Prisoner 52

by S. T. Burkholder

  Thus they stepped over the severed corpse of the behemoth which lay there still and went on that way, through the dust and heat of the foundry. To where they would build what had once been built for them, in the way of things. For however long men allow that way to be.

  Day 17

  He had heard it said that scars tell stories. So it was that the smooth hull Sejanus ran his hand across then had no story, but that which he had given it in the tract of welded plates before him. His story was writ in that, and small. Other inmates soared with him through the airy expanse in which they worked and took in what their laser turbines had wrought. Others with other dirges sung in how the steel would move when it was put to its own duty.

  He ran his arm across his brow to clear away the sweat and added to it the dirt and oil caked upon it. The waste fires surged somewhere obscured by the great hulk of the Mass Artillery Walker that towered massive before him and put forth new heat into the old, compounded the noxious elements that rose to the sea they had made along the ceiling. Sejanus adjusted the sit of the filtration mask and then put his hand to the controller arm of the welding cannon, thumbed the stick to bear him to the loading platform.

  The machine stirred into motion, twirling him round to face the port assigned to him and bearing him toward it. He leaned to the left and right as he came to gague the alignment of the docking clamps and, hearing their locks click into place, depressed the heavy keys of the arm's interface in their tired combination. He listened for the hiss of the locks as they activated and then disembarked from the cannon. Once there on the platform he turned round to look across the behemoth, hunched over like some captured beast, and watched the showers of sparks as the prisoners still at work welded its hull. The low drum of industrial pistons sounded in the distance.

  "We do good work today." Jobaal said and laid a hand onto his shoulder. "It is hell; but even in hell a good day's toil has its own reward."

  "Have you ever been inside one of those things?" Sejanus said.

  "The Jedezian Fly Korps had no use for artillery; but I do not think I would have turned it away, if it could have been modified for the gas giants."

  "Shakes the earth for miles. The enemy thought it was thunder, the shell took so long to get where it was going. Probably it wasn't the enemy."

  "Sejanus?"

  "Any enemy worth fighting would have been long gone by the time the barrage got there. Wouldn’t you? Blow any defences to the hells, though, emplacements. They learned real quick to get rid of those. But we kept the cannons firing, all day and night. And you never know when it's going to stop or where it's all going."

  "We did our duty, Sejanus. To our people. Nothing more."

  "I keep thinking, Jobaal." He said and crossed his arms. "Of some kid."

  "What child?"

  "I don't know, any kid. Or a bar streetside somewhere. Some sunny day. People laughing, even if it is the laughter you get out of people when they're scared. Some young pair seeing each other for the first time, or an old hardwood setting down to a peace and quiet he thought he earned. But nobody's earned anyting, that's the truth. And they don't know what's coming."

  "What's coming?"

  "That barrage, Jobaal. Even if it isn't a barrage that's ours, or ain't a barrage at all. We did something bad out there. It makes me sick inside."

  "I am sorry, Sejanus," Jobaal said and shrugged. "I do not follow. But I am Jedezian. You will speak otherwise, but that is the special strength of your people: the things we sometimes do not follow."

  Sejanus turned towards him and smiled at him behind the mask and patted him on the shoulder as he brushed past to the ladder. He put his hands to the damp steel rungs and listened to the echoes his boots made against them. A tiny beeping reached him from his wrist and so he put off his descent to bring his bracer before his eyes and saw the emergency levels of his bodily water. He acknowledged it to quit the noise and cast about from that high place for the hydration station.

  It lay tucked into an alcove on the far side of the factory floor and its stores already petitioned by a line that only grew longer under scrutiny. He slid down to the dust and debris and could feel the heat through his gloves. Thus he struck the ground lightly and crossed over to it beneath the watch of the guardsmen posted high above on the walkways. He remembered what they had done with the last man to fall from dehydration not an hour ago and looked to where he had been left to lay undisturbed.

  The queue built upon itself and did not move. He looked past them to the plinth and capsule of the hydration station, the blue swill of the water behind the glass, and saw that it was empty and that no one moved to fill it. He looked on as the men who stretched themselves long ahead of him commiserated and listened as they told stories and laughed. Sejanus paid them only another glance and then circumnavigated to the steps of the dais ahead.

  "Whoa there," A man said no sooner than his foot rested on the first.

  "There's no one inside." He said without turning and scratched at the itch in his throat that he could never reach.

  "Ah," The man said and he remembered the voice then. "You are the OBPAFer, the one from the depot this morning. The one that we had words with. He wants our company, then he wants our water!"

  He laughed with all the others who had heard him and those beyond who pretended to it. The line at last shortened, but not to make use of what it led to. Sejanus turned toward the man whose beard was fenced in now by the mask he wore and he scanned those who stood nearest him. He saw their blue, and he saw the commonality in their uncommon features – that it was absent of the genetic pale of the Citadel.

  "Let us test your eyesight." He said to Sejanus and gestured to a ragged ensign above the hydration station. "Tell me if you cannot see the flag there, chem-fiend?"

