Prisoner 52 (6 page)

Day 4

Tezac bent double over the bowl of Nutripaste set before him and gripped the edges of the table and shook his head sharply.

"You alright?" Leargam asked, pointed at him with his spoon. "Or is the couisine not to your liking?"

"Preservifluid." Was all the man across from him could say, who took a deep breath through his nose before straightening up again.

"They're still pumping that shit into you boys, huh?" Leargam said and dove back into the grey putty of his meal and shook his head at it. "Well it is a simple fix to complex living."

"It's cheap and it's quick. Fine for the Mini
stry, and even better for BiotiCorp." He said and tensed again, closed his eyes. "But you never get used to it."

"And you've had enough to get used to it."

"Virtuous Order." Tezac said and waited a moment for another pang and when it did not come he picked up his spoon from the table. "Twenty-seven years. Give or take. Most of it in stasis."

"Well I'll be fucked," Leargam said and swallowed another moutful. "I'm sitting with a living breathing Lord-Knight. Not that I needed you to tell me, your size and all. And not a scratch on him too, fighting like that in those wars. Impressive."

"Not entirely." Tezac said and raised his right hand to him before passing his spoon into its fingers.

"Cybernetic?"

"Wrist-down."

"Cut off or shot off?"

It seemed to Tezac as though he had the practiced air of one used to asking such questions. Of one who had made such commentary before and perhaps had sat where he had sat then and making it a hundred times. The only constant in a hundred lifetimes, populated by the remains of expectation. And the man before him now did not enjoy being only the next, only the last in a long unfortunate line.

"Cut off." Tezac said. "Clean. Raylic warblade. Organic, self-producing acid."

"Rayl," Leargam said and chuckled as he swallowed again, but there was no mirth. "Man the stories I head about that swamp-covered shithole."

"Did you serve?"

"Me? No."

"And you weren't conscripted?"

"I was way out here when it broke that another Reclamation was brewing. Back when this place was just a backwater mining operation, and all we had to deal with was a few smugglers. Then the Concilium ships touched down and that was that. Pay was good. Hell, better than what we were hauling ourselves. So most of us stayed on. You going to eat that?"

"Not hungry." Tezac said and pushed the bowl away. "What the hells is it?"

"Nutripaste. Bioticorp's latest invention. Didn't they feed you this edible waste?"

"Intravenuous Preservifluid flow." He said, inspecting a spoonful of the muck that refused to fall away back into the bowl. "STIM cockstails when morale was low."

"That's why this is free." Leargam said and scooped out what was left of his own into a soupy mass that made Tezac's stomach churn. "Morning meal on company time, they foot the bill. Real food's in the cantina. Real girls, too."

The old man's smile and upturned eyebrows were interrupted by a chime from his wristband. He tapped the screen to accept the transmission and on it appeared a face Tezac could not quite make out at his vantage, shrunk to fit tiny dimensions. Leargam looked into the eyes of the man who it was on the other side and Tezac could see his shoulders droop in a sigh
that went unvoiced.

"Leargam," He heard the man's voice say. "Report to hangar bay 7, pad 12."

"You get promoted Penders, or did the girls at Susie's just give you more than your usual tune-up this morning?"

"Big laugh." The man said. "Round of applause."

"I'll be here all week." Leargam said. "What's down at the hangar bay that you're interrupting my breakfast?"

"Prisoner transfer. Impromptu. Military vessel by the broadcast codes. Sounds like some kind of emergency. I thought we'd get our best right on it."

"Can't hangar personnel handle it? I'm off duty until core standard 7."

"It's your block and it's your tower, Leargam. I don't want to hear it. And take that rookie with you."

"Alright," He said, and sighed. "Leargam, over and out."

"Does this happen often?" Tezac said.

"Military ship this far out?" The old man said as he stood and gathered up their utensils. "Maybe. A few times. None of this emergency landing crap, though. On my damn shift, too."

"What about this?" Tezac said and indicated the untouched bowl of sepia goo on the table before him.

"Degradable. Like everything else in this scrapheap." He said and went away from their table and deposited everything in the autowasher, tucked away into its own dingy corner of the dingy mess hall. "Be about 30 minutes, all gone. Spendthrift magic."

"Alright," Tezac said and stood up, hands on his hips. "What about my weapon. They said I'd be issued one on arrival."

"They're always saying one thing or another. Truth is, kid, out here, you're on your own. Unless you got me around - or in comms distance of course."

"Is my weapon within comms distance?"

"Everything's in comms distance on Cocytus." Leargam said and circled round their table to him. "Getting there's the hard part. But lucky for you, armory's right on the way to our own plot of landing pad hell."

Thus they went out from the mess and navigated their way through the third level
of headquarters, past the empty recreational rooms and common areas to the lift that waited like a tumor at the center of it all. Tired figures, some cloaked by their armor and their helmets and some not, shambled past them as the doors opened and Tezac could not help but look upon the shape of things to come. They stepped inside. Leargam pressed the topmost button. The maglev units beneath their feet engaged and, humming, spurned the earth.

The lift that was empty but for the two of them opened onto the lonely hall of the fourth and highest level of headquarters. Its gleaming stone produced no echoes, its balconies no commiserating figures. They stepped through and onto the hard, polished floors. Tezac looked up at the great hollow pyramid of steel that sat upon a plinth before them at the heart of the atrium, and within it the single chain of unity onto which the arms of the many were fastened. He had placed in his time such symbols upon many worlds, steeped in blood and stamped with iron treads. It was that of the Concilium, of Man so-called and less so with every Reclamation, and it stretched upon red flags along all the corridors that led away from the chamber.

