A Galaxy Unknown

by Thomas DePrima

  * * *

  An hour after breakfast on her third day of captivity, a pair of eyes appeared at the door slot and a voice ordered Jenetta to stand on the circle. She complied immediately and her wrists and ankles were secured before the guard entered the cell. Once inside, he moved quickly around behind her, grabbed her hair, and savagely pulled her head back. She tried to scream, but the thick, rubber gag suddenly thrust into her mouth with practiced ease cancelled all sounds. An elastic-like band attached to the gag was stretched out and slipped over her head, then solidified in that position when the guard pressed a button on his controller. Jenetta now understood how the bands on her neck, waist, wrists and ankles seemed like they were custom made without any visible seams. The knowledge hardly seemed worth the price at the time.

  Thus silenced, only Jenetta's legs were released by the guard so that she could be shoved out the door and prodded along an empty corridor lined with cell doors until they emerged from the cellblock. Jenetta found herself in a large, circular room with ten doors evenly spaced around the off-white walls. One door had no markings and one was marked ‘Head', while the others were sequentially marked ‘A' through ‘H.' Like the door to her cell, all other doors here seemed to depend upon old-fashioned hinges and locks for opening and closure. It meant that no one could manage an escape by circumventing electronic locks. You could only move around in the detention center if you had access to one of the heavy ancient keys the guards carried. Her superior computer skills would be of no use to her here.

  Propelled to an empty area against the wall between doors ‘D' and ‘E', Jenetta's ankles were re-secured before her arms were released. After ordering her to raise her arms over the bar suspended above her head, with one arm on either side, the guard pressed a button on the controller that pulled her wrists together. She had foreseen what was intended so the sudden movement didn't catch her by surprise, but the next action did. The guard depressed one of two buttons on the wall and the bar rose until Jenetta was standing on the balls of her feet. As her arms began to protest the sudden distention, her guard smirked at her and released the button before taking a seat in an ‘oh-gee' chair at one of the four desks in the center of the room.

  Jenetta hadn't seen this guard before, but he was cut from the same cloth as the others. About six-foot tall, and weighing roughly two-hundred twenty pounds, he had the look of someone who enjoyed inflicting pain on others. His unkempt brown hair and unshaven face complemented his rumpled uniform. It was only a few hours into the new watch and he already appeared as if he been on duty for days without a break. Like the hawk-faced guard that had shocked Jenetta with a Level-1 on the first day, his lips were curled into a permanent sneer. Jenetta nicknamed him Big Ugly.

  Pulling the stun pistol from his holster, BU dropped it into a drawer of the desk before taking his seat and removing a holo-magazine cylinder from a different drawer. Twice as long as the holo-tubes used for data lists, the three-centimeter thick holo-magazine cylinders are extremely sturdy, lightweight, and offer better image resolution. Even at twenty-centimeters length, the composite-material tubes are comfortably portable, and can be updated in seconds by downloading different issues of magazines or newspapers contained in the central computer.

  Placing the narrow tube on the desk in front of him, BU pressed the recessed button to activate it, and watched as a page of text and images rose up along the length of the cylinder. He twisted the end of the cylinder slowly until he found the page that he was looking for, then picked up the cylinder, leaned back in the chair, and began reading. He glanced over at Jenetta's gagged, helpless, and suspended form every few minutes.

  Over the next forty-eight minutes, Jenetta's arms screamed for release as a number of security people came and went from the detention center, most taking time to ogle her body with lust-filled eyes. Jenetta visually ascertained that the doors with the letters were cellblocks, and the unmarked door was the entryway to the center. A chronometer on the wall maddeningly ticked off the seconds, and confirmed that she'd been in the detention center for three days.

  When a giant of a man dressed in the white clothes of a medical attendant and smelling of antiseptic entered the center pushing an ‘oh-gee' chair, BU jumped up and glowered at him. There was no mistaking the acrimony in his voice as he said, "It's about damn time you got here. I got a call telling me to prepare her almost an hour ago. I can't even go to the can when one of my prisoners is in the anteroom."

