‘I want proof of life,’ he said.
‘Then you shall have it,’ Qayin replied, ‘at least, of life at the moment. You see I don’t believe that you will free us without another demonstration of our determination to succeed, captain.’
‘You leave my people be,’ Idris growled, his thick fists bunching by his sides.
‘No,’ Qayin replied. ‘I won’t. Not until you release us from the prison. Ah, here we are.’
Idris watched as Qayin was filmed walking through the cell block’s control tower, corpses visible floating within, and then out into the cell block. Debris and blood drifted through the air as they walked.
A ripple of whispered profanities and exclamations of disgust drifted across the bridge as the crew witnessed for the first time the ghostly aftermath of the riot in the cell block. Corpses drifted everywhere, blood and other bodily fluids spilled in long glistening trails that hung in the air like gruesome gossamer webs. Qayin’s voice chortled over the grim scene.
‘Like what we’ve done with the place?’
‘You’ll pay,’ Idris replied. ‘One way or another, you’ll pay for what you’ve done.’
‘What I’ve done?’ Qayin asked, touching his own barrel chest as though appalled. ‘I didn’t try to blow up the prison, captain. Makes me wonder who did it and why, y’know? Especially now, seeing as you’re willing to cut us loose and all of the hostages too.’
‘You give me no choice.’
‘You have a choice!’ Qayin roared, his face filling the monitor and the image shuddering as he grabbed the floating camera. ‘You let us all out or none of us! That is your choice, captain!’
Qayin turned the camera and let the captain and his crew see the hundreds of corpses floating through the cell block.
‘This is what happened, captain,’ Qayin’s voice echoed through the bridge as he swept the grisly scene slowly with the camera. ‘This is what your governor did to us. And now you think that I ask too much, to be freed from this place?’
Qayin set the camera in the air before him as he spoke.
‘It’s time, captain, to make your choice.’
Qayin sent the camera gently flying up alongside him as he scaled steps that climbed to the top tier of the prison block, then caught it and pushed it down the gantry as he walked past the cells. He twisted it so it faced sideways to its plane of motion, the view on the monitor changing to sweep past the cells one by one.
Inside each cell, variously standing at the gates or cowering on the thin mattresses, were the captured correctional officers and marines
‘These are your people are they not, captain?’ Qayin challenged.
Idris ground his teeth in his jaw but did not respond.
‘Fine looking gentlemen,’ Qayin taunted, ‘honourable, upstanding, Word abiding men.’ He chuckled. ‘All of them, except one.’
The camera was stopped in front of the last cell on the tier and Idris almost rushed at the camera as his voice boomed out across the bridge.
‘No!’
There, in the cell, was a woman. She was sat on the bed with her back to the wall, her legs pulled up against her and wrapped in her arms. Her long auburn hair was draped across her legs, her body covered only by the thin, stained sheets of the bed. From her bare shoulders, feet and arms, it was clear she was naked beneath them.
‘Yes,’ Qayin replied from out of shot. ‘Say hello to your wife, captain.’
The woman on the mattress looked up, her face stained with grime and tears, her hair matted against the sides of her face.
‘Meyanna,’ the captain gasped, his whole body trembling as he gripped a stanchion for support, his gaze fixed upon the image of his wife.
‘She survived, captain,’ Qayin mocked him. ‘For now, anyway. I have not yet decided how best to use her. Should I have her tortured and killed, like C’rairn? Or maybe I could let the men have their way with her, all fifty three of them.’
The captain’s complexion paled as he slumped against the stanchion. Andaim rushed to his side and helped him right himself as Qayin’s voice echoed through the bridge.
‘And then I had an idea, captain,’ Qayin said. ‘I thought to myself, let’s do all three. Alpha?!’
Idris looked up at the monitor and the image swivelled toward the main entrance to the block. There, walking through the cell block, was Alpha Zero Zeven.
Andaim’s voice sounded meek as he whispered low enough to ensure that Qayin would not hear him.
‘They’re going to use Alpha again. She can’t deceive them this time.’
