"Reception," A woman's voice answered.
"This is Tezac Hotchkins," He said hoarsely. "I'm just in today. My stuff hasn't arrived yet."
"Nobody's stuff has arrived yet, hun." She said. "Just wait til the morning. Your uniform is covered; it's in the room."
"There's no way I could come and get it myself?"
"It's a long haul to take care of yourself when it's goin to be taken care of in a few hours." She said. "It's late. Get some sleep. You'll need it."
He said nothing more as he could say nothing more. The voice yet spoke, but the words meant nothing and were distant. Tezac let go of the switch and stumbled over himself toward the bed. What sweat there was on his skin made room for more and the room spun. There was very little that found its way through the haze and to his senses, save the pain. The pain that was with him always whenever the auto-hypos were not. The metal ghost of his hand coursed with it and the mattress was no comfort and the sheets could not warm him. There was no night that passed in all the housing complex worse than his, and he'd still Hell to look forward to tomorrow.
Day 4: Early Morning
He placed his naked hand against the biometric scanner and admitted his eyes to that of the retina. The ghosts of the hibernation pod were with him still and the sanctioned STIMs they had promised would chase away the fog did nothing of the sort. It had been a long voyage, hurtling through the Innerverse and then into the outermost reaches of the Outerverse. A frozen sojourn that lasted 36 months and had ended as quickly as it had began. The security globe above the doorway warbled and flashed the color of the skies outside and the door slid open, into the wall. Tezac stepped through and it thus closed behind him to bring round the man already sat within at the terminals.
"You the rookie?" He said and turned back round to the hardlight consoles that ringed the small extent of the room.
"Yes," Tezac said and came further within and looked about himself at the monitors and the holodisplays that the other guard manipulated infrequently.
"Take a seat." He said and gestured sightlessly at the chair that bouyed magnetically next to him. "I'm Leargam, by the way."
"Tezac," He said and extended his hand to the man. "Hotchkins."
Leargam turned around once more and looked from the hand to the man's face that held it out to him and then took it. They shook. He sat down on the seat indicated by his new colleague and waved a hand over the eye embedded into the lectern before him. Its holodisplay erupted and generated a hardlight console beneath it. He set his helmet down upon the shelf of the terminal bank and scanned his way into the database via its sensors. His fingertips opened the way for him and he set to the routine described to him during the remote briefing he was given before embarking the better half of four years ago.
"You don't have any STIMs, do you?" He said softly to Leargam.
The man gave him a look and then said, "Son, I wouldn't go around asking that too often."
"Do you have any coffee, at least?" He asked instead.
"Coffee?"
"Black blood of the working man," Tezac said. "Coffee."
"Only black blood we got around here are the Ultracorist inmates and guards with misplaced values." Leargam said and scrolled his finger across the hardlight terminal to a new camera feed. "No, in so many words: we don't have any coffee."
Tezac shook his head and squinted into the brightness of the holodisplay's camera feed and slid his finger across the hardlight projection below it to scroll on to the next one. His enthusiasm for it lilted the longer he did so and soon it seemed as though the business had swallowed up the hours of his predawn morning. It was not long thereafter that he activated the terminals nearest to him and programmed between the three an automatic cycle of the different feeds and relaxed into the weightlessness of the magnetic chair.
"How long is it until dawn?" He said to Leargam.
"Half an hour until we hit the alarm."
Tezac nodded and began to settle back into his chair, but then jerked awake at a thing seen only briefly out from the corner of his eye. He sat upright and threw himself to the controls of the terminal and navigated the display back to a previous camera feed. In his haste he passed well by it and scrolled back again to find the smoking paritions of a man who had been moments before on his feet and walking. They laid both within and without the laser grid of his cell, still housing those others that slept inside. Tezac leaned close to the monitor and studied the dismembered corpse and found, he thought, the several pieces of its head.
"Leargam," He said.
"Yeah?"
