Prisoner 52 (21 page)

He shrugged at Leargam and turned about and began his descent of the ladder. His feet rang against the rungs and the old man waited until he passed out of mortal sight and climbed down himself. Tezac called up the visor's three-dimensional map of the maintenance level to track their progress and balked at the great distance there was to climb. Then his foot met with something below that stirred beneath its touch and went on doing so, at turns writhing and jerking and emitting tearing gnawing sounds. Leargam weakly kicked his shoulder.

“What the hell are we stopping for?” He heard above him and the movement beneath his feet quit.

Tezac said nothing, but looked down between his knees. His light shone across the worn legplates of his exo-suit and between them down onto some deranged thing of limbs, of sleek flesh and black eyes but to none of them a face. There was no such thing but passing vestiges that squirmed beneath the folds of skin in a silent agony that was without end. At the touch of the light it fixed its manifold gaze upon him and roared from some maw unseen that reeked and sounded with the dying cries of a thousand voices so that he felt sure it was to hell that he had descended. The innumerable limbs quivered and reared up so that the aberration bared its underbelly to him and he saw in that fleeting moment the ovular pit of jagged, rotted teeth and from which torn shreds of viscera and clothing hung. Then it spun awry and wormed its way beneath what it had rested upon, into darkness.

A mass of pulpy, fleshy cords lay
below in its place and stopped up the shaft but for the space that the creature had squeezed between to escape. Bundled at its core were the fragmented remnants of a human life, naked and grown into the cocoon that had been vomited forth to encapsulate them. Here at a glance a hand and there an arm or a leg bent awkwardly and at odds with itself from the bulge and and thus as his light fell across the amorphous globule there began an intense mewling. He tracked the terrible wail to its source and there found amidst the limbs and all other human attitudes of biology, bound and one with the organic ropes, a head and it addressed him in the only way its slowly dissolving countenance could then manage. There was a plea in the simple and infantile cries that issued from it and this most of all drove him back up the ladder to the platform above, swiping at and calling for Leargam to hurry in advance of him.

“What was that down there?” The old man said and Tezac collapsed against the wall.

“I don't know.” Tezac said and leaned over onto his knees. “I don't know.”

“What was it?”

“Whatever it is,” He said and straightened. “We've got to get rid of it.”

“Get rid of it.”

Tezac fixed his eyes on Leargam and said, “Kernes will want to know about Tilden.”

“Kernes; Kernes? What about Kernes? Is he here? You saw what I saw. You saw it.”

“You want to explain what we saw down here?” He said. “To these people?”

“Tezac.”

“We'll tell them we didn't find anything. Maybe he deserted; went out into town and died. I don't know.”

“What do we do then?”

“What kind of temperatures can these shafts take?”

“What kind of temperatures?
”

“We'll burn it.”

“With what?” Leargam said and shrugged from where he sat against the wall. “You saw how big that poor son of a bitch was.”

“This is maintenance. Ought to be something down here that burns.”

The old man stood to his feet and the calls of the creature filtered up from the mouth of the shaft, as those of a man whose tongue has been cut out for speaking lies. Tezac gave the square of pitch and the ladder that upthrust from its reaches a last look and then started away with Leargam at his side.

“That thing better keep quiet.” The old man said.

“There's nobody to hear it.”

They returned to the offices before the elevator and went through the yet opened doors, one to either pair of quarters, and rooted through the storage lockers and bins stacked and arranged therein. A pile was begun in the atrium common to the rooms and in it was gathered a handful of tubes of lubricating oil; an electrode coupling; a small barrel of degreaser; and a spool of wiring. Tezac found Leargam standing beside the mound as he returned with this last, staring into it.

“Is this everything?” He asked.

“Everything.” The old man said.

“Is there a problem?” Tezac said and bent to work at the cache of supplies before him.
              “That boy,” He said and then glanced off to the darkness of the corridor and the officorial chamber that lay beyond it. “And that thing. It don't sit right. Burning him up like this, like a hunk of garbage clogging up the incinerator.”

“You think he wants to stick around?”

