This Bloody Game

by Dan Schiro

Four Wormrock Penitentiary men in fully armed warmechs came out to meet them and held a profanity-laced exchange with Costigan. Apparently the amended transfer schedule had pissed off the durok shift commander, but Costigan shrugged his way through the tirade. After the durok ran out of steam, he waved the new guards in with his huge mechanized hand. Costigan and the Briarhearts went through an administrative entrance to get the warmechs they would need to endure Bavara-5’s gravity. A stern poxgane correctional officer escorted Aurelia down an aisle between the nanofiber fences toward the “female-identified” wards, while the three guards remained to tower over Orion and Kangor.

  “Beastly, this one,” said a grayish poxgane wedged into the cockpit of a warmech. With a whir, he slapped Kangor’s shoulder and made the big vycart stumble. “He’ll fit right in.”

  Kangor growled but kept his fists at his sides as the durok shift commander took a step toward Orion. “What the hell is this one?”

  The other guard, a black-haired great ape, poked a steely finger at Orion. “I think they call this a hoo-man.”

  “Human,” Orion said, enunciating it slowly. “You were pretty cl—”

  A swat from a mechanized arm slammed Orion to the dirt, and the multiplied gravity made him hit the ground so hard he felt his teeth rattle. He barely had a second to get the air back in his lungs before the great ape hauled him to his feet with a jerk of Orion’s arm that nearly dislocated his shoulder. “You speak when spoken to, slag,” the guard screamed. “You wanna last a week here, slag, you shut up!” He shoved Orion forward so hard that he barely kept his balance. “Now walk!”

  Orion’s limbs felt heavier than gold as the guards prodded him and Kangor down the aisle between the nanofiber fences. Prisoners in the recreation zones hissed and jeered at them through the durable mesh, and Orion noticed a range of bio-modifications among them. Many had huge muscle implants, cybernetic body parts or bio-spliced weapons like claws, spiked tails or bulging venom glands that made high-gravity detention necessary. He also saw seemingly average beings from common humanoid races, glaring or cursing or expressing nothing at all. If they were here without any kind of bio modification, they were probably the most dangerous of all the prisoners.

  Processing turned out to be the scourging horror Orion had expected. Wormrock Penitentiary could have used modern bio-filters to remove any dangerous pathogens from incoming prisoners, but they found it more effective to scrub newcomers clean with a generous dose of pain and humiliation. After stripping him down in a dank cement room, a chuckling guard hit Orion with a jet of scalding water that smelled of chemicals and burned his eyes. Next, they coated Orion with thick spurts of briny soap that hit his naked body like slaps. Grabbing stiff-bristled brushes, they scrubbed Orion head-to-toe until his skin ran red, and then the water returned to batter him to the ground with its scalding spray. The whole time he yearned to release the spellblade trapped in his silver tattoo and rip the guards apart, but he held back according to plan.

  After that, Orion didn’t have to “play” the broken prisoner. His body ached as they forced him into coarse gray rags and ill-fitting shoes, and his head throbbed as he underwent a rough medical examination. Luckily, their machines didn’t detect the pure manacite twined through his right forearm at the atomic level. After a blaze of photography to document the prisoner and a quick blood draw to record his DNA, the guards dragged him into a cavernous cellblock. A few jittering glowglobes lit echoing, trash-strewn stacks that smelled of sewage, blood and sweating bodies. The guards hauled Orion down a long lane of two-man units and dumped him in a musty cell without so much as a “good luck.”

  “Dicks,” Orion hissed as the bars clanked shut and locked with a heavy bolt. For a moment, Orion lay exhausted on his back between two dingy cots, the floor sticky against the back of his head and hands. Then, in the shadows at the back of the dark room, a great hulk stirred.

  “Little friend,” Kangor said as he leaned into the dull shaft of light that reached their cell. He knelt down and hoisted Orion, propping him up against the sagging cot. “Are you hurt?”

  Orion took a few seconds to catch his breath — the amplified gravity had already worn him out. “I’m good, big guy,” he said, forcing a smirk. “Just wish they hadn’t scrubbed off my tan.”

