by Peter David
His head throbbed, his left shoulder and arm ached…at least the para-medics, or whatever they were, had bandaged the arm before stuffing him into the brig box on their plane. He’d thought it might’ve been broken, but it wasn’t. His shoulder had been jammed into the side of the cockpit, numbing his whole arm. They’d given him a drug he thought might be poison, but turned out only to be a pain pill. For some reason, probably leverage, they didn’t want him dead. Not yet.
Now he was here. He knew a prison cell when he saw one. Unlike Starfleet’s fancy bright brigs, this one just had the old-fashioned titanium bars. Sure. Why use expensive energy beams to hold prisoners in when plain metal would do the same job and couldn’t be shorted out?
Pressing his right hand to the stone floor, Stiles pushed himself from his knees to a sitting position. Tile, not stone. Big squares of rough-glazed tile. What was it his mother had called that color? Terra cotta.
Over his shoulder, the oval door or hatch or whatever it was that he’d come through clanked shut and barked loudly as it was locked from outside. Nobody had talked to him, nobody had counseled or advised him, nobody had told him what was going on or how long he would be here, or what the legal process would be. Did the Pojjans even have a legal process? How much of a coup was going on here? Was there a government in place at all?
Ashamed of his failure to do simple mission homework, Stiles realized he had no idea what to expect or any way to judge what had happened to him. The Pojjan soldiers had pulled him off the top of the mountain, bandaged his arm, run some kind of scanner over him, flown him back and dumped him into this cell. Was this a prison? Or just a holding cell? Would he be here for six months, or moved to a trial, a sentence, a hotel room?
“I’m not a criminal,” he murmured, trying to sort all this out. “Not a rebel or terrorist…so what am I?”
With notable effort, he stood up on shaky legs. His head throbbed relentlessly. The cell was dry at least, and warm enough. Well, at least they weren’t barbarians. And there was light. Not much—enough to see by, not enough to disturb sleep. All the lights were outside his cell, beyond the titanium bars. Probably they had learned that light fixtures could be cannibalized into lock-blowing bombs. He remembered that from the Academy alternative-energy course.
A bunk and mattress, a woolly blanket, a toilet, a sink.
“Welcome to Alcatraz,” he grumbled with a sigh. “Hope they feed me.”
“You’ll be fed.”
Stiles flinched back a step. His heart drummed.
“Who’s talking?” he yelped. “Where are you?”
“In the next cell.”
Stiles pressed against the bars, trying to see, but the cells were side by side and there was no doing it. The bars were cold against his cheek.
“Are you a prisoner?” he asked.
“Seems obvious.”
A male voice. Sounded young. Not old, anyway. Sounded like it could be one of his own team.
“Are you a criminal?”
“My incarceration is political.”
“Political…so’s mine, I think. What’re they going to do to us? Have they got courts on this planet? Are there laws?”
“Yes, they have laws.”
“How soon will they—”
“Not soon. They’re in turmoil here. The Federation is leaving.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that rumor…”
This was getting him nowhere. He couldn’t see the other guy, and if he asked too many questions, that guy would be justified in asking questions also and Stiles would feel obliged to answer.
Then again, why not?
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
“Zevon.”
“Just ‘Zevon’?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Eric Stiles.”
“Human?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Starfleet, then.”
“How do you know that?”
“The only humans on this planet are either Starfleet personnel or Federation diplomatic corps workers. The Pojjana would never put diplomatic staff in prison.”
“Ah…they’ll harass the military but not the civilians. There’s brainy.”
“The military understands that capture is part of the job. The Pojjan know that.”
Stiles shuffled to his cot and sat stiffly down, then sank back against the wall. “Are you saying that if I weren’t Starfleet, they wouldn’t put me wherever we are?”
“That’s correct. They wouldn’t have captured you at all. The Federation would be hostile if civilians were made political pawns. Starfleet is fairer game.”
“Oh, that’s great….”
Lying back as he was, Stiles gazed at his uniform, at the black field of shirt and pants, the ribbed waistband, and the poppy-red shoulder band under his chin. It looked strange with the combadge missing. They’d taken it. So they knew it wasn’t just jewelry.
“But wait a minute,” he began. “I was guarding a coach full of civilians and the Pojjana tried to shoot us down. Why would they do that? Isn’t that making them political pawns?”
“The Pojjana could have claimed the coach crashed. If they gained possession of the civilians alive, they probably would have put them back in the embassy and claimed some delay or other.”
“Buying time?”
“Most likely. The Pojjana are clumsy with politics. They do things without knowing why.”
“Just hedging their bets?”
“Perhaps. The lingering of a thousand civilians is easier to justify than the disappearance of one soldier.”
Stiles flexed his legs and winced at the stiffness. “What you’re saying is that I’m small potatoes.”
“I would suspect so,” Zevon confirmed quietly. “If that means what I infer.”
“Yeah…mmm…ow…”
From the other cell, the man called Zevon quietly asked, “Are you injured?”