  He peered where the man pointed and saw the dim device upon it, the ring of chains that was a corona within a corona to a bright star. He had seen it before and elsewhere, jutting awkard and tattered from the ruins of municipal buildings. Schools, bombed-out command centers, oceans of pulverized humanity that somehow held out enough to keep it from the course of the silent history that comes in defeat. Places all that had no right to hint that a new dawn had once been imagined there.

  "Yeah I see it."

  "This is a True Union hydration station." He said and stepped nearer to him. "For True Unionists only."

  "I don't want any trouble."

  "Oh," He said and pivoted round to the other Unionists, then back again. "Neither do we. So find another station."

  "I'm on emergency levels."

  "He is on emergency levels!" He said to the others and guffawed. "Why did you not say so? Emergency levels, call for emergency measures."

  The bearded man turned from him then and strode up the steps to the platform of the water dispensary. He bent down to take hold of the laces of his boot, stumbled and caught himself on the tips of his fingers. The knot undone, he took the heavy leather off and held it beneath the nozzle at the center of the console before him. He made no effort to cloud his amusements as he navigated the touchscreen there to trigger the spout. Water poured down into the soiled boot and the bearded man waited until it was full to the brim before removing it and keying off the flow. He took it then to Sejanus, lopsided on the stairs with his feet off balance.

  "Here, drink!" He said and thrust the boot at him, spilling some of the water onto the ground where it sizzled into steam.

  Sejanus took the boot from where he held it by the heel in the palm of his hand. He kept his eyes on the man’s and tipped the boot back and drank deep of the slimy substance rendered therein. Drained, he tossed it at the bearded man’s feet.

  The Unionist across from him stood still a moment to match his gaze and then shrugged and nodded to something out of sight behind him. Hands seized him about the arms and too many to contest. They tried to force him to his knees and kicked at them when he moved not. He fell to the floor that seared him and was kept there, his head tugged roughly back
by a hand across his forehead. He was thus forced to look up at the bearded man prostrate and tried in vain to recall such another time. The Unionist knelt down to him.

  “You enjoyed being a bootlick, OBPAFer?” He said and squeezed Sejanus by the cheeks from beneath his chin. “Huh? Well, here.”

  The man shot upright of a sudden and swept the steel toe of his boot across his face. His head was knocked astray in a blur of flame and shadowy forms and fell to the earth with nothing to hold it up, the sense knocked from him. He tongued Katherine’s adrenal patch and, finding it secure, half-wished it had been that side. The light of the furnaces glimmered in the blood that had splattered from the new gash below his eye and now ran to pool before him. The boot that had made it settled there into view, atop the puddle.

  “Here is a boot to lick.” Its wearer told him.

  The hands that held him down forced him then towards the reddened toe and though he fought his peeled lips drew nearer. A shot went off and then another. A soft succession beneath the roar of machinery, but distinct and known. A grasp fell away for each of them and he heard the thumps of others joining him upon the floor. The rest dropped away quickly and he got to his feet, rubbed the blood away from his chin with the back of his hand. He looked up to the dark figures of the guardsmen, cloaked and armored atop the walkway, and they back down at him – impassively. His eyes fell back to the Unionist, who had come to stand before him again.

  “Go on.” He said. “The war did not end for us outside, you know this. It will not end because of this in here. Go on and tell the rest of your loyalist scum that Androsius will not tolerate anyone not of the Union at his water station.”

  Sejanus said nothing, but went to make his way through the close ranks of Unionists who had built round the scene of their scuffle. They turned away from him once he had gone and resumed what it was they had been about and as though what had gone on before them was only a thing in passing. He looked over his shoulder to see men dragging away the bodies there before the station and amid the gaiety of their companions.

  “Sejanus!” A voice called and he saw Jobaal alight not far from him upon a broken down cargo handler, wings receding into their chitinous sheathes. “What were those shots? I saw you heading to the hydration station – and then there were the shots.”

  “You saw me.” He said to him.

  “Sejanus, they are too many. I am one of few of the hive that work in munitions and on this shift. My people cannot make an enemy of the Union.”

  “Your people.” Sejanus said and shook his head, started away and then turned round again. “I don’t have a people.”

  Then he was gone, and Jobaal looked after where he had been. He wondered how many human men had gone the same. These questions were not asked in the hive, for they did not want for an answer. A natural matter that one needed the whole and the whole the one. And in having no answer of his own, he could not supply one. He could not attest to why a man might be castoff, nor understand why that man should not in his hate seek a new hive. Long though he had pondered it, in viewing the lives of more than those here, Jobaal yet found the race of Men amiss. He understood that they made war, that they bolstered the hive with it and so gathered its resources. But it was a stranger thing then, he thought, that they should slake the many to abet the few.

  Day 17

  A man with no teeth leapt atop the table of the metal bench and dropped his pants. He looked up into the face that beamed with idle glee, at the ragged cap that sat atop his shaven head. Three other men stood behind him as the one before him emptied his bladder into the bowl of NutriPaste he had gotten from the dispensary and not touched. Someone sat down beside him and he could see out of the corner of his eye the beard he wore, the symbols cut into it that were common among the men he had seen there.

  "I do not like to see loyalists in Tower 8." He said, but Sejanus had yet to look at him.

