Prisoner 52 (24 page)

Day 42

"If you're fixing to shoot me," Sejanus said. "Shoot me in the hallway here and spare me the suspense."

"Quiet, inmate." Penders said. "Nobody's going to shoot you. By the gods, we aren't even fixing to rough you up any. I'd sure love to. I'd love to put a bullet right between those eyes of yours. But I guess you can't have everything."

They stopped before the sealed gateway of one of the recreation pods and Penders swept round to the control p
anel beside its massive breadth, leaned upon the threshold to look at him.

"What's in there, lieutenant?" Sejanus said.

"Look at you." Penders said and snorted. "They ought to have put you all down the moment that war was over. You're an animal, even worse than that scum they bring in from the Outerverse. You put animals down when you don't need them anymore. When they get too old or too tired or too stubborn. I hear you like to tell people you're a soldier, that true?"

Sejanus didn't answer.

"No," Penders said and straightened from the doorway and turned to face the panel. "You ain't no soldier. You're just a dog. Outlived his usefulness. Some people got a nasty habit of keeping old dogs around, though; I don't know why. Out of pity, I guess."

He scanned his bracer across the reader and it thanked him and the door hissed where it split down the center. It started into motion and labored along its tracks into the walls. Sejanus caught a fleeting image of some grotesque of flesh and leather and black chitin in the far distance at the heart of the otherwise empty courtyard and
then was thrown forward through the doors that began to shut in his wake.

"You're late, soldier." A voice called to him. "We were about to start with you."

Something exploded across the tip of his spine and he fell to the floor. Clubs laid into him where he curled prostrate and, bloodied and beaten, the men who wielded them hauled him up from the floor and dragged him forth. He saw as they went the group of Unionists ahead that held a Jedezian of unmistakable size at their feet and it looked about slowly, without definiton as though caught in a groggy dream. They neared enough from him to see the angry red mark upon the head of one of the men, the man who had spoken, and he knew him for Androsius. He brandished a knife absently in the air and Sejanus was brought to him. He bent low to face him and held the knife up to his eyes, caught in a red haze with the blood that ran down over him.

"You see what happens, eh? You, you understand now." He said and struck him across the face, once then twice. "You think you are outside; you think that because you are the victor out there, you are the victor in here? That you own our world inside these walls, too. This is a different world. A universe beneath the universe and inside it I am the victor. I am the one without reprisal. You watch. You
will see; I will show you."

Androsius stepped away and
around to stand behind Jobaal and twirled the point of the knife so that his men would haul the Jedezian up. Sejanus heard him mutter for them to get the wing out and watched the heavy goassamer unfurl from the exo-skeleton, its fine bladed edges glimmering in the diffuse light. He drove the dull knife into the silken tissue near its root at the Jedezian's shoulder. It howled suddenly and terribly, called back to the waking world as Androsius sawed through the wing and it struggled as if through a stasis field.

He came to the serrated bone that hemmed the wing overtop and could cut no more, though he tried. Sejanus heard him
call for something as if through water and an old length of piping was put into his hands and with it he beat the chitin amidst the shrieks until it gave in a spray of acrid yellow gunk. He looked away when Androsius sidled round to the other wing and a hand roughly pulled him back and another held his eyes open to watch.

These figures resolved from the blur of the world and the noise they made seemed closer
now, as though he had travelled the distance that had lay in between. He had begun again with the cutting and Sejanus grapsed for the words that his mind would know out of the senselessness that had been struck into it. The screeching of his friend spurred his thoughts to the enigma phrases of the thought-mantra for clarity, that the tumblers of his mind might fall into place.

The pipe was taken up and the fog brought on by his own beating
wafted away. But his body remained fast and held from the torture that went on and, though he could struggle now against the men who held him, he decided all he had done was give himself a clearer picture of agony. He looked on at the breakage of the second wing's bones.

"You sons of bitches." He said and spat out the blood that had pooled in his mouth. "You sons of bitches."

