Prisoner 52 (5 page)

Day
3: Arrival

He knew most of them from the wars. It did not matter that he did not know them personally. They all had that look, himself stuck in among them. Cocytus was just another waypoint. Another stop. They had all been to several and found them wanting and so moved on to the next. Hardly hoping for something better, hardly wanting for something more. Birds following the wind patterns that tell them which hemisphere to make for at which certain season. Thus the solar trade lanes and backwater navigations of a thousand freelance pilots had delivered them there to that prison world, to Cocytus - to Hell.

             
"You're all here, then?" The voice of a man said through a subvocal microphone, he that stood far off beyond the field of heads shaggy or shorn but nowhere in between and upon the walkway there. "Good morning, gentlemen."

             
Their silence was their greeting.

             
"My name is Elias Mullins," He went on. "I hold the rank of Enforcer-Captain in the Collegia Vigilant, and I am your commander. It doesn't matter much to me why you're here. I know why you're here. I know why they're here, the prisoners." He then began to pace, his boots echoing against the grated catwalk. "All that matters to me is that this operation remains tidy, clean and efficient. How you keep it that way is subject to a certain set of rules. Most of which you're familiar with. They're in the Enforcer's Codex; they were in your training. You're all enrolled in the Guild. But out here we've had to improvise, and there's a few things you might not be aware of."

             
He turned about to the immense wall behind him and waved a gloved hand at it and the black bulge there that was the holoeye broadcast its display, huge as the dimensions of the auditorium. The great plain of blue bathed them all in its glow as the overhead lights dimmed. Images from inmate processing were the first to appear, materializing large and then sliding away small and into long lines of tiny faces. Muted recordings of intrapopulation violence came next. The Enforcer-Captain turned back round to face them as it began to display attacks on the guards themselves.

             
"We house here the inmates that no other prison world will take or those who the Concilium is too ashamed to kill, the ones who still might have a use. And under no circumstances do we interact with the prisoner after he is escorted to his cell until he is to be released or transferred or summoned." He said and turned to the side and waved his hand at the holodisplay. "These are the separate routes you will use to navigate the complex. They are situated at a minimum height of 15 meters above the prisoner at all times. They are completely enclosed by polymer shielding and equipped with rail turrets. There is no gods-damned reason for you to ever venture beyond them. At no point are you permitted to leave these corridors and engage the prisoner without express approval from myself or the Overseer. Is that understood?"

             
He surveyed the tired and silent faces arrayed before him, his arm still leveraged at the schematics of the prison shown massive behind him. It was not unlike the rallies that most of them had experienced at one point or another, the words that loomed large before the fight.

             
"Now," He said. "I don't have to tell you that your life here will not be simple. That these men are dangerous and don't want anything more than to turn your face into a pile of goo. It will be a joy when you are reassigned by the Guild elsewhere to another prison or another detail. But while you're here, you're here. You will be under my command – and you will follow my orders." He said and looked across the ranks with his wild, peeled eyes. "Alright. Dismissed."

             
He and the others that comprised the audience waddled about face and then toward the blast doors that opened at the auditorium's end, opposite the platform from which their Captain spoke. The specters of cryo-sleep kept their lips sealed, their eyes forward. His feet moved for him and sensed the push of those behind and the stall of those ahead. He had a mind only for the lights that shone beyond the threshold of the gateway and he stared at them idly. They blurred into one another as the sweat beaded upon his brow. His veins burned. The old wound howled for the auto-hypos stowed away with his luggage and made an antagonist of the world around him. More so than it already was.

Day 3: Night

He stumbled through the doorway and crashed to the floor before the toilet and crawled onto the bowl. It rose within him. He could feel it as he would feel a thousand razors following the line of his intestines all on to his throat. The stuff came until it was lodged there and his eyes began to water and his lungs hadn't the air even to wheeze. Finally the obstruction sprayed out of a sudden past his teeth and into the water of the toilet as a great globule. Silver, congealed and foul. Next was the outpour and he was long in purging the metallic fluid from his body and soon it was all mixed with bad alchohol and worse food. A kaleidoscope of wastes that swilled within the toilet.

