by Jacob Gowans
She zoomed into the Akureyri area.
“Juraschek and Wang watching the harbor. This is key. No matter if the targets make it into the city, you two will be our last defense. The Coast Guard is on board to work with you searching boats leaving port. They’ve already been doing it for several days. Maru and I will be stationed watching the roads in from the south and east. Cheng and Brizendine, you will be on the north and west. The six of us will be using visuals, infrared, and satellite to capture them. Two teams on the ground, searching the hills and mountains: Byron and Yazzie are ground team number one. Hyävrinen, Garrett, and Avery are number two. That leaves our other two Elite to patrol the air.”
Dinsmore and Kolomiyets bumped fists.
“Berhane, you’ll be a rover starting with Juraschek and Wang. Then you’ll move around. I want you to experience everything. That way I can learn how to use you when you join the team. Before we leave, I want our Tensais working with me on detailed tactical strategies and with the ground teams on equipment. Since there are some caves up in the mountains, spelunking might be required. Questions?”
Sammy looked around the room. All he saw was excitement. Slowly, he raised his hand.
“Yeah, Sammy, what?” Anna asked.
“Uh . . . what do I do to prepare?”
“Train with the rest of us. Train so hard you think it’ll kill you.”
15.
Wyoming
Friday July 19, 2086
The Queen was glad for mild winters in Eastern Cape, a coastal province in the South African Territory. Her cruiser’s climate sensors informed her that the evening’s temperature was a comfortable ten degrees Standard when she set down her cruiser in a large, open field between the cities of East London and Queenstown. No more than a hundred meters away was a main road that connected East London to Johannesburg, a journey of roughly a thousand kilometers.
She had flown in from the southern tip of Africa, double-checking her systems all the way to ensure she had not been tracked or seen by any detectable instruments. It was much trickier than flying into Baikonur with Victor Wrobel’s aid. The CAG’s stealth technology was woefully behind what the NWG possessed. After setting down, she went into the cargo space and released the ramp. In the cargo hold sat her bike. She started it up and revved the engines, enjoying the rumble of power. Then she backed down the ramp and motored through the field until she hit paved road.
She would have preferred to fly directly to her destination, but the fox was explicit in his instructions. No compromising the secrecy of her presence to the NWG. The long drive annoyed her, but the overall delicacy of the mission was too delicious to not enjoy. How many others of her brothers-in-arms would the fox have trusted this mission to? The Queen couldn’t think of one. He had Aegis trained specifically for covert ops, but not one of them had been sent to accompany her.
She smiled confidently at her reflection in the rearview mirror, her face illuminated by the light of the GPS holo-map projected by her dash onto the small windshield. She noted the perfection in her facial features, restored by skilled surgeons in Atlanta four weeks ago. Not a blemish could be found. She supposed the gesture was the fox’s way of making amends, reminding her that despite punishing her with the solution, there was no need for hard feelings.
Too bad I feel otherwise.
The road was dark and winding with occasional billboards sporting short, two- to three- second advertisements. One in particular stood out to her: a man in a green suit stood before a white background. His eyes were shut, his mouth moping. Then he ripped open his suit coat and an unnaturally large grin appeared. As he opened his eyes, dollar signs showed where his irises would be. In large purple letters on his shirt, the Queen read: “Why owe me? When you can owe YOU!” Be your own boss and work as little or as much as you want!”
The words “why owe me” stuck in her head. She repeated them several times to herself as though she sang a song. She remembered cuffs—big, thick, heavy ones—digging into her wrists and ankles. The bouncing armored vehicle. The harsh taunts of the guards. The starchy orange uniform irritating her skin. The smell of hopelessness. Her mind went back to a time before she became the Queen, back to when she was just Katie Carpenter.
* * * * *
December 2055
A Humvee forced its way down a lonely paved road through the desert as the snowy winds blasted it from every angle. Katie’s head pressed against the reinforced glass plating, knocking its cold surface each time the vehicle bounced on the damaged pavement. This was the government’s third attempt at taking her to the prison facility in Mid-Western America Territory, formerly known as Wyoming. The first attempt at moving her to the prison in a small bus had ended in her freeing herself and slaughtering the two guards and the driver. She’d wandered through the deserted terrain, dehydrated and starved until being caught, subdued, and taken to a hospital for medical attention.
The second attempt had a similar ending, only she’d rolled the bus and two of the four guards had lived. She hadn’t made it very far that time.
Now her arms and legs were individually cuffed and clamped down in specially made restraints in such a way that she couldn’t remove her appendages without breaking her wrists and ankles. Combined with the Humvee’s titanium frame and reinforced glass, escape seemed virtually impossible.
The prison appeared in her view between gusts of white wind. It stretched out over a hilltop in the middle of a large sea of dust, sagebrush, and shrubs—an unmistakable statement to potential escapees that there was no sustenance nor places to hide outside the walls of the institution. But Katie knew her escape was imminent. She would find her moment and seize it. The guards, whose restrained and cautious manners had gradually grown more raucous and snide as they drove closer to the facility, now laughed hysterically about something Katie could not see or hear.