“We can't cut him out? We can't get that Katherine or whatever her name is down here with a surgical laser?”

“Would you want to see this, any of this, if you had a choice?” He told him. “Besides: nobody can know about this but us. Ain't nothing to cut out, old man. That thing didn't just wrap him up, or maybe it did. At first. I don't know what it did, or what it even is.”

“So we'll just toss a firebomb down on it. Go back to Suzie's for drinks afterwards.”

“We don't have the luxury to care right now. Might be we've got
enough time to quash this and that's it. People start asking questions and they'll get to thinking we either killed him or we went nuts.” He said and fastened the electrode coupling to the ends of several stripped wires cut from the spool. “And that's not even my primary concern.”

             
“There's a primary concern here?”

             
“Command gets wind of this and the port'll shut down. No port, no offworld shuttles. No offworld shuttle, we might as well go ahead and eat our guns while we're down here and out of the way. We need to get rid of Tilden."

"Get rid of Tilden, what,"

"Something's coming, something's already here.” Tezac said and took a light-disc from the bandolier about him and pried open the underside with the point of the knife. “We've got to leave, Leargam. Katherine and me, we're getting out the next transport that docks.”

“What about everybody else here, kid? You know how long I've been here? How many of these guys I know, whose families I know? You just showed up. Now I gave my eyes for all your bullshit already, and I'm not leaving my friends to die.”

“How many of your friends came and saw you in the MedVault? Huh, old man?” He said and affixed the trailing ends of the wires that looped about the fixtures of the coupling to those of the light-disc's miniature battery, leaving alone its control unit. “Know how many?”

“I was unconscious.”

“That's alright. I can tell you. Know why? Cause it was just me. Every night. Yeah, they were at Suzie's. Watching the new girls, boozing it up. I know it ain't always easy, the jams I've gotten you into; but you tell me now, who's really your friend on this shithole planet?”

Leargam stood by and watched as he stabbed the head of the canister of degreaser and spread the holes with the turning of the knife enough to drop in the wired tubes of lubricant so that five buoyed out of sight within the pungent liquid. Then he strapped the coupling overtop the punctured plate and the d
ismantled light-disc over that. A fountain of interconnected wiring tumbled down amidst the metal and tape.

“When's the next ship due in?” He said at last.

“In a week or so.” Tezac said and stood with the device in hand. “Maybe not at all if Command hears anything.”

“There's another option.” Leargam said as they made back for the shaft. “If that falls through.”

“What, take the lift by force and commandeer a frigate in the hangars in orbit? Fly out into space as free men?”

Leargam stopped and turned towards him and Tezac did the same.

“There's a smuggling ring out in the colonies, asshole. Once a month they launch a freight container out of an orbital catapult and there it sits until a bird comes in to get it. Guards at the monitoring stations get a cut to look someplace else.”

“We don't have a month.” Tezac said and tossed the bomb into the air, caught it again in the palm of one great hand
and made for the shaft. “Barely got a week.”

“Next one is in two.” He said and started after him. “I figure whatever happens out here in the installation will take more than that to reach the colony. All we got to do is get reassigned to the perimeter towers out there and wait and hope this planet can slow these things down long
enough.”

“We'll need a reason.” Tezac said and stepped to the edge of the maintenance shaft and at the
appearence of their light the moaning started up again from below.

“We don't need shit.” Leargam said and came to stand beside him, shrugged. “We'll just do what we  always do.”

“Make trouble.” He said and tossed the bomb into the dark below them and listened for it to thump dully against the mass of flesh within.

They heard it moan in some ethereal kind of confused horror. As if it were a force for pain blown across the planes and without physical limit. He placed his hand upon Leargam's shoulder and led him far enough away that the incendiary could not hope to cook them and then turned around. He held out his bracer and waved for it to activate and, glancing up at the shadows before them, navigated to the control relay for the light-disc. His finger hovered over the hardlight key and he peered hard into the heart of that abyss, illumined for the moment by their flashlights and host to a secret knowledge it would not divulge.
He depressed the trigger.

