Prisoner 52 (4 page)

Day 2

He worked through the dithering flow of inmates that he had been released into and
who were returning from work detail, the bulk of that horde already deposited back into their cells. He touched lightly the refab sutures above and below his eye and felt the queer bubbling of the flesh integrating with itself and took his hand away. His cell neared ahead and so he forced his way to the edge of the column and then on into his cell when he had come to it.

             
"All fixed up?" Anders asked from where he had sat before on the lower bunk, face cloaked again in the shadows of its own bones from the light above.

             
"More or less." Sejanus said and remained poised within the threshold, snapped his gaze to the sudden green flare of Dibsey's chem-stick in the darkened corner. "When do I meet with Nyar?"

             
"There's something I've got to ask you; something you have to answer for that to happen."

             
"For a lot of things to happen." Dibsey said.

             
"And maybe a lot of things not." Said Hulk, towering close at hand.

             
"I'm listening." Sejanus said and put his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat, around the shiv, and looked Hulk over.

             
"Bertraum." Anders said and put the sheen of his eyes in their self-contained darkness on him. "Old guy we have around at mess. Been here longer than any of us; couple lifetimes served, started going upstairs. He told me: that he knew your name."

             
"Said as much to everyone."

             
"He said you're a deserter, too." Hulk said. "He say that much to everybody?"

             
"Let it not go unsaid, brother," Dibsey said. "That beforehand you had murdered your commanding officer. In battle, more's the pity."

             
"I'm wanted in 12 systems." Sejanus said. "Everything from assault and murder to theft and failure to comply. Everyone has a story for how I got the start of it."

             
"Then it isn't true?" Anders said. "You know what it would mean if it was true."

             
"He's a crazy old man. You said so yourself." He said and stepped into the light of the cell and it shined down on him as through an oculus in the audience chambers of the ancient kings of their ancestors. "I did my duty, and fought for my people."

             
Anders nodded at the floor and stood, approached and embraced him in the way that he had only some hours earlier. In the intervening time a man had been required to die, and with that moment at its close he now knew it was under debate on his word whether or not he should join that man. Then he was taken into arms again as a comrade, greeted as a friend, and thus were fanned the vascilations between life and death.

             
"Welcome home then," Anders said into his ear. "Brother."

Day 2

             
"A conqueror approaches." A voice called out from across the shorn heads and tables, a man beside the doorway into the mess hall. "Bend to him your ears, and lend to him his glory. All hail Julius Agrifficus Nyar: Orbidux of the Cocytus Penal Legion; Tamer of Rebel Taan and Scourge of the Union at Karkakarum; Master of a Thousand Head and Fief-lord or Tower 7. All hail Julius Agrifficus Nyar."

             
The trays and bowls and utensils had already begun to rattle and slam beneath his words before he had finished and the discord erupted into cheers as a figure filled the doorway. Some stood on the tables and others on the benches, but all stood. He saw hands raise outward toward the man, fist into hand a flat arc from the breast in the Concilium salute, and the great anthem of the Magnartig Hieraccies rolled out deep and triumphal from the thousand mouths around him. Thus the man stepped forth.

             
He made tall and straight for the ranks of his men who filled the hall and with his clear blue eyes focused on none of them, but all of them. He held up his hands in recognition of their resounding love for him and smiled in the way only leaders can. He then clasped them tight at the small of his back and with the rigidity of his steps the slicked black locks of his hair began to fall into his face. He smoothed them back again and entered the sea of hairless scalps before him, unalike but adored.

             
Julius Nyar shook hands with those he passed and bade them strength and honor. As the thunder of a storm now passed echoes hollow through the canyons and gorges it has left behind. He went slow through the crowd that welcomed him and as they might a hero kept too long away by his duty and was thus ferried little by little to where Sejanus stood with his cellmates. Anders waved him down as the rank and file before them and near at hand had begun to part in his reception.

             
"Orbidux." He heard him say. "Strength and honor."

             
"Strength and honor." His commander said and shook his hand and made to pass by, but Anders took him by the arm.

             
"Your captivity went well?" He asked.

             
"As well as it can." Nyar said. "What is this? Why are you touching me?"

             
"There's someone you should meet." Anders said and gestured toward Sejanus.

             
Thus their eyes met, cold against cold, and they took a step nearer one another. It was as if two great spatial entites had broached one another and the intervening space that had once been cold with dormancy was now caught up into the warring conflagration of these orbital bodies. As if a thaw had come across the land and unleashed the life that longed to boil over beneath. Nyar stopped where he stood, but Sejanus came on.

             
He drew the shiv from his coat sleeve and slashed at his throat and, though the shock of surprise had been put into his face, Nyar had been quick and the blade cut only into the tough leather of his greatcoat. Sejanus stabbed again in a wild frenzy at his eyes, shifting closer to do it, and the other Blackbloods looked on mortified; the aura of invulnerability they had crafted for their leader had been breached and by only a mortal man. Nyar leaned away from the point of the knife and Sejanus made a quick step forward and slashed him across the bridge of the nose, down along his cheek. Then the others were upon him.

             
He wrestled in their grasp, shouted and raged at the man who stood smug again before him. Blows rained upon him from all around and brought him to his knees. Nyar took the shank from his grasp as from an unruly child and held it before his eyes, all but puncturing them. But he moved the point of the knife away and above his brow and there made a long, slow cut down to his quivering jaw. Sejanus remained silent beneath the shouts and jeers of the Blackbloods.

             
"I don't know who you are." Nyar said to him. "And I remember most that would try to kill me. I don't suppose it will matter now."

