Prison Break

by Rachel Ford

  PRISON BREAK

  By Rachel Ford

  A drumroll sounded, and the assemblage responded with cheers and jeers. I was silent. My attention was focused beyond the chaos around me, past the Justices high on their dais, past the constables attentive in their surveillance, toward the broad door at the far end of the open court. The prisoner’s entrance.

  The Chief Justice, Lord Anders, sounded his gavel. Silence descended, and the forms around me returned to their seats rebuked. My line of sight to the door was unobstructed.

  “Bring out the prisoner,” Anders called.

  The great wooden door began to move on groaning metal hinges. It was practically medieval – nothing like the high tech, sensor and computer operated doors beyond. But, I supposed, that was the point. It was meant to be evocative of distant days. Surer days. Harsher days.

  The judges, too, decked out in their scarlet robes and severe headpieces, each wearing a perpetual scowl: it was all meant to create a sense of separation, of finality. We were to understand the distance between ourselves and those above. We were to respect the authority they wielded, and understand the absoluteness of their rulings. We were in turn to believe them justified, in and of their own authority.

  The door finished its arc. Two men, wearing the trim blues of the constabulary and the obscuring face shield of prisoner detail, stepped into view. Then I saw him: the preacher.

  He was haggard, dirty, bruised, and sporting weeks of unkempt facial growth. But there was no mistaking the man under the mess.

  The prisoner detail guided him to a podium facing both the crowd and the half ring of judges.

  “Edlin Falgir stands accused of the following high crimes: propagation of heretical and seditious belief, countermanding free commerce statutes, laundering money through unlicensed philanthropic endeavors, and intellectual deviance.

  “Be it known that under interrogation the accused has confessed in full to his guilt.” With a flourish that could not have been unpracticed, he held aloft a tablet, bearing a shaky signature beneath a wall of text.

  This he handed to one of the lesser judges. “If you will be so good as to read the confession, Lord Olstar?”

  A thin man with pinched features, Lord Olstar recited, “On the third of Newmarch, I the undersigned, EDLIN FALGIR, do solemnly and of my own volition, confess:

  “That I did knowingly and willfully misrepresent my heretical beliefs as monotheistic;

  “Without regard for the common good, expressed heretical doubts;

  “Blasphemed the protected beliefs of my fellow men, thus violating the religious freedoms of law abiding citizens;

  “Fostered public corruption;

  “With callous disregard to legal free enterprise, facilitated black market purchases…”

  I found my eyes straying from the Justice to Father Edlin as the charges were read. He was thin, and older – much older – than I remembered.

  Funny, isn’t it, Priest? ‘Religious freedom.’ ‘Free enterprise.’ Somehow it’s always the rights of man that get lost among those pretty euphemisms.

  My thoughts were wandering. I willed myself to endure the rest of this coerced confession.

  A murmur ran through the crowd as it concluded, accompanied by the clucking of tongues and shaking of heads. The Chief Justice allowed it. “Edlin Falgir, do you confirm the confession and signature shared with this Court as your own, offered freely?”

  Now, at last, Edlin Falgir looked up, staring with bloodshot eyes at the crowd. “I do.”

  “Having confessed to your crimes, do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Then the Court finds you guilty on all counts. It is the sentence of this Court that you will be taken from here to the place from whence you came, and there be kept in close confinement until such time as the Magistrate decides; and upon that day that you be taken to the place of execution, and there your head be severed from your body, that you be rendered dead.”

  I expected nothing less. No one passed through the interrogator’s hands without a confession. No one who confessed recanted. No one who acknowledged their confession avoided punishment. And most punishments entailed death; it was, after all, the surest way to prevent reoffending.

  The crowd might revel in the spectacle of watching justice – such as it was – done, but the outcome was never in doubt. I knew it. They knew it.

  Edlin knew it. He’d known it before he left his cell. I’d seen it in his eyes when he first stepped out. I saw it now: resignation.

