Prisoner 52 (23 page)

T
he words of the Overseer followed him in this way, out of the door and then over the broadcast system when he had gone too far for the man to be heard and who would not dare pursue. He passed beyond the doors of the inner seal and then into the umbilical and looked out the crinkled drooping plastic of its walls to where the wreckage of the hauler still idly drifted through space. He wondered if the crew had had the time to begin a dash for the escape pods, if in their trust their sensors were even activated, and if there remained any chance that some of the men it carried were still alive.

His eyes desired to search elsewhere and he knew what for and when he relented they combed the stars for a greater blackness amidst them and the putrid sphere the sight of it seemed to drop into his belly. He turned round to look for it
in the void behind him and it remained hidden to him and he asked himself if he and the Overseer were alone in their insanity of it. For as great as his fear was for it, it was greater still that it should not be there at all.

Day 30

The gates opened and the heat struck him at once in rolling waves that felt to be cooking him. He breathed deep through the respirator of his mask and it rasped. He let the cooler, filtered air set in his lungs a moment and when he breathed it out again, felt the chill leave with it. Then the row of men before him started into motion and he marched forward with them.

They spilled out onto the ramp privy them and Sejanus looked out over its railing at the newcomers that were flogged at that moment through the gauntlet that he had once passed through, going naked over the sediment and industrial detritus that covered the floor. He blinked lazily at them and their ragged cries, listened to the sound of the breathing apparatus and then looked away. Airborne debris and particulates made black splotches upon his goggles and he wiped them away.

The rank and file splayed at the terminus of the ramp and the inmates went on to their appoint
ed crews and it seemed to him as once when he had seen a river blown free of the boundaries of a gorge and was loosed to roam across the trench-filled plains beyond. But those plains had not been dead and their grasslands not filled with the skeletons of a pined-for age. And they themselves were no river, but a black slog of mire and chemical and that obeyed no law save that which was forced upon them. He made thus for the great, jagged shadow among shadows that waved to him from amidst the tributaries, for it was a thing he knew and trusted. The Jedezian approached as he neared and they met with the embrace which was reserved for comrades in old wars.

"Welcome back." Jobaal said. "Master Control clear your head?"

"Are we still on the walkers?" Sejanus asked and parted from him, but kept his hand.

"Aircraft now. Atmospheric landers. It reminds me every time we put on a wing or lock in a cannon. The roar of the wind, the sound of the metal tearing free. The death cries of the
soldiers inside when they knew they are doomed. It was glorious."

"It's good you've got enough fond memories for two of us."

"Come, come, Soldier." Jobaal said and put his arm round his shoulders and led him away. "Today we forget what came after, and remember only what it felt like to kill traitors."

Sejanus heard through the grind and churn of the heavy machinery, the loud sparks of the welding cannons, a commotion. He looked in the direction of the laughter and the shouting and saw
against the wall to his right, in the shadow of the walkway that rested high above, a group of prisoners gathered round another. Him in the center gave his hand to any who would take it and Sejanus studied the blue armbands upon those he offered it to, the chains tattooed there and the beard of one known to him. They caroused and pushed the man about, but did not strike him, and the man he knew for Androsius made a whirling motion and began to handle something on the front of his jumpsuit. Jobaal followed his gaze and then back to its source.

"You go on ahead." He said to the Jedezian.

"Sejanus." Jobaal said, but let go of him.

"Go on." He said and broke away.

"You were just released." He called after him.

"Something I've got to do." He said and tossed his satchel of tools aside.

He came upon them as they laughed. He found the eyes of the man who had urinated in his NutriPaste and, though his face belied some new irregularity in their mirth, he was mute with terror. Androsius busied aligning himself with the man they had surrounded and in the intervening moments had been stripped and arrested, though he did not struggle. Sejanus approached the two men who were unoccupied and with their backs to him, rose his bootheel and put it into the side of the knee of him on the right. He collapsed sidelong to the left as his weight fell whole upon the leg that now draped uselessly in two and was held together only by the shreds of its sinew and flesh.

At his cries the others turned and let go of the man they had accosted. Sejanus put his elbow into the orbit of the man
who was beside him and upright still and then slipped a leg amidst his and ploughed him from his feet. Androsius fumbled still with his jumpsuit, stupid with fear and surprise, and the men who flanked him rushed forward to meet Sejanus. He maneuvered to his left that he might keep only the one man there in front of him and parried past the punch the same threw at him and gripped his windpipe and dug in his fingers, manipulated him thus to keep at bay the other who remained. This one struck round the man who he held and was beating into the side of his head when Sejanus collapsed the esophagus of his shield and kicked him away into the man behind and retreated.

