by Elin Wyn
We reached the front of the line, turned in our trays to the inmates who had taken this particular task as their own, and headed out.
Larko and his friends were nowhere to be seen, thankfully.
“Who was that idiot, anyway?”
I gritted my teeth. “Someone I used to know, when I was a kid back on one of the Cilurnum stations. I had a chance to change my life. He didn’t. Not surprised he ended up here.” And I really didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “Come on, I'll show you where the men's barracks are.”
“Keeping genders separated seems like a lot of effort for a system that seems to rely on self-policing,” Mack commented.
“Keeps down trouble. And, honestly, a lot of the women like it that way.”
He nodded. “What happens if you aren't in by curfew?”
“The doors to the dormitories are sealed until the next cycle. If you're with a large enough gang, it's not a big deal. On your own, things might be a little dicey.”
He stood at the door, frowning. “If I'm in here, who's going to see you safely back to the women’s dorm?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “That's very sweet, but I'll be fine.” He didn't look convinced. “We’re nowhere near curfew. I'll be heading right back to the dorm and there're plenty of people around.”
He still didn't look happy, but, honestly, I didn't need him to take care of me. Didn’t want to have to try to figure out how much I could trust him. I showed him how to wave his cuff towards the sensor, then the door slid open and I stepped back.
“Good luck, I'm sure I'll see you around.”
With obvious reluctance, he stepped through. The door immediately slid closed behind him, resetting for the next inmate.
Odd guy. I headed back to the other side of Minor, nodding to people I knew as I passed.
Most of them seemed to be here on fairly minor infractions. Nice enough folks, I was sure. I figured they’d do their time, get sent back home whenever their term was up, and only remember this place in odd moments, warn their kids to play it straight.
There were some bigger bruisers to be certain, like Jado and Malik, and treacherous thugs like Larko. For the good of the station, I hope the system kept them up here.
Mack, I couldn’t figure out what he could have done. Big enough, certainly strong enough, to have gotten into all sorts of trouble.
But he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. I remembered the wipe marks on the back of his neck and shuddered.
The only time I knew about people being wiped was after interrogation. Which meant my nice guy had to be mixed up in something pretty serious.
I headed back to the women's side, avoiding the sound of couples taking advantage of the time before curfew.
There might be curfew to ensure a functioning workforce, but some people didn't care.
I waved my arm at the scanner, looking forward to a quiet evening. Who knew, maybe tomorrow I’d look up Mack from the clinic’s comms, see if I could find a little more information about him.
Inmate files were sealed, but that didn't mean everything on Minor was. And where there was one authorized way to open a system, there were always others. Just took a little looking.
The door scanner remained blank.
“Not again, this glitchy thing,” I muttered.
I waved my arm, slower this time and then pulled it back to examine the cuff better.
My band had gone black.
I tapped it gently, then with a little more force.
Black. I'd never seen, never even heard of anyone's cuff going black.
“Door stuck again?” Ardelle’s giggle would've gotten on my nerves once upon a time, but she was a genuinely kind woman. I couldn't imagine what had gotten her sent up here and, in all of our late-night chats, had never asked.
Her blonde hair was more than a little mussed, and the front seal on her jump suit askew.
“How is Jado doing,” I asked, evilly amused to see her blush.
But she surprised me. “I don’t want to talk about Jado, silly. I want all the details on that guy you were with earlier. Come on, get in so I can make you spill.”
“I can't.” I showed her my cuff and her face fell.
She gnawed her lip. “When did that happen?” she asked worriedly.
“I don't know. It was green at dinner. Must be some sort of malfunction.” We both stared at the band, willing it to go back to a nice safe green.
She threw her shoulders back. “Come on in with me.”
“You know that won't work. We’d just both get shocked, and lose points.”
“You don't know that. If yours is malfunctioning it shouldn't shock you. Maybe it won’t even realize the two of us are entering at once.”
I shook my head, stepped back from her. “It's not worth the risk. Besides,” I grinned, fighting for equilibrium, “how would I ever explain to Jado if I got his girlfriend hurt?”
“But what are you going to do?” she whispered.
“It's all right. I’ve got a plan.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I've never even heard of a cuff malfunctioning and you've already got a plan for this?”
It was hard to explain that the vast majority of my previous life had required coming up with a plan for everything, no matter how small the chance. You never knew when one of those low probability contingencies could end up saving your hide.
All I said was, “You never know what can happen, right?”
I headed back into the corridor and waved as I turned the corner. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“You better,” she called, but I heard the whoosh of the door seal behind her before I took off.
I headed back to a spot two levels down, near the edge of the maintenance zone. I’d noticed it and unconsciously filed it away while stumbling around the satellite my first day here, trying to get my feet under me.
For all my talk of always being prepared, I certainly hadn't been ready for my cuff to go black.
I’d been on my way back from securing a hiding place for the datachip. Maybe I'd been smug, overconfident. I’d spent almost 6 months on this assignment, most of it deep undercover in the warren of neighborhoods of the Orem station. Each strand of data had been carefully pulled, then teased out of a nest of rumor and innuendo.
