by Greg Curtis
Meanwhile the first robot floated over to the only chair in the room, one that he was sure hadn’t been there when he first entered it, and bade him sit down. It was the first chair he’d seen on Unity that actually looked like it had been designed for a human being. More than that, it even looked comfortable.
Reluctantly, though in truth there was nothing else to do, he took the proffered chair and waited for the people to arrive. It was a mistake.
Immediately he sat down some sort of energy field sprang up around him. Glowing sparkles of light surrounding him, encasing him. Exactly like those he had seen used against Helos and Li so long ago. Yet in spite of knowing what the field was, and what it would likely do, he reached out and touched it like a silly child. The fire flash that blinded him wasn’t half as bad as the pain that rocketed back up his arm, and he yelped in shock even as his vision darkened. It was far worse than any electric fence he’d ever heard of, and maybe it was just as well he fainted. At least he didn’t have to know the pain for a bit.
In time, and he had no idea exactly how long, he returned to the world, and even had the presence of mind to realise that one of the machines was talking to him. Had been for a while. He tried to pay attention, but it wasn’t easy when his fingers were on fire and his entire body still tingling.
“- have been found guilty of violating the Interstellar Community Earth treaty in trying to pass along two sets of advanced technological information. And last you have been found guilty of stealing a Force guard’s weapon and discharging it without authorization on a space ship.” It took him a few seconds to realise it, but suddenly he understood he was on trial. And by the looks of things, missed most of it already. If they’d even had a trial. He surely hadn’t been out of it that long.
“Accordingly this court will now pass sentence.” Helos and Li! It was his only thought and he cursed their names for the millionth time. They had somehow managed to not only persuade the Community to charge him. They’d then managed to get him tried in absentia and convicted, all without his knowing a thing about it. God they must have hated him.
“In reaching this sentence it is acknowledged that submissions have been received from members both in the Force and the Houses of Science, all accepting that you now have gained advanced knowledge not only of Calderonian technology, but also that of the Interstellar Community. As such you pose a continuing and serious danger to the Interstellar Community and its treaty with humankind. No submission has yet been received from the human ambassador.” Which pretty much squared with what he’d guessed they’d do. First they didn’t want to rock the boat with the Community and lose even more ground, and second he wasn’t exactly flavour of the month with them anyway.
“Therefore sentence is passed as follows. You will be taken directly from here to a waiting convict departure vehicle. There you will be stripped of all clothing and technology, and transported to the prison colony furthest from the human territory, placed at least one thousand two hundred and ten klicks from the next nearest prisoner, and left there for a term not to exceed fifty standard years.” Fifty years! Daryl practically cried out loud at the sentence. He’d be eighty-four by the time he was due to be released, assuming he survived. And with no weapons and no knowledge of the world, he was unlikely to survive more than a month.
“But your Honour -.” That was as far as he got. He wasn’t given a chance to protest as some sort of metal object was passed through the field by one of the robots, and his world turned black again in mid-sentence.
********************
The next time he woke he was in a tiny little room. One that reminded him distinctly of his cell on the Targ, but with one critical difference. This one was moving. He could feel the faint fluctuations in his weight that told him a crude antigrav field was operating. It took him all of a second to realise that he had to be on the prison transport vehicle. No chance for appeal. No chance for anything. Sentence had been passed and was already being carried out.
Looking down he discovered he was naked, and he realised they’d stripped him. Removing not just any contraband he might be carrying, but also his dignity. And unlike the Targ, he had been given no prison garb to wear. He hunted around for some, not having found it laid out on the bunk, and finally realised there wasn’t any. There were no storage closets, nothing was waiting for him except for what he could see and there was nothing to see.
His entire world consisted of a little round room, with an artificial light in the ceiling, steel walls with no windows and no door, a steel floor, and a toilet hole. Water for a shower looked like it might come from a hole in the ceiling, and food seemed to consist of a small pile of ration bars on the bed. No food dispenser, no water dispenser, no way of making a call to his advocate, nothing.
For the longest time Daryl just sat there on the bunk, trying to make sense of his new nightmare, and wondering how it could be. And how he could possibly survive like this anywhere. Even prisoners had rights. It made no sense, except that it also made perfect sense. He was human. A member of the most loathed and despised race in the universe, as it turned out, with good reason. He had committed crimes, and even though he’d thought they’d been dealt with on the Targ, apparently they hadn’t. Add to that his fellow scientists’ obvious hatred of him, the possible danger he still posed to their Community’s treaty with Earth, and of course some rather questionable alien laws, and he was living with the result. For as long as he could survive it.
He was going to be discharged naked and alone onto an alien world for fifty years with no chance of release, and somehow expected to survive. Except that he doubtless, wasn’t expected to survive. In fifty years’ time they’d be lucky to find even his bones. That was the whole point of the punishment. The worst of it was that there was nothing he could do. He was trapped, doomed.
