Grendel Unit

by Bernard Schaffer

  "I see," General Milner said. "That's most courteous of you, but my men can handle themselves. There's really no need to−"

  "Policy, sir," Warden Drexel said, and now it was his turn to smile. "I am sure you understand."

  The General looked at Bob and Frank, just two men surrounded by a half dozen heavily armed guards, and said, "I guess you boys are going to have to get used to being babysat."

  Warden Drexel moved around his desk and plopped down in the deep leather chair there. He kicked his dusty boots up onto the desktop and leaned back, getting comfortable. "While they're doing that, you and I will stay here and discuss various things going on in the government. It's not often I get to speak to someone so in the know, and I have many questions."

  "Actually, I have my own duties to attend to, Warden."

  The Warden waved his hand around the office and said, "Attend to them here. This is the central brain of the entire prison. There is absolutely nothing you could possibly need to know that you cannot find from right here. In the meantime, I will have Agnes bring us food and drink and we can amuse ourselves while your underlings are crawling around the ducts and closets, counting how many crates of toilet paper we used last year."

  Their eyes met across the desk, with neither man speaking, until the General exhaled and started to unbutton his uniform shirt's collar. "I can't see any reason not to relax and enjoy myself a bit. Especially if you insist."

  The corner of the Warden's mouth turned up slightly and he said, "Oh, I do."

  For high-alert patrols, the guards suited up. Frank and Bob waited outside of the armory, staring at the walls while they waited, glancing at the multiple cameras positioned in every corner of the ceiling. They made small conversation, careful about anything they said to avoid being recorded or overheard.

  When the door opened again, both of them fell silent.

  The guards were wearing cybernetic Sentinel Armor, massive battle suits designed to withstand direct tank fire. They weren't meant for quelling domestic situations, let alone something as simple as a prison riot. The computer circuitry and cybernetics required to even move the damn things cost as much as a small spaceship. Even if Grendel Unit had ever found a need to wear something so bulky and heavily armored, they couldn't have afforded them.

  The guards' faces were hidden behind reflective silver shields and Frank said, "I thought you guys never made direct contact with the prisoners. What do you need those things for?"

  A speaker under the front guard's helmet crackled, "If this place goes up in flames, we're the only thing standing between you and over a hundred thousand inmates, pal. Just mind your own business and go count the paperclips, you read me?"

  Frank's escort consisted of six guards. They carried no additional weapons aside from the suits. There was no need to. There were rockets built into their shoulders and chainguns mounted under panels in their gauntlets. Wearing them, the guard would be able to fearlessly enter any situation and simply begin mowing down their opposition. And if the weapons ran out, the hydraulics in their gloves and boots were heavy and powerful enough to simply begin crushing people or tearing their limbs off.

  Frank had two on either side of him, and one positioned at his front and one at his back. He was penned in like livestock as they navigated the upper floors above the prison, their boots clanging on the steel mesh floor. It was dim below, but at times he could see faces looking up at him through the grates, often human but sometimes not. Their stares were neither desperate nor angry as they watched the men above. Somehow, the life in their eyes become diminished, gone flat. There were deep grooves in the sides of their faces where there might once have been laugh-lines. Their teeth had turned gray, or had fallen out completely, and the skin sagged on their arms, loose sacks of dirty flesh.

  The guards' suits clicked and whirred with every movement, taking hundreds of pounds of torque from a thousand different micro-pistons to conduct simple movements. Frank could not fathom how they were able to work that armor into their budget after the enormous cost of what it must take to feed and house over a hundred thousand inmates.

  The answer is grimly simple, he thought. Money trickles from the top down. The people on the upper floor get everything, and the people down below get the run off. It made sense why the Warden was so damn nervous.

  Frank looked at the sparkling suits of black armor, and the shielded faces surrounding him and knew they were scanning him with their optics, pulling up all of his files.

  Have fun with that, Frank thought.