"Feed 6," He said. "Tier 14."
"Cell number?"
"239. On the left, heading to the middle."
"239, 239, 239." The older guard said to himself and then, "Prisoners Jacobs, Seagrave, the brothers Liam and Olum."
He leaned closer to the monitor as Tezac had and his grey eyes looked over what he saw before him, a stretched plain of light to the sidelong rookie. He saw the wrinkles on Leargam's face that painted the history of his squinting so at such things many times before. He saw in the light the oil of old sweat that had settled on his skin and the grey stubble on his chin. But there was none of the palor of old age, and had he seen fit to do aught for the steel of his hair Tezac could not have seen him for aged.
"All life signs read as normal except for one." Leargam said at length. "Vidal Jacobs. One of the Gang of Six. Raped and murdered his way through the Imkrang system to seven standard lifetimes, four completed. Due for his next Delayed Expiration injection tomorrow. Appears that's our man on the floor, then."
"Was he sleep-walking?"
"Could be," Leargam said and floated over to the control station of the observation tower. "But it's hard to sleep walk out of night containment. Maybe he got fed up with 400 years. And another 200 to come."
There was a silence between the two and in the tower which encapsulated their own as the old guard worked the hardlight console broadcast before him. Then Tezac scoffed and shook his head.
"Why not just kill him?" He said.
"Son where do you think they send the ones who can answer that?" He said as he dug into the pocket of his vest for a chem-stick and at last took it into his fingers, held it up to look at it. "Alright: let's wake up the beast."
"Shouldn't we clean up what's left of Jacobs?"
"Give em something to look at in the morning and they're less liable to make something to look at in the afternoon." Leargam said and slid the chem-stick between his teeth and grinned at Tezac. "At least that's always been my motto."
He hit the lever with that smile. The sleeping pods of the thousands of cells thus all began to clank and hiss and beep at once. A horrid cacophony that seemed to Tezac to be without end and so signalled the end of time and of the universe and of everything. He fastened his helmet over his head and voiced for it to cancel out all extranneous noise. His world became silence. The world of all the others screamed. So it was until he saw on the hardlight monitors that the inmates now writhed upon the cold floor, ejected angrily by their berths that now receded pityingly into the walls again. He saw Leargam tap a key out from out the corner of his eye.
The loudspeaker whined beyond the cold walls of the observation tower and against the cold walls of the holding tower. The inmates woke shouting and jumping and cursing. Those who had been dreaming cried. It was a new day. A new hell. But it was and would be the same as that which came before it. The prison that was enough of itself each day to torment, but remained as malleable as it needed to disturb contentedness. It was the road that every man walked every day, but he could not predict what the weather had done to it across the night or who else he might find upon it. Only the men in the suits knew, the men who looked on from the hardlight heavens, and they would not tell.
"Wakie, wakie." Leargam said over the channel. "Another day in paradise. Line. Come on. Line em up and shake em down. That's the spirit."
They shuffled out from their cells and packed themselves
into ranks along the tiers, filling them up from wall to open edge. So many ghouls of old placed into new raiment and made to haunt new wastelands and new graveyards. Tezac wondered at the calm of those in front and that they should be so sure of the courtesy of those behind. He wondered if he might think differently tomorrow, or after as many tomorrows as they had seen dashed here. But these thoughts left him as his eyes left the lower flung terraces and moved across those above them and counted upwards the arrayed masses of prisoners until they disappeared overhead.
"There's so many." He said, looking up through the polymer window still.
"Galaxy's a big place." Leargam said into the hardlight console before him. "Our corner of it anyway. Initiating drone scan."
