The Rig

by Joe Ducie

  With the grand tour over, Tristan left him to it, slipping into his bunk and picking up a magazine that lay on his pillow. Drake’s body ached from the day’s work, so much so that he could barely face the climb up the short ladder to his bunk. Just get it over with.

  He washed his face under the cool water from the sink and noticed a whole bunch of dead bees against the bottom of the window. What are bees doing all the way out here?

  Too tired to give it much thought, Drake kicked off his shoes and climbed up into bed. With not so much as a goodnight to the boy in the bunk below, Drake was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  7

  The Titan

  The next day followed much the same pattern as the first, as did the day after that and the week that followed.

  Drake learnt within a week that life on the Rig was bound solely and always to the rigid device strapped to his wrist. He couldn’t step more than half a metre outside of a designated area, at any time of the day, without the tracker buzzing and flashing red, imposing a five-credit fine for every offence.

  ‘You going for the record, or something?’ Tristan asked one night, catching a glimpse of the display as he brushed his teeth before bed. As Drake clocked his first week on the Rig, his credits stood at $-437. That included the hundred or so he’d actually earned working in Tubes.

  Still, Drake continued to push his limit, looking for blind spots or holes in the security net. In his not unimpressive experience, any prison was like a block of Swiss cheese – it stank and was full of holes. Ten days into his five-year sentence, it grated on Drake that he had yet to find even one flaw in Warden Storm’s design. While it only took a distance of half a metre outside the designated area on the centre platform to set the tracker off, that net could be pushed to three metres on the eastern platform, during his work in Tubes. He guessed that was due to the fact that the work area was quite large – it had to be, some of the pipes were pretty long – and the GPS net was a shade more lenient.

  He had realised on his fourth night that he could, technically, be locked out of his cell at night, but only at a distance of half a metre from the door to 36C. Any further would set the alarm buzzing.

  Whether a blessing or not, Drake did not have another encounter with Alan Grey and his gang of meatheads following the fight on day one. He saw the thugs briefly, from across the cafeteria, Sunday night at dinner – roast beef, a rare treat. The rest of the time found Grey and his followers, at least to Drake, conspicuously absent.

  ‘Advanced lessons,’ Tristan said, when asked where they’d gone. ‘I don’t know much about it. They were picked by Warden Storm.’

  Drake’s small, bespectacled cellmate had fast become one of his main sources of information concerning the workings of the Rig and its people.

  He met with Doctor Lambros eleven days after arriving on the Rig, the first time he had seen her since she stitched his hand. Drake had picked those stitches out on his eighth night, the wound all but healed. He thanked her again and she offered him some gummi sweets, which he accepted with a grin.

  ‘I see you’ve managed to avoid hitting anyone.’ Doctor Lambros beamed. ‘This is good, Will. I’m glad you seem to be fitting in here.’ She glanced at a report on her desk. ‘Although you seem to be testing the boundaries of your tracker quite often. Sinking into quite a bit of debt, aren’t you?’

  ‘Alliance credits just aren’t worth that much to me,’ he admitted. Although he knew better, Drake found himself liking this small woman more and more.

  ‘You do know you need a positive balance of at least two hundred credits at the end of your time here before you’ll be released, right?’

  Drake frowned. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘The Rig isn’t like those old, rundown government or state facilities, Will. The Alliance, rightfully, expects you to work, to build your character and gain responsibility, and once your time is up, pay your way back to St. John’s.’

  Drake’s liking for the good doctor varied, depending on his mood.

  Of Warden Storm Drake saw nothing. The man, as far as he could tell, did not deign to lower himself into the cellblock or the centre platform at meal times. When Drake thought of him, he imagined the warden growing fat at the heart of the control tower, watching the cameras and laughing at Drake’s growing frustration with the tracker.

  Although he had to admit, if he’d been leashed like this at Harronway – maybe even Trennimax – escape would have been damn near impossible. The tracker would not have made much difference at Cedarwood, as his escape there had been at breakneck speed down Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald. Drake still had nightmares about that rickety laundry cart swerving at sixty miles an hour down the snow-covered tracks.