             
He placed the blade against the hollow of his throat and Sejanus could feel it pierce the skin. A gunshot stilled his hand. They all of them looked up at the detail of Enforcers upon the cruciform walkways above, rifles trained upon them.

             
"Release the prisoner." A voice called down to them from beyond the audio filters of the helmet of its speaker and the hands let go of him. "Prisoner, proceed to the mess hall doors."

             
He raked them all with a steady gaze, bloodied and beaten, and settled them on Nyar. A moment passed wherein they were swallowed into that primordial duel as old as sentient life itself, into a confused jungleplace that brooked nothing of neutrality. Then the Orbidux stepped aside and cleared a way for him by his assent through the Blackbloods and which led in their minds only to a doom they promised him.

Day 2

The auxiliary lift thundered up the shaft with him alone as its occupant. Above, in each of the corners, he saw the camera bulbs that wathced him close as a captured specimen. He looked up into them in turn and then away at the doors shut against him. High and to the right of the threshold he watched the altitude readout tick off with alacrity and for him it might as well have read the same from moment to moment, for all that
he felt it move. Then it warbled and the doors slid open with a magnetic sigh.

He stepped out onto a bridge of steel enclosed below and to the sides by walls of polymer glass and above by the tower's apex. A pair of guards awaited him and ushered him forward along the causeway. He looked out over the edge and saw through the thick snows and fierce winds the sprawling metal collossi that comprised the installation and how much they appeared the ruins of some dead race driven into oblivion by the freeze of their world. The Enforcer behind him roughly pulled him aright and he was taken through the doorway ahead.

Within was a solitary chair, not unlike that which had bound him to Master Control only yesterday and upraised from one of a hundred hatches then sealed away across the floor. Before them all towered a great pulpit and upon which was emblazoned the Conciliatic Crest in the fullness of artistic embellishment. The many hands of a striving and dismal people latched onto the Chain of Unity and pulling them up from above those of the Great Conciliators, the faces of whom he knew the artist could only have guessed at. The Enforcers pointed with their rifles for him to sit.

"Prisoner seated and restrained." Said
the Enforcer who flanked him on his left. "Prisoner 1771, Hastur Victor Sejanus, present for summary punishment."

"Thank you, Enforcer Girda." He heard a voice say from within the archway behind the throne upon the pulpit. "At ease."

The Enforcers glanced down at him from behind their dark helmets and went away to either side of the judiciary hall. Above a figure resolved from the shadow thrown by the throne and then came into the pale cold light that streamed in through the glass walls and sat down. Sejanus could see little more than the white of his hair and the harsh lines of a harsh face, the uniform that he wore in the most military fashion without risking presumption.

"This is your second day here on Cocytus, yes?" The man said and looked up at him from the display of a holorod that he had been carrying and now brooded over, squinted down at him but not for the light or the distance.

"Yes." Sejanus said.

"And I have it that you killed a man yesterday in ritual combat, and today you tried to kill another." He said and glanced back down into the glow of the hardlight screen. "But unprovoked, him unarmed. Is that also correct - inmate?"

Sejanus said nothing and the guard at his distant left took a step nearer as if that one pace of the many between them could bring about anything at all and shouted for him to speak.

"It's alright, Girda." The man said. "Very well. I remand you to two days isolation in your cell, isolation door and no meal or recreation priveledges. Your cellmates will be sharing your punishment."

"Have him shoot me, then." Sejanus at last said and pointed with his head at Girda.

"What's that?"

"You do that, and I'll be dead in two hours. Not two days. You're wasting somebody's time, so," He said and nodded at Girda. "Have him shoot me."

"It says here you fought in the wars. From before the Reclamation, even. Until
you killed your commander – and deserted just before the declaritive victory."

"I was a soldier."

"Then you ought to be familiar with the discipline here. If a man breaks rank," The man said and opened his arms to him as he stood from the throne as though in welcome. "Then the rank breaks him."

Day 2

He was forced to marching, the second time that day and both
of them a harrowing relapse into bygone days that had been the twilight of his self-ascribed importance. The part of a larger thing, now extricated, and so made the servant of something else as large and great and as terrible and which belonged to that unforeseen elseworld of the duality he had occupied all his life. That men such as he had been bred and trained to occupy. But amidst all these fellows in all its parts, he was alone. Apart from those who then leered down at him from the higher tiers and peered up from below and glared as he went past. The infectious element of a sole cellular body. Thus his cell appeared to him as though he had been headed elsewhere and was recalled to it as if by some sorcery and the guards at his back stopped with him, the agents of his fixed state.

"Step inside." The Enforcer said and when he did not slammed the rifle's stock home between his shoulder blades and he fell forward into his cell under the exo-strength of the blow.

"Under the summary punishment for Prisoner 1771, I hereby condemn this cell to two days unpriviledged isolation by order of the Enforcer-Captain Elias Mullins."

"Shut the door, Girda." Anders said from his customary place.

"Initiate isolation procedures for Cell 614." He said into the transmitter of his helmet, silent to those without, and there was a loud groan of metal as the blast doors began to seal closed between them and create for two days two worlds.

"Stand up, Sejanus." Anders said and he did so.

Sejanus looked between them all and listened to the sounds of their breathing in what had become their self-contained prison. He watched the spastic clenching of Hulk's big burly hands that even in their digits seemed not bereft of his muscle and then found the slow calculating stare of Dibsey as glinting points within the shadows of the corner, settled in turn upon them all. Anders stood and came close enough to again embrace him and Sejanus thought that if he did so, he might kill him. But the Blackblood produced from his belt instead a short, jagged blade - and the Enforcers who were yet outside the cell heard a scream, the first of many.