“My ship crashed. I got knocked around. I thought my shoulder was broken, but it’s not. Mission was simple…if headquarters…if they’d just cued me in to the situation, none of this would’ve happened. They should’ve briefed me. I’m just an ensign. I’m not supposed to know everything. Somebody should’ve known this would happen…so they can have it. They don’t come and get me? Fine. I’ll stay here. I don’t need Starfleet if they don’t need me.” Staring at the floor tiles between the frame of his bent knees, he sighed. “I have a date tomorrow night….”
Prison. Prisoner of war? But there was no war. Why was he a prisoner? Did a cold war have prisoners? How long?
Ambassador Spock hadn’t told him how long this might last. Now Stiles understood—the ambassador had just not known. He had deliberately evaded answering. The answer was bad. More than six months?
How long would it be before his hair got long enough to braid? How much longer before he actually started braiding it, just for something to do?
Staring ahead at the next few minutes, with an aching shoulder and a throbbing head, somehow the concept of months eluded him. Right now even the concept of lunch was eluding him. How long before he got hungry? Would they feed him? Was deprivation part of the torture regime? How much did this Zevon really know about Pojjan habits? If Zevon himself was Pojjan, he might not really know how they’d treat a human prisoner.
I’m on my own.
“I wouldn’t be here if I’d had a better team,” he complained. “Travis was the only one with any off-station experience. It’s not my fault what happened.”
“You were in command of a landing party?”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
The other prisoner fell to silence. Stiles’s own protest echoed briefly, then died. Ashamed and angry, he sat up and stared at the floor tiles, memorizing the grout. As if framed in each octagonal tile, scuffed and scratched, he saw his teammates’ faces.
“Sorry…” he whispered. The faces all merged into one face, his own—scarred and shriveled like the picture of Dorian Gray sitting in the atti
c, hidden, corrupted with excesses.
He pressed a moist palm to his forehead, brushed back his hair, now gritty and sweat-matted, closed his eyes. Thoughts tumbled. Blames and guilts blended into a single nauseous mass.
“I shouldn’t….”
His voice pierced the tomblike quiet, then dissolved. He clamped his lips shut before he lost control of what popped out of them. Didn’t know whether Zevon could hear him. Hoped not.
Hot in here. It hadn’t been hot when he’d been dumped here. Was somebody playing with the temperature controls? Trying to break him down?
“It won’t work!” He vaulted to his feet, skidding on the tile. When nothing changed, he paced. Across the cell, around the perimeter, along the bars, to the toilet, back to the bunk. There, he faced himself again.
He turned and continued pacing. His arms and legs ached. Why was he hurting more now than when he’d crashed?
“Do you feel anything?”
“I feel insulted. I feel like I’m being laughed at. I feel—”
“That’s not what I mean. Do you feel anything unusual—anything physical?”
Stiles paused at Zevon’s sudden return to the conversation. “Like what?”
“Pressure…”
“I’ve got a headache, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No! Are you standing?”
“What?”
Suddenly his eyes began to sting fiercely, his head to throb horridly, as if he’d fallen into a vat of acid. Had he been shot? Phasered? Some kind of Pojjan weapon? Cramps gripped his midsection and he grabbed the titanium bars of his cell, contracting against them until his knees couldn’t fit between them anymore and he began to slip toward the floor. The floor was shaking! The walls were rumbling!
As he forced his eyes open, he saw the stone wall across from his cell now tattered and flaking before his astonished gaze.
Over a whine in his ears he shouted, “What’s happening! What is this? An earthquake?”
“Lie on the floor! Quickly!” The other prisoner called over the increasing roar of collapsing stone and cracking mortar. “Lie face up! Put your arms flat at your sides! Breathe deeply!”
“What is this? What is this! Why is this happening!”
“It’s the Constrictor! Lie down!”
Stiles pushed off the bars and rushed to the hatch through which he’d been dumped in here. He pounded until his fist rang with numbness. “Hey! Let us out of here! The building’s coming down on us! Let us out of here!”
“Lie down, you fool,” the other man said one more time.
“Ow—ah—ah—!” Grasping at his ringing head with both hands, Stiles staggered across the tiled floor, insane with new agony. As if iron bars were hanging from his limbs, brute force, like sheer invisible tonnage, pushed him to his knees. The floor came up to meet him and he collapsed forward, pressed physically to the cold tile as if crushed by a giant’s palm.
With one last effort he dragged his right arm under him and managed to turn halfway over, then partially onto his back. After that he gave in to the rule of sheer might. He gasped as his flesh flattened against the tiles with such duress that he could feel the edges of the tile and the shape of the grout lines creasing his body. He stared, consumed with fear, at his own arms stretching out before him.
As his face lay against a tile, he saw a crack develop in the floor, small at first and then larger, running through the bars and out into the corridor, then up the wall. The building—
Trapped on his side, Stiles tried to raise his head, to follow the crack with his eyes, but his skull alone weighed a hundred pounds. His arms, sprawled out before him, actually began to bow into the shape of the floor over the indentation of a drain he hadn’t even noticed until now. Insane with shock, he witnessed the surreal horror of his right arm breaking, his unsupported limb molding itself to the squared-off shape of the drain. His lips peeled back with sheer agony.
