Prisoners of Darkness

by Jason Anspach

  Still, his training allowed him to surmise that they were moving northwest. He was sure of that much. He’d never lost his directional bearings, in spite of the lack of a sunrise or sunset. Knowing the approach of his shuttle, seeing the sun that one last time, and then feeling the pattern of the flight as it homed in… that was enough for him to keep north in his head. He hadn’t lost it in all the days he’d been underground.

  The pace was easy enough, thanks to traveling with a spindly-legged old man. But it was dark and unfamiliar. If the old geezer was bringing him all the way out this way just to kill him… it was likely that no one would ever find him.

  Two things kept Owens from dwelling on that possibility, though he remained ready for it. First, to kill a legionnaire is easier said than done for even the fittest species, and the old man didn’t appear to be in peak physical condition, even for his age. Second… something in Owens’s gut told him to trust the old coot. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious about how much farther the two would be traveling.

  “Not much longer,” the old man said, as if sensing the question at the tip of Owens’s tongue. “Name’s Crux, by the way.”

  “So I heard. I’m Ellek Owens.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said the old man. “Watch out now, narrow passage.”

  They took a sharp right turn in the darkness. Owens had kept his hands stretched out, feeling along the walls, and now they seemed to be closing in around him. “How do you find your way through here?”

  “Used to it. I got an ultrabeam, but I try not to use it. Fool thing nearly makes you go blind if you switch on after this long in the dark.”

  Owens wondered how the old man managed to keep that sort of contraband away from the guards. He didn’t bother asking. Instead, he asked a question that was of more personal interest. He had studied the Savage Wars extensively, had even written a thesis on the Battle of Larkspur while at the Academy. “You said you were in the Savage? Tell me about it?”

  “Yeah, I was in the Savage.” Crux cackled softly. “I was younger then. Still, I was already an old man by the time General Rex came on the scene with his young men and brought the whole thing to a close. Served twenty-four years. Most of ’em in combat.”

  “That’s a long time to fight.”

  “Coulda gone home. But the fight wasn’t finished. So I kept on fighting until I couldn’t any longer.”

  Owens smiled. There was no requirement to stay in the Legion for life, but it always warmed him to meet a leej who shared the urge to keep on fighting until he died. “That was a pretty rare occurrence back then, from what I’ve heard—fighting that long.”

  “Yeah,” Crux agreed, absently, as if he were concentrating on something else. “Most of us got killed before we had a chance to fight so long. The smart ones did their three tours and went home, hoping the Savages didn’t show up on their planets.”

  Owens grunted in agreement. The Legion fought the enemy on their turf, so their families wouldn’t have to face the fight back home. That was the thing that had the galaxy buzzing the most right now. With the fall of Tarrago, the specter of real, in-your-face warfare was a frightening reality for the first time in two generations. War was something that was supposed to happen out on the edge, or maybe in the mid-core in small doses. Tarrago had changed all that.

  The passage puffed a draft of stale air in Owens’s face. There was something alien in the scent. A sort of musk, or a mix of urine and mold. What could cause that?

  “Crux, you ever worry about coming across those… whatever those things are in the abandoned shafts? Guards warned me about them the first day.”

  The old man laughed. “That’s just to keep you in line. We’re the most dangerous thing in these tunnels. Leejes is always the most dangerous thing, wherever they are.”

  Owens let out a chuckle. That was true enough. Or at least it used to be. It was still the case in Dark Ops, but the influx of points and their lax standards had had an eroding effect on the rank and file of the Legion. It was concerning.

  “We’re just about there,” the old man announced. “Now, the boys—even though they sent me to get you, they’ll seem suspicious at first. But it’s just them being cautious. Understand?”

  “Sure, I understand,” said Owens, but his mind was fixed on just who these “boys” might be—and whether he had jumped out of the runkar’s arms only to land in its nest by agreeing to follow this old legionnaire into the distant darkness.

  They turned again, and a faint glow of soft, yellow light played against the uneven walls. It was a weak light, Owens knew, but after complete and total darkness, it seemed to him as though he were staring directly into the sun.

  “It stings,” the old man said, no doubt feeling the effect himself. “But it gets better as you move along. By the time we go inside, your eyes will be adjusted. More or less.”

  Owens wiped away the wetness from his eyes. They had always been sensitive. The shades had helped with that. Or at least, that was his thought; his wife had maintained that the shades only exacerbated the situation. Either way, he wouldn’t have minded having them now, as he trailed the shuffling Crux toward the bend in the tunnel that seemed to shield them from the source of the light.

  Just before reaching the bend, Crux held up a hand. It was the old, ingrained signal for his patrol—in this case Owens—to stop.

  Owens halted immediately, the sight of that upheld hand causing him to react in practically an instinctive manner.

  “I’ll go in first and announce our arrival,” Crux said, what teeth he had left glimmering in the light as he grinned. He seemed to be perpetually winking, and the shadows on his face deepened the aged lines found there. “Like I said, boys might be a little jumpy around you.”

  “You said suspicious,” Owens said.

  That constant wink intensified. “Suspicion makes you jumpy.”

  Crux turned the corner. “Okay,” he said to someone unseen. “I brought him.”

