Prison Planet

by Jake Elwood

  Footsteps clacked on the stairs behind her, and the voices of her companions went silent. She turned around.

  A woman descended the staircase, a Dawn Alliance officer with a pinched, disapproving expression. She smiled with the air of someone doing a difficult and pointless trick, then let her face sink back into its distasteful grimace. “Your ship is approaching.” She pointed at the windows behind Alice. “You're going home.”

  Chapter 3

  Officers filled the shuttle.

  The wardroom, apparently, had held only about a third of the captive officers on the giant space station. Almost forty prisoners, all of them men, sat on the hard benches that lined both sides of the winged landing craft.

  No one knew for sure what world was below them, but he had a strong inkling it was Gamor. Half way from Dawn Alliance space to the United Worlds base at Garnet, Gamor was closer to home than he could have hoped for. If the Dawn Alliance was shipping prisoners so deep into the Green Zone, the war had to be going very badly for the United Worlds.

  That was essentially what he'd learned from his fellow prisoners. Everyone who'd been in the wardroom when Tom arrived had been captured in the opening days of the war. Most of them were under attack before they knew war had broken out. Few of them even managed to put up a fight.

  In the ten days since his arrival at the station, prisoners had trickled in with stories of other battles. None of them had much good news to share. The attack on Garnet had been an utter disaster for the United Worlds. They hadn't lost Garnet itself, and many ships has survived, but the losses in men and ships had been catastrophic. And the UW Navy, shocked and furious and badly disorganized, had reacted poorly. They'd sent small sorties out, poorly supported, in doomed missions to strike back, somehow, some way, against the enemy. The DA smashed one mission after another, destroying ships and killing crews. All over the Green Zone the Dawn Alliance was taking territories, digging in, and making alliances with the colonists. Meanwhile, the United Worlds Navy floundered, blundered, and lost ships.

  It can't all be bad news. He scanned the haggard faces along the opposite bulkhead, searching for some flash of spirit, some hint that hope remained. One of those weary men must have seen some scrap of success before being captured.

  He would have to wait to find out. No one was going to speak, not with Dawn Alliance guards sitting in jump seats along the middle of the shuttle. Tom was learning to hate the cold-eyed men who wore the uniform of the Dawn Alliance. Hate them and fear them. They were free with their shock batons, ready to retaliate for any hint of rebellion or even impertinence. He'd learned to toe the line, it shamed him to admit how thoroughly.

  You'll get yours. He glared at the nearest guard, nursing a faded coal of anger, making a vow that felt hollow and pointless. This was a clash of nations, of cultures. Prisoners had to be controlled, and the fear that grew from a measured cruelty was the most efficient way to maintain that control. It wasn't sadism. It wasn't wanton. It was simple, calculated efficiency, stripped of any shred of compassion or remorse. It was too clinical, too impersonal to feed his rage, and the anger faded, leaving him empty and cold.

  None of the officers had any contact with enlisted personnel. He could only wonder about the Kestrel's crew. He worried about them. Once he'd sworn to get them all safely back to Garnet. It was obviously a promise he had no hope of keeping, but his sense of responsibility still gnawed at him. They were his crew, and in many cases they were his friends. He was sharply, acutely worried about them.

  The shuttle began to vibrate, distracting Tom from his somber thoughts. His pulse increased, and he reached down to grip the edge of the bench seat beneath him. That drew an amused glance from the man across from him, so Tom made himself let go.

  For pity's sake, this isn't the first time you've been on a shuttle as it lands. He felt so completely helpless, though, that every tremor of the seat, every hum and rumble from the shuttle's wings seemed to signal his imminent death in a fiery crash.

  I'm going to have to escape from this place soon, or it'll unman me completely.

  He tried to remember what he knew about Gamor and couldn't come up with much. It was terraformed, so the air should be breathable. There would likely be Terran vegetation. He didn't think there was a colony on Gamor, though. He couldn't remember why, but there had to be something wrong with the planet if no one had settled here.

  It looks like I get to be a pioneer. Until I get out of here.

