Prisoner 52

by S. T. Burkholder

  Day 16

  Hastur Victor Sejanus woke to find himself free of the medical pod's magnetic containment. The occasional mote of white drifted by outside, calm and unhurried. There was a cry here and there, of pain or for medication withheld, and then the soothing voices that answered them. But apart from these, Arbitronix United Installation #2397B might have been long abandoned en masse.

  He pulled on the edges of the tube with the toes of his boots and slipped out into the null-grav field beyond, hovering hundreds of meters from the floor. He looked about himself, at the shadowed forms that bouyed still in stasis and technicians that floated to and fro attending them. His eyes fell on the woman who mock-leaned against the wall beside him and then kicked off from it to float foetal before him, he before her.

  "Quiet today." He said.

  "It's bound to get much louder." Katherine said. "Our time together is at an end."

  "The jig is up then." He said and glanced at his bracer. "You're early."

  "Are you ready for this?"

  "It ain't like I've got much choice." He said and looked about the vast chamber a moment then settled on her again. "Have you heard from him?"

  "I thought you said you didn't need taking care of."

  "Have you heard from him."

  "Not since the last time."

  "Last time was a week ago."

  "Listen," She said and took something from her vest pocket. "Open your mouth."

  "Open my mouth?"

  She gave him a look and then repulsed nearer to him and he did as she bade.

  "This is a self-adhereing pocket." Katherine said as she placed the sac of synthetic tissue along the inside of his cheek, where it melded with the flesh there. "Inside is a batch of stimulants and selective tranquilizers; I believe you and the other inmates call it RAGE."

  "What do you want me to do with it?"

  "Prisoner 71," One of a pair of figures called from the opened blast doors far below them, floating upward to where they hovered. "Assume stance and await restraint."

  "I want you to use it." She whispered in his ear and he smelled her hair. "Whenever you're in trouble. Just bite down on it. I can't give you another, so don't give in to your emotions. And make sure it's you or them, life or death. But whatever you do: watch where you get hit."

  "What do you care if I live or die?" Sejanus said, but looked to the guardsmen who neared.

  He placed his wrists together behind his right leg and saw one of them interact with his bracer and the maglocks sealed his hands together in that way. They glided to a stop before Katherine and he saw the glint of light that played off the implants that marred the face of the one. He caught Sejanus's stare and lashed out with the butt of his rifle and it was all he could do in the moment to offer his skull in place of his jaw.

  "Penders!" Katherine hissed.

  "Oh what do you care." The guard said, his speech slurred by the half of his face that was no longer of himself. "There's a thousand of him to peck on the cheek, if blunt objects is your thing. He can take it. Can't you, inmate?"

  "Yes, sir." Sejanus said.

  "So," Penders went on and turned away from him. "Give any more thought to it, Kate?"

  "No, Penders." She said. "And it'll be no the next time."

  "Well," He said and grabbed Sejanus by the back of the collar of his jumpsuit. "You'll come around. Won't you?"

  She revolved away from them then and drifted away and through the heights of the infirmary. Penders watched her go until she became as distant as she had been and at last went away himself, down to the doors below and with Sejanus in tow. He saw out of the corner of his eye the man he was with studying him and he looked away as Penders looked back at him.

  "Something on your mind?"

  "What if she files a complaint?" The man said.

  "What if she does?"

  The man shook his head and they passed through the opened gateway of Holding Tower 7's medical quarters, into the decontamination stent between the inner and outer seals. They unfitted the repulsor modules from their boots and sat Sejanus down in their place upon the bench to do the same for him. The sanitizing agent flooded out from the vents once the equipment was locked into place and they had keyed for its release upon the hardlight projections of their bracers.

  "Master Control," Penders said. "Hold decon."

  "Holding decontamination, Enforcer Penders." The computer intelligence said.

  "What are you doing?" The other guard said.

  "Just having a little fun.." He said and traced the slope of Sejanus's jaw with the muzzle of his rifle.