Qayin’s voice echoed through the bridge once more.
‘You saw fit to ask my men to kill me, in return for an amnesty captain,’ Qayin sneered. ‘Now I will kill your wife if you don’t extend to us all the same courtesy.’
*
Alpha Zero Seven strode down toward the cell block, the arc welder in her grip as she stepped between the corpses floating in the control tower and out into the block proper.
As Qayin had promised, the hostages had been installed into the cells once more, his men accessing the power lines and rigging the cell gates to open and close via the control panels in the tower.
There was no noise, not like the cell block used to be. Once, before the blast and the riot, the cell block had been a constant source of noise on the rare occasion she had passed through under armed guard before the Atlantia had left dock and she had been sent into solitary stasis. Breathing, shouting, swearing, sweating men confined to their cells. It had never been as quiet as it was now.
She walked across to the centre of the block and looked up at the tower, where two of Qayin’s men watched her through the smoked–glass windows. One of them pointed up to her right, to the top tier, and she turned and headed for the stairs. She heard the sound of Qayin’s voice sniggering out across the lonely cell block as she reached the stairs, and she let her boots fall heavily on the metal steps as she climbed. The steps clanged noisily, each stride echoing back and forth up and down the block until she reached the top tier and turned onto the gantry and listened to Qayin’s voice.
‘Now captain, I can’t speak for myself but I suspect that many of my men, cooped up for so long in here, would like to get to know her much better, don’t you? So we’ll have to leave something alive for them. They won’t appreciate tainted goods now, will they?’
The convicts on the gantry parted for her, their eyes fixed on her metal mask. She saw from the corner of her eye the hostages, incarcerated in the cells they had once guarded, their gazes filled with fear as they watched her walking alive and unconstrained in the cell block.
She reached Qayin, who stood back and grabbed a camera that was floating in the air before him. He turned it and pointed it at her.
‘You remember Alpha, don’t you captain?’
She heard from the camera’s microphone the captain’s voice, tinny and small.
‘Don’t do this.’
‘Why not?’ Qayin asked with an airy rhetoric. ‘You’re not giving me a good enough reason not to, captain.’
‘If you kill her, you remove the last reason for me to not cut you all loose.’
‘The last reason?’ Qayin asked, his eyes widening. ‘So the other thirteen hostages mean nothing to you captain, a mere inconvenience to you, are they?’
‘You’ll murder them all!’ Idris yelled. ‘You’re a killer, nothing more. You cannot be trusted!’
Qayin grabbed the camera and stared into it. ‘I’m a killer,’ he agreed, ‘and I cannot be stopped.’ He turned the camera back to the cell. ‘Unless you do my bidding, captain.’
Qayin glanced at Alpha and nodded.
She turned and walked into the cell.
Fear. It had a unique scent, rank and shameful. It poisoned the air in the cell, tainted the body of the woman curled upon the mattress. She could see that Meyanna Sansin’s ankles were restrained. Her wrists were likewise cuffed, and a thin coiled–metal binding attached those cuffs to the ones at her
ankles.
Alpha approached the bed and Meyanna looked up again as she sensed the approach. Alpha saw pure terror flush pale and sickly across Meyanna’s face as she realised who was occupying the cell with her. Alpha heard the cell door slam shut behind her with a crash that echoed throughout the block as Meyanna’s sudden, choking sobs filled the cell.
‘Please, let me go.’
Alpha loomed over her and activated the welding arc, a fierce blue–white flame roaring into life. Above the sound of the arc she heard the captain’s voice on the camera’s microphone as Qayin poked it between the bars of the cell.
‘Leave her alone!’
Alpha reached down and yanked the sheet aside, hurling it behind her as she leaned down and grabbed Meyanna’s arm. She turned to one side so that the camera could clearly see what she was doing and then jabbed the welder at Meyanna’s body. The fearsomely bright arc welder clicked and hissed as it hit Meyanna’s skin and seared into her body as though it were not even there.
The smell of burning flesh stained the air as Meyanna screams soared out of the cell and shrieked across the cell block, her body writhing in agony.
