Prisoner 52 (17 page)

Day 17

A man with no teeth leapt atop the table of the metal bench and dropped his pants. He looked up into the face that beamed with idle glee, at the ragged cap that sat atop his shaven head. Three other men stood behind him as the one before him emptied his bladder into the bowl of NutriPaste he had gotten from the dispensary and not touched. Someone sat down beside him and he could see out of the corner of his eye the beard he wore, the symbols cut into it that were common among the men he had seen there.

"I do not like to see loyalists in Tower 8." He said, but Sejanus had yet to look at him.

"Sorry to spoil your view." He said.

"I am sorry to spoil yours." The man said and he indicated the rotting genitalia only now coming to the end of its extrication.

"This is some point you're trying to make I guess."

"We live in a world of points now," He said and made a motion of his hand, as if to request something he could not readily describe.

"Sejanus." He told him. "Hastur Victor Sejanus."

"And you are a solider."

"I am a soldier."

"You were a soldier." The bearded man said and leaned nearer to him, to in proximity bring him to meet his eyes. "Take care that you remember that here. This is not Blackblood territory, and next time we will do worse than just piss in your food."

The inmate that stood on the table leapt down and he could feel the presence of the men behind him begin to dissipate. The man sat beside him clapped him on the back and he clenched his fists so that they shook upon the tabletop, his jaw so that he thought his teeth were sure to shatter. Then they had gone and the runed beard escaped his periphery. He did not inform them that it was his difference from those in Tower 7 that had transported him to Tower 8, for to such men the truth mattered very little and was futile when pursuant to error.

H
e swiped the bowl from the bench to where it shattered against the wall, the urine and the putty it saturated plopping to the floor. Sejanus could not decide whether he first expected and imagined the booted footfalls that came up behind him then or that he heard them; but they stopped behind him all the same and with a final stamp, as if their being brooked further announcement. Two, near as he could tell, and they flanked him to either side.

"Is there a problem, inmate?"

"I don't have a problem."

"That looks like a problem." The other one said and he could see the baton that pointed to the mess along the wall to his left, but not the hand. "Clean it up."

"No."

"He said: clean it up." The first man said and batted
at his hand with the baton, but it struck only the metal of the table which dented beneath it.

Sejanus slipped beneath the table as the other man made to grab him and came out the other side. He drew up from the floor and saw for the first that
they were prisoners, not guards, who sought to apprehend him. They wore a crude sort of uniform, ratty brown fatigues in mockery of those the Enforcers wore beneath their exo-suits. But these dopplegangers had no such tools, and in place of rifles brandished clubs that still bore the stains of old beatings and had not even the small dignity of an electrified field to lessen the savagery in their discipline.

Like attired men stumbled to a halt at the ends of the corri
dors the benches made, near and far, and filled them up as they collapsed upon him from either side. Sejanus looked across the tabletop to the two who looked on from there with glib amusement and so slid across to them just as the mad rush of their fellows was to meet upon him.

             
They thought to bring their clubs to bear again, but the langour was in them that cannot fathom the disrespect of old power. Sejanus took his weapon from the hands of the one by force and staved in his head and turned it upon the other. He splintered the arm that was put up to breaker the blow and then those that had come as reinforcements fell upon him from behind. His legs were taken out from under him and it felt as though he were caught up in a storm that took metal for its rain, the white flashes of bludgeonings for its thunder and lightning.

A
s the dark clouds come over the sun he fall from any light at all. Even so sombre as that which shines over Cocytus. He heard as he departed that world for another the vague noise of cheering and thought then of the disparity that interposes between like things in unlike places. Then quiet, the final silence and final darkness to usher him onward to the throne of old night. Whereat he had often imagined his hand should be taken and at last.

Day 18

His eyes fluttered open. The sound of his own breathing filled up the silence, slow and measured and the only thing that reminded him sound was still real. A white void was presented to him through the swoop of the visor of his sealed helmet and he looked away from it, lest it swallow him up. He could see beneath his chin the blink of lights, the radial displays of his suit's air pressure and oxygen capacity. He watched the latter with some hope of finding in its remainder an inkling of his sentence; but he stared now for a long time and it remained fixed at 3200 litres.

One moment bled into the next and he dared to look about himself. There were no angles that he could find. Just the air hose that fed into the tank upon his back. On this he pulled, but for all his augmented strength it gave not a little from its socket upon the wall below. He used it to drift toward that wall and from it bounce to its spherical continuation on the far side. So he had found himself a moment's entertainment and in it the pod's dimensions. Twice again as tall as himself and as wide, no more room than to drift in place.

He kicked off the wall toward the black slit in the opposite side and looked out the tiny window there. Outside all was darkness and rusted metal, lit here and there with diffuse overhead lamps that created distant beacons throughout the underground complex. Way markers for travellers in that dark, strange land and in the glow of one he saw as much. A pair of men escorting a third down the walkway central to the network of them. He shouted at them, pounded on the wall and then on the glass with the flat of his hands. He punched and kicked and made dull, mute booms that resounded through
out his prison as through deep and lonely caverns. But they walked on, and made no indication that his was any different than the hundreds of other isolation chambers housed around him.