  The shuttle landed with a harder thump than Tom was used to. He grunted with the impact, then lifted a hand to shield his eyes as the back end of the shuttle swung open.

  No sunshine came streaming in, though. The surface of the planet was almost as dark as the shadowed interior of the shuttle. The outside air rolled in, so hot that perspiration sprang out immediately on Tom's forehead, so humid that he gasped, struggling to breathe. He smelled dirt and distant flowers, sap and fuel and the rich tang of rotting vegetation. He welcomed each scent as a distraction from that terrible humidity.

  “All prisoners will disembark!”

  Tom wasn't sure which guard had given the command, but he knew better than to dally. He stood with the rest of the prisoners. Rising was more difficult than it should have been. Gamor's gravity was distinctly higher than standard, and Tom sighed, feeling a twinge in his knees. If I can feel it already, it's going to get a lot worse.

  As he stepped down to the ground he got his first glimpse of the surface of Gamor. The first thing he saw was a tower, five or six meters high, built of logs. It was such a bizarre choice of building materials that Tom froze for a moment, gaping. The prisoner behind him gave him an impatient nudge and he kept walking, staring upward.

  The top of the tower was about two meters square, and it housed a single soldier with a gimbal-mounted multi-barrel gun. His attention was fixed on the prisoners, and he tracked them with the gun as they walked.

  As Tom looked around he saw more archaic notes. Coils of wire festooned the legs of the tower, wire with jagged metal points jutting from it. He'd heard that some of the colonies used such primitive technology, but he'd never actually seen barbed wire before. More of it glinted on tall fences that pressed in on either side. Almost twice the height of a man, the fences had wooden posts linked by close-spaced strands of wire covered in knife-like barbs as long as Tom's little finger.

  Beyond the nearest fence was a hundred meters or so of open ground and then an unbroken wall of thick forest. This had to be what happened when you terraformed and then nobody moved in. Trees grew everywhere until wood became not just a cheap building material but an actual nuisance that had to be cleared away before you could build.

  He looked at the ground around him and saw tree stumps every few meters, cut almost flush with the ground. Thick roots wound across the dark soil, making footing treacherous. By the look of it the ground would be a quagmire of mud when it rained. He looked up, saw a layer of gray cloud stretching from horizon to horizon, and grimaced. It probably rained a lot.

  Half a dozen buildings stood near the shuttle, some wooden, some metal. The shuttle rested in the middle of a broad white circle someone had marked out by pouring a white powder directly on the ground. A second white circle marked another landing pad. It was the most primitive shuttle port Tom had ever seen.

  Barbed wire completely enclosed the landing pads and the cluster of buildings. The fence had two gates, one leading to forest, the other opening onto a larger compound. As Tom watched, a soldier swung the gate open.

  “This is Camp One.”

  Tom looked around, finally spotting the speaker, a short man in burgundy with a sash across his chest and a pistol belted around his waist. He had a bristling mustache and an air of all-encompassing self-importance. A clerk hovered at his elbow, and a pair of soldiers with rifles stood behind him.

  “My name is Amar. I am the commander of this camp. You are prisoners here, and you must understand one thing. You have no rights.”

  The pris
oners glanced at each other. The faces around Tom showed the same unease he felt.

  “We have few rules here,” Amar went on. “But the rules we have come with harsh penalties.” He leaned forward, glaring at the prisoners. “Very harsh penalties indeed.”

  “Now look here.” A prisoner took a step forward, a thick-bodied man with the three and a half stripes of an overcaptain on the rumpled shoulder of his uniform. “You can't say that we have no rights. There are international treaties that clearly state-”

  Amar made a gesture and the soldiers behind him moved toward the captain. To his credit the man didn't flinch. He had to know that whatever was coming wouldn't be pleasant, but he stood with his head high and said, “There is a galactic community of nations which will look upon-”

  Two rifle butts slammed into him, almost simultaneously. The man on his left was aiming for his face. The one on his right aimed for the stomach, and struck half a second sooner. The captain grunted and began to double forward, accidentally saving himself from a broken nose. The upper rifle butt hit his forehead instead. The impact echoed, a sound that would haunt Tom's nightmares for days.

