Breakout

by David Ryker

  “Maybe they need the cannons for minin’?” Maggott offered.

  “I thought about that, too,” said Schuster. “But that would be like using a machete for brain surgery. It’s the wrong tool for the job.”

  “I don’t like this at all,” said Bishop. “We need to run it past Quinn ASAP.”

  “He wont’ be outta the Can fer a week,” said Maggott. “We’ll hafta use the back channel.”

  Bishop looked at Schuster, who shrugged. “Sloane made it clear I’m seconded until further notice. I gotta report for duty at 0700.”

  “And I can’t fit m’leg inta that fookin’ thing, let alone the rest o’ me. Besides, I don’t consider callin’ yuir girlfriend a real duty, even if it was Quinn’s orders. Schuster n’ me actually had tae do something today.”

  Bishop sighed. “Fine, I’ll get on it in the morning. Lights out.”

  Schuster climbed back into his bunk as the other two laid back on their own. He didn’t know about them, but having an assignment again, even one as strange as this one, was leaps and bounds better than the tedium of regular prison life. It was a long time before he finally fell asleep, his mind racing with possible scenarios.

  He had no idea then how much he’d soon be longing for those boring days to return.

  13

  The Can was the collective term for Oberon One’s six solitary confinement cells. Each was two meters cubed, with a hole in the floor for a toilet and a meter-deep metal bench that ran the width of the space.

  Quinn sat on the floor in a beggar’s crouch, his arms folded on his knees and his chin on his arms, thinking and trying to deal with the stench coming from the hole. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in the Can, but it was by far the worst. Not because of any physical circumstances, but because he desperately wanted to be able to communicate with his men.

  A sudden snorting sound pulled him out of his thoughts again. Ulysses was asleep in the next cell and would periodically let out a hard snore, thanks to the fact his head had no support under it on the so-called bed. Ironically, despite their name, the solitary confinement cells allowed for sound to travel between them via the air ducts. Quinn guessed the staff of Oberon One knew about the design flaw but didn’t care. All that mattered was that the troublemakers were physically out from underfoot and in uncomfortable conditions.

  “I want to kill him,” said a small voice through the vent.

  Quinn sighed. “He can’t help it, Sally; he’s asleep.”

  “It’s incredibly rude.”

  And starting a pointless fight with me in the mess hall wasn’t? Quinn thought but didn’t say. The woman’s reasoning processes had always eluded him.

  “We need to keep the peace and stick together on this,” he said instead. “It’s the only way.”

  “What is this, Quinn?” she asked in her sing-song voice. “Neither of us knows what happened, and Ulysses knows even less than we do.”

  “I have my men working on it.”

  “Your men.” She giggled. “You still think you’re soldiers, don’t you?”

  “Not soldiers,” he snapped. “Marines. There’s a difference.”

  “You are prisoners.” She said it slowly, as if explaining something to a child. “Only a fool would think otherwise.”

  “We aren’t guilty.”

  Her shrill laughter made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  “Oh, of course not,” she said. “No one is guilty on Oberon One. We were all wrongfully convicted, especially those of us in the war.”

  Quinn pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. He knew arguing with her was pointless. There seemed to be only one thing that she took seriously, so he would keep bringing it up if that’s what it took to keep her on track.

  “What did you see, Sally?” he asked. “In your vision?”

  He waited in silence for a full minute before returning to his thoughts. He’d been hoping for an answer, but right now he’d settle for the peace and quiet if the former was off the table.

  “What did you see?” she replied.

  Quinn had almost drifted off when she finally spoke. He considered her question for a moment—he was in no mood to relive the experience, but if it was the only way to get her to talk, he knew he had to.

  “I saw people,” he said in a low voice. “They were in my rifle sights. I was gunning them down by the dozens. They were screaming.” He paused for several moments and screwed up his courage before adding: “And I… I was laughing at them.”