He pressed his thumb against one edge of the hardlight console and slid it across to the other. A hatch hissed open somewhere upon the tower walls above them and the distant mutedness of the noise recalled Tezac to a place far beyond the station. Beyond the cruel planet that enfolded it, and indeed any planet at all. A place or memory buried within the dark corridors of space. In what all sound is reduced to in the wake of a hull puncture. The life-giving atmosphere flushed out but enough lingering to transmit last cries, enough to know more of those swallowed than their silhouttes disappearing into the greater black. He reeled and curled into that depth which haunted him thus and remained there until the loud blare of the drone that bouyed outside pulled him back out again.
Its carbon fiber wings bore it forth into the fullness of the air of the tower, whirring and chirping and bellowing its electronic song. The guns of its selective lidar scanners ejected from its ovular hull and twisted and churned as their waves rolled across the shabby forms of the prisoners that they could reach. Thus it moved and ascended the heights and spun within them and catalogued the vastness of the human scree that populated it.
"And it's found Jacobs," Leargam said and dismissed the report the drone had beamed to his console before it emitted the deep blare again that sounded so much to Tezac as though it had malfunctioned.
He keyed on the loudspeaker again and said, "A few of you are probably wondering what it was you stepped in and why it smells so much like burnt flesh and why we're so late to the party." There was scattered laughter then as he went on that was not so scattered, for the few of many are still many. "This is a friendly reminder that spending the night outside the sleeping cells does a bright future make, but unfortunately not a very long one. And don't worry, if it fails to make that clear, the drones will be making the rounds all week to let you know."
The old man turned to him and leaned toward him and away from the console and said, "Time for grub." and there was none of the joviality in his voice. It was tired now, with the rest of him. Outside he could hear the hissing chorus of air pockets departing the storage hatches that opened along the tower and the whir of the drones housed behind them fluttering out. On the hardlight monitors he saw the ornithopters buzz frantically about and then settle in new places to bellow commands at a new pack of inmates that shuffled forward silently.
Leargam rose from his Maglev chair and Tezac with him. The rookie followed the man who went stocky and pale beside him to the door. It opened at their presence and they went out onto the narrow trestle beyond and had thus begun to retrace Tezac's steps to the barracks. But he knew not where the prisoners went somewhere behind him and feared that he might never know, though out of sight and out of mind must have been a thing pined for there. But for him it was the seeing and the minding and the doing of the thing that made the thing not so bad. And it was idleness that made for bad things.
Day 4
Tezac bent double over the bowl of Nutripaste set before him and gripped the edges of the table and shook his head sharply.
"You alright?" Leargam asked, pointed at him with his spoon. "Or is the couisine not to your liking?"
"Preservifluid." Was all the man across from him could say, who took a deep breath through his nose before straightening up again.
"They're still pumping that shit into you boys, huh?" Leargam said and dove back into the grey putty of his meal and shook his head at it. "Well it is a simple fix to complex living."
"It's cheap and it's quick. Fine for the Ministry, and even better for BiotiCorp." He said and tensed again, closed his eyes. "But you never get used to it."
"And you've had enough to get used to it."
"Virtuous Order." Tezac said and waited a moment for another pang and when it did not come he picked up his spoon from the table. "Twenty-seven years. Give or take. Most of it in stasis."
"Well I'll be fucked," Leargam said and swallowed another moutful. "I'm sitting with a living breathing Lord-Knight. Not that I needed you to tell me, your size and all. And not a scratch on him too, fighting like that in those wars. Impressive."
"Not entirely." Tezac said and raised his right hand to him before passing his spoon into its fingers.
"Cybernetic?"
"Wrist-down."
"Cut off or shot off?"
It seemed to Tezac as though he had the practiced air of one used to asking such questions. Of one who had made such commentary before and perhaps had sat where he had sat then and making it a hundred times. The only constant in a hundred lifetimes, populated by the remains of expectation. And the man before him now did not enjoy being only the next, only the last in a long unfortunate line.
"Cut off." Tezac said. "Clean. Raylic warblade. Organic, self-producing acid."
"Rayl," Leargam said and chuckled as he swallowed again, but there was no mirth. "Man the stories I head about that swamp-covered shithole."