Deep down he had a need to scream his lungs out, to bang on the walls until they broke and he could find whoever was driving this tugboat and get him to take him home. But he knew that once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. Hysteria and blind panic was already threatening to overcome him and somewhere behind it was despair. Which he knew was only reasonable. After all, in ten minutes he’d gone from being a free man on an alien world to a convict being exiled to an unknown destination. At least that was ten minutes from his perspective. It could be far longer, since he had no idea how long he’d been out for.
He’d never even been given a chance to speak in his own defence. That was the other thing that rankled. He hadn’t been able to defend himself. The whole thing was some sort of travesty of justice. An alien kangaroo court. Except that it might be normal. For all he knew, all Interstellar Community courts might be the same.
Somehow he calmed himself, knowing that this wasn’t the time to panic. Instead he had to explore his surrounds, try and make contact with his guards, and even try to launch an appeal. If such things existed. But surely he told himself, prisoners had to be given some basics. The essentials of life. Food, water, shelter and clothing. Except of course, that he had no idea what an alien prison would be like. Maybe they didn’t believe in letting their prisoners have anything. After all, if they survived, they’d only have to be brought back into society one day, to cause more trouble. Letting them die was probably far more efficient, and after all he was only a human. A member of a race that murdered its own people.
Taking his own advice he started exploring his new prison, millimetre by millimetre, all the while calling for the guards. For anybody actually. Neither approach was successful. Other than what he’d seen in his first few seconds here, there was nothing else to find. No compartments with food, water or clothes. No sign of any communications equipment. Not even toilet paper. And try as he might, no one answered his ever louder calls for attention. No voice either alien or computer. Could it be that there were no guards?
The impossible and yet seemingly true idea scared him more than he could say. The idea that he was alone, on an alien prison ship, being transpor
ted to God knows where, and without anyone to even tell him what was happening. Suddenly he started panicking, he simply couldn’t help himself, and his calls became screams. Unanswered screams.
Banging on the walls didn’t help either. They were soundproofed in some way, and though he kept banging, he could hear nothing from beyond them. Which didn’t help his mood. In fact it just made him panic more, and bang louder, desperate to see or hear someone else. Anyone else. But it was useless. Even when he managed to rip the bed loose from its floor mounts, and smash it against the walls, there was only a modest thump, and no sign of buckling in the steel. Not enough to bring anyone running. Not enough to break him loose. He would run himself into complete exhaustion long before the walls ever gave way. Unfortunately, the rational part of his mind had by then retreated to safety, and what remained was far from sane.
Once the bed was in his hands and he knew he was both trapped and doomed, he gave in to his panic, and began beating the bed frame against the wall, again and again and again. It didn’t matter that it was hopeless, that nobody could hear him, that maybe there was nobody else on the ship at all, or that even conceivably, it might be a vacuum on the other side of the walls. None of that was important. The only thing that mattered was that he had to get out of the trap.
Naturally he couldn’t. He beat and he beat and he beat the bed frame against the walls until it resembled nothing more than a pile of scrap metal and still he couldn’t even scratch the walls. And then, when he finally understood the futility of it, he threw aside the bed frame and used his hands, beating the walls with them until they were bloody ribbons of flesh, and even then he continued beating them until exhaustion and pain would let him go no further. And all the while a part of him, the part that had always been in control was telling him he was wasting his time, that he was going insane. But he couldn’t listen to it. Not then, and not for a long time to come.
Instead, he collapsed onto what remained of the mattress and screamed his lungs out when nothing else would work, and he didn’t stop until his throat was raw. But that was enough for him to have recovered some strength and he returned to pounding the walls with the bed frame. And so a cycle began as his journey continued, where he would pound the walls as hard and as long as he could, and then scream his rage and frustration when he couldn’t carry on. It was a cycle that continued for many long hours and perhaps even days, until he could continue no more, and collapsed into a dark, dream ridden sleep.
But even in his sleep he knew that his nightmares as bad as they were, were still better than what awaited him when he was awake.
Chapter Eleven.
After five weeks on Erewhon Daryl knew he was in desperate trouble.
The scant rations he’d been left were finally running out despite his desperate efforts at conservation, and he’d realised he’d have to start foraging. Actually hunting. The problem was that he had no idea whether the flesh they had would be edible. He suspected not. The smell from the only animal he’d thus far managed to kill was bad enough to strip paint. And cooking just made it worse. An indescribable stench that seemed to linger long after he’d hurled the carcass far away. He gagged at the thought of putting anything so horrid in his mouth. Yet unless a miracle happened, he knew he’d have to. It was food poisoning or starvation.
The plants weren’t much better. He’d found a tuber like thing, that with several hours boiling, could become merely bland. A potato it wasn’t but at least it was close. And he’d also found a fruit he could eat. It looked like a carrot, hung from a sickly looking pine tree, and tasted like liquid slime, but at least it hadn’t made him sick. Other than nauseous. He could only hope that it had some protein content.