  The memory still brought him to the edge of despair, even days later. The vision had entrenched itself in his mind with a strength no dream ever had, and he wondered if the emotional impact would ever fade. He hoped like hell that it would.

  The cells went silent again for several minutes. Ulysses’ snores had ceased, which made Quinn wonder if he’d woken up.

  When Sally finally spoke, her voice was fragile and strangled.

  “I saw everything obliterated,” she breathed. “My beloved Tokyo. Fujiyama. The sky, the water. Everything. And I was responsible.”

  Quinn frowned. It had been almost a hundred and fifty years since nuclear weapons had been dropped on Japan during the Second World War. So much had happened to the world since then—new alliances, the advent of cold fusion, the scrapping of nuclear arms—but he knew that even to this day, the people of Japan had a generational memory of that incident. It was seared into their collective psyche in a way that the rest of the world could never fully understand. Even the Trade Wars, which had plunged so many billions into poverty, and the atrocities of the Trilateral War seemed to pale in comparison. The only event that came close was the nuclear strike on Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, in the 2060s.

  “How did it feel?” he asked, hoping the answer would be a way for the two to bond. “Will you tell me, Sally?”

  Silence again, then: “It felt like the most powerful orgasm I ever had.”

  Quinn blanched. If he’d ever harbored the illusion that deep down, Senpai Sally might just be misunderstood, it was now thoroughly erased.

  “Ho-lee sheep shit.” Ulysses’ voice was quiet and breathy through the vent. “That’s messed up, woman. Even fer you.”

  “All right,” said Quinn. “Now you know what we were talking about in the gym. Do you believe us?”

  Ulysses paused. “I don’t wanna, but shit, you saved me and got y’self thrown in the Can. I don’t know if what yer sayin’ is real, but I do believe y’all think it’s real. I s’pose that’s the same thing, ain’t it?”

  “It was real,” Sally protested, but without much force.

  “I still think you was drugged.”

  “Maybe,” said Quinn. “But to what end? And how did they drug us while were still contained in our suits on the moon’s surface? And why did they take away the two Yandares?”

  “Keiko and Miko,” said Sally. “They had names. Have names.”

  “We’ve all got names,” said Quinn. “And we all matter, regardless of what led us to being in here. I’m not going to sit back and have someone experiment on us, or kidnap us, or whatever the hell it is that’s going on here.”

  “So what’re you gonna do about it?” Ulysses asked. “Send a strongly worded email to yer tribune’s office?”

  “I don’t know yet, but making sure we’re all on the same page was the first step. Why do you think I saved your life like I did?”

  “Wouldn’ta needed savin’ if Crazy Lady hadn’t done her ninja voodoo shit on me when I wasn’t lookin’.”

  “I’ll show you ninja voodoo, you uncultured little—”

  “Enough.” Quinn cut her off before she could finish her insult. “We need to focus here. We behave ourselves and get out of the Can at the first opportunity, then we go from there. What’s important is that we’re going to put aside the politics for now. Agreed?”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Agreed,” said Sally.

  “All right,” said Ulysses.
His right sounded more like rat. “But I still think y’all are crazy.”

  “Well, if we are, then I guess you don’t have anything to worry about,” said Quinn. “If we’re not, it’s a good thing for you that we’re doing this.”

  “S’all good with us in here, but how’s Sally n’ me s’posed to get the word out to our people? Ain’t no visitors in the Can.”

  “We’ll have to use the back channel,” said Quinn.

  “What is the back channel?” asked Sally.

  Quinn grinned. “You’ll see soon enough. Now let’s get some shut-eye.”

  14

  The worst part about accessing the “back channel” was that you had to volunteer for latrine duty for a week just to do it. The claustrophobia was a close second, but it didn’t last for a whole week. The smell was a distant third.

