Prisoner 52 (2 page)

The inmates were emptied into a vast chamber through vast gateways and were castigated from above by the glow-discs there, suns in miniature, and they ran b
efore their brilliance like lost banished figures in some ancient pictograph being driven from paradise. The guards in silhuoutte beneath light shouted for them to form into lines before the two fenced off areas that dominated the room. The cracks of electrified whips drove them along and Sejanus could smell the familiar stench of burnt flesh. Before them lay two paths of fencing, cordoned off from one another, that each led onto the great planes of a loading elevator and he traced with his eyes the huge ramps of their tracks into the darkness of the shafts to either side – still as those around him were scourged.

"Those with holobadges form left." Said a
man who marched across the walkway that ran overhead before them, hurriedly and slapping at the air where he wanted them to stand. "Those without, form right. Do not dawdle."

Sejanus fought the sudden current of the men around him and navigated its ebbs and tides as they all did, trying not to get caught in the undertow. They filed into the fenced off areas and soon began to assemble into ranks once free of one another and he saw around him then a field of black eyes, like his own upon his breast above his heart, and felt not so alone as he had. He looked over to those others in their other compartment that were not his kith and saw in their menagerie all that he had fought against and had been instructed to hate above all things. But the sight brought nothing.

"Alright," The Enforcer said to someone out of sight far overhead. "Load em up."

Their feet rocked beneath them as the lifts started up. They thus left the steel earth behind and the system of walkways overhead journeyed with them slantwise into the shadows of the overhead shaft that began at the hei
ght of the left wall. Shadows fell and the massive lift crept inside the broad mouth of the tunnel. He watched across the way as those he had marched with from the magrail port, but had been weeded from, were taken away opposite and disappeared as well into their own separate gloom.

"Hit the spots." The same voice called, lost in the lightless tunnel, and the beacons exploded with light. "Watch positions."

Sejanus lowered his eyes from the blinding glare with the rest of them and studied the blood and grime upon his toes. He looked askance and through the cage that lined the edges of the platform and watched the wires which hung throughout the shaft dance sombrely in the white of the spots. Their shadows mimicked them across the stone walls as if they were the true substance the light only leeched the essence of. One sparked to the left and the embers were tossed down into the enveloping shadows below.

He heard music then, distant and faint, but no motter how distant or how faint the tune could not escape him. His heart uprose to hear it, the symphonic melodies rolling over one another in triumphal grace. He knew not the composer or the name its composer had given it, but he knew it well. He had heard it in the mess of the Citadel's neophyte cloisters and the day he was inducted into the Orbital Breach and Planetary Assault Forces. He had heard it played through the streets of the cities of the enemy, now lying in ruins, over the broadcast systems of fleets of airships and tanks. A hundred thousand times and each time a cause for joy, for it was one of the old things. That stay with a man in comfort of newer labors and newer tragedies. That remind him of home. But it had become a hollow thing, a tinny thing. As hollow and tinny and full of bluster as any cry of war he ever heard uttered. And to hear it played there, in that place and in supposed welcome, the smile that had sought to spread upon his face was thus
utterly ended.

The lift began to slow, its track to groan and clunk more sparingly like the last soundings of a dying leviathan at last ran through by lance and spear. It reached its apogee and the machinery that had borne it up gave a last boom that resounded through the shaft below. Above a light began to spread and with it new pounds and whirrs as the teeth of the immense hatchway doors overhead parted. The spots were doused and the music became clearer the farther the gateway opened and the lift began again in earnest, straight upwards now to vomit them forth.

They became level with the ground and continued to rise. He looked about him with all the others at the tiers that rose until they blurred into one iron figure high above and at the prisoners that filled them up. They at turns observed and screamed and cheered and ratteld the caging that barred them from the edge and open air. It seemed a scene out of the madness of fable, all the arcs contrived to a certain point. A thing without sense and felt to him some bizarre homecoming planned for all of them aboard the lift, but to what home it was none could say. A shadow of what it had been to return to the Core in triumph from a long, hard campaign. Still the elevator climbed and revealed ever more of them, staring all with a third, blackest eye at their hearts.

