London Wild

by V. E. Shearman

  Myajes returned the salute. The Guardsman seemed to be blocking the way into the prison camp without actually looking as if he was trying to block the way. Myajes felt he’d better introduce himself. Now to see just how well his makeup job had been that morning. ‘I am Captain Monroe. I’m here to question one of your prisoners taken in the last few days.’

  ‘I see, sir,’ the Guardsman replied, and he continued to stand there for a moment, causing Myajes to wonder if maybe he needed a password of some sort. If he did, he had no idea what it might be. The Patriarch hadn’t said anything about needing a password, but it was unlikely even the Patriarch knew everything. The lack of a needed password could get him killed.

  A few seconds passed before Myajes noticed that the Guardsman was listening to the plug in his ear, no doubt receiving further orders on what to do about their visitor. It ended when the Guardsman nodded reflexively at the instructions he had just received. He then stepped to one side of the door and said, ‘Please follow me,’ before leading the way through.

  Myajes obeyed and followed the man through the door into the courtyard of the prison camp. The door he passed through caught his interest for a moment. It was about eight inches thick, but that wouldn’t have done much good against a cutting laser. However, the thickness of the door seemed to be in three sections, the two outermost parts being each about four inches thick. But in the middle (and this was probably true of the large gates as well as the small door) there was a thin layer of something else, something definitely not wood that was most likely laser resistant and quite possibly missile resistant. Myajes was impressed, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the entire camp was like that.

  Everything actually inside the camp seemed to be made of wood. Wood was very expensive these days; the forests in this area had been part of a major reforestation policy brought in several hundred years earlier. It was only legal to use the trees in the forest if you planted three new ones for each you removed, and of course the licenses to do so were so expensive that it was rarely cost effective to bother. Of course there were always loopholes. If doing something seemed to be in the government’s best interest, a way could be found to circumvent any inconvenient law. The prison camp had probably been built from the timber cut from the trees that had grown in the location that the prison camp and the road leading to it now occupied.

  It was a large place, big enough for the twenty prison blocks, all of which looked to be wood on the outside but were probably made of something more secure on the inside. There were also a large number of auxiliary buildings, canteens, arsenals, administration blocks, relaxation areas for the off-duty Guardsmen and so on, again all apparently made of wood. There were even ramparts around the top of the wall, making the prison camp feel a little more like a fortress. Of course there were the two towers he had seen previously, but there were also a number of searchlights scattered along the ramparts, all of them aiming inwards.

  The Guardsman waited until Myajes was in the courtyard and then closed the small door behind them. There were two buildings just inside the gates, positioned so they were just clear of anything that might drive through them. Each had a large reflective glass window looking out onto the gates. He couldn’t see anyone in the buildings, but he had no illusions that they couldn’t see him.

  ‘This way,’ the Guardsman told him, and he led Myajes into the rightmost of the two buildings.

  The first thing Myajes noticed as he walked into the small building (in fact, it took up so much of the little building it would have been impossible not to notice) was that the wall farthest from the door was lined with monitors, watched by three Guardsmen. Every inch of the route from the fake plants to the prison camp’s doors was covered by hidden cameras. They must have seen him hesitate to drive over the fake plants at the entrance to the bridle path. They must have seen him scratch the paintwork of his car trying to take that narrow corner and how many attempts it had taken him to make it. Worst of all, they must have seen him stop the car to check that his disguise, uniform and orders were all authentic looking. He had to be careful. They couldn’t know why he had stopped to admire himself, but they must know he had.

  Besides the door, just below the window was a long table on which were three stacks of paper. There a communication link was being used as a paperweight on the stack nearest the door. A Sergeant sat in a chair next to the table but facing the door. He had a piece of paper in his hand which he had apparently just stopped reading as Myajes had entered the room.

  The Sergeant was on his feet in an instant and saluting the entering officer, but to the three soldiers on the monitors he might as well not have existed.

  Myajes returned the salute instantly and said, ‘My name is Captain Monroe, and I’m here to interrogate one of your prisoners.’

  The Sergeant, whose name happened to be Fry, nodded to the Guardsman who had brought Myajes into the building, and the man saluted before leaving. His post was evidently in the other small hut just on the other side of the large gates.

  ‘Do you have orders?’ Sergeant Fry asked him. He seemed to be analyzing every movement the newcomer was making.

  Myajes reached into his pocket and pulled out the papers the Patriarch had forged for him. The seal looked authentic and was signed in the name of one Lieutenant Colonel Norton, known to be fairly high in the ranks of the Elite Guard and believed to be the officer in charge at the Cattery itself. He must have the clout needed to get Myajes what he required. He moved very carefully, aware that everything he did was being studied, even if the Sergeant wasn’t aware that he was doing it.

  Sergeant Fry took the paper and checked it over. ‘Hmm…Well, it looks in order to me, sir.’ He handed the orders back. ‘Do you have the name of the cat you’d like to question?’

  Myajes resisted the urge to grimace when the word cat was used, though it had almost caught him unready. He had to be more careful. Instead he replied as smoothly as he could in the circumstances, ‘I don’t know what name she would be using.’ Myajes knew that it was highly unlikely Lara would still be here if she had given her real name, so he had to assume that she had lied as to who she was when she had first been picked up. To think otherwise would mean all the danger he was currently putting himself in would be for nothing.

