The Eternal Prison (22 page)

 

“Krajian!” I hissed. I’d meant to shout. “Marko!” My voice sounded like I’d already been buried.

 

I didn’t hear anything for a moment, and then there was the roar of displacement springing full formed all around me, the sickening lurch of being snatched from gravity.

 

“Krajian!”

 

I struggled, weak without any leverage, trying to at least bend myself into a shape where I could get my legs under me. A sudden roar of noise—an explosion, not far away—compressed everything inside the hover for a second, and I could tell we’d been jogged off course, spinning a few times before the displacers, whining with that familiar rusty noise, compensated and brought us back into the slot. Just as I got my bearings again, two more blasts, louder than the first, and we were spinning again.

 

“Fucking
hell,
” I shouted, managing to get one of my legs under me. I surged upward and met the sticky, combined weight of all those bags, giving me inches and then solidifying. I growled deep in my chest, pushing up and up and up—and then things were shifting, getting easier.

 

“Cates,” I heard Krasa shout. “Hold on.”

 

Hold on,
I thought. A System Pig was telling me to fucking
hold on.

 

Her hand appeared, thrust toward me from between bags, and I snatched it without hesitation, without embarrassment. She hauled me up, and I pushed, and with a sudden slippery, sucking expulsion I lurched free, stumbling into her, getting a noseful of her again, clean and simple with a sour undercurrent of fucking terror, maybe an almondy tinge of anger. She steadied me with both hands on my shoulders just as another goddamn explosion went off nearby in the air, and gravity did some flips for a second or two as the displacers hit a white noise level of sound, disappearing above the range I could hear.

 

“You okay?” she shouted with everything she had, sounding like she was whispering a mile away.

 

“Did you just ask me if I was
okay?
” I shouted back. “What the fuck are those explosions?”

 

“What?”

 

“Those are class-C Disruption Shells,” Marko shouted, sounding far away. I turned to find him leaning in, an inch from my ear, surfing with his feet on two shifting body bags and hanging onto a safety strap descending from the ceiling of the cabin. His hair was damp from sweat and plastered against his head, revealing that he actually didn’t have that much hair: his fucking head was freakishly huge. I stared at him as he continued. “Standard suppression procedure. Next come the big boys.” He nodded, raising his eyebrows. “F-90s, field-contained armaments.”

 

I looked back at Krasa, using her roughly to keep my balance. “Well, fuck,” I yelled, putting everything I had into it. “Who the fuck’s bombing us?”

 

She frowned. “Your people!” she shouted back. “The army! The goddamn SFNA is knocking on the door!” I just stared at her and she rolled her eyes as we both almost ate some body bag, the hover rolling beneath us. “The siege! They’re making a play for the city!”

 

“Well, shit,” I shouted, looking back at Marko. “Not our problem, then—Zeke, you can get control of this heap?”

 

He nodded. “It’s a simple shell running the show.”

 

“Hit the stick,” I howled. He nodded and turned away, but I lunged for him and caught his sleeve, lurching into him.

 

“Don’t crash!” I shouted, grinning. “Or I will slit your fucking throat!”

 

I felt wonderful. Better than I’d ever felt before. Marko sailed off, slamming into the wall before recovering his footing and lurching away, and I thought it would actually feel
good
to kill someone.

 

Ooh, Avery’s crossed over,
I heard Glee whispering in my ear. For a second I thought I could smell her again, feel her in the cabin.
Avery’s not even
human
anymore.

 

 

 

 

XVIII

I’D BEEN DIGESTED A LITTLE

 

 

 

 

It sounded like I was at a party. The flurry of voices overlapped each other, tripping on each syllable and blending together into a buzzing sludge of verbiage that made my head pound painfully. My whole body ached as if I’d been stepped on by a giant, crushing bones and grinding my joints into powder.

 

Somewhere in the distance there was a grinding, screeching noise, the most horrible noise I’d ever heard in my life.

 

It advised against opening my eyes.

 

Every now and then a voice would float up near the surface and break out nice and clear. At first I tried to follow them, make sense of them, but nothing connected; no one seemed to be replying to anyone else, so I gave it up. I remembered the terrible pressure in my head as that jackass doctor had begun processing me, and then —

 

I froze, jerking upright and then collapsing forward as my whole body cramped in protest, pain rippling up from my legs and slamming into my head, where it laid down thick roots, strangling me. I slumped there for a moment, panting.

 

I can hear you, goddammit; I know you’re there

 

… in a stall just off Taitou Alley, second from the left, ask for Shen
…

 

I don’t understand, I just don’t understand

 

… fifty to you, but if we don’t tell Gerry about it, it’s seventy to you, follow?

 

… it deepens like a coastal
…

 

They weren’t voices. They
were
voices, but inside me, in my head. Dozens, maybe more, men and women, kids and geezers, all just shouting constantly. I reached up and put my hands on my aching head, finding it sticky—
blood,
I thought, recalling something about needles. The swelling balloon of acid embedded in my skull was nearing critical mass, jiggling nauseatingly with every silent bellow from the crowd inside me. Was that what they’d done to me? Sliced my head open, inserted a sac of poison, sewn me back up rough and jagged to wait for the inevitable bursting? It was pushing my eyes out of my head, choking me.

 

I opened my eyes. The shouting went on.

 

I’ve never seen one, but I’ve seen clips on the Vids about them

 

… fucking Pigs fucking fucking Pigs

 

… the Little Prince’s security wasn’t worth whatever he was paying them

 

I was still in the lab, still sitting on the slab, but I’d been pushed forward in time—my restraints were torn from the slab, equipment lay smashed on the floor amid a few dead Crushers, men and women in an unfamiliar uniform, and the
extremely
dead Dr. Kendall (distributed liberally around the room), and the walls were scorched in several places. The smell of gunpowder and blood hung in the air, and I became aware of a slight vibration, irregular and faint, slithering up from the floor into the slab beneath me. Working to ignore the voices, I could hear gunshots and shouts somewhere not too far off.

