She forgot herself and tried to call out again, coughed as a result.
She blinked tears from her eyes at the strain on her throat as she heard the last ghostly whispers fade away into the silence around her. She looked to her left, down the cell block. The four tiers of cells ended at a control tower set into the towering walls and festooned with thick glass windows, arc–lights and automated cavitation weapons: the tools of crowd control, of non–lethal response systems.
One of the tower’s windows was shattered and one of the cavitation weapons twisted at an awkward angle on its mounts. As she scanned the block she realised that the prisoners had escaped, perhaps run riot. They had overwhelmed the tower, maybe murdered any officers monitoring them. Perhaps then the emergency override had been activated, and the prisoners suffocated in their own cells to protect the rest of the vessel…
But then, where were the rest of the crew?
What was in the rest of the vessel?
She glided along the gantry, pushing debris and floating corpses out of her way until she reached a flight of steps that descended down toward the floor of the block. There, she saw the body of a correctional officer lying flat against the base of the steps.
His uniform was soaked in blood, his face battered to an unrecognisable pulp of torn flesh and bone and his legs broken at awkward angles where they lay against the metal steps. She pulled herself down the steps toward the corpse, which was dressed in heavy black boots and dark blue uniform. Nearby lay an equally heavy looking helmet and face–shield that had been torn from the officer’s head before he had been beaten to death.
Unlike the prisoners, the officer’s body did not float in the air. The fabric was filled with micro–filaments of positively charged iron. The effect upon the wearer, as the uniform and boots attracted themselves to the negatively charged filaments in the vessel’s deck, was to replicate gravity.
Upon a prison vessel, enforced zero–gravity resulted in the convict population losing muscle mass, their weakened bones and reduced strength making them compliant and easy to control. The prison officers wore gravity suits, their muscles under the same load as planetary conditions and thus becoming far stronger than those of their unruly charges.
She reached down and yanked from the dead officer’s belly a four–inch shank, fashioned from the sharpened end of a fork handle, the pronged end of which had been encased in a sheath of thickly–wrapped medical dressing. The blade made a sucking sound and left a gloopy string of blood floating in mid–air as she dragged it free of the unyielding flesh.
She heard whispers just over her shoulder and she whirled, waving the scarlet–stained blade before her as a chill rippled across the back of her shoulders. A breath of sound, soft and gentle, carried like distant music on the cold air. She pushed off the edge of the stairs and drifted across the block to the guard tower.
The access door at its base was locked, so she pushed off the ground with her legs and floated up to the shattered window high above, careful to avoid cutting herself on the jagged remains of the smoked glass as she reached in and pulled herself inside.
The tower control room was deactivated, probably from elsewhere when the riot had begun. She realised that the situation had been sufficiently bad for the monitoring officers to have been abandoned to their fate inside the cell block.
The corpses of two dead officers and at least half a dozen convicts drifted through the control room, gently bumping into each other in an endless slow dance of death, their eyes staring into nothingness and ribbons of spilled blood, black and cold, lacing their bodies.
She eased her way between the corpses and heard once again the whispering voices, clearer now as she moved into the control room. She tensed, listening, and heard somebody speaking.
She turned toward the voice and saw the body of a convict slumped across a control panel nearby. She drifted toward him and pulled his body off the panel.
Instantly, she heard the voice speaking, distorted and garbled as though coming through intense interference.
‘….designator Nine–Nine–Four–Delta… major hull breach… is there anybody there…?’
She reached for a transmit button on the control panel and then hesitated. She could not speak through her mask.
She stared impotently as the voice continued.
‘… Nine–Nine–Four–Delta, please respond… repeat, you are severely compromised… everything has gone… will be forced to cut loose…’
And then a new voice replied, stronger and clearer than the first.
‘Nine–Nine–Four–Delta’s inactive, cut them loose. Repeat, no survivors in the high–security wing. Cut loose immediately, hold Atlantia Five on the tethers only...’
She stepped back from the control panel and glanced about her.
From somewhere in the distance she heard the sound of huge collisions that reverberated through the vessel’s hull as though giants were hammering at the hull plating. She felt the vessel shift around her as she floated just above the control panel, a shuddering motion and then a deep silence.
She pushed off the control panel and pulled herself down a spiral staircase that descended down through the control tower, passing the tangled bodies of correctional officers and convicts locked in duels to the death, their long–dead faces twisted with pain and fear.
She reached the bottom of the staircase, where two doors awaited her. One, which was locked, led out into the cell block. The other, also locked, led from the tower into the rest of the vessel. She turned and drifted across to the nearest correctional officer’s corpse, searching through his pockets for access passes, keys, anything that might unlock the door.
Her hand rested on a large pistol, gripped in the officer’s cold hand. She wrested the weapon free and shoved it inside her suit before foraging further.
She found a passkey and turned, floating across to the tower door and swiping the card over the locking mechanism. It opened out onto the cell block with a hiss of released pressure. She turned and tried the other door, out of the cell block tower and into the rest of the ship. A display flashed a request at her.