Rumors had been checked, deleted files recovered. I’d already sent a comm to my handler, Stanton Grene, that I was ready to be brought in.
The stakes were too high to leave the disc on me. Life on a station at the Fringe of the Empire was always dangerous. Even if no one ever knew who I was, it wasn't impossible to fall off a glide between station levels or get hit too hard in a casual mugging.
I checked my chrono. Before long, I'd be back to the little apartment I'd made my own.
But I never made it.
When I woke up, I was in the clinic on Minor, Denon running a healing wand over the gash on my temple.
Lost in memory, I didn't hear them until it was too late.
Larko and one of his meat-headed goons blocked the next intersection.
I glanced around. No one was around, either everyone had gone in for curfew early or, more likely, the word had gone out that if people didn't want trouble they'd stay away.
“Looks like getting out of the lower levels didn’t do you any favors, Zayda” Larko mocked. “We ended up in the same place after all.” His smile spread across his face, but his eyes were flat and cold. “And what a shame. Somebody's been a bad girl. No points at all?”
His friend laughed and I rolled to the balls of my feet, ready to fight or dodge.
Another of their gang came around the corner behind me, boxing me in. I glanced up, but the ceiling tiles in this part of the satellite were fused. Annoyingly good work.
Larko stepped forwards as I crouched into a fighting position. “Such a shame. No points, no handy friend.” He ran his eyes over me slowly, no doubt undressing me in what passed for his mind.
I might've been
unsettled by it, but anger was more useful.
“Maybe you need some new friends? You should think about it.”
Another step, then another, intent clear in every motion
There wasn’t any point in wasting time or energy trying to talk my way of out this. No one would listen, they weren’t reasonable sorts of guys. I stretched my shoulders, flexed the muscles in my arms. And looked the group of them over, weighing, appraising.
No way out but through, Stanton often said.
“Bring it,” I muttered, and braced myself for the fight.
Mack
I walked through the door into chaos packed into a large, low-ceilinged room. Probably not a surprise that throwing a couple of hundred men into shared living quarters with minimal supervision is going to lead to a lot of mess.
I wrinkled my nose. Void, everyone here needed a shower. Maybe two.
Men milled back and forth, mostly with the casual bullshitting and nods of people who've agreed to leave each other alone.
Three men tangled in a scuffle in the far corner but no one seemed concerned.
I took a step towards them when a skinny older man with red rimmed eyes stepped in front of me.
“You’re new here, I get that, I do, but I really would leave them alone if I were you.” His squeaky voice rode up and down the scale with each word.
“And that would be why?” I asked, somewhere between confused and annoyed.
“It’s the Monts, they all are, it’s what they do. Either over a woman, or rations, or who’s going to be in charge today, or tomorrow. Or yesterday,” he giggled.
I stared at the combatants, noting their relative sizes, weights, fighting ability. They all seemed fairly evenly matched. I shrugged and turned away.
“Good idea, good idea,” the skinny man half skipped next to me, patting my arm.
I looked down at him, frowning. “Who are you, and why do you care?”
“I'm Gozer, I am. I know everybody and everything in here. I keep my points up, yes I do, yes I do.”
His hand trembled, just a bit. I wondered what he had been on when he was scooped and brought up here. But if he had information about the prison, maybe he could help me figure out what I was doing here.
But, first things first. “If you know everything about this place, how do I get a bunk?”
“Follow me, follow me.” He patted my arm again and then, with his odd half-skip walk, darted in front of me, across the open room. A corridor led from the far wall with four more doors branching off of it, but he kept going to the end.
“Richo didn’t come back yesterday, or the day before or before that. Nobody’s claimed his bunk yet, it’s in the back, nobody wants it.” He looked up with a flash of embarrassment for a minute. “Most people don’t want to be that close to me. Richo didn’t mind, but he’s gone now.”
“If it's flat and nothing’s crawling in it, you’ve got a deal. I’ve slept in worse.”
The words jabbed at me. How did I know that? There was no memory to back up my claim, just a brief glimpse of hard-packed dirt under a vast, open night sky.
Oblivious, he bounced over to a small door at the end of the hall. I stooped to follow him into a narrow, barren room. The few beds were occupied by men that could all have been clones of Gozer: skinny, used up, fearful.
Gozer stood next to the sole unoccupied bunk in the back, stroking the thin blanket nervously.
“I do my shift in the laundry, I do, I do.” He looked up slyly. “Our things get done first. Nice and clean.”
The other men looked away, two resuming their conversation, the third flipping idly through a tablet.
I called over to him and he flinched. “Hey, you got access on that?”
“It’s in dummy mode.” He wrapped his thin arms around it, waiting for me to try to take the tablet from him. “Stuff comes in, but I can’t get to the outer network.”
That’s what they tell you, I thought, but… a sharp pain bloomed in my temple where the headache that had hovered just out of sight since I woke in the infirmary took hold.
Gozer still stood anxiously by the bed, rocking from side to side.
