Prisoner 52

by S. T. Burkholder

  Day 54

  "You're a real bright one, inmate." The captain said. "They should let you keep that uniform, you know. You could be our pet in population."

  "Quiet." Sejanus said and the panel they were entwined beside chimed and the doors behind him thrummed open.

  "Warning," A woman said and the lights within the lift shut down with a loud clack and came up again a moment more in the dim red of emergency. "Warning. Riot in progress. Warning. Riots in progress. Affected areas: Tower 1; Tower 2; Tower 3..."

  The voice went on as the Enforcers looked up into the crimson glow in stupefaction and Sejanus fired the machine pistol in a burst across the front rank. The bullets stuttered out of the barrel and tore into the men before him and into the men who were in turn behind them. Sejanus compressed his grip round the captain's windpipe and the exo-suit crushed it as he would a can and he kicked him forward through the air and knocked those who were there to the floor. Then he was off, bounding down the hall under the hail of sporadic gunfire and then blind down some unknown corridor out of their line of fire.

  Day 54

  The hiss of the suits' airjets began to subside until at length it was only the pound and whir of their servo-motors that filled the echoing silence of the railway network and their glowlamps peeled away the dark which cloaked the containment gate that had fallen into place across the access shaft of the isolation and specialized containment sublevels. They drew to a stop before the blast doors and the stomp of their suits settled into quiet upon the earth.

  "No concussion mine in the universe could get past this." Leargam said.

  "Is there another way around?"

  "Always is." The old man said and sighed. "But we'll have to ditch these suits; be at the mercy of whatever's on the other side."

  "Not much choice about it." Tezac said and disengaged the environmental seal of the powered armor and began its disembarkation routines.

  They left their impermeable shells and entered into the cold shades of the underbelly of Cocytus's sole penal installation. They undocked their rifles and their helmets from the stowaway compartments at the rear of the inert suits that squatted now like obscene bionic apes in the darkness and Tezac activated the light of his helmet. Leargam left himself to the darkness that existed for all save him.

  "Up this way." The old man said and made for the edge of the railway platform to their right, climbed up onto it.

  Tezac followed and they came to the only doorway there presented upon the small landing and over it the sealed bulk of another emergency barrier, though a fraction the size of the last and no larger than they. They looked between themselves and Tezac approached the barrier and aligned the muzzle of his rifle with the interlocking seam between its doors. He depressed the key beside the grip and the pneumatic ram pistoned forth from its tube beneath the four barrels of the rifle and wedged itself between the teeth.

  He commenced to lever the air into the gas cylinder and then pulled the trigger that would otherwise fire the weapon. Instead there came a mechanical jolt and ring that passed through the driving bolt of the ram and its head split where it had penetrated between the doors and divided them a finger's length from one another. Thus, little by little, he forced open the emergency barrier so that sidelong his great bulk might squirm through. He released the catch on the lever and the gas filtered out of the cylinder in a loud, sharp hiss and the driving piston retracted its arms and withdrew into its slot beneath the barrel of the rifle.

  "I guess you didn't want to be rude." Leargam said.

  "I don't count it prudent not to knock." Tezac said.

  A figure emerged from the shadows left by the bloody emergency lighting in the corridor beyond and planted its boots square upon Tezac's breastplate. The man to whom they belonged followed after them and thus knocked the big man from his feet and off of the platform, both tumbling into the railway tunnel below.

  "You fire and he dies." The man said and Leargam moved to the edge of the landing and looked out over at him, astride Tezac with a service knife at his throat.

  "You've got an exo-suit, but you're no Enforcer." The old man said. "Who are you?"

  "I killed an Enforcer, and I took his." He said. "My name's not important."

  "Sejanus?" Tezac said.

  "What are you doing down here?" He said at length.

  "Take that knife away and I might get around to telling you."

