Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  The rest of the Wasters she’d encountered in the prison had only been there for a couple of weeks. The bodies of Johnny and Frank were reminders of how long they’d been neglected, how long they’d been left to rot since their capture on the Sirius-5 moon of Vulca. She blamed her bosses. Blamed Jansen for chasing one greedy mission after another. Blamed Moses for being swept up by the underboss’s ambition.

  “Where are your clothes?” she asked.

  “It’s an experiment,” Freezer said. “When they want to restrain us, they can stick us to the walls. It’s all this very complex electromagnetic system that runs through the place. It’s got different modes, so that it can do different functions. Like, it can be a light grip for boots, or it can be a strong, body-wide grip to restrain inmates.”

  “Okay,” Dava said, glancing around and wondering how much time they had. She looked back at him, and looked past him to see a neon-green uniform strapped into the cot at the other end of the cell. “So you think they can’t stick you to the wall if you don’t have the clothes on.”

  “Exactly,” Freezer said with a grin. “The targeting system relies on encoded chips and wires that are stitched somewhere into the fabric. So small you wouldn’t be able to see them with the naked eye.”

  “So you just get naked instead,” Thompson said. She’d been delegated the keeper of the warden once again, though the cable was no longer attachable to their belts, so she had to hold it by hand. She yanked his drifting form. “How do we get them out?”

  “Uh.” The warden’s hand was hastily wrapped in cloth that had turned dark, and his chest wound had mostly stopped bleeding. But his eyes lolled, and he blinked to attempt to focus. “You. You can’t. Can’t open them from here.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell us that before we got here?” Seven-Pack said, narrowing her eyes at Polar Gary.

  The big man didn’t respond to the barb. He was looking at something far away, something the rest of them couldn’t see. Dava knew the crate he was carrying weighed nothing; yet he was tired. Defeated. She shouldn’t have brought him to this place.

  “And they won’t open unless someone is inside the uniform,” Perzynski added. He frowned at the naked forms of Johnny and Frank and tried to muster a semblance of confidence. “This is a very secure facility.”

  “Assistant Warden Denis Perzynski,” Freezer said, in a voice deeper than he usually spoke.

  The warden flinched and looked up at him, his eyes finding new focus. “What? How do you know my name?”

  “I’m like a sponge, Denis. Every bit of info I pick up, I remember. Even the most trivial shit.” Freezer pointed at each of the corners of the mesh, making a circle with his finger. “Like here’s something: I heard that in the right kind of emergency, these gates pop right off.”

  Perzynski’s mouth opened and closed a few times. Finally, he weakly managed, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m just an assistant warden.”

  “Safety first, right?” Freezer rubbed his fingertip along the surface of the mesh. “They must make you go through all kinds of safety trainings to work here. And I bet even more to get promoted to assistant warden, right?”

  “I – I guess.”

  “So it’s in there,” Freezer said, tapping his temple. “You just have to search your memory. Cellblock safety measures. Something bad enough that the inmates could lose their lives. This is ModPol Justice. It’s part of the deal: you take care of the criminal element for the known galaxy, just as long as you promise to be humane and shit like that. In an emergency, you can’t just let the inmates die.”

  Eyeball had finished his wing-spreading exercise and began working on something else. He squatted against one wall, then sprang forth with his legs, in what looked like a horizontal jump across the three meters of space and shot his arms out, flat palms smacking the opposite wall, arms flexing as they bent. Then he repeated the process in reverse, straightening his arms and springing himself backward. Dava watched a few reps of this, watched him use the force of his momentum as a form of resistance.

  “Think, Denis,” Freezer prodded.

  “I don’t know,” the warden whispered. Then his head lifted suddenly. “Right, the fire suppression system! If there’s a fire in the cellblock, all the cells open and vacuum is created. It will suck the inmates out to the main corridor. Then it seals so that the oxygen can be burned off and the fire will die.”

