Grendel Unit 3: Fight the Power (6 page)

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 them 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."

"Screw 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."

5. 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.

He looked around his cell and sighed bitterly, dwelling on the irony of that notion.

He was not tired, but knew he must sleep, so he planted his feet on the edges of the toilet and lowered his head into his hands, sleeping sitting up and hunched over. He slept in polyphasic cycles, forcing himself to nap for half an hour every six hours
. It left him plenty of time for his work.

Vic closed his eyes and his senses folded in on themselves
, one by one, like a crumbling house of cards. First, he could no longer smell the fumes from the toilet or the musty stench of the corridor and cells where a thousand horrors had occurred and never been cleaned. Then he could no longer hear the pipes hissing and water trickling or rodents scurrying from behind the walls and above the ceiling, or the distant screams of yet another prisoner who'd fallen victim to one of his peers for some meaningless slight.

The final card to fall was his ability to feel anything. He was lost inside a dreamland then, floating through the sky, looking down on the prison, as if he'd just done a Baumgartner Jump
but instead of landing, he was sailing along the current, letting it carry him wherever it wanted.

It was peaceful in the sky, far above everything, and Vic wanted to go higher. To see if he could break through the atmosphere and reach space. He wanted to look for a ship up there. His ship. His crew. He wanted to tell them to let him on
board and get him the hell out of there, as far and as fast as possible.

A voice spoke to him from the sky, as loud and clear as a deity, and it said, "Hello, Victor Cojo. I heard you've been looking for me."

Vic's eyes flew open and he saw a man sitting across from him in his cell, sitting on the bed with his back straight and his hands folded serenely in his lap. His long neck was craned toward Vic, as if he were posing for a portrait and had been instructed not to move. The man's hairless face, with nothing but a thick fold of skin over his narrow eyes, and a field of gold-studded earrings decorating his cheeks and chin, was unmistakable. The Sapienist Commander called Bal Ghor raised his eyebrow curiously and said, "Tell me, Victor Cojo, why have you sought death?"

Vic leapt from the toilet with tiger-like quickness, diving for the bed to reach the man, but before he moved, Bal Ghor spoke one word and a dozen prisoners flooded through the entrance and dove on top of him. Vic managed to grab the front of the man's shirt, twisting it in his fingers
as he slammed down on the edge of the bed with his chest, clutching it as long as he could until too many fists and knees rained down on him.

"Stop hitting him," Bal Ghor said. "I want answers. Lift him up." They grabbed him under the shoulders and hoisted him up to look Bal Ghor in the face. Vic tried to look away, but someone grabbed him by the back of his head and forced him to look.

The Sapienist folded his hands behind his back studiously as he admired Vic, looking him up and down. "You know, I find you extremely interesting. I always have. You have quite a reputation, as I'm sure you can imagine, Captain Cojo. There are even some who would offer you a kind of begrudging admiration for your tactics if, as I'm sure you can understand, not your philosophies. So when I heard you were being brought here, I told myself that this was a rare opportunity. That I would finally be able to rid the galaxy of one of its most vile scourges. But then, I came to realize something."

Bal Ghor moved closer to Vic, close enough
that the two could smell each other's breath, and he whispered, "I realized that you are one of us."

Vic spat with laughter and said, "I'm far from that."

Bal Ghor wagged his finger in Vic's face and said, "We are the outcasts, Captain. The great unwashed. We are hated for our different ideas and refusal to conform."

"You are hated for attacking innocent women and children, you son of a bitch!" Vic shouted. "Do not ever think I am one of you. Do not sit here and clothe yourself in fancy terms to justify murder. I am glad for every single one of you I killed. I am glad for every single one of you I put in this godforsaken place, and my only regret is that I did not find you sooner. I serve Unification. I am a Unification
citizen and soldier, and I will die one, whether it's today in this cell or a hundred years from now."

Bal Ghor
chuckled and leaned in toward Vic, "Tell me something, Captain. How is it that you do not see the terrible comedy in all of this yet? You do not serve Unification."

"The hell I don't."

"You serve the Sapienists."

Vic raised his head and shouted, "Never!"

Bal Ghor grabbed him by the face and clutched his chin, hissing, "Unification is the Sapienists, you damn fool. They are one. At the highest levels they are two snakes twisted around the same pole, using one another to their mutual advantage for so long that they are now permanently entwined. The agendas are the same."

Vic laughed at the insanity of the idea, saying, "Your people would wipe out every other species in the name of a
Human God, and then you turn around and kill any humans who don't agree with you. Tell me how that is anything like Unification."

Bal Ghor shook his head piteously and said, "Poor, delusional, Captain. While the so-called Sapienists are instilling terror and fear, your government is subjugating all those races in the name of protecting them. They are casting a net so wide across the galaxy that it will enslave us all before we even realize it exists. Tell me something, for all the thousands of species you've brought into your little social experiment, how many sit on the government's High Council?"

"Every species has its own representative government," Vic shot back.