Hands
came round his neck and tried in some way to get him into a hold. He at once bit down on the hand that passed near enough and put his elbow into the man's ribs until his grip weakened enough to throw off. Sejanus kicked sidelong at the man and drove him away and turned at the sound of sprinted steps behind him. He smacked the fist aside that came for him and stepped forth and put his hands to the temples of the Unionist who he found there, put his thumbs into the eyes. He screamed and flailed at his arms and the footsteps of the man he had left behind him faded away into nothing.

Satisfied, Sejanus threw away the head that he held and the Unionist to whom it belonged scrabbled blind and howling across the factory floor. Androsius fidgeted where he stood and faltered in his step
s wherever he took one and looked upon him with a sort of dumb fascination. He approached him and the man whose knee he had broken shivered and groaned between them, looked upon the splintered bones and blood that he cradled without any mind for the world save its pain. Sejanus kicked him in his jaw as he passed and teeth flew free in bloody arcs and his neck snapped. He went to Androsius and took him by the collar of his vest. He whimpered. Sejanus pulled him along until he fell and then dragged him to where he had laid aside his tool bag and rummaged through it until he found the hand-welder.

"Please, soldier." He said. "Please, I'm sorry."

"So now I am a soldier." Sejanus said and activated the torch and took the bearded man up by his shaggy hair.

"Don't do this. Whatever it is you are going to do."

"Hold still." He said and through his cries that sublimated even the terrible drone of the foundry burned into his forehead the broken chain and open hands that comprised the mark of a traitor, an enemy to the state and people of the Conilium of Mankind.

"There.
" He said to him. "What do all these tattoos mean now? Everyone will know what you are. Go tell your friends. Your fun here is over."

Sejanus stood then and moved from him and Androsius rose stumbling over himself in his hurry and shuddering for his pain, ran off as a man does in the kind of abandon that comes with great fears that he knows only the direction of. The man
who they had chosen for their entertainment entered his eyecorner and looked off at the Unionist and to Sejanus he might have looked at the passing of a bird, if birds fly in Hell.

"What was that about?" The man said to him and as though the end of one word were afraid of the beginning of the next, the beginning the end and dead as the stone and metal around them.

"Are you fucking with me?" Sejanus said.

"Tobias." The man said and turned toward him at last
, but looked elsewhere, and offered his hand. "Tobias Simms. How are you called?"

"Sejanus." He said and took his hand and crushed the limpness of its grip, though there was no pain that came into his face.

"The other one." Tobias said and Sejanus looked past him at the one of Androsius's attendants who remained, the inmate who had first seen him and relieved himself in his lunch.

"Do what you want with him." He said and took his hand away and his eyes from the
man standing furtively at the wall and then back to Tobias, who had still in the course of things to look at him. "Take care."

"I'll be sure to." He said and Sejanus left him standing there, staring off at an unknown point in the distance wavering in the heat of the factory.

Day 42

Jobaal watched the heads bob before him, those that were human. He marched amidst them when he could have flown, as the Khagani did when they could have been juggernauts. But these things did not occur to them. The Jedezian went on through the gloom of the broad corridor that for him was not so at all. The archway that led into the equipment room ahead appeared as under the light of day, and the holosign above it a sun that made itself indistinguishable.

He heard already the pound of the machinery and could smell the burning chemcial fumes. A haze overtook the air and all but the helmeted guards above began to wheeze. The pace picked up, never failing to. The filtration masks hovered before their eyes, watery now as the coughing fits began to wrack them. Jobaal's mandibles clicked together and shuddered with e
very breath of the noxious air. He could feel what was at work in his remade cells and wished almost that the deep inhalations he took, each day, would kill at last.

"Prisoner 192-10J!" An Enforcer called down and he looked up at the sound of his name. "Halt, and assume position."

The rail-turrets above him gyrated upon their lines along the ceiling and settled into place, barrels spinning and lasersights trained on him. A team of guardsmen streamed down the ladder from the walkway there and cleared their way through the teem of prisoners with the butts of their rifles. They scattered at the hits and thinned what remained of those heading into the factories. Jobaal stood alone and the Enforcers formed into a ring about him and drew it closed.

"I do not want any trouble." He said to them.

"Neither do we." Said the man who had spoken before, from atop the catwalk.

"Have I done something wrong?"

"Proceed to Courtyard 12, inmate."

"It is not Courtyard hours."

"It is now."

"Forgive me,"

"You're forgiven. Now get to Courtyard 12, or your escort will force you to."

Jobaal sighed as much as
his people could, a huff of acrid wind out from his mandibles.

"What choice do I have?" He said and put out his hands as if he sought something from them.

One of the guards waved active the holodisplay of his bracer and navigated its interface to seal the Jedezian's hands together at the manacles about his wrists. So entrapped, they led him away as pygmies might have done in triumph to their village with a foreign giant. It was in vain to think of escape, he knew. He thought. The agents of the vast complex men like these had created across the galaxy multiplied as the hydras of old. There might have been an end to them, but it was no end a prisoner could make alone.

