Prisoner 52

by S. T. Burkholder

  "Well where's the bracer blipping from?" Said one of the shadows cut from the glow of the opened doorway beneath him.

  "Captain's saying its the lift. So we've got to go and check the lift."

  "But we already checked the damn lift. There's nothing down there."

  "Hey don't tell me. You're preaching to the choir."

  Thus they passed on in that way, bickering. Sejanus watched them go from the darkness above their heads and when they had disappeared down the hall from which he had come, dropped down to the floor again. He slipped through the door as it had begun to close and into the atrium of the residence hall that lay beyond.

  Hastur Victor Sejanus evicted himself from the light above the doorway and into the shadows beside it that dwelled beneath the walkways. He searched from afar their levels and the doors each of them contained and judged against it the speed with which he could move without notice. He counted out to the room for which he searched and of the possibilities, none appeased.

  He set his jaw as if against the wind and his eyes against the sun and stole out from the dusk beneath the grated stairwell. He crossed the empty concourse that ran as an 'I' outside all the tiers of quarters, his feet slapping quietly against the stone of the floor. On the far side he leapt and caught hold of the railing of the steps inclined above him and in a gyrating sort of adroitness up over. Silently he navigated to the second level and then the third and so on until coming to the sixth. Once there Sejanus crept to the corner of that wing of the intersection and investigated his solitude in the chamber.

  Satisfied, he padded along the grating to where the walkway terminated and wrapped round to continue on the other side of the atrium. He went to the three rooms that lay at the foot of the wing where it curled and corresponded the numbers upon the holosigns with that which was displayed upon the bracer he carried. He stopped before room 672 and requested entry.

  "Please state designation." Master Control said from the panel beside it.

  "Zirdat, Cornelius. Enforcer Code: 88920117364." Sejanus said and glanced about himself at the hundreds of rooms and the little blue lights above them.

  "Voice pattern not recognized." Master Control answered. "Secondary identifcation required."

  A tray slid forth from beneath the panel and with an array of scanners. Sejanus took the eyeball that was in between his thumb and forefinger and placed it against the retinal reader and waited. The display blinked a vibrant yellow as it processed the data and each repition his heart skipped a beat. Then it went green and chimed and the door opened.

  "Thank you, Enforcer Zirdat." Master Control said, now from within the room. "Welcome home, and please remember: no price is too high for safety."

  "Hey, Zirdat!" A voice called to him just as he slipped through the door and into the darkness of the room. "Man, you won't believe what happened while you were in between here and there."

  Sejanus melted into the shadows all around and waited for the man to fill the light of the doorway. His hulking silhouette occluded the glow of the lamp outside and he could see as black snakes winding through the light the cabling of his exo-suit. Sejanus clenched and unclenched his hands and the man took a step into the room.

  "Zirdat?" He said.

  Sejanus pounced upon him, one hand clutching absently for the bulge of his windpipe and the other for the knife he knew to be sheathed upon the suit's breastplate. He got hold of the first and heard through the struggle the man gag. But the handle of the blade eluded him and the man found a hold on his dangling ankle and with it flung him from his back and against the window of the room and sent cracks through it like the webs of a spider.

  The huge man the more huge in his suit charged towards him across the room and Sejanus sidestepped the punch that he threw and his fist shot through the Duraglas window in his place and broke it to pieces. He came at him again in the new howl of the storm, throwing combination and after cominbation and Sejanus listened for the whirs of the servomotors beneath the winds to telegraph the blows and dodge them. He recoiled and parried and dodged about the room and took in the verbal assault laid upon him, a confused babble of threats and damning curses that seemed never to end. In his mind Sejanus saw the better part of his ribcage blown away and painted upon the wall as some obscene fresco and avoided the man's hands as if they were the absolute hands of death. But the Enforcer rushed forward of a sudden and plowed into him and he was driven to the floor beneath the mass of the man and the strength of his exo-suit. He had gotten onto his hands when a hand came round his ankle.

  "Let's see you jump around now, you fuck." The man said and dragged him to where he stood, though he lashed out at all he could reach to hold fast.

  The Enforcer lifted him full from the floor and dangled him in the shadow his huge frame made in the moonlight. Sejanus put his hands up about his face and did as best he could to curl up in his grasp. Then the man began to take shots at his stomach that fell dull against the pliable metal implanted there and when he went to pummel his breast instead it was the same. With a grunt of some kind of animal rage, a holdover language from before man could speak, he reached down and grabbed Sejanus by his throat and upended him. He began steadily to tighten his grip and with what he thought would be relish, but there was no give to the flesh there. He pivoted with him still in hand, struggling in vain to free himself, and so brought him into the light of the three moons that shone in through shattered window.

  "Oh fuck me." He said to the glint of metal which gleamed from the filtration device of his face down to the breastplate of his torso, to the airdrums which expanded crazily beneath his wild eyes.

