Deathstalker d-1

by Simon R. Green

  "Silo Nine is where they send the hard cases, the ones who fought back. Who questioned their orders or dared to think for themselves. And, of course, anyone found guilty or even suspected of being members of the underground. Officially, Silo Nine doesn't exist. Which means they can do anything at all there that they feel like. The prisoners become just so many warm bodies, used for experimentation. The Empire's always interested in improving its stock, or learning better ways to control or discipline it. We're talking about psychological conditioning, genetic tinkering, and every kind of mental or physical torture you can think of. Some of it works, much of it doesn't, but there are always more warm bodies to work with. Sometimes, the Empire works changes on them in the name of scientific inquiry. There are monsters in Silo Nine."

  "And Wormboy?" said Finlay.

  "He runs Silo Nine. He was human, once. Now he's become something else, though whether it's more or less than human depends on who you talk to. He has artificially augmented esper abilities far beyond anything that's ever arisen naturally. He makes the prison the hell it is and enjoys every moment of it. The suffering and despair of others makes him strong. It's because of him that no one ever leaves Wormboy Hell alive."

  Finlay shook his head slowly. "I never knew any of this."

  "You never asked. As long as there were always more clones and espers for you to use up as you chose, you never questioned the system that produced them. And you never asked what happened to the garbage you threw away, did you?"

  "All right! I'm sorry. There are a lot of questions I never asked, but I'm asking now. I want to know. Has anyone ever tried to break into this place before?"

  "No one that's lived to tell of it. Silo Nine has state-of-the-art security. Always. We've never been able to get past it before, but this could be the break we've been praying for. There's a lot of us who'd give our lives and die happy for a chance to bring down Wormboy Hell."

  Finlay looked at her steadily. I thought you said I was your life. "You've lost someone to Silo Nine, haven't you? Someone close."

  "Yes. We all have. She was my friend, before I was a clone and after. She helped brief me on taking over as Evangeline. The only person I could ever really talk to. They came for her in the early hours of the morning, and I never saw her again. Daddy tried to find out what had happened to her, for fear she'd talk, but even he couldn't get answers about what happens to people inside Wormboy Hell."

  Evangeline fell silent, and Finlay couldn't think of anything to say. They looked across at Hood, who was talking persuasively again.

  "I've managed to infiltrate some of my own people into the incoming security forces, and I've convinced some of the braver cyberats to run a jamming storm to coincide with our attack. They'll run interference while we get our people out and keep security from calling for outside help."

  "All right," said the hog. "We're convinced. Set things in motion. We'll spread word throughout the esper network. You organize the clone forces. We'll begin our attack on Silo Nine in one hour from now. Get moving."

  Hood nodded quickly with his empty cowl, turned away without acknowledging Evangeline and Finlay, and strode quickly out of the chamber. Finlay looked at Evangeline.

  "This is all happening a bit fast for me. You're really going to launch an attack on a maximum security prison just on that man's word?"

  "Of course. We trust Hood. We've been given good reason to in the past. And we've had plans for an attack for years, ready to take advantage of any opportunity that arose.

  We've dreamed of this for a long time, Finlay. A lot of blood debts are going to be settled today."

  "But what if it all goes wrong?"

  "Then it goes wrong! We can't miss out on a chance like this; it might not come again for decades. You can't conceive what it's like in that hellhole, Finlay. None of us can."

  "That's not strictly true," said the abstract pattern in a cool, expressionless voice. Looking at it too closely made Finlay's head ache, so he looked at it sideways and concentrated on the voice as it continued. "We have contact with one of our people in Silo Nine. She volunteered to be captured and sent there. We spent some time preparing her so that she would appear to break under their interrogation, but still keep the deepest part of herself free and separate. We can listen in, but we can't speak to her. She knew she was almost certainly going to her death, but she still volunteered, just on the chance that we might be able to make use of her. She was ready to wait for years, if need be. Have you ever cared about anything that strongly in your life, Finlay Campbell?"