BIOMETRIC SCAN: PLEASE COMPLY
She cursed mentally and turned, grabbing the nearby officer’s boot and dragging his corpse toward her. She spun him over, grabbed the back of his head and shoved his face toward the sensors. A bright green laser–line swept down the officer’s face and the sensor beeped in recognition. Then, another request flashed up.
AWAITING CONFIRMATION
She pulled the pistol from her suit and left it hanging in mid–air near the security door, then she pushed back and away from the door and out of the tower. She looked up to where, above her on the walls of the cell block, several observation spheres swivelled to point at her, unblinking glossy black eyes staring down into hers.
From the control panel up in the tower, she heard a voice ring out loud and clear in the otherwise silent block.
‘We’ve got a live one!’
***
IV
She floated just above the floor of the cell block, surrounded by clouds of debris, corpses and spilt blood as she gazed up through her mask at the cameras.
A long silence ensued as she awaited a further response. When it came, it echoed around the cell block to haunt her.
‘It’s Alpha–Zero–Seven. It’s her.’
She heard a flurry of broken conversation in the background, panicked voices fluttering back and forth.
‘How the hell did she survive?’
‘What do we do with her?’
‘She’s maximum security, we can’t deal with her.’
‘Cut her loose!’
More silence as the microphone was abruptly cut off. She waited, staring up at the cameras but not moving or making any attempt to influence any decision they might make.
The microphone crackled again.
‘Hey, Alpha? How did you escape?’
Escape. Something about the way the man behind the micropho
ne used the word sent a ripple of anger fluttering through her guts. She remembered the weapons that had been fired at the escape capsules.
She reached up and pointed to her mask.
‘She can’t speak,’ a voice in the background uttered. ‘And look at her, she’s tiny. She ain’t nothing.’
A flurry of angry responses were cut off as the microphone was again silenced. She waited, glancing around her at the cell block and it’s hundreds of corpses. Slowly, a dawning realisation that there may not have been an accident after all began to creep into her mind, and with it a rage that seemed familiar and yet muted, distant, as though all that she had been as a person had somehow been scoured from her mind, an entire history erased.
The microphone clicked again.
‘Alpha, we got a deal for you.’ She remained still, looking up at the camera. ‘We’ll open the security door for you, but we want something in return.’
She let the silence draw out and gave no indication of any emotion.
‘We got needs, y’know? Men got needs. You understand?’
She stared up at the camera for a moment longer, and then she reached up and began unzipping the convict’s suit she was wearing. She kicked off the thin boots and let the correctional attire slip away from her shoulders. The cold air touched her skin once more, pale and soft as she stared up at the camera, her features hidden behind the mask.
She heard a strangled muttering on the speaker and then a loud click echoed through the cell block and the security door inside the tower rattled as electronic seals were opened. The heavy door squealed as it slowly opened on hydraulic rams.
She pushed herself forward off the floor of the cell block and glided through the air back into the tower and to the door, pushed it open further as she slipped through and grabbed the pistol as she went.
A corridor, devoid of retardant foam or scorching, led away from her. The lighting was not flickering here, the power supply more stable. She could tell that she was still in a prison vessel, the harsh metal walls scarred with years’ of neglect, the smell of unwashed bodies and lousy food filling the air.
She pushed the security door shut behind her and locked it manually before turning and floating down the corridor. The air was still cool but it had lost some of the chill of the cell block and the bumps on her skin settled as she floated along.
Ahead she could see two barred gates set twenty feet apart, security against convicts escaping that also allowed for weapons to be discharged through the bars. Each gate was mounted into heavy beams that crossed the ceiling of the corridor. Floating between the two sets of gates she could see the bodies of two more correctional officers, their backs shredded with wounds.
She heard a bang and a squeal as a solid security door was opened on the far side of the gates. She slowed, turning her body so that her feet touched the floor a few cubits away from the first barred gate, and waited.
There were four of them. They walked through the security door, their heavy black boots thumping against the floor of the corridor. Magnetic suits in graphite grey, bearing the markings of maintenance crews, weighed them down and allowed them to walk almost normally in the low gravity. Each man carried a pulse rifle at port arms.
She knew that they were not maintenance. One man had a shock of blonde hair from which dangled numerous tags, coloured ribbons signifying gang kills. Another man was missing the flesh from half of his face, tattoos carved off in retaliation for turning against a former prison crew, the savage injury healed into a mass of twisted scar tissue. The other two, tough looking men who were tanned despite years inside, were almost certainly pirates or mercenaries of some kind. Both wore tattoos on their necks of roiled dragons that she recognised, their allegiance to a gang whose leader was known as Tiamat.
What they differed in appearance they shared in expression, all of their gazes fixed upon her as they walked toward her down the corridor. She stood in silence, naked and small behind the bars as they reached the first set of gates.
She saw their eyes caress her naked body for a few moments.
‘Alpha Zero Seven,’ one of them said, the shorter of the two pirates. ‘Heard of you.’