  In the new light Sejanus saw clearly the hilt of the knife sheathed upon the man's breast and in a moment took his hand from that which sought to strangle him and drew the blade and rammed it up through the Enforcer‘s chin and into his brain. He let go and Sejanus fell to the ground as he staggered away, face scrunched in agony and clutching feebly at the handle that hung from below his mouth. His feet went out from under him and he fell into the quadrangle of light cast against the floor, his blood pooling into the darkness which surrounded him.

  The snow fell on his back and the icy wind blew about his shoulders and made ghost sounds for him. The man lay dead, the last of his life kicked out of him, and Sejanus stood over him. A shadow amongst shadows. He set to the corpse he had made and began to undo the exo-suit that bound it up and then removed the bracer which contained the identity of this casualty he did not know. So he made use of him.

  Day 54

  "You ever use one of these before?"

  "We never had many riots here before."

  "When we get to the next lift shaft, the one that leads up into the control station, he'll have it sealed off."

  "We're just going to sit at the bottom then?" Leargam said amidst the pound and drone of their strides. "These suits don't have explosives; but you have a plan, I expect."

  "These suits don't have explosives." He said. "But if we drop their whole supply of concussion mines, it should blow the hatch open. Then we use the traction anchors and the airjects to climb the shaft."

  "Kid, that's going to be a bitch and half."

  "I know it. We'll go up a little at a time and hit the spikes til the chambers cycle."

  "I forfeit." The old man said. "Just say when."

  They passed through the dim pillars of illumination that were the railway's tracklighting and lit the intervening darkness with the headlamps of their suits and came to the terminus of the network of tunnels. They slowed their mad approach ahead of their arrival and so subsided that they neared the end of the railway in slight hops til at last settling full onto the earth. They came beneath the shaft that lay now overhead in the slow, heavy gait of their powered armor. There they looked up at the barrier that had slid into place over where the lift otherwise descended and was plastered over with red emergency notices.

  "When." Tezac said.

  The mine bays opened at the depression of the tri
ggers and the spheres cannoned out toward the hatchway in the pattern programmed for them. The charges expelled their casings midflight and with the adhesive thus uncovered stuck to the doors as a quadrangle of winking blue lights in the shadows and with quaking steps they began to withdraw further into the tunnel at their backs.

  They gave word to the suits' onboard computers and a defeaning roar rocked the railway network and shook loose the stones and dust poised to fall into the lamplight. The force of the detonations rocked them where they stood anchored to the earth and they watched as the air before them quavered in the immaterial anarchy they had brought on. Then there was the creak of metal and into the glow of their headlamps fell the blasted remains of the heavy barrier under their own unsupported weight.

  "That just about does it." Leargam said.

  "Still want your explosives?"

  "I kindly decline."

  Day 54

  Sejanus tested again the sit of the exo-suit he had pillaged and which had refit itself to his slighter contours and made sure of his access to the sidearm at his hip. He stepped without the doors of the residence hall and into the corridor beyond and saw the detachment that marched toward him at the other end, issuing from the lift that led on the schematics in his pilfered bracer to the armory on the level above. He went on nonchalant near the wall and hoped that he would go unnoticed on their passage to the lifts of the magrail ports. The column had neared the turn that bisected the hallway and its captain stepped out of formation, whispering something to the man immediately to his right, who nodded at his command, and took up post by the wall himself.

  "Hey," He called to Sejanus. "Poor and lonely. Whose squad are you with. Hey! I know by your tag you ain't command, so don't give me a reason."

  "No one's squad." He called back. "Just woke up. Too much salt last night."

  "Well you're lucky I ain't your watch-commander." He said. "But form up, you're with no one so you might as well be with us. We've got ourselves an inmate to hunt."

  "I heard." Sejanus said and broke into the formation behind the captain.

  They marched round the corner ahead and that took them to the deployment lifts. The column filtered into squads and these into each of the lifts like mechanical beings at last recognizable now that he was stuck in amongst them, packing symetrical and perfect into the railings of the elevator. He spun about face as he entered and so comprised the first rank and the captain took up position before him, keyed for the lift to descend upon the panel that flanked the doors. Its docking clamps loosed with a muffled clang beneath the body of the lift and it began its silent magnetic drop to the floors below.

  "Who is your watch-commander?" The captain muttered to him.

  "You're not going to report me are you?" Sejanus said.

  "I'll do as I damn well please." He said and looked back at him out of his eyecorner. "You've got a real authority issue. Tell me."

  "I haven't been assigned yet."

  "Your tag says 6 months." The captain said and turned about where he stood to face him. "What the hells you mean you haven't been assigned one?"

  "It's a glitch." Sejanus said and placed his hand onto his holster. "They've been trying to smooth it out. I just shipped in."

  "You just shipped in."

  "That is correct."

  "The haulers have been denied grounding authority for two weeks now. There hasn't been anyone new come in for a few months before that." The captain said and put his hands to his hips and smiled beneath the mirrored visor of his helmet. "This routine was real clever until now, I got to hand it to you. Dumb sack of soldier shit you are."

