Prisoner 52 (9 page)

Day 5: Early Morning

"What'll you take?" Naeus said.

"No, man." Said Girda and waved the offer away.

"Come on. I'll hedge you 100 CorpBucks that they kicked him to death." Naeus pursued and Girda stopped and gave him a look. "200 more they had fun with him."

"Make it 200 on the first and that they stabbed him and you've got a deal." Girda said and they halted before the isolated cell and he activated his helmet's transciever. "Open cell 614."

"That's a lot of money."

"You want a go in the back with that hotsie-totsie at Suzie's you better put it up and hope I'm wrong." Girda said and glanced at him, back at the door. "Gate's opening."

"Gods
damn it; alright, you ingrate. Alright. You're on." He said and pointed at him. "Don't go fucking with me about it when I'm right neither."

"No fucking, I promise. Them's the rules."

The locks disengaged one after the other heavily, like great stones dropped into a metal well, and the isolation door began to slide open and groan along its track into the wall in which it was housed. Blood painted the floor in streaks and great puddles and was spattered against what walls they could see as it opened and Naeus smiled in anticipation. His grin reached its apogee when a dead limb appeared and then the corpse it belonged to. But then his mouth fell open and his eyes screwed up in disbelief. Another dead man was revealed and then another after that and the man who had made them all had sat himself in the far corner amidst the shadows of death. They looked across the blood and gore that colored the cell and the dead and colored him and he picked his chin up from his breast and looked back at them, his eyes faint sparks in the dark.

"He ain't dead." Naeus said. "Girda, he ain't dead."

Girda matched the bloody man's stare and nodded and then said, "No. No, Naeus, he isn't. But he will be. Are you injured, Prisoner?"

"Come here." Sejanus said through the dryness of his throat. "Find out."

"Stand up, inmate." He said and took a step backward to the side of the cell. "We'll get you to the infirmary. Get you cleaned up."

Sejanus made to get to his feet and then fell back upon his hand, propped against the stone of the floor. He winced and held his left flank as if he did not the ribs there would splay outward through the skin. Another attempt and he was upright, walking from the cell with his head unbowed and nary a limp or hobble. There at the threshold and
breathing the open, fresh air that did not stink so much of death he looked upon the Enforcers and then turned to march off where he knew they would take him.

"He killed them." Naeus said. "All three. By the gods, he's still standing."

"And they'll kill him." Girda said and shook his head. "Damn shame."

Day 5

He stepped without the doors of the lift and surveyed the horde of prisoners waiting already in
the pod, as though in a dream that they could not go on with without him. The doors closed behind him and he glanced back at them. Sejanus returned his eyes to the hundreds that were then upon him and studying the bruised ruin of his face. Beneath their stares he took a stride away from the lift and then slid to the floor against the wall.

A man parted from the close mass of inmates before him and in his hand was a knife and Sejanus was on his feet in a moment, readied. He saw through the bleary world the drugs left him with that it was Nyar and he approached him as if he were a lone child uselessly making a defense against the wolves. He slowed some paces away yet and to his side advanced the interminable ranks of what had become in that place his
sad parody of soldiers, himself of himself.

"I might've known you'd live." Nyar said. "You know, I don't want to have to do this. I didn't believe the men when they told me, but you've lived up to your reputation; those were good men you killed."

"I've got room for a few more." Sejanus said to him. "On my count."

"A few maybe." He said and began to pace before him. "Before I kill you: why?"

"They told me you were in command. And I thought maybe you wouldn't fuck up the first time."

There were a few chuckles that he heard, nervous and diffused far apart from one another. But the longer the silence
of their leader was permitted to build, the more those assembled around him descended as well into quietude.

"
But I don't want it; I never did want one." Sejanus said and shook his head as though something awful had worked its way into his system. "Come and try me. Single combat. You first, then the others."

"The Rit
e of Challenge is reserved for true Men, Sejanus." Nyar said and then shrugged. "All I see here is a rabid dog. Unfit for service."

And so they set upon him, as one. With crude tools and
careless swings – the mad bent of butchers.

Day 5

They went
on beside each other in a tight-lipped silence. It was only them that walked the walkways. He had not seen or heard another and it might have been strange for him, his mind not elsewhere and mapping scenarios and words to fit them. Leargam had not spoken and had not looked toward him save to investigate some far off point in the distance that was perhaps not there at all.

