Prisoner 52 (16 page)

They were each taken by the refor
mation and realignment of those they stood with upon the platform and were separated, though would not turn or look away from one another. As seaside mountains that, worn away so long at their roots by the tide, free themselves from the land and drift apart but never out of sight. Each had been marked in the other's memory and even in death would live on there, for in such places and with such men as they all slights deserve as much.

Day 17

"Move it along." The guard said from above him, patrolling with the others along the grated catwalk there. "Nice and easy."

He shuffled forward at the behest of those before and behind him, all of them adrift in the river that they comprised. Ahead the line stalled and then went again. So it had gone for some time, but he could not see why beyond all those in front of him. The walls stood high to either side and where they curved inward to meet he could see in the conical glow of the overhead lights the matte of inudstrial patriculates which clung to the air there.

"Standby," He began to hear faintly and followed by a useless number of words that he could not until the line had progressed further and it repeated in its robotic voice: "Standby for nutritional injections."

The pound and groan of machinery soon all but drowned out any other noise and he came close enough in the procession's slow way that he could see the archway into which the inmates filed toward their hell. They were stopped therein by the guardsmen beyond it and a pair of mechanical arms detached from the threshold to stab autohypos into the neck of him who awaited them. It came his turn and he did as the voice bade and stood by while his infusions were administered. The Enforcers ushered him onward into the teem of prisoners already processed.

He felt no better as his feet dragged at the heels of the others. The heat that built with each of his steps did little to abate his condition. The shouted voices of the workers
who toiled somewhere beyond the length of hall that he travelled down became audible beneath the churn and hissing gouts of smoke and steam.

The corridor opened ahead and he stepped out onto the stone of the floor that was mingled with debris and dirt and shavings of metal. He was struck full by the swelter of the
conflagrations that plumed in the distance and could no longer tell where his skin stopped and the air began. Every breath parched his throat and here and there across the factory floor he saw those who had felt the same, who had found no remedy for it but in death. Left where they lay, stepped over and moved out of the way. Made a game of.

They were halted before a cordon of high containment walls and over their gates were the guards
men who did so, standing three atop a platform there. Those who had arrived before him were crammed now against the forward barrier and no more could be fit at the rear and so the small door by which they all had entered began to close, sounding the klaxon that sat above it. Somewhere far off he saw the dark hulks of the things he had once used in murder and destruction that now fell to him to breathe life into.

"Able-bodied men form here." The foremost of the guards said and indicated the area of the courtyard to their left, then that to their right. "Physical deficients here. Honesty will be observed."

The inmates shuffled through and jostled one another as they made their way to the designated places through the ranks thick with their fellows. Sejanus had gone to his left, with those others that were fit to slave. He looked to where the men had gone that were not and wondered what such facile men could have done to be condemned to this fate. But he remembered the shapes that evil travels in and how the great sometimes do so with the small and so returned his eyes to the front.

"You there," The guard
who had spoken to them shouted and pointed down into those of them disused to work, at a man therein tall and wiry and who looked on his face to be caught up in the whole show by mistake. "What is your condition?"

"Me?" The man said and indicated himself and the guard nodded curtly, his finger still levelled at the man. "Wasting disease I picked up, on Juiya. I can't lift very much. Sir. Or work for too long."

The Enforcer nodded again and said, "Shoot him."

"Wait!" He had started to cry out, but the gunfire of those next to the officer
who had ordered his death ended it before it could be finished.

"You will work." The officer said. "Or you will die. Pray, pray to your outmoded gods, that it is death
– and not the colony, for you."

He surveyed the prisoners massed before the hot gates, silent and unmoving and staring forward into nothing with the same tired eyes as though it were only a cavalcade of engines that had misfired. Thus he turned from them and waved for his subordinates to follow and the klaxons sounded for what seemed the hundredth, thousandth time only that day, for all days had become a continuous one. The gates before them, to either side, began to open and slide upward in a slow drudgery to where they were secured as new
ramparts atop the wall, new blacknesses against the flaring flames in the distance. Standing water let loose from a dam, they flowed outward through the two new gaps.

One of the men at the front of their column was struck dead no sooner than he had departed the cordon and then the shouting began. They wore prisoners' clothes and beat them through the gauntlet that they had
formed with bits of metal, strung up by cabling and leather. Another fell some paces in line ahead, laid low by what looked a Rayl through the smog. Those who had been behind him marched on and he passed beneath their feet in the abiding silence of death. The creature that had done it smiled in the vertical way of its maw and it was by the rotting yellow of the teeth therein that Sejanus kept sight of it as they progressed, the blackened rest of it blending with the smoke.