She got out from the bed and went to the bathroom. A chem-stick hung lazily from her fingers, long and lithe and bony like the rest of her. Its vapors twirled in the harsh light and dissipated against the ceiling. She stood in the doorway and leaned against the threshold and the outside curve of her hips was white against the blackness of the bedroom beyond. Her arm hardly cupped her breasts as she clasped herself, the other that held the inhalant set upright upon it and leaning delicately away. He looked up from the sink and into the mirror at his pale face and then at her reflection.

"You should go." He said. "My bracer's on the table by the bed."

"I can stay if you want," She said. "It won't cost you nothing; you ain't like the rest of em."

"That's why you should go."

"Alright, chiefy." She said. "Don't be a stranger."

She flicked the chem-stick past his shoulder and into the toilet bowl and turned and went out into the dark of the apartment. The hourglass of her body swayed until it faded from the light of the bathroom entirely.

"Don't worry about the money neither," He heard her call from somewhere in that absence of light. "I won't take more than what's owed."

He said nothing and triggered the spigot of the sink and doused his face again. It never drove anything away and it didn't then. Outside in the room the door snicked open and he heard the patter of her footsteps go out and into the hallway. He looked at himself again in the mirror and into his own bloodshot eyes and then at the dark bulb that protruded from his breast, above his heart. He set his fingertip against the biometric lock beneath it and its holodisplay flickered into life, broadcast against the bathroom wall.

He read his name there, the letters all arrayed in a bright blue above his service photo. Dressed in the black, his stare dead and grim. He looked over the record detailed beside it all and then the commendations listed beneath that and at these he keyed the holodisplay into inactivity. Tezac waved the sink off and the lights and departed the bathroom. He made for a panel upon the wall beside the open doorway that led out into the hall. He depressed the button that would shut it and then that which communicated elsewhere.

"Reception," A woman's voice answered.

"This is Tezac Hotchkins," He said hoarsely. "I'm just in today. My stuff hasn't arrived yet."

"Nobody's stuff has arrived yet, hun." She said. "Just wait til the morning. Your uniform is covered; it's in the room."

"There's no way I could come and get it myself?"

"It's a long haul to take care of yourself when it's goin to be taken care of in a few hours." She said. "It's late. Get some sleep. You'll need it."

He said nothing more as he could say nothing more. The voice yet spoke, but the words meant nothing and were distant. Tezac let go of the switch and stumbled over himself toward the bed. What sweat there was on his skin made room for more and the room spun. There was very little that found its way through the haze and to his senses, save the pain. The pain that was with him always whenever the auto-hypos were not. The metal ghost of his hand coursed with it and the mattress was no comfort and the sheets could not warm him. There was no night that passed in all the housing complex worse than his, and he'd still Hell to look forward to tomorrow.

Day
4: Early Morning

He placed his naked hand against the biometric scanner and admitted his eyes to that of the retina. The ghosts of the hibernation pod were with him still and the sanctioned STIMs they had promised would chase away the fog did nothing of the sort. It had been a long voyage, hurtling through the Innerverse and then into the outermost reaches of the Outerverse. A frozen sojourn that lasted 36 months and had ended as quickly as it had began. The security globe above the doorway warbled and flashed the color of the skies outside and the door slid open, into the wall. Tezac stepped through and it thus closed behind him to bring round the man already sat within at the terminals.

"You the rookie?" He said and turned back round to the hardlight consoles that ringed the small extent of the room.

"Yes," Tezac said and came further within and looked about himself at the monitors and the holodisplays that the other guard manipulated infrequently.

"Take a seat." He said and gestured sightlessly at the chair that bouyed magnetically next to him. "I'm Leargam, by the way."

"Tezac," He said and extended his hand to the man. "Hotchkins."

