Prisoner 52 Read online

  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 green 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 upward 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.

  He was faced in the far distance with a partition and upon the lofty ramparts of which patrolled armed guardsmen and above them, along rails that gleamed dimly throughout the dark of the girdered ceiling, turrets kept watch. There was a further breadth beyond the apex of the wall and within it he knew the inmates of the other tiers and sections of tiers to be emptying. To his right he found the same and the unseen presence of as many prisoners who teemed around him then. Numbering in all upwards of a thousand in perfact math, but divided and kept hidden by human sensibility into fractions thus made useless to one another.

  "Our table is over there." Anders said and pointed off to the outermost section of bench in the row of tables nearest them.

  "Where does that lead?" Sejanus said and pointed to the door upon the left wall and crushed against the far partition, cornered.

  "Magrails." He said. "Work detail after meal time. Come on."

  "Do these halves meet outside?" He said and followed him through the splintering streams of prisoners to the table.

  "Separate corridors all the way to the port. Why?"

  "No reason."

  "You know, Sejanus," Dibsey said and took him lightly by the arm, as a man might his personal confidant, and Sejanus took his arm away. "There is something to be said of not abusing too good a thing."

  "Habit I picked up." He said and stopped before the benches.

  "Troopers," Anders said and took his place at the table amidst his fellows and their laughter, their jesting, fell silent to greet him with quiet echoes of 'Sir' and downcast nods.

  Sejanus looked them over and they, he. He might have been aboard a carrier again or experiencing a return to some rundown and stripped away simulacrum of the Citade
l's hallowed halls, to an extended family that knew no end for all their similarities. But among them he saw the Cog, tattooed here and carved there and each one a mark of his new exile among old comrades. They looked for it upon his face, as he had seen it rounding eyepits and nestling in the bowls of sunken cheeks, and when they could not find it looked in his eyes.

  "Who's the fish, Sarge?" Said a man across from Anders and a seat to his left.

  "Sejanus." Sejanus said and took an empty seat some spaces down from where his cellmates had sat themselves in the places reserved for them.

  "New cellmate." Hulk said.

  "Did you tell him what happened to the last cellmate?" Someone said unseen from down the table and the rest burst into laughter.

  "Hastur Victor," Dibsey said and their mirth tapered off into a serpentine quiet beneath the noise of the other inmates. "Sejanus."

  He matched their stares in that silence, so many probes launched to calculate some secret history that could only be confirmed under scrutiny. To scout the far off shores of a savage people men had only heard tales of.

  "Welcome, brother." Said the man who had first spoken to Anders, a face of scruff and sallow skin beneath a dark knit cap.

  Sejanus nodded to him in kind and the sporadic and conjoined conversations resumed with the tones of a routine made uneasy by the interruption. He set his arms against the tabletop and looked into the dark blankness of the inactive meal screen between them, shoulders hunched and jaw clenched. As though it were existence itself in that place which was abhorrent to him and best got clear of. Looking as one who often looks into suns.

  "Sejanus." A voice said to his right, at the end of the table there, and he looked to the older man who was seated there - a half-blind greybeard that looked at the tabletop out from beneath a tight wrapping of dark cloth and who spoke like the name had been an ejaculatory thought. "I know that name."