Thus he tried to move away from it. But as did all those he shared that torment with, a flinching and starting mass that for all its fright could not flee from the blows that came. A constant reshuffling that awarded no one nothing more than temporary reprieves at the expense of the whole. Sejanus drew away from the Rayl ahead only to find himself drifting toward it
again as the inexorable course of the river went on.

All around him men fell. He had stepped over the corpse of a man whose skull had been caved in beneath the cudgel of a Khagani that raged now behind him. He eyed the Rayl. The Rayl seemed to eye him, even as it struck the inmates that passed before it wantonly. Screams became his world, blood and the blunt thwack of steel against meat. Smoke and the scorching air. But through it all he held the eyes of that beast.

The Rayl swung out at him and he caught up its wrist in one hand and with the other took hold of the arm and pulled it low. Then he put his boot into the joint of the limb and watched the bone break through the black scales in a spray of green. It shrieked and recoiled toward the lines of its comrades in wild fear. He bent and took up its flail from the earth and held the thing fast and with the weapon in hand dove forward and brought the thonged gear down onto its brow. The tall beast toppled over onto the floor, through the boundaries of the gauntlet and made a space in its death.

He was seized of a sudden by arms enough that he knew not how many had laid hold of him. They pulled him out from the effusion
that ran within the gauntlet and threw him down beside the corpse he had made. It lay there bleeding, the tied-off cog buried deep into the bone. He squirmed backward from it until meeting the wall and those who had removed him closed in, six in all. Humans, mostly. But at the forefront of them all towered one of the red giants that hail from the world called Khagan. He beat his chest, muscle as hard as steel and roared at him in the bestial warcries of his people.

A form passed before him. Blood spattered against everything and the Khagani split into two halves that toppled opposite one another, viscera strewn from either and pooling with the red of his veins. He drew heavy, heaving breaths still and hugged himself as he looked to Sejanus, but not at him. Broad eyes under a heavy ridged brow that bespoke the end he had foreseen long ago. Mouth agape, gaze colder and more distant as the moments passed. His
breast soon ceased to rise and fall and Sejanus felt a sting as his sweat rolled down into the cut that had been made at the bridge of his nose. A figure strode slowly into view and flexed the dark shapes of its wings before removing them to their chitinous sheaths. The other inmates of the gauntlet ran.

"You are in bad habit," The shadow said. "Of making too much of your first arrivals."

It turned around and gave him its three-pronged hand and he took it.

"How did you know?" He said as it pulled him to his feet and succeeded in pulling him a sight from the floor.

"That gate is for newcomers." He said through the heavy cycling of his mask. "I know that this is not the first of such gates you pass through of late, because I know you are transfer. I know you are transfer, because I did not see you with the other new arrivals this morning. If you had been here long – and cause problems like this one, to get transferred – you would have just been shot. Or sent to the colony. You will want shot – if there is choice. I am Jobaal."

"Sejanus," He said and shook the hand offered to him. "You're a Jedezian."

"They let us out of Sector 10, from time to time. To mingle with the other species."

"Fly-Korps, too. The way you handled him."

"Bred and trained." It said with the Concilium salute. "Veteran of both Korblast and Ulrime. Among others of course, but you know the fighting there was in the gas giants."

"We heard about it in the Outerverse. How you dealt with the Hab-Flotillas. I didn't envy you; I can tell you that." He said. "You said Sector 10?"

"The only non-human containment sector."

"There's a man I know, got transferred there a couple months ago." He said. "A guard."

"New Enforcers come every day." The Jedezian said and shrugged with shoulders too large for his kind in nature. "They go just as fast."

"You'd know him. Used to be a Lord-Knight."

"I would call you a liar, a Lord-Knight reduced to this place, if I did not know otherwise. The Concilium does not breed even its OBPAF soldiers that large."

"Tell him I'm alright." Sejanus said. "If you can."

"We will see when the day is through. If you survive, then I will tell him." Jobaal said and threw its arm around his shoulders. "Come. You need a foreman; I need a welder. You will join my fitting crew."

"What do you fit?"

"We have done most everything. Those who have lived of course. Today we do personnel carriers; tomorrow, who knows. Life is an adventure."

Thus they stepped over the severed corpse of the behemoth
which lay there still and went on that way, through the dust and heat of the foundry. To where they would build what had once been built for them, in the way of things. For however long men allow that way to be.

Day 17

He had heard it said that scars tell stories. So it was that the smooth hull Sejanus ran his hand across then had no story, but that which he had given it in the tract of welded plates before him. His story was writ in that, and small. Other inmates soared with him through the airy expanse in which they worked and took in what their laser turbines had wrought. Others with other dirges sung in
how the steel would move when it was put to its own duty.

