Prisoner 52 (8 page)

Day 4

Their boots rang against the grated catwalk and those other guards they passed either standing or walking nodded to them, they in return. The masses of prisoners surged over one another below in a confused mess of sweat and grease and buried rage. It was a silent storm, ever brewing. Ever looming. They looked to the turrets that hovered above each time insult begged injury and grew into a commotion only for so long as it took the machines to remind them of the rules in their dry and mechanical voices. But somewhere, hidden down in the tangle of human lives, Tezac in his short time knew already the presence therein of human atrocity.

"There's not enough room to even stand on your own." He said.

"They find ways," Leargam said. "Look around; you'll see them sometimes. The stronger ones making chairs out of the weaker ones here. The gangs blocking up space there. Always fun when they start another pushing war. You know, for breathing room."

"What's your auto-target setup?" Tezac asked
and they drew up to the door of the next pod.

"We were
using vitals," Leargam said and scanned his bracer and the doors slid open and they waited for the guards beyond to pass through. "But that tended to get messy fast. Somebody has a too big a STIM dose and their heart blows up, everybody around him could kiss their asses goodbye along with him. Then command switched to substance scans to look for weapons and sudden bone fractures or blood loss and it's worked pretty well since. Every now and then we get a few incidents. Strokes of genius, but nothing we can't handle."

             
Tezac nodded. It was the same elsewhere. All over and for all peoples. New ecosystems had developed. Alien solutions to alien problems. Deals brokered and silent wars waged for the small boon of standing free amid a swamp of people too deep to probe. And how little it mattered, he thought. Here or a manufactory planet in Corporate SlaveSec, what was the difference. Even in the Galactic Core. Necessity could find no greater home than in them. Doing what could be done to temper the hell that had been contrived for them, for such as it is with hells. The power to dispell them is reserved for him who created it, and those like him. But never those condemned to it. It was a thing that he knew, and was sure that he knew and had learned above all others. The only thing. The only reward for a lifetime spent in battle.

"Is every holding tower this crowded?" He said as they crossed into the next courtyard.

"Here, yeah." Leargam said and formed up alongside him. "Sector 7 is low priority. We get the dregs, the flunkies, the goons. The boots on the ground sort."

"And we got the warlock."

"Well," Leargam said. "Any fuck-up happens cause of somebody else's."

"They're all human," Tezac said as he looked over the inmates below. "Looks like mostly Corist, even."

"All of em." Leargam said. "Every last scum-sucking piece of trash in this heap."

"They can't all be. Not every courtyard."

"Tower 7's Blackblood turf. Well the turf we gave em anyway. They don't mingle with the Outerverse cons except on work detail and we keep that shipshape, you believe me."

"I didn't think there was that many. Here, I mean."

"Oh, it's just a number til you see it. But you know that." Leargam said and Tezac looked at him. "Just wait til you see the Jedezians' tower."

An alarm sounded loud from overhead and there was the stamp of feet as the inmates below arrayed themsevles at attention and into ranks. The great doors upon the wall just beneath the walkway opened and slid into the walls. Tezac went to the railing and looked out over the assembled masses before him. There were only a few that peered back up at him and not for long. Casting their eyes to their boots as soon as they met his.

"You know," He said. "I never thought I'd see it like this."

"Midday consumption." A voice said over the loudspeaker, tired. Without tone. "Midday consumption. Move out. Midday consumption."

The marching steps of a hundred formations across as many courtyards resounded throughout Tower 7 and the men below swarmed into the huge lifts that awaited them there and were so swallowed into the bowels of the beast of which he was a part. The prisoners drained away as so much waste let loose from a canal lock and they went on upon the walkway, through to the next pod and saw the same in the courtyard below.

"That's us too." Leargam said. "And that's it. First day on patrol is out. We report back to the observation booth at core standard evening. Once these assholes return from labor. By then we won't have to do much to pacify em. Tezac?"

He stood still just outside the doorway of the chamber they had crossed into and stared off into the distance beneath them. Leargam went to the railing and followed where he looked and saw there a tangle of limbs and the heavy leathers and ratty wool of prisoner uniform. He keyed the switch on his helmet for his visor to lower and activated its zoom function and then at once turned away. A puppet of flesh that had been a man, lying as limp and lifeless - but for the motions of the men it sprawled between.

"Hey," Tezac shouted down at them; but they only looked back up at him. Their bodies moving independently of their attentions.

He raised his rifle at them and still they did not stop. It was only that same dull look. That empty glare, that which saw only the source of a sound and none of its maker. That had been diverted only by a new utterance, a new sight, that had not been present a moment thence. The next in queue for registration, reflexively taken stock of. They went on and it seemed they would indeterminably until he fired upon them. A spray of gunfire broke across the wall behind them and they scattered. Animals rooted out of the underbrush. Scavengers away from the corpse of a friend, all taken and even what remains in a decent death.

Day 4: Night

The cold ploughed down through the streets of the town, e
mpty but for Enforcers like them, and its agents filled the gutters with snow and ice and misery. Night had fallen, and it was only the regulators of their suits that kept the feeling in their fingers. The inhabitants of that sorry place, huddled about the prison walls and without any luxury but the worst kind, had long been driven inside. Beyond the neon flood that the comers strove through, where they were needed for the needs of those without.