  Kangor chuckled. “You do not tan, pale creature.” He gestured to his face and arms where the processing team had shaved away his orange fur. “I feel like tymic lion, sheared for the show ring.” He sat down on his own cot, the frame creaking under a vycart body that had slowly added layers of thick muscle to adapt to the increased gravity. “When do you expect our delivery?”

  “Soon, assuming the asset doesn’t decide to screw us over.” A scurrying shape caught his eye, and Orion instinctively called forth his spellblade. He lashed out with the clawed fingers of the gauntlet and snared a bald rat. “We have to act fast here,” he continued as he crushed the worming rodent in his manacite-swathed fist. “Once they start running our faces and biometrics through the datasphere, our cover won’t last.” He watched as the creature’s meager life force added a faint red glow to his gauntlet’s veins. “But we need the icebreaker before we make our move.” He opened his hand and held out the bloody rodent to Kangor.

  “So, we wait.” Kangor took the tiny beast and bit into it. “What happens if it never comes?” he asked around a mouthful of meat.

  “Like always.” Orion leaned back and closed his eyes. “We make it up as we go along.”

  Hours passed with little more than a few distant screams and obscenities from the other cells on the long block. Orion leaned against the cracked wall behind his cot and concentrated on slowing his metabolism to reduce the strain the planet’s gravity put on his heart. Occasionally another rodent would wander into their cell, and Orion would spike it with a lance from the fingertip of his gauntlet, capturing a tiny bit of life force for his spellblade and a little more protein for Kangor to add to his freakishly muscular physique. They saw a few guards patrolling the long hallways of the stacked cellblocks, but plenty of prisoners seemed to have an open-door policy here. A few stopped by to taunt the newcomers, but the greasy inmates hurried away when they got a look at Kangor’s silhouette and flickering orange-red eyes. The cellblock’s sleep cycle had begun and Orion’s heartbeat had slowed to just 20 beats per minute when he finally heard the clanking steps of a warmech coming down the corridor.

  “You slags enjoying your stay?” asked a scaled mystskyn behind the warmech’s diamond-glass bubble, his gray reptilian eyes shifting uneasily.

  Orion sat up and blinked himself out of the meditative state. “We’re finding the accommodations most comfortable,” he said, speaking the code phrase that Mervyn had sent along with the bribe.

  The mystskyn nodded and opened a storage compartment in the leg of his mech. “Then this must be yours.” He pulled out a blue-gray bundle and forced it through the slot at the bottom of the door. His suit whirred and he turned to continue down the corridor.

  “Hey, before you go,” Orion said, getting to the bars as quickly as he could. “Have you heard about the politician who got thrown in here? His name’s Zovaco Ralli.”

  They guard lurched to a stop and turned back. “I didn’t get paid for gossip, just the package.”

  “That was a sweet little windfall, though, wasn’t it?” Orion smirked. “There’s a whole lot more where that came from too, if the right guy is willing to play ball.” He shrugged. “Think of it as an investment in a future partnership.”

  The guard returned with a few heavy steps and leaned toward the bars to look down at Orion. “I heard he got buried deep, down in the third ward,” he said, his voice a low growl from his short-snouted face. “Wouldn’t expect a skinny politician to last long down there. Third ward belongs to the King of Bones. Not even the guards go down there anymore.”

  Orion nodded. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Don�
��t thank me, slag,” said the mystskyn, turning to continue his patrol. “I was never here.”

  Checking left and right to make sure no one would come ambling past their cell, Orion unwrapped the blue-gray fabric and unfurled his smartcloak, its many pockets packed with useful items. Within the bundle, he found his kinetic bodysuit, brassy datacube and a black data drive the size and shape of a railroad spike.

  “Okay,” Orion breathed as he held up the spike and examined the silver circuitry etched on its surface. “The icebreaker is intact.”

  Orion dressed in his combat gear and tossed his datacube in the air, the brassy cube struggling languidly against the planet’s pull. “Project Jailbreak Schematic 1,” he commanded, prompting a pre-loaded hologram to appear. “Show me the shortest route to the third ward cellblock.”

  The belabored device whined as it processed the request, and a red line zipped through the blue hologram, illustrating the path from their cell on the top floor of the prison to the third sub-basement of the massive facility. “Not good,” Kangor grumbled as he looked at the suggested path. “We’ll have to fight through three security checkpoints to get there.”