  The devil’s own luck, he thought.

  His count of the guards had settled between twenty-five and thirty active officers on the Rig at any one time. The face masks still made it impossible to be certain, so Drake had taken to watching how the guards held their weapons, how they walked, whether the stunning baton was hung for their left or right hand. The fact that they all carried semi-automatic rifles, all the time, still made Drake nervous. He’d never known prison guards stationed among the general population of inmates to be so heavily armed. They reminded him more of soldiers than guards.

  Well, Brand is a soldier.

  All it would take was one inmate, or a group working together, to tackle a guard and swipe his weapon. Then what? Drake didn’t want to think on it, but given his current situation, he found it hard to think of much else whenever he saw a guard.

  On his twelfth day on the Rig, Drake learnt of something that sent the escape gears in his head spinning. The helicopter wasn’t the only transport that came to the Rig. After lunch that day, the Tubes crew were granted a small reprieve from their mucky work – for ninety minutes during the four-hour work period, at least. The hose refuelling the Seahawk had ruptured on the helipad and the crew was sent in to mop up the spill.

  ‘Well, what’s all this, then?’ Drake asked Mario as they stepped out of Processing, in the shadow of the control tower, on the southern platform.

  ‘All what?’ Mario, while not overly friendly when Tommy was around, still spared Drake a bit of hassle.

  ‘That ship.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That massive bloody ship over there!’

  Drake pointed to what was perhaps the largest vessel he had ever seen up close. A massive cargo ship about the length of a football field, burnt orange under the sun, bearing the silver-crowned crest of Alliance Systems along its hull. Large, white letters below the crest identified the ship as the TITAN.

  ‘Oh yeah, that shows up every two weeks or so. Drops off food and supplies, I guess.’ Mario rubbed the back of his neck, blinking in the sun. He was more at home in a dark, dank pipe than in the world above. ‘What, you think we just throw a line off the Rig’s edge and catch dinner every night? For a smart guy, Drake, you’re not that smart.’

  ‘Keep it up and I’ll lock you in the crap pipe, Mario.’

  Mario snorted and flipped Drake off.

  Dozens of workers swarmed across the Titan’s deck, removing straps from piles of crates and containers stacked ten metres high. A large yellow crane built into the stern of the ship descended to collect the cargo and swing it up and around onto the Rig, where Warden Storm, Brand and a group of twelve guards accepted delivery. The crane also collected a bunch of small shipping containers, resting on sleek hydraulic forklifts, and loaded them aboard the ship. Brand ensured each container was firmly attached before the crane took it away.

  Working under the sun for a change was invigorating, especially out in the open air. The weather was chilly, and storm clouds threatened the horizon, but Drake rolled up his sleeves and got to work with the rest of the crew cleaning up the fuel spill.

  Officers Hall and Stein monitored the crew and directed the clean-up. Drake threw down sawdust on the helipad while Mario and Greg scrub
bed with heavy, wire-bristled brushes. Tommy and his lads scooped up the gooey, fuel-soaked dust into waiting barrels, as the large crane on the ship offloaded more Alliance-stamped crates.

  Drake kept an eye on the Titan as much as he could without arousing suspicion. He watched the Titan for close to an hour. Near the end of the clean-up, large panels swung open at sea level in the ship’s hull and a fleet of three matte-black speedboats emerged from within the behemoth.

  Each smaller boat was manned by a crew of men who drove in circles around the mighty ship, churning up the dark water. Inspecting for damage? Drake wondered. The boats then vanished under the Rig, but Drake could hear the motors whirring below.

  Soon the unexpected break from Tubes was over, and with two hours left of the work day, Drake found himself knee-deep in muck on the eastern platform before dinner. At least Mario had some good news at the end of the shift. Tubes crews operated on each platform, with the eastern being the worst, and rotated every two weeks. Tommy’s crew switched to the western platform the next day, the boys’ platform, working below the exercise area. The female inmates took care of the northern and centre, while the southern point of the diamond apparently didn’t need workers.