They stood beneath the silver glow
of a sign that read 'Susie's' and the doors opened and the music that had been only a muffled drone hit them hard. They went in past the bouncers that stopped up the short, snug corridor and into the gloom that lay between the light of the bar and the light of the stage. They walked beside it and stole glances at the girls dancing there and the little parts of them that were covered. Smoke rose from chem-sticks, drinks spilled, and table after table of Enforcers laughed silent below the great noise as they studied the products displayed.

Leargam pointed out a table near the back and Tezac nodded at him and so they went over to it. They removed their greatcoats and slung them over the backs of the chairs. The old man said something to him and then shouted it when he could not hear and after many repitions threw up his hands and made for the bar that stood off to the side of the stage.
Tezac disengaged the suit's neckflaps and the plating retracted so that he might remove his helmet and he did so and laid it on the table before him. He took his seat just as Leargam had returned with some dark liquid that frothed in two heavy mugs.

"Thanks," Tezac said and took the glass handed to him.

"Best godsdamn part of the day," Leargam said and sighed as he sank into the torn leather chair beside the scratched wooden table and sipped the mug, watched intently the stage.

"What a day," Tezac said and drank deep. "What a way to end it."

"There weren't nothing we could have done for him. You smother a guy, quiet, the turrets just can't track it. We can't either. There's too damn many of them. And you'll learn. You'll learn. You spend as much time here as the rest of us, when you see a thing like that," Leargam said and waved his mug at the room around them. "This is how you cope."

"That's not it."

"Well what is it then?"

"
That’s not how it should end."

"Look around, kid. You ain't in a place where things should or shouldn't happen anymore. They just happen, and mostly it's to them who had it comin
g." Leargam said and set his drink aside on the table and fished for a chem-stick in his vest pocket it. "You know chances are he did something to get sent out here."

"I know it." Tezac said and stared off toward the dancers upon the stage, at some distant point beyond them
and they themselves only blurs. "But when I was released from the Order, I thought that was it. I thought I was out, and I wasn't going back. I’m certain everybody does. Then you ship back home - wherever it is, if it was ever home to start - and you look around and find some use for yourself outside war. So you set to it. Your mind's made up and your head's clear for the first time in a long time. And you got it all mapped out. But then it grabs you, and reels you back in."

"It?"

"It."

"Then why here?" He said and lit the chem-stick hanging from his mouth and blew out the first puff of smoke and rested it between middle and fore finger upon the arm of
his chair.

"Not a lot of work to go around, if you're not a slave. Not for men like me. And with the Reclamation winding down the only Enforcer details that needed hands were the ones getting
new clients. So the Outerverse slams is what we got. What we all got. Both sides pushed into the same gutter."

"And you're not sitting in containment yourself; just what's left of the guys you fought."

"The war's over." Tezac said and drained his mug. "We won."

"You want back on the assault grid?" Leargam said and took a drink himself, sucked on his chem-stick. "Instead of here?"

"I could have went back in with the Merc Brigades." He said and nodded to himself as he looked out at the dancers. "Waste away in a suit until someone threw me in a revenant module. I know guys running jobs for the Outer Syndics now that drove tanks in the war. Cost more than your life's worth of paychecks. And mine. Slaving away on some backwater, just trying to survive. Get their next STIM fix to keep up with a habit they got given."

"
Well, kid," He said. "You picked the worst place to get away from that life."

"There isn't no other life for me."

"Well what the hell else you good for?" Leargam said and took a swig of his ale.

The place went quiet and all went still. The dancers froze like marionettes, their strings the notes of the music. Those laughing did not laugh and the enforcers crowded around the old, dirty tables amid young and cleanly filthly prostitutes fell into that silence. Their faces dour, as if some terrible remonstrance of their own memories had come up all at once and smote them. All in that one moment of nothingness. Then the music began, the next song in line, and they lit up again and the dancers with them. Laughter, carousal. It all started once more at the beating of the noise.

"You think I'd be here if there were any mining contracts left?" He went on. "Hell, I knew it was all over the moment those ships touched down. The gig was up, and the only deep space left these days is rubbing noses with the Maerazians. Or the by-gods Petronins."

"I look a
round, Leargam. At these people." Tezac said. "And I think that maybe we came down on the wrong side of things."

"Would it have been any different?" The old man said and took a long drag on his chem-stick, squinting in the ubiquitous light that flared all around them. "Probably you'd be dead. Least you wouldn't be here. And the Concilium, well, they would've rolled into SepSec anyway and rolled on through it. Take the
Order right along with them too for their trouble, and you know probably more than me how much the Citadel'd like that."

"Then I'd have died fighting. Like I was supposed to."

"There‘s nobody supposed to die fighting. They just die." He said and straightened in his chair and leaned toward Tezac and pointed at him with the fingers that bore his chem-stick. "Look, it's all going down. You and me, we're small time. Couple guys having a couple drinks in a nowhere bar on a nowhere planet. You ain't in command of the Order any more than I'm a titan of industry. And the days a man could make something of himself he wasn't born into, especially a young man, they're over. Most you can make is like me, sit back and ride the wave into obscurity as gently as possible."