  “So wait, all the inmates get sucked out of their cells?” Thompson said.

  “Well yeah, mostly,” Perzynski said, his voice dropping to a barely audible mumble. “Mostly. With acceptable losses.”

  “Where are the sensors?” Freezer asked.

  The warden half-nodded over his shoulder. “In the walls. All up and down and across. But it needs to be a big enough fire to trigger the evac procedure.”

  “What can we set on fire in this place?” Seven-Pack said.

  “We need something fast,” Dava said. She looked back at the hatch they had come through. They’d made short work of four guards on the way from the yard to the cellblock. More would be coming. And there had been a promise of securibots, which would not be so easy to dispatch as flesh-and-blood staff.

  Thompson yanked the crate open with her free hand. “I think there are some firebombs in here. Seven, take a look.”

  Seven-Pack holstered her pistol and pulled a rectangular box from the crate. “A whole case of them. There’s like a dozen in here.”

  “Do they have adhesive on them?” Freezer said excitedly. “Is there a remote trigger? You could spread them out around the wall and trick the system into thinking there’s a massive fire!”

  Seven-Pack peered into the box. “There’s sticky stuff on them and a little clicky thingy. Is that what you mean?”

  Dava grabbed the box and held it open. “Tommy, Seven, Gary. Each of you grab two of these. Spread out and get them out on the wall.” She looked back at the cells opposite the massive, featureless surface. “Try to get them in spots where the cells across from the wall are empty. No need to set fire to any inmates. The more that survive this, the better. Even the ones that aren’t Wasters.”

  Her team went to work. Thompson handed over the warden’s cable. Dava kept one eye on Gary as he pulled his way up the wall. He wasn’t moving as fast as he could, but at least he was moving. The directive seemed to give him enough purpose to get out of his funk.

  “Johnny, how are you holding up?” she said, leaving the others to their work. Watching them wasn’t going to make it go any faster.

  Eyeball grunted. Coming to the end of his exercise routine, he was stretching out his arms and legs. “I hate this place,” he said finally. The first words he’d spoken since she saw him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I wanted to go back for you.”

  “Food’s terrible, but I’m used to that,” he said, not looking at her. “Wasting away in the null grav, but I’m a Waster anyways, so that don’t matter.”

  “Johnny,” she said softly. There was a soft ring of fuzz growing around his head. She knew he wouldn’t be allowed to shave it himself. When she looked at him and pictured the head without the hair, she remembered that moment. The corridor. The Pollies – no, they weren’t Pollies, they were Fenders. The ModPol military types. Too many of them. Overwhelming him while he tried to protect Frank.

  “Not much to entertain a man in this place,” he droned on, head into his chest. He reached down and slapped his maleness lightly. “Can’t get it up. Not that I have any enthusiasm for it, so that don’t matter neither.”

  She looked at Freezer, who shrank with embarrassment. “Takes gravity to make an erection work. Something about the blood flow.” He looked down, then back up at her. “I hear lady parts don’t work much better here.”

  “But what keeps me goin’, day to day,” Eyeball said, lifting his head slightly. “What keeps me going is the knowledge that my friend Frank Reezer is okay. Because someday I’m gonna get out of this place. And Frank too.
And we’re gonna go back home. And Frank is gonna get his rations. And he’s gonna give ’em to me. Four bottles a month.”

  Dava looked at him. Waiting for something else to spill out of him. That was it though. His speech was over. She looked at Freezer in the next cell.

  “That’s right, Johnny,” he said, talking forward through the mesh, but turning his head to the left as though he could see the other man through the steel wall. “Four big bottles of whiskey every month.” He looked at Dava. “When we get home.”

  “All set,” Thompson said, floating over and grabbing the warden’s cable. The warden had gone quiet again, his expressions migrating from shock to confusion to pity and always back to fear.

  Seven-Pack and Polar Gary came quickly after Thompson.