"There isn't one." The Enforcer atop the walkway called after him. "Take comfort in that."

They escorted him back through the access tunnels of the factory, dim with the failing overhead lights and dirty. Blood stained the walls, remnants of old executions he doubted served as reminders but that no one had seen fit to wash them away. Every ten paces or so the splotches of red were caught up in the sprawling murals of Arbitronix United's glorious conquest of the outermost rim of known space. Suns, always suns, that he would never see again which were not realized in the minds of others.

The opened gateway to the subterrenean magrail port materialized beyond the curvature of the corridor and he could hear again the endless drone of Master Control, going on interminably in the maxims of man and the swift retribution with which recent uprisings and violations had been met. The vast interior of the platform lay empty but for the rising steam of the grates along the wall
s, issuing from he knew not what but imagined it some lower hell they were yet to be condemned to. Its ferryman pulled into the station as if conjured forth from the blackness of the tunnel, its headlamps burning through the dusk of the manmade cavern of rusted steel like the eyes of a great worm that had made it its home.

He went silently to the dark, stocky hulk of the tram car and its doors whined as they slid open. The Enforcers behind shoved him along inside and took their places around him. They were forced to the hard metal benches once the transit got underway and the broad quad-barrels of their rifles stared him down from where they were laid across th
eir laps. They remained in that way, no more alive than a portrait made of his people in bondage, until the train came noiselessly to a stop.

They went out into the receptory magrail port, dead as its mirror on the other side. Master Control spoke little here, and he could hear again their boots echoing against the grated floors. He looked to the ceiling as they walked him onwards and watched the water that dripped from the pipework. He listened to the whirr of the servo-mot
ors of the Enforcers' exo-suits and counted how they matched to the thrum of his nerve clusters as if they were timing them out. They mounted to the steps that led to the door of station, lit from above by the holosign that informed on the schedule.

Their boots fell hollow in the corridor beyond. It was a long corridor that morning, and a longer one in that moment. The Arbitronix holomurals that cycled and changed to either side of him seemed now to gloat over him and taunt. The Enforcers stopped him before a thin door
that was stuck into the wall not quite at the terminus of the hall and pounded on it. It slid open. They thrust him inside and between two guardsmen who flanked a narrow tunnel. The lift into which he was led at its end rattled up the shaft. He marked the passing of each lamp with a calm that built in him, like the tossing of waves against the shore as the moon rises. Things he had never seen, would never know. Born to a desert planet, and condemned to fight in wars for territory inhospitable to all but the life that technology had made possible. Now he was here, upon Cocytus.

The cage doors opened and his escort brought him to a
duplicate of the corridor from which they had come. They drew up to its single door and the man on his right scanned his bracer across the reader there and the door snicked open. Beyond were a cadre of their fellows and they thrust him out into their midst, but remained behind in the passageway themselves. The centermost of the new squad pointed with his head off to Jobaal's right and the Jedezian started in that direction, the Enforcers close at his heels.

He looked about himself and saw the high ceiling, packed with piping and wiring, and the great doors of the artery that ringed the ingress
es of the recreation pods. There were no other prisoners on their march and above the walkways were absent of their sentries. He had never seen them vacate their higher world and indeed felt himself in a dream, the in tune banging of their steps upon the grating merely the compounded noise of his sleeping hearts. They stopped before the door into Courtyard 5.

"Why are we here?" Jobaal said to them.

"Surprise party." The man said who had directed him down the hall outside the lift. "Somebody's planned you a little reunion."

His fellows chuckled behind their helmets and he scanned his bracer across the panel beside the huge threshold.

"Welcome, Enforcer Penders. Designation accepted." Master Control said from the speaker. "Doors opening."

"In you go." Penders said and motioned for him to enter.

"What is in there?"

"Guys." He said and waved his men forward and turned away.

The squad of men crowded up behind him and hauled him forward and their exo-suits contended at odds with the strength of his people and the mutations done to it by the foreign conquerors that now thought to move him. Their servo-motors whined and their heels dug into the metal crosshatch they stood upon and Jobaal had taken into the air a man in one hand and threw him aside into the frame of the doorway when Penders, shaking his head, swept around and clubbed him just beneath the cranial plating with the butt of his rifle.

He fell forward dazed into the Courtyard and grasped feebly at the hot pain that seethed from the vulnerable tissue he had been struck upon. The Enforcers behind evacuated the threshold at speed and Penders set the door to closing. The Jedezian found his feet in a stumble and spun round to crash uselessly against the
one partition that slid toward the other and he slid with it, falling to the floor again as the gateway sealed.

"Hello, bug man."
A  man said behind him and whose voice he knew, but was not relieved to hear.