  He raised his rifle as if to strike him with it and Sejanus blurted, "Not in the face."

  "Not in the face?" Penders said with a smile and slowly dropped the rifle back to his side, looked back at his partner. "I hate to be the one that says it, but I don't think you're cut out for life in the Politik."

  "You wouldn't want to return a prisoner from medical with new wounds." He said to the floor. "Would you?"

  "Well look at the brain on dickless here." Penders said and glanced over his shoulder to the other man again before returning to the inmate. "You just saved me a mess of reports to file. It won't help you, though. But that's typical of the vets of this war. No spine."

  "I'll have to report this." The guard said from behind him.

  "You're not going to do shit," Penders said and drew his sidearm on the man. "Except stand there and watch."

  "I can't be a part of this." He said as he put his hands up.

  "You don't have to be."

  "Penders."

  "Mitchum."

  The man shook his head and so he turned back to Sejanus and smiled, grisly with the flesh of his lips that was not there to contort and showed only as metal, toothed scaffolding.

  "Don't worry," Sejanus said to Mitchum, but held Penders’s eyes. "I'll be alright."

  "We'll see about that." The Enforcer before him said and he bowed his head.

  He raised the butt of his rifle again and Sejanus tensed at the coming blow, but it never did. Penders's bracer had chimed and now did so again as it blinked into the soft gloom of the decontamination chamber. He let fall his weapon and keyed his acceptance of the transmission on the prompt.

  "Penders," A voice shouted from a sidewise projection that Sejanus could thus not make out. "Have you retrieved Prisoner 71?"

  "Yes," He said. "Yes, Sir. We have."

  "Good." The voice said and paused. "Good. Bring him to me."

  "Of course, Sir." Penders said and the hologram dispersed in a drone that sighed throughout the short corridor.

  "The Sisters must like you." He said to him and hauled Sejanus to his feet, hunched over still. "But fate or no: it's a small world."

  They made for the doors of the outer gateway and Penders called for the sterilization process to continue. Beneath the billowing of the vents Sejanus could hear the other man who was with them sigh with relief. He nodded to himself as the door opened.

  Day 16

  He was thrust through the doorway before it had hardly cleared and stumbled into the room beyond, looking back over his shoulder at the man he had made promises against in his mind. Penders only grinned at him and so he stood to attention for the man who stood at the wall of glass beyond the holodesk before him, shadowed by the light outside.

  "Leave us." The man said.

  He heard the door hiss closed behind him and saw the light that had made a pillar about him collapse into nothingness.

  "Do you know who I am, Prisoner 71?" The man said to the all-encompassing window, hands clasped at the small of his back.

  "Enforcer-Captain Elias Mullins." Sejanus said. "Commanded the Ersatz Legion 2nd Batallation in the Second Reclamation, two Chains of Unity for it. You're in command here."

  "I'm a god then; wouldn't you say?" Elias said and turned aout, leaned on the holodesk between them. "I'm your god."

  "That's one way to look at it."

  "Yes," He said and squinted at
him, nodded to himself and circled round to face him. "I understand you've had some issues with the other inmates here."

  "You could say that."

  "I could say that. I could look at it that way too." He said and went back behind the holodesk, activated it. "I believe we have a mutual acquaintence."

  "You mean Tezac."

  "He's very fond of you."

  "He doesn't even know me."

  "Well," Elias said and smiled as he looked up from the display at him for only a moment, his face something hollow and spectral in the dim blue glow. "Holding Tower 8: acknolwedge."

  "Holding Tower 8." A man said. "Ready and waiting."

  "This is your Enforcer-Captain. Are there any vacancies at your post?"

  "Uh," The man said and they could hear the movement of his fingers across the hardlight console of his station. "How many? Sir."

  "Just one, initiate."

  "Well. We've got," He said and Sejanus could hear the man' shrug in his voice. "Cell 758; Partition 4. Previous occupant met his end in that skirmish they had over at Munitions."