  Easily six-foot-nine, the blasé attitude of the newly arrived man seemed to irk BU even more. Despite BU's menacing posture, the medical attendant remained insouciant. "Don't blame me, I got held up at medical stores. I needed a restraint chair and the clerk wasn't around. He finally showed up with some lame excuse about having to deliver something."

  "Restraint chair? For her? She's so small that you could just throw her over your shoulder."

  "The last time I did that I threw my back out and was laid up for a week. Now I use a restraint chair for all prisoner transports. Release her."

  As BU aimed a controller at Jenetta, her arms and legs were instantly released. She ached all over from having been suspended from the bar and immediately rubbed the sore muscles in her shoulders.

  "Into the chair, bitch," BU said impatiently.

  Reaching up, Jenetta tugged at the gag, to the amused delight of a smirking BU. When the band remained inflexibly solid, she reluctantly climbed into the waiting chair. As she settled in, she felt the EM field engage. Her arms were pulled tightly to the chair's arms, and her ankles were anchored to the chair's footrest. The attendant touched something to her neck and she felt herself sinking into a pool of warm liquid as darkness smothered her.

  * * *

  Jenetta awoke back in her cell, feeling as if she'd been beaten up and left for dead in an alleyway after an all night drinking binge. She ached everywhere, and her stomach was trying to do things no respectable stomach had a legal or moral right to be doing. She rolled off the cot and crawled to the toilet, but nothing came up as her stomach tried to heave imaginary contents into the bowl. After hanging limply onto the stainless steel receptacle for a good ten minutes, she crawled back to her cot and climbed up, a string of spittle still dangling from her mouth. She was thankfully asleep again in minutes.

  When she awoke again, hours later, she sat up and looked around. Her stomach felt a little better but her chest was throbbing with pain. Peering down, she discovered that she'd been tattooed. In seven-centimeter high letters just above her breasts, was imprinted the word ‘SLAVE.' Beneath that, in four-centimeter letters was written ‘PS89726.'

  "Those miserable bastards," she muttered aloud with fire in her eyes. In those first moments, Jenetta was angrier than she had ever been at any time in her young life; angry enough even to kill, and she swore an oath to herself that whoever was responsible for the tattoo would regret his or her actions to their dying day, which couldn't come soon enough.

  * * *

  Removed from her cell again the next morning by BU, Jenetta was once again suspended in the anteroom. As she balanced herself on the balls of her feet in an effort to relieve the painful distention of her arms, she glanced up at the wall chronometer. If not for the gag that filled her mouth, she wouldn't have been able to suppress an emotional outburst. According to the date display, a full eight days had passed since her last session here. She could only recall one. She couldn't account for the discrepancy and wondered if the guards were playing with her head.

  On this occasion, she was only made to dangle like a sprig of mistletoe for a short time before an attendant arrived with a restraint chair to pick her up. There was no mistaking the fact that the medical attendant wasn't the same as for her last trip. Although also wearing hospital ‘whites', he couldn't be much more diametrical in appearance. No taller than Jenetta, he had just a few precious tussocks of carefully combed-over white hair left on his aged, liver-spotted head. When Jenetta was freed from the bar, he just motioned feebly to the chair,
and then secured her when she sat down.

  Not being sedated for this excursion through the corridors presented Jenetta with an opportunity to see a little of the station as she was taken to the medical department; and what she saw impressed her. The sophisticated design of the multi-tiered structure corresponded favorably to the amazing feat of coring and lining the asteroid. The trip took her through an impressive medical facility and past numerous research labs.

  Moved from the restraint chair to a special recliner in a small lab, straps were used to secure her to the arms of the chair before an adhesive strip with attached wires was applied to her head. The soothing strains of classical music was the last thing she remembered until she awoke in the ‘oh-gee' chair as she was being taken back to the cellblock. At least the chronometer in the anteroom indicated that it was still the same day.

  She expected to be returned directly to her cell, so she was surprised when the guard in the anteroom put her on the holding bar. She was forced to stand there in her underwear as dinner was served to the prisoners in each of the eight cellblocks. She observed that there seemed to be four guards working to feed the prisoners, in addition to the one in the anteroom, so surely they could have taken her to her cell if they wished.