  “Send him in,” replied a commanding voice.

  Beckoned by the old man’s curled finger, Owens turned the corner and shaded his eyes with his palm. He was facing a dead end, a small cavern, that contained only two things: a soft yellow light that still overpowered Owens’s eyes, and twenty or so hard-looking men.

  One of these men, a man of granite with a flat-top and a neatly trimmed mustache, pointed at Owens. “Search him, and if he tries anything… kill him.”

  Imperial Temporary Prisoner of War Interrogation and Detention Facility

  Tarrago Prime

  Tyrol Gogan drove his gauntleted fist into Thales’s gut once more. For the umpteenth time, Thales wished he’d worked out more. Yes, since being captured he’d lost weight. But there was a part of him that knew if he’d done more core workouts he wouldn’t be suffering as much during these beatings.

  Sergeant Gogan of the shock troopers seemed to have sensed this and so had given this area the most attention in the beatings of late.

  Thales lay on the floor of the warehouse gasping for air. The weather had turned cool on Tarrago since the defeat. He sucked at its crispness, knowing winter was coming on. It would be a hard and cruel winter if they weren’t rescued, or exchanged, soon.

  And that was unlikely.

  Unlike many others, Major Thales of the Repub Naval Artillery didn’t hold out much hope for a rescue. The truth was, he’d never had much faith in the Republic. He doubted any rescue operation was underway, nor any sort of negotiations for some kind of prisoner exchange. He doubted anything was going to change in his circumstances.

  “Seriously…” wheezed Gogan, his bucket off, his face red and florid. “You’re gonna need to talk, fat boy.”

  The two shock troopers behind Thales dragged him to his feet. Stood him upright. Steadied him.

  Gogan hit him again. Savagely. Knocking him to the cracked concrete of the factory that now served as the camp’s interrogation center.

  Thales went lights out.

  Wh
en he came to thirty seconds later, he was still lying on the cold concrete and Gogan was going on and on about other prisoners taken from Fortress Omicron. About how they were talking. Telling all their secrets to get the orbital defense gun working.

  Thales resolved two things in his mind.

  This was a lie.

  And he would not talk.

  Again, the two shock troopers dragged him to his feet. Everything felt distant, and he wasn’t even sure he was making a conscious choice to stand. Only that his mind and his body were in a kind of loose diplomatic alliance to work together regardless of whether he contributed or not. The alliance felt very fragile.

  “Just stand there, fat boy,” sighed Gogan. Thales could tell he was winded. If only slightly. The man had pointed to a specific spot on which Thales was to stand. Thales marked the spot with the one eye that remained open.

  Then he shifted ever so slightly, hopefully without notice, to a spot just to the right of the one he’d been ordered onto.

  He’d read about that in one of his books. A book on escape and evasion written by some legionnaire hero who’d been taken captive. He’d read that you resisted in a hundred small ways just so your mind didn’t break, because then you’d start telling them everything they wanted to know.

  The Dark Legion, the Empire, whatever they were calling themselves, they wanted to know the secrets of the orbital defense gun. Very badly.

  Which meant, to Thales, that it still didn’t work.

  Which meant…

  “Cute,” muttered Gogan. He struck Thales once more. Hard.

  Thales went down, fading into a darkness that seemed like a hiding place. Hearing Gogan’s voice from some distant place on the other side of the forest he found himself running through.

  “Fine, fat boy. Tomorrow we hand you over to the pros. You want advanced interrogation… you got it. They know what they’re doing. And believe me… it ain’t gonna be a picnic.”

  But Thales was gone by then, and he only heard the words like some echo in a dream.

  Somewhere not this place.

  Not this reality.

  Not this war.

  09

  Imperial Temporary Prisoner of War Barracks

  Tarrago Prime

  “It’s gettin’ bad, Cap’n.”

  Desaix stared out the window of the old office park that had been converted into a prisoner barracks. At the compound. The razor wire. The prefab towers and searchlights. The new dark legionnaires in their armor. Doubled. All of it was hasty. The real base was up the road.

  After the Battle of Tarrago, they’d all been held in the massive brig facilities aboard the three high-tech battleships. Desaix had been interrogated, given the minimum information back, and then been transferred down to the surface. Once installed in the camp, they’d sat for a few days before being put to work on a crew constructing a road between the temporary barracks and the new base being built out beyond Tarrago Prime’s outskirts.

  An Imperial base.

  The base was massive, well designed, and definitely gearing up to start training shock troopers en masse.

  All captured personnel had been offered a chance to switch sides and join… the Empire.

  What empire, thought Desaix.

  But this was for real.

  Some had joined.

  Many had not.

  Desaix was a captain in the Repub Navy. He may have been wild and reckless and occasionally disobedient, which he liked to think of as daring and bold, but he was all in for the Republic. He just wondered if he’d ever command a corvette again. The Audacity had been blown to pieces. As he was being ferried away to one of the big battleships in an Imperial shuttle, the shock troopers who’d captured them had scuttled his ship.

  That moment had been like a knife right to his soul.

  And yet the Freedom had jumped away.