A great roar issued from the mouth of the shaft and precede
d a gout of red flame that shot up over the lip of the edge and rebounded from the ceiling of the tunnel to spill into it. Then it died away and in its place all that there was was a faint glimmering of cinder across the blackened wall beyond the ladder, the quiet smoldering of the creature that had been suspended therein. Smoke rose from the pit and he was glad of his helmet to not smell its stench. Seeing it ascend and play weirdly in the light, he looked away and departed with Leargam.

Day 29

“Tomorrow's the day.” Leargam said and twisted his glass between thumb and forefinger upon the lighted bar, a bridge of white in the prevailing purple
haze of Suzie's.

“Are you ready?” Tezac said, his voice rumbling barely audible beneath the blare and thrum of the music.

“Yeah.” He said and shot back what remained at the bottom of the tumbler, gritted his teeth at the burn and watched the girls upon the stage. “I don't know. Can you ever be ready for something like this?”

“I think you can come to terms with it.”

“Tough thing,” Leargam said and magnified his cybernetic view of the new dancer he had centered on, as if anything in that moment could make him think of something else, and then looked away. “Knowing what kind of jam you're leaving somebody in.”

“You get used t
o it.” Tezac said to the pitcher he held before him and then drained its dark contents.

He looked round at all the face
s he had seen and saw now again the many that he did not know. He wondered what the old man saw and wondered more at what he felt, seeing them as he saw them now. It was easier in that way, but he knew pain was the ultimate siege device. In that moment he knew Leargam's thoughts and that they turned in upon themselves, for they were his thoughts too. But for him the disconnect was buried somewhere deep. There was metal and cable and the great human need in the way of meaning for the old man, and what was more it could be understood.

But the
thing that called to Tezac called to him from across a great distance and when he answered it he found it was only an echo, ricocheting back to him from some unknown unsounded place. The sway of the dancers' bodies was the sway of weak trees in a high wind, the smoke of the guardsmen’s chem-sticks the old contrails of random aircraft.

And a blandness settled on him, a longing for some other realm beyond this one that he knew to be
only illusory, and in such moments he thought that space-hauler due to land that time tomorrow was his chariot to it. But a keening laugh or an inane attempt at humor and it was the old hatred as familiar to him as his name, as clear and real as the rock and stone of the oldest worlds. Perhaps it is so with all men, that over time what makes them men withers away without anything to nurture it and so falls prey to what makes them beasts. That which finds fertile ground for planting in all places.

“You find anything in those maintenance logs?” Leargam said of a sudden and recalled him from far off.

“I couldn't,” Tezac said and leaned forward onto the bar with his elbows, stared into the brightness of the countertop and breathed deep through his nose. “I couldn't access them.”

“You couldn't access them.”

“They know. Somebody knows. I need another drink.”

“Then tomorrow is a gamble.”

“I'd call it a shot at a few thousand meters. In bad weather and with a worse rifle. But it's your choice.” He said and punched in the code upon the menu screen for another pitcher.

“You know how expensive that shit is, don't you?”

“They only know something. Not what we know. Not exactly, so I think. But I can't say if it'll be enough to shut down the station.”

“Have you given much thought to how we're supposed to get to the damned station in the first place?”

“Take an HEV out to the orbital lift.” He said and wiped the froth from his lips. “Ride it up, and we're done.”

“That simple, huh?”

“There was a uniformity to all the logs. There wasn't anything reported, not anything in that volume, until a few weeks ago. Nothing. Not a godsdamned thing. For months.”

“That ship's been out here,” Leargam said low and calculated the figures invisible along the shelves of empty bottles on display behind the bar. “For longer than that. And we were out at that – that,”

“I know.” Tezac said. “It isn't the ship, even if it involves the ship.”

“What are you saying?”

“We ought to check the arrival logs. See who was brought in that day. Prisoner transports, all of it.”

“That'll take some time. And some doing.”

“Limit it. The person we're looking for: he won't be like the others. He'll be out of place. No prior convictions. No gang affiliation. He might even be in for something like a psychotic break, but so violent they couldn't have sent him anywhere but here.”

