Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  *

  A few dozen people lay about the containment chamber coughing and sucking wind. Or at least, they would be lying about if there were any goddamn gravity in this place. Instead, Dava watched them drift awkwardly all around her.

  The firebombs had all blown together with the trigger, and the alarms started only seconds later. There had to be cameras, and she wondered if anyone tried to stop the evacuation. If that were the case, automated systems had prevailed. A long side door had split apart, allowing a narrow space through which air began to suck. The mesh doors all swung open and every inmate in the cellblock came through the slit, right after Dava, Thompson-Gun, Seven-Pack, Polar Gary, and Assistant Warden Perzynski.

  There were several faces Dava recognized, and it brought a small thrill of victory to her chest. She never thought she’d be so glad to see so many ugly Waster mugs.

  “Clothes,” Freezer managed to shout, biting back a cough. “Take off your clothes!”

  Dava, having been closest to the doors when the charges blew, was suffering the least from the effects of the vacuum. She picked up on Freezer’s cries. “Everyone take off your clothes!” She grabbed a nearby inmate by the neon-green jumpsuit. “They’re going to activate the mag field any second now! Get these clothes off now or your ass is going to be stuck to the wall!”

  Most of the room took the hint and began stripping. Voices grew stronger as the command spread through the crowd. A wave of green was displaced by a mix of white, beige, pink, red, brown, and black. If they weren’t in the middle of a prisonbreak, Dava thought it might have been some kind of performance art.

  “Johnny,” she said, going to the big man first. “Get something from the weapon crate. You get first dibs.”

  Eyeball glanced to one side, his good eye blinking while his bad eye stuck, creating that angry wink she was so glad to see again. His gaze rested on Freezer, and once he’d gauged that his meal ticket hadn’t strayed far, looked toward the crate. Polar Gary had unstrapped it from his back and tied it to the wall. Eyeball nodded at it. “I want explosives. And lasers. Projectiles are no good in this place.”

  “Why not?”

  He frowned. “Recoil. Hard to brace yourself.” He looked down at his exposed body. “You need muscle to take a good shot.”

  She wanted to pity him, to feed her guilt. But she needed the real Johnny Eyeball. “There’s a flamer.”

  His head lifted and his good eye brightened. “A flamer?”

  “A compact. Nice jetstream on it. Good range.”

  His grin told her that would do. She followed him to the crate while he fished the flamethrower out, along with some gas bombs. Freezer joined them, showing no interest in anything in the crate, for which she was thankful. The hacker was not exactly competent with a weapon.

  “We still have a bunch of people in other cellblocks?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said. He tapped his head. “I know where everyone is, cuz of The Flow. But there are sixteen cellblocks and four yards. We got Wasters spread out all over.”

  She figured as much. “And a lot of them will still be in their suits, so if the mag-lock kicks in, they’ll be stuck.”

  Freezer nodded. “I can fix that, if I can get to a security station.”

  “Good.” She put a hand on Eyeball’s arm. “You can escort Frank?”

  He huffed. “Yes.”

  “We should take Perzynski,” Freezer added, nodding at the warden. The man was shivering now, just floating through the room with his arms around his legs. Thompson held the cable casually, as though he were a balloon on a string.

  “Fine,” Dava said, motioning for Thompson to bring him over. “You and Johnny go to the nearest security station. Can you find it?” Freezer just tapped his head. She allowed herself a small smile. “Good. And Seven, Gary. Get the other Wasters armed up. Each of you take half and get to the two closest yards. As soon as Freezer breaks the magnets, we need you to grab everyone you can find. Get to a dock.”

  “You got it, Dava,” Seven-Pack said. Gary grunted and nodded.

  “Oh, and Seven. Make sure Jerrard is okay.” The thought of leaving one of the few Earth-borns behind gave Dava a sick feeling in her gut. It was bad enough he’d helped them in Yard Beta, only to get stuck to the wall when the mags kicked on. She looked at her last mate. “Tommy, you’re with me.”