  "Prepare to fill it, Tower 8. Ready a detachment for prisoner transport. Core-standard dawn, in the magrail port."

  "Understood, Captain. Tower 8 out."

  "What's my end of this?" Sejanus said once the transmission was ended.

  "I am not entirely without mercy, Prisoner 71." Elias said and circled round again and gestured to one of the chairs there, but Sejanus made no move toward it. "We have a moment, you realize."

  He sat imself and went on, pulling a chem-stick from the dispensary on his desk.

  "Where are you from?"

  "Kurwieler." He said at last and sat down across from him, hands linked magnetically still but now on his lap before him. "Aubraxis system."

  "That's a Slave Sector, isn't it?"

  "It was." He said and nodded slow, looked out the window then back again. "Gone now. Went separatist during the war, got blasted out of space by mass drivers."

  "You didn't have any qualms," Elias said and offered him a chem-stick that he refused, so the Captain activated his own. "About killing your own people?"

  "I was on Reydghulk when it happened." He said. "Command said Aubraxis was too costly for orbital invasions."

  "Did you spend much time there? As a boy."

  "I don't remember it, or my parents. I was young when they took us; we all were. The Citadel is all I've known."

  "You know I wonder sometimes," Elias said and replaced his chem-stick to the dispensary. "At night mostly. That if the uniform I'm wearing is a product of the age I was born to. Things were different then; they didn't take you at birth."

  "I don't know if it would have changed anything. I don't know much of anything about that anymore." Sejanus said and shook his head at the wall and said no more.

  The Captain jerked his chin at the banner that stood draped to the floor in the corner and said, "What does that flag mean to you?"

  "I couldn't tell you. If you asked before the fighting started, maybe I could. I was bred for it; same as everyone in my gen-class, by that point." He said and looked to his boots, back up at Elias. "But it didn't help. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you."

  Elias shook his head and said, "Why?"

  "You want my opinion?"

  "You're free to give it."

  "It's a lot easier chem-deathing planets that aren't human."

  His eyes settled on those of the inmate across from him and he leaned forward onto his knees and said, "We ought to pity you, is that it?"

  Sejanus pursed his lips and made a short snap of his head.

  "You people are a joke." He said. "You figure it all out for us the day we're born. You enlist me for assault training. You toy with my gene matrix and pump me full of drugs I can't remember half the names of. I'm shipped out to systems I didn't know existed until I got out there to kill men who look no different from me. Might have been me, circumstances allowed. Then I show up here when you've run out of uses for us and I'm the one who earned it. You ask me: we should just let the Maerazians roll across the Gulf and watch everything burn."

  Elias Mullins smiled once more and nodded to himself. He stood from the chair and went round to the holodesk, navigated its hardlight display.

  "Penders, Mitchum." He said. "Escort Prisoner 71 to the magrail port; ensure he arrives at Tower 8 by Core-standard dawn."

  The door to the Enforcer-Captain's office opened and the shadows of the guardsmen filled it, filled the light that ran a tract across the floor.

  "Goodbye, 71." He said. "I hope you enjoyed your time here as much as I did."

  Day 17

  The crystalline shores of Velvae stretched out to either side of him, to ends unknown beyond the coastal horizon. The waves lapped gently as they always did and glittered beneath the pale light of the moons altered above to hold them to that tranquility. He crouched naked on the lip of the gemstone cliffs that burned with a gentle and warming glow and looked out to the far ocean, delicate and full of promise. There was no sound but the rustling of jungle leaves behind him and the sway of the grasses that crowded the roots of their trees, brought on by the soft breeze that blew and could be felt only across the skin. The sweet scents of growing things wafted to him and he breathed deep of them. Somewhere out there an animal trilled, but only just.