There, where his right arm lay shattered and compressed into the shape of the drain, a fissure opened in the floor, swallowing the drain’s metal grate, dismembering the tiles, uncoupling the titanium bars as shriveling compression took over and the planet opened up.
Stiles felt himself fall, deadweight, strong-armed through a cracking floor, and saw in his last glance the mangled building unravel itself and cleave down upon him.
Beneath the grind and roar of utter demolition, he listened as if disconnected to the echo of his own cries.
Chapter Five
“CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“You don’t have to yell, Eric.”
“We’re doing whatever you say.”
“Stiles?”
“The Federation will negotiate for your freedom. I’ll see to it personally.”
“Wasn’t so hard.”
“This is hardly routine for you. You needn’t cheat yourself.”
“Eric Stiles! Can you hear me?”
“Relax.”
Voices pumped through a haze of agony. Had to answer them. How else would they find him?
Cold stuffy air lay against tons of crushed stone and the sharktoothed edges of cracked and disrupted floor tile that now formed more of a wall, bracing one side of a deep fissure.
Faint light swam above, dusty shafts of light, offering no comfort but instead framing the ugliness of what lay above and around.
Water dripped somewhere nearby. Hear it, smell it.
Feel it—his left thigh was soaked.
At least I’ve still got a leg.
Eric Stiles tried to raise the leg he’d just rediscovered. The knee came up a few inches, which forced him to balance by raising his head and shoulders—agony searing through his right arm, shoulders, and right side. He threw his head back and gritted his teeth. The effort drove him all the way to consciousness, suddenly, like hitting a rock, and his eyes shot open. The light he had seen as a blur now focused far overhead. It must be…forty feet up. Had that been the cell, up there? Was that the same light in the corridor outside his bars?
“I hear you. I’m trying to reach you.”
Who was that?
Until he heard the other voice, this one clear and not far away, Stiles hadn’t been aware that he was moaning, wincing out the sheeting pain in his right arm. Broken. He remembered now. It had been sucked into the shape of the tile drain, broken in at least two places.
Were the bones popping through the skin? Would he bleed to death from a broken arm?
“Eric Stiles, speak if you can.”
No, leave me alone. I’m almost dead. Let me finish. Complete one thing. Follow through on this one thing.
Slowly, more slowly than the trickling of thought or water, his body adjusted to the constant pain. As he stopped struggling, stopped trying to lift himself, gradually his arm settled from searing mind-numbing agony to an acceptable throb with his fingers numb. The numbness itself hurt, but after a time he was able to concentrate on the hazy light far overhead and play mental games with it. He endured its mockery, accused it of fickleness, fielded its insults, and claimed it was impotent. Surging in and out of awareness, he conducted a conversation with the faint light and imagined that it was singing to him.
At that point, the fleeting thought that he might be delirious finally settled home and he cleared his throat just to hear his own voice. Just as he began to drowse again, something crashed—the sound of brick and tile falling.
Stiles flinched bodily and raised his head. “Who’s there?”
“Zevon.”
“Where are you?”
“Making my way to you. Can you come toward me?”
“My leg,” Stiles gasped roughly, “it’s pinned under something.”
Only now did he comprehend that his leg was caught, only when he actually heard the words, even though he’d spoken them himself. Was the leg cut off? Just an imagined sensation? He could feel his toes. Was that important?
“Did the building collapse?” he asked. His words echoed slightly, enough to offer a sensation
of cave dwelling.
Zevon’s response filtered uneasily from far away. “A sinkhole has opened beneath the jail building. We fell into it. It may have saved our lives by relieving the stress at the critical moment.”
“What stress?”
“The Constrictor. A particularly harsh one this time.”
Stiles paused and concentrated on breathing. He’d heard that Constrictor word before. Where?
Resting his left hand on his chest, he felt himself breathe. In, out, in, and a sigh.
“This is…this is really…what’s the word—ironic?”
“What is?” Zevon sounded closed-in, muffled.
“I pulled rank to get this mission.”
“How did you?”
“The ensign who was up for duty that night, he was on my watch rotation. When I heard about somebody getting a chance to evac Ambassador Spock…what an opportunity! I rotated the other guy to an escort mission off the starbase. When the name for duty officer came up, it was mine.”
Glancing around his jagged stone prison, Stiles noted with clearing eyes the truly freakish surroundings which would now only in the most generous of mists have resembled a building. Twisted pipes and structural supports lay in tatters around him, the walls of former street-level chambers now fractured in dozens of places, so that plasterwork, concrete sections, brackets, lathe, joists, and support rods showed their gory broken edges. His jail cell had been on the street level. Now he was forty feet below the street, in what could be described as a wide well-shaft walled in on all sides by the remains of the floors above.
“Still in the cell,” he muttered.
Stone and metal collided somewhere in the dimness, behind a huge slab of concrete that must be the remains of the wall between his cell and Zevon’s. How much of the broken building had wedged itself between them?
“Is there anybody else in here?” Stiles raised his head. “Wish I could move…I’m so…cold…”
“Can you see your bunk?”
Bunk? Oh—Stiles blinked and forced himself to figure out his surroundings. There was the toilet, standing on its head with a piece of support rod piercing the bowl. What if he had landed over there? What would that rod have done to his body?