  A guard who finished his feeding duties early, returned to the anteroom to relax. Definitely the smallest of the jailers Jenetta had seen in the center, he stood no more than two-inches taller than herself, and weighed perhaps only one-hundred-thirty pounds. At roughly twenty-five-years-old, he also appeared to be the youngest of the jailers. As he sat down at the desk next to other guard, the sandy haired turnkey nodded towards Jenetta and said, "What's she doing out here?"

  The anteroom guard, who had put her on the bar, said, "Bellis is still feeding the prisoners in her cellblock. You know the rules, no prisoners can be transferred during mealtime."

  "I'm sick of all the ridiculous rules around here. With the electronic collars on them, these prisoners are as docile as sheep. And when their EM bands are secured, they're even more helpless than baby lambs. There's no good reason why we can't have more than one cell door in a block, open at the same time."

  "If you wanna avoid the shit details you follow the rules, all of them, and you keep your big mouth shut."

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," the small guard said as he gazed salaciously at Jenetta. "I thought that you might have some ideas about doing a little diddling. She wouldn't be bad looking if you cleaned her up a bit. I like them young and sweet. How about it, honey," he said, raising his voice slightly, "are you sweet?"

  If Jenetta hadn't been gagged, she would have given him explicit instructions on where he could put the stun baton that he was abstractedly fondling as if it was an erect extension of his body. It might have even been worth the electric shock she would certainly receive.

  "Put your tool away, Romeo. If you mess with a female prisoner, they'll throw you out an airlock without a spacesuit."

  "Yeah," he said, grinning at Jenetta with lust filled eyes, "but only if we get caught."

  The first guard scoffed, "Any guard here would turn you in for the reward in a heartbeat. A week's stay, all expenses paid, at the pleasure hotel on Timerius Prime ain't easy to ignore. The company is serious about guards not messing with their new slaves."

  Romeo suddenly growled angrily and turned away from Jenetta. "I have to work off this frustration. I'm going up to the mess hall for a pie."

  Glancing up at the chronometer, the first guard said, "The cell block is already locked down for the night. Opening the door before 0500 will set off alarms all the way up to the commandant's quarters. Five patrol groups and a supervisor will be down here before you get halfway to the lifts. You're really anxious to take a vacuum stroll without a suit, aren't you?"

  "I won't set off any alarms. I'm not going out the main door."

  "Then just how the hell do you intend to get the pie?" the first guard asked, chuckling.

  "I'll use the food elevator."

  "You're nuts! You can't survive the sterilization sweep unless you're enclosed in a food container, and you're about five-foot too tall for that."

  "I've done it before."

  "Liar!" the first guard practically spit out.

  "I'll prove it to you, right now," Romeo said confidently. "Key in ‘ORSTR156.'"

  "Oh, I've heard about that— but it doesn't work. The guy that you replaced tried it and got fried. It was okay going up, but when he tried to come back down, the sweep got him. All we found was his clothes, a small pile of dust, and an empty dessert pan."

  "Yeah, I heard about that also, so I looked into it. I know a guy in the computer center. My buddy says that the defaults are automatically reset at the top of every hour. The guy who got dusted made it to the kitchen, but wasted too much time up there. It was ten seconds after the new hour when he tried to come back down, and the sterilization sweep process had defaulted back in. I still have twenty minutes before the hour, so punch in the code."

  "It's your neck," the first guard said as he punched the code into the terminal.

  "Detention center food elevator sterilization sweep process disabled," the computer announced in an androgynous mechanical voice.

  Jumping to his feet, the guard that Jenetta now associated with the name Romeo said, "I'm off."

  "Bring me back an apple pie."

  "Get your own, Rosewood."

  With a malicious grin on his face, Rosewood, the guard at the computer console, gave Romeo a sideways glance and said, "How about if I reengage the sterilization sweep procedure while you're on the way up?"

