Prison Planet
Page 7
It didn't matter. They died, one by one, a bullet catching the running man in the back and knocking him face down in the mud where he twitched and moaned while Amar finished off the others. At last he stood over the injured man and fired a bullet into the back of his head.
A terrible silence fell.
Amar lifted the microphone to his lips. “Bury your dead.” His voice was flat, devoid of emotion. “You are dismissed.”
“I won't have it!” Blood suffused Washington's face, reddening the few areas that weren't dark with bruising. “Do you hear me? I won't have it!”
Tom, Hoskins, and Palmerston stood shoulder to shoulder in front of their hut. As the only three officers at Site Charlie they were responsible for the whole fiasco in Washington's eyes. He was making sure the whole camp knew it, too.
“My first week! My first week as commander of this camp, and you dump this in my lap? Was I not clear in my orders? Did I not tell you just this morning that you were to cooperate?” He glared at the three of them. “Answer me!”
The three of them mumbled, “Yes, Sir.”
“By God, I won't have another incident like this one. The men work like bloody dogs in this heat, and all you have to do is stand back and bloody watch them. And what do you do? You apparently don't see a bloody thing while a bunch of damned idiots plot a suicidal escape right under your damn useless noses.” He went on in this vein for several minutes, flecks of spittle flying from his lips, while Tom stared into space and tried to figure out if he deserved it.
“You're all on punishment duty,” Washington said. “For seven days you can maintain the officers' latrines. Maybe that will motivate you to pay a little more attention next time you're leading a work crew.” He screwed his face up in an exaggerated grimace of disgust. “Twelve men dead, and two more skulking in the jungle with no hope of doing anything more than dying out there. God help me.” He shook his head. “Get out of my sight.”
The three of them slunk away. Latrine duty. Terrific. The compound had running water; four small pipes rose from the ground in the dining hall, the nickname for the open ground between the officers' huts and the huts of the enlisted men. There were certainly no flushing toilets.
The latrines were holes in the ground. The Strad prisoners had simply capped each hole with dirt as it filled and dug fresh holes. With the influx of new prisoners, however, there wasn't room inside the fence to keep digging. So the old latrines had to be dug out, the contents removed one wheelbarrow full at a time, and wheeled outside the compound under a guard's supervision to be dumped in a fresh hole at the edge of the jungle.
It would be hard work, and disgusting, but not nearly so unpleasant as it would become in another few weeks. Then, the contents being removed would be much fresher.
“I'm sorry,” Hoskins said. “They were in my platoon. It's my responsibility.”
“No!” Both officers turned to look at Tom, and he flushed. “It's not your fault.” He didn't say what he was thinking. It was my fault. I knew they were up to something. I saw it coming, and I looked the other way. Twelve men dead – that was more responsibility than he could own up to.
Instead he said, “You didn't know. You didn't attack a guard, or run into the jungle. It's not your fault.” He was thinking of his own guilt, of course, not Hoskins's. “You're not responsible for what someone else does. Only what you do.”
“Well, I know one thing,” Palmerston said. “It sure as hell isn't my fault. I was way over on the other side of the clearing.” He made a face. “Do you think we should start on the latrines tonight?”
“We've been through enough today,” Hoskins said. “Tomorrow is soon enough.”
Tom, his conscience pricking him badly, would have preferred to get to work immediately. He shrugged, though, and said, “All right.”
“Those idiots,” Hoskins murmured. “Why'd they have to do it?”
There was no good answer. Tom shook his head and turned toward the hut, wondering if he'd be able to sleep.
A squad of soldiers brought in the escaped prisoners just after sunset. They lashed the bullet-riddled corpses to poles set just outside the wire and left them there as a bleak reminder of the hopelessness of escape.
Chapter 8
Brobdingnag wasn't just a backwater, it was an accident.
Alice stared through a tiny window in the belly of the First Bee of Spring, watching as a dilapidated joke of a space station grew before her. The station had come into existence when a bulk freighter had broken down in deep space, half-way between Gallant and Achilleus, not terribly far from Tazenda. The original plan had been to abandon the ship after removing her cargo and stripping her of parts. But only the smallest of freighters bothered to make salvage runs, and the process of unloading the hulk took months.
And in that time a miniature economy sprang up. Someone opened a store to sell things to the endless trickle of freighter crews. The passenger accommodations on the crippled ship, while far from glamorous, were huge by the standards of small-haulers. An enterprising crew member turned the empty rooms into a hotel of sorts, renting them out to spacers craving a break from the tiny capsules they had on their own ships.
Eventually ships began to stop by even when they weren't under contract to offload cargo. The derelict ship was a convenient stop if you were flying between Gallant and Achilleus. There was less traffic from Tazenda, but sometimes a ship made a detour if they were low on something the captain considered vital.
There wouldn't be any traffic from Tazenda now, she thought sadly. Not for a long time.
The owners of the hulk had reconsidered, and left her engines intact. The ship couldn't move itself, but the engines generated enough power to keep the lights and gravity on. The company grafted on a docking facility and built a restaurant, and Brobdingnag was born.
