King rubbed his chin. “So, our Mechtechan friend is actually a skilled engineer after all. I shall have to bring this matter up during our next chat.”
“There is also a rather large data file on the ship’s logs that our people can’t decrypt.”
King raised an eyebrow and almost smiled. “Really? Now that does pique my interest.” He turned back to the visual display of the alien talking with the Warden in the cafeteria. “Have Jericho set up the interrogation room again. I think Mr. Quantum has had quite enough of a reprieve.”
---
When a teeth-jarring buzzer signaled the end of breakfast, the inmates stood and hurried to bus their trays before lining up. As the Warden joined the queue, he saw Jericho, King’s pet bruiser, enter the mess hall with four armored guards. They made straight for Quantum.
“Don’t,” Hogan whispered. “It ain’t worth it.”
The Warden didn’t listen. He stepped between the approaching armed men and his friend. “Where are you taking him?”
Quantum touched his shoulder. “This is unnecessary. I shall go in peace.”
“I’m not letting them cut on you again.”
Jericho sneered and motioned to his men.
The four guards came at the Warden with stun batons, but he was ready. The first was unconscious before he hit the floor. The second became a shield, stunned into senselessness by the third man. When the Warden disarmed the fourth, using his weapon against him, the inmates began to get rowdy. Cheers turned into a chant of, “Warden! Warden! Warden!”
Pulse blasts shook the air as the stun cannons dropped over a dozen haggard men to the floor in spasming agony.
“That is quite enough, Warden.” King’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers. “Unless you want my men on the mezzanine to use lethal force to quell your little riot, I suggest you stand down.”
The Warden dropped the stun baton and let go of the guard he used as a shield.
Jericho motioned for the recovering men to take Quantum into custody, then stepped forward and hit the Warden in the throat with his stun baton.
As the Warden convulsed on the floor, the stun baton continually reapplied to various parts of his body, he heard Jericho announce to the hall: “This man is not a hero. He is not your savior. He will not free you. He can only get you killed. Or worse. He can get you sentenced to Tartarus.”
Following his men and Quantum out of the mess hall, Jericho finished the proclamation with, “I trust you all to do the right thing.”
The Warden tried to stand, but nothing worked. As his consciousness began to fade, he saw a ring of filthy, haunted faces descend upon him.
---
“You have not been entirely truthful with me, Quantum.”
King stood over the alien restrained to the horizontal Y-shaped gurney. Though still showing signs of trauma, the Mechtechan appeared in far better trim than the toughest of inmates who had faced similar treatment in the interrogation room. King suppressed a chill of delight at the thought of how long this process might last.
“I have spoken no falsehoods.” The alien’s dark grey eyes did not blink.
“And yet your silence has contained volumes of duplicity.” King picked up one of the antique surgical scalpels he favored for such work. The electric shocks, while satisfying for a moment or two, left no visible testimony for later admiration. “You claim not to be an engineer, and yet the modified Ranger VII is a tribute to your technical prowess. Would you care to clarify?”
The Mechtechan continued to lock gazes with him, not flinching from the blade now hovering above its marred face. “Imagine a small child brings you a pencil drawing of a family standing outside a house. The people are amorphous collections of ellipses approximating limbs and torsos with curved lines and semicircles representing smiles and eyes, and the house is an irregular rectangle topped by an equally irregular triangle half the size of the largest person.
“Given this crude representation of a portrait, could you not make vast improvements on this picture even without the benefit of formal artistic training?”
King cracked a smile. The alien was easily the most intelligent being he had ever encountered, and yet here it was, trapped and under his power. Captured by King’s own plans and ingenuity. “All right, we’ll come back to that in a moment. Tell me about the encrypted file on the ship’s log. What is it?”
The Mechtechan said nothing.
King slid the point of the scalpel against the edge of the big left eye. “I am serious, Quantum. It cost a lot of money to hire those bounty hunters. Not to mention the risk of the operation. If they had been intercepted by actual Star Cav ships before recovering you, I doubt they would have kept my name out of things. So, I’m going to ask you once more. If you do not answer, you lose this eye. Now, what is on that encrypted file?”
“What have you done with the Star Warden?”
King frowned. “I believe he is facing ‘inmate justice’ at the moment. If I am right, he is on his way to the lowest decks, and you will never see him again.”
“Free him and I will tell you everything.”
King stood straight, his hand quivering. He had to catch his breath, realizing he was torn between the desire for the alien’s knowledge and the impulse to cause it more pain. Keeping his eyes on the prisoner, he stepped to the wall com and called Jericho. “Bring me the Warden.”
“Sir?”
“I said, bring me the Last Star Warden. Now!”
“On my way. Jericho out.” King could tell by the reluctance in the man’s voice it was probably already too late.
---
The Warden came to his senses gripped by a dozen strong hands. He was carried aloft on a sea of unwashed bodies, descending into a darkened corridor. They held him so tightly he couldn’t move his head. All he could see was the dimming light panels along the hallway’s metal ceiling. Above the cursing and growling of the angry horde, he heard a familiar voice close to his left ear.
