Inferno 2033 Book Two: Perdition

by Michael Compton

  Lani broke in on Sands’ thoughts. “Hey, anybody have a key to unlock these guns?”

  Sands turned to Ahmer. “Won’t your sonic screwdriver, or whatever you call it, do that?”

  Lani pulled on the cable that was looped through the trigger guards of the row of shotguns. It was secured by a conventional padlock.

  “Wow,” Bao said. “That’s really old school.”

  Sands looked it over—hardened steel shank, laminated body, keyed locking mechanism. It was a padlock, all right. He remembered something G.K. used to say whenever the team was confronted in the field by some unexpectedly sophisticated technology: “Nothing outsmarts a computer like a good old-fashioned rock.”

  “We have bolt cutters in our tool kit in the Vestibule,” Desmond offered.

  “Yeah, that should work.”

  Desmond wondered if that was Sands’ way of telling him to go top deck and get the cutters. Or maybe he was being sarcastic. It was hard to tell with this guy. But after a moment it was clear that Sands’ mind was on something else. He paced up and down the racks of gear, then from the hatch to the wall, as if he were trying to get a measure of the space.

  “Something’s not right,” he said. “Ahmer, pull up those plans again.”

  Ahmer scrolled through the images on his tablet until he found the layout of the compartment. It was just a blank rectangle with a hatch indicated on the outer bulkhead. The rectangle was long and narrow, just like the compartment itself.

  “Dimensions look okay,” Ahmer said. “But look—what’s this?”

  He pointed out another blank rectangle, much bigger, that lay behind the back wall.

  “I don’t know much about blueprints,” Sands said, “but they usually don’t have big empty spaces like that, do they?”

  “No. They don’t.”

  “All right, everybody check that back wall. We’re looking for a crack, a seam, maybe some kind of catch.”

  They all inspected different parts of the bulkhead, running their hands over surfaces, feeling behind racks of weapons and armor, but nobody could find anything.

  “Hey, check out this fire alarm,” Bao said. He pointed at a glass-covered, red rectangle mounted on the wall opposite from where they had been searching. “I don’t think it’s a fire alarm.”

  “I think you’re right,” Sands said. The box didn’t have any markings referring to fire or an alarm. Behind the square of glass was nothing but a round red button, like a panic button. The cover that framed the glass window was locked with a small brass padlock that could easily have been jimmied with a screwdriver. But Sands figured there was a reason the cover was made of glass. He knocked it out with a tap from his elbow.

  “All right, everybody stand clear of that back wall.” He punched the button, and a series of explosive bolts cut a neat rectangle in the bulkhead, revealing a large metal door, like that of a bank vault.

  “I think we just found our magazine.” Sands inspected the hand-wheel on the door, tested the latch handle. Both were fixed tight. “No padlock on this one. Think you can open it, Ahmer?”

  Ahmer stepped up, massaged the keypad of his hand-held with a motion somewhere between playing a piano and milking a cow. Several times he looked expectantly at the latch, only to go back to the keypad.

  “Des, it looks like we might need those bolt cutters after all.”

  Missing the irony, Desmond took a stutter-step toward the hatch before he either caught himself or was stopped by the ping of the electronic lock.

  “Got it!”

  Sands acknowledged Ahmer’s grin with a nod and spun the wheel-lock. With a pneumatic hiss, the six-inch-thick door swung open.

  “Holy shit,” someone said. It was the consensus view.

  Even Sands was taken aback by the weapons bonanza. The automatic rifles, high-caliber machine guns, and grenade launchers weren’t really a surprise. But why would the guards of a prison ship ever need surface-to-air missiles? And it wasn’t just the type of weapons that surprised him, it was the quantity. There were tons of them, enough to outfit an army. Including handguns, Sands thought, there might have been enough to put a weapon in the hand of every person on the ship—guards, Drones, and inmates alike.

  “Why so many weapons?” Desmond wanted to know.