In the years since, the place had grown and deteriorated. It looked like a junk heap in space, a mess of battered metal that would collapse under its own weight if anyone set it on a planet.
The First Bee of Spring was delivering water to the station, and looking for cargo or passengers heading to Gallant. Alice didn't expect to see much of the station, not that there was much to see. She'd spend the stopover on the hull of the Bee, refurbishing hull plates.
She watched as the ship docked, then headed up to the main deck to grab her vac suit. Captain Grayson met her at the top of the ladder, though, her face grave. “Alice. We need to have a little chat.”
The sight of Junot glaring at the back of Grayson's head from the cockpit told Alice this wouldn't be a pleasant conversation. She said, “All right,” and followed the captain aft to the ship's tiny common room.
When Bridger and Ham joined them Alice knew it was going to be even worse than she'd thought.
“I'll get to the point,” Grayson said. “I'm putting you ashore here. You'll be able to find another ship sooner or later.” She looked at each of them in turn, sorrow in her eyes. “I don't like to do it, but if I keep you aboard I won't be doing you any favors. I'm getting some disturbing chatter from the station. Captains have been telling stories. All kinds of ships are getting boarded. There's DA inspection teams in every port these days. They check IDs, they take thumb scans, they interrogate people. If you're not in one of their databases, they arrest you until you can prove you're not from Neorome or Tazenda.” She shook her head. “If I let you stay on the Bee you'll be putting your own heads in a noose, and mine along with you.”
An hour later, her stomach feeling hollow and queasy, Alice watched the Bee move away from Brobdingnag. She stared at the ship as it shrank with distance, until a brilliant rectangle of light appeared just beyond her nose. The ship slipped through into seventh dimensional space and the portal disappeared. How many times will I get a scrap of security and then have it snatched away? How many times will I find a temporary home and then lose it? Fear and a nagging uncertainty weighed on her shoulders, like a toddler who refused to be put down. How long will I have to car
ry it?
“Well, that's discouraging,” said Bridger. He stood beside her on her left side.
“Downright disappointing,” agreed Ham. He stood at her right side.
“On the other hand,” said Bridger, “it gives us a chance to fully explore the delights of Brobdingnag.”
Alice chuckled, shaking her head. She figured they'd seen more than half the station just walking out the airlock. They stood in a fragile cube of space, a blocky metal structure stuck on the side of the original freighter. Thin sheets of aluminum covered the floor, ceiling, and one wall. The remaining two walls were mostly glass. It wouldn't take much of a meteor strike to depressurize the whole space, and she'd be astonished if there were force fields to keep the atmosphere contained. This was interstellar space, where the odds of a meteor strike were vanishingly small, but still …
“Let's go inside,” she said, jerking a thumb at the hull of the freighter behind them. “We need to figure out what to do next.”
The others nodded and joined her as she turned and took a single step. There were no gravity generators in this add-on to the station. Instead there was bleed-over from the freighter, growing stronger as they moved closer to the hull. Alice had nearly no gravity as she pushed off from the floor. She sailed up and forward, moving in a line that was almost straight. As she moved forward her weight increased and her vector curved. By the time she touched the floor again she had more than half her normal weight.
One bouncing step and one normal step brought her to a hatch in the hull. She ducked through, feeling immediately more comfortable with solid hull plates between herself and the void. The men followed her in.
The derelict freighter had seemed tiny from the outside, surrounded as it was by the endless depths of space. From the inside it felt palatial. Designed to carry massive cargoes, the ship was built on a tremendous scale. Alice stood in a long, high-ceilinged room with scuffed metal deck plates under her boots. The drab utilitarian fixtures seemed at odds with the extravagant dimensions. She looked around, trying to figure out what this room was for, and jerked her head back in surprise when she realized it was a corridor.
Even groundside buildings weren't so generous with space, never mind ships. She shook her head in disbelief and turned in a circle, getting her bearings. “We docked over there, right?”
“We need to go to the forward hold,” Ham said. He pointed. “It's that way.”
She stared at him. “Why the forward hold?”
“It's the one with gravity.” When she gave him a blank look he said, “The forward hold is basically the local town. Out here you get a few hawkers and the dock crews. Everyone else is in the hold.”
“I thought you said you'd never been here.”
He shrugged and grinned. “I haven't. But I used to think about coming here. I had some kind of romantic idea about living without a star system. Out in the middle of the deep dark, a lonely way station between worlds, not another human settlement in a light-year.”
Bridger snorted. “Your dreams are my nightmares.”
“That's because you're a Philistine,” Ham said airily. He put a hand to his chest. “Within these humble ribs beats the heart of a poet.”
That made Bridger laugh, and Ham laughed with him. “Anyway,” he said, “I learned everything I could about this place.” He wrinkled his nose. “It wasn't that much, actually. It's kind of a nowhere spot.”
“No, really?” Bridger raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment.
“So I went to Rivendell instead.” Ham grimaced, one fingertip touching a puckered scar on his chin. “I should have stuck with Plan A.”