  Romeo hesitated for a second, knowing that he was outmaneuvered. Smiling balefully, he said, "Okay, two apple pies coming up, or rather down."

  Romeo used his jailer key to initiate the operation of the food elevator. As the door opened, Jenetta observed that the car was about a meter wide and two-meters deep, but only a meter and a half high. Even Romeo, with his short stature, had to squat as he entered. He pressed the single button on the wall outside the elevator and yanked his arm in as the door slammed close. Jenetta saw the ‘in service' lamp illuminate and remain lit for about 60 seconds.

  At four minutes before the hour, the ‘in service' light lit up again. When the door opened a minute later. Romeo stepped out carrying two pies. Jenetta's stomach began rumbling loudly as the sugary sweet aroma of freshly baked apple pie assailed her nostrils.

  Romeo glanced over at her and said, "Yeah, I know that you'd like some, but you know what? You ain't gonna get any, bitch." He laughed cruelly as he cut his pie into pieces and started stuffing his face.

  Rosewood, still sitting at the desk, said, "You cut that awfully close, kid. You only had three minutes left."

  "I ran into a guy that I know as I was taking the pies off the bakery cart, and we shot the bull for a while. I still had time to get back."

  As the two guards greedily attacked their pies, Bellis emerged from the cellblock where Jenetta was housed. "Hey, pie. Save a piece for me."

  "Get your own," Romeo said.

  "We're in nighttime lockdown, or I would."

  "Too bad. That's your problem. Besides you still have a prisoner to put away."

  Bellis looked over at Jenetta, scowled, and pulled his controller from a side pocket to release her hands. She dropped them to her belt, was re-secured, and then her ankles were released. Bellis grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her into cellblock C, repeatedly muttering, "Miserable goddamn bastards," under his breath as they walked. Opening the cell door, he shoved her in, secured her legs, and removed the gag. She expected some lecherous remark, but he was still so upset with the other guards that he stepped out of the cell, locked the door, and released her without uttering a word to her.

  Jenetta worked her mouth and rubbed her arms before reaching down to pick up the food tray that had been left in her cell. As expected, there wasn't any apple pie, just a large portion of the usual overcooked vegetables and a small dish of plain white rice. "The pie is pro
bably as poorly prepared as the vegetables, anyway," she grumbled as she started to eat.

  * * *

  During each of the next two days Jenetta was taken to the medical lab, but on the day following she received a visitor in her cell. Verifying that she was secured before unlocking the door, Rosewood pushed the door open wide and respectfully stepped back out of the way. A man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Captain Lentz entered the cell. As he pushed the unlocked door closed behind him, Jenetta just stood there staring with her mouth partly open as she examined his face.

  "Hello, Angel, how are they treating you?"

  Although the face was slightly different, there was no mistaking that voice.

  "Captain Lentz?" Jenetta asked hesitantly.

  "Yes and no," the man replied with a grin.

  * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  ~ August 4th, 2267 ~

  "My real name is Mikel Arneu," he said. "I looked enough like Lentz that some minor cosmetic surgery allowed me to take his place. After we disposed of his body, I reported to the Vordoth as its new captain. My involvement became necessary when the previous captain refused to make the trip without GSC convoy protection. The double we'd prepared to take his place looked nothing like Lentz. We needed the Corplastizine that the Vordoth was carrying, for the creation of our newest space-port, not to mention wanting the rest of its six kilometers of valuable cargo. My face was returned to my original appearance after the mission was over."

  "What? You're with the Raiders?"

  "Better than that, Angel— I'm the commandant of this base. We call it Raider-One because it was the first of our hidden bases, and one of our most ambitious undertakings up until that time. It took several years to hollow out this asteroid, fully line the interior, and construct the habitat. It's cost was staggering, but over the past eight years it's paid for itself many times over." He chuckled as he said, "Do you know that we operated from here for almost two years before people realized that Raiders were behind all the mysterious ship disappearances in this sector? After that, we didn't even bother jamming the IDS bands when taking ships. We had grown so strong that I decided they could scream all they want. It wouldn't make any difference."