Prisoner 52 (30 page)

"Don't wait on me." He said to Tezac and turned to run.

The old man rushed for the broken terminus ahead that he saw clearly through the dark and marked the slam of his naked feet against the metal as like the last beats of his heart and jumped. He passed flailing through the air and struck the bent slope of walkway on the gap's other side so that the wind was knocked from him and he clung on with tired fingers through the holes in the grating. He felt Sejanus's hands upon his arms and they began to pull him upward no sooner than he looked up to see Tezac's massive form bound from end to end above him and knew the things from which they fled were soon to do likewise.

He was not long back on his feet before they had begun to run and moment to moment the others had outpaced him in
their race for the bright array of glowlamps far ahead and far behind he heard the sound of bodies coming down onto metal. They sped through the overhead lights and were taken as it seemed to him from oblivion and back into it again at turns and he looked back over his shoulder at the men who pursued them hunkered down like rabid apes, becoming in the light more just a phantom in the dark that Sejanus had slain.

They went on through the course of the labyrinth of catwalks and came to the silent control booth that lay at the center of them all, its windows shattered and bloodied, and turned aside from it toward the light again. A shadow burst forth from within the broken glass above and landed before Leargam upon the walkway and he stumbled to a stop before th
e bare-skinned, gore-strewn man who tried to steady himself after his fall, but in the throes of his frenzy lunged for the old man unbalanced.

He
cried out as he became entangled with the inmate and Sejanus turned and cast his knife at their figures, wrestling amidst the light of a glowlamp behind him. It spun through the air across the distance and then sank deep into the base of the skull of the man who had set upon Leargam and who in that moment sputtered and fell dead at his feet. He leapt the corpse and made for the others ahead with all he had left in him. The inmates behind remained close at his heels, but as they passed the man that was left dead in his wake there were fewer that followed than before and other sounds besides than the press of their feet against the grating.

The radiance of the glowlamp arrays brightened and deepened the nearer they came until they had come t
o the stairs that led down onto the platform which the lights shined down upon. In their glow Sejanus saw it for what it was and knew why they had come there. They trooped down the steps and onto the pad of the magnetic containment silo and approached the lift that lay at the center of it, the hardlight lectern that controlled its functioning.

The men who pursued them spilled out from the stair in their wake and into the new brilliance and looked about themselves as if they were hunting animals taken in an instant from a world natural to their insticnt and displaced into another. Their raving reached to new heights of fury so that they foamed at the mouth and looked about at the world as though they had been starved of its succor for eternities thence and what frail traces of humanity were left in them had fled.

They charged forth haphazard and Tezac braced himself and Leargam in a fluid motion drew the knife from his vest and drove it through the neck and into the spine of the first to come for him. The man in his death throes and chemical rage fell upon him still and bowled him over, beating him in a blind assault even as the blood poured from his wound. Tezac managed a kick into his shoulder that threw him off before three others of the pack had set upon him.

A flurry of grappling arms and teeth and blood and empty gazes whirled about him and he saw through them Sejanus draw up behind the inmate that flailed yet upon Leargam where he cringed upon the floor and take his head into his hands and with the strength of his exo-suit snap his neck. He cast the corpse aside and the old man retrieved the blade from the wound in its throat.

Tezac kicked at his foes and butted heads with those he could, but their insanity knew no pain and harm had become naught to whatever daemon had been produced in them by the long years locked in their own drug-fueled nightmares. Their teeth had begun to tear through the fabric of his jumpsuit when Sejanus appeared beyond the man before him and laid into his flank with his fist and the gore contained therein sprayed out upon him, blown apart by the blow. He fell at their feet, his bones splayed out through the ruined flesh like white towers upon a red ridge and the rolling rivers of which were blood.

Red spattered onto his face that was not his own and out his eyecorner he saw Leargam with his knife dismantling the nape of the neck of the man who held his right arm. Still he clung to it coughing and wheezing through the blood spilled and biting at him until at length his body could bear no more of the madness of his mind and
he went dribbling to the floor. Tezac lashed out with his fist thus freed and broke away the jaw of the man it met and kicked at the only one his great foot would reach. His bare foot landed square upon his breast and sent him wheeling away and then crashing to the floor. Tezac turned to with his fists upon the only one to remain and commenced to beat him. He had reduced the man's face to pulp and punched his eyes from their sockets and his teeth from his head when he at last collapsed before him, dead.