"The dog speaks." Androsius said. "And to insult my mother. But of course I had a mother. Until we saw your assault barges up there in the skies. You must know: a soldier does not care if he dies, else he is not a soldier. But the ones he fights for, he must care about them. So here is one you care about. What shall I do with him next, eh? Should I cut out his eyes? Break off his mandibles? What? You tell me, dog too long in the tooth."

"Too long in the tooth." Sejanus said and
looked away and the Unionists began to laugh, but he hardly heard them.

"Bring in the other one." Androsius said and he heard the gate groan open again behind him and the men
who had bound the Jedezian went to receive the newcomer.

Their boots settle
d onto the floor before him and he looked up to see the man who had introduced himself as Tobias Simms standing with the Unionists. He looked about at that room as if the circumstances that surrounded him were of no particular note and only the novelty of new demesnes appealed to him. They took him away and the men who held Sejanus forced his eyes to where Tobias had been forced against the wall. Androsius followed after and spoke to him over his shoulder

"What should I do
with this one, huh? Should I do what you inerrupted before?" He said and drew close to Tobias and aligned himself. "You enjoy this, eh?"

"I'll be sure to." Tobias Simms said and a strange thing passed over the face of Androsius and then his head detonated in a cloud of blood and bone.

The men who held Sejanus loosened their grip as they stared agape at the seizing, stumbling corpse of their leader and he bit down on the patch sealed into the inside of his cheek and released its dosage into his veins. A cold fire spread through him and burned along the channels of his circulatory system and started his heart to beating so that it was fit to burst. He was conscious of a roaring, but heard nothing save the rapid pound in his breast.

He broke free of the men
who had their arms about his own and fell forward onto the floor and there spun over, put his boots into their knees. Blood spurted into the air beyond the bones as they splintered rearward and with a great snap like trees broken by the wind, heard for him like the hulls of ships blown out of orbit sinking and cracking beneath alien seas. They leaned into one another for support and Sejanus leapt to his feet and bowled them over.

He fell upon the one, beating and biting and tearing as the man screamed
and fought beneath him and he screamed back at him. He felt the air move at his back and turned in time to intercept the kick leveraged at his head and pull from his feet the man whose leg it was. He broke it and climbed over the man who scrambled and shouted to his friends for help and then Sejanus commenced to beat his head upon the stone floor. They looked from the man whose face was gone and then to the man whose brains he was pounding from his ears and faltere. He rose from the corpses he'd made and made their decision for them.

H
e ran for the first Unionist his eyes had found and the man backpedalled at his advance and another who stood beside him interposed. Sejanus registered the new threat and put his head into its nose and pulverized it. His head was thrown back and his mind briefly into senselessness. In that time Sejanus had struck his windpipe so that it no longer protruded and the man fell before him.

The two Unionists
who held Tobias still against the wall flew from him through the air and passed Sejanus on either side, blood trailing after them from the ruptures of broken bones across their bodies. Sejanus saw only that man who remained and at last fled toward the gateway which he saw then began to open. He reached him in a few paces and snatched him up with both hands by the ankles and his face caroomed off the ground. The Unionist reached for his own legs, that he might turn the tables, but the foot for which he stretched connected of a sudden with his face and did not cease til it had been rendered a gory ruin. Sejanus cast him away then as so much refuse and then cast himself about for the next sign of human life.

His attentions had settled onto Tobias Simms and he charged for him. Then he was torn away through the air by the ethereal quaver of the concussive pulse wave that clipped him sidelong and met with the wall farthest from the gateway. He crashed down to the f
loor again and collasped there to see the guard who stood amused within the threshold across from him. He rose with a cry from where he lay and the man started and blasted him yet again with the concussion cannon. The wave hit him full and flung him backward and into darkness as his head rebounded against the metal of the wall. He smelled his own blood and then nothing.

Day 43

Water sprayed down on him from above and stung his skin, cold and sharp
, and drove him back across the floor. He cried out and scrambled away from it to his feet, but the force of it knocked him down again. Then there was a squeak beneath the roar of the water and the flow dithered off to nothing. He could stand and see the hose which reeled now back into the darkness of the ceiling far above him.