"You seem to be experiencing some discomfort." Master Control said. "Would you like
a sedative?"

"No," Sejanus said and slumped back into the emptiness of nullgrav as much as he was able. "How long am I in here?"

"I am priveledged with this information." It said into his helmet. "However, pusuant to Arbitronix United regulation 12: 'Isolation and deprivation of an inmate', paragraph 4, clause 2b, I am prevented in supplying it readily. It is part of your rehabilitation. Your heart rate has elevated to unsafe parameters: would you like a sedative?"

"No."

"I will not ask again."

"You won't have any argument from me."

"Vocal patterns indicate antagonistic behaviour. Please remember, Prisoner 1871: isolation is a period of quiet and stillness, during which an inmate can reflect upon the transgression for which he is being punished. Insubordination during this time indicates a greater need for solitude, and can result in further sentencing."

Sejanus said nothing. He coiled into himself, arms about his knees, and listened to the slow heavy filtrations of his airtube and closed his eyes and fell into the cadences of the thought-mantra used in times past against the shock of artillery barrages or the hyper-vigilance of nighttime excursions into deep jungle and forest territory. A calm transcended him, that of which he spoke to himself
– a nexus of all points meeting that fear and rage were only shadows of and must so be bansihed from the conscious mind to achieve perfect efficiency.

"Silence," Master Control said and grated against the fortifications he had arrayed for himself in his mind and the voice of the computer sneered, if such emotionless beings can be said to sneer at all. "Could be construed as a form of insubordination. Heart rate is falling to levels indicative of sleep. It is only 7 hours past alignment by the Core-standard count. Would you like a stimulant?"

"No," Sejanus said to the empty black before his closed eyes. "Thank you."

"We have quite a long time together, Prisoner 18
71." Master Control said. "Please inform me if there is anything you need. I exist only to serve Man."

Day 18: Night

He was adrift. He hovered engulfed by waters that no light had ever touched let alone penetrated and knew no depth. He looked to the left and right of him where the currents swirled at turns in great shadows and ghostly light and slowly the vortex they comprised swallowed him. To where he knew a thing awaited him, a dweller in madness and all that was obscene and beyond the ken of what he and other men had taken reality to mean. There it coiled and lay and writhed somewhere beyond the void below him
which gave up no indication that he neared what he dreaded so much more for the fact that he could not track its coming, save that the stink of eons out of time grew more pungent. Thus a pale and emerald light began to filter up to him – and to outline something terrible.

"It knows nothing of what we seek." Voices said that he had chosen to believe took place only in dreams. "But it must.
He has not yet arrived. We must wait. And this one must protect him. He must become a part of us. We must add it to the flesh-gardens and take its shape for our own. But it resists. It is strong. But mortal. It will wither and die in the grasp of we who are without age."

Tezac closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and bent all of himself against the eels that slithered through his thoughts and sought to divulge what his mind held. He saw then the broken worlds. Those that had ended in
deluge and drowned ruin; those that had been left emptied of life as though it had never been at all, only its structures left to speak for them. He saw the monuments and triumphs of a thousand thousand peoples annihilated and their empires lain waste. The great monstrosities that blotted out the suns that shine on dead worlds and the shambling servants that roam about their old and titanic girth. Most of all he witnessed the smooth, unhindered power with which ceaseless aspirants had been evaporated from time and the little Man knew of space.

"Do you see, so-called Human? How useless your struggles. How inevitable your fate. We are beyond all that you know. How
can you contend with we who have wrought the desolation of existence?"

A sound filled his ears that was the death cries of all those worlds he had not seen but in the moments of their doom and now made one. The deranged gibbering and eldritch chanting of the entities that had swallowed their existence into a void that knew no limit and could not be satisfied, save by the fruition of plans obfuscated to all but the timeless and dark intellect
which had made them before even the most distant epoch had begun.

But as he screamed back at them and the voices they had stolen he soon found his own could be heard above the rest, smothered no more by the countless dead. He looked about the gloom and quiet of his room then and threw off the covers soaked through with sweat and sat up on the edge of the bed. He shut his eyes long enough to smooth away what they had seen, but only beckoned what could not truly be forgotten. He leapt from bed and to the window, keyed off its tint and watched the moonlit surface and how its tranquil twinkling in a mirror of the stars would turn to blank
white rage in mere hours. But he welcomed it now, while it remained in state. So it was that he saw the comms panel beside his door upon the far wall, reflected amidst this primordial peace and which it disturbed with the demons of the age. He could not help but go to it and dialed for the voice he wanted to hear.

"Hello," Said the
man on the other end of the call.

"Leargam," He said. "It's Tezac."

"I know who it is. I wouldn't have answered the damn call if I didn't know who it is. Kid, it's the middle of the night."

"Meet me in the company bar as soon as you can. It's important."

"There's nothing important enough for me to oblige that request."

"Trust me."