"This is command." Leargam said and gestured about them. "Most of its the auditorium you already been in. The rest is all mangerial. Sterile, stuffy offices. Company shills. Our tech is tucked away in a Womb somewhere. Armory's that way."

"Why wasn't I told any of this before?"

"New arrivals are restricted to observation levels until two days time." Leargam said and led him through the archway of the corridor that led to the armory. "Then you go on response duty. Then you get a weapon. Then you get suited up. You understand where I'm headed."

Tezac nodded and said, "A head start."

The gate that looked massive at the terminus of the long hallway grew larger still as they approached. The thick blast doors were marked 'Armory', white paint over red, and took in the dimensions of the wall. Leargam went to the sensor array embedded on either side of the interlocking center and admitted himself to the electronic eyes of one form or another, of one sight or another.

Thus he stepped back from the scanners and their hardlight console flashed a bright blue before the doors groaned open, sliding into the walls. Pale faces and hunched shoulders tumbled out its ingress like stones let loose into a rive
r, held feebly at bay by the dam that takes only a little push if a little push was ever given. They made for tired greetings and paid no attention to the newcomer behind the old guard.

"Armory's all here," Leargam said amid the buzz of all the noise of the huge, alive place.

Tezac watched the next shift step into the supply daises and then as the arms of the machine snatched them up roughly by their limbs. They showed no signs of having noticed. Not even as the hundreds of spindly struts sprouted from their draping feet and went to work at fitting their exo-suits to them. Differences there were among them, but they all dropped when all was done back to the metal of the platform on legs of pliable stone. Used to the storms that come, not caring when they had gone - never truly leaving.

"Come on, you piece of junk." Leargam said as he fought with the console of one of the outfitter-machines.

"Please state designation." It said and he repeated it loudly and thumped its display pedastal.

The thing whirred to life and took him into its manifold grip with a vengeance and thanked him for his passcode. The earth moved beneath the metal at his feet and did not stop until the tiny manipulators grew from the parting floor of the dais as so many blades of grass.
The only kind on Cocytus. His armor was partitioned throughout their many hands as crickets the meadow. Tezac leaned against the wind that blew against him only.

"Should have retired this unit years ago." Leargam said to him. "I swear it's older than me. I do."

Leargam dropped to the dais in full raiment. The scaffolding of the exo-suit clacked against itself as he stepped down from the platform and gestured for Tezac to take his place, the servo-motors of its joints whirring as both leg and arm moved. It appeared not to be much, and less so to any being that never laid eyes on such a thing. But he knew the hole that could develop in a man or any flesh-based creature that came into contact with the fist of him who wore it. He had seen it. He had done it.

"Have at it." The old man said.

Tezac brushed past him and mounted one foot upon the dais and the other would not go until he made it to go. His boots fell hollow onto the cold steel of the platform and resounded against the emptiness that lay beneath. It seemed to him that he was already shut in and had already been again imprisoned. He navigated the hardlight console of the outfitter-machine and saw that his fingers shook as they went along the interface and prompted the mainframe that a new user had arrived at one of its satellite gates.

"Please state designation." Its voice said to him, sad. Itinerant in some hidden way.

"Tezac Hotchkins," He said. "Enforcer Code: 51322970608."

"Thank you, Enforcer Hotchkins, and welcome to Cocytus: Penal World and Colony for over 5 million inmates. Owned and operated by: Arbitronix United." It said to him. "Arbitronix United: maintaining discipline across the galaxy. Do enjoy your stay, and we know you will do your duty."

He waited rigid and silent as the arms unfurled from the pylons of the supply dais and closed in around him. He looked nowhere but forward, into the shadows that clung to the far wall of the long armory, and did so even as the cold metal clamped round his wrists and his ankles and lifted him from the earth. The air ceased to flow, and was not so cold anymore. Sweat ran down his side. The world closed in on him. It became something he must escape, but he did not know to where. There was nowhere to go but inward, puncturing a hole within oneself and watching oneself dissolve into it. Absent from the pressures that enclosed from everywhere.

All the years spent in small spaces and amongst even smaller company rushed to meet him from where he had abandoned them.
The many and miniature hands bore up the components of his exo-suit from the storage cylinder beneath and in their approach, slow and purposeful it seemed to him, he felt the urge to vomit up the nothing in his stomach. He saw in them the self-contained prison, the living to fight and fighting to live. No rest, no sleep. No taste of bread, nor water. The always of bloodshed, and pain known but not felt. The chemical horror that had released him in ruins.

A tunnel came into his mind and all of it that was not
a shadow was a blur, and so eschewed by him. It was the image at the end of it that he desired, a portal into a distant place that was only such as all things are in paralysis - one form or another. He saw through the bright frame of that else place and beyond his bed and upon his bed, his luggage. It was his comfort and he wanted to go there, but he couldn't. He wanted to struggle, but he could not. These dual worlds held him at their arms' length, considerable and the pull powerful. A fugue place took him into itself, held him in an oblivion of everything. A celestial body caught in the competition of its equal betters and moving only when they moved. Their energies, insurmountable of one another, demolishing him slow at his core. But then the mechanical limbs released him and he fell to his knees upon the dais and stood slowly.

A rack ejected from the hardlight console's pedastal that stood before him and within it was a rifle. He took it and thus it was his, as all things are that are truly owned. There was a
pinch in his left hand as he gripped the underbarrel of the gun and its display trilled at him, flashing rapidly from along the stock.

"Biological sample taken," His helmet said to him. "Arbitronix Firearm 32-7785b registered to Enforcer Hotchkins. Please use responsibly and accurately; remember: haste makes waste."

"Look at you," Leargam said and thumbed the key to retract his visor and placed another chem-stick between his lips. "Sleek, clean bad ass."