“Well, you finally made it,” Bridger told him, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Your dream has come true. And you get to be our guide.”
“Lucky me,” Ham muttered. “This way.”
They followed him down the impossibly wide corridor, around a corner, and up to the biggest hatch Alice had ever seen. They walked through – and everything changed.
Brobdingnag's forward hold was enormous, a good two hundred meters across and just as deep. One wall was laser-straight; the other wall curved to follow the hull. At the back the ceiling was over a hundred meters high, curving forward and down to become the front wall.
The sense of space was magnified by the tiny scale of the community in the middle of the hold. A dozen buildings stood in a meandering double row, making a street in between. There were no peaked roofs, not in this place where rain and snow never fell. In fact, she doubted every building had a roof. Each building had straight, unbroken walls. There were no windows.
The three of them walked toward the little settlement, their feet clacking on the hull plates and echoing from the ceiling high above. A row of waist-high pots lined their path from the giant hatch. The pots were filled with soil, and each pot held a sapling perhaps a meter high, dwarfed by the pot that held it. Alice tried to imagine a time, years distant, when visitors would walk between lines of stately trees.
Someone in Brobdingnag had vision. This fragile place, created by chance and mishap, was truly a home for at least some of its residents.
The buildings, when she drew close enough to see them better, were as eclectic as anything she'd seen in even the quirkiest frontier towns, a mix of cubical aluminum shipping containers and haphazard structures made from sheets of metal bolted to a steel framework. None of the buildings were large, and only a few looked as if they had as many as two rooms.
A trio of men sat in front of the nearest building on a bench made from a long plastic crate, chatting quietly. They nodded politely to the visitors and returned to their conversation. Farther down the street, a woman watered plants in crates full of soil. She set down her watering can as they approached. “Hello there!”
“Um, hi,” Alice said. The whole scene felt surreal, like a small colonial town had been transplanted to the hold of a ship without the residents noticing.
“Are you with the First Bee? I didn't think they were staying.”
“They aren't,” Alice said ruefully. “They left us behind.”
The woman's forehead wrinkled. “Oh, that's too bad.” She looked them up and down. “You don't look like troublemakers. You have a dispute with the captain?”
Alice nodded. It was as close to the truth as she cared to get.
“Well, it happens. Especially in days like these. These are trying times. Lots of people making difficult choices.” She gave them a shrewd look that said she suspected everything Alice wasn't saying. “Anyway, you've come to a good place now.”
“I can see that,” Alice said, not sure if she entirely meant it. “Thing is, we're not quite sure what comes next.”
“You should talk to George.” The woman turned her head and shouted, “George! Come on out here, you old pirate. I know you're listening anyway. You might as well be sociable.” She leaned forward to look past Alice. “You lot, too. Quit pretending you're not curious.”
The three men behind them rose from their bench and ambled over, moving like people who had not much to do and plenty of time to do it. A gray-haired man in rumpled trousers and a faded blue singlet emerged from the building behind the woman. Two more women came out of the building across the street, apparently taking the first woman's words as a general invitation.
“My name's Sarabeka,” said the woman with the watering can. “You can call me Beka. This is George. He's my husband and general pain in my neck.”
George snorted and gave her an affectionate look.
Beka introduced the others, a flood of names that vanished from Alice's mind as quickly as she heard them.
“There's half a dozen more permanent residents. You'll meet them soon enough if you stay a while. And we've got two ships still in port. One crew's sleeping in the hotel.” She gestured toward the deck plates. “That's what we call the old passenger cabins. They're nice enough, but they get expensive if you stay a long time. You'll want a place up here if you're staying more than a few days.”
“The Dawn Alliance doesn't come here,” said George. “Least they haven't so far. Tazenda keeps them busy. Tazenda and the war. So you're in the right place, if that's why you left your ship.”
“They had an argument with their captain,” Beka said.
“Sure they did,” said George.
A man said, “I'm telling you, the DA will get here eventually. Probably set up a garrison.”
“Well, when they do,” said George, “we'll all swear you've been here for years, and we knew you when you were growing up on Haultain.”
“I told you, they're not hiding from the Dawn Alliance.”
“No, of course not,” said George. “I'm just saying.”
Despite the open space all around, Alice suddenly felt smothered by the press of bodies around her. “Excuse me,” she said, edging back from the crowd. “I'm going to take a walk. Is that all right?”
“Of course,” Beka said. “If you go back the way you came and turn left, you can find the hotel area. There's a card-operated bar. Even a holo-tank.” She pointed at the back wall of the hold. “Or if you go that way, you can see the farm. And there's a hatch that leads into the aft hold. I think the boys are in there boxing. That can be pretty neat to watch, until you realize what knuckleheads they are.”
The conversation sprang back up before Beka even finished speaking. No one paid much attention as Alice skirted the group and moved deeper into the hold.
The “farm” started just after the last building in the little improvised village. A knee-high barrier made of long polymer sheets attached to crates marked the boundary. The barrier made an enclosure, and the enclosure was full of dirt. Plants grew in tidy rows, little green shoots a handspan in height sticking up out of the soil.