He ran his arm across his brow to clear away the sweat and added to it the dirt and oil caked
upon it. The waste fires surged somewhere obscured by the great hulk of the Mass Artillery Walker that towered massive before him and put forth new heat into the old, compounded the noxious elements that rose to the sea they had made along the ceiling. Sejanus adjusted the sit of the filtration mask and then put his hand to the controller arm of the welding cannon, thumbed the stick to bear him to the loading platform.

The machine stirred into motion, twirling him round to face the port assigned to him and bearing him toward it. He leaned to the left and right as he came to gague the alignment of the docking clamps and, hearing their locks click into place, depressed the heavy keys of the arm's interface in their tired combination. He listened for the hiss of the locks as they activated and then disembarked from the cannon. Once there on the platform he turned round to look across the behemoth, hunched over like some captured beast, and watched the showers of sparks as the prisoners
still at work welded its hull. The low drum of industrial pistons sounded in the distance.

"We do good work today." Jobaal said and laid a hand onto his shoulder. "It is hell; but even in hell a good day's toil has its own reward."

"Have you ever been inside one of those things?" Sejanus said.

"The Jedezian Fly Korps had
no use for artillery; but I do not think I would have turned it away, if it could have been modified for the gas giants."

"Shakes the earth for miles. The enemy thought it was thunder, the shell took so long to get where it was going. Probably it wasn't the enemy."

"Sejanus?"

"
Any enemy worth fighting would have been long gone by the time the barrage got there. Wouldn’t you? Blow any defences to the hells, though, emplacements. They learned real quick to get rid of those. But we kept the cannons firing, all day and night. And you never know when it's going to stop or where it's all going."

"We did our duty, Sejanus. To our people. Nothing more."

"I keep thinking, Jobaal." He said and crossed his arms. "Of some kid."

"What child?"

"I don't know, any kid. Or a bar streetside somewhere. Some sunny day. People laughing, even if it is the laughter you get out of people when they're scared. Some young pair seeing each other for the first time, or an old hardwood setting down to a peace and quiet he thought he earned. But nobody's earned anyting, that's the truth. And they don't know what's coming."

"What's coming?"

"That barrage, Jobaal. Even if it isn't a barrage that's ours, or ain't a barrage at all. We did something bad out there. It makes me sick inside."

"I am sorry, Sejanus
," Jobaal said and shrugged. "I do not follow. But I am Jedezian. You will speak otherwise, but that is the special strength of your people: the things we sometimes do not follow."

Sejanus turned towards him and smiled
at him behind the mask and patted him on the shoulder as he brushed past to the ladder. He put his hands to the damp steel rungs and listened to the echoes his boots made against them. A tiny beeping reached him from his wrist and so he put off his descent to bring his bracer before his eyes and saw the emergency levels of his bodily water. He acknowledged it to quit the noise and cast about from that high place for the hydration station.

It lay tucked into an alcove on the far side of the factory floor and its stores already petitioned by a line that only grew longer under scrutiny. He slid down to the dust and debris and could feel the heat through his gloves. Thus he struck the ground lightly and crossed over to it beneath the watch of the guardsmen posted high above on the walkways. He remembered what they had done with the last man to fall from dehydrat
ion not an hour ago and looked to where he had been left to lay undisturbed.

The queue built upon itself and did not move. He looked past them to the plinth and capsule of the hydration station, the blue swill of the water behind the glass, and saw that it was empty and that no one moved to fill it. He looked on as the men
who stretched themselves long ahead of him commiserated and listened as they told stories and laughed. Sejanus paid them only another glance and then circumnavigated to the steps of the dais ahead.

"Whoa there," A man said no sooner tha
n his foot rested on the first.

"There's no one inside." He said without turning and scratched at the itch in his throat that he could never reach.

"Ah," The man said and he remembered the voice then. "You are the OBPAFer, the one from the depot this morning. The one that we had words with. He wants our company, then he wants our water!"

He laughed with all the others
who had heard him and those beyond who pretended to it. The line at last shortened, but not to make use of what it led to. Sejanus turned toward the man whose beard was fenced in now by the mask he wore and he scanned those who stood nearest him. He saw their blue, and he saw the commonality in their uncommon features – that it was absent of the genetic pale of the Citadel.

"Let us test your eyesight." He said to Sejanus and gestured to a ragged ensign above the
hydration station. "Tell me if you cannot see the flag there, chem-fiend?"