  “Okay.” Dava pulled herself close to Perzynski. “Job’s almost done, pal. You might actually live through this. So tell me where the vacuum is going to pull everyone.”

  *

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  Runstom was staring up at the walls of the yard that bent all around him. Yard Beta. It was a massive sphere, and there was no real ground. The word yard had been borrowed from traditional prisons; the wide-open stretch of space that inmates were free to move about in. Going by that definition, it still matched: it didn’t have a ground, but the place was wide open, and the inmates were free to move around. Usually. At the moment, they were stuck to the walls all around him, limbs splayed at odd angles, like splattered bugs.

  “Mag-locks have been activated,” an older guard grunted at him. He was a B-fourean, lanky and pasty, and his name badge said Chen. “It’s tuned to their pajamas.”

  Runstom had gotten a rundown of how the mag system worked. Seeing it in action, it sunk in better. He and the other three guards were stuck to the wall with the grip-boots, and could move almost as well as walking in gravity. The magnetic force tuned to the sunny-green prison-issue uniforms by contrast had been turned to maximum strength.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  Chen, who was supposed to be in charge, scanned around the yard in silence for a moment. “There,” he said eventually, pointing. “A couple still in the middle. We push them to the wall to get them stuck. And look for anyone not wearing green pajamas.”

  “You mean the infiltrators.” Runstom was feeling a need to be blunt and overt. “They will be armed.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Chen said.

  “Weren’t there supposed to be securibots coming?” Runstom had heard the announcement that had been piped into the yard before he and the others arrived. Since he’d been in the facility, he hadn’t seen any bots in operation that weren’t cleaning something.

  “I heard they’re running diags on ’em,” one of the others said. She looked like a teenager to Runstom. Like most of the guards, she was also a B-fourean.

  “Diags?”

  “Nostics,” she said. “Takes a while.”

  It took him a moment to put the two halves of the word together. He wanted to probe, find out why the securibots weren’t already active. He feared the possible answers: they were too costly to operate, there were too few to risk them, they didn’t work reliably. Some combination of those.

  “Come on, let’s just get the greens and get out of here,” Chen said.

  They disengaged their boots and pushed off to the middle of the space. The other guards seemed to understand the invisible streams of air currents and were using them to navigate. Runstom had watched a quick holovid training on them, but again, it was a different thing to experience them in person. So while he clumsily made his way to the others, he watched them pursue green-suited inmates and shove them lightly in the direction of the walls. Once they drifted within a handful of meters, the magnetic force kicked in and pulled them the rest of the way.

  Runstom caught up just as the last inmate was away. Chen floated and stared into nothing, giving the impression he was listening to his earpiece. He glanced down at his arm for a moment.

  “Roger,” he said, then dropped his arm and looked at the others. “Orders are to go through the far hatch and secure the next corridor.”

  Runstom looked across the way at the small round door in the middle of the wall. He absently stretched an arm toward it, as though he might swim his way there. Chen either took pity or didn’t want to wait for him to figure out the current system. He grabbed Runstom by the uniform and shoved him in the direction of the hatch.

  After he hit the wall, he managed to grab a handhold and re-engage his grip-boots. As he clomped his way to the nearby door, a blurry white blob floated into his vision. He flinched, leaning back so that he could see the object and pluck it out of space.

  “What is that?” the young guard said as she waited for him to step through the hatch.

  He held it up and frowned. The white surface contrasted with the olive-green skin of his own fingers.

  “Better hold onto it,” Chen said with a humorless grin. “If you collect enough pieces, we might be able to put him back together again.”

  Runstom didn’t bother to ponder whether this was sarcasm or naive intention. He slipped the wayward digit into a chest pocket and pulled himself through the hatch.

  After passing through the short lock tube, they came to the corridor to be secured. It was empty of life, but not of bodies.

