Prisoner 52 (10 page)

Day 6

"This is different." He said as they took their seats at a table that was tucked away into the farthest corner from the door, the light of the globe at its center refracting through their drinks.

"The company bar." She said and gestured around them and hunched back onto her elbows, thin and condensed but looking at him full and smiling.

"It's dead." He said and looked to all she had indicated. "But It's nicer. Quieter."

"Than Susie's?"

"You know it?"

"Of course. Everyone that isn't here is there." She said and leaned forward and sipped at her drink. "Hard not to hear about it from somebody."

"I got the full tour. First day on duty. It wasn't as I was told."

"When did you ship in?"

"Two days ago."

"And you've already decided not to partake in the ritual." She said and mock winced. "I can't say that will bode well for your standings."

"I expect my standings are shot as it is."

"That's alright," She said and took another drink and brushed her
hair back behind her ear and he watched her delicate fingers move. "A guy like you is never in high demand around here."

"And what guy is that?"

"The kind that breaks the first rule his first day on duty."

"We're back to that again, huh?"

"I don't believe it was any of what you said."

"You know a lot about a person just meeting them."

"Were you in the Wars?"

Tezac looked at her and then slowly he nodded and said, "Yeah. A long time. Same as a lot of guys that showed up here with me. Both sides of the fence."

"And none of them jumped it to save a convict they've never seen before."

"I said already I don't know why. Maybe it was a lot of things. Most things are." He said
and looked at her across the table, leaning forward as if it was all she could do to put off recoiling into an earlier time, and so he let himself sink back into the embrace of the chair. "We were out there. At the same time. Most of the battles listed on his service record, I was in. So I looked down there and I saw what was happening and I thought of all he had to come through just to get to that moment. All the times he could have died in better ways. More important ways. And to die here, on this planet, like that. Like a dog, after everything. It just wasn't something I could bear. Letting him die, I'd be letting me die too."

"And if it happens again?" She said and
cocked her head. "Some time when you're not around?"

"I'll be around." Tezac said. "I have to be; I need him to live. I need to know if what I remember is what he remembers. I need to know if it was as bad as it was."

"Good luck convincing him to talk." She said and finished the last of what swilled in her glass. "You're still a guard and he's still a con, even if you both used to be soldiers."

"You still haven't given me your name."

"Katherine." She said and she held out her hand and he gave her his.

"Well, Katherine." He said and stood with their hands still clasped together. "I ought to get back."

She held her grip as he turned to go and as he turned back to her she said, "You didn't return the favor."

"It's Tezac." He said and she let go and so he made his way back across the bar. "Hotchkins, if you need to find me."

"Why would I need to do that?" She called after him as he stood waiting for the doors to open and then went out into the hallway beyond.

Day 7

"All quiet?" Tezac said and touched Leargam on the shoulder and sat down beside him.

"Not a peep." Leargam said as he leaned to manipulate the console to the left of him and then slouched back into his chair. "You're late."

"You're early."

"So you're late."

"Ihey'll keep." Tezac said as his fingers glided over the hardlight console before him and established its displays to his liking. "They're refridgerated."

"Ain't you full of pep this morning." Leargam said, reading the news bulletins he'd set to scroll across the top of the camera feed above him, and sipped at his cup.

"Is that coffee?" Tezac said and leaned toward him to see, excited as a child shown a new toy.

"Hotchkins!" His wristband shouted and he looked down to find Penders's face staring two dimensional back up at him. "Captain wants to see you. Penders, over and out."

"There goes my good day." Tezac said once his image had gone. "Start of one anyway."

"Wonder what that's about. My name better not come up." Leargam said, who had been looking at him and now returned to the monitor. "Hells it probably already has."

"It was me that did it. I'll take the blame."

"You're godsdamned right you will." Leargam said, scoffing. "But it won't matter, kid. Remember where you are."

"You keep telling me that."

"You keep forgetting it." Leargam said and set his mug aside and looked to him. "Everybody takes the blame that was there. Only way to be sure the problem's solved is to solve all parts of the problem. And I'd think you understood that after however many years it was of living it."

"Look I'm sorry, Leargam. I did what I had to do." Tezac said and deactivated his console and stood from the MagLev chair. "Can't help it now."

"You got me in a jam while you were at it. We'll be lucky if we're only suspended from patrol, that I can godsdamn assure you."

"Are you alright here?"

"I've been alright here since you were playing soldier in the Citadel." He said and nodded to himself. "Be alright when you're playing something some place else. Maybe a drug den once your meeting's through, who knows."

He could see Tezac linger out the corner of his eye; but the old man only watched the camera feeds until he shook his head and then was gone. He looked at last to the empty space the man had occupied and the doors that had shut closed in his wake and then down into the deep nothing of the coffee in his mug. He wondered to what fate a man who had arrived not two days ago had already taken him and why it was so. He wondered more if that fate was not the nobler one. If it was a fate at all, for there are no such things. A man makes his fate with his hands and the tasks he puts them to, or so he had always believed. But a life spent along the rim of all that was unknown and terrifying can break such beliefs in a world of choices. Absent the falsity of a revengeful cosmos seeming in some mad and ina
ne way to punish only the good.

Day 7

It was a wasteland that he had entered. The cold, silent corridors of the holding tower. The lone penitent of a truant exodus. Only the hollow blows of the storm against and around the complex accompanied and
enclosed him. Enclosed them all in that other world that was not so deserted as this one. Now it was only him that it confined to the tract of what lay ahead, immune to escape.