  According to Unification's main database, Lieutenant Frank Kelly was a paramedic assigned to a medical transport ship. He had never been in combat and was routinely awarded Unification pins for his study of packaging engineering, or rather, how to fit as much gear as humanly possible into smaller and smaller containers. For anyone who did not have Level Black security clearance, that was all the information available about Frank, or the rest of the Grendels.

  Bob Buehl was registered as a pilot, for obvious reasons. He flew the medical transport ship Frank worked on. A long time ago, during a boring space flight, Frank had hacked into Bob's personnel file and registered him as a Quarrin, a member of a polygamist religion based on subservient male members of a species acting as the lovers and domestic servants of a protective dominant husband.

  He'd listed Monster as that husband.

  Vic and he had laughed until they cried, and then Vic had ordered him to change it. Frank had certainly meant to, but something always seemed to come up that prevented him from getting around to it. Now, wherever Bob was, the guards scanning his profile were probably looking at his tight shirt and carefully-defined physique and thinking, "I knew it."

  As they approached two swinging doors at the end of the hall, Frank winced at a horrific odor filling the room. He felt his eyes stinging and said, "What the hell is that?"

  The guards kept walking and pushed the doors open, taking him into a large room above the cafeteria kitchen. There were blue barrels lined up along the walls, with hoses coming out of the top, pumping what looked like gray sludge into large machines. The barrels were leaking, and Frank leaned forward to see what it was, then wrenched his head away in revulsion, realizing that was the source of the stench.

  The machines rumbled and beeped as they drank the gray sludge in for processing. Every five seconds, a large chunk of reconstituted blocks of meat dropped from the bottom of the machine through the floor, landing on the prisoner level below.

  Frank looked through the grates and saw prisoner cafeteria workers picking up the meat blocks and carrying them back into the kitchen. To his disgust, he watched one of them twist a handful of the dripping meat substance off with his hand and stuff it into his mouth.

  How hungry do you have to be to do that? he thought.

  The first guard whacked Frank on the arm and said, "Hey. You going to start accounting or do we have to stand here smelling this all day?"

  He'd probably only meant to tap Frank, but the armored hand had been heavy enough to knock Frank sideways. Frank collected himself and pulled out his scanner, saying, "Sorry. I'll try and be quick about it."

  He held the scanner up and activated the screen, quickly punching in a series of codes. He turned and briefly pointed it at the first barrel, then turned and swept the scanner across all the guards in their fancy suits, making several passes as he moved from barrel to barrel, careful to let the scanner collect all the information that it needed.

  "You almost done? We've got a lot more to get to and our shift if over in a few hours," the guard said.

  Frank looked at the screen on his scanner and said, "That should do it."

  He pressed a button on the device and the room fell eerily silent as every electrical device and mechanical instrument froze. The food processors stopped beeping. The barrels stopped pumping. The guards Cybernetic Sentinel Armor suits stopped moving.

  Frank could hear their muffled voices under the screens of their helmets, all of t
hem cursing and grunting as they tried to move, but it was impossible. Without the assistance of all that expensive circuitry to assist their movements, the armor was too heavy to budge. Frank waited a moment to make sure that everything was properly stopped, then he calmly walked over to one of the barrels and started to unscrew the hose.

  He held his breath and looked away as he yanked the hose free, careful to try and not spill any of the gray sludge on his hands because he was afraid it might either burn a hole in his skin or he'd never get the stink out.

  He walked over to the first guard and gripped the bottom of the mask's shield with his fingers, prying until he was able to activate the emergency release button. The shield whisked up into the helmet and Frank saw the red, puffy face of the irate guard beneath. "You son of a bitch! What did you do to me!" the guard shouted.

  "Quiet down," Frank said, "or I'll close your mask and go talk to the next person. Maybe he'll want to help himself." The guard swallowed hard and looked nervously from side to side, seeing that none of the other guards was moving either. "What's your name?" Frank said.

  "Wallace Slavish. Corporal," the guard said.

  "Well, Wallace Slavish, Corporal, today is your lucky day. I need to know how to get down below to the prisoner level."

