by Jack Conner
“Lookin’ for this?” The man waggled it teasingly. Like many here, he was infected, and some of his many scars ran through patches of fish scales.
Avery studied the man’s leer and said nothing. At the edge of his vision, and not concealed by the steam that veiled much of the room, Avery saw the prisoner’s member standing up, as knotted and scarred as the rest of him.
Another prisoner stepped beside the first. He shoved Avery against the wall. Avery hissed out a breath as his whip-wound scraped a chip in the tile.
“Oooh, I like them tender,” said the newcomer.
Please, Avery thought. Anything but this.
Other prisoners were moving away. They may not like what was about to happen, but it was evidently not uncommon, and they wanted no part of antagonizing the offenders. The guards waited outside, but Avery knew they never entered the showers and would not interfere in anything short of a riot.
“And you’re small,” said the man who’d stolen Avery’s soap. One of his rough hands reached out and cupped Avery’s face, almost gently. “I like that.”
“Not as much as me,” added the second. He ran to blubber, and his nose was shrinking and turning wet and black, like that of a seal. Pressing even closer to Avery, he said, “So, you gonna make this easy for yourself, or you gonna make this hard?”
“Say hard,” begged the first man. “Say hard please.”
In that moment Avery was incapable of saying anything. His mind was completely paralyzed by fear. Using all his will, he managed to eek out one syllable. “I—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “I—” It was all he could do. His mind was blank. His legs were shaking. In another moment he thought he would void his bladder.
The men laughed. The one who’d stolen Avery’s soap reached down toward Avery’s member—
A shape loomed out of the mist behind the two men, grabbed them each by their skulls and slammed the globes together. Crack. The two fell in a wet heap. Shocked, Avery watched the shape materialize, expecting Janx somehow to appear, even though he did not work in this unit, but instead saw the large form of the man who’d been working beside him in the processing plant. He was an ugly brute that had growths sprouting all over his body that were somewhere between fish scales and sections of a lobster’s carapace. Something like a sea anemone squirmed from his neck, and his right arm had mutated into a tentacle, long and whip-like. The fingers of his other hand had developed webbing between them and were becoming fused together, turning into a flipper.
“I—” Avery forced himself to voice a coherent thought. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” the man said. “Thank Janx.”
“He paid you to look after me?”
“Asked. Me an’ him served together, long ago, under him they call Segrul the Gray, or they do now. Back then he wasn’t so gray.”
“You’re a pirate.” It didn’t surprise Avery. Many of the inmates were either pirates or smugglers.
“Call me Rolf.”
Avery nodded to the men on the floor. “Will you face reprisals?”
Rolf didn’t answer but turned about and vanished back into the steam.
Once he stopped trembling, Avery stooped, retrieved his soap and began to wash his hair, putting some distance between him and the two men. Thank you, Janx.
* * *
The laughter of the seals drifted in through the encrusted bars of the cafeteria—ark-ark-ark—and Avery tried to tune the sound out as he shoved his way through the press of people, looking for his company. Cold air wafted in, but the number of prisoners packed tightly together kept the air from freezing. Still, Avery wished the guards would close the windows. Whether the air was processed or not, and it was, the sea’s pollution was still wafting in.
Killers, thieves and rapists surrounded Avery. Most were either pirates or smugglers, he had learned, caught by the Magistrate’s Sea Guard, which was apparently an Ysstral naval defense force separate from the military. Throughout the Empire’s history, Ysstral lords had always overseen the country’s defenses, and there were separate lords that ran the sea defense, air defense and land defense, and these in turn had to regularly coordinate with the military wings whose duties overlapped theirs. There was much in-fighting between the three Defense Lords, and Avery supposed that was the point; it kept any one from getting too powerful. Of course, then there was the Emperor or Empress who had to wrangle the three to suit their own interests, not to mention the generals who commanded the military, plus all the various bureaus that prosecuted and monitored crime. It was a complicated system, and the result, as far as Avery was concerned at the moment, was that the Magistrate was able to run this prison with great autonomy. Just my luck.
As he moved through the crowd, evading elbows and pincers, Avery was struck by just how many of the inmates were infected, and infected recently—that is, since their incarceration. He could tell these from the others because their mutations ran toward the seal, arms shrinking and deforming to become flippers, like with Rolf, bodies thickening, becoming blubbery, noses turning black, whiskers sprouting from scarred, grizzled faces.
Part of Avery felt annoyed by this. After all, he’d been slaving away in the processing plant for nearly a week now, only to learn that much of the food managed to pass through the system without being fully cleansed. The rest of him felt fear: he too could be stricken with another bout of infection. After surviving the sea’s taint once, he knew he was more likely to endure another round than before, but he would almost certainly undergo more mutations, and the last thing he wanted was a godsdamned flipper.
Janx waited for him at the table he’d appropriated for the crew of the Muirblaag. Duke Leshillibn had split the crew up as much as he could, putting them in different work stations and prison wings, but there were only three lunches, and so he could not completely separate them. The nine crewmen that shared this lunch grouped around Janx, talking furtively, giving their reports on what they had seen and witnessed since their last gathering, then receiving orders from their captain in turn. All poked with different amounts of disgust at their lunch of bloody, fatty seal meat, boiled, unseasoned potatoes and brown mush.