  “Shit,” Chen said softly. His resolve was holding, but he stared at the dangling forms of the four dead guards in silence for a moment. Each was stuck to the floor or the wall by a boot or two, leaving the rest of their bodies to the will of weightlessness. Chen probably knew them all. Runstom wondered if he had considered any of them a friend.

  This was the work of Space Waste. They would tear the place apart. The guards had become complacent, even lazy. The job was too easy, thanks to the tech, the zero gravity, and the deep-space location. Maybe these guards were never prepared. Maybe they were ModPol’s washouts. Given a job that even a fuck-up could handle. The magnetic fields were their safety net. Runstom wondered how much of a guarantee that tech was. How easily it could be subverted.

  He checked the charge on his gun. Still one hundred percent. Was he going to allow himself to walk into a slaughter? Should he die because the architects of the prison never expected a crew of Wasters to break in and run amok? Because the administrators were sold on inexpensive tech? Decided not to spend precious money on properly trained and outfitted personnel?

  “Room is secure,” Chen said into his headpiece. Runstom couldn’t hear the reply. He imagined the vita-sensors and hidden wall cameras told the remote superiors the rest of the story.

  “They want us to move on,” Chen said. Something in his voice told Runstom it wasn’t the type of move on he was hoping for. Move on back to your quarters would have been nice. Move on from the deaths of these colleagues would have been acceptable. But the tone said, move on through the corridor. Move on to the next horror.

  “This is fucked,” the young woman said. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “We have to go down to hatch seven and into cellblock four,” Chen said gravely. “That’s where the infiltrators went.”

  “And what the hell are we supposed to do when we find the fucking infiltrators?” She waved an arm at a nearby corpse. “Get ourselves killed?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m your superior.”

  “Well what, then, oh great superior?”

  The two glared at each other for a moment. “Are there cameras in there?” Runstom said, trying to get a look at the screen on Chen’s armband.

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t have authorization for them. But Command does.”

  He stopped at that, prompting the woman to stick her arms out after a few seconds of silence. “And?”

  Chen swallowed. “They said the hatch is clear inside.”

  This caused a string of unprofessional obscenities to pour forth from the woman as she stalked around the corridor. Angry pacing wasn’t easy to pull off in mag-boots and zer
o-gravity, but she managed her best. Runstom noticed the fourth of their group hadn’t said anything in the thirty minutes or so that they’d been on the mission. His eyes just stared forward, shiny with glaze. He was either scared senseless or stoned. Or both.

  “I’ll go in first,” Runstom said.

  “What?” Chen looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Why?”

  “There’s another one of those airlock doors, right?” Runstom was already stamping down the hall toward hatch seven. “I can go through and tell you if it’s clear.”

  “Hey.” The woman stopped her pacing. “Hey, that sounds like a plan. Let the new guy go first!”

  Runstom almost stopped to tell her he wasn’t a new guy to anything, then just let it go. Move on. He reached the hatch and tapped at the side panel.

  “Okay,” he said as it slid open and he stepped through. The three of them came up behind him, stopping short of the doorway. “Wait here. I’ll go through and take a look. I’ll call you when I know it’s clear.”

  They nodded at him in silence and he tapped the panel. The door irised closed. He turned and face the other side. He was probably going to get himself killed. Did it matter that he might have saved three lives? Maybe they would be killed anyway. Maybe they would have stood a better chance if the four of them went through together. But he knew it wouldn’t matter.

  He checked the charge on his rifle. Ninety-nine percent. The damn thing was leaking electrons or something.

  With a deep breath, he hefted the gun, then reached out and tapped at the pad. The familiar hiss started and stopped, cut short. The door was immobile. He blinked and reached for the pad again, then the cylindrical room turned red. His ears buzzed with an alarm both in his earpiece and coming from unseen speakers in the small space.

  “Warning. Fire detected in cellblock four. Emergency evacuation procedures in effect. Warning. Fire detected in cellblock four. The block will be evacuated and purged.”