Timae knelt over, short of breath, with sweat dripping down his brow. His once sharp green eyes now looked dull, and his black hair was matted with dirt and grime. The massive steel I-beams, modified with large gears on the side, had to be inserted into the gearbox one after another, and the cheapest, most efficient muscle around was human. The crawler had made it to a large plateau, and the captain had issued the command to lift it to clear the height, saving nearly 1500 miles of further travel longer over the Jakkoshic Wastes.
Before Timae's imprisonment on the SandCrawler, the HHS Sana'a, by the Iron Empire’s army, he had worked as an inventor. He had been influential to the United Territories of Zorathia discovering proper energy weapons first, and they had thought they won the arms race. The warlike Empire, however, proved that the most important thing on the battlefield wasn't technological prowess, but fierce and brutal determination. Every time they traversed a plateau, they were putting themselves at risk and immobilizing themselves if they were found out by a Zorathian scouting party, but the risk was significantly less than if they had to add the horizontal travel the climbing negated.
“I hate this life,” Yashim muttered under his breath, “But they would have taken my sisters if I hadn’t volunteered.”
“These jingoist puppets only know one, violent way to get anything done,” Timae agreed, “But I’m sure we’ll get free soon. At least I pray we will.”
The modular lifting mechanism used interlocking steel beams that were stored next to one another, with a large base platform that touched the ground to lift the large crawler up the nearly 30-meter plateau face. Each beam weighed nearly 100 pounds and required two people to place it in its proper order, without stopping the ascent. Working in teams of four per stack of steel beams to make the climbing process as quick as possible, Timae and his partner Yashim carried their next steel beam into position and waited for the agonizingly slow engine to make enough space for the next beam.
“Come on hurry up,” Alim shouted, emphasizing his words with the wooden club cupped in his hand, “We don’t have all day!”
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Timae clenched his fists, fighting the urge to lash out at their cruel taskmaster. They tried to avoid the gaze of their cruel taskmaster, but even that wouldn’t be enough to escape a beating if he thought they were underperforming.
After three hours of backbreaking work, loading and unloading the steel beams as they exited and entered the lift box compartment, Timae and Yashim were finally allowed to drink water.
“Thank the gods!” Yashim gasped, as he gulped down the precious fluid.
The dirty water barely helped quench their thirst, but it was enough to keep them alive. Now that the crawler was on flat ground again, or what passed for flat ground on the sand dunes, the engines needed to be fed fuel constantly.
“You, and you,” pointed Alim with his club, “You were going too fast and almost tipped the crawler. As punishment, you’ll take the first shift on the engines.” Alim smiled nastily, and swung at Yashim’s back, who obviously hadn’t gotten moving quickly enough. A random slave, whose name Timae had never learned, stepped in between Alim and Yashim and took the blow himself.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing!” Alim growled. Another guard, noticing the commotion, hurried over and grabbed the slave’s arms to hold him in place. Timae struggled with the guard and Alim cracked the side of Timae’s head, as the world started to rotate horizontally. The last thing Alim saw before losing consciousness was the samaritan’s form doubling over as a wooden club was savagely swung into his stomach. What’s the point of learning names when you’re all destined to work until you die in the war machine of the Iron Empire. Timae thought to himself, as the darkness closed in.
Timae was shaken awake some time later, he didn’t know how long it had been. But if there was anything to go on, it was that Alim wouldn’t ever let them sleep for more than four hours. The most important thing to Alim was that the job was completed as soon as the order was given, to try and get more recognition, and maybe some extra rations or spoils, from the captain.
The captain of the crawler, Noura Sareen, was a young, attractive woman with green eyes and black hair, both rare traits in the Empire, who often showed kindness to the slaves further increasing her list of uncommon traits. She would sometimes reprimand Alim for mistreating them, but Timae knew she was too busy and overwhelmed with the demands of her superiors to do more, after all there was a war going on.