“Looks great, thanks.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress was possibly better than just lying on the permasteel deck, but just barely.
“Do you want Richo's job, too?” Gozer asked. “Nobody’s seen him, and they liked him down on the farm. He was strong.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You look strong, too.”
I matched his smile. “I suspect I’d manage.”
For all of his little twitches, Gozer obviously had some brains. Find a quiet place, find a big guy as protector, find a job. He had prison life figured out.
“What happened to Richo, anyway?” I asked.
Gozer’s face fell. “Nobody’s seen him. Must have got shipped out.”
“That's a good thing, right? He's probably somewhere back on the station, waiting for you to get released so he can buy you a drink.”
Gozer shook his head. “I don't think so, I don't think so.”
What an odd little man. I leaned back on the bed, eyes closed. One thing was right at least, the sheets were softened from repeated washings, and clean.
Tomorrow I’d ask him to show me how to get a job at this farm. Have to do something to keep my points up until I figured out what the hell I was doing here and how the hell I was getting out.
I thought about the sick system Zayda had described. Prisoners ruling other prisoners. Sure, it might work if you had some sort of innate belief in people. But I didn't.
I mentally walked back through the day, waking up in the clinic, and then...
There was nothing. It was like staring into a dark fog trying to conjure faces from the twisting mist.
And if I didn't have my memory, I had no idea what I had done to end up here. Had I robbed someone? Killed someone?
With the same sort of flash I'd had of that unknown night sky, I realized that yes, I had killed someone in the unknown past. But it wasn't something I felt guilt over, just flat. It was a job.
Suddenly the men’s section with its noise and stench was too close, too confining.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I muttered.
“We all say that,” Gozer giggled, and bounced on his bunk.
“No, right now.”
He shot up with alarm. “You can’t do that. Curfew is soon.”
“Are the doors locked?”
“No, not yet. There’s a warning siren. Don’t get inside, have to stay outside. Outside with the ghosts.” Gozer looked honestly worried.
“I’ll be fine”. My words, an echo of Zayda’s earlier, didn’t seem to calm him much.
I looked for anything to leave as a token that the bunk was spoken for, but all I wore was the light gray pants, shirt, and jacket I’d woken up in. No pockets. Wouldn’t have been anything in them anyway.
“Keep my bunk for me, alright?”
He nodded, face still screwed up with concern. I headed back down the corridor, planning to go straight through the large gathering room to the halls of the corridor proper. There had to be one corner in this entire place quiet enough to think.
A large hand fell on my shoulder and I brushed it off. “Later,” I growled, glancing back to see a pair of men who looked vaguely familiar. A tall blond and a stocky gray haired man to his side, both looking like they could handle themselves. On the neck of the gray haired guy I could see a black mark, disappearing into the collar of his jacket.
“You don’t want to try to go this alone,” the taller one said. “Loners tend to disappear.” He turned away. “Let us know when you figure it out.”
As the door slid shut behind me, I realized I didn’t have any idea of the layout of the prison. I’d been to the clinic, the mess, and here.
“Let’s change that,” I muttered to myself as I jogged down a random hall. “Time for a scouting mission.”
As I moved, I traced a map of the
corridors in my head. Just having a better idea of the lay of the land eased some of the tension from my shoulders. One more pair of turns, and I’d head back to the dorm. No reason to take stupid risks on the first night.
Turning another corner, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight. I slowed, considered if I should get involved, then one sound cleared any doubt.
“Like hell, asshole.”
That was Zayda’s voice.
I tore through the corridors at full speed.
So focused on reaching her, I almost tripped over the arm of a guy sprawled across the corridor floor.
Zayda faced off against the jerk who harassed her in the mess hall. Another man sat slumped against the wall, shaking his head slowly.
The guy I had almost tripped on started to sit up. “Not today, bastard.” I slammed his head back against the decking and he stayed down.
Zayda landed a sharp elbow into the asshole’s throat and he staggered back, eyes wide with shock.
She crouched, sweeping her leg in front of her and knocking him to the floor. In a flash, she was over him, her knees hitting him in the shoulder socket while she choked him into submission.
Her fire, her fierceness mesmerized me. So much so, I almost didn't notice when the third joker pushed himself away from the wall.
“Back off, you bitch,” he shouted and reached for her.
I reached him first and threw him back down the corridor. He hit the deck with a satisfying thud.
I turned back to Zayda. The idiot had finally gone limp.
“Nice job,” I said as she stood up from him.
She whirled, fists ready to fly.
I raised my hands up. “Just me. Glad to see you didn’t need help.”
She looked at the guys on the deck past me. “Not much. Thanks.”
Her shoulders slumped and with an unexpected flash of rage I saw a bruise beginning to bloom on her cheek. She saw where my eyes landed and scrubbed at it as if it were a stain she could just wash away.
“A couple of them landed. Shouldn’t have happened. Got sloppy. As for why I'm still out here…” She raised her cuff and tapped it.
“I thought you said they didn't go below yellow.”