Janx smiled when he saw Avery and patted the spot to his side. Sailors made way for him, and Avery sat down gratefully.
“I met a friend of yours,” Avery said, after the captain of the Muirblaag had given one more order, then told Janx about the incident in the showers.
“Bastards!” Janx said, suddenly livid. “I ought to hunt them down and stomp their throats in.”
“Next time. I’m just glad Rolf was willing to help. Those men may not be glad to see him again.”
Janx grunted. “I’ll make sure he has back up.” He scanned the cafeteria for Rolf, and Avery looked with him, finding the mutated pirate some distance away, eating quietly with a small group of hardened inmates. “I’ll have a word with him,” Janx said. “Maybe he can start lunching with us.”
“That would be good,” Avery agreed. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to him. And you, for having him watch me.”
“Had to. I wasn’t there, and the Maj is keeping my men away from you as much as possible. Lucky I found Rolf when I did.”
“You knew him long, back when you were pirating?”
“A year or so before we switched ships. It was when I was new to the life.”
“Oh?” Avery felt he could do with one of Janx’s stories, and it rarely took much to get the big man going.
Janx nodded. “I was tryin’ to keep my head down, just tryin’ to get by. I had people already hunting me, some of them here in the Empire, and thought joining the bad folk o’ the seas would throw ‘em off the scent. Maybe it did, but it caused me a whole mess of new problems. One big one was Segrul. When I started workin’ for him, I knew he was a nasty sort right off. Heard he was goin’ through a torture phase. Liked to break his women before he took them. So one day we hit this merchant ship and he sees this soft young girl he wants to make his o
wn. I was too junior to even get close, but Rolf was high up in Segrul’s councils. He knew what would happen to that girl, and he knew she was too soft to take it, so I see him talk to her, private-like, and later they find her body stone cold dead afore Segrul could even lay a hand on her.” Janx shook his head. “It was a hard sort of mercy, but it was a kind thing Rolf did, givin’ her that pill.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Yeah. I’ll ask ‘im to join us next time.”
Avery decided to get down to business. “How was the hunt?”
Janx glanced at his plate—his seal meat was untouched—then out the overgrown bars of a nearby window. The cafeteria was situated at a low point in the fortress, and seals seemed to be camped just outside, hooting and laughing and jostling for position on their black rocks.
“I survived,” he said. “That’s about all.” He had been assigned to the hunting parties, Avery knew, that were dispatched twice daily to bring home food for the inmates. Word had it that the Magistrate was too cheap to buy meat for the prisoners, so he made them supply their own. What they caught for themselves he didn’t have to purchase, and he was able to keep the allotted budget for that item in his personal account. Also, rumor indicated that he enjoyed watching the men at their sport.
“Fuckin’ seals,” Janx went on. “Godsdamned laughing seals. They laugh at you when you’re sticking ‘em with spears, they laugh at you when you’re cuttin’ ‘em up, they laugh at you when they’re tryin’ to take a bite out o’ ya. That’s all they ever fuckin’ do is laugh, and you can’t tell me that’s not what they’re doin’. They ain’t right, Doc. They just ain’t fuckin’ right.”
“I know,” Avery said, and tried not to frown down at his food. Several of the nearby sailors who had overheard were staring at theirs, more than one looking queasy.
Avery paused. “Did you learn anything this time?”
Slowly, Janx nodded. “Today I saw something. We struck out in a different direction and I think I saw ... it.”
“The docks?” Avery knew there must be a place where the Magistrate received new inmates, as well as a place for his fleet to dock and receive goods from the mainland.
“I believe so,” Janx said. “To the south. I can draw it on a map, as well as a gate I saw in its wall. I also got word about the girls.”
“Really? You found them?”
Janx inclined his head at one of the crewmen. “It was Laro. He heard it from a fella named Cryan, who has a sister locked up in the woman’s section.” The women’s section of the prison was much smaller than the men’s, and kept separate. The main part of the prison was a far cry from the gentler quarters Avery and the others had known the first few days of their confinement; there were no unisex quarters down here. “Anyway,” Janx said, “he had a visit with his sis, and did what we wanted—asked her about Hildy and the bitch.” Avery hid a sigh; despite their days together and their game-playing, Janx and Sheridan were unlikely to ever be friends.
“And?”
Janx grinned, showing off several metallic teeth. “They’re in Block Three, Cell 356.”
“Excellent!”
Janx looked at him sideways. “Now all we have to do is break them out.”
Avery sighed. “And us.”
“And us.”
Someone screamed. All heads snapped in that direction. A pirate pitched to the floor, shaking and foaming at the mouth. He was a large fellow and mutated to resemble a seal in many respects. Fellow prisoners bent over him, but Avery saw there was nothing for them to do.
Prison authorities realized it, too, as a team of guards entered the cafeteria and shepherded a couple of paramedics to the stricken man. The paramedics loaded him on a stretcher and took him away, presumably to the infirmary. Of course, there wasn’t much even medicine could do for the man now, Avery knew. The man had been stricken with infection, once again, from the sea.
