the exact number mentioned in Ezekiel 9:1-2: “. . . Then he called out in my hearing . . . ‘Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a deadly weapon in his hand.’ And . . . six men came . . .”
    A skin nicknamed Tripod was the first skin to die as a Fon dropped off a roof and buried a six-inch blade between the unsuspecting human’s shoulder blades. Four of his companions died within seconds of each other. The last of them took a pipe to the side of his head, staggered through a complete circle, and collapsed.
    Ivory, who caught the motion from the corner of his eye, started to turn. He never made it. His Fon, the one to whom the ancestors had given a mental likeness of the racialist’s features, struck the back of the human’s head with a length of two-by-two. It was a glancing blow, but sufficient to drop Ivory in his tracks. There was the jolt of the blow, followed by an explosion of pain, and the long fall into darkness.
    The Fon, satisfied with his grasperwork, jumped to a nearby roof. A debt had been incurred . . . and a debt had been paid.
    The racialists, their bodies left to rot, were but a small down payment on the long bloody day to follow.

     
    Consistent with the fact that they had what amounted to a genderless society, the Saurons had a marked tendency to regard their slaves in much the same manner as earlier generations of humans viewed horses. The aliens placed a definite premium on size, strength, and, to a lesser extent, on color, favoring blacks over browns and browns over whites, in what observers like ex-FBI Agent Jill Ji-Hoon knew to be conscious racism.
    So, given the fact that she had white skin, stood six-foot-two, and had the broad shoulders of a competitive swimmer, the onetime law enforcement officer was often chosen for tasks which the alien overseers considered to be physically demanding but appropriately menial. That’s why she was not especially surprised when a Kan leaned over the parapet above, ordered her team to meet him on the plaza below, and promptly disappeared.
    The team, what the Saurons considered to be a matched set in terms of physical ability, consisted of Ji-Hoon and three reasonably well built men. Two had come on to her and failed. Only the third, a man named Escoloni, remained true to his wife. Something Ji-Hoon admired. Their eyes made contact as they maneuvered the five-hundred-pound block of limestone into place on top of a long, gently curving wall. It was the last oversize brick of that particular run and fell into the assigned gap with a gentle thud.
    The six-foot-long steel pry bar clattered as Escoloni allowed it to fall on the stone pavers. “So,” the man everyone called Loni, said sarcastically, “what now? High tea?”
    Ji-Hoon grinned and used a faded red bandanna to wipe the sweat off the back of her neck. “Don’t I wish . . . No, some kind of shit detail most likely.”
    Loni looked doubtful and gestured to the dry set wall that circled the citadel’s third level. “Shit detail? What do you think this is?”
    “There’s worse,” the man named Hosker said somberly, “unless you think the stone mules actually enjoy what they do.”
    An entire lexicon of slang words and terms had evolved on and around Hell Hill. The term “mule team” referred to those slaves assigned to haul the quarter-ton blocks of limestone up the hill. A backbreaking job that could have been performed in a tenth of the time through the use of machinery. But the Sauron Book of Cycles dictated otherwise, that was the rumor anyway, and Ji-Hoon believed it. She had seen the stonemaster poring over what appeared to be a large volume of weatherproofed manuscripts and heard the overseers refer to it.
    The way Ji-Hoon understood the matter, the Book of Cycles, plus the memories that the stonemaster had