He shivered and hugged himself against the freeze that set his teeth to chattering, watched his breath fog in the pale moonlight that shone down from the small windows atop the walls. He saw the snow flurries that blew across them and knew that they did so about one of the Courtyard pods that ringed the heights of the holding towers.

He hopped from one foot to the other lest they both freeze to the floor, so cold that he could find no place to set himself and huddle his naked body back into warmth. A spotlight activated and blinded him to all but the shadow of the hand that he held up to block it out. He tried to call out, but the chill caught his voice in his throat and he could only gasp for air.

              "Prisoner #1871, formerly 1771." A man said from somewhere beyond the white. "You have a habit, as I understand it, of causing a ruckus. You have a habit, as I understand it, of not doing what you are told."

             
"Where am I?" He said to the light, shivering.

             
"We cannot seem to cure you – can we?" The voice said. "It is futile, you know. You cannot win."

             
"I know it." Sejanus said and looked about the cold floor at his feet to find his answers there, augured the patterns of the frost the hose had made.

             
"I hear already the next words to leave your lips. That you are a man and not an animal. That you will not be caged. You cannot be controlled." He said and clucked his tongue. "You know, many of the Captains would have had you shot. Jettisoned out into an ice-ditch for the natives to feed on. Elias Mullins the foremost among that faction. But I chose to do the thing differently here, for you. Yes we may do whatever we like with you, and it will be met with no great importance. Someone may get angry, or many someones. But it is always the same to us. Put blinders on any animal and he will only see what is in front of him, which of course is all that you want him to see. So you see now, because I show it to you, that we have done wonders to convince man he is an animal. We give you food and drink, and you want more of it. Take it, it is endless. You want women, your mind is a harem and your body will not know the difference once it is hooked in. And drugs, well you know all about drugs – don't you, 1871?"

He felt his knees grow weak and his eyelids heavy. The frozen stone beneath him appeared inviting then and it was only the beat of his heart that told him he still was there. His limbs were faint glows of feeling against the outer cold, the outer c
old becoming all that there was of the world.

"In this way he is like a sheep." The man went
on like a stream over small rocks, like the tired early morning. "Yet even sheep are troublesome in a herd. He must be managed and like the animal we have reduced him to, we have reduced him also to the belief that only in great numbers lies great strength. His only hope to overcome the shepherd who keeps him for his own ends. So we keep him apart, in all the ways that matter. We keep you apart with your gangs and petty hatreds. What is it worth then, this distinction between man and animal? It is metaphysics, principles. Whether you call yourself a man or indeed the universe looks on at you and says 'ah, yes: here at last is a man', it does not matter. You see, I have locked you into a cage like an animal just the same. And like a hound that will not bring to heel, I will beat the stubborness out of you. Now, 1871: what do you make of that?"

             
"I make that you'll end up disappointed."

             
The man clucked his tongue again and said, "That is all, then?"

             
"That's all."

"Well," He said and the light dimmed, went out altogether. "If we cannot take the fight out of you, perhaps sub-level isolation can convince you to leave it behind, eh?"

Sejanus said nothing, but pooled his powers against shaking less and drew himself up. He looked from his feet to the holoprojection that had manifested in the dying of the light and bouyed in the air before him, large so that the stare he matched could swallow him. He studied the mild and preened countenance of the man he found in it, that looked upon all that he saw as part of some paltry play he had only then become aware of. Sejanus traced the lines of age that ran down from the ends of his lilting smile and across skin too darkened for so pale a world. Everything about him spoke of smelted copper, he thought, that a man unused to such things might mistake for gold.

A pair of guardsmen manifested from the darkness of an opening that had appeared along the wall to his right and came for him. He was too frozen to gather the will to move, but something inner and terrible wrestled with him anyway to escape. As it always had, no matter the lack of evidence for one.
He awaited them and when they reached him he would not turn until he was made to turn from the incautious eyes that watched him go upon the holoprojection. Beneath them he was comedy, and he could not help but feel it was a court he had been expelled from – and that he was the jester.