‘All right!’
Alpha barely heard the captain’s horrified, agonised plea from the camera. She pulled the welder away and turned as Qayin spoke.
‘What was that, captain?’
Meyanna had slumped down onto the mattress, the flesh of her arm seared with a hideous lesion of cauterised flesh several inches long, her body shaking and her sobs muffled as she buried her face into her shoulder.
‘All right,’ came the captain’s voice again, choked with sobs in harmony to those of his wife. ‘I’ll open the hatches.’
Qayin grinned and turned the camera back to face himself.
‘Congratulations, captain,’ he murmured. ‘For the first time today you’re saving lives instead of taking them. You will open up the main hatch from the prison into the Atlantia. I and my fellow convicts will be allowed out first, upon which time you may send men to recover the hostages.’
‘No,’ Idris gasped, sounding out of breath. ‘The hostages are to be released before anybody else.’
‘No deal!’ Qayin snapped and then looked at Alpha. ‘Cut her again!’
‘No!’
The captain’s voice was both a roar and a cry, sharp and loud enough that Alpha did not move.
‘The convicts first,’ Qayin insisted. ‘No negotiations, captain.’
‘Very well,’ the captain whispered, his voice scoured of defiance. ‘The convicts may leave first.’
‘We will remain armed,’ Qayin informed the captain. ‘We wouldn’t want you shooting us all like rats in a barrel once we’re aboard, would we now?’
Alpha heard the captain agree and then Qayin tossed the camera casually over his shoulder. It floated out over the cell block, tumbling as it went.
‘Get the men ready,’ he ordered Cutler, and then shouted across the block loudly enough for the convicts to hear him. ‘It’s time to leave!’
A rally of cheers soared through the block as Cutler turned and hurried down the gantry and the convicts freed the hostages, yanking them out of their cells and hauling them away with shouts of glee.
Qayin looked at Alpha. His glare bored deep into her eyes and he spoke slowly.
‘Nicely done,’ he said. ‘Patch her up and then move her.’
Qayin grinned broadly and then walked away.
Alpha turned to Meyanna’s huddled, rocking form.
She grabbed the sheets and draped them across Meyanna’s shaking body and then turned to the cell door. The camera had tumbled out over the abyss of the cell block, spinning as it went, and collided with the corpse of a convict.
Alpha began stripping out of her uniform.
***
XIII
‘You cannot do that, captain!’
Hevel was standing on the bridge, his hands behind his back and his pallid skin glistening in the dim bridge lighting.
The captain leaned against the stanchion, dragged a weary hand across his face. ‘And why is that?’
Hevel paced toward the captain and dropped his voice.
‘Give them their escape and before you know it they’ll have the helm. It’s suicide to let them in here.’
‘And murder if I don’t,’ Idris snapped back. ‘They have my wife.’
‘You think that they’ll let her go once they’re aboard?’ Hevel challenged. ‘They won’t give her up. She’s their only leverage over us, her and the other hostages. Letting them aboard saves their lives but gives us nothing.’
‘Tell that to the hostages!’ Idris growled. ‘You would have me abandon them all to their deaths?’
‘Do you think that Qayin and his thugs won’t try to take control of the vessel once they’re aboard?’ Hevel pressed. ‘We have no means of housing them securely and not enough armed troops to contain them. There are murderers among them, thieves. Just what do you think’s going to happen when you open that hatch?’
‘Fourteen innocent people won’t die!’ Idris yelled back. ‘Tell me, Hevel, would you be so bold were it your wife held by those murderers and thieves?’
Hevel stepped back from the captain.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I would be bolder. I would go in there and take them back.’
‘I don’t believe that for a moment,’ Andaim snapped. ‘You do have family in there, don’t you Hevel?’
‘I don’t care to think about it,’ Hevel uttered.
‘One son a politician, the other a convict,’ Andaim said. ‘Qayin and Hevel, cut from the same cloth.’
‘We are nothing to each other,’ Hevel snapped, ‘and we share no traits.’