"Listen," Tezac said as they drew up to the door of the next pod.

"Ain't nothin to say." Said the old man and passed his bracer over the scanner. "That stuff'll kill you, what's left of you. And that's all."

The doors parted and admitted the roar that Tezac had taken as only the storm outside. Leargam gave no curious glance and instead stepped through without reserve. He followed, himself drawn up in what loomed forthcoming and what hounded him of old. Thus it was not until he saw the horde of inmates below and by chance of wayward eye that any incongruity struck him. That they all shouted and congealed as at the impact crater of some curiosity born of the cosmos, for only on Cocytus and the worlds with which it shared much had brawls been levied such importance. Here one against several, blades against fists.

"Leargam," Tezac said to his back, for the old man had gone on while he had stopped.

"The turrets will handle it." Leargam said without turning and went on still.

Tezac looked and they hung limp from the ceiling of the courtyard. Inactive, harmless. Perfect witnesses to what transpired below. He zoomed in his visor's display on those who fought fought there and saw in detail the wounds the lone one bore. Blood soaking through the front of his coveralls and the ragged strips of cloth and flesh intertwined where the knives had cut deep. And so he caught sight of the symbol burned into the nape of his neck, the globe pierced by the chained spike and placed there by laser upon Citadel induction. He enhanced his view until he could read the words he knew to be there stencilled above it: 'Orbital Breach and Planetary Assault Forces'.

"The turrets aren't working." He said.

"You say something?" Leargam said and at last turned around, far down the walkway.

"The turrets aren't working." Tezac repeated, shouting, and activated the exo-suit's strength modules and kicked out the polymer observation window as he leapt down into the space between the wall and the cordon of inmates
which enrounded the one.

He landed with the wounded and staggering man at his back and his attackers braced before him. Dead beneath their feet were those that he guessed had come first and in less numbers. He studied the
man who stood center of them all and dropped yet into fighting stance as though no more had happened than the wind shifting of a sudden. One of untold hundreds, different in no way but the shade of their skin or the length and part of their hair. But in his eyes he could see what lay beneath his scowl and builtup hatred and taut tattooed muscle. As any man can in another, as the prisoner weighed him then. And he did not find it in those that flanked him.

Thus Tezac aimed his rifle at him and fired and shot dead the man behind as
his target rolled to the side. A knife struck the plating of his suit across the shoulder and he butted him who wielded it with his rifle and caved in the nasal cavity in a spurt of blood. He had no sooner returned to those before him when they fell upon him with the weight of multitudes and still more bearing on them in turn from behind. For all the strength of his solitary armor, he was forced to the ground. Blows beat against him like hailstones bound to accomplish little but worried over all the same. Knives cut across his chestplate and bent themselves trying to pierce it. He fired blindly and blood sprayed upon him; but another just as quickly replaced him from whom it came and his rifle was wrestled out of his augmented grip. There was gunfire somewhere above as well, above the shouting and dull beating of flesh and bone upon polymer. But it was thus drowned out.

"Turrets Courtyard 5 reactivate." He said over the helmet's command channel. "Override designation: Tezac Hotchkins, 51322970608."

"Turrets activated." A voice said to all those assembled that had surged forth at last seeing a guard leap into the pit and come within reach, gods so long cut off by silver ladders now brought low. "Threat detected. Economical Neutralization protocols activated."

T
he machines blared, droned loud and commenced firing. Those in the front rank and those behind them were reduced to masses of pulp and red. Tezac saw the man he suspected to be their leader tumble three rows deep, handing his knife off into the stomach of the man who had been behind him at that moment. The gunfire ceased and all the sound that there was in the courtyard was that of the many feet shuffling slowly back and away. Stormy waters receding beaten from a rock face thought to be malleable, but vowed to in some way return.

Tezac scrambled to his feet and recovered his rifle and braced it against his hip, swayed it in an arc across the tide of depraved flesh that retreated
from before him then. They were silent now and moved so slow and langourous that he thought they might not have been moving at all. He stepped backward over the inmate that sat bleeding where he had collapsed against the wall upon his arrival and kept one arm aloft to uphold his rifle at the other prisoners and with the other scanned the codes of the man's identification tattoos with his bracer.