The old man shrugged and said, “Should we be looking at that Maerazian son of a bitch we hauled in?”

“I've fought the Maerazians.” Tezac said. “Border raid near the Tyrehean systems, and the things I saw in that battle,” Tezac said and nodded his head as he peered into the thick, black liquid before him in the pitcher. “But this isn't them. Now if you're going to ask me, then I'm going tell you to go back to your quarters and start praying it's Maerazians. That or put one through the roof of your mouth and call it quits.”

“Well I'm asking, and I ain't praying. Or shooting.”

“It might be worth asking instead: what's an Exodus Age, anything near that old, doing this far into Concilium space?”

“You think they're on the run.”

“I think it might explain the upswing in border activity GalNet's been reporting.” Tezac said and hefted his drink, inspected it. “You wanted my opinion, so there it is.”

“Maybe we ought to be thinking about what to do.” Leargam said and scanned the faces clustered about the stage and lit diffusely by the pink lights there, listened to the isolated laugher and dull murmur of a dozen different conversations. “If that transport doesn't come through, Tezac,”

“It'll come through.” Tezac told him. “Shouldn't be worrying about that.”

“Well I wish I had your confidence, kid.” Leargam said.

“What confidence.” Tezac said and smiled around the edge of the pitcher he then drained and set down, empty, and followed the old man's eyes. “You going to miss this place?”

“A place can mean a lot of things to a man.” He said. “Specially when it's seen him young and it's seen him old and he's gotten to know the difference. I guess I'll miss what it used to be, but that place's been
gone fifty years now or more. Nothing left here for me, I guess; nothing that's still mine anyway.”

Tezac could feel the slow creep of the alcoholic buzz peal back from its line of advance and in its wake he sensed a veil to be dropping down over him. A dense fog that could turn the most vibrant and teeming forest to a dark, foreboding wood that concealed the deep melancholies of outcast gods and beasts. It was the mist that was with him always and had taken a dusk to a golden day, obscured whether that day had ever really shone at all or was merely a dream. Something dreamlike, tied to no place or thing. A constant garden for the darkest of musings.

His bracer trilled and shocked him from his reveries with a shake of the head, as though his body had been the only true thing about him and his mind had gone on to distant pastures. He looked down and squinted into the cerulean light of the screen hovering before him and accepted the incoming transmission. He held the wristband out before him and the holoprojection erupted from its tiny bulb and hovered in the air above it, steadily receiving the feed. Kernes's face resolved from the scattering of light particles and Tezac felt a part of himself die slow.

“Evening, boys.” The Watch-Commander said.

“We're off duty.” Leargam said over the blare and thump of the music.

“I don't know if I'd want you on duty, how much two have been drinking.”

“What's this about, Kernes?” Tezac asked.

“You've got a special invitation, asshole.” He said. “Call me by anything less than Sir or Watch-Commander again and I'll drag the disciplinary squad out of bed to flog you on the spot. I figured a veteran would have understood something so simple.”

“A special invitation?”

“You are to report to,” Kernes said and began reading off another screen to his unseen right. “Garage 12, Sector 10 for overland transport to the orbital lift. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” Tezac said and poised his finger over the disconnect key. “Hotchkins out.”

He depressed the holokey and the display winked out. He let fall the bracer slowly and looked off into the nowhere between the feet of those milling about the stage and then up at Leargam. He studied the old man's iron eyes, the red dots that dwellt what seemed deep within, for what seemed to him an age and within them read what were his possible fates. Then he took a breath, the first in a long moment.

“What could that mean?” He asked him.

“There ain't much in the way of command up there.” Leargam told him. “All that's
planetside. I figure if they were shipping you out there'd be a bit more ceremony to it, probably talk with the EC first.”

“Am I walking into some kind of fix?”

“Special invitation, orbit.” He said and shrugged. “I say the Overseer wants a word. You better enjoy that pleasure-barge he's got up there as much as you damn can, for all of us stuck down here. Captains don't get asked up there, maybe one or two all the time I been here. Euphor world with thrusters behind it, that's what that is.”

“If he wants to see me, it isn't to treat me to a good time.”