  Geordie Bishop wheeled the mop and bucket into the third-level latrine and set the yellow sandwich board warning of slippery floors at the entrance. There was no actual door, of course, because privacy was not a thing on Oberon One. The guards had their own bathrooms with separate stalls, of course, but the male and female inmates shared the toilets located on each level. The sandwich board was usually enough to convince the prisoners to either hold it or find another toilet, since the steel floor was swabbed along with all the fixtures. A fall could easily crack a bone or knock out a tooth, and health care on board the station left a lot to be desired.

  Bishop set the faucets on the trench sink to run, generating enough white noise to cover what he was about to do next. He propped a knee on the edge of the counter, wincing as the steel edge dug into his shin, and hoisted himself up.

  As he steadied himself against the wall, his fingers felt around the low ceiling for the hidden switch that activated the emergency access panel. He was almost disappointed when they found their target. The panel slid open above him, revealing a vertical tunnel that was less than a meter in diameter, including the rungs set into the wall.

  He took a deep breath and hopped, clamping his hands on the lowest rung. He pulled himself up, rung by rung, panting with exertion until he’d gone far enough to finally prop his boots on the rung closest to the opening. The position of the tunnel meant it was subject to full gravity, unfortunately.

  He stood there a moment and breathed deeply, trying to recover a bit before setting off up the ladder. There wasn’t much time—the hatch couldn’t be closed from the inside, so the whole time he was in the tunnel, he was exposed. All it would take was a guard walking in and seeing the hole in the ceiling and an alarm would be sounded, putting an end to the back channel once and for all.

  As he climbed, Bishop silently thanked the architects of Oberon One for not bothering to put security cameras in the station’s shitters. He knew it had nothing to do with their privacy and everything to do with a policy of spending as little as possible on the inmates, but the result was the same. The Jarheads had discovered the passageway, which was designed for emergency maintenance, when Dev Schuster had been dropped into the Can after laughing at a guard. He’d extrapolated its existence while doing mental gymnastics to pass the time, theorizing that the Can was close to the hub for the electrolysis system that generated the oxygen on the station. They found the hatch in the latrine through the process of elimination.

  Bishop made it to the fifth level in less than four minutes, counting off the precious seconds in his head. The sign in the entrance was usually good for about twenty minutes, but he didn’t want to push it any further than he had to. He slid through a small porthole into a dank horizontal access tube that branched off from the vertical one, and pulled himself along via the with rungs on the ceiling.

  No gym for me this week, he thought, trying to see the bright side. Then he realized he’d be spending his gym time cleaning latrines instead, and he scowled.

  He’d counted out six hundred seconds by the time he finally reached the spot where he could smell the stench of bodily waste wafting in from the catch basin under the solitary cells. He was in the right place.

  “Boss,” he whispered. “You there?”

  “The fuck izzat?!”

  Bishop recognized the voice of the leader of the Southern Saints coming through the air vent. It was followed by the familiar, steady voice of his former commander.

  “Quiet,” said Quinn. “It’s one of my men in a maintenance hatch.”

  “Clever,” said a woman. Bishop recognized the deceptively charming voice of Senpai Sally. “Apparently I’ve underestimated the Jarheads.”

  Quinn ignored them. “Report, Geordie.”

  Bishop recounted what Schuster had told them, or at least as much as he had understood.

  “Arming the Rafts?” said Sally. “It makes no sense to add weapons to a ship unless they plan to use them.”

  “On who?” asked Ulysses. “Nothin’ out here but us prisoners.”

  “That’s the key question,” said Quinn. “And it drives home my point about working together. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Sally.

  “Yeah,” said Ulysses. “I gotta admit, I thought y’all was crazy up to this point, but I cain’t argue with you no more.”

  Sounds like Quinn’s plan worked, Bishop thought with absurd pride. He’s still got it, even after two years in this hellhole.

  “Best get back, Geordie,” said Quinn. “Time’s wasting. Tell the others to keep it up until we get out of here.”

  “Yessir,” he said automatically. “How long do you think that’ll be?”