  Freed of the burden of tugging the warden, Thompson had both hands wrapped around her submachine with the massive drum-like magazine. Either she didn’t have the same concerns about recoil that Eyeball had, or more likely, she would rather deal with it than give up her favorite weapon. She certainly managed in the corridors between the yard and the cellblock. “Aye, Capo,” she said.

  They moved through the masses of disrobed bodies to a hatch on the other side. Dava consulted her map one last time, committing the route to the Core to memory. She looked at the panel next to the hatch, ready to have the warden brought over, but it was in a different state than she’d seen before. It flashed with some kind of emergency warning and a brief message about evacuation. Had the fire temporarily disabled the locks? She tapped at the screen and found the door control. It hissed open at her touch, with no request for identification.

  For a moment suspicion washed over her. She couldn’t believe someone could be so stupid to create a system inside a prison where the doors became unlocked in the case of a fire. A trap? Then she realized the doors were just a backup method of inmate control. The magnetic locks embedded in the walls and tuned to the clothes of everyone in the station were the primary. And it was likely that while the fire unlocked these doors, they had not unlocked access to any docks. The final and strongest method of control was the fact that the station was in deep space. An escaped prisoner had nowhere to go.

  She waved Thomson forward and they passed into the lock room. After a brief cycling of the doors, they were in a new corridor. This one was darker and narrower than the others.

  The two of them traveled much faster, alone and with no burdens. They snaked through the corridor and its occasional turns and forks and within fifteen minutes of silent gliding, they reached a circular hall that bent around the Core itself.

  Though the hall curved, it was long and there were no corners to use as cover. She suspected there would be guards somewhere, so they floated in silence. Listening.

  After a few minutes, she heard a voice and held up her hand to freeze her anxious mate. She listened. One voice, but speaking, pausing, responding, like a conversation. It came from the leftward curve of the hall.

  She used hand signals to silently communicate to Thompson. I’m going right. Follow at a short distance behind.

  They proceeded around the hall at a careful pace. Dava kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, the inner curve of the wall. She estimated they’d gone about a quarter of the way around. It was hard to tell without any point of reference but the hundreds of handholds on the walls.

  She stopped and signaled again. I’m going on. You go back. Pinch.

  Thompson nodded and flexed her hands around her rifle. Dava held up a hand to hold her and signaled again for her to use the blade attachment.

  This caused a moment of silent facial contortion. She knew Thompson hated attaching the bayonet to her rifle. They’d gone this last stretch in silence, and Dava wanted to continue to take advantage of their small team of two and remain invisible. After Thompson had a few seconds to throw a silent fit, she dug the blade out of her uniform and fastened it to the barrel of the submachinegun.

  They parted ways. Dava watched as Thompson pulled herself along with one hand, the other aiming the gun that was strapped around her shoulder. Dava turned and eased herself along the curve hand over hand, her own blade clamped between her teeth. She was counting on making faster progress than her mate.

  After another minute or so, she let go of any chance of knowing where in the circle she was. Then she saw another hatch on the outer wall. By the map in her head, there had been on
ly two hatches that connected into this hall, and they were directly opposite one another. She’d gone halfway around. She stopped and listened. No voices, no sounds at all.

  She kept going. Steadied her breathing, which was not easy with a knife in her mouth. Then she heard the voice again. Just an inquisitive grunt.

  She raised her arm and tapped out a message to Thompson. Turn around and head the other way. There was a code, a way to add an audible beep to the message using symbols. Freezer had figured it out and for a few days everyone annoyed each other by sending beeping messages to everyone’s Messengers. She tapped out the signal several times and sent the message.

  A second later, she heard the series of beeps from ahead of her, still a few dozen meters distant.

  “What the hell?” The voice was much closer. “Heya, Command? Hey, yeah. We got any personnel down here in the Core right now?”

  Dava crept forward, her eyes on that horizon. A tiny bump appeared, perhaps a hand or a weapon. She froze and listened.