‘Yet you murdered hundreds at the flick of a switch,’ Andaim pointed out. ‘Just the sort of callous act that Qayin was imprisoned for.’
Hevel did not reply, his features twisted in frustration. Jerren pointed up to the monitor nearby.
‘Sirs, you need to see this.’
The captain turned and saw the camera moving again on the screen. The mask of Alpha Zero Seven briefly appeared to fill it. Then the camera was turned and showed her naked flank as she glided away from the corpse of a convict floating high in the cell block.
‘What the hell is she doing?’ Hevel asked out loud.
Nobody answered, every man on the bridge enraptured as the video showed Alpha glide back into Meyanna’s cell. The camera swivelled over to point at Meyanna and then they saw Alpha approach her, the arc welder back in her hand, Meyanna staring wide eyed in horror at the naked, masked woman as she toward her.
‘Stop!’ the captain yelled.
They heard a shriek as Meyanna cringed away from the brightly flaring arc welder, and then silence as the fearsome device sliced through the wire joining Meyanna’s wrists to her ankles. Moments later, Meyanna gritted her teeth, her eyes squeezed shut and a muffled cry of agony reaching the camera’s microphone as Alpha used the welder to slice through the cuffs on her wrists.
They fell away, bright globules of molten metal tumbling through the air as Alpha tore them free, Meyanna’s wrists scorched by the blue–white flame of the welder. Alpha moved to her ankles and moments later they too were free.
‘She’s cutting her loose,’ somebody said.
Alpha turned and let go of the welder. Her masked face approached the camera and stared at it in silence for several long seconds.
Captain Sansin spoke, his voice clear on the bridge.
‘I can see you.’
Alpha turned and grabbed the captain’s wife, hauling her off the mattress and propelling them both out of the cell. Alpha grabbed the camera and carried it with her as they flew out over the cell block, Alpha pushing off the floating bodies of dead inmates and directing both her and Meyanna toward the opposite tier’s access door.
‘She’s heading for the prison hull’s stern,’ Idris said. ‘What’s back there?’
‘Storage units,’ Andaim replied, ‘alongside what’
s left of the engine bays.’
‘What now?’ Hevel asked. ‘What the hell is she going to do?’
The captain shook his head.
‘I don’t know, but whatever it is we had better be ready. She wants an amnesty and by the Word I’ll give it to her if she gets those people out.’ He turned to the security detail. ‘Alert Bra’hiv’s men in the shuttles!’
The soldiers turned and dashed from their posts as Hevel spoke up.
‘She cannot be trusted,’ he insisted. ‘She is a convict.’
‘I know,’ the captain replied. ‘But we can handle one convict far better that we can control fifty of them, agreed?’
‘You were not so adamant about mounting an assault until your wife was presented with a means of escape, captain,’ Dhalere purred alongside Hevel. ‘Are we to understand that all other citizens aboard the Atlantia are second class when compared to…’
‘This is not the time, Dhalere,’ the captain snapped. ‘I have my hands full enough without accusations of favouritism clouding the waters further.’
‘Dhalere’s right,’ Hevel growled. ‘Your wife now has a chance of escape, but what about all of the others in Qayin’s hands? They are being taken to the bow, are they not?’
‘One thing at a time!’ the captain shouted. ‘I cannot control everything that happens aboard the prison, but I can remove the most powerful bargaining tool they have.’
‘And save yourself from the grief that others may suffer in your stead?’ Dhalere asked.
The captain scowled at her and turned to Andaim.
‘If Qayin and his thugs find out what Alpha’s doing they’ll tear her to shreds, and the other hostages with her.’
Andaim, his hands behind his back, tensed a little and raised his chin.
‘I can join Bra’hiv. Maybe we could use this to join forces with her and get all of the hostages out?’
The captain nodded. ‘Do it, right now.’
‘Alpha should be left behind with the rest of them,’ Hevel insisted. ‘She has no place on…’
‘Belay that,’ the captain said, and looked at Andaim. ‘Do not put my wife’s life at risk, but if you can liberate Alpha then please do so.’
Atlantia Series 1: Survivor Page 9