Leargam turned around once more and looked from the hand to the man's face that held it out to him and then took it. They shook. He sat down on the seat indicated by his new colleague and waved a hand over the eye embedded into the lectern before him. Its holodisplay erupted and generated a hardlight console beneath it. He set his helmet down upon the shelf of the terminal bank and scanned his way into the database via its sensors. His fingertips opened the way for him and he set to the routine described to him during the remote briefing he was giv
en before embarking the better half of four years ago.

"You don't have any STIMs, do you?" He said softly to Leargam.

The man gave him a look and then said, "Son, I wouldn't go around asking that too often."

"Do you have any coffee, at least?" He asked instead.

"Coffee?"

"Black blood of the working man," Tezac said. "Coffee."

"Only black blood we got around here are the Ultracorist inmates and guards with misplaced values." Leargam said and scrolled his finger across the hardlight terminal to a new camera feed. "No, in so many words: we don't have any coffee."

Tezac shook his head and squinted into the brightness of the holodisplay's camera feed and slid his finger across the hardlight projection below it to scroll on to the next one. His enthusia
sm for it lilted the longer he did so and soon it seemed as though the business had swallowed up the hours of his predawn morning. It was not long thereafter that he activated the terminals nearest to him and programmed between the three an automatic cycle of the different feeds and relaxed into the weightlessness of the magnetic chair.

"How long is it until dawn?" He said to Leargam.

"Half an hour until we hit the alarm."

Tezac nodded and began to settle back into his chair, but then jerked awake at a thing seen only briefly out from the corner of his eye. He sat upright and threw himself to the controls of the terminal and navigated the display back to a previous camera feed. In his haste he passed well by it and scrolled back again to find the smoking paritions of a
man who had been moments before on his feet and walking. They laid both within and without the laser grid of his cell, still housing those others that slept inside. Tezac leaned close to the monitor and studied the dismembered corpse and found, he thought, the several pieces of its head.

"Leargam," He said.

"Yeah?"

"Feed 6," He said. "Tier 14."

"Cell number?"

"239. On the left, heading to the middle."

"239, 239, 239." The older guard said to himself and then, "Prisoners Jacobs, Seagrave, the brothers Liam and Olum."

He leaned closer to the monitor as Tezac had and his grey eyes looked over what he saw before him, a stretched plain of light to the sidelong rookie. He saw the wrinkles on Leargam's face that painted the history of his squinting so at such things many times before. He saw in the light the oil of old sweat that had settled on his skin and the grey stubble on his chin. But there was none of the palor of old age, and had he seen fit to do aught for the steel of his hair Tezac could not have seen him for aged.

"All life signs read as normal except for one." Leargam said at length. "Vidal Jacobs. One of the Gang of Six. Raped and murdered his way through the Imkrang system to seven standard lifetimes, four completed. Due for his next Delayed Expiration injection tomorrow. Appears that's our man on the floor, then."

"Was he sleep-walking?"

"Could be," Leargam said and floated over to the control station of the observation tower. "But it's hard to sleep walk out of night containment. Maybe he got fed up with 400 years. And another 200 to come."

There was a silence between the two and in the tower
which  encapsulated their own as the old guard worked the hardlight console broadcast before him. Then Tezac scoffed and shook his head.

"Why not just kill him?" He said.

"Son where do you think they send the ones who can answer that?" He said as he dug into the pocket of his vest for a chem-stick and at last took it into his fingers, held it up to look at it. "Alright: let's wake up the beast."

"Shouldn't we clean up what's left of Jacobs?"

"Give em something to look at in the morning and they're less liable to make something to look at in the afternoon." Leargam said and slid the chem-stick between his teeth and grinned at Tezac. "At least that's always been my motto."

He hit the lever with that smile. The sleeping pods of the thousands of cells thus all began to clank and hiss and beep at once. A horrid cacophony that seemed to Tezac to be without end and so signalled the end of time and of the universe and of everything. He fastened his helmet over his head and voiced for it to cancel out all extranneous noise. His world became silence. The world of all the others screamed. So it was until he saw on the hardlight monitors that the inmates now writhed upon the cold floor, ejected angrily by their berths that now receded pityingly into
the walls again. He saw Leargam tap a key out from out the corner of his eye.