Day 1

He moved onward in a sort of plucking at the ground, packed into the teem that searched for their cells as he did. He held his clothes close to his chest and the heavy bundle of wool and leathers made a buffer between he and those before him. Thus he watched with all the wherewithal left to him, cold and naked, the delineation of the numbes atop the cells to his right. He watched nothing else, had a mind for nothing else. He studied them so that he nearly forgot which was his own and that he searched for. Of the pale and tattooed forms he passed within the recesses of the cells, he caught only fleeting and peripheral knowledge. Enough to know that they scanned with anxious eyes the shape and color and size and markings of each body that marched past with nary a passing interest, but a reflex. With as much concern as he might regard a weapon or a bullet, things he knew too well to consider more than an extension of some other thing.

His
eyes fell on the sequence '614' and to him seemed familiar and in the hesitation that followed his course was chosen for him. He slowed and so was forced from the files by the ponderous, unyielding advance of the inmates around him and within the cell three men eyed him incurious from its two beds and one leaning upon the bunk to his left.

"Drop your clothes." The one that sat to his right said softly, hands to either side and braced against the bed frame and his eyes hooded as with a long fatigue.

He looked them over at a glance and saw the shorn heads, the drawn faces and distant stares, tattoos enough to hide them in a dim night. A pluming tuft of hair leapt out at him from the chin of the man leaning to the left. He blinked slowly and matched the gaze of the man who had spoken, but said nothing. He let fall his stacked jumpsuit and coat and boots from his breast to his waist, but no further.

"Your ass is safe here. We've got to check you out. Drop your clothes." The man said
again and Sejanus looked at him and dropped enough to begin slipping into the jumpsuit.

"He said drop your clothes." The man with the beard said and caught a handful of the jumpsuit up where it draped round his hip.

"Watch it, Hulk." Said the man who half laid and half sat against the wall upon the lower bunk behind him, lean and clothed in darkness and eyes that glimmered in it. "He is one of the boys. Hastur Victor Sejanus. Yes I know you, fish. Killed more men than radiation; that anybody knows anyway. Could be in the running for plague, too."

Sejanus saw a chem-stick flare up in the shadows there and the bony hands that held it to the thin-lipped mouth, a mask of death that surfaced only briefly from the gloom in the weird gr
een light and was then submerged.

"Really, Sejanus." The man sitting at his right said. "It's just your tatts we need to see."

He looked at the man who had a hold of him and whose namesake was aptly justified and Hulk let go, so he let fall his jumpsuit. The man upon the bed nodded at Hulk and he began to read the skein of his life illustrated across his body. He heard him mutter the names of places that he had been but sounded now from another man's life, from a history of ancient places buried in ruined texts. 'Kurwieler'; 'Tych'; 'Nidgog, Ioja, Potlaad'. He raised his arms to the ceiling: 'Slave; killer; soldier'.

"He‘
s OBPAF." Hulk said and the ringleader of them grinned and rose to stand before him.

Sejanus took the hand given him at the wrist and they embraced in the Concilium's way.

"Welcome, brother," He said once they had parted again. "Had to be sure."

"Of what?" Sejanus said and zipped up the jumpsuit and stepped into the legs of the heavy, leather coveralls on the floor.

"Didn't they tell you?" He said. "Tower 7's strictly for veterans. We don't mix with the resistance parasites except on work duty, or with what's worse."

"Civilians." Hulk said and he picked the heavy greatcoat up from Sejanus's feet and handed it to him.

Sejanus gestured to the bed beyond the man before him, socks in hand, and the man stepped aside saying: "Yes, please. Sit."

"You all know me." He said to them and sat down atop the mussed and sparse blankets, leaned to slide on the thick woolen socks.