“I told you it wasn’t worth it,” Hogan hissed. “Now we’ve got to send you to Tartarus, or King will send some of us. I’m sorry, Warden, but you made your bed…”
Something was roughly shoved into his hand.
He heard a hatch open. He was fed into unwholesome darkness. The Warden tumbled down a ramp as the hatch slammed shut above him.
All light died.
He came to a painful stop on a slick metallic surface. The stench made Hogan’s cell seem like a country garden after a warm spring rain. The Warden covered his face against the revolting miasma, praying that the ship’s air filtration system still neutralized any airborne pathogens spawned in the unseen filth of this lower deck.
Touching the object in his left hand, the Warden realized it was Hogan’s penlight. He flicked the device on and struggled to his feet. One sweep of the narrow beam revealed that the inmates’ dread of this place was well and truly justified. Even the Warden’s heart was chilled at this testament to humanity’s ultimate degradation.
The walls of the chamber were splashed and caked with blood. There were sigils and graffiti written in the stuff, and the age-old motto: ABANDON ALL HOPE. Three pyramids of human and humanoid skulls stood as tall as the Warden’s chest, and one corner was a reeking cesspit of rotting tissue.
It did not take much imagination to understand on what sustenance the denizens of Tartarus survived.
A drum sounded in the distance, echoing weirdly through the darkened bulkheads. A long, ululating, and demoniac howl answered. The Warden shined the light around the grisly chamber until he found an opened door. He stepped through it just as he heard the first hurried footsteps. From the feral calls and growling sounds combined with the slapping of unshod feet on the deck becoming a quiet thunder, it seemed as though several dozen were racing to find him.
“Fresh meat,” the Warden muttered as he broke into a run. Enveloped in the fetid darkness, he fled from the approaching and unseen horde.
The penlight flashed wildly around
the narrow corridor, revealing scattered bones along the deck, walls stained with more filth and gore. The Warden could see there was no power run to any of the panels on this level, not even emergency lighting. But there was air, and he knew that King would not bother to keep a separate system running for the areas of his prison he deemed abandoned.
That meant one universal air system served all of Hulk 13.
That system was the Warden’s only hope of escape. He had to find an access point, get inside, and pray that his instincts could guide him back to the upper levels and out of this nightmare. He just had to do it before the inmates of Tartarus found him.
He ran through the hellish labyrinth for what seemed an eternity. His pursuers never seemed to flag, their maniacal howls and insane gibbering echoing weirdly in the darkness, their hot breath fouling the already rancid air. The Warden’s lungs and legs burned, his eyes ached from straining against the stygian gloom, but he could not stop to rest.
Resting meant death. And not a clean death, either. Not at all.
A grunt to his right warned the Warden of the strike a second before it would have skewered him. He swerved away as the blade of a makeshift spear lunged out of a hidden alcove. Flashing the penlight in his attacker’s face, the Warden grabbed the weapon’s shaft, wrenching it from its blinded owner.
The spear appeared to be made from the elongated chitinous forelimb of one of the sentient insectoids of the Elysium system. The Warden drove the blunt end of the weapon into the bewildered tatterdemalion’s forehead, dropping the unfortunate soul to the deck.
The rabid pursuit grew closer. Shrieks of insane glee filled the corridor and his ears. The Warden waved the penlight in that direction. Scores of pale eyes glimmered in the distant shadows.
Taking the captured weapon, the Warden ran.
He hadn’t gotten far before the penlight began to blink.
Every other heartbeat was in total darkness.
The gibbering howls and stampeding footsteps of his hunters boomed closer.
The stench of their hot and hungry breath and their filthy bodies choked the air.
The Warden came to a T-junction. On instinct, he turned to the right. The corridor narrowed, turned again, passed half a dozen sealed doors, and came to a dead end.
The light blinked faster, stayed dark longer.
The howling horde reached the first junction. Even if they split up, at least twenty or more insane criminals hungry for his blood would be upon him in moments. The Warden placed the penlight on the floor, ready to use the primitive spear and the narrow corridor to make his last stand.
He almost laughed at the notion of a man who had spent his life among rocket ships and ray guns perishing with a stone-age weapon in his hands.
The penlight’s beam fell on an air grate in the floor.
The spear’s blade made short work of the cover’s seal. The Warden slipped into the ventilation shaft, doused penlight in hand, just as the maddened pack thundered over the closed grate. He held his breath and slid slowly away from the access point as his hunters went into a frustrated frenzy, turning on each other.
As blood dripped through the grate behind him, the Warden shook his head in pity. The inmates of Tartarus had been reduced to less than animals by King’s callousness and cruelty. No one deserved that level of dehumanization and debasement, no matter their crimes. The Warden would make King pay for all he had done, but to do that, he first had to escape Tartarus himself.
He crawled through the darkness, searching for a way up. Up would lead him out. But once he was out, he would still be locked inside the worst prison ship in the galaxy. What he would do at that point was a bridge yet to be crossed.
“But cross it I shall, because Quantum needs my help. And Stanislaus King is long overdue for a reckoning.”
---
“Three days.” King paced the width of his office. “Three days, and still no sign of the man.” He cast a furious glare at Braun and Jericho, both standing at attention just inside the door. “And yet we’ve lost how many down there?”