  "Sorry to spoil your view." He said.

  "I am sorry to spoil yours." The man said and he indicated the rotting genitalia only now coming to the end of its extrication.

  "This is some point you're trying to make I guess."

  "We live in a world of points now," He said and made a motion of his hand, as if to request something he could not readily describe.

  "Sejanus." He told him. "Hastur Victor Sejanus."

  "And you are a solider."

  "I am a soldier."

  "You were a soldier." The bearded man said and leaned nearer to him, to in proximity bring him to meet his eyes. "Take care that you remember that here. This is not Blackblood territory, and next time we will do worse than just piss in your food."

  The inmate that stood on the table leapt down and he could feel the presence of the men behind him begin to dissipate. The man sat beside him clapped him on the back and he clenched his fists so that they shook upon the tabletop, his jaw so that he thought his teeth were sure to shatter. Then they had gone and the runed beard escaped his periphery. He did not inform them that it was his difference from those in Tower 7 that had transported him to Tower 8, for to such men the truth mattered very little and was futile when pursuant to error.

  He swiped the bowl from the bench to where it shattered against the wall, the urine and the putty it saturated plopping to the floor. Sejanus could not decide whether he first expected and imagined the booted footfalls that came up behind him then or that he heard them; but they stopped behind him all the same and with a final stamp, as if their being brooked further announcement. Two, near as he could tell, and they flanked him to either side.

  "Is there a problem, inmate?"

  "I don't have a problem."

  "That looks like a problem." The other one said and he could see the baton that pointed to the mess along the wall to his left, but not the hand. "Clean it up."

  "No."

  "He said: clean it up." The first man said and batted at his hand with the baton, but it struck only the metal of the table which dented beneath it.

  Sejanus slipped beneath the table as the other man made to grab him and came out the other side. He drew up from the floor and saw for the first that they were prisoners, not guards, who sought to apprehend him. They wore a crude sort of uniform, ratty brown fatigues in mockery of those the Enforcers wore beneath their exo-suits. But these dopplegangers had no such tools, and in place of rifles brandished clubs that still bore the stains of old beatings and had not even the small dignity of an electrified field to lessen the savagery in their discipline.

  Like attired men stumbled to a halt at the ends of the corridors the benches made, near and far, and filled them up as they collapsed upon him from either side. Sejanus looked across the tabletop to the two who looked on from there with glib amusement and so slid across to them just as the mad rush of their fellows was to meet upon him.

  They thought to bring their clubs to bear again, but the langour was in them that cannot fathom the disrespect of old power. Sejanus took his weapon from the hands of the one by force and staved in his head and turned it upon the other. He splintered the arm that was put up to breaker the blow and then those that had come as reinforcements fell upon him from behind. His legs were taken out from under him and it felt as though he were caught up in a storm that took metal for its rain, the white flashes of bludgeonings for its thunder and lightning.

  As the dark clouds come over the sun he fall from any light at all. Even so sombre as that which shines over Cocytus. He heard as he departed that world for another the vague noise of cheering and thought then of the disparity that interposes between like things in unlike places. Then quiet, the final silence and final darkness to usher him onward to the throne of old night. Whereat he had often imagined his hand should be taken and at last.

  Day 18

  His eyes fluttered open. The sound of his own breathing filled up the silence, slow and measured and the only thing that reminded him sound was still real. A white void was presented to him through the swoop of the visor of his sealed helmet and he
looked away from it, lest it swallow him up. He could see beneath his chin the blink of lights, the radial displays of his suit's air pressure and oxygen capacity. He watched the latter with some hope of finding in its remainder an inkling of his sentence; but he stared now for a long time and it remained fixed at 3200 litres.

  One moment bled into the next and he dared to look about himself. There were no angles that he could find. Just the air hose that fed into the tank upon his back. On this he pulled, but for all his augmented strength it gave not a little from its socket upon the wall below. He used it to drift toward that wall and from it bounce to its spherical continuation on the far side. So he had found himself a moment's entertainment and in it the pod's dimensions. Twice again as tall as himself and as wide, no more room than to drift in place.

  He kicked off the wall toward the black slit in the opposite side and looked out the tiny window there. Outside all was darkness and rusted metal, lit here and there with diffuse overhead lamps that created distant beacons throughout the underground complex. Way markers for travellers in that dark, strange land and in the glow of one he saw as much. A pair of men escorting a third down the walkway central to the network of them. He shouted at them, pounded on the wall and then on the glass with the flat of his hands. He punched and kicked and made dull, mute booms that resounded throughout his prison as through deep and lonely caverns. But they walked on, and made no indication that his was any different than the hundreds of other isolation chambers housed around him.

  "You seem to be experiencing some discomfort." Master Control said. "Would you like a sedative?"

  "No," Sejanus said and slumped back into the emptiness of nullgrav as much as he was able. "How long am I in here?"

  "I am priveledged with this information." It said into his helmet. "However, pusuant to Arbitronix United regulation 12: 'Isolation and deprivation of an inmate', paragraph 4, clause 2b, I am prevented in supplying it readily. It is part of your rehabilitation. Your heart rate has elevated to unsafe parameters: would you like a sedative?"