  “Okay, I’m gonna do a walkaround.”

  She heard the clicking of gripper boots. The bump disappeared. She grabbed a pair of handles and flung herself through space toward the opposite wall at an angle. Just as she reached the wall, she could see the guard moving along, angling his head to try to peer around the lengthy corner, in the direction he’d heard the beeps. She softly grabbed the wall as it came to her and reoriented herself, this time bracing her feet against the holds. She launched herself forward.

  She sailed silently through the air and pulled the knife from her teeth. She was on a direct course with the guard’s back, but lacked the velocity she had hoped for. She had no choice but to let her momentum carry her to her target.

  At just a few meters from the lanky, pale-skinned guard, her Messenger beeped.

  The guard’s head cocked, then turned. With the awkward clicking of grippers, he managed to get his body half turned toward her before her knife reached his throat.

  Eyes wide, he batted at her blade with the barrel of his gun. She grabbed at it with her left hand so that she floated to the side when he tried to aim it at her. He pulled frantically, but in the absence of gravity it was easy for her to maintain her grip. She swiped at him with the blade, slicing through his uniform and into his forearm.

  His sudden yelp was cut short by a gurgle and a forward lurch. Dava let go and floated off to the side as he teetered forward awkwardly, the gripper boots still fixing his feet to the floor. Thompson rode him, her feet against his ass and her bayonet firmly buried between his shoulder blades. She bent her knees, then straightened them, yanking her weapon free in a fan of crimson plasma. Some of it sprayed into the surrounding walls, some of it gathered into spherical puddles like wayward asteroids.

  They looked at each other, both of them scowling fiercely. Neither of them could hold it for long – Dava wasn’t sure who cracked first, but soon they were both silently laughing, nearly bursting blood vessels trying to control their hysteria. All Dava could think about was how badly she wanted to tell the story back at the Space Waste base. About how she’d used Freezer’s beeping Messenger trick to turn Thompson into guard-bait, only to have the trick reversed on her. All in good fun, considering they both survived.

  And as she kicked against the floor with one foot to avoid one of the drifting globules of blood something very, very small twisted deep inside her. They would rejoice in this man’s comical demise. An innocent man? No, anyone on a ModPol paycheck was not innocent. She had taken so many lives. What was this one to her? Her reputation was for an intimidating forty kills, but in reality she had stopped counting long before that and had gone far past it.

  She needed Moses. These acts, they were murder one by one. But Moses would tell of something much bigger. He wasn’t fighting individual guards or cops or soldiers. He was fighting systems. She needed him to remind her of that. She needed one of those speeches, the kind that started soft and grew to a deep, chant-like bellow. The kind that rode strong on undeniable righteousness.

  They followed the featureless hall back the way Thompson had come until they found a lone control panel. It was unlike any she’d seen before, such as those accompanying the hatches. She prodded at it, not really understanding what she was looking at in the sea of unlabeled icons.

  Thompson flinched, reflexively raising her weapon, causing Dava to flinch. A curved segment of the wall slid away, revealing a short passage of only a few meters. Just beyond, she could see the shimmer of some kind of barrier. Beyond that, a wedge-shaped cell that tapered in three dimensions. The cell was empty.

  She looked at the panel interface again, having identified the door control by chance. This hint allowed her to make some further guesses and she found a list of prisoner numbers. The operator at the dock had rattled off Moses’s number, but Dava had been too keyed up to think to remember it. There were only two on the screen. She picked one and it started some kind of sequence. The door slid back into place, becoming nothing but a wall once again. The sounds of machinery could be heard just beyond, and within a few minutes, the door reopened.

  As the wall slid away she squeezed through the opening before it was even complete. She pulled herself down to the barrier.

  Moses drifted near the rear of the cell, his back to her. His form seemed limp, and her heart-rate ramped, a sudden fear that he’d died in this place. Died alone. Had left her.