  “And why hide them like this?” Lani wondered. “Like they’re super top secret.”

  “Two good questions,” Sands said.

  “Maybe Miss Brzinski have the answers,” Ahmer offered.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sands took a wicked-looking bullpup from one of the racks, hefted it appreciatively, and cracked open a box of ammo. “Okay, folks, time for a crash course in military armaments and self-defense.”

  ***

  It was a delicate matter arming the Drones. Lani claimed to know her way around an AR—at least she said she could load one and shoot it “without killing anybody.”

  “Well,” Sands retorted, “the idea might be to kill somebody.”

  Lani replied that he knew what she meant, which he did, but he couldn’t resist needling her. She was a little put off by the backwards configuration of the bullpup, which she held in her hands like an unwanted gift. “Why is the magazine behind the trigger?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You load one and you pull the other. The fact that you know the difference tells me you’ll be okay.”

  She smiled at that. Sands didn’t smile back, but he happened to notice that Ahmer did. It only lasted an instant before teenage awkwardness prevailed and the two guilty parties suddenly became fascinated by their shoes. But it occurred to Sands that he had caught Ahmer several times looking at Lani the way hopelessly hormonal nerds have been looking at attractive young women since the days of slide rules and T-squares. Sands filed this observation in his growing store of Headaches I Don’t Need.

  Sands decided the best course of action was for each of the Drones to carry an unloaded rifle strapped over each shoulder and a backpack full of charged magazines. To his own back he strapped a grenade launcher and a shotgun. Altogether, it made for a hefty load, but better to get what they could carry now rather than take a chance on being left short if they couldn’t get back to the cache. In case of direst emergency, Sands instructed them on how to load and fire their weapons, but he made it clear no one was to touch their rifles unless either he ordered them to or he was dead. “And even if I’m dead, you better think twice.”

  He also outfitted each of them with a knife, tear gas grenades, and a baton, which he instructed them to carry in their hands at all times. If they did come under attack, they would at least have their batons at the ready, and the worst damage they could do to themselves would be to drop them on their toes.

  Once everyone was outfitted, they resealed the vault and closed the hatch. Sands didn’t like leaving the riot gear so poorly secured, but he figured they would be back soon enough. Luckily, he aired his concerns—just in the habitual way he had picked up over years of running operations with many moving parts—because Ahmer and his magic keypad had a solution.

  “Every hatch has a mechanical latch and an electronic latch,” he explained. He touched a few keys, and the latch clicked, a tiny LED indicator going from red to green. “Now, no one can open it unless they are hooked into the main system.”

  “Okay,” Sands said with a nod. He would have to remember to stop taking this kid for granted. He had knowledge and technical knowhow Sands lacked. “Can you get Hari on that thing?”

  “Sure,” Ahmer said. “It has a function similar to cell phone.”

  He touched a few keys, the device crackled, and Hari’s voice said, “Ahmer?”

  Ahmer looked at Sands. “Go ahead. You’re on speaker.”

  “Hari, this is Sands. Do you have those names I gave you?”

  “I found two, Mr. Sands.”

  “That’s good. Can you send the information to Ahmer for me?”

  “It’s on the way.”

  Sands hefted his bullpup in t
he ready position. “All right, everybody. Saddle up.”

  “Where are we going?” Lani wanted to know.

  “Deck Eight.”

  “Deck Eight? Why?”

  “Reinforcements.”

  -11-

  A religion that a person has not made for himself is a superstition and not a religion.

  —Martin Luther

  Ray Leflore sat on his bunk, staring, as he often did, at the legend emblazoned on the bulkhead across from his cell: 8 FRAUD 8.

  When he had first come to Inferno, three years ago now, the word had made him angry. Anger was the “sin” designated for Deck Five, and he would have felt much more at home there. Or they could have placed him on Gluttony Deck. It would have been an insult, but at least it would have made some kind of sense, considering how he liked to pack it in. Violence Deck would have been more appropriate, since that was how he had lived his life. He could even have accepted Heresy Deck, because, in a way, he had long ago thrown over everything he once believed in. But how was he a fraud?