There was a pause on the other end of the line so long that he worried Leargam had fallen back to sleep until he heard the old man say that he would and then the transmission ended. He breathed a sigh of relief that turned into a shudder and he looked out the window again and then up at the stars, the darkness which loomed between them. He needed no better argument than that to dress as much as was necessary and hurry out the door that seemed the slower in opening for the abyssal deep that lay beyond those points of light.

Day 19: Midnight

The doors opened on the bar and he scanned the barren field of tables that was populated only by the few men too adamant in their drink to leave. He found Leargam at the booth farthest from him, its little lamp shining dimly at the center of the table like a beacon for travellers to come in out of the rain. The old man sat with its glow upon his face as he leaned
heavily upon his hand, asleep.

Tezac sat down across from him and tapped his elbow and he shot awake, looking about himself in the stupid surprise that comes only when
roused. But he sobered no sooner than he saw Tezac across from him and joined him in leaning close onto the table. The dome of light lit their faces from below, death masks in the haggardness of night and altered circumstances. Unshaven, drawn and uncared for.

"Are you having anything?" Tezac said.

"Just what you're fixing to tell me."

"You ought to have a little of something."

Leargam thumbed the key of the dispensary that lay where the wall met the table and said to it, "Whiskey."

"Have you seen anything strange in the last few days?" Tezac said.

The tumbler dropped down into the slot and the old man watched the nozzle pour it full of the amber liquid with a certain kind of relish. The tiny door revolved open and the mechanical arm ejected his drink and said, "Thank you, Enforcer Leargam; have a nice day."

"You too, shit can." He said.

"I'm sorry." It went on as he turned away and put the glass to his lips, with the utmost sarcasm. "'Shit can', is not an appropriate order designation; did you mean 'Shiza Tzan', the Concilium-approved reproduction of the Petronin wine?"

"Oh piss on it." Leargam said and tossed the whiskey out onto the dispensary's interface, which then at last sat in its silent and sopping shame. "What'd you ask me?"

"I said have you found anything odd in the last few days."

"Other than the Jedezians' hive-tower? Or the Khagani shaman rituals? You know, how about we start with the Rayllic molting process. It excites me."

"I'm serious, Leargam."

"You think I'm not? Why are we even here? Why are they here?"

"Forget about the Outerversers for a second. Have you looked at the stars lately? Or the moons?"

"I ain't a poet."

"Neither am I."

"I don't know."

"At least once in the last couple months."

"Maybe." He said. "Yes. I don't write it down every time I look out the window."

"And you never saw a black spot where there wasn't supposed to be one. Some stars that were missing."

"This is what you woke me for?"

"What about dreams?"

"I'm convinced I'm in a bad one right now."

"I've seen a ship, Leargam." Tezac said loud enough to wake up the drunks that sat passed out over the tables. "In orbit. I've been inside it in my dreams. Only I don't think they were dreams."

"Okay," The old man said and touched him on the shoulder. "So you've seen a ship. What kind?"

"I don't know." Tezac said and cleared his eyes with the heel of his hand and took his temples between thumb and forefinger. "Nothing I've seen before. It was dark, almost like stone. And there were these growths all over it; but they weren't random, Leargam. It was like they were a part of it. Or the hull was a part of it. But the voices. The voices are what stay with you. They stayed with me."

"So you're hearing voices."

"I'm not crazy." Tezac said as he looked up of a sudden and could feel the spittle fly from his lips.

"Hey," Leargam said and held up his hands. "You wake me in the
middle of th night and start raving about ships and tumors. And voices now. What would you think to hear me saying some of this? Are you sure this doesn't have something to do with something else?"

"No," Tezac said as he rubbed his brow, level and loud, then cut the air with his hand. "I mean yes. I'm sure. This is
– this is something else. Not that. I haven’t in a while."

"And you said you've seen things?" Leargam said and inclined his head. "Or at least you asked me if I had."

"It was a while ago that it started. A few days after I got off the transport. It was my friend, from the Citadel. I was inducted with him. We fought together. His voice, maybe. But it wasn't him." Tezac explained and ordered a whiskey from the dejected dispensary, drained it. "I can't fight what I can't see. Somehow I think somebody knows."

"What the Hells does that mean?"

"That green light." He said and shut his eyes as if to ward it away, but only invited it back in his mind’s eye. "I need you to come with me."

"About the only place I'm prepared to go with you is medical." Leargam said and shook his head at the desola
te bar. "Come with you. By the gods, what for?"

"There's an observation post across the surface a few miles, from the old days when the Concilium first landed here. Even before your time. I think we can find this ship out there, with
the orbital telescope."

"You're having fun with me."

"You stuck with me up until now." Tezac said. "It's not far. We can use one of the HEVs from the depot, be back before sunrise. No one will miss us."

"There's not a thought in my head that ain't running the other way. But," He said and looked out across the calm, quiet common room and sighed through his nose. "I'll be fucked if I've got anything else to do. Waking up every hour or two as it stands."

Tezac smiled as much as he could and said, "I'll see you at the lift."

"Yeah," Leargam said as he vacated the booth and then called after him. "If I don't get second thoughts on the way."

"You won't." He said over his shoulder, and it was so.