  He felt then upon his shoulder the hand of the woman who slouched beside him. She drew up close to him to ensure that he could feel her against him and for the second time he turned to regard her. She was all that he had ever desired among women, in figure and in feature, but he was numbed to it. The dark hair that framed the pale face did nothing to draw his gaze back when it wandered again to the sea. She entwined herself about the arm that he steadied himself upon that he be reminded of the voluptuous perfection that was there to wait upon his every passion, but still he stared.

  “This is a Euphor-world.” Sejanus said. “I’ve never been to a Euphor-world.”

  “Maybe you read about it somewhere.” She said and rested her head on his shoulder and he could see her in his periphery to look up at him with the clear, blue depths of her eyes that were not unlike the tides below. “Or one of the boys told you; you know how you talk.”

  “We were only awake long enough to fight.” He said and took his arm away to stand.

  “Then I don’t know.” She said and leaned down from her hands to rest upon her arms that she might draw him to the press of her breasts against the crystalline precipice. “I don’t remember being here either; but I’m here with you and that’s all that matters to me. Come, lie with me.”

  “This is a trick.” He said and turned away from her to look about himself at the jungle, at the ocean that shined back at him with a thousand stars in miniature. “A simulation, with thought scans.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It’s not real.”

  “Does it matter?” She said again.

  He watched the branches of the trees as they wavered, the perfection of their leaves. He saw the white puffs of cloud beyond them that never interfered in their track across the sky with the smooth discs of the moons, but to partially obscure them and contrive the nightly tableau. Sejanus tested the sit of his foot on the crystal beneath it and could find no uneven surface, nothing that jabbed or pained him. Everything was as it should be, as it ought to be. No wave off the coast grew greater than he wished it or too still to displease him.

  There was nothing in the voice of the woman who did not bid him to turn round again and nothing in her way to prevent him from staying once he did. It was a dream world, that he perhaps imagined in some long forgotten sleep – man or boy. A seabird cawed then out in the moonlight and the surf crashed somewhere out of sight, just as he had once imagined it would hearing of things such as oceans and trees and sunlight in the long ago of the Citadel.

  “I didn’t earn this.”

  “You didn’t earn me.” She said and rolled onto her back, stretched out like a jungle cat upon the ro
cks. “But here I am, everything you’ve desired. Touch, and you will feel me; ask, and I will please you in all the ways there are.”

  “No,” He said and drew his lips to the tight line of the skull that his face was an aspect of and shook his head at the curvature of the watery horizon. “It’s what your masters would want.”

  There was a blaring, caught somewhere in the distance, and a red light rolled across his induced dream-world. It turned green fields to rust and blood, the woman beside him there in that paradise to some imp come to haunt him. He cared little. This dream was theirs, and what had come after. He awoke then and the pressure seals of his sleeping berth evacuated their gasses in hissing plumes that he could see only just beyond the cross-section of glass that was its window. He moaned in some vague noise he had no control over and squinted his eyes into a light that was not there. He imagined that he would stumble forward into everlasting nothingness if he but had the room.

  The needles of auto-hypos pierced him unseen and all over and the haze cleared at once. He could of a sudden hear the faintest sounds beyond the molding of the sleeping berth and those that were near enough nearly deafened. The smallest imperfections of the glass shielding before his eyes were readily apparent. And even those things that he could not see and could not hear were there for him, and he processed them all in that colorless way which comes with the formulaic identification and removal of threats. A pale world, forever to remain pale when there are no enemies.

  The door of the pod parted before him at its center, lifting away above and below upon grimy struts, and its gurney tipped flush with the wall outside. The restraints about his limbs retracted and he was spilled out onto the floor. The air in the cell chilled him to the bone and he could feel as he balanced himself onto his knees the light tugs of the NervLink cables fastened along their ports in his spinal column. They popped free one after the other and were reeled back into the neuro-hub that had rested above him within the berth. He then looked about himself, at the other 5 men with whom he shared this cell and in whose eyes he saw the same faded dreamings – the same chemical madness.

  "Line!" A voice called over a transmitter outside and so they stood. "Line."