 

I touched my head again. I’d been hooked up to the brain-sucking machine, but I was still here. Felt like I’d been digested a little, but still alive—whatever had happened here, it had interrupted my processing before they could take an imprint of me. I swung my legs over the edge of the slab and studied the carnage, bodies cut in pieces, hunks of meat, pools of blood everywhere—shredders, I concluded, and not used with much skill. It was amazing that I hadn’t been cut to pieces by accident, and not amazing at all that I’d been left for dead. Between being hooked up to Dick Marin’s Magical Brain-Sucking Machine and sleeping through a firefight, I’d have left me for dead, too.

 

… sixteen at twenty-two, thirteen at fifty-one

 

… his blood was hot, hotter than I would have imagined

 

Slowly, feeling every inch, I knelt down, blood soaking into my jumpsuit, and leaned in to get a look at the off-white uniform half the bodies in the room were encased in. It wasn’t SSF or ObFu; it was a tough, strangely tacky material that held whatever shape I pinched it into for a few seconds, then slowly resolving into its original composition. With a grunt I flipped a torso over. Over the right breast was a logo that resembled the SSF globe and stars; instead of stars the globe was surrounded by arrowheads, and instead of ssf the initials sfna were knocked out in the middle of the globe.

 

… System of Federated Nations Army, jackass

 

I blinked. I listened to the voices for a second, sifting the continuous stream, but that particular voice—young and snarling, angry and rough—didn’t repeat. I suddenly felt watched. As I reached back down to feel the uniform again, the shooting outside suddenly grew louder, underscored by a ripple of small explosions that made everything in the lab jump.

 

Head pounding, voices screaming, I looked around quickly. Whatever was going on here at the prison, it wasn’t over. Being left for dead could turn into being very, very much actually dead if I was seen staggering around, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, dried blood streaked down my face. Spinning, I dragged my gritty eyes around the lab, spotting a more or less whole Crusher lying on the floor. I limped over, scabby hands tearing at the jumpsuit and peeling it from me like a second skin, the dirty, crusty material coming off me reluctantly. My body was purplish and striped with grime; several of my flesh wounds were obviously infected, and suddenly the aching in my head spread throughout my whole body, sinking into my bones like bright, cold blue veins.

 

Naked, I shivered and knelt down over the Crusher. I tugged its uniform off, revealing a deep, ragged belly wound out of which a nest of red wires and thick white liquid leaked. I was naked with a mixture of blood and fucking coolant puddled around my feet, taking another man’s pants off. It wasn’t how I’d always pictured I’d go.

 

I’m so sorry, whatever I did, I don’t deserve this

 

… accident don’t happen, motherfucker—I got your number, and I’m gonna pull it someday

 

… it was like six inches long and smelled like a fucking zoo full of animals had died the week before during a heat wave

 

… Avery, getting shot naked is the least of your worries.

 

I paused for a second, a sharp spike of pain throbbing behind one eye. Another voice, boiling up from the mess of noise in my head, had seemed familiar. Like I knew it.

 

You know me.

 

“Fucking hell!” I shouted, pushing and scampering back to crash into a loose gurney, which went sailing off gracefully. I rubbed my hands into my eyes, hard, making them ache even more as lights flashed inside my head. What revised hell was this shit? I opened my eyes, expecting blood to be dripping from them onto the floor.

 

I waited, panting, but the voice didn’t rise above again. The noise outside the lab was getting louder, so I forced myself to uncurl and crawl back to the half-naked Crusher. With stiff hands I pulled its uniform off and pulled it on—too big, ridiculous, but I cinched it on me as best I could and tied its boots onto me tightly, my own mysteriously missing. As I stood with some loud popping noises, my head swam as I searched the mess for weapons—six or seven shredders just dropped on the floor. I went through them fast, tossing aside the first three for being gummy with blood and gore. The last was in pretty good shape, with half a clip left. Ten seconds, tops, of ammunition. I stole four clips from the others lying around and did a quick inspection; if the fucking thing didn’t jam on a chunk of some dead asshole when I squeezed the trigger, I might kill a few bastards with it.

 

Skin itching under the damp, reeking uniform, I limped purposefully for the swinging doors. Anything would be better than waiting for the flood in a room without cover or exits. Holding the shredder in front of me, I considered sending a burst through the doors to cut down anyone standing on the other side, but rejected the idea. It didn’t feel right to kill people before you even saw them, without giving them a chance to form a fucking opinion about it. I stopped and spun around, transferring the heavy weight of the shredder to one arm as I grabbed hold of the gurney. With a grunt and a massive twinge of pain that burned all the way down my back, I sent it rocketing through the doors, snapping them open for a second, revealing the dark concrete hallway and a single Crusher staring at me as the gurney crashed into him, sending him sprawling.

 

As the doors flapped shut I saw the Crusher’s face: I’d seen it before. Pasty, with a long chin, covered in a thin smear of peppery hair. I rushed forward, unsteady on my stiff leg, and kicked the doors open again, staggering into the hall.

 

… his name’s Guy he’s a fucking punk

 

… just a dose. I’m sick I’m telling ya

 

… je veux juste qu’il tout finisse je veux finir

 

“You,” I hissed, keeping the shredder in front of me as I stalked down the empty hall toward him. He was getting to his feet, mouth open, eyes wide, the uniform hanging off him as if he’d shrunk five inches in the last hour. The noise of a fight was louder, screams, the heated whine of shredders, bone-rattling detonations that spiked up from the floor into my boots. “I know you.”