She remained still.
‘We should kill her, right now,’ said the blond convict with the tags. ‘She’s bad shit, man.’
‘You ever known shit to be good?’ asked Scarface.
‘Man, they don’t put masks like that on without a damned good reason,’ replied Tags.
Scarface’s one good eye twisted upward in delight as he smiled with half of his teeth. ‘It’s so they can’t bite back. I want me a piece of that.’
The stocky pirate stepped up to the gate.
‘You good with that, Zero Seven?’ he asked her.
She did not move, just stared at the pirate through the slits of her mask. He stared back at her, and looked her up and down for several long seconds. She saw him lick his lips, his eyes drawn to the cleft between her legs.
‘All smooth,’ said the taller pirate, ‘just the way I like ‘em.’
The shorter pirate slung his rifle across his shoulder and from his pocket withdrew a blocky metallic key. Difficult to copy and implanted with a holographic identity chip, such keys provided more security than any biometric scan. He inserted it into the first gate and turned it. The gate creaked open and he moved through, the other pirate right behind him.
‘Stay here,’ he ordered Scarface and Tags.
‘Don’t you cut us out,’ Scarface growled. ‘We agreed, the dice decide who gets her first.’
The pirates did not respond, their gazes fixed on hers as she watched them approach the second gate and insert the key into the lock. It turned, and she stood her ground as the gate swung open and the two men stepped through it.
‘Now,’ said the stocky pirate, ‘you be a good girl and give us what we want and you’ll be just fine.’
He smiled, gold teeth interspersed with black ones that gave him a predatory appearance. She stared at him in silence, her arms hanging limply by her sides as the taller pirate, his rifle still aimed at her, jerked the barrel of the weapon upward a couple of times.
‘You know the drill,’ he growled. ‘Get ‘em up.’
Slowly, she raised her hands and placed them behind her head. The movement caused her breasts to lift and both men’s gazes drifted down to them. The stocky pirate reached out for her as he stared at her breasts, and one rough–skinned hand cupped her between her legs and squeezed.
She kept her hands behind her head as the pirate smiled again.
‘Man, am I lookin’ forward to tasting every inch of you and…’
She unfolded the pistol from where she had coiled it in her thick hair as she grabbed the pirate’s arm and pulled herself into him, pinning his rifle beyond his reach and his hand between her legs. She aimed the pistol around his shoulder and fired, a deafening crack as the pistol shot a bright blue–white ball of plasma that punched through the taller pirate’s face in a hiss of sizzling flesh that echoed down the corridor as a huge flower of blood blossomed outward from the back of his head.
The second shot went into the side of the stockier pirate’s head even as he tried to push away from her, a blast of blood, brain and bone splattering the wall of the corridor amid a blaze of plasma particles as a frenzy of shouts went up from Scarface and Tags. They aimed their rifles down the corridor at her as she pushed off the floor of the corridor and shot up to collide with the ceiling behind the beams.
A deafening clatter of rifle fire rang in her ears as she hugged the ceiling behind the shelter of the beam, saw pulses of energy smash against the ceiling close by to scorch and dislodge tiles, heard the convicts shouting at each other as they fired in a confused frenzy of accusations.
‘I told you!’ Tags shouted. ‘Let’s get out of here and shut the gates!’
‘Shut up!’ came Scarface’s response.
The shots ceased. She remained in place, waiting.
Scarface called down the
corridor. ‘You got a pistol, missy, but we’ve got two rifles and hard dicks. It’s your choice. You either come to us willingly, right now, or we kill you and use you anyway while you’re still warm.’ He chuckled manically. ‘Ain’t no use in…’
She poked her pistol below the beam in the direction of the voice and fired twice.
A scream of agony shrieked down the corridor as Scarface took the full impact of her shot, the fearsome energy pulse searing his flesh and burning his uniform with it.
A broadside of shots peppered the beam beside her, sparks of plasma showering past and the smell of scorched metal singing her nostrils as she huddled out of sight.
‘Kill her!’ screamed Scarface in a tortured, keening cry. ‘Kill the bitch!’
She peeked her head out and saw Scarface lying on his back in the corridor and being dragged away by Tags, who was trying to aim back at her while pulling his injured comrade away from danger and into shelter.
Bad move.
She swung her pistol down, took aim and fired before Tags could even aim back at her properly.
The shot hit Tags in the chest and blew half of his lungs out of his back in a scarlet spray, his face bulging with agony as he toppled over backward and slammed to the deck, his suit pinning him there as smoke puffed from his chest.
Scarface screamed again, still tearing at the smouldering wound in his right thigh.
She fired again and Scarface fell silent and still, his jaw skittering across the corridor in a trail of blue smoke.
She pushed down off the ceiling toward the stocky pirate’s corpse, grabbing his rifle and security key as she propelled herself through the open gates. Tags and Scarface’s smouldering bodies wreaked of burning flesh as she glided over them and hit the security door at the far end of the corridor.
Atlantia Series 1: Survivor Page 3