Geosynchron (5 page)

And if you failed? If the connectibles managed to drag the newcomers away first? The Defense and Wellness Council wouldn't tolerate out-and-out murder in their prisons. But anything short of that
could be winkingly ignored.

Quell glanced over at poor Rick Willets, huddled behind a metal
post, trying to cradle a rifle in his mangled hands. The connectibles
had caught him two weeks ago nosing around the dock for food. He
was found three days later. The microscopic OCHREs in his blood and
tissue would eventually return his thumbs to their opposable positions;
until then Willets would be down a few chits in the evolutionary
game. If he had neural bio/logic machinery, he could heal even faster, but Willets was an Islander, an unconnectible, a technological skeptic.
He would just have to wait.

The Islander turned and spat on the floor. The whole business
reminded him of the shoot-'em-up holo games he had played as a kid,
all monotony and repetition and mindless adrenaline. Except this is only
half as exciting, he thought, and twice as pointless.

Still, he didn't expect any casualties like Rick Willets today. The
manifest indicated a batch of Islanders along with a few Pharisees and
one prisoner with no stated place of origin, usually shorthand for the
diss. Quell had brought fifteen men to the dock. The connectibles only
had a token force of twelve, and were not expected to put up much of
a fight. Not worth risking too many men unless reinforcements were
at stake.

A few meters down, Plithy settled in behind a drum of industrial
lubricant and aimed his pistol at the hangar doors. The others were safely
out of sight, as the plan dictated. Twenty minutes passed. Uncertainty
stretched the nerves, but it was the long waits that snapped them. Quell
watched the gun slowly droop out of the boy's quivering hands until the
barrel was lying on top of the drum along with the grip.

"Crazy crazy crazy," muttered Willets to himself, a mantra to ward
off harm. "Crazy crazy crazy."

Quell nodded. Yes. Crazy way to run a prison indeed.

This was decidedly not what Quell had expected from prison.

The Islander had known the Defense and Wellness Council would
not treat him lightly. In their eyes, he was a dissident, an agitator,
member of the only group to cast off central government rule and form
a functioning opposition. Not only that, but Quell had defied the
Council's direct orders during the chaos at Andra Pradesh-and
lobbed a pulse grenade at a dozen Council officers-and taken a shock baton to Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee himself. With the help
of MultiReal and the crackling energy of the baton, he had given Lee
a blow that might have split another man in two. But at the last possible instant, her words had come bubbling to the front of Quell's
mind: All of us are looking for a way to deflect our own suffering. Words she
had spoken to him decades ago when he was a stubborn student and
she was merely a sheltered rich girl.

He had wondered if killing Magan Kai Lee would be the deliberate
act of a rational mind, or a decision made cowering under the aegis of
searing pain. Did he really want Magan dead-or was he just deflecting his own suffering?

No. Quell would prove her wrong. He would not deflect; he would
absorb.

So Quell had pulled the blow at the last instant, and Magan had
lived. He had let the officers of the Defense and Wellness Council take
his weapon away and yank the thin copper collar off his neck, severing
his Islander lifeline to the multi network. He hadn't protested the
kicks to the stomach and groin that had followed in the elevator, or the
blow with the gun butt that had broken his knee in the courtyard. He
had known that he could use the quantum prestidigitation of MultiReal to escape the Council's clutches at any minute. He had known
that he could kill every single one of those motherfuckers if he wanted
to, dartguns or no dartguns. But he would not. He would not.

The Council officers had shoved the Islander into a waiting hoverbird and lined up for one last beating. It had suddenly occurred to
Quell that this might be his last opportunity for escape. Rumor had it
that the hulls of these government 'birds could even block subaether
transmissions, a feat that seemingly violated the universal law of
physics. No subaether meant no access to the Data Sea meant no access
to MultiReal-possibly forever.

All of us are looking for a way to deflect our own suffering.

He had let it happen. The door had slammed shut.

There had been a long interregnum of blackness, pain, and silence.
Three hoverbird transfers with no food or water. More beatings.

So much for a trial by jury, Quell had thought.

When he had come to, Quell was kneeling on the icy floor of an
airlock with his wrists shackled, surrounded by dispassionate guards
wearing the white robe and the yellow star. Outside the airlock, he had
heard the metal din of ships coupling. He had waited for the taunts
and excoriations to resume, but instead the guards had simply stood
there, for two hours. Quell had been torn. On the one hand, he had
wanted to give his OCHREs time to prepare for another battering. On
the other, he had just wanted to fucking arrive wherever he was going
to arrive already.

And then, in quick succession, as if they'd been rehearsing for days,
the door had opened, the guards had lifted Quell by his elbows and
knees, they had flung him out onto his face, and the door had
whooshed shut behind him.

At which point the chaos had begun.

A black code dart had zipped by Quell's ear, missing by centimeters. Someone had kicked him in the stomach, then someone else had
smashed the kicker in the back with a metal pipe. The Islander had
soon found himself ducking and bobbing through the middle of an
epic melee, goal unknown, strategy uncertain, clutching onto that
primal instinct to just stay alive for another few seconds. There had
been three dozen people in the corridor hell-bent on pummeling each
other to pieces. A man had stepped in front of him swinging some
crude variety of welding tool. Quell had formed a cudgel with his
cuffed fists and delivered an uppercut to the man's chin, lifting him a
few centimeters off the ground before relieving him of consciousness.

The Islander had been trying to pick up the man's dropped weapon
when a voice had come streaking through the maelstrom: "Remember
the Band of Twelve!"