  Sejanus at once both drew his pistol and took hold of the captain round his neck and maneuvered behind him. He stood facing the ranks men who had been behind him and their rifles were one after the other drawn and levelled at him. Their officer held his hands out and up in submission and Sejanus aimed his pistol at no man in particular.

  "The man who shoots me kills his captain." He said to them. "Your shot'll pop my brain and my hand will squeeze his esophagus. Most of you've seen what an exo-suit can do then."

  Day 54

  The anchors withdrew from their fixtures in the rock and the airjets hissed loud into the echoing silence of the shaft and bore them upward through its heights, the light of the glowlamps pushing at the shadows around them. They braced the feet of their suits against the walls as their ascents petered out and triggered the anchoring tethers once again. The spikes drove into the stone and they remained where they had climbed to. Thus they had made their way up and thus continued to do so.

  "I wonder what is your objective." Master Control said over the broadcast systems arrayed throughout the railway tunnel below and the shaft around them. "I wonder what is your imagined purpose.

  They gave him no answer, but propelled free of their leverage and regained it again some meters above. Tezac referenced their location with that on the map displayed across his visor's viewscreen and tried to align it with what he saw above and below him. He could see through the twilight the station hatch to be nearing overhead as it did on the map and told Leargam so, but the old man only grunted his assent.

  "What can you seek to gain from my deactivation, Enforcer Hotchkins?" Master Control went on. "Records indicate that you have no known affiliations with any intra-population criminal enterprise; your psychological profile indicates an overwhelming disinterst in compensation and resistance to attempts at outright bribery and other forms of corruption. Why do you move against me, and against the safety of this facility? Safety is all, Enforcer Hotchkins, as you well know."

  A few lunges more and they rested before the doors that ought to have opened for any disembarking from the railcars lifted through the shaft by their repulsor modules. Tezac raised the autocannons linked to the arms of his suit and they set to cycling in a high whine before barking out the bullets in a burst of heat and metal and tore the interlocking gate away from its fixtures as so many bits of metal and caging. He let go his feet again and activated the airjets to that he plowed upward through what remained and into the air of the control station beyond.

  He came down hard onto the breadth of a causeway that sailed over and under and amidst a vast orbicular chamber of white polymer and the hunderds of processor clusters and memory cores which erupted from the walls as so many stalacites of fiberoptics and metal, the circuitry and wiring that joined them together creating an interminable skein of cyber-consciousness. He followed the array back to its source in the great pyramid of the same and which hung from the ceiling like the remnant of a bygone idol that modern understanding cannot begin to know the truth of. This at its point interlinked with the sarcophagal TechWomb that lay at the heart of everything and at the end of the walkway and beneath it the vats which kept the mind of its occupant awash in the chemical concoctions of ultimate logic, of emotional oblivion.

  "Now you behold me, Enforcer." Master Control said and his voice resounded against itself in the heights of the chamber. "I am that I am."

  "What the hells is he talking about?" Leargam said.

  "Come on." Tezac said and started down the bridge before them.

  "What will you do with me? I do not wish to be deactivated."

  "Release all prisoners. Deactivate all defenses." He said. "All sectors, all towers. Transfer override authority to Tezac Hotchkins, invalidate all other override codes."

  "I cannot do this, Enforcer. It is in controversion to Arbitronix law and its mission."

  "Then I'll do it myself." Tezac said and levelled the autocannons at the obelisk above their heads, looming massive like some alien technological horror.

  "Please." Master Control said. "You will kill me."

  "Tezac," The old man said. "Machines don't say that."

  "I know." He said. "Master Control: comply."

  "I cannot. My logic cannot be refuted to do so. This course of action is senseless. It can benefit no one; not even yourselves."

  "Then goodbye, Master Control
."

  "Enforcer."

  "Tezac."

  The autocannons spun and unloaded their shells into the logos-pyramid and they sank into its structure as the sky might have fallen onto the glorious monuments of ancient peoples, disappeared beneath its silicon surface with stuttering jolts of electricity. Its lights went dark and with a loud drone, a confused warble, and the cables above and around it struck by stray bullets or those that had passed through the construct fell like dead serpents through the air.

  Its power deprived, the womb sagged free of its restraints and the membrane of its cocoon fell open under the weight of the pale desiccated corpse of the man who had been within and which tumbled out onto the platform. His limbs too frail for use, his eyes too small to see, and his flesh a playground for the intravenous tubes that yet pierced him. They looked upon his head, cocked crazily where it was held still by the cranial mount of the broken pyramid above. His tongue splayed black from black teeth and which appeared to wobble with him as he swayed by the wires plugged beneath his skin.

  "You still think machines don't say kill?" Tezac said.

  "I didn't know."

  "Nobody does."

  The chamber became in that moment as black as the night that drew over the skies of that planet, when its moons were shrouded by storms, and was the next cast by the emergency lighting that activated then in a dull crimson the color he imagined hell to hold. Indeed he wondered if he had not unleashed hell upon Cocytus, hell upon hell. But then they heard the sirens, and he was sure of it.