The water too had been a problem. Even after he boiled it, he’d found it sickening. It was stagnant, all of it. Even the rain was stagnant. Never the less he drank it. There was nothing else to drink after the shower had stopped working, and thus far it hadn’t made him any more sick than a touch of diarrhoea.
The very air itself was sickening. It stank as though the area was geothermal, though he’d seen no sign of any activity in the region, and in truth, even the sulphurous parks on Earth had never been so bad. This place was more like the very pits of hell itself, the odour that of the death of demonic creatures. He wouldn’t have breathed it in at all had he had a choice. But his lungs kept working no matter how much he didn’t want them to.
He was slowly becoming sicker with every week that went by. He knew that in his more lucid moments. In part it was simple hunger, as he was becoming weaker every day. But hunger surely couldn’t cause severe stomach pain and his stomach occasionally just seemed to tie itself in knots for hours at a time. Hours where he could do nothing but lie down and scream with pain. But if it was appendicitis, as he feared, it kept going away.
Nor could hunger account for the blurring that was affecting his vision, as though someone had found some fogged glass and sewn it across his eyes. At first he’d thought it might be some sort of allergic reaction, hay fever or its equivalent. But he wasn’t sneezing, and it wasn’t going away either. Sooner or later he feared, he would be completely blind.
But it could perhaps explain the hallucinations that had started annoying him. The voices that came out of nowhere, and said things he didn’t understand. The images that assailed him, day and night, and which he still couldn’t understand. At least he hoped so. The alternative was that he was going mad.
Even more worrying though was that he’d started day dreaming, more and more often, even when he was supposedly awake. Often now when he sat down, or took a break from his labours, he seemed to lapse into hours of vivid dreaming. More than a few times he’d started himself awake to find the sun had moved a long way, and his head was full of strange images. Things that he couldn’t quite remember, but which terrified him regardless.
For the past couple of weeks though it had worsened again as his dreams had become part of his waking life. He saw things he couldn’t understand, even when he was supposedly awake. And sometimes he even spoke with them. Shouted and screamed at them, praying that they’d go away, and it was only some time later that he realised there’d never been anything there. That he was screaming at thin air. Or that he’d been talking at all.
It was a frightening thing for him to know that he was slowly losing his mind, and worse to understand that there was nothing he could do about it. Whether it was the hunger, the isolation or something in the air or water of this putrid planet, it was beyond his ability to do anything about it. He just threw himself into his work harder, in the hope that concentration would keep the nightmares at bay.
At least there’d been nothing physically dangerous to him, so far. All of the animals were no larger than big rabbits, herbivores and carnivores both. But he had noticed larger shapes swimming in the slow moving river nearby and decided early on never to swim there, or anywhere else. The area where his cell had landed was relatively open and flat. He wasn’t likely to fall and break any bones nearby. Which was fortunate as he had no medical kit. Not even bandages.
Li and Helos had really done a number on him. No food, no real water, a barely tolerable planet, they must have hated him as no one before.
He’d known from the first day here that he was not going to survive fifty years. At best, eking out the last of his rations and combining them with the local vegetation, he’d hoped at the start that he might make one year before he starved to death. Assuming the local food had any nutritional value at all. Now after five weeks he knew he didn’t even have that much time. He didn’t know how long he did have. Three months perhaps. He hoped. It was what he could do in that time that was important, and whether he could get off this rock.
Already he’d found both iron sand and clay, and with those two things and the local variant of wood, he was now building a forge. Or at least starting it. Presently he was making clay bricks and kiln drying them. Then when he had time, which was all he actually had, he could start smelting me
tal. Wrought iron he figured would be the best he could do, but it would be a start.
With iron he could make weapon tips, better than the sharp pieces of flint he’d attached to his make shift spears. He could also perhaps, make an axe. And an axe might eventually allow him to break open the antigrav unit at the base of his cell. Of course the casing itself was some sort of hardened alloy. It would not be easy.
With the antigrav unit, and any tools he could fashion, he hoped he could maybe build either a radio, or perhaps even turn his cell into a true space ship. It would have many of the components he required, and he had the knowledge to convert the tiny little one cell prison ship itself into a full interstellar cruiser able to find Earth and get him home. It was pie in the sky stuff, and he knew it. But a man had to have hope. Without it, he had nothing.
His problem was that even with the severe rationing he’d undertaken, first one food bar a day, and then a half, he’d only begun his exile on the world with a two week supply. And even at his present rate he had only another week or two to go. Already he’d lost a lot of weight, fifteen kilo’s at the least, and for the first time in too long he could see his ribs sticking out above the grass skirt. He had to find food. Maybe food would stop his hallucinations.