  He had told himself the word was meaningless, just an in-joke of some architect who had a fancy for Dante, and it had nothing to do with a prisoner’s crimes, real or fabricated. Or, even if the deck names were intended as meaningful labels, the reality was that prisons got crowded and inmates were placed wherever there was space. Ray had been a late-comer to the ship, helicoptered in long after it had filled most of its cells and put out to sea. But every day, there was the word, in giant block letters, staring him right in the face, the first thing he saw in the morning and the last thing he saw at night. After a while, such things work on a man.

  Ray had never been the contemplative type, but that word had turned him practically into a Buddhic navel-gazer. He considered all the ways he had been a fraud in his life—his failures as a husband and father, his carefully cultivated tough-guy aura, his need to make jokes in the face of death, his dedication to defending a nation that had never been kind to him or others of his race. The self-inquiry had started almost as a game, and he was surprised how easily he came up with convincing evidence of his fraudulent nature. Before long, the obvious instances were exhausted. The game became a challenge, and as he delved deeper, a habit. And a habit in prison is a way of life. Fraud, he realized, was the very essence of Inferno and everything it contained, from the phony “justice” it meted out to its prisoners to the phony “Process” it doled out as food. As a young man still in thrall to the daily Bible lessons conducted by his pious father, Ray’s favorite scripture had been Ecclesiastes, with its famous verse: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” Here, in his tiny wire cage in the belly of Inferno, he had devised his own scripture: “Fraud of frauds! All is fraudulent!” It didn’t have quite the same poetic ring, but it had the virtue of being true. And once he had seized on that bit of wisdom, he made peace with his verbal tormentor. If he was a fraud, it was because he was of a fraudulent world.

  So he sat on his bunk. Staring at that word but thinking about other things: about the lights that still dimly burned, about the video feeds that still followed their familiar schedule, about the Process that still extruded onto his waiting tray at the appointed times. The ship’s clockwork mechanism was still purring along, but what did it really signify? It was all calculated to make him think that things were normal, that someone who knew what he was doing was in control, that all was well.

  But all was not well. An explosion had rocked the ship. The power had been interrupted. There had been chaos above decks, and now a dead quiet. He had heard the rumors that the crew had abandoned ship, that some stray Drone was wandering below decks, freeing prisoners according to some plan only he knew. He had even heard one of the freed prisoners was a woman.

  Ray knew better than to believe ship’s rumors, but he also knew better than to dismiss them. His cell was close to the main elevator, and he had heard the familiar whine of its machinery several times since morning. After years of listening to it, he could tell if the car was going up or down, and even at which deck it was stopping. Someone had descended to Deck Nine that morning, then back to top deck. Then down to Deck Three. Since then, the elevator had been silent, neither descending to the lower decks, nor returning home to the top. But Ray had the sense that someone was still moving through the ship.

  He was too far from the service stairs to hear any movement there himself, but someone had heard or seen something, and word was spreading like slow, rumbling thunder. Someone was coming.

  ***

  The elevator had been okay for the short trip down to the magazine on Deck Three, but Sands wanted to be more discreet in reaching Fraud Deck, the last deck before the ship’s deepest pit, and his old home, Treachery. It was slower going down the stairs of the service shaft, but the walls were solid and Sands and his crew were shielded from prying eyes. Someone may hear their footfalls on the metal steps, but if seeing was believing, hearing was only a rumor, and Sands felt the less his fellow inmates knew about who he was and what he was doing, the better.

