by M. D. Cooper
DEALS
STELLAR DATE: 3.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Summerville Regional Justice Center, Jerhattan
REGION: Earth, Terran Hegemony InnerSol
The corridors were all made of plascrete, with no windows in sight. Reinforced security doors separated sections of cells every fifty meters or so.
The voice contained no emotion, and she wondered if its words were a joke or a threat.
Inmate 2527 nodded and moved cautiously along the corridor, pausing at each turn. After two intersections revealing even more corridors filled with cells, the directions proved trustworthy.
The voice shifted to a higher register, as if reciting a poem.
Inmate 2527’s thoughts collected around the idea of a bomb hitting her location. Surprisingly, the concept didn’t send her into a panic. She recognized a list of dangers with a protocol for each.
2527 reached the end of her fourth corridor.
Easing around the corner, 2527 found a short stretch of corridor that ended on a round room with other passages out. Every wall was covered in workstations and screens monitoring sections of the prison. She counted five guards in the room.
In a few seconds, 2527 had prioritized her targets in the command node. She checked her pistol, then raised it with a supporting hand and walked forward with a shoulder close to the wall, firing deliberately.
Three of the guards fell from shots to the head and chest. The two remaining had time to take cover behind consoles, and frantically return fire.
2527 zagged in the corridor, ducking as shots flew past her own head. There was no cover, but the guards weren’t taking their time to target her.
She didn’t know why exactly, but she understood they were poorly trained. They failed to work together and instead huddled as they fired over the tops of chairs. Confident information appeared in her mind as she needed it, and she slid left and right in response to their shots. She hit one guard in the hand, and he dropped his pistol, shouting with pain.
The second guard bobbed over the back of his console, and 2527 shot him in the neck. A spray of blood hit the wall behind him, and he slid to the floor, clutching at his throat.
Adjusting the book against her stomach, 2527 walked into the command center. She checked the guards scattered around the floor. The guard she’d shot in the hand was crawling on all fours toward one of the exits.
Memories surfaced as she looked at the men and women. Some looked familiar. She associated them all with violence and fear.
2527 came around a console, approaching the guard trying to escape. A smear of blood followed him on the plascrete floor.
“Hey,” she said.
He looked up, and she kicked him in the face. The guard collapsed, unconscious.
2527 paused to steady herself under an onslaught of memory. Images and emotions surfaced from the haze like faces from dark water.
Shaking her head, she went back to what appeared to be the master console. Banks of controls corresponded with cell blocks.
In rapid succession, the cell blocks changed status from locked to open, and another terminal near the security panel flashed walls of green text.
The voice ignored her, saying instead,
A muffled explosion filled 2527’s hearing, and the floor jerked upward. A second later, she was flattened on the plascrete floor, gasping for breath, as the overpressure wave roared down the connecting corridors, and the world vibrated like nothing had changed.
Cara Sykes, the voice had said.
In the aftermath of the bombing, Cara remembered why she was a prisoner.
FAMILY JEWELS
STELLAR DATE: 3.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Summerville Regional Justice Center, Jerhattan
REGION: Earth, Terran Hegemony InnerSol
Outfitted in a set of riot armor from a munitions cabinet outside the command center, Cara controlled her breathing as her thoughts were nearly overwhelmed by memories and the intrusion of Link connections. She had nearly forgotten what it was like to be connected to the outside world.
voice said.
Cara slung the rifle over her shoulder and clipped three grenades into her harness. They weren’t going to stop Marines, but she might hold her own against more of the prison guards.
Her name had felt awkward in her mind for a few seconds, but now she slipped into it with ease. She was Cara, and her family name had meaning as well, a gallery of faces, watching from her recovering memory.
She saw them but couldn’t remember their names. Deeper thoughts turned like rusty cogs, while immediate tasks came like second nature.
Without thinking about, she slid the armored suit’s helmet over her head and accepted the flow of data to her Link. Building schematics filled her mind, along with local topography.
“Summerville Justice Center,” she said, trying out the name. She didn’t remember entering the place, and the line drawings populating her mind’s eye didn’t jog any memories.
Cara laughed.
Felix didn’t answer.
Cara’s suit fed bio and environmental data into her mind, and she saw that, despite being underweight and malnourished, there was nothing chronic in the readouts of her body.
From her location, she would need to climb ten levels to reach the surface, through what appeared to be identical cell blocks. Each collection of corridors surrounded a central yard area where the prisoners had performed their work.