  Restless and unable to sleep in his bunk that night, Drake heard the crane on the Titan swinging through the night. When dawn broke, he watched the mighty ship sail away, her cargo hold stuffed with whatever Storm and Brand had loaded onboard. Drake watched until the ship had become a small dot on the broad horizon.

  As the patterns of daily life became routine, Drake allowed himself to loosen up. He began to think the fight with Grey forgotten, the guards, while certainly armed, more like the soft touches in his other prisons, and the Rig as someplace familiar. Two and a half weeks to the day since he arrived on the diamond-shaped platform, Drake was reminded just how far from normal things were.

  ‘I mean you don’t care, do you?’ Tristan asked, standing next to Drake on one of the treadmills in the exercise area. Tristan walked at a steady place. Drake was running his eighth mile, burning through pent-up energy and daydreaming about Flanders Road football fields back home.

  ‘Not really, no.’ He had been on the Rig for eighteen days, and made little to no progress on his escape. Noting guard counts, shift patterns, supply runs and the Rig’s layout was all good and well, but he felt like a hamster in an exercise wheel – running nowhere fast.

  ‘You’re negative nearly six hundred credits now.’

  ‘What are they gonna do?’ Drake asked, between deep breaths. ‘Send me to jail?’

  ‘You need credits to get off, you know, at the end of the five years.’

  Drake snorted. He liked Tristan, but the kid could be grating sometimes. Drake thought himself, at fifteen, older and wiser than his cellmate, but had learnt the other night that Tristan was nearly seventeen. His size and demeanour made him seem a lot younger.

  ‘When I go it won’t be on their terms, mate.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the escape. How’s that working out for ya?’

  ‘Swam halfway to the mainland last night before a cramp forced me to turn back.’

  ‘So that wasn’t you snoring above me at two in the morning, then?’

  Breathing hard, Drake slammed his fist on the treadmill’s cool-down mode and began a slow jog. ‘A clever decoy made of papier-mâché and toothpaste.’

  ‘Genius. How’d they ever catch you after your last escapes?’

  Drake sighed. ‘They knew which way I’d run …’

  ‘Oh no. Look who’s back.’ Tristan nodded towards the stairs behind Drake.

  Drake stopped the treadmill and wiped the sweat from his face with a handtowel. He glanced over and cursed. Alan Grey, Mohawk, and his gang of toughs were descending into the exercise area. Officer Brand walked behind them and leaned casually against the handrail at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Advanced lessons, wasn’t it?’ Drake said. His breathing was returning to normal after the run. ‘Gone for two weeks. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’

  Tristan shrugged. ‘I try and stay off their radar. You should, too, given what happened last time.’

  Drake thought about wandering over and asking Grey just where he’d been, but Tristan was right. He’d likely get his head caved in. Last time he’d caught Grey and his gang unawares – they’d underestimated him – this time they’d swarm him and tear him apart. That’s what Drake would’ve done, if their roles were reversed.

  ‘Right.’

  Drake spent the next quarter hour doing a few sets of curls with the free weights. He could feel Grey’s eyes on him, from time to time. At 1000 his tracker beeped and advised of lessons for the next two hours. Drake was up to lesson fifty in the maths department, and found the problems had failed to get any harder. He spent most of the time in class organising what he knew of the Rig in his head.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Tristan said.

  Drake threw his towel over his shoulder and, feeling good after the workout, followed Tristan over to the stairs out of the exercise area. Brand still leaned on guard against the railing, facing away from them and chatting into his radio.

  Drake felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, an innate sense of danger, and turned just as Grey moved in on him. The large, pig-faced bully held a long, sharp knife in his fist. The knife shone a bright white, as if it were ablaze. What? Drake’s mind registered the strange weapon just after his instincts kicked in.

  Grey struck at him with the glowing knife in a vicious lunge. Drake swung his left arm up to deflect the strike. The knife caught on his sleeve and cut through his skin as if it were tissue paper.

  ‘Ah!’

  Sizzling pain burnt down his arm and a spray of blood spattered the rubber matting of the exercise area. Grey snarled and advanced on him.