  "I put my life on the line every time I entered the Arena," said Finlay. "But that was just for me. I never cared about anyone except me, until I met Evangeline, and then I only cared about us. Maybe that's changing now. I don't know. I'm still coming to terms with… everything. I can't really understand what life has been like for you."

  Then let us show you, said the esper leaders, and their thoughts swept over Finlay's mind like an irresistible tide of blinding light. He was torn away in a rush of thoughts and images, and all he could do was go along with it. He could feel Evangeline's presence beside him in the churning maelstrom, and that comforted him. He stopped trying to fight it and allowed the esper leaders to take him where they would. He listened, and after a while, thoughts came to him that were not his own.

  Jenny Psycho wasn't her real name, but she had to give that up when she went undercover. She lost a great deal more when the Empire threw her into Wormboy Hell, but she somehow held onto her real name and kept it safe, one last secret hidden deep inside her, where her torturers couldn't find it. Not even Wormboy himself. To them, she was still Jenny Psycho, captured terrorist. Just as the esper leaders had planned, though she'd forgotten that. She'd forgotten a lot of things. It was the only way to survive.

  She lay curled in a ball, naked and shivering, on the bare concrete floor of her cell. There was no furniture, or any other luxury, just four bare stone walls surrounding a space maybe twice the size of an average coffin, with a ceiling so low she couldn't stand upright without stooping. They'd dropped her in, sealed the lid shut, laughed, and then left her alone in the darkness. They dropped food and water in through a sliding vent in the ceiling, but no one ever talked to her.

  Except Wormboy.

  She knew she'd never be allowed out again until it was time to kill her, but she didn't know when that would be. So every time the guards came, she was afraid they'd come for her, and scrabbled back to press into a corner, as though she could hide from them. But they only dropped the food and water and went away. Sometimes it was hot and sometimes it was cold in the cell, but there was never any light. She had no idea what she looked like now, but it was probably pretty bad. She hadn't been able to wash in all the time she'd been there, however long that was. She'd tried counting the meals, but she soon lost track. There was a grille in the floor in one corner that served as a toilet, but not very well. Sometimes she heard things moving underneath it. Live things. Living off her.

  Like Wormboy.

  She used to scream a lot, but all that got her was a sore throat, so she stopped. She used to talk to herself, but she ran out of things to say. She still sang occasionally, as a small sign of defiance, but she was starting not to like the way her voice sounded. She smelt bad. The stench in her cell rose and fell just enough to keep her from getting used to it. She suspected that was deliberate. It was the sort of thing Wormboy would do.

  They caught her easily. It seemed to her there was a reason for that, but she'd forgotten it. As a low-level esper, it had been her job to mentally test and examine babies developing in the womb to discover whether they had any trace of esp in them. If they did, they were either aborted or taken away at birth to begin a lifetime of training and conditioning. Depending on whether it was a useful kind of esp, of course. It wasn't a foolproof method, but it caught quite a few. The mothers all looked at her with the same controlled desperation, and she gave them all the same brief meaningless smile. And for a long
time she just did her job, doing as she was told, as she'd been trained, but constant exposure to so many bright, innocent unsullied minds was finally too much for her. She began using her talents to conceal the babies' esp. It wasn't difficult. The esper abilities would still appear in later life, but at least that way they had a chance at a safe, normal, free life. Security found out. She hadn't tried that hard to conceal it. Defiance, perhaps, or maybe some last trace of her own conditioning. Or something else that she'd forgotten. Either way, they caught her.

  And now here she was, alone in the dark with a worm in her head, down in Wormboy Hell.

  Light began seeping into her cell from somewhere. A sickly yellow light that made her think of disease and decay. In it, she could see the sores and scabs on her blotched skin. The smell was suddenly thick and choking, and her stomach heaved painfully though there was nothing in it. And there in the cell with her, crawling out of the shadows in splashes of bloody amniotic fluid, came the babies. Bald and pudgy, with barely formed arms and legs, they crawled over and around her, a living carpet of unforgiving flesh. Unfinished fetuses squirmed spasmodically on the concrete floor, trying to squeeze in between her and the floor, as though trying to crawl back into the wombs from which they'd been prematurely torn.

