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way
down dozens of floors, Daniels told Critias, “We have heard of you
around here, marshal. My brother Irving was on the Gaoxing when she
floundered north of Berlin back in eighty-two.”
    Critias remembered the
incident well, “She was a fat boy reclamation freighter that
bellied down so hard she broke in half to the keel. Ghouls were all
over her looking for vittles like ten thousand pissed off honey
badgers. I saw some amazing sights that night. They tapped me for
my captain’s bars over it.”
    “ Irving is a deck officer
on a new freighter now,” Daniels told him. “He serves on the ‘Big
Red’ Fred Sanford, thanks to you and your marshals’ rescue team.
They only take like kids with no parents, so I worked my way up to
Red Rat One to be more like you guys, always in the shit and taking
none of it.”
    As thanks to the
compliment, Critias answered, “Your brother should be proud then.
The biomechanics won’t stew up those mechsuits for just anybody. In
the days of King Louie, you would all be Captains’ Table
Foragers.”
    The marshals and
reclamation personnel were both Foragers in the meaning of the
oldest term before that single service of ingenious survivalists
had split up into those who specifically harvested resources and
the combat oriented marshals who wielded the heavy weaponry for
protecting them along with everything else. The Red Rats were
scouts and killers rather than scavengers, but still part of the
Reclamation General’s considerable reach of power. The lord of
scavengers commanded more ships, ground vehicles, and personnel
than the Marshal Service did. The Reclamation General even had
access to the same heavy weaponry with the exception that he
required the Council of Governors’ approval, which he had little
trouble coercing. With all the power that the Reclamation General
commanded, it was little wonder that he could also call upon his
own fully mechsuited equivalents of combat marshals. It was not so
huge a step for Colonel Walker to leave the Marshal Service to go
work for the Reclamation General, and in some ways, it had been an
upward promotion.
    “ Been a long time since
the days when Foragers collected canned food,” Daniels reflected,
“but we need to keep the memory alive all the same.” He kicked open
the final door to outside; it led out onto a grated bridge that
reached out to connect to the top of the outermost containment
wall. Holding the portal wide for his men to pass through, Daniels
shouted, “Let’s get fat!”
    As the armored warriors
rushed out at a run, they gazed down at the wide breach in the
barrier left by the reclamation tank. Many unarmored defenders
toting rifles were also down below. They had arrived first to take
covering positions from where they could gun down any infected that
impinged the security of the compound.
    A dreadful howling
reverberated in the manmade canyons around the installation with
increasingly frightful volume. The infected made a distinctive
sound when chasing food and it invariably conjured up more of their
kind. The contagious chorus was always a frenzy of hunger, but
became a fanatical quest for mere homicide when humans were
available prey. The damned creatures still remembered enough of
their former lives despite the passing of inhuman centuries to seek
out men as though crazed necessity.
    While the ghouls had all
started out as human beings, nearly three centuries of hard living
had differentiated them into a variety of monstrous forms. People
gave the creatures just as broad a range of amusing names based on
their general appearance and degrees of mobility. The infected
regenerated their injuries, but it had its limitations that
included rampant deformity under some circumstances.
    The first enemies to
approach the opening in the defenses were the crawlers. When other
infected had first killed them while they were still human or some
later misfortune like the collapse of rubble had robbed them of a
limb, it rarely grew