The loudspeaker whined beyond the cold walls of the observation tower and against the cold walls of the holding tower. The inmates woke shouting and jumping and cursing. Those who had been dreaming cried. It was a new day. A new hell. But it was and would be the same as that which came before it. The prison that was enough of itself each day to torment, but remained as malleable as it needed to disturb contentedness. It was the road that every man walked every day, but he could not predict what the weather had done to it across the night or who else he might find upon it. Only the men in the suits knew, the
men who looked on from the hardlight heavens, and they would not tell.

"Wakie, wakie." Leargam said over the channel. "Another day in paradise. Line. Come on. Line em up and shake em down. That's the spirit."

They shuffled out from their cells and packed themselves into ranks along the tiers, filling them up from wall to open edge. So many ghouls of old placed into new raiment and made to haunt new wastelands and new graveyards. Tezac wondered at the calm of those in front and that they should be so sure of the courtesy of those behind. He wondered if he might think differently tomorrow, or after as many tomorrows as they had seen dashed here. But these thoughts left him as his eyes left the lower flung terraces and moved across those above them and counted upwards the arrayed masses of prisoners until they disappeared overhead.

"There's so many." He said, looking up through the polymer window still.

"Galaxy's a big place." Leargam said into the hardlight console before him. "Our corner of it anyway. Initiating drone scan."

He pressed his thumb against one edge of the hardlight console and slid it across to the other. A hatch hissed open somewhere upon the tower walls above them and the distant mutedness of the noise recalled Tezac to a place far beyond the station. Beyond the cruel planet that enfolded it, and indeed any planet at all. A place or memory buried within the dark corridors of space. In what all sound is reduced to in the wake of a hull puncture. The life-giving atmosphere flushed out but enough lingering to transmit last cries, enough to know more of those swallowed than their silhouttes disappearing into the greater black. He reeled and curled into that depth which haunted him thus and remained there until the loud blare of the drone that bouyed outside pulled him back out again.

Its carbon fiber wings bore it forth into the fullness of the air of the tower, whirring and chirping and bellowing its electronic song. The guns of its selective lidar scanners ejected from its ovular hull and twisted and churned as their waves rolled across the shabby forms of the prisoners that they could reach. Thus it moved and ascended the heights and spun within them and catalogued the vastness of the human scree that populated it.

"And it's found Jacobs," Leargam said and dismissed the report the drone had beamed to his console before it emitted the deep blare again that sounded so much to Tezac as though it had malfunctioned.

He keyed on the loudspeaker again and said, "A few of you are probably wondering what it was you stepped in and why it smells so much like burnt flesh and why we're so late to the party." There was scattered laughter then as he went on that was not so scattered, for the few of many are still many. "This is a friendly reminder that spending the night outside the sleeping cells does a bright future make, but unfortunately not a very long one. And don't worry, if it fails to make that clear, the drones will be making the rounds all week to let you know."

The old man turned to him and leaned toward him and away from the console and said, "Time for grub." and there was none of the joviality in his voice. It was tired now, with the rest of him. Outside he could hear the hissing chorus of air pockets departing the storage hatches that opened along the tower and
the whir of the drones housed behind them fluttering out. On the hardlight monitors he saw the ornithopters buzz frantically about and then settle in new places to bellow commands at a new pack of inmates that shuffled forward silently.

Leargam rose from his Maglev chair and Tezac with him. The rookie followed the man who went stocky and
pale beside him to the door. It opened at their presence and they went out onto the narrow trestle beyond and had thus begun to retrace Tezac's steps to the barracks. But he knew not where the prisoners went somewhere behind him and feared that he might never know, though out of sight and out of mind must have been a thing pined for there. But for him it was the seeing and the minding and the doing of the thing that made the thing not so bad. And it was idleness that made for bad things.