"Did you serve?"
"Me? No."
"And you weren't conscripted?"
"I was way out here when it broke that another Reclamation was brewing. Back when this place was just a backwater mining operation, and all we had to deal with was a few smugglers. Then the Concilium ships touched down and that was that. Pay was good. Hell, better than what we were hauling ourselves. So most of us stayed on. You going to eat that?"
"Not hungry." Tezac said and pushed the bowl away. "What the hells is it?"
"Nutripaste. Bioticorp's latest invention. Didn't they feed you this edible waste?"
"Intravenuous Preservifluid flow." He said, inspecting a spoonful of the muck that refused to fall away back into the bowl. "STIM cockstails when morale was low."
"That's why this is free." Leargam said and scooped out what was left of his own into a soupy mass that made Tezac's stomach churn. "Morning meal on company time, they foot the bill. Real food's in the cantina. Real girls, too."
The old man's smile and upturned eyebrows were interrupted by a chime from his wristband. He tapped the screen to accept the transmission and on it appeared a face Tezac could not quite make out at his vantage, shrunk to fit tiny dimensions. Leargam looked into the eyes of the man who it was on the other side and Tezac could see his shoulders droop in a sigh that went unvoiced.
"Leargam," He heard the man's voice say. "Report to hangar bay 7, pad 12."
"You get promoted Penders, or did the girls at Susie's just give you more than your usual tune-up this morning?"
"Big laugh." The man said. "Round of applause."
"I'll be here all week." Leargam said. "What's down at the hangar bay that you're interrupting my breakfast?"
"Prisoner transfer. Impromptu. Military vessel by the broadcast codes. Sounds like some kind of emergency. I thought we'd get our best right on it."
"Can't hangar personnel handle it? I'm off duty until core standard 7."
"It's your block and it's your tower, Leargam. I don't want to hear it. And take that rookie with you."
"Alright," He said, and sighed. "Leargam, over and out."
"Does this happen often?" Tezac said.
"Military ship this far out?" The old man said as he stood and gathered up their utensils. "Maybe. A few times. None of this emergency landing crap, though. On my damn shift, too."
"What about this?" T
ezac said and indicated the untouched bowl of sepia goo on the table before him.
"Degradable. Like everything else in this scrapheap." He said and went away from their table and deposited everything in the autowasher, tucked away into its own dingy corner of the dingy mess hall. "Be about 30 minutes, all gone. Spendthrift magic."
"Alright," Tezac said and stood up, hands on his hips. "What about my weapon. They said I'd be issued one on arrival."
"They're always saying one thing or another. Truth is, kid, out here, you're on your own. Unless you got me around - or in comms distance of course."
"Is my weapon within comms distance?"
"Everything's in comms distance on Cocytus." Leargam said and circled round their table to him. "Getting there's the hard part. But lucky for you, armory's right on the way to our own plot of landing pad hell."
Thus they went out from the mess and navigated their way through the third level of headquarters, past the empty recreational rooms and common areas to the lift that waited like a tumor at the center of it all. Tired figures, some cloaked by their armor and their helmets and some not, shambled past them as the doors opened and Tezac could not help but look upon the shape of things to come. They stepped inside. Leargam pressed the topmost button. The maglev units beneath their feet engaged and, humming, spurned the earth.
The lift that was empty but for the two of them opened onto the lonely hall of the fourth and highest level of headquarters. Its gleaming stone produced no echoes, its balconies no commiserating figures. They stepped through and onto the hard, polished floors. Tezac looked up at the great hollow pyramid of steel that sat upon a plinth before them at the heart of the atrium, and within it the single chain of unity onto which the arms of the many were fastened. He had placed in his time such symbols upon many worlds, steeped in blood and stamped with iron treads. It was that of the Concilium, of Man so-called and less so with every Reclamation, and it stretched upon red flags along all the corridors that led away from the chamber.
Prisoner 52 Page 5