In the new silence someone choked and growled through the constriction of his airways and they turned about on Sejanus and the man he strangled the life from. Tezac drew up behind him and watched as he looked down into the eyes of the inmate's that were as unblinking as his
and looked on as the light departed from them, as the wild rage that struggled against its own death subsided to a smolder and moment to moment died out. Sejanus let the man fall limp at his feet and stepped away.

"You alright?" Leargam asked.

"Fine." He said and turned to face them. "You're bleeding."

"You get to be my age and we'll see how well you square off with some punks hopped up on adrenazine and an extended stay in their own
bad dreams."

"Come on." Tezac said and started away from them toward the control panel of the lift
for the magnetic containment shaft. "Over here."

"This is what we came for, the mag-con chamber?" Sejanus said and followed him, looked out over the railing that hemmed in what appeared to him the darkness of a pit
in the lowest kind of hell. "What's down there?"

"Our way out of here." Tezac said and waved active the hardlight console before him.

He navigated its interface querulous and hazy with the crack he saw now in the projector bulb and what he imagined was its confusion at the absence of Master Control, lost as a child without its parent. His fingertips at times depressed through the light particles and at others were shocked by their attempt to harden around them. Thus by turns and meeting its hardened electro-fabric sparingly, he isolated the functions for the magnetic containment shaft before them and indicated for it to open. His command went ignored and he tried again and this time the console strobed red, then subsided to its dull blue.

"Access denied." The on-board computer spoke. "You are attempting to release an inmate of the 10
th
grade without authorization. Seek authorization from,"

He submitted his Enforcer code and bio-credentials and began the override sequence.

"Access denied. Override clearence insufficient. Processing...Emergency status condition detected: prisoner riot; all towers, all sectors. Emergency status condition detected: Master Control presence inert or compromised. Collegia Enforcers rendered primary control group. Access granted. Magnetic containment shaft deactivating; sense deprivation functions deactivating; isolation sarcophagus ejected. Standby."

The lift shaft thrummed from deep down within its darkness and they backed away from the yawn of the pit railed off before them. They watched at length the pyramidal apex of the magcon monolith broach the darkened rim and climb until it stood the height of a man higher than the railing that walled it in, itself half as tall as
the men who stood around it, and then the locking mechanisms of the lift clanged into place.

Tezac stepped forward and activated the sarcophagus's hardlight display and engaged the release procedure, navigated through the warnings and clearence confirmations the onboard computer prompted him with. Then he stepped back and the magnetics throughout the machine deactivated with a lilting
drone and its doors sagged open so that the face of the tomb parted. From within the slit of blackness between the interlocking teeth a black wind dirfted outward and seeped down into a miasma that clung to the floor and moved like diseased smoke.

A blast of force that existed only as the pain of the impact, the thrum through the ears, blew the doors apart from their braces and pistons and threw them from their feet. They stared up from their places on the floor, deafened and wheezing for the win
d that was knocked out of them and the cloud of purple shadow that lingered within the monolith. A great clawed hand appeared out of it, of long fingers and pale flesh upon little more than bone, and laid its lithe digits upon the bent ruins of the doors. The black talons of a foot came next and settled onto the steel floor of the magcon pad with a rumble and they saw the characters writ into the skin of its digitrade leg and which produced the fumes that had begun already to permeate the air with the reek of uncounted dead. Tezac crawled away from the slime he saw to spread outward from the paw, from its whole revealed being.

Thus it pulled itself forth and they were confronted with a maw that gnashed at nothing and at the
heart of the Maerazian, the worms which slithered out as tongues from within. Below there was no flesh, no tissue. But the same bone as before, its ribcage bare and gapped and covered only just in that ichorous pale skin inscribed without end in an unknown language. Its spine lay visible and behind all that which they saw and was in turn sheathed in thick scales that upheld his upper body as a serpent might its own.

They looked then into the eyes that peered down upon them and the wells of souls that turned therein and were imprisoned. It opened its mouth as if to speak and so bared its teeth
, filed to a point. But something alien passed across its face, drawn tight and grey and transluscent upon its skull and humanized only by the thin mustaches which drooped from beneath its skull's nose.