  The blade remained pressed against his skin and the rasp and wheeze of Sejanus's breathing apparatus filled the silence. Then his eyes played across the reflective visor of Tezac's helmet and he withdrew from him. Tezac got to his feet and motioned for Leargam to lower the muzzle of his rifle, but the old man kept his weapon levelled at the inmate. A second glance and he relented.

  "I could ask you the same question." Tezac said.

  "Escaping." Sejanus said. "Now answer mine."

  "Escaping."

  "Escaping?" He said and gave him a look. "From what?"

  "We don't have time to explain." Leargam said from atop the railway platform. "We've got to get moving, Tezac."

  "The access shaft to the surface is that way." Sejanus said and pointed with his thumb down the length of tunnel that led away from the emergency blastdoors.

  "We're not going to the surface." Tezac said.

  "I just came from there." He said and glanced at the door the two had breached, nodded slightly to it. "You don't want to go that way."

  "Whatever is happening in sublevel isolation is happening everywhere else too."

  "Dipshit here blew up the MCU." Leargam said. "The whole complex is rioting."

  "Good luck then." Sejanus said and pushed past Tezac and made away down the tunnel for where he imagined the access shaft to be, hidden within its shadow and cold. "Whether or not you listen doesn't mean I'm wrong."

  "Sejanus," He called after him. "Whatever you're fixed on doing, it won't work. Inmate or Enforcer, somebody's bullet is going to wind up in your skull. Or worse."

  "Worse?" The soldier said and stopped ahead and turned about to face them.

  "He told you," Tezac said and pointed with his head at Leargam. "We don't have time to do this. But the only way off this rock, is through that door. You can come with us – or do Man proud when you die."

  "One death is as good as another." He said and went back to where the old man stood upon the platform and leapt up to stand beside him. "This one will just be slow, and painful, for both of you."

  "You picked up a real nutbag," Leargam said. "You know that, Tezac?"

  "I've got a habit." The big man said and mounted to the landing and started for the fissure of black he had made in the doorway. "Come on."

  Tezac passed through the opening foremost, turning aside his massive profile and slipping through the teeth of the doors, and Sejanus and Leargam walked through one after the other. They passed into a short corridor and their flashlights cut through the crimson dusk and fell onto the pair of doors inset upon the close walls, sealed as that which led to them, and at beyond them all at the hallway's end a ladder.

  "These are supply caches." Leargam said to Tezac and indicated the blocked doors. "Should be some ammunition in there, riot control suits maybe."

  "You were loud enough with that door there." Sejanus said and passed beyond Tezac to take point. "Shouldn't risk popping either of these two now that you're inside."

  "He's right." Tezac said and kept his rifle levelled at the ascent ahead, moved steadily toward it and poised as if to spring suddenly in all directions at once. "Anyway, we're cutting it close for time as it is."

  "Kill your lights." Sejanus said and they looked between one another and he mounted to the first rungs of the ladder.

  They did as he bade and so that in the bloody glow of the strip lighting he appeared some renegade ascending unlawfully out of the hells. Tezac and Leargam mounted the ladder after him and climbed through the darkened shaft at the impetus of the hollow ringing of their boots upon the rungs. They listened
to the whine of the hinges overhead as Sejanus pushed open the hatchway that terminated the ascent.

  They emerged into a room that for them existed only as the blackness of its walls pierced through by the distant, gloomy light which streamed in through the windows. Leargam saw clearly the polymer door that lay ahead and opened by someone he imagined had been Sejanus and told them so. The others moved up to the threshold and Tezac peered out from the windows at the glowlamps which hung down from the shadows of the ceiling, beacons of the life that yet remained in the machinery of the prison.

  He looked across the walkways that had been torn up in places or fallen away and jutted as rearing beasts of metal into the amber pillars cast by the glowlamps and the shadows that enrounded them. He sorted through them to find the white light of the null-grav chambers upon the walls beyond and saw the blood and gore that coated those doors of the isolation pods which were rent asunder or forced open, those that were yet closed as tombs he had no desire to know the secrets of.