  She wanted to love them all, poor blameless innocents, but she knew what was coming next. They came from Wormboy. Teeth appeared in all the babies' mouths, sharp, jagged teeth thrusting up through torn bloody gums, and slowly, deliberately, they began to eat her alive. Jenny always swore that this time she wouldn't scream, but she always did in the end. Teeth ripped at her flesh as she screamed and screamed, and blood ran down to pool thickly on the floor. As the pain and the horror mounted, pudgy fingers began to pry at her squeezed-shut eyelids to get at the eyes beneath, and even though she knew none of it was real. Jenny Psycho screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.

  Wormboy did so like his little games. And mindgames were the best fun of all.

  * * *

  Fat and wide and greasy like a slug, genetically-engineered to never sleep or waver in his duty, Wormboy filled an entire auditorium from wall to wall; vast acres of pale, faintly luminescent flesh that rippled and folded in upon itself. His bulk covered all the floor, and his huge distorted head pressed against the ceiling. Long tubes entered his body here and there, providing nourishment and removing wastes. He could never have eaten enough to satisfy his enormous appetite. His body's needs were taken care of by the authorities so that his mind could roam free across the prison. Wormboy's parents had been normal enough humans, but he had been designed and tampered with from the embryo onward to shape the mind and talents of the perfect jailer. He ran everything, from the computers that ran Silo Nine's security, to the guards who enforced his edicts, to the little pets that gave him access to every prisoner's mind.

  Every time someone was damned to Wormboy Hell, for whatever reason, a small genetically designed and Imperially patented parasite was surgically implanted in their brain. Wormboy's worms. They blocked off the esper's powers so they couldn't use them offensively, and secreted various useful chemicals that helped to keep the espers and clones quiet and malleable. And if by some chance an esper or a clone did find the strength of will to fight off the chemicals and try to escape, the worm would fry their brain.

  If his prisoners misbehaved, or held back information, Wormboy used his little pets to gain entrance to their recalcitrant minds and sent them nightmares that had all the hallmarks of reality except that you couldn't die in them, no matter how much you wanted to. Wormboy sent his horrid dreams to instruct or persuade or punish, or just for the fun of it. There was no one to tell him he couldn't, and after all, no one cared. They were going to die anyway. The worms gave him all the control he needed and were much cheaper and easier to run than hundreds of individual esp-blockers. Their designer won a major award, before he disappeared into Silo Nine to insure he never told anyone else his secrets.

  Wormboy liked to go among the monsters, the malformed, horrid results of esper and clone experimentation. Too dangerous ever to be released, too useful to kill, they roared and spat in their cells, clawing at the stone walls. Human no longer, but more than beasts; wild and awful and beyond pain or fear, they defied even Wormboy's best efforts, but he never gave up on them. He swept back and forth among the specially reinforced cells, walking up and down in their minds, and they screamed and howled with a rage that shook the walls. To them, he was just one more monster among many. Wormboy laughed and laughed and laughed.

  His mind roamed free among the prisoners of Silo Nine, present in every mind controlled by a worm; a slimy mental caress, a passing presence like a chill wind from a charnel house. Bringer of nightmares, vast and awful, horrid and merciless god of his own private hell.

  Finlay Campbell lay curled in a ball on the floor of the abandoned workstation, shaking and shuddering. Evangeline knelt beside him, her hands cool on his feverish face, murmuring calm and soothing words. He felt sick, tainted and invaded on every level of his mind and body. Wormboy's thoughts had ripped through his mind like poisoned barbed wire, brushing aside all his defenses as he shared everything that happened to Jenny Psycho. Neither of them had known he was there, but that just made him feel even more helpless, unable to help Jenny or any of the other victims of Wormboy's rape. Finlay snarled his killer's death's-head grin, his hands clenched into fists. He would find the monster in its lair and kill it, and maybe then he'd feel clean again.