  ‘Should’ve just taken your beating,’ he spat.

  Drake pushed back on Grey’s shoulders and the knife swung between them, cutting his green jumpsuit open across his stomach and missing his flesh by the width of a playing card.

  Grey swatted him away and Drake stumbled back. Only a handful of seconds had passed since the attack began. Drake saw Tristan, out of the corner of his eye. His cellmate reached over and swiped the baton hanging loose in its holster around Brand’s waist. The guard spun with a cry and reached for Tristan, but the little lad was too quick.

  With a grunt, Tristan swung the baton and pressed the bright red button on the side, sending a humming charge through the business end. He struck Grey under his extended knife arm and blue sparks flew.

  Grey made a startled cry somewhere between a whimper and a scream. He fell to the mat, twitching and shaking. Drake lost sight of his strange knife.

  Tristan stood, his arm still extended, looking stunned at what he’d just done – and pale.

  ‘Put that down,’ Marcus Brand said, strolling onto the scene. Then, as if discussing the matter over drinks, he casually raised his sleek, black rifle and fired.

  A whip-crack sound exploded out of the barrel a split-second before the bullet smacked into Tristan’s chest.

  Brand had shot him.

  Drake’s eyes bulged and he felt as if the whole world had been drowned in thick, treacly crude oil. He felt his legs moving, but slowly, dredging through the oil. Tristan’s arms flew back in slow motion. The electrified baton fell from his hand in a slow, lazy arc, and Drake watched his eyelids flutter closed.

  Time sped back up and Tristan hit the rubber floor with a dull thud.

  ‘You bastard!’ Drake roared. He balled his fists and advanced on Brand.

  Brand swung his rifle around and pointed the barrel directly between his eyes. A river of ice melted down Drake’s back as Brand pressed the hot barrel against his forehead and smirked.

  ‘What was that, Mr Drake?’ Brand asked. ‘What did you call me?’

  Quite a crowd had gathered in the half a minute since the fight began. Guards on the tiers above, inmates around the enclosed exercise area. Grey’s gang
hung back, forming a half-circle around their fallen leader. The air trembled with tension, but was quiet enough that Drake heard his heart pounding in his ears, as drops of blood from his arm splashed against the floor.

  ‘You … you shot him.’

  Brand laughed. ‘I certainly did. Look closer, Drake, you moron.’

  Glaring down the length of the rifle, Drake took a slow step back and looked at Tristan, expecting a bloody mess. The scrawny boy’s glasses had fallen from his face, but there was no blood – no gunshot wound. A dart, about the size of Drake’s thumb, stuck through his green jumpsuit in the nook below his left shoulder.

  ‘Stunning rounds – non-lethal,’ Brand said, and spat on the mat next to Tristan. ‘More’s the pity, huh? He’ll have one helluva bruise and a headache when he wakes up, though.’

  Drake shook as he turned back to Brand.

  ‘What’s the matter, lad? Scared?’

  The guards on the walkway above jeered and laughed. Four of them had descended to stand on the stairs behind Brand, weapons at the ready. The inmates looked on, some frightened, most solemn.

  ‘No,’ Drake said carefully. ‘No, I’m not scared.’

  Brand scoffed and, after a long moment, lowered his rifle. ‘Why’s your arm bleeding?’

  Drake gestured over his shoulder. ‘Grey had a knife. Tristan must’ve seen him go for me. That’s why he grabbed your baton.’

  ‘A knife? That looks more like a burn.’

  Drake actually took a moment to look at his arm. A long, jagged cut stretched from the crook of his elbow and down his left forearm. But the wound looked … scorched. Cauterised, he thought. Half the cut was blackened and burnt. It was still bleeding, but only a trickle compared to what it should have been.

  ‘I saw the knife,’ Drake said. ‘It was shiny – no, bright. Glowing.’

  Brand’s smile faded and he glared over Drake’s shoulder at the unconscious Grey and his gang. ‘Pick him up and get him into his bunk,’ he snarled. The gang and Mohawk shuffled their feet. ‘Now!’ Brand snapped.