  “Lots of guards, lots of warmechs.” Orion narrowed his eyes and gazed at the glowing layout, his mentor’s Blooming Flower technique turning it inside out in his mind. “Alright, I’ve got an idea.”

  After sealing his improvised route in Memory’s Prism, Orion slipped his datacube into a pocket of his smartcloak and went to the heavy-duty lock on their door. He called forth the spellblade from his silver tattoo and put a fingertip of his gauntlet to the large lockbox. Rivulets of silver liquid flooded in through the seams and keyhole, and soon Orion could feel the clockwork-like interior of the lock as clearly as if he held the pig-iron pieces in his hands. He simply snapped a pin here, forced a cog there, and the lock disengaged with a rusty clank.

  “Okay, step one complete,” Orion said, grunting as he slid the heavy bars aside. “Let’s hope the next 900 steps go just as smoothly.”

  “It would be a shame,” Kangor snorted, his shaved brow knit, “for our claws to go unbloodied today.”

  Orion shook his head and peeked out into the corridor. “Corrupt or not, these guards didn’t set up Zovaco, Kangor. We’ve got to do our best to not hurt them… at least not too badly.” He turned and made sure that he had Kangor’s attention. “You hear me?”

  Kangor scoffed through his wolfish nostrils. “Yes, yes, corrupt enough to punch, too innocent to kill.”

  “That’s about the shape of it.”

  The two of them crossed the aisle that separated their cell from a railing and looked down. Floor after floor of cramped jail cells stretched to the ground, and an identical wall of cells faced them. Orion estimated that their single long side of the pentagonal prison must have housed thousands. He could see shadowy faces peering at him from the barred rooms and hear the muttering of many voices as inmates rose from their cots to see who was leaving their cell after sleep cycle lockdown.

  Orion realized it would be a matter of minutes before the guards overcame their apathy and trotted out to investigate the chatter, so he reached into his smartcloak and found his diamond-fiber climbing wire. After looping it around a rail that was spit-covered but sturdy, Orion tossed the spool over the edge. The 10,000-foot spool of spider-silk thin wire would be more than long enough to reach the ground. He just hoped it was strong enough to hold both him and Kangor.

  “Want me to go first?” Orion asked, hooking a thumb out over the rail.

  Kangor offered a throaty chuckle. “So I can land on you when this line snaps?” He shook his head. “No, we’d have to bury you in a briophyte’s coffin. Better if I break your fall.”

  “Hey, I’m not planning on the line breaking at all. But if you insist.” Orion stepped aside with a flourish.

  Kangor tore a sleeve from his ragged brown jumpsuit, bit it in half, and wrapped it around his huge hands. Then he shot a wolfish grin at Orion, took up the nimble line and vaulted over the edge. After a deep breath to still his nerves, Orion wrapped his hands in the bottom corners of his smartcloak and followed his beastly friend down. He fell more quickly than he had anticipated thanks to Bavara-5’s insistent pull, but eventually his smartcloak offered just enough traction for a controlled descent.

  The inmates did more than just take notice as they fell between the two great walls of the cellblock. Shouts of “slaggers jumpin’!” and “slags runnin’!” rained down along with bits of burning garbage, rotting chunks of food and generous wads of spit. Orion did his best to ignore it as he got hit with a little bit of everything, concentrating on planting his feet on the railing of each level as he rappelled toward the ground. Kangor hit the bottom and rolled like a muscular boulder, and Orion touched down just a moment later, his kinetic bodysuit absorbing a high-gravity impact that would have otherwise snapped his shins.

  This lowest floor was as shadowy and long as the stacks above, but with a bloodstained concrete slab between the two towering walls of prisoners. Though they weren’t far from the shortcut Orion had pinpointed, they had come down in the wrong place at the wrong time. A guard in a warmech was in the middle of escorting a mangy temba nubu across the ground floor, taking the feline humanoid back to his cell. For a moment, they froze and stared at each other, Orion and Kangor just as surprised as the guard and prisoner. Then the guard shoved the prisoner to the side.