"You have set me loose." It said and formed its words as if they were things with the dust of ages upon them. "Why?"

"We need a way out of here." Tezac said.

"I can go where you cannot follow. Why would I remain behind so that you can escape this place?"

"A deal." Tezac said and got back to his feet with the rest of them, forced himslef to look upon what he knew to have once been a mortal man. "We can make a deal. You get us out and I give you the deep-space broadcast codes for all the Collegia Vigilant outposts this side of the Outerverse."

"Kid," Leargam said and he heard the old man take a step forward.

"Your creature speaks."

"Don't come any closer." Tezac said to him over his shoulder.

"I can rip such things from your mind. These are trivial things."

"They're not in
there to rip out."

"But you will lead me to them?" The Maerazian said. "You try to circumvent me. I can take the location from you. I can take your shape and walk as you; I can take your voice and request them if need demands it. You hide nothing from me. I have bargained with beings older than your race, to their detriment, and have won great power from them. You know this. So you did not believe your merchant's tricks would win me. Tell me true: why did you release me?"

"It should explain our situation." Sejanus said from behind them both, the old man and Tezac, and who stood alone as if before a curiosity.

"Desparation brings about strange thoughts." He said and considered him a moment. "I
am your greatest enemy. The unknown lurking at your spatial borders. But you need my aid and what am I to do? You are a small creature, a little creature; but I have watched your people expand into the depths of space that they had exiled mine into long ago and there was no mercy in any of this. I can attest that small things through ruthlessness, unless kept small, will become great. Right demands that I flay the skin from your bones and feed your souls to the voices that call to me. And for this I will spare you, and show your kind that was once my kind also that I am merciful."

The Maerazian floated from the steel at their feet by the unseen limbs of his will and they recoiled from a great heat that burst into being around him and crackled with an unearthly charge. He rose enrapt within a shimmering sphere that disintegrated all that which it came into contact with and so ascended through the metal ceiling of the sublevel, through the bedrock that closed in around the buried facility. Then he was gone.

Day 55

The lift shuddered up the shaft and Tezac adjusted the sit of his vest upon his shoulders and watched the depth readout tick off its absurd numbers. Leargam fidgeted beside him and did the same, but looked between it and the doors as if by some cruel trick they could open before the apoointed time and when he least expected. Behind them both Sejanus stood, quiet save for the cycling of his respirator implants that made the mechanical silence an alien thing. As if the machinery around them were no dull creature, and he were its spirit.

"I never thought it'd end like this." The old man said.

"It ain't over yet." Tezac said.

"I had a sort of picture in my head
, sure enough. Some sad little thing in the company bar. Sad because only a few people showed up that had nothing really better to do. A few halfhearted goodbyes, drinks on courtesy. Nothing like this.“

The altitude entered into positive integers and rose fast and in a moment steadily began to slow. They both watched the count ascend and when it came to a stop they watched it still. Tezac clenched his fists and Leargam shifted his stance first onto one foot and then onto the other so that he rocked back and forth as if at the start of a race. Sejanus waited and watched the doors commence to slide open and onto darkness.

They looked between one another and then out into the shadows, peering into the gloom of the emergency lighting and the that of the moons and stars shining through some far off window of the magrail port and illumining the internveneing hallways with a ghoulish twilight. In it they found glowlamps shot apart by precise spreads and here and there the bodies of the dead or dying. Spent shell casings gleamed like the eyes of animals in the dark. A man screamed and then fell into weeping and muttering and then silence.

There was gunfire, far and then near and then far again. Men uttered their last cries or
lingered on somewhere in the black and cold. They heard distant voices, stripped of all but their authority or their fear and what signified their truer selves. Silence took hold again, as it does. Tezac looked to his friends, they at him, and with a nod he set out into the atrium of the lifts' boarding platforms.

"Where we headed?" Leargam said and took up post at the edge of the archway into
the corridor beyond and Tezac the other, but Sejanus disappeared into the shadows ahead. "The fuck is he going?'

"Residential." Tezac said.

"I'm getting too old for heroics, kid."

"If it was you up there, or him, and her down here with me, would I leave either of you two to die?"

"I should like to think." He said. "But I see your point. Even if its a damned suicidal point to have."

"You think I forgot?"