The jostling came to an end when the Humvee hit paved road. The change in terrain caught her attention and she looked up. It was a giant building of light brown stone surrounded by walls topped with a jungle of razor wire. Dobermans circled the perimeter of the grounds accompanied by heavily armed guards. Towers overlooked every part of the prison. At the top of the iron gate over the road, in arching letters, she read:
WYOMING ULTRAMAX SECURITY PRISON.
When the prison gates shut behind them with a resonant clang, the first twinge of doubt hit Katie. Ultra-maximum security. The words constricted her thoughts as the Humvee pulled to a stop at the front entrance. Still, she noted with great satisfaction that no less than six guards came to the back of the vehicle to greet her. They raised their guns and waited for the driver to open the rear door.
Cowards! I’m not even nineteen.
With guns trained on her head and chest, one of the guards slowly approached her and, with trembling hands, checked the tightness of facial restraints while another unlocked her from the clamps securing her to the vehicle. Katie suppressed a childish grin and allowed them to maneuver her without making any trouble. Getting inside took forever. Each door they went through required multiple security checks, and when she finally reached processing, she was quite tired of being a good, cooperative girl.
Then she noticed the surly, hulking man in a black uniform with flaming red skulls waiting for her. Katie immediately recognized him as Elite. The rebellious edge inside her died down a bit. Perhaps she could take him one-on-one, but giving him trouble with eight armed guards surrounding her would be foolish. Terribly foolish. Thus far, brushes with the Elite had never ended well for her.
Bastards. . . .
After the guards completed her processing, the monstrous Elite returned with a thick black circular band and a stonier expression than he’d worn moments ago. One of the guards clubbed the back of her knees, forcing her to kneel on the floor. She glanced back to be sure she knew who had done it. The Elite took advantage of her distracted state and placed the black thing around her neck.
A collar!
The gua
rds jeered. She sprang to her feet. Instantly, a terrible shock started in her neck, traveled down her body, and sent her writhing to the floor as one of the guards continued to shoot her with electricity. Experiencing true pain was a rarity since her transformation. Her unfamiliarity with the sensation made the awful jolt even more agonizing. The guards taunted her through it all, and Katie vowed she would see each of them die.
No, I’ll make them die.
When it was over, she allowed them to take her to her cell. She saw no other prisoners on the walk, only isolated cells with thick steel doors containing a bean slot and a higher-placed window slot that could only be opened from the outside. The same thick concrete-titanium mesh bricks that formed the prison halls also lined her cell, which greeted her like a horrible open mouth laying in wait. Nine men—eight guards and the Elite—watched her enter the cell. Then, through the bean slot, they removed her cuffs. The process took several minutes, and when it was done they slammed shut the slot and shocked her one more time, insulting her in the most vulgar language imaginable.
Four tiny lights in the corners of her chamber provided adequate illumination for her to see the respectable stack of paperback books in one corner, a dingy cot that filled almost a third of the room, an abysmal excuse for a toilet, and a centipede as long as her pinky crawling up the wall which she immediately killed with her bare foot.
Shoes, they’d said, had to be earned.
For a moment, she realized how terribly alone and small she was in that cell and in that facility. Then, in an immediate defensive response, she asserted herself again with supreme confidence and patience. She had no room for doubt, no room for wonder, no room for fear. She would be free again. In her mind, she reviewed the faces of the men who had escorted her into this place. She listened again to the words they’d said and the laughter they’d shared at her expense. How will I kill them? And as simple as that, she had something to do.
Her lawyer had informed her that in the Ultramax facility, prisoners were granted one hour a day to leave the cell and go to the yard. Katie waited for this with anticipation. However, the guards didn’t come for her the first day. Nor the second. Nor the third. Time passed with her counting meals and the rounds made by the guards. Some guards walked heavily, others had a light step, a couple of them dragged their clubs along the walls and doors, one even sang softly as he patrolled the corridors. Two weeks went by before they let her out. She’d expected them to try to break her will and make her realize that anything she had could be taken away, but it didn’t affect her in the least.
Katie wasn’t sure what time of the day it was when a guard pounded on her door and shouted, “Arms out!”
A rush of excitement passed over her, and she obediently thrust her arms out the bean slot. The instant she felt contact she grabbed the guard’s wrists with her hands and pulled him into the cell door. The man’s skull collided with metal and made two sounds: a loud dong followed by a sharp crack. Electricity ripped through Katie’s neck and body. Her shriek betrayed her surprise at the agony, but she did not release her grip on the guard until she heard joints crack. She had forgotten about the collar despite—or perhaps because of—its constant presence. The pain flowed through her relentlessly, even as the cell door opened and fresh air flooded the room. Two guards came in with clubs swinging. So did the Elite soldier. A third guard lay on the floor outside with a bloody face.
Katie lashed out in retaliation, but her limbs were useless as the electric surge punished her more than the clubs. She managed to connect with one guard’s sternum and he fell back wheezing, but then her entire body collapsed in exhaustion and she could feel only faintly the blows pouring down on her.