Tezac set aside his drink untouched upon the table between them and got to his feet. He looked down at Leargam and then around at the jubilance that was his new world and the people in it. His new home. He wanted to visit upon it the things that he had seen and thus knew, or thought he knew by seeing them. Grab them and shake them and shout at them the thoughts and thousand pains that were expressionless for him and so he kept silent. He could not ask of them why they did not understand themselves and why it was so, for he understood none of it himself. It was a boiling, a billion molecular collisions that took place with no clear path to extrude their energies. All in a moment he had realized the other planes, lower and higher, and how immutable the walls between them were. Unconsiously he flexed his right hand and consciously
felt only the constant needles.He made for the door and the cold of the town that hemmed in the walls of the prison proper and Leargam's voice called after him.

The winds met him. The ice hailed him. And he did not break his stride into the deep snows and deeper chill that went through everything and even the things that cannot be touched. His thermoregulators warmed him, though he shivered. Sweat beaded on his skin, though he was cold. His eyes wandered all over at congruencies that were only shadows. Mad marbles rolling around a mad skull. The automated plows rolled past him and he past them and found more in their silent company than he did in that which he left behind.

So it was in all those places he had walked by, cozy and cozened and to him full of laughter. Even in those places that were without windows, or without open doors though all doors be closed to him. He would have it that way; he had made it that way. A preemptory refusal. No rest, no sleep. Not tonight, not any night - for him. There was in his walk written his history.  Any certain one that saw him could read it, and he made no show to hide it. For all show was facile. All show was idolatry. And so it was that a showsman among showsmen stepped from the darkened alleyway further darkened by his shadow and the shadow of the night and produced himself into Tezac's path.

"A miserable night," The man said and
Tezac looked over his teardrop shape in the darkness. "Can't imagine it'll get any better on its own. You neither, by your look. What's a little edge off, huh?"

"I don't know," Tezac said and contemplated the drawers he knew to be embedded in the man's suit beneath his shabby cloak. "A few doses of Mute?"

"A few shuffles of CorpBucks." He said and withdrew his cloak from around the great artificial bulk of his stomach and keyed open the desired cryostorage chamber in the suit's abdomen. "Have you got em?"

"I've got a little. Shipped in two days ago. Haven't been paid yet."

"A little won't cover it." The man said and moved to close the tray back up into his suit again and Tezac snatched up the wrist of the hand that did it. "Let go."

"I'll give you what I got." Tezac said. "And the rest when I get it."

"I don't do loans."

"Broken bones?"

"Not in the habit." The man said in a quaver. "Alright, alright. Hand it over before someone sees from Susie's down the way."

Tezac upturned the man's wrist and scanned his wristband across his own and authorized the credit transfer and roughly took the bags from the storage tray and quit the entrance to the alley. He slid the bags into one of the deep pockets alongside his vest and forced his way through the storm and along the streets. He knew not where he was or what way led to what other and followed whichever gust blowed most powerful. He often took the sacks out from his vest again and contemplated how easy it might be to toss them into the gutter and seek out the tram station and depart from them and all that they represented together at once. But it was by their presence and his knowledge of their presence that his
aimless circuits of the parasite latched onto that of the prison which had spawned it brought him to the magnetic tract binding these two cancers together.

Leargam said his goodbyes at the elevator to them that travelled back with him from Susie's and swaggered down the hall
to where he knew Tezac's to be. Those in the lift were too far gone to remind him that his floor had not come up yet. He counted off the numbers stencilled beside every threshold as he went and so saw one of them to be open where he expected his to be. He referenced its number with that upon his wristband beside the rookie's picture and again and then rushed to it when he realized they were the same.

He crashed into the doorway and balanced himself upon the frame and saw in the light that streamed in from the hallway Tezac lying within it. Curled within himself, his exo-suit discarded around him and his eyes closed. Leargam stumbled into the room and slid onto his knees and cradled the man's head in his arms and checked his pulse. It went, slow and steady
and quiet. He put his ear to his mouth and it was the same. A threadbare creature gone to such a place that would welcome him, unabashedly. Unreservedly.

But Leargam smacked him lightly and then harder when it did not wake him. Tezac mumbled a nothing and the old man let him gently to the floor and looked about himself to find the autohypos strewn all about them upon the floor. He picked one up and threw it away at the wall, its inset vial shattering. The light played off the empty plastic of the pouches that lay amidst them all and he took one of them up into the light and read the labelling and looked down at Tezac and let him roll off his knees. He stood up, pocketed the bag and went to the doorway. There he turned round again and looked at the man lying before him. A shell. An afterimage hours old. The substance beneath the mold. He shook his head at all the things he could not understand, all of which he could not account
for and what could bring such a man to such loathsome frailties. Then the old man turned to leave.

"You can't tell anyone." He heard from behind him, slurred and forced, and he stopped.

"I won't." Leargam said over his shoulder. "Not yet. But you better get a handle on that shit before I do."