  ‘A female, though,’ the Sergeant said as if hearing a revelation. ‘Well, we have a lot of females at the moment. This order to imprison all domesticated cats was made without thinking about where we would keep them all. At the moment we have up to thirty at a time in cells made for one.’

  ‘You don’t sound too happy,’ Myajes commented. The fact that the Sergeant seemed unhappy about the crush in the cells could be good for him, as the Sergeant might have too much on his mind to scrutinize him too closely.

  Sergeant Fry pointed to the stacks of paper on the desk and said, ‘Of course I’m unhappy about it. I’m the one that has to sort them all out. It has to be done every day so that those that are destroyed can be processed properly every morning. It was me alone doing this job before the latest government incentive, and do you think they’ve given me anyone to help with it since the workload climbed thirty fold? And they also expect me to man the doors and cater to anyone coming in with legitimate business or otherwise. At least I have little bit of help with the doors.’

  Myajes decided it was best to show no emotion, although part of him wanted to strangle the man for being so callous as to be more concerned about the paperwork involved than the lives they were ruining.

  ‘Anyway,’ the Sergeant said, ‘I think I know the one you want to talk to. She was brought in the night before last, and everyone seems to want to question her. We’ve even had an official request from Colonel Davis to question her about the shuttle she was on.’

  ‘Shuttle?’ Myajes looked puzzled. It wasn’t out of the question for a Herbaht to make use of a shuttle, but it was unlikely.

  ‘Yeah,’ confirmed Sergeant Fry, ‘it seems the cats have got themselves a few shuttles now.
Oh well.’

  Something obviously didn’t ring true. Myajes knew that the Herbaht didn’t have access to their own shuttles. It was possible a herd follower of the Goddess might have done some Herbaht a favor, but even then, flight plans would have had to be made. Well, he couldn’t afford to worry about it now. As an Elite Guard, he was supposed to be super-efficient, and this new information wasn’t part of his remit. ‘Perhaps if I go to the cells that hold the females I might recognize the one I’m looking for.’ He said, ‘I don’t know her name but I have seen pictures of her.’

  ‘Ok,’ came the reply. ‘I guess if you don’t know which cell she might be in and you don’t know her name, then we’ll have to do things the hard way. Do you have a picture of her on you? If someone here recognizes it, it could save us both a lot of time and hassle.’

  ‘Not on me,’ Myajes replied. ‘I didn’t think I’d need it. I guess I wasn’t expecting you to have so many inmates.’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘That new policy from the government caught us all by surprise.’

  Myajes had to agree there. The wild Herbaht and the herd had never really gotten on, though there had been a few attempts to reconcile the races throughout history. But no herd had ever considered the domesticated Herbaht a threat to them. They had been safe, even protected, for centuries. Something had to have happened recently to change all that.

  While Myajes was thinking Sergeant Fry took hold of the communication link paperweight and spoke into it, ‘I need two Guardsmen here at the double.’

  As he put the link down Myajes looked around and saw two soldiers in their dark purple uniforms run across the short gap from the building opposite to this one. Neither of them was the guard who had let him into the prison camp in the first place. Myajes had assumed the other building was a guardhouse protecting the gate, and this pretty much confirmed it.

  ‘Take Captain Monroe on a tour of the female inmates,’ the Sergeant said to them as they entered. ‘Let him see all of them. If he would like to question any of them, allow it. If he wants to be alone with the prisoner, then allow that too, but make sure he is disarmed first.’ Turning to Myajes, he added, ‘We can’t risk the chance of an inmate getting her hands on a weapon. You know the females are the most deadly of all the cats.’

  ‘I’d heard,’ Myajes agreed. He didn’t like the idea of being without his weapon, but then he didn’t really intend to question Lara. He had to find some excuse to get her outside the prison camp. ‘Perhaps if I were to take her to question her, and then I report that I’m getting nothing out of her because she has been cramped in the cell and needs time to recover before she could be more loquacious…’ he half thought to himself. It wouldn’t do as a plan, but perhaps it was a start.

  ‘I hope the one you want is still alive,’ Sergeant Fry commented as Myajes followed the guard out of the building. ‘We’ve been piling them into the cells like you wouldn’t believe, and we’ve been processing them as quickly as we’re able in order to make room for the next delivery. Fortunately it’s been two full days since the initiative was announced. I think the initial influx will be dying down now. It’ll grow again at the end of the seventh day, though. We’ll get them from everyone who has been keeping his or her cat until the last possible moment. There are actually patrols out, calling on known cat owners, so we can take them in now and lessen the blow on that last day. We’ve had them out since the evening it was announced. No one seems to understand that we haven’t the facilities to cope. If they’d given us notice we could have built more cells, maybe another Cattery or three. But no, no one ever thinks of the logistics of these things. They just announce them and expect others to sort it out for them. Pet owners are the same. They don’t care that the influx on the last day will make the current situation seem like a picnic….’