“Seven, sir.” Jericho frowned, stared at the carpeted floor. His face was filthy, as was the riot armor he wore. He had led almost every shift of searchers down into the lower decks, only stopping to rest and eat at Braun’s specific orders. “Seven dead. Thirteen wounded.”
“Pathetic, Jericho! If Braun were a man, I’d send her down there. How do you like that? I’d prefer to send a girl than you at this point! You’re useless!” King punched the palm of his left hand. “Double the shifts.”
While Jericho continued the manhunt and Braun maintained operations, King had vented some of his frustration on the captured Mechtechan in the interrogation room. But the alien still refused to cooperate until it knew the Warden was free. “I want that man found, dead or alive.”
Braun cleared her throat. “Sir, staff morale is very low. Dangerously so, I’m afraid.” She went silent, but it was clear she wanted to say more.
King sneered. “Spit it out, woman. Speak your mind.”
Braun took a deep breath, an action King found unseemly as it made her ample bosom seem to swell. “Well, sir, there are men on this ship that are due leave. Past due, in fact, and in light of the recent casualties, those men are… requesting that their leave be honored. I recommend we do so, at least for those with seniority. Set up a rotating schedule to assure the men that we still hold their best interests at heart.”
King scoffed and resumed his pacing. “I should sanction desertion in a time of crisis? What kind of advice is that? About what I’d expect from a woman! Things get hard and you want to get all soft and comforting! Unacceptable! This is a prison, not a cruise liner!”
He looked at Jericho. “Take the names of the men ‘requesting’ leave, and make sure they are on the next search party. Tell them that if they ever want to leave this ship again, they must first bring me the Last Star Warden.”
He glanced at Braun, now chewing on her pouty lower lip. “You want to improve morale, do you? Well, tell the men that the first crew to find our wayward Warden will receive two weeks paid leave and a thousand credit reward. That should motivate them to do their damned jobs!”
---
The Warden was so exhausted he almost didn’t notice it.
The clean smell of fresh air.
Every bone and muscle in his body hurt, cramped and bruised from his interminable sojourn through the labyrinthine guts of the prison ship. The penlight had died some time ago. He didn’t know exactly how long, just as he didn’t know how long he had been crawling like a blind worm through the narrow metal tunnels. He judged it had been a matter of days by the growth of stubble on his face and the roiling hunger pangs in his empty belly. His mouth was bone dry, his throat filled with razor blades with each painful swallow.
But he had not stopped moving. Every ounce of his will focused on drawing and keeping a map of the ventilation system in his mind. It was not a perfect map. There had been a few mistakes, costly wrong turns and backtrackings. Costly in calories and time, neither of which could he afford to lose. But he did not stop, would not. Not even for a moment’s rest.
Every time he thought he was done, out of energy, out of hope, he would close his eyes and see the battered and marred face of Quantum. He knew that no matter what his own troubles, his friend was being beaten and tortured by the madman who ran this flying hellhole.
Those few moments of hopelessness and despair would vanish, replaced by the Warden’s resolution to rescue Quantum and to punish Stanislaus King.
When he tasted the fresh air on his face and tongue, the Warden opened his eyes and saw light for the first time in almost forever. He blinked against the pain that was brief yet euphoric. He wanted to laugh, but even the act of smiling split his dry lips and caused him to cough. He clutched the air grate with both hands to push through and into the outer corridor.
The muscles in his forearms and back knotted into fiery cramps and the air rushed from his lungs in a sh
uddering gasp.
“Who’s there?”
The Warden held his breath.
It had been a woman’s voice.
He thought he might have lost his mind somewhere in the winding dark and was imagining things. But then he heard a booted step on the deck outside the grate. Blinking to clear the crust from his eyes, he peered through the slats to see the blonde woman he had seen with King upon entering the Hulk 13.
Braun, he thought her name was.
She was alone.
The Warden realized he hadn’t the strength to free himself from the duct. Not at present. He had a choice to make: wait for her to leave and hope his strength returned before Quantum died, or take a chance on this woman having some remaining sense of morality that might outweigh her loyalty to King.
He paused.
As he stared at her through the PlaSteel grate, just a meter away from possible freedom, the Warden’s mind filled with memories of every wicked and evil thing, every act of duplicity and selfishness he had seen since his return to the Frontier. All these crimes paled in comparison with the horrors he had witnessed on this ship.
The woman turned to go.
“Wait…” The Warden’s voice was barely a whisper in his own ears. He tapped the grate with his bloody knuckles. “Wait.”
He blinked. The woman’s lovely blue eyes stared at him through the narrow slats. He watched as her full lips slowly curved into a smile. “There you are.”
The Warden returned the expression. “So I am.”
---
“You have not found him.”
King gritted his teeth at the smug expression on the alien’s face. At least he imagined it was smug. The damned thing never showed any emotion at all, no matter how many wounds King inflicted upon it. The nub of a new antenna rose from the blue cranium just above the empty left eye socket. And still the Mechtechan gave him nothing.
The Last Star Warden - Tales of Adventure and Mystery from Frontier Space - Volume 1 Page 14