“Fuck this,” said one of the crewmen.
Another flung his plate against the wall, where the contents slimed down. Other prisoners were also edging away from their meals, or at least tucking into them with less abandon.
“Last godsdamned time I touch something from that kitchen,” someone said.
Avery studied his meal. The seal meat looked quite raw, and it reeked of the chemicals that had supposedly purified it. They didn’t do a very good job. Is the Magistrate skimping on those, too?
After a beat, the other prisoners resumed their meals. They saw this sort of thing too often to lose more than a moment over it.
Rain pounded them as they emerged from the cavernous cafeteria room twenty minutes later and into the yard, a bleak, sprawling affair of concrete and rock. Metal canopies protected large parts of it, and the rain plinked off the shelter. It was a steady drizzle, the droplets seeming to hit at a slightly slower rate than normal precipitation. It was an oily, bitter-smelling discharge, and Avery couldn’t help but think of some vast entity drooling, without cease, onto the Ysstral Empire. Of course, sometimes the rain did let up, and the sun would shine down, palely and briefly, before the drool resumed. Now was not one of those times, however, and Avery and Janx found a rock to perch on to watch their men play a game of handball against a chipped concrete wall while rain oozed off the canopy behind them in steady, viscous streams.
The crew of the Muirblaag did not socialize much with the other inmates, and the other inmates regarded them warily, half with contempt, half with fear. The sailors were not (generally speaking) criminals, and as such did not belong here. Worse, being military, they were one step removed from police, and these met universal scorn behind prison walls. As such, the other inmates barely tolerated the sailors.
From time to time a crewman would run up to Janx, whisper something in his ear, and then, after receiving a low reply, dart off again.
“They seem to take to you,” Avery said. “I mean, as captain.”
“Well,” Janx said, “it’s not the first time I’ve ever had that title, you know.”
“I know.”
Janx sort of smiled, but it was a tired smile. “Did I ever tell you about this one time, when I was a pirate captain, and ... ?” He seemed to fumble for words, or at least enthusiasm, then let it drop. Avery was sorry not to hear the tale, as the last one had turned out so bleak, but he could understand the sentiment. He had little enthusiasm for much these days, either.
Janx turned to look at him, opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it.
“Yes? What is it?”
“It’s just ... you think you did the right thing, tellin’ the Duke no?”
Avery remembered the lord’s expression when he’d mentioned waiting for Ani to come of age. Had he actually been licking his lips?
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Not what I meant. I mean, why not tell the bastard sure, you’ll go along with it, then, when he lets us outta here, pull a runner on him and vanish. But first get the hell out of here.”
Avery glanced over his shoulder, watching the seals cavort on their rocks. They seemed to be the only ones unaffected by the rain. In fact, they seemed to revel in it. Black waves blasted the black shore, and a seal slipped into the dark water after a flashing silver shape.
“I think he would’ve prepared for that,” Avery said. “We would not have gotten away, I’m sure of it. Still, it’s more than that.”
“Yeah?”
“The Duke seems to have been approached by the mystery party.”
Janx rubbed his head, wrinkling up the skin. He hadn’t shaved his head in the last few days, and stubble was sprouting from his dome. Some of it was gray.
“That’s what it sounds like,” he agreed.
“If we pulled a runner, as you say, after having been released, they would find out. The Duke would have already told them he had accepted another offer, and when he came back to them saying he’d changed his mind because of our escape they would inquire as to what happened, and from one source or another they would find out. The only r
eason we’re alive right now is because the Duke wants me to accept his offer. Don’t you see? He hasn’t told them about us. He knows we’re rivals and wants to keep us secret from them.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d prefer to deal with me than them. Prefer to set the terms of whatever deal there is himself. Gods know what their offer was.”
“Well, he does want to kill the Empress. Maybe they’ve offered him help.”
“Could be,” Avery said. “Either way, whatever they want in return isn’t something he wants to give. If I say yes, he could become Emperor without accepting any conditions he doesn’t like—or can’t provide. Our only hope is to break out ourselves. Get word to Hildra and Sheridan. Tell them it’s coming. Have them be ready to liberate the women of the crew.”
“I still say that’s a mistake, Doc. We can’t free everybody. There’s just too many. We might be able to slip out, the four of us, and get the Codex outta the Mu, but that’s it. We can free the men when it’s all over.”
“If we can get them to the docks ...”
Janx’s expression soured. “If.” He waved it away. “What about things on your end?”
“They moved me today. Put me at a different station. I think I’m going to be there for a few days, at least. It’s just down the hall from one of the lock rooms where they keep the alchemical compounds. If I can get into it ...”
“You have the picks I gave you?”
Avery patted his chest, where he had created a little inside pocket. There he stored the lock picks Janx had given him yesterday. The whaler’s former set had been confiscated by the guards when they had searched him, but he’d crafted a new set out of the tines of a stolen fork and some wire he’d bought in trade with a former pirate.
“You remember how to use them?” Janx said.