He peered where the man pointed and saw the dim device upon it, the ring of chains that was a corona within a corona to a bright star. He had seen it before and elsewhere, jutting awkard and tattered from the ruins of municipal buildings. Schools, bombed-out command centers, oceans of pulverized humanity that somehow held out enough to keep it from the course of the silent history that comes in defeat. Places all that had no right to hint that a new dawn had once been imagined there.

"Yeah I see it."

"This is a True Union hydration station." He said and stepped nearer to him. "For True Unionists only."

"I don't want any trouble."

"Oh," He said and pivoted round to the other Unionists, then back again. "Neither do we. So find another station."

"I'm on emergency levels."

"He is on emergency levels!" He said to the others and guffawed. "Why did you not say so? Emergency levels, call for emergency measures."

The bearded man turned from him then and strode up the steps to the platform of the water dispensary. He bent down to take hold of the laces of his boot, stumbled and caught himself on the tips of his fingers. The knot undone, he took the heavy leather off and held it beneath the nozzle at the center of the console before him. He made no effort to cloud his amusements as he navigated the touchscreen there to trigger the spout. Water poured down into the soiled boot and the bearded man waited until it was full to the brim before removing it and keying off the flow. He took it then to Sejanus, lopsided on the stairs with his feet off balance.

"Here, drink!" He said and thrust the boot at him, spilling some of the water onto the ground where it sizzled into steam.

Sejanus took the boot from where he held it by the heel in the palm of his hand. He kept his eyes on the man’s and tipped the boot back and drank deep of the slimy substance rendered therein. Drained, he tossed it at the bearded man’s feet.

The Unionist across from him stood still a moment to match his gaze and then shrugged and nodded
to something out of sight behind him. Hands seized him about the arms and too many to contest. They tried to force him to his knees and kicked at them when he moved not. He fell to the floor that seared him and was kept there, his head tugged roughly back by a hand across his forehead. He was thus forced to look up at the bearded man prostrate and tried in vain to recall such another time. The Unionist knelt down to him.

“You enjoyed being a bootlick, OBPAFer?” He said and squeezed Sejanus by the cheeks from beneath his chin. “Huh? Well, here.”

The man shot upright of a sudden and swept the steel toe of his boot across his face. His head was knocked astray in a blur of flame and shadowy forms and fell to the earth with nothing to hold it up, the sense knocked from him. He tongued Katherine’s adrenal patch and, finding it secure, half-wished it had been that side. The light of the furnaces glimmered in the blood that had splattered from the new gash below his eye and now ran to pool before him. The boot that had made it settled there into view, atop the puddle.

“Here is a boot to lick.” Its wearer told him.

The hands that held him down forced him then towards the reddened toe and though he fought his peeled lips drew nearer. A shot went off and then another. A soft succession beneath the roar of machinery, but distinct and known. A grasp fell away for each of them and he heard the thumps of others joining him upon the floor. The rest dropped away quickly and he got to his feet, rubbed the blood away from his chin with the back of his hand. He looked up to the dark figures of the guardsmen, cloaked and armored atop the walkway, and they back down at him – impassively. His eyes fell back to the Unionist, who had come to stand before him again.

“Go on.” He said. “The war did not end for us outside, you know this. It will not end because of this in here. Go on and tell the rest of your loyalist scum that Androsius will not tolerate anyone not of the Union at his water station.”

Sejanus said nothing, but went to make his way through the close ranks of Unionists who had built round the scene of their scuffle. They turned away from him once he had gone and resumed what it was they had been about and as though what had gone on before them was only a thing in passing. He looked over his shoulder to see men dragging away the bodies there before the station and amid the gaiety of their companions.

“Sejanus!” A voice called and he saw Jobaal alight not far from him upon a broken down cargo handler, wings receding into their chitinous sheathes. “What were those shots? I saw you heading to the hydration station – and then there were the shots.”

“You saw me.” He said to him.

“Sejanus, they are too many. I am one of few of the hive that work in munitions and on this shift. My people cannot make an enemy of the Union.”

“Your people.” Sejanus said and shook his head, started away and then turned round again. “I don’t have a people.”

Then he was gone, and Jobaal looked after where he had been. He wondered how many human men had gone the same. These questions were not asked in the hive, for they did not want for an answer. A natural matter that one needed the whole and the whole the one. And in having no answer of his own, he could not supply one. He could not attest to why a man might be castoff, nor understand why that man should not in his hate seek a new hive. Long though he had pondered it, in viewing the lives of more than those here, Jobaal yet found the race of Men amiss. He understood that they made war, that they bolstered the hive with it and so gathered its resources. But it was a stranger thing then, he thought, that they should slake the many to abet the few.