  “On the ground slags, on the ground,” shouted the poxgane behind the diamond-glass bubble. He pointed wrist-mounted pulse cannons at them. “On the ground, now!”

  Glancing at Kangor, Orion spoke in a low voice. “You mind taking this one?”

  The big vycart snorted. “Gladly.”

  “Just don’t kill him,” Orion hissed.

  Kangor bellowed a roar that echoed up through the stacks. The great mountain of muscle ran at the guard through a flurry of pulse bolts and slammed his shoulder into the center mass of the warmech, toppling it. Orion knew he couldn’t run, much less fight in the oppressive gravity, so he summoned his spellblade gauntlet and waited. Yet while Kangor rained heavy fists down on the warmech’s armor plating, the temba nubu prisoner who had been thrown to the ground got back to his feet. Orion could see now, in what dim light reached them from the glowglobes high above, that the furry humanoid wasn’t just suffering from a bad case of mange. The circuits of toxic bio-modifications glowed beneath his bleeding patches of bare skin.

  “Well, hello there,” the convict said with a scratchy voice as he noticed Orion. “You’re prettier than my last girlfriend…”

  As the prisoners in the stacks cheered on the violence, the temba nubu came toward Orion with his chained hands outstretched, a deranged tilt to his mouth. Aiming to take him out with a single blow, Orion conjured a spiked mace and readied it with a two-handed grip. The prisoner hissed and reached for him, but when Orion swung the mace, his arc was clumsy and slow. The temba nubu sidestepped, and though his cheap, degrading bio-modifications were likely killing him, they still made him quicker than Orion in the heavy gravity. The prisoner simply kicked out a foot to trip him, and Orion fell forward after his heavy mace like a maimed horse. He landed on his knees with excruciating force, but he barely had time to cry out before the convict slipped his manacles around Orion’s neck.

  The inmates in the stacks cheered with animal bloodlust, and the bio-modified temba nubu squeezed Orion’s windpipe with all his chemical-enhanced might. Orion tried to gasp his friend’s name, but Kangor was busy tearing open the back panels of the warmech and beating the guard into submission. As the deranged prisoner laughed and showered him with spittle, Orion reacted on instinct — or was it the spellblade’s instinct? His weapon flowed from a heavy mace to a long, curved knife, and Orion hammered the blade back into the temba nubu’s ribs. The chains around Orion’s neck slackened, and the life force of the prisoner flowed into his spellblade. A roar rose from the
inmates in the stacks, as if giving voice to the slippery alien emotions of Orion’s ancient weapon.

  Sucking huge breaths of air, Orion vanished the blade, shrugged off the prisoner’s dead weight and fell forward on his hands and knees. For a few moments he coughed and spit, the prisoners’ cheers echoing over him like the dirty caress of an anonymous lover. Then Kangor ran up and knelt down next to him.

  “Little friend,” Kangor said, shaking his head as helped Orion up. “I thought you said we were not to kill them?”

  “I said no killing the guards,” Orion panted. His heart hammered in his chest, and his blood felt thick as crude oil in his veins. “We need to… move fast… now.” He staggered forward, the gravity of the prison planet dragging him down.

  Kangor reached out to steady him. “I will carry you.”

  “No.” Orion straightened up and tried to draw a deep breath. He looked into the rich red veins of his spellblade gauntlet, and he could almost taste the prisoner’s foul soul there. “Lightness of being.”

  White fire flared bright around Orion, and his body was relieved. He took a moment to adjust to the feeling of lighter-than-Earth gravity, moving his limbs smoothly and quickly, taking deep breaths as his heart slowed and his head stopped pounding. They dashed across the concrete slab as alarms blared and warmechs lumbered out of the security checkpoint joining their side of the pentagon with the next. Orion and Kangor ran to an alcove between two long lines of cells and ducked inside, but Orion didn’t see what he had expected.

  “Where is it?” he hissed.

  “What are you looking for?” Kangor said, squinting at the wall at the back of the alcove.

  “There’s supposed to be a maintenance hatch here.” Orion rushed to the wall and rapped his silver-swathed knuckles on the smooth cement. “Mervyn must have pulled an old schematic,” he muttered as he conjured a silver sledgehammer from the palm of his gauntlet. “Watch my back,” he said over his shoulder.