  "Did you see what happened down here?" Tezac whispered across the threshold.

  "Not this." Sejanus said and nodded out the opened door. "Something big enough to knock over a sense-dep tube freed me. I imagine it came back for more."

  "And you got out just in time." Leargam said behind them. "We should be so lucky."

  "What do you see out there, old man?"

  "I see a whole lot of the same you can see from right there." He said and then leaned forward. "Hold on."

  "What?" Tezac said.

  "You see them, don't you." Sejanus said.

  "The Gods," Leargam said and looked between them both, then out again to that unknown point only he saw. "What are they doing?"

  "Would one of you care to tell me what‘s going on?"

  "Did you think I was the only one that got out?" Sejanus said. "They're the ones they forgot about down here, spent too long in the tubes. But it's the quiet that's the worst."

  "How many of them are there?" Tezac said and then looked to Leargam. "How many do you see?"

  "There's just a group of them now, crouched around something or other. I don't know, kid: I can't swear for the whole damn place. It's a big damn place."

  "Whatever you're going to do down here," Sejauns said. "We better get to it. You won't wait them out."

  Tezac did not answer, but started from the doorway and Sejanus stopped him with a hand upon his shoulder. The big man looked to him in the shadows, the red bars of the readout of his vocal implants rising and falling as the lone brightness in the dark, and he pointed to his shoes. Tezac nodded and bent and removed them and Leargam did the same. Sejanus passed out onto the walkway as they did so and went silent along its grating.

  They followed after him to the stairwell that terminated the leftward extension of the catwalk and ascended behind him to the fullness of the sublevel's network of causeways. Sejanus stopped ahead where the apex of the steps gave way on either side to the walkway it fed into and looked back at Tezac, who pointed off to the left at the brighest point in the darkness of the deep hold.

  Sejanus went on ahead and skirted through the shadows round the columns of light that issued down from the glowlamps and continued until he felt with his steps the undone edge of a break in the walkway. He awaited the others and warned them off when they came near and mimed for Leargam to look ahead. The old man did so and then informed him of the distance between the segments.

  "I'll go, then you." Sejanus said to him and then nodded at Tezac. "Then you. After that we'll have to run; no man your size is that quiet."

  They gave their agreement and so he moved past them, turned round and went as a ghost does across the shattered thrust of metal that had been made of the walkway and leapt from it into the air. He disappeared into the darkness that lay between and they hardly heard his feet meet the grating when he came down on the other side. Leargam looked to Tezac and the big man nodded down at him in the half-light and they heard across the way a bang as though something had fallen to the walkway there.

  Sejanus heard the savage breathing of the man in the shadows and held his knife out before him and waved it to and fro against what he could not see. Feet pounded across the metal at him and he heard growling in the blackness and slashed at it, again and then he lunged with the knife. The blade cut at first through something like flesh and the man howled like some reprobate excuse for the dark heritage of Man, but met only air when he had stabbed at it. He leapt back and let his ears see for him as he reoriented himself.

  He listened as his enemy circled him as a wolf might, caught in some wilderness not built of metal and stone, and if that wolf were driven by what madness can make of predation. It could not resist its impulses, he knew, as in times past he could not resist his own and so when the man roared and rushed him once more, he waited. The pound of his feet across the walkway neared so that Sejanus could nigh feel the grasping limbs they bore forth and he stepped to the side and jabbed out again with the knife. The roar was choked off and he felt the blood jet warm across his cold hand. He withdrew the blade smoothly and the man tumbled off the severed edge of the catwalk.

  "Sejanus?" Tezac whispered from behind him and beyond the gap. "Are you alright?"

  "Get across." He called back. "Your friend first. Now."

  There a noise in the dark like that which they had heard, only it was Sejanus who listened and they who turned round to face it. Tezac stared blind into the black that intervened between the nearest glowlamp and that which shone beyond the break in the walkway, the shattered husk of the light useless above them. Leargam studied the figure that approached them, naked and bloody and in his eyes an impenetrability, an emptiness that he had imagined existed in his own but knew now it was not so. Another swung up from below the catwalk and landed beside the first and he took his first step backward.