  “Should be tomorrow, as long as we’re on our best behavior.” His voice rose slightly. “We will be on our best behavior, correct?”

  “Whatever,” said Ulysses. “I’m always a Southern gentleman.”

  “Yandares are paragons of decorum,” Sally said sweetly. “Until we’re crossed, of course.”

  Glad it’s Quinn dealing with those two nutjobs and not me, Bishop thought.

  Quinn dismissed him and he started back the way he’d come. It seemed to be harder slogging this time, and by the time he reached the vertical shaft, he could feel clammy sweat in his armpits. The trip down was easier, hopping three or four rungs at a time.

  He saw the white fluorescent light from the latrine long before he reached the opening. He’d lost count of the seconds during his conversation with Quinn, but he knew he’d been gone at least twelve minutes, possibly longer. With another two meters to go, he simply let go of the rungs and dropped, landing in a cat’s crouch on the steel counter next to the sink trough, facing the cold steel wall.

  Made it, he thought as he turned to hop the last three feet down to the floor.

  “Hello, there,” said a female voice from behind him.

  Bishop’s heart thumped painfully in his chest and his careful balance suddenly disappeared. He stumbled mid-turn and dropped to the floor, where the impact of his knees on the cold steel sent jolts of agony up his legs.

  He was on all fours, grimacing, when he caught sight of the pair of boots in front of him. They were attached to legs clad in brown pants, not orange. His mind raced as his eyes rose to see a pretty face looking down at him.

  The eyes weren’t pretty, though. They were quite ugly, in fact.

  “Hello, Officer Ridley,” Bishop groaned. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  15

  The door to the outer room of the warden’s office shooshed open and Ridley shoved Geordie Bishop through it. His back screamed at him as she did. The welts she’d left with her baton were still fresh in the tender area above his kidneys, but he managed to keep it off his face. At least she hadn’t activated the club’s electrical field while she was beating him.

  In the corner of the room, Butch Kergan stood gazing out the small porthole into the blackness beyond. He turned to face them, and Bishop thought the look in his eyes was far away. Where the hell was Farrell, the warden?

  “Iona,” Kergan said mildly. “Why are you here?”

  “Sir,” she said. “I found this inmate climb
ing though the air vent maintenance shafts. He gained access in the third-level latrine.”

  Kergan’s brows rose. “And you thought what? That he was trying to escape? Where exactly would he go?”

  Ridley’s cheeks turned crimson. “Sir, I think he might have been trying to get into unauthorized areas of the station.”

  Bishop glanced from one to the other, blinking. What the hell was happening here? The only interactions he’d ever seen between these two before now had been Kergan pitching lame pick-up lines to Ridley, and Ridley threatening to hurt him in return. Up till this moment, Bishop had assumed she hated the man as much as the inmates did.

  And he’d never heard her refer to anyone outside of Farrell as “sir.” Ridley walked around the station like a sheriff in an old western movie, silently daring every inmate to step out of line. The bruises on Bishop’s back were proof that she enjoyed punishing others for the slightest infractions. And, as his wailing back could attest, climbing through the guts of a prison was not what she considered a slight infraction.

  Kergan strolled toward them, his hands clasped behind his back, and the temperature in Bishop’s belly dropped about thirty degrees. The guard’s deep blue eyes seemed to have their own inner light that made Bishop feel like he was being examined under a microscope. Suddenly the memory of those drowning puppies rose to the surface of his mind again and his heart began to race.

  “You were on the moon during first contact,” Kergan said. There was no inflection in his voice, like he was examining a rug he wanted to buy. “Two attenuation failures. You are of no consequence.”

  Bishop tried to keep his breathing steady as Kergan turned back to Ridley.

  “This subject means nothing,” said Kergan. “Remove him.”

  Ridley stood blinking back tears like a lost child for a moment, and Bishop saw Kergan’s expression soften just a bit.