  He ran through the calming chants he'd learned in the Arena, and gradually the shaking stopped. Control slipped over him again like a cool, familiar cloak, and he sat up. Evangeline hovered over him worriedly, but he managed a small smile for her.

  "It's all right, Evie. I'm back. I swear to you, I never knew any of this. I never heard of Silo Nine, or Wormboy, or the terrible things they're doing there. If Parliament and the Company of Lords knew about this…"

  "Many of them already do," said Evangeline. "Unofficially. They don't care, or if they do, they manage not to think about it Clones and espers aren't people, remember? We're property. The Empire made us, so it can do whatever it wants with us."

  "But if the people knew; if we told them, made them understand…"

  "You wouldn't be allowed to tell them. The production of clones and espers is too important to too many people. Stop the trade, and millionaires would become paupers overnight. And what would happen to the Empire, dependent on espers for its smooth running at all levels? The Empire has a vested interest in preserving the status quo at all costs. Why do you think they spend so much time and effort in portraying the underground as ruthless terrorists? I'm sorry, Finlay. This is all new to you, but we've lived with it all our lives."

  "I won't allow this to continue," said Finlay. "It's wrong. It's obscene. It's against everything we're taught to believe and honor. The Families are supposed to protect their people against such abuses, guard them against horrors like this."

  "Even clones and espers?" said Evangeline.

  "You were right," said Finlay. 'They are people, too."

  Evangeline smiled. "Welcome to our rebellion, Finlay. The attack on Silo Nine will be starting soon; will you be joining us?"

  Finlay smiled back at her, and his eyes were cold as death. "Try and stop me."

  Which was how he came to be padding down a narrow technician's access tunnel, gun in one hand, sword in the other, leading a small army of rebels through the interconnecting guts of the undercity. Evangeline was there at his side, a large gun looking out of place in her small, delicate hand. He had no doubt she would use it, though. She'd been there in Jenny Psycho's mind, too. Just the thought was enough to make Finlay's hands tighten around his sword and gun. He had vowed upon his name and honor to find and free Jenny, or die trying. It amused him a little to think how outraged he would have been at such a thing only a few hours earlier. A death vow over clones and espers? Unthinkable. His father would have disowned him. Or maybe not, if he'd seen wh
at his son had seen. The Campbell had been a hard, pragmatic man, but even he would have drawn the line at Wormboy Hell. The Campbell, for all his faults and intrigues, had been an honorable man.

  Finlay glanced about him, but there were only the bare polished walls of the tunnel and a ceiling so low he had to walk hunched over to avoid banging his head. There was darkness before his parry, and darkness behind them, as the fifty or so men and women moved in a blaze of sourceless light, a bright golden glow generated by the minds of the espers. Finlay hadn't known espers could do that, but he had a feeling there were lots of things he didn't know about espers. He'd begun to suspect that when early on one of the esper leaders had looked at him, and suddenly Finlay had a map in his head of the long, convoluted way that would lead him into Silo Nine. The map was still there, clear and distinct, though he'd never been this way before. It also told him he wasn't far from the first of the prison's outer defenses.

  The fifty or so men and women with him (he kept getting a different answer every time he counted, because some of them weren't always there) seemed to be making a lot of noise, but Evangeline had assured him they were all telepathically shielded from detection, while cyberats were running interference on the tech security systems. The rebels were invisible, for all intents and purposes, until they began their attack. By which time they should be deep in the diseased heart of Wormboy Hell, and it would be far too late to try and stop them then.

  Hood strode along on Finlay's other side, calm and confident. There was still no trace of any face in his cowl, which frankly spooked the hell out of Finlay, but Evangeline trusted Hood, so Finlay went along with it. Certainly the man showed no sign of fear or hesitation, despite the odds they'd be facing. Finlay approved of that. Among all the things a warrior needed, a cool head in a dangerous situation was right at the top.