  "Don't wait on me." He said to Tezac and turned to run.

  The old man rushed for the broken terminus ahead that he saw clearly through the dark and marked the slam of his naked feet against the metal as like the last beats of his heart and jumped. He passed flailing through the air and struck the bent slope of walkway on the gap's other side so that the wind was knocked from him and he clung on with tired fingers through the holes in the grating. He felt Sejanus's hands upon his arms and they began to pull him upward no sooner than he looked up to see Tezac's massive form bound from end to end above him and knew the things from which they fled were soon to do likewise.

  He was not long back on his feet before they had begun to run and moment to moment the others had outpaced him in their race for the bright array of glowlamps far ahead and far behind he heard the sound of bodies coming down onto metal. They sped through the overhead lights and were taken as it seemed to him from oblivion and back into it again at turns and he looked back over his shoulder at the men who pursued them hunkered down like rabid apes, becoming in the light more just a phantom in the dark that Sejanus had slain.

  They went on through the course of the labyrinth of catwalks and came to the silent control booth that lay at the center of them all, its windows shattered and bloodied, and turned aside from it toward the light again. A shadow burst forth from within the broken glass above and landed before Leargam upon the walkway and he stumbled to a stop before the bare-skinned, gore-strewn man who tried to steady himself after his fall, but in the throes of his frenzy lunged for the old man unbalanced.

  He cried out as he became entangled with the inmate and Sejanus turned and cast his knife at their figures, wrestling amidst the light of a glowlamp behind him. It spun through the air across the distance and then sank deep into the base of the skull of the man who had set upon Leargam and who in that moment sputtered and fell dead at his feet. He leapt the corpse and made for the others ahead with all he had left in him. The inmates behind remained close at his heels, but as they passed the man that was left dead in his wake there were fewer that followed than before and other sounds besides than the press of their feet against the gr
ating.

  The radiance of the glowlamp arrays brightened and deepened the nearer they came until they had come to the stairs that led down onto the platform which the lights shined down upon. In their glow Sejanus saw it for what it was and knew why they had come there. They trooped down the steps and onto the pad of the magnetic containment silo and approached the lift that lay at the center of it, the hardlight lectern that controlled its functioning.

  The men who pursued them spilled out from the stair in their wake and into the new brilliance and looked about themselves as if they were hunting animals taken in an instant from a world natural to their insticnt and displaced into another. Their raving reached to new heights of fury so that they foamed at the mouth and looked about at the world as though they had been starved of its succor for eternities thence and what frail traces of humanity were left in them had fled.

  They charged forth haphazard and Tezac braced himself and Leargam in a fluid motion drew the knife from his vest and drove it through the neck and into the spine of the first to come for him. The man in his death throes and chemical rage fell upon him still and bowled him over, beating him in a blind assault even as the blood poured from his wound. Tezac managed a kick into his shoulder that threw him off before three others of the pack had set upon him.

  A flurry of grappling arms and teeth and blood and empty gazes whirled about him and he saw through them Sejanus draw up behind the inmate that flailed yet upon Leargam where he cringed upon the floor and take his head into his hands and with the strength of his exo-suit snap his neck. He cast the corpse aside and the old man retrieved the blade from the wound in its throat.

  Tezac kicked at his foes and butted heads with those he could, but their insanity knew no pain and harm had become naught to whatever daemon had been produced in them by the long years locked in their own drug-fueled nightmares. Their teeth had begun to tear through the fabric of his jumpsuit when Sejanus appeared beyond the man before him and laid into his flank with his fist and the gore contained therein sprayed out upon him, blown apart by the blow. He fell at their feet, his bones splayed out through the ruined flesh like white towers upon a red ridge and the rolling rivers of which were blood.