'Hastur Victor Sejanus', his display read and beneath it a photo of his face as it appeared clean of blood. His military record was listed alongside his prison record and Tezac navigated to it and therein saw the names of a hundred different, familiar worlds. He picked the man's face up by the chin and inspected the gashes above his right eye and along both cheeks. Long, deep. The paths of a life misspent. Himself a road of many roads as ancient as the stone they had been hewn from. Their conclusions all but uncertain.

"Infirmary drone to Courtyard 5." Tezac said. "Immediate medical attention."

Then he slung his rifle and scooped the prisoner into his arms and the servos in the suit's knees whined as they bore him up onto the walkway, through the hole they had helped him to make in its shielding. There Leargam only looked upon him, mouth agape and eyes wide. And Tezac looked back,
imponderable as the tinted visor of his helmet.

"The hell were you thinking?" The old man finally said.

"I don't know." Tezac said and shrugged with the dying man in his arms as if in the gesture he could account for something in him. "Nothing."

Leargam shook his head and glared at him a bit lo
nger before turning away. "Godsdamned junkies," he heard him mutter and inside something shrivelled away to nothing. It was all he could do to look after him, even after he had long gone, until the medical drone arrived from their hive deep within the complex and with an escort of blaring attack drones.

The squadron spread out over the prisoners below and at turns dived at them and soared back into the air where they scrolled their targeting lenses across them. Their charge descended to Tezac and the white infirmary drone unfurled the gurney from beneath it and tendrils snaked out from within their sockets in its body and readied the autohypos they contained. It
hummed at him, quiet beneath the hazard of the day, and seemed to extend further the platform it bore. As though he were already dead, and it come to ferry him to that place of honor earned of a life living by it.

Day 6

He fitted the repulsor modules onto his boots and stood up from the bench and submitted his palm and his eyes to the scanners beside the doors. They opened onto the infirmary floor that spread massive before him, hemmed in by the walls as tall as it
was broad. Technicians floated in the air above him and went from medical pod to medical pod to inquire of their computers the condition of those who bouyed within. He navigated the remote databases displayed across his visor and queryed for the location of Hastur Victor Sejanus and along the left wall and high up a waymarker appeared. Thus Tezac lifted off into the air and aligned to the point of light.

The distant overhead lights washed over him one after the other as he passed beneath their beacons in turn and into the shadows again that waited between them. So it was and seemed all across Cocytus, that light was assailed on all sides and that all it illuminated was its vicinity and no more for it could do no more than that. He appeared amidst the drifting white of the medical technicians a mortal visitor to a wraithsome realm.
              Some adventurer-captain delved into the realms beyond realms in search of something lost or not yet found. Such as it was, such as it was then.

Sejanus hovered idly within the light of the MedVault and beyond the steel and glass of its doors. Shut off from any world but the one that transpired beyond the pale of consciousness. Taut with the rigor of death, but his vitals went slow and steady on the display. The mechanical arms and instruments inside worked without fault or fatigue across his naked form and sutured in their precise way the wounds that marred it. Biogel lay traced in thin lines in perfect adherence to the cut edges already ministrated. But arrays of the limbs were lost still in the deeper tissues and moved out of sight and so moved the ragged edges of the laceration they operated
within.

"Are you the guy?" A voice said at his shoulder and he looked and saw the wo
man who stood there, pale and dark of hair and green of eye and both arms crossed around the tablet that she held tight to her breast.

"Yeah." He said and looked back into the glow of the repository. "I'm the guy."

"Brave thing you did." She said. "Crazy, most would say."

"Is that what they say."

"Why'd you do it?"

"I don't know." He said and his shoulders rose and fell with the breath that he took. "Same reasons as anybody, I guess."

"A lot of guys come through here. I ought to know." She said and he looked at her and then back to the MedVault as she went on. "Not many of them would jump down there like that. Then come to see about him afterward."

"It was his tattoos, if I had to say it was anything. Wasn't much that went through my mind until I saw
them, and not much more than that even then."

"You'd have a time finding someone in this tower that didn't have them."

"Then it was the circumstances." He said over his shoulder. "Listen. It doesn't bear talking about. Nice meeting you."

H
e swivelled away from her upon the invisible currents of the repulsor modules and started down through the air toward the doors.

"Is it worth drinking about?" She called after him and he stopped.