  The captain fell, dropping like a corpse, his limbs loose and slack. He landed in the dirt, making no attempt to protect himself, and the beating continued. One soldier drove kicks into his ribs while the other gripped the barrel of his rifle and slammed the butt repeatedly into the side of the captain's face.

  The crack of a gunshot, impossibly loud, made Tom flinch. Wet dirt erupted from the ground not much more than a handspan behind one of the soldiers. Only then did Tom realize that some of the officers had started to move, surging forward in an instinctive urge to help their comrade.

  Now they stood frozen, arrested in mid-lunge, staring up at the guard tower. The man in the tower stood rigid, fingers curled around the triggers of his weapon, obviously ready to open fire.

  “You bloody shit rat,” said a lieutenant, but all the prisoners took a step back.

  The beating lasted for most of a minute, a horribly long time considering the vigor of the attack. When Amar finally gestured his men back, the captain was a bloody mess unmoving on the ground.

  “You have no rights,” Amar said, his voice terribly low and quiet. “That is your first lesson, and I think perhaps you have learned it. Hmm?”

  Prisoners glowered at him, but nobody spoke.

  “There is another lesson.” The man's cold gaze ran up and down the line of prisoners. “When you violate the rules, you will suffer. You have learned this. Now you must learn that you will never suffer alone.” And he nodded to his two soldiers.

  They advanced on the line of prisoners, and the rifle butts lashed out. They attacked the men who'd been on either side of the fallen captain. A commander doubled over as a blow took him in the stomach. A lieutenant bobbed his head to the side, slipping the blow and making the soldier stumble against him. It brought him only a moment of respite. The rifle butt slashed sideways, taking him on the side of the face and knocking him to his knees.

  Prisoners on either side clenched their fists but didn't move, all too aware of the man in the tower. It was impossible to doubt that Amar would massacre them all if they fought back.

  The new victims endured half a dozen savage blows each. By the end of it both men were on their knees dripping blood into the dirt. The soldiers, unruffled, returned to their places behind Amar.

  “I have been merciful with you today,” the man said. “I'm done being merciful. You have an important role to play in the transformation of this planet. It will be made useful to the Dawn Alliance. Your enlisted prisoners will do the work required. You will guide them.

  “You will have the opportunity to encourage resistance among your men if you choose. Know that if you do this, every prisoner will suffer. We would prefer willing cooperation from able men, but we will break the spirit and the body of every prisoner if we must. We will kill nine men out of every ten if it buys us the cooperation of the survivors. Is that clear?”

  A few prisoners glared at Amar, silent and furious. The rest, Tom among them, couldn't meet his eyes.

  “Disobedience will lead to physical punishment,” Amar said. “Transgressors will be punished. Their comrades will be punished.

  “Violence against the guards will be punished with death. Death to the attacker. Death to at least three additional prisoners. Perhaps more, depending on the severity of the attack.

  “Attempting to escape is punishable by death.” He shook his head, looking like a stern parent unable to understand the shenanigans of his children. “There is nowhere to escape to. There are no ships, except shuttles with no ability to enter seventh-dimensional space. There is nothing in the system, nowhere to go. The planet contains work camps controlled by the Dawn Alliance. There is nothing else.

  “And yet, some prisoners will try to escape. Know this. Every man who attempts escape will die. For every man who successfully eludes the guards and makes it into the jungle, three prisoners will be executed. Is that clear?”

  No one spoke.

  “It has happened,” Amar said, sounding almost cheerful. “We once had three men evade capture for almost forty hours. Their bodies decorated the posts just inside the prisoner compound, until the smell became unendurable.” He smoothed the front of his uniform with small, pudgy hands. “The nine prisoners who were executed as a deterrent were not put on display.” He smiled coldly. “We're not barbarians, after all.”

