Chapter 7:
Old Earth.
Jessica stood looking at it, and her heart gave a hard throb.
She stared at the spinning blue and green orb, the browned and uninhabitable parts of the planet showing in stark contrast to the parts that still held life.
Centuries ago the air had become tainted by pollution, and the seas had gone bitter, killing off the life and food that could be found within those bodies of water. The freshwater wars had caused real havoc, and many had died when the oceans rose and drowned cities that had once been the seats of power.
There had been no Federation then. Back then; Old Earth had been stuck in a weird time and space hole that let other species go past without ever noticing that place. It had only been after an intrepid explorer who had heard the old tales of how once there had been a place that his race had gone to many years before. They went there because the beings there made for wonderful slaves and they had possessions. Old Earth had not even known that they were not the only beings in the universe.
Being that Earthlings would fight for any reason at all, especially if they had a common enemy, they finally banded together to stop fighting over the resources left on the planet in order to wage war on those in the fledgling Federation.
As a result, they had won a place in it, and their planet, while still mostly ruined and demarcated into two clear cases of rich and poor, had gotten much in the way of tech and aid from the Federation. Tech and aid that helped them to rebuild the still habitable areas until great cities once more stood.
Jessica had grown up in Old Toronto, below ground. Her father had been a smoke boiler, a man who kept the stacks of sun batteries working, and her mother had been a servant in a Federation house.
When she had been eight, her father had sold her into service to the Youth Brigade in order to pay for a medical procedure to save his life.
She had been given a bag and a rake and sent down to the bowels of the tunnels that lay just below the exquisite and guarded communities that those who could afford to live above resided in. Her job had been to gather up as much of the trash as possible every day and take it to the incinerator and compress stations, also below the communities. She knew, going in, that she had little chance of living more than a year at that job. If she didn’t fall off a rope trestle or catch a sickness from the trash and other things down there, she would likely be killed by a terra rat.
Terra rats had long heavy teeth, and they could weigh up to sixty pounds and stand up to three foot tall. After Jessica had witnessed not one but three other workers—all of them adults who had banded together in an effort to survive those terra rats, being killed and eaten, she had known just how expendable she was.
The very rich did not give a damn about the people from the below ground. That she had always known. That they would let them die so they did not have to deal with their own damn rats and trash. That had made her angry. She had been determined to survive the year of labor that her father had sold her into and she had been smart enough, after witnessing what the rats could do, to fashion a weapon for herself.
Her first training had been against those rats. It was only after a curious young man from above and his equally curious friends had come down to the tunnels to see if the terra rats they heard of but never saw really did existed that Jessica was noticed by the Federation.
That boy, who had been fourteen and twice her age and much more than twice her size, would have died if she had not seen him and his cowering friends trying to flee from a pack of terra rats.
“Stop running!” her voice echoed throughout the tunnel. “They will kill you if you run; you have to stop and stand your ground!”
They hadn’t stopped, and she had swung down from her perch above, her weapon at the ready. She stabbed one rat and then scrambled up the perch again, her feet barely clearing the perch before the rats began to snap at the dead one, tearing into the carcass with real relish.
The boys had huddled in a blind corner, trapped and unable to get out because the rats were there, right in front of them. Jessica reached a filthy hand down. “Come on. Climb!”
They’d climbed. But the rats, which could also climb, finished snacking on the body of their friend and began to stalk toward them again, their long tails slithering and swishing along the garbage-strewn gutter tunnels.
The one who’d led his friends demanded, “Give me your weapon!”
“No.” her fingers clutched it more tightly. “You don’t know how to use it. I made it myself.”
His hands clasped hers, and he yanked hard. They grimly fought for control of the weapon, a simply sharpened hunk of metal she had found on the trash heaps and sharpened on the stone walls.
The rats got closer. One of the other boys screamed and hid his face. The one tugging at her weapon shouted, “You don’t deserve to live, and we do! You’re just a slave!”
Her scream held fury. “If you take this weapon you will still die because you don’t know how to use it!”
A hand met her chest. Jessica fell, her body arcing over the perch and landing far below in a trash heap.
The terra rats swarmed the perch. Jessica knew now was her chance to run, to let whatever happened, happen. The rats would eat and be full, and she could make her trash quota of twenty bags much more easily if she did not have to fear being killed and eaten.
Only she didn’t. Instead, she fished a heavy length of metal from the pile and ran into the fray, whacking one rat so hard it fell to the ground and writhed in its death throes. That bought her just enough time. She yanked her weapon from the rich boy’s hand and said, “Grab the ropes and run. Run!”
They did. She went with them. They raced along the upper rope walkways. The tunnel walls were too slick for the terra rats to climb but they could and did climb the massive trash heaps to get to those rope walkways near the very top arch of the tunnel, and she knew it.
She shouted, “How did you come in?”
The boy who had taken her weapon shot her a look. His face was solid white, and there were dark rings of shock around his eyes. His mouth worked. He shook his head.