“You have to be careful about this one,” a guard said. “She is one sick little—”
Patched, fuzzy memories followed for the next several days. Needles and nurses and bandages with more harsh words and sounds in the background. At some point they took her back to her cell. Men with derisive voices gave her nothing but soup to eat . . . forced her to prostrate herself on the ground and dip her face into her food . . . electrified her with the collar after every meal. Then all at once, her mind emerged from its fog, healed and alert. Weeks later, she first noticed her reflection on the back of a spoon.
And the scar.
Katie did not believe it when she saw it: long, jagged, hideous. It disfigured her. She stared at the spoon for several minutes as the truth sank in. Then great wails escaped her, loud and heart-wrenching enough to bring the guards running to investigate. They tapped on her door to see if everything was all right, but she screamed, pounded, cursed, and clawed at the thick steel until her frame was sapped of strength.
The scar filled her mind. It ran from above her left temple to under her left eye. The guards’ clubs had split open her face. Hours passed without the spoon leaving her hand or sight, but tears fell from her eyes, spoiling her soup with their bitter flavor. She inspected herself everywhere with the spoon, spotting burn marks on her neck, a second scar, this one much smaller, under her chin. A third ran along her hairline. Each one brought greater sorrow, so deep and filling that she contemplated ending her life. She twisted the spoon back on itself until the head came completely free. When the guards forced her to return it, they told her she couldn’t have another spoon for a month as punishment.
Katie repeated the guards’ names over and over in her mind. Schuller, Kosco, Meacham, Crowther.
Six months went by between the day she attacked the guard and her second chance at recreation time in the yard. All she had to occupy that time was daydreaming and reading the stack of books in the corner of her cell. When they came, Katie cooperated with the guards and let herself be led to the small grounds. She used the hour of walking around the perimeter of the yard to observe every detail of the security, the structure, the behavior of the guards on the towers, everything her brain could possibly take in. It was summer and the weather was hot. Half the grounds were covered by the shadow of the prison facility. The grass in the shade felt wonderfully cool on her bare feet. All too soon, the guards walking at her sides nudged her.
“Back inside, freak.”
She turned toward the doors and something caught her eye. On the cement walkway, where the concrete met the grass, were three red drops. She saw two more spots of the same color on the blades of grass near the edge. Though she wanted to take more time to look at it, she did not want to chance losing her privileges.
Her next walk outdoors came three days later. She observed more drops, none on the cement, but at least five or six in the grass. Three days after her second walk, she saw none, but the grass was wet and the ground springy from recent rainfall. The mysterious red drops returned soon enough, and she became convinced that they were bloodstains. At first she guessed that prisoners were being killed by guards, but the small amounts of blood indicated otherwise. Perhaps prisoners were being beaten?
As weeks passed, the puzzle of the blood drops weighed heavily on her mind. Determined to discover their source, she spent more time listening at her bean slot, and less reading books or fantasizing about killing her guards. She memorized when guards passed her cell, whether or not they had inmates with them, and paid close attention to the sound of their footsteps. While she couldn’t open her bean slot more than a few millimeters, it was enough that she could tell that there were times when inmates had to be helped back to their cells whether by physical assistance or quiet words of encouragement from the guards.
When the guards began allowing her to walk at her own pace, her daily inspections of the prison yard grew more and more meticulous. Sometimes she caught snippets of conversation between two or three of them. She often overheard them speaking about bets, laughing over who owed someone else money. In time, by keeping a vigilant watch, she became certain that the guards were beating some of the inmates. This investigation made the time pass like a breeze blowing so softly that she rarely noticed. The weeks built into months, and soon she had been
in prison for a year.
One day around dinner time, as her guards passed her plate of food through the bean slot, she spotted two legs strutting down the concourse, flanked by the guards. These weren’t ordinary legs. Pink shoes adorned the two feet, and stemming up from them, she observed black nylons. At the height of her sight, she saw a matching tight pink miniskirt swishing in beat with the step of the legs. The legs moved in a prissy sort of way that Katie instantly placed as a hired female. She’d seen similar-looking sluts passing through the jail during her time in smaller facilities while awaiting trial.
But they aren’t supposed to be allowed at Ultramax. Naughty boys.
Taking her food from the guard, Katie stored away this piece of information, determined to use it when the time came. Someone—some prisoner—had enough power or sway over the guards to have a female brought to his cell. And that was the sort of power she needed to escape. A month later, Katie caught a guard on a bad day. As he passed her lunch to her through the slot, she noticed the foul stench and asked what the meal was. The guard swore rudely and shoved the plate hard through the bean slot.
“How should I know? Choke it down or starve!”
In his huff, he forgot to secure the bean slot. Working quickly, Katie ignored her lunch and used her spoon’s edge to jimmy the catch and the slot. In three hours’ time, she managed to do enough damage that even when the guards shut and secured it, she could still pop it open with a steady push. Now she had a way to watch the concourse whenever she wanted. This occupied her time for the next several days. And she learned volumes.
On multiple occasions over the next weeks, she saw half a dozen guards leading two prisoners down the corridor, the same direction as the exit to the yard. No one spoke, but the expressions on the prisoners’ faces told her that they knew exactly where they were going. Sometimes the prisoners had smug looks on their faces, sometimes they appeared eager, and other times . . . terrified.