  Slavish sneered and said, "No way in hell am I telling you −"

  Frank splattered him across the face with the gray sludge from the food tube and waited for the man to stop screaming before he spoke again. "You done?"

  Slavish was crying then, trying to spit as much of the food stuff out of his mouth as he could. "That stuff's poison, you jackhole! It has to go through the food replicator and be decontaminated before humans can be exposed to it."

  "Sounds nutritious," Frank said. "Now tell me how to get below, or I'll force feed you the rest of what's in the barrel."

  "It burns!"

  Frank could see the skin on Slavish's face beginning to turn red. Soon it would start to blister. He moved his hand away from the dripping mouth of the tube to make sure none of it got on him. Slavish's eyes were tearing up and snot was dripping out of his nose into his mouth as he whimpered, and Frank said, "Tell me what I want to know and I'll clean you off, okay?"

  "There's an emergency hatch two doors down," Slavish whined. "You have to know the code though, and I'm not telling you, so you'll have to take me with you. Get me out of this suit and take me with you, man. Please, hurry up."

  Frank sighed and turned the tube upside down, spilling a chunk of slop onto Slavish's chin, having to shield his face and back out of the way when the Corporal sputtered and spat it off of his lips. "Stop that, for Christ's sake! It's toxic! I told you that!"

  "I don't have time for this, Corporal," Frank said. "Give me the code before I pull down your face shield and go talk to someone else."

  "No-don't do that-I'll tell you," Slavish said. "It's PE-No.1."

  Frank repeated the code back to him and Slavish whimpered and said, "Don't close the shield and leave me. Please. I told you what you wanted to know."

  Frank carried the hose back to the barrel and was glad to screw it into place and be rid of the foul, septic odor leaking out of the nozzle. He looked back at Slavish's frozen suit and felt his stomach lurch at having the filth splashed across his own face and being unable to remove it. Serves him right, Frank thought. Being part of a system that feeds this garbage to the prisoners, treating the females like their own personal concubines. Slavish had probably done all that, and plenty worse, and Frank told himself the right thing to do was harden his heart and show no mercy to any of the bastards.

  Slavish cringed when Frank appeared in front of him again, crying out in fear as Frank's hands came up to his face once more, but instead of the toxic sludge, or more inventive torture, he felt a cold, cool cloth against his skin, washing him clean and neutralizing the burns.

  "T-thank you," Slavish muttered, talking between wipes of the cloth across his mouth.

  Frank reached for another sanitizing wipe in his medical kit, telling the Corporal to, "Shut up and stop flinching."

  Frank opened the hatch and lowered himself down into the darkness of the prison level, looking up one last time before he headed down the stinking corridor. Once again he was possessed by the feeling of being swallowed up by this place, sinking deeper and deeper into its bowels, never to escape. He tried to take a deep breath, but the air was too thin and putrid for him to inhale and he gasped, sticking a finger down his collar to try and clear room for his throat. He felt his face getting hot and slick with sweat as the hatch above slid closed.

  That's it, Frank thought. I'm trapped. No weapons. No gear except this stupid scanner.

  His knees wobbled slightly and he realized he was panting nervously, and much too loudly. What the hell's wrong with me? he thought.

  He knew it was pointless to consider turning back. There were hundreds of guards with Sentinel armor and high velocity weapons at their disposal. Anyway, the roof was manned with automatic cannons to shoot them out of the sky even if they did manage to make it back to the ship. The entire insertion was poorly planned and even more poorly executed, and he knew it. Deep within he knew that he and Bob were the wrong operators to try and pull it off.

  Vic could do it, Frank thought. Vic is the one who could dream up and pull off this crazy crap because he's fearless and ruthless and knows how to win. Me? I'm just a glorified nurse. I've always had Vic in front of me and Monster as backup. It's easy to be brave when you've got a five hundred pound mantipor ready to swoop down and start snapping people's heads off like dandelions.

  And Bob? Bob is a neurotic disaster waiting to happen. He's so tightly wound it's no wonder he doesn't have an aneurysm. The idiot can't even have a normal conversation without having to do a hundred jumping jacks because he gets so frustrated.