"Of course they do. But at the very top, looking down, it's all homo sapiens, isn't it? For all the Unification Federal Courts imposed throughout their territories, how many non-humans are there? How many governors? How many Generals? I'll tell you, Captain. The answer is none. Unification allows all of its pets to live in its houses and receive scraps from
its tables, but who do you think they send to discipline their animals when they bite their masters? The answer is clear, is it not?"

Vic looked down at the cell floor and said, "No. It's not true."

"They send us," Bal Ghor said, suddenly smiling. "You are beginning to understand now, aren't you? Yultorot, the man you've been chasing all this time, he's just a pawn in a much larger game. So are you. And so am I."

"Just kill me and get it over with," Vic muttered. "I don't want to hear any more of your filth. You're boring me and you're wasting good time you could spend getting this over with. Let's go."

"Not quite," Bal Ghor said. He waved his hands at the prisoners holding Vic and they let him go, dropping him to the floor. Bal Ghor looked down at him and said, "I want you to live knowing how much of your life has been wasted. I want you to live with the knowledge of how futile all of this has been." The Sapienist lowered himself to Vic's level and his voice softened, "I know what you are feeling right now, Captain. I truly do. I felt the same things myself after I was sent here, after I realized that the people I'd served so faithfully had turned me over without so much as a passing thought. You are not the only one who has been used, and you are not the only one who has been cast away. As I said before, you are one of us."

Bal Ghor stood up and left the cell, followed by the others. Vic listened to them go, their footsteps echoing on the floor and walls of the never-ending corridors, deep inside the guts of an endless
prison. He backed up to the far wall of his cell and collapsed, unable to breathe. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his face, sinking down as deep as he could into his arms and legs, burrowing into himself so that no one could hear him weeping.

Bob Buehl was running then, following the dim beeping circle on his screen, saying, "Come on. This way."

Frank cut right, then made a sharp left, doing his best to stay behind Bob, cursing the bastard for all his stupid exercising. Bob darted down a dark tunnel, racing forward into what looked like nothing more than a black wall, but as Frank ran
in, he saw they were simply inside another corridor, carved into the wall haphazardly and unmarked. It was ingenious, in a way, Frank thought. If the prison were organized and segmented, vast gangs would form and soon be able to threaten the guards. By housing everyone in the dark and in such a confusing fashion none of them would easily be able to find one another, it kept them disoriented and disorganized. One false turn down the wrong corridor and you might suddenly find yourself in hostile territory with no possibility of escape.

"He's in there," Bob said, stopping suddenly. He pointed at the f
arthest cell at the end of the corridor, a faint light casting shadows on the open entrance. Bob's voice cracked a little as he stumbled forward and whispered, "Monster? You in there, buddy?"

"Go away," the Mantipor muttered. "I am not in the mood for humans."

"We can if you want to," Bob said, just as he swung himself around the entrance to show himself. "But that wouldn't make for a very good prison break, now would it?"

The creature's roar was deafening, so loud it made Frank's teeth rattle, but all he saw was a pair of massive, patchy-furred arms snatch Bob out of the doorway and squeeze him so hard, Bob grunted, "Wait…not so tight…I'm serious…"

Frank heard Bob gasp with relief and then saw Monster lower his head under the entrance to emerge into the corridor, filling it with his form. He glared down at Frank, saying, "Come here."

Frank held up his hands, saying, "It's okay, really. I just
−"

Monster scooped him up and crushed him to his chest, making Frank's ribs creak and his spine crackle and adjust. Frank heaved in air as Monster let him slip back down to the ground, then felt the beast's hand on his shoulder, shaking him, "How in the hell did you get here? Have we been pardoned?"

"Not exactly," Bob said. "We'll explain later."

Within minutes
, they were running down the hall, chasing Monster as he crashed through narrow entries and rattled the grates of the steel mesh ceiling above. It was if the Mantipor had been set free of chains and was now running for his life, snarling back at Bob and Frank when they fell too far behind that if they could not keep up, he would carry them. "The Captain is ahead," Monster shouted over his shoulder.

"There!" Monster said, aiming his clawed finger at the open door. The three of them looked at one another, none of them moving, until Monster said, "It should be one of you."

Frank clapped Bob on the shoulder and said, "You go ahead, Bob. You've known him longer than me."

Bob shook his head softly and said, "Stop being an idiot. Go get our Captain so we can get the hell out of here."

Frank felt his hands shaking with nervous anticipation as he walked toward the cell, his legs suddenly made of cement. He peeked in and saw a man that he barely recognized sitting on the bunk of the cell. Physically, Victor Cojo still looked much the same, but it was as if the fight had gone out of him. He was sitting slumped, staring at nothing, not even looking up when Frank called his name and walked in.

"Monster?" Frank called back into the corridor. "What's wrong with him?"

"I do not know. He was not like that the last time I saw him. Is he sick?"

Frank opened his medical kit and
removed a diagnostic wand. He waved the wand over Vic's forehead and temples, shaking him on the arm to try and get him to respond. "It's nothing I can see. His temperature's normal. Blood pressure is elevated, but that's to be expected." Frank snapped his fingers in Vic's face and said, "Hey, Dummy. The Cavalry is here. Stop kidding around. We gotta go!"