  “Moses?” she whispered. She reached for the barrier and tried to penetrate it, but it resisted her with a soft but firm force, darkening and glittering where she touched it.

  His body stretched out to its full length, which seemed even longer in the absence of gravity. He slowly turned, a measured, tumbling rotation on multiple axes. His foot flicked, kicking off the tapered wall near the back of the cell. He drifted up to the barrier. When he braced his progress against it, it flexed toward her in a glittering hand-shaped outdent.

  Reflexively, she put her palm against his.

  His momentum arrested, he pulled the hand away. The barrier where he had touched it reverted to the soft, barely visible sheen. “Good to see you, Dava.”

  She wanted to say something, to cry out, to embrace him. Another part of her wanted to gush, to tell him everything, to unleash her fury at Basil Roy’s betrayal. To demand he do something about Jansen. To put the man on trial. To find out what he knew. To take charge again. To guide them, to guide her.

  But she couldn’t say any of that. None of it would come out. He looked the same as always, great and strong and wise, but something in him was broken, something beyond what she could see. She was rescuing him. Expecting him to rescue her in return.

  “Thompson,” she said without taking her eyes off Moses. “Drop the barrier.”

  After a few seconds of silence, the reply came. “I don’t know how, Dava.” There was another panel in the middle of the short passage. Dava looked back and watched Thompson poke at it uselessly. “It wants some biometrics or something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Retinal scan, voiceprint, or fingerprint,” Moses said. “They usually don’t need them, because they have their identities in their uniforms. But down here in the Core, they have to confirm using one biometric.”

  Dava started tapping at her Messenger. Did you find a security station yet?

  The reply from Freezer was almost instant; he was always so quick with interfaces. Yepper.

  Can you unlock cell 7 in the Core? she tapped.

  This time the reply took longer. No can do. Biometrics on site only. Requires warden clearance.

  She stared at the message in silence, then closed her eyes. She was so close. She would not leave this place without Moses. “What is this barrier made out of?” she asked when she opened her eyes.

  “Some kind of nanomaterial,” Moses said with an idle prod at the flexible stuff. “Lots of little particles. Probably uses magnetic force like everything else around here.”

  “Maybe we can track down a warden,” Th
ompson said. “We only need a finger or an eye—”

  “Wait!” Dava almost lost control of herself in the null gravity as she twisted around, rummaging through her pockets. Finally she felt the small, cold slab of meat and pulled it out, holding it up triumphantly: one of Perzynski’s fingers.

  She passed the digit off to Thompson, who took it with a smile. “Dava, I didn’t think you were the trophy type.” She turned back to the panel and prodded at it a few times – first with her own fingers, then with the estranged finger when prompted. “Damn, it’s not working.”

  Dava craned to see. “What does it say?”

  “Identifying Assistant Warden Perzynski,” she read aloud. “Insufficient clearance. Shit.”

  “He’s only an assistant warden,” Dava said, thinking out loud. She tapped out a message to Freezer. “Let’s see if Frank can get into the personnel database.”

  “What for?”

  “See if we can get this poor bastard a promotion.”

  Okay, it’s done, Freezer sent back after a few minutes. Under the reason, I put that he’s a dynamic go-getter who synergizes and thinks outside the box.

  “Congratulations, Perzynski,” Dava said. “You’re a full warden now.”

  Thompson went back to the panel with an ear-to-ear grin. “Yes!”

  The barrier split down the middle, at first creating a thin gap that widened with a slinking sound until it was wide enough for Moses to pass through.

  Dava didn’t wait for him to come out before she crashed into him with a full embrace.

  Chapter 11

  When the alarm finally let up and the hatchway opened, Runstom took one look into the cellblock and pulled the door closed. They were all loose – the entire cellblock. Coming through the hatch on the opposite side. Armed. And naked.

  He opened the door back into the corridor he’d left the other guards in. There was no sign of them. As the round hatch began to swing closed, he grabbed it. Fortunately, some safety protocol prevented it from crushing his fingers.