  We are going to die.

  Frank looked around at the rust and mold covering the walls and knew it deep inside. We are going to die in this sewer and probably never even find Monster or Vic. Or worse, have to stay here with them until the other prisoners kill us all. Slowly.

  Frank's body had locked up and wasn't allowing him to move. He heard a voice whispering in the darkness and spun around, searching for his attacker. There was no one there. Christ, he thought, I'm losing it.

  "Frank?"

  Frank looked down and saw the scanner on his hip was glowing softly. He yanked it from his hip and touched the screen, saying, "Bob? Is that you?"

  Bob's face appeared on the screen and he said, "Are you inside yet?"

  Frank wiped his face, trying to clear the sweat out of his eyes, and he said, "A-affirmative. I'm under the north hatch near the food supply room."

  "Good," Bob said. "I'm less than a click from your position. What's your status?"

  Frank looked back up at the sealed hatch and swallowed dryly. "I'm in prison."

  "Don't I know it," Bob said. "I'm coming to you. Monster's cell isn't that far from you. Let's get him first and he can take us to Vic."

  Frank nodded, then looked back at the screen and said, "How the hell do you know all this?"

  "The General rerouted me into the prison's mainframe from that Warden's office. That weirdo really can run the entire place from his desk."

  "Okay," Frank whispered. "Listen, hurry up, all right?"

  "Why, what's wrong?"

  "I don't like being down here."

  "I'm not exactly on vacation either, you know," Bob said.

  "It's not just that. I'm having some sort of nervous reaction to this place. It's making me claustrophobic or something."

  Bob's eyes narrowed on the screen, "Listen up, Sally. This is go-time, not sit around and cry about it time, you understand? This is where winners are made and quitters never win, so man up and get with the program, because only the strong survive."

  Frank stared back at him, blinking several times, "Bob, did you just mash up every bad motivational speech ever given? Jesus, you're an idiot."

  "Scre
w you, Frank. Stop being a sissy. How's that? Better?"

  "No, because I don't know my position here. At least you've got all your technical doodads and whatnot. I'm operational support, Bob. I support the operator. I'm not the lead. I'm never the lead." Frank saw Bob's face shaking up and down and realized it was because his own hands were holding the scanner too tightly. He whispered, "This is too big…I don't think we can do it. I don't think we can win."

  Bob was moving then, ducking in and out of shadows as he hurried along a darkened corridor. "We probably can't," Bob said. "But those crazy bastards would do it for us, so we have to try."

  23. Fight the Power

  Vic stopped briefly in front of his cell and checked both ways to make sure no one was looking before he ducked inside. It was mid-afternoon and most of the inmates were out of their cells, attending to whatever small semblance of a life they'd carved out inside the prison. Almost all of them were the worst kind of filth in the galaxy, who'd preyed on everyone around them to satisfy their cruel whims, and nothing had changed except everyone they preyed on probably deserved it.

  Vic went about his sleep ritual, leaving his bunk made and instead climbing on top of the toilet tank. There were no doors on any of the cells, just four walls with a narrow open entrance facing the corridor. Vic had stopped sleeping regularly the moment he'd entered the prison. In the Unification Academy, they'd been instructed on various sleep cycles in order to maintain surveillance in hostile territory when you are undermanned, or alone.

  In spaceflight, units such as Grendel were supposed to maintain monophasic sleep cycles, taking shifts to allow everyone on board to get eight hours of rest. Vic had never imposed any restrictions on his men and they'd never asked. As long as the work got done and someone was flying the Samsara, he didn't care what else happened.

  Thoughts of the Samsara struck him in the chest like a fist. When he slept, he dreamt he was aboard her once more, in his quarters, listening to the low hum of her engines as they barreled through space. If anywhere in the galaxy could be considered his home, that was it. Most soldiers maintained a private residence somewhere, a place they could retreat to during their time off. Vic had never bothered. He could not stand the idea of being tied to one place forever, of being confined.