As she studied the schematic, the image hiccupped and updated, showing a quarter of the facility now collapsed. A section of the path Cara would have followed was marked as a radiation danger zone.
No matter how Cara studied the map, she couldn’t find a route that didn’t require passing through an irradiated section of the prison. The riot gear would provide limited protection, but couldn’t keep her alive long enough to get to the surface.
A path across the facility glowed in the schematic.
She would need to drop two floors and pass through the lowest level where the facilities services provided geothermal heat and water storage. From there, Felix showed her a maintenance lift that rose directly to the surface.
Cara crossed her arms as she looked over Felix’s plan. Most of it would work.
Using the armor’s interface to the general administrative system, Cara searched for her name among the prisoner records. Surprisingly, she was able to locate her file quickly. She didn’t have time to read it or the sentencing documents. Instead, she pulled up the record she had hoped to find: her prisoner property statement. Accompanying the record was a cell block storage location.
She pulled the rifle off her shoulder and held it across her body, then broke into a jog in the direction of her belongings.
The suit provided a few lift enhancements in her legs and arms, making the run effortless. She surprised several small groups of guards who thought she was friendly until she charged into them and kept running.
The suit’s comms systems maintained a barking babble of coordination among the guards. They were recovering from the blast while also realizing that every prisoner had been released from their cells and the docility protocol. One voice was plainly crying, while others sounded incredulous. It occurred to her that there were more human voices than seemed necessary.
Cara thought of the guard standing over her in the cell, and her stomach twisted. How long had she been here? Years at least. She would have to review her record when she had time.
Farther back, before waking in the cell, her memory continued to fail her. Bits of her life surfaced, punctuated by emotions that didn’t necessarily make sense. The corridors of a freighter’s habitat ring felt like a punch in the gut, while the view from the top of an ancient building, overlooking the remnants of a city half-sunk in slow, green water filled her with warmth, though she couldn’t remember why.
Still, someone was going to pay. Her revenge wasn’t finished with the guard in her cell.
The storage room she was looking for was only a level above the cell block where she’d been housed, but the corridors were now filled with prisoners in various states of self-awareness. Some were still obviously in the thrall of the docility protocol, and wandered around with their mouths open, eyes staring, while others were fighting guards or choking each other.
There were too many for her to fight. The armor drew attention, but when she bowled over the first group of brawling prisoners and kept running, the others gave her space.
Cara jumped on the information.
Cara turned a corner to find a phalanx of guards setting up a defensive position at the entry to the open yard. The local comms was filled with their bickering.
Out in the yard beyond their position, some twenty prisoners were forming ranks in the central space, ready to attack. The guards nearly had a crew-served gun in position, with barriers on either side.
Dropping her shoulder, Cara rushed forward and slammed into the guards assembling the gun, sending them sprawling. In the confusion, one of the barriers fell forward, and the prisoners shouted with violent glee as they seized the opportunit
y to attack.
Cara kept running. Her boots hammered on the plascrete floor as she dodged inmates. A muscled man tried to grab her around the waist, and she shot him in the jaw. He fell back, gurgling. After that, everyone else gave her a wide berth.
The open room was lined at the sides with long tables that she had vague memories of being covered in bits and pieces of machinery as she and other prisoners worked the assembly line. The armor made it easy to leap over the tables and reach the opposite corridor. According to her helmet’s HUD, her goal was just fifty meters away.
Running past another wave of dazed prisoners, Cara rounded a corner and found herself facing the reinforced door of the inmate property storage area. A thick pane of glass filled the space beside the door. Two guards were visible beyond, watching the prisoners Cara had just passed.
When they saw her, their voices immediately came over the local comm channel.
“Who are you? Are you from Administration? Are we getting an evac?”
Cara slowed to a walk and slung her rifle. She nodded her helmet at the window.
“That’s right,” she said. “Let me in, and we’ll get you out of here.”
“Wait,” said a guard coming up behind the others, a mean-faced man with grey hair. “How do we know you’re with Admin? You could be a prisoner.”
“The prisoners are busy killing us,” Cara said. “I just took out a block of them. But you can stay in here if you want. You can get treated for radiation poisoning later.”
“Radiation!” the first guard said. “It was a nuke after all? I didn’t believe it. Why?”
Cara shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Maybe we had some high-value prisoner we shouldn’t have taken in.”