  The Audacity had at least bought enough time for the carrier to get clear of the defeat that was known as the Battle of Tarrago.

  So, there had been that.

  “I said, it’s getting’ bad, Cap’n.”

  Jory was right.

  Jory Moncray had been a sensor operator on one of the big destroyers of the Seventh. He’d barely escaped the destruction by making it into a lifeboat, but it had failed to boot up to jump. Instead he’d been captured and so eventually ended up here in the temporary prisoner of war dorm.

  But he was still a sensor operator.

  He was still listening and reporting in to his commander.

  He knew all the news there was to be known inside Camp Spirit.

  “Camp Spirit” was the Empire’s name for it. Their little joke. As though the only thing about spirit in this place was that it was being broken. Slowly. One long day at a time.

  Still, there was a worse camp.

  A small factory a mile and half away.-

  High value prisoners were taken there to be broken. What made them high value was the information they knew. A Repub corvette captain like Desaix was not considered high value. A credit a dozen, someone might have said. Desaix had seen two other corvette captains in the morning formations on other days.

  Then one day there had just been him, and Desaix wondered if maybe the other two had flipped.

  “Yup,” said Desaix. He walked over to the little stove they kept inside the cold barracks, lifted a pot of tea, and poured a bit into the prison-issue canteen he’d been given, if just to hold it between his hands. If only to keep warm. Night was coming on.

  He walked back to the window.

  The early twilight was a deep blue. Stars were coming out above, and the air was cold and clear. Up above, a corvette, a Repub corvette in fact, dropped down out of the sky, activating her landing lights as she approached the brand-new base in the distance.

  Ground searchlights from the defensive towers that ringed the new base came to life, caressing the falling ship.

  Across the silent forest, Desaix heard the comforting hum of the ship’s repulsors throttling up for landing.

  Jory came to stand next to him. “Enough of us have flipped for them to crew that vessel.”

  Desaix said nothing, instead thinking… Then they ain’t us.

  “’Specially when you consider those two captains like yourself mayhap have flipped, sir. Unlike yourself.”

  Desaix took a small slurp of the tea.

  A good captain, he reasoned to himself, would put together a resistance plan. Organize and escape as per training, and implement the plan when the time was right.

  “We’re leaving,” said Desaix. He took another slow slurp of the tea.

  Jory said nothing for a long moment.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “When?”

  “In about twenty minutes.”

  Then Desaix went over to the wall, levered out a loose panel, and pulled out a blaster.

  ***

  The prisoner transfer sled pulled into Camp Spirit with just two prisoners in the back. One prisoner knew exactly where they were. The other had no clue. She’d only just recently been captured.

  Atumna Fal had no idea where she was.

  She’d been interrogated at the factory camp. Questioned, really. It was little more than a prolonged question-and-answer session. A Raptor fighter pilot, and a junior one at that, didn’t have much anyone wanted. If she’d been a squadron leader, or a special weapons pilot… then maybe. But the questions she was asked covered only her actions during the battle and since. As though the interrogators were interested only in filling in the missing pieces for some permanent record no one would ever bother to read.

  She gladly told them how many of their comrades she dusted during the massive fighter engagements over both fleets. She leaned in and told them everything with a zesty relish, hoping to provoke some anger within her interrogators, enjoying pushing the ice pick into the wound. But the Imperial interrogators hadn’t seemed to mind. The questioning had gone on and on, covering an
d re-covering her movements during the battle and not really caring about much else.

  They hadn’t seemed interested in her time beneath the waters of Tarrago. Which she’d completely lied about, instead opting to paint a story of desperate escape and evasion in the weeks since the battle.

  When at last they’d added their bureaucratic signoffs to her data files, they ener-chained her wrists and ankles and placed her on a bench inside the main admin section of the temporary headquarters inside the interrogation camp. Toward dark they loaded her, and another prisoner, onto a sled and drove off, not bothering to tell Atumna exactly where they were headed in the early twilight.

  The other prisoner still wore the uniform of a Repub Artillery major. He’d been beaten soundly.

  He opened one good eye and smiled at her in the half darkness of the rear container atop the sled.

  “Major,” said Autumna.

  Thales started to laugh, then coughed up some blood onto the metal deck of the sled.

  The two dark legionnaires driving didn’t seem to care if he died.

  After a moment he leaned close. “You still Navy?”

  Atumna looked forward and then back, a worried look of desperation crossing her beautiful orange face. She raised a tentacle and covered her mouth on the side facing the dark legionnaires.

  “Nothing can stop us,” she whispered.

  Thales lay back and smiled.

  She’d given the correct E and E response.

  He coughed some more.

  Then, “Don’t give in. They’ll come for us. Republic’s not done yet.”

  She didn’t really believe him, and she was rather surprised when a few minutes later she was “rescued.”

  ***

  This was classic Desaix, though nobody who was part of his ad hoc escape plan knew it.

  Desaix was a gambler. Always had been. He knew that the new base was ready. That more and more of these dark legionnaires were starting to come down planetside and begin to form and train a much larger military force. He guessed that in time the prisoners who had refused to join up with the Empire would either be shot or transferred out to the base for some kind of conscript work. The time for an escape attempt was now.