Quell had looked up, startled. The Band of Twelve. The original unconnectible dissidents, the legendary founders of the Islander movement. As a child in Manila, Quell had memorized their names before
he had learned long division. Years later, his proctors would peel back
the onionskin and reveal a number of unpleasant truths about the Band
of Twelve-three were convicted thieves, one was a rapist, and five of
them were tax evaders. But none of that had mattered to Quell in the
middle of the prison tumult. Remember the Band of Twelve! That familiar
morsel of propaganda had been like a taste of home. He had lunged in
that direction.

The voice had belonged to a young Islander named Plithy who had
been cringing behind a structural support pillar. He had greasy brown
hair and the posture you might expect from a zombie. Quell had followed him out of the battle towards the unconnectible level of the
prison, head-butting a charging connectible in the process.

The prison itself was your basic nightmare of design by committee:
lots of long corridors and useless alcoves. But strangely, there were no
doors or locks anywhere to be found, and no sign of the Defense and Wellness Council either. Quell had followed the boy through the labyrinth,
weaving around glazed-over and disaffected Islanders by the score. Finally
they had arrived at a room with a bunk waiting, newly made, along with
a bowl of greasy stew left like a burnt offering. Quell had wanted nothing
less than to be in a stranger's debt, but hunger had trumped any other
considerations. He had sat on the bed and tucked into the bowl.

"What're you in for?" Quell had muttered between spoonfuls of
stew to the boy, who, disconcertingly, did not leave. It had seemed like
a question prisoners were supposed to ask one another.

Plithy had plunked his hands into his pockets and looked down at
the floor. "Throwing stones at Council officers," he had said.

Quell had nearly dropped his spoon. "They put you in here for
that?" Harassing Council officers with stones and bottles was practically a team sport for young men in Manila. Quell had gotten quite
proficient at it himself as a boy.

"One of the stones hit a commander," Plithy had explained.

"But-"

"In the eye."

The Islander had begun to get the feeling that Plithy was an albatross in search of a neck to latch on to. Evidently the old proverb about
rumor traveling faster than the speed of light was true, because Quell
had soon discovered that the boy had already heard about the altercation with Magan Kai Lee. He had apparently then magnified the story
to mythical proportions and used it as an excuse to dedicate his life to
Quell's service. Quell had wanted no part of it, but he couldn't afford
to be so selective in his friends right then. He had scraped the bowl
clean of gravy, laid back on the bunk, and asked Plithy for the lowdown on the prison. The boy had obliged.

The Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation Facility that hovered
over Earth's Twelfth Meridian was a simple structure: two wheelshaped platforms connected by a thick axle. The unconnectibles inhabited the "lower" wheel and the connectibles inhabited the "upper," the
terms being more or less arbitrary in space. The axle contained the
dock, where Council ships arrived to deliver the prisoners, the foodand the weapons.

The whole setup beggared belief. And in fact, Quell had refused to
accept it until he had seen the stockpiles for himself. What kind of
prison gave its prisoners weapons? But there they had sat, still crated
and fresh from the factory. Dartguns, dartrifles, magazine after magazine of black code darts loaded with nonlethal stun programs. Quell
had picked one of the rifles up, polished the barrel on his sleeve, and
aimed it at an imaginary Council officer bursting through the airlock.
"Aren't they afraid we're going to break out of here?" he had asked
Plithy.

The boy had chuckled. "How?"

It was a good point. The Defense and Wellness Council controlled
everything in their orbital prisons, from the air to the food supply to the gravity itself. The only transmissions allowed in or out were those
that pinged Dr. Plugenpatch databases to pull down healing bio/logic
software. The officers who did the unloading in the dock were well
armed, and inoculated against the black code in the prisoners' dartguns
to boot. Suppose a group of prisoners did manage to overpower those
guards and take control of their ship, against all improbability. What
then? How could they fly a ship without proper authorization codes?
How would they deal with the battery of Council hoverbirds
patrolling the area? And where would they escape to anyway?

Quell had soon realized that not only was escape impossible, but for
the unconnectible prisoners even planning to escape was fiendishly difficult. They belonged to a society that deactivated neural OCHRE bots
at birth. They depended on the accursed connectible collars to sense
projections on the multi network, and the Council had taken their connectible collars away. Who could say that the Council didn't have spies
in multi roaming the hallways and listening to their conversations?
Who among the unconnectibles was capable of detecting them?

So they played this juvenile game the Council had set up. Studying
schematics of the prison, conducting raids on the enemy, shoring up
defenses, risking bio/logically enhanced torture to protect a square
kilometer of empty metal. Breaking the thumbs of their connectible
captives, because that was what the connectibles did to them. It really
was quite similar to those shoot-'em-ups from Quell's childhood. You
had two factions, limited resources, and violence waiting around every
corner, with an unseen CPU mindlessly hurling obstacle after obstacle
in your path until you died or time ended.

In one of his more philosophical moments, lying in his bunk and
listening to Plithy prattle on about the Islander resistance, Quell had
decided that the game they played here was not unique. Wasn't it, in
fact, the same game the centralized government had been running
Earthside for generations? Connectibles versus unconnectibles; rebels
versus the establishment; the powerful versus the powerless. Artificial distinctions all. He had pictured the man responsible for this state of
affairs. Not a mindless CPU, but a perilously old man, bald as stone
and despised by about seventy-eight percent of the population,
according to the last polls Quell had seen.

How could this grotesque game possibly benefit High Executive
Len Borda?

Quell shook his head. He checked the action on his own dartrifle
now as he waited for the airlock to open and disgorge the new batch of
prisoners. It was pointless to speculate about the mind of Len Borda.
Pointless to anthropomorphize human reason and logic when the situation clearly lacked both.