They crept on. The bodies that lined the walls and were scattered across the floor amidst the debris of grenade blasts and ammunition cartridges were of prisoner and staff alike. He searched among them as he went and, though there were women and children dead with the men, none were Katherine. He could not decide how the thing boded.

"This isn't good, kid." Leargam whispered behind him. "There's more of them than us and equal parts dead. Where's that Sejanus asshole?"

"Anybody we come across will be none too happy to see us." Tezac said and peered round the corner before him and found it empty beyond. "One'll shoot you just for the uniform you're wearing; the other, cause we blew up their computer. I wouldn’t worry about it. Come on, we're getting close."

Tezac stepped out into the opened doorway they had arrived at and surveyed the
concourse that lay before him then and waved Leargam through. Gunfire rattled far off and hurried the old man into the residential atrium, empty and silent as the creep of the frontline would have it be.

They moved through the miscellany of looted possessions and tossed out bedding and broken furniture that littered the floor and circled round to the railing of the stairwell and started up to the second leve
l, then the third where they saw Sejanus across the way. Tezac nodded to him and went until the walkway swept left at the turn at the end of the wall and then followed its course to circle round to his position – into earshot of the voices within the opened door they both now perched beside.

"You've been at it long enough." They heard and then laughter. "It's somebody else's turn, man."

"Six men." Sejanus whispered to him. "Some armed, some with just their rifles nearby."

"You already had a turn." Another man said from inside the room.

Tezac motioned for him to switch places and Sejanus did so and the big man slid to the edge of the threshold. He stuck his eye out into the open and saw there within the room the group of inmates Sejanus had described to him, their weapons where he had said, and they were arrayed about another of their number who gyrated atop some figure indistinguishable in the gloom.

Tezac spun at once into the room and took up the rifle leaned against the jamb of the door and fired from the hip at the men before him, spraying with its four barrels in an arc. Blood spewed into the glow of upturned flashlights, limbs flew free and men fell dead and
in a moment all who remained were himself and the man prostrate before him. He approached and the man squirmed away from him, his hands held up.

"What the fuck, man?" He said. "We would have let you have some."

He drove the butt of the stolen rifle into his face and it collapsed under the blow and he commenced to beat him until his cranium became bits of bone and random visera. He heard Sejanus storm into the threshold behind him and then stop. Tezac knelt to the woman face down at the center of all the dead and turned her over and saw in the broken, lacerated face some semblance of the woman he had known, but in her crazed eyes there was no sign of life. He closed the eyelids and let her fall back down to the floor.

"That her?" Sejanus said and turned at the sound of Leargam's boots upon the grating of the walkway and then looked back to Tezac.

"Kid," The old man said over his shoulder.

"Nothing for it." Tezac said and stood.

"Should never have come to a place like this." Sejanus said and stepped into the room. "We need to keep moving."

"You're in the wrong place for that, pal." Someone said from without the room
and Leargam turned on the voice and had begun to back into the doorway when a shot rang out that pinged against the stone of the wall beside it. "That was a warning. You two in there, throw down your guns and come out or I blast your friend into two pieces."

"Tezac," The old man said.

"Keep talking if you want me to do it anyways."

"They're not on the walkways." Sejanus said. "I would have heard."

"Walkways or no, there's going to be two dozen out there. Whoever they are." Tezac said and threw down his rifle and at once Sejanus reached for it. "No. It's not just you you're making decisions for."

"So we surrender."

"Better than dying." He said and went on when he saw the meter of his vocal implant prepare to speak. "They don't teach you this in the Citadel, but you can't escape death. Surrender now, and you can fight later. When getting blown in half isn't a certainty."

Sejanus let fall the weapon and stepped to the side that Tezac might pass and he did so. He followed after him and
they both joined Leargam out on the walkway and looked down upon the cadre of inmates that were spread out over the floor of the atrium below and in exo-suits done up with tar and engine grease to create a paltry black. He took it for camouflage until he saw the Chain and the Fist, the seal of the Concillium, crude to pointlessness as bare spots in the amalgam that coated the armor of their shoulderplates.

"By order of the Black Blood of the Concilium of Man," The man who had spoken to them said, the high purpose of his words foreign in his mouth. "I proclaim you spoils of war,
and slaves of the fifth kind."