  Still, it was remarkable how the murmurings of the rumor mill so closely tracked their movements. When they arrived at the landing designated 8 FRAUD 8, it was as if the whole cell block had been waiting for them. Sands immediately regretted bringing Lani along, because her presence on the mezzanine set off a cacophony of jeering and cat-calling that rattled his skull. The Drones hung back as if they meant to stay in the stair well, but Sands forged ahead, Lani scuttling up to him so close he almost tripped over her. She was crowding his gun hand, but Sands said nothing. She was understandably scared, and it wasn’t lost on him that some of the sex-starved crazies on the block were already jerking off in their cells. There was nothing to do but keep moving—get what they came for and get out.

  “Which cell?”

  Ahmer consulted his hand-held. “Opposite end. By the elevator.”

  “Of course. Glad we didn’t come that way.”

  “But you said—”

  “Keep moving.”

  By the time they got to the end of the mezzanine, inmates were throwing things—Sands didn’t want to know what. Fortunately, the cell was situated where the mezzanine joined the central shaft structure, and it was shielded somewhat from the view of the other inmates and their projectiles.

  Sands stopped, the Drones crowding behind him like chicks behind a mother hen. The man he saw sitting in the cell before him was thinner than the last time he had seen him, with maybe a little gray at the temples, an extra line in his brow. But for the strange expression on his face, Sands would have known him anywhere. Ray LeFlore looked at Sands with penetrating eyes, as if he recognized this ghost from the past but meant to stare him down until he proved his reality or dissolved into mist.

  As the two men continued to stare at one another the Drones became antsy, but at last the man in the cell spoke.

  “Sands.”

  “Catfish.”

  For a moment, Sands thought his old friend might burst into tears, and he could not have stood that. Sands warded off any rising sentiment with a crooked smile. “So, you ready to stop sitting on your sorry ass and start kicking some?”

  Catfish smiled. He rose from his bunk and came to the grate. “Laissez les bon temps roulez.”

  Desmond leaned over to Bao and whispered, “This is weird.”

  In a moment, Ahmer had sprung the hatch and Catfish was out of his cell. The two old friends approached each other awkwardly.

  “For a second there I wasn’t sure you were real. Then I wasn’t sure if you’d come to bust me out or kill me.”

  “Kill you? Shit, Catfish—”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Sands knew. He’d had plenty of long nights when he thought he could have easily killed any one of his old compatriots for their apparent betrayal at his trial. But now…

  “That was a long time ago, Cat.”

  Catfish nodded. “They drugged us.”

  “I knew that.”
<
br />   He didn’t. But now it all made sense.

  “If you guys are gonna hug it out, I wish you’d get it over with so we can get out of here.”

  Catfish looked at Lani with a quizzical eye. “So she’s real, too? I thought sure that was my imagination.”

  Lani cocked her head. “Ha. Ha.”

  Sands and Catfish embraced, thumping each other on the back.

  “Glad to see you, Bro.”

  “Glad to be seen.”

  “All right,” Lani pleaded. “Let’s go!”

  “One second.” Sands took one of Ahmer’s rifles and a loaded magazine and held them to Catfish. His old friend eyed the weapon appreciatively.

  “Whatcha got there, an XM, full auto?”

  “Only the best for you, Bro.”

  “Nice!” He took the bullpup, rammed the magazine home, and threw the bolt.

  “How come he gets a loaded one?” Bao demanded.

  “How many people you killed with one of these?” Catfish asked him. Bao was silent. “That’s why.”

  “All right.” Sands turned to Ahmer. “Point the way.”

  Following his tablet like a divining rod, Ahmer led the party through several twists and turns to another block on the same level. There they found Angel, doing pull-ups from a pipe that ran across the ceiling of his cell. At the sight of Sands and his party Angel froze in mid-air, let out a whoop, and did a somersault, sticking the landing like a gymnast. Unlike Sands and Catfish, Angel was untroubled by doubt or recriminations about the past, and he regarded his old friends with a broad grin.

  “Shit, it’s about time you two gold-brickers came and got me. Where you been?”

  “Up on Lust Deck bangin’ yo’ mamma.”

  Bao and Desmond looked at one another with wide eyes. “D-a-a-a-m-n!”