"Hulk you already know. I'm Anders, but most everyone calls me Sarge." The man said and pointed off into the shadows of the bunk across from him, lit only briefly by the flare of the chem-stick. "And him in the dark is Dibber."

"Call me Dibsey."

"If this place is for veterans," Sejanus said and took the boots handed to him by Hulk and slid them on too. "Thanks. What about the defectors?"

"Holobadge or no, we track them down pretty quick." Anders said. "There's not many places to hide. When you think about it. Eyes and ears."

"When I think about it."

"Yeah," He said and glanced at the other two, they to him, but all back to Sejanus. "Either you're a Blackblood or you're not. We keep them around for barracks concubines or slaves; but pretty and weak isn't easy to come by here."

"Join or die, brother." Hulk said. "Just like the Oath said."

"And if I refuse to join?"

"Well you aren't pretty and, if reports are to be believed, you're not weak either." Dibsey said from the gloom and chuckled, a faint and oily sound that enlivened the shadows it sounded from. "A joke; a joke."

"Would you?" Ander said. "You don't have the brand, but I'd figured you for enlisted some way already."

"Who do I see about this?" Sejanus said and pulled the black knit cap down over his bare head.

"We'll take you to see Nyar. Once he gets out of isolation. Tomorrow. Then there's initiation."

"He's not any common street punk." Dibsey said and his eyes shone in the green flare of his chem-stick, nearly depleted. "Nyar will just induct him on the spot. Make him lieutenant maybe. Who knows these days."

"I had to slave two years for that." Said Hulk. "No way."

"And if he does? Are you going to challenge him the way Moss did? They're still scraping him off the floor in the mess."

"You said Nyar." Sejanus broke in.

"Yes," Anders said. "Julius Agrifficus Nyar. You know him?"

"No." Sejanus said to his boots. "And he gets out tomorrow?"

"Early morning."

"Then we should see him as soon as possible. Should I know anything?"

"Nothing you don't already. Standard fare. Magnartig Courtesy."

Sejanus nodded and leaned with his hands onto his knees and said, "What do we do until then?"

"Morning consumption is in a few minutes." Anders said and glanced at his bracer. "Work detail after that."

"Where?"

"Shipping and recieving. Scum does all the labor; we just watch and operate the loading platforms, an exo-loader or two. Easy stuff."

"They trust prisoners with cargo?"

"Us." Anders said and shared a chuckle with the other Blackbloods. "Guards get a cut of whatever we smuggle off-world. But every once in a while,"

             
"The Codex sticks." Dibsey said.

             
"And we have to do some readjustment." Hulk said

             
"A sweet deal." Sejanus said.

             
"It isn't shit compared to what I hear the colonies are into out on the surface." Anders said.

             
"Resource smuggling?"

             
"Cocytus would be a smouldering ruin before the Concilium was done with the revenge fucking." Hulk said.

             
"We move drugs mostly." Anders said. "In prison and out. A little slave trafficking with the inmates people forget about, but nothing too profitable here."

             
The Blackblood pulled an auto-hypo out from his back pocket and handed it to him. He saw the three makeshift color-coded plungers and the needles that went to them, all crudely taped together, and knew. He opened the left flap of his coat and slipped the syringe into the inside pocket there.

             
"We got all the Rage you need, brother." Hulk said.

             
"Keep that out of sight." Anders said and pointed at the concealed hypo. "Guards still have to look like they're doing a job, and don't use it every time some Outerverse skel gives you an angry eye. This isn't the war anymore; battle stims attract attention."

             
"The wrong kind." Dibsey said and he could see through the shadows the sheen of his teeth.

             
"I won't need to." Sejanus said.

             
"Say that now," Hulk said. "Until some True Union shitheads catch you alone on the warehouse floor."

             
An alarm sounded outside, a harsh buzzing noise, and he could see briefly the flight of drones that the control tower spewed from its hatches from where it speared upward through the heart of the holding tower. Men spoke and boots fell en masse as though a veil of silence had suddenly been lifted from the doorway of their cell.