  Chapter 4

  The intake process took an hour. Very little of substance happened during that hour; mostly Tom stood in line while the men ahead of him received uniforms and gave up the clothes they'd been wearing since their capture. The process was managed by bored, indifferent clerks, with armed soldiers always in sight. It was simultaneously dull and alarming, and humiliating to boot. The only upside was that it took place indoors, in a long narrow building with polymer walls and rough plank floors and, wonder of wonders, a weak, overburdened air conditioning system. The humidity became merely bad instead of intolerable, and although sweat continued to trickle between Tom's shoulder blades, it was less than before.

  The three officers who'd been beaten stood at the back of the queue. They received no medical treatment, not even the captain who'd taken the worst of it. He wobbled on his feet, and Tom watched him from the corner of his eye, waiting for the man to fall. He never quite collapsed, though he put a hand out blindly to steady himself against the wall from time to time.

  It pained Tom on an abstract level to lose the uniform he'd worn with pride for the last several months. The fabric was rumpled and dirty and pungent, which made parting with it easier. He stripped and changed under the uncaring eyes of the guards and his fellow prisoners.

  His new uniform was a shade of khaki so pale it was almost white. The trousers were the right length, which was a stroke of luck. By the look of it, everyone was getting trousers of the same size. They were baggy enough to accommodate even the fattest man, with a drawstring that Tom pulled tight and tied. The blouse was similarly shapeless, loose and baggy with a shoulder seam that reached halfway to his elbows and sleeves that jutted past the tips of his fingers. He rolled the sleeves up far enough to free his hands and joined the men ahead of him, who stood patiently waiting for the rest of the group to be outfitted.

  The uniforms were made of a rough, coarse fabric that made Tom's skin itch. He fidgeted until he drew the attention of a guard, then made himself stand still. The only part of his old uniform that remained was his shoes, and he decided he should be grateful to retain so much.

  It would have been easy enough to distribute three dozen uniforms in a couple of minutes, especially since there was no difference in sizes. The clerks, though, made the process interminable. Three of them controlled the distribution of uniforms, each man clutching a data pad and behaving as if he was handing out fully armed warships instead of third-rate pajamas. Every prisoner had to have a thumbscan. After the scan all three of them would peer into
their data pads, then poke at their screens with excruciating slowness. It would have been maddening if Tom hadn't been sure that whatever came next would be worse.

  When the injured men took their turns the process became even slower. One man had trouble pulling his bloodstained shirt over his head. The captain could barely lift his arms to shoulder height, and when a young commander tried to help him a guard sprang forward, rifle at his shoulder, finger tight against the trigger.

  Through it all, speakers mounted high on the walls droned an endless stream of propaganda at the prisoners. Tom heard about the glorious destiny of the Dawn Alliance, the numerous and irrefutable reasons the Alliance was entitled to every terraformed planet in the Green Zone, and a shopping list of absurd atrocities they blamed on the United Worlds.

  There was cautious praise for the colonies which had signed treaties with the invaders, and a laughable vilification of Neorome and Tazenda, the two colonies which had refused to sign. According to the unseen speaker, the two upstart colonies had ruled the Green Zone with an iron fist, terrorizing their neighbors until the courageous Dawn Alliance had arrived to dispense justice and liberty.

  Of course, the United Worlds was also supposed to be a tyrannical force dominating the entire Green Zone. Tom supposed the two villains must have taken turns oppressing the hapless colonists, and shook his head, not knowing whether to be outraged or amused.

  At last everyone was dressed in pale khaki. Amar reappeared, the same two goons flanking him, and ordered the prisoners to follow him outside.

  The humidity hadn't decreased. Tom gasped and dragged the coarse sleeve of his uniform across his perspiring face. He tasted salt, and wondered if he would ever get used to this place.

  The same gray cloud covered the sky from horizon to horizon. It matched his mood. Tom shuffled along with the other prisoners, following Amar to the gate that separated the smaller compound from the rest of the camp. The gate was as primitive as the rest of the fence. A perspiring soldier swung the gate open, then watched with sullen suspicion as the prisoners filed past.