  Sergeant Fry was still ranting as Myajes was led out of earshot and towards the nearest of the prison blocks. He had thought he might be too late to save Lara, but it hadn’t occurred to him that this government initiative might have caused more of the inmates here to be exterminated even more quickly. She had been a prisoner here for four days now; he doubted that many made it past one at the moment.

  The entryway of the first cellblock was almost like the sitting room of a house: three comfortable armchairs all facing a newspaper in the corner. There was an artificial tiger skin rug on the floor in front of the armchairs, as if the guards posted here were trying to make the place look like a hunting lodge. At least there weren’t heads on the walls. Who could know what heads they might’ve been? Behind the armchairs was a glass case carrying five laser rifles, a small drinks vending machine that looked out of place in the otherwise hunting lodge feel to the room and the door to the cells beyond.

  The guards walked through the hunting lodge room and beyond the door into the cellblock itself without making a greeting of any kind to those stationed here. Nor did the three on guard in this cellblock even so much as look up as Captain Monroe and escort passed by.

  ‘This is the wild cat block house. It was thought you should start here, although due to current population constraints we also have many domesticated cats in these cells too. All those on the right are females, and those on the left are males,’ one of the Guardsmen told Myajes as they walked between the rows of cells. ‘Take your time; look through the spy holes to find the one you want. If you need to we will open the door so you can have a better look.’

  ‘You’ll follow me in?’ Myajes asked. Perhaps they could overpower the guards, creep up on those in the hunting lodge and fight their way out, saving everyone in the camp. No, that was a silly idea. These were Elite Guard, and most of the inmates were domesticated and wouldn’t even begin to know how to fight.

  ‘We’ll wait at the door,’ the Guard told him, ‘our weapons at the ready. If any of them attempt to attack you we’ll sweep the cell with our lasers.’

  ‘I hope you’re good shots,’ Myajes joked.

  ‘We promise that if we kill you doing that, it will be an accident,’ the guard replied with a smirk. ‘Your best bet would be to throw yourself on the ground and hope we miss you.’

  ‘This is it,’ he said after peering into the third cell along through the small spy hole in the door. He stepped back so that one of the soldiers could unlock the door and open it.

  Myajes stepped into the doorway of the cell and looked at the inmates, all of which shrunk back from him. All except one, who sat on the floor just inside the cell and seemed interested rather than scared at his appearance. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something odd about her. Not that it mattered. She wasn’t Lara.

  He could see Lara sitting beneath the window on the cold stone floor. He hadn’t been too late after all, and it was obvious she had recognized him too. But for some reason she was refusing to even look at him. She just shook her head and then turned away.

  Myajes hesitated. Something was wrong. Lara should have been overjoyed at the opportunity to get out of the cell and away from the danger. Why would she shake her head at him unless she was trying to warn him not to reveal who she was? And that meant something had caught her eye when the door had opened that even he had missed. He turned to face the two soldiers with him.

  They both had their laser rifles in their hands, the way they had said they would when the cell door was open. They were both standing there, ready to open fire if the cell’s occupants should attack. Then why did they both seem to be aiming, if only slightly, towards him?

  ‘So,’ one of the Guardsmen asked, ‘which one is it?’

  Myajes looked back into the cells and shook his head ever so slightly. They must have known all along. The Sergeant had used the word cat a lot more than might have been necessary, using it in situations when the word pet might’ve fitted even better. Had that Sergeant been trying to torment him? They had known. No wonder the Sergeant had gone off on a tirade about nothing much, not wanting to give too much away.

  ‘Which one?’ the Guardsman i
nsisted.

  ‘I, er…’ Myajes turned to look back at the guards and then at the inmates. He felt lost for what to do. He rounded back on the guards. There were only two of them. Maybe if he could reach his own weapon… Normally he’d think twice about one Elite Guard; against two he’d probably die, but at least Lara’s secret would die with him. He reached for the holster that had carried the pistol he had brought and found it empty. The Elite Guards had already relieved him of it and he hadn’t even noticed.

  The Guardsman looked him straight in the eye. ‘Are you going to tell us which one you’ve come to try and rescue, Myajes, or do we have to use drugs to force it out of you?’

  ‘You, you…’ Myajes felt stunned. He couldn’t think straight, but there was no real point in protesting his innocence. ‘You know me?’

  The soldier grinned broadly. ‘Myajes Conjah, sixth most wanted in the country, cats and humans included. Why yes, we know you. We want to know why they would have sent someone as important to the cats as you. Who in this cell is so important that they would actually send one of the bodyguards of your Matriarch on some harebrained rescue attempt?’

  ‘Well obviously I don’t intend to tell you,’ Myajes said as calmly as he could manage.

  ‘No,’ the soldier told him, ‘perhaps if we had been a little more careful you would have given it away. However, with the application of a few drugs we’ll soon know who we have.’

  ‘We have a nice cell picked out for you,’ put in the second Guardsman. ‘We cleared out all the other inmates.’ He drew a line across his throat with his finger. ‘We can’t risk putting you in a cell to spread your subversion among others, can we?’

  ‘If I might ask,’ Myajes put to them, ‘how did you know?’ He bet it was that stop he’d made on the bridle path.