He had come to the empty intersections of so many corridors and glanced down them all to find himself alone that he thought to call out, but he did not. The doing validating the reason that lurked behind it. Justifying the feeling that what he passed through was more than empty space and more was left at his back than only the places he had been. It was a cold wind that blew beyond the walls and a colder one that blew then within his heart. The walls had eyes and the floors had ears and he dared not imagine what the heights overhead could contain.

There was a bright light that shined out at him as he passed the junction ahead and so he stopped and then turned and squinted into it. The emerald rays flickered out of a sudden and there beyond them, in their place, stood the cut of a man who nearly put him to the ground to see him. He was there as though it were still the day that the Citadel had finished with them, the day they planned their induction into the Order. Uniform clean and whole, powered armor not yet issued. No burns, no tatters. No blood, no bones. Only life, light life.

"Tezac," The man cried jovial. "Hey!"

"Ilyan?" He whispered and took a step forward and the light erupted again from the figure.

"Tezac," The man called out and waved for him to hurry. "Come on. We're waiting for you; we're all waiting for you."

"Who?" Tezac said and he put out his hand to shield his eyes from the light and then set forth down the hall.

"All of us!" He said and thrust his forefinger at the sky that churned unknown beyond the steel above them and his voice became many voices all speaking at once, his arm many arms that
all reached beyond their extent. "In space. You remember don't you? Of course you remember."

He had come near enough now that in a few more strides he might reach out and touch this man hidden in shadow. Beyond his alien radiance that consumed now all of the corridor and thrust all else into darkness, overwhelmed and nullified and broken through. As though its green waves had taken him up on some tidal current of dimensions and whisked him elsewhere. Burying him beneath the still and silent sea of a blackened world, the pale mote of green that was its distant sun shining down into it but piercing nothing and so only dancing refracted across its surface. Yet he was there still in the corridor and standing and with the voices of eons ageless and untold gnashing at his ears.

But the light was then gone. As the sun sets on a dying day and in the flight of its comfort gives rise to what can abide only night and what longs for its eternal rule. He followed its diminishment to the prism that lay embedded into the brow of what had been his friend, and he knew in some horrible way still was. Ilyan shuffled toward him on legs that were manifold and fused at the knee and without regard to the bend of any of them and so dragged behind him as many limbs that sprouted and flexed from his own arms, lost somewhere beneath. All uniformed, all torn and bloodied with the wounds he knew they had sustained.

Indeed it was into Ilyan's face that he looked; but bloated and pale and sagging so that it seemed by some trickery it did not fall from its anchors. He spoke some word or the start of one that was lost in the unwieldy speech of too many jaws, too many teeth and tongues all jabbering at once. Tezac faltered and retreated from it, mouth agape. It smiled at his horror and in doing so created competition between a hundred mouths that all vied for joy themselves.

But he looked nowhere but the eyes and of which there were only two and he knew to be the only true part of this chimera. This cruel gestalt risen from isolated memories and given new life from old disasters. He looked into the eyes of his friend and the incredible pain they contained, and they dissolved. Forked rivers into nothingness that crawled and shrieked with things seen and not seen. The flesh that drooped around them wasted away to putrescence. Fluids ran that filled his nostrils with the decay that lay only beneath the tides and bottomless fathoms of graveyard seas.

"It's wonderful, where we've been. Beyond thought or agony. Beyond memory." Ilyan said above the others that spoke as well. "Join with us. Free yourself. Complete us."

A cracking filled the corridor and then a splitting like the muffled puncturing of tissues and its legs parted from their contorted adherence in a deluge of dark fluid and drew themselves up high until its shadow fell over him. It made for him then with a speed that allowed for no escape and he stood his ground until the thing bore him down and enclosed his head in the yawning expanse of its conjoined maws and one throat and all the rotted jagged teeth therein. At last he drew up his fists and struck out and struck only air and then only air was upon him. He sat up from the cold steel of the floor and looked about himself and found himself alone again save for the storm, the constant companion.

He stood to his feet and peered down either length of the corridor and found nothing there but empty space that seemed without end and quiet of a depth that could smother any sound. Tezac
rested his eyes on the poster that hovered holographically along the wall before him. Upon it a man, a man like any other man. Rifle in hand and exo-suit gleaming in the imagined sunlight of a forgotten artist, eyes upturned to the clouds as though they held some fought-for goal. Boots planted firm on the rock outcropping at his feet and the silhouttes of his comrades in formation behind him.

'Arbitronix United,' it read above it all, 'Protecting tomorrow's future today'. He read the
words and he read them again and then glanced across the display that they described. The names were never the same, their faces or flags. But they themselves were homogenous. A sum that remained the sum no matter the equation. It was the same here that he had seen in a hundred elsewheres, a hundred other lifetimes, and in his ascendency lay their progenitor. Mere student to ready infantryman. The progenitor for all present things; the robber of all past futures. His birthright, the bargain of others.

             
Footsteps echoed from far off and pulled him back to the world that he had fled and was again drawn into. Those of another came soon after and at last some other lifeform but what lived out its life in his mind crossed into view, passing through the intersection at his left. The second approached him from beyond that junction and then passed behind him, bound to nowhere or to no one but all that lay ahead of him. He looked again to the holodisplay and then down the corridor to where the guard now walked and into the expanse that out of nothingness had birthed his fears. At once made barren and punctured, and thus barred to him.

             
He turned from it and made for the corridor's end in the intersection, but could not keep from looking back. As if only in secrecy could phantoms appear and that so long as he watched and waited and knew of it they could not hound him. But hound him still he knew they would. So do all men who conjure remembered travesties that they fear will haunt them, and so haunt themselves. He rounded the corner and hunched his shoulders, watched his feet as they bore him to the magrail port of the holding tower.