             
"Chow time." A voice called over the broadcast system, screeching and droning into activation. "Come on. Line. Line em up."

             
Anders levelled an upraised palm at the threshold and Sejanus rose from where he sat. Hulk moved aside and he stepped out onto the walkway of the tier. His cellmates filed out after him and together they formed into the rank and file of the prisoners that waited there. The drones tossed to and fro on invisible magnetic currents and washed them all with flat cones of blue light, projected outward from the bulb that was at the base of their fat bodies replete with cabling and the skeleton of their hull.

"Looks like we're all here." The voice of the control tower said. "About face, make for the lifts."

"I need a weapon." Sejanus whispered to the back of the man before him, but did not speak to him.

"We'll get you kitted." Anders said from behind him at his ear, nodding and glancing with his eyes all round them. "Just wait til we get to the warehouse."

"Do we share mess with anyone?"

"Some low level rings." Dibsey said. "Crypsis 6'ers, Helva Outriders and the like. But they know to bend knee these days."

"Some are coalition," Hulk said. "Some just stay out of the way."

"But everybody pays." Anders said. "Drugs, CorpBucks, extra manpower. 6'ers, Outriders, Pax Vyrianus: in Tower 7, you're under our wing."

"And you're under Nyar's." Sejanus said.

"In Tower 7." Dibsey said. "There's Vorsitz in Tower 10, specialized containment. But
you'll find the Enforcers there aren't too selective in how many of his communiques reach his lieutenants here and there."

"Bought?"

"The ones we need to." Anders said. "Most of them hate anything outside the Galactic Core as much as we do."

"You could call them Loyalists." Dibsey said and he could hear the smile in his voice. "Recruited from the same pool as you."

The column of inmates ahead halted and he and his cellmates with it. Sejanus heard before he saw the gate that rose groaning into its emplacements within the walls of the holding tower. Others opened at the three other corners of the walkway and as the march began again he saw those across the way empty into the darkness beyond as floodwaters into drainage. So it was with those on each tier above and below him that, collected, could shake the earth with its march.

He passed from the diffuse heavens of the holding tower and beneath the looming shadow of the opened gateway, taken into a funereal hall. But in those niches where the corpses of the slain might have been interred in olden catacombs there was only bare stone and overhead the still figures of exo-suits, the light of their helmets shining down on the inmates that passed beneath them. He traced the outline of the short cloaks that draped from behind their shoulder plates and their quad-barreled rifles that thrust u
pward from the sloping shadow rendered it like a monolith.

A trifold glow appeared from the pitch far ahead and sent its red waves out over them in revolutions. An alarm began to sound, low and impetuous, and the column halted. Beyond the river of shorn skulls and black caps he could see the prevailing horizon of another gate rising and when it had reached no more than a hair above their heads the advance resumed into the mouth of the low and leering threshold.

They filed out onto the great plain of another cargo elevator, greater even than the last, and all those he shared that fourth of a tier with packed themselves full into it. Shoulder-to-shoulder they stood and he looked up at the sounds of voices heard above and saw a lift in duplicate, dozens of boots beyond the cruciform glass shielding that formed a part of it. There was a clunk that reached him from far above and then a hundred others to match, so that it seemed an echo of the first never to end and reaching his ears in mounting waves. Then the lift on which they stood started into motion and thus with it those above, those below, and shook the tower with the rumble of their heavy rusted gears.

It met the suspension columns at the bottom of the shaft with a slam and rattled, they with it. The inmates situated at the edge
began to evacuate through the threshold that waited their arrival before them. He and his cellmates followed after and Sejanus glanced upward to find the lift above descending still, as though it alone made use of the lift system. Narrowly the ranks behind him had escaped before their lift slid rearward into a slot at the base of the wall and upon rails that ran through the depression beneath. The next crashed down in its place a moment more than the space had been cleared for it and in this way the offloading continued until he could no longer stand the loud clang of each lift meeting the clamps behind him.