  They had broken him.

  Court was dismissed. The crowd, its bloodlust sated, meandered out of the courtyard and dissipated.

  I headed back for the Driftwood.

  Driftwood, though a serviceable freighter, is anything but cheerful. As I sat in my customary seat on the bridge, ostensibly formulating a plan, the steely grays and industrial blacks seemed to lead me, inevitably, back to the trial. I wondered at the hell Edlin must have endured to strip away any spark, any hint of defiance, of hope, of anger.

  My anger, on the other hand, burned white hot at the thought. I remembered Edlin, back when the priest still operated his little church. I remembered the optimism – the suffocating, god-damned infuriating optimism – the man exuded. I’d wanted to strangle him at times for it. But it was hard to hate the man who saved your life.

  I felt my breath grow ragged. The toll of the day was starting to hit me, physically. The doctors called it the fluttering. Anger and fear had elevated my blood pressure, increased my heart beat. Now the fluttering had begun, in earnest.

  With two fingers, I felt at my wrist for a pulse; to my untrained touch, I felt nothing. One chamber of my heart, the physicians said, would beat faster than the other. A heartbeat is supposed to be a steady beat – lub dub, lub dub, lub dub, like the footfalls of a marching army. It’s not supposed to be a shallow flutter, like the pitter patter of light rain against a tin roof or the tinkle of chimes in a breeze. It’s not supposed to be fractured; broken.

  I fumbled for the bottle I kept in my console for a pill. It was almost time for my second dose anyway. The medicine would chemically regulate the rhythm, and given enough time I’d be back to normal. Until the next episode, anyway.

  I leaned back in the chair, breathing in and out. When the doctors talk about it, they focus on the risk of developing blood clots and dying from a stroke. But in the moment, it’s the furthest thing from mind. You’re too caught up in how it can render a healthy body impossibly weak – feeble – in a matter of minutes, leaving you struggling to move and ever short of breath. It’s like drowning on dry land, with the burn of oxygen deprivation searing your lungs as desperation claws at the outskirts of your control.

  I closed my eyes, focusing on the rhythm of my breathing.

  Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

  The urge to panic was always there, fighting for supremacy, triggered by the feeling of suffocation. I was sweating and shivering at the same time.

  Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

  It would pass. I just had to stay calm and wait it out. And in the meantime, just breathe.

  Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

  “Goddammit,” I snarled into the void of my tiny bridge. If only I’d been born with two hearts, like an Atrudian.

  The ragged edge was leaving my breathing. I still couldn’t feel my pulse, but the sensation of drowning was lessening.

  That’s it. Inhale. Exhale.

  It was awhile before the fluttering stopped, and my heartbeat returned to normal. With the passing of the crisis came a new sensation; exhaustion. It was my body’s survival mode: fight, rest, repeat.

  But today I didn’t have time to rest. Edlin didn’t have time for me to rest. So, carefully, ca
lmly so as not to excite myself and risk triggering another episode, I turned my thoughts to the problem at hand.

  Despite the medieval trappings, and behind all the showmanship, the Citadel was a state-of-the-art prison facility. The Technotheists had furnished the District with advanced security systems, including a set of Metal Men – a sort of armored animatronic police unit. Aside from the robots, members of the constabulary roamed those halls. And they weren’t welcoming to visitors, particularly the uninvited kind.

  It’s a suicide mission, my mind nagged.

  But, then, so what if it was? It was my life to throw away, wasn’t it? And I owed it to that damned foolhardy do-gooder, after all.

  “Bridge,” I directed, “display facility schematics on the aft screen.”

  “Schematics on screen,” the metallic voice of the ship’s AI answered. I swiveled my chair around to the view panel, studying the facility for the ten thousandth time.

  “Bridge, enlarge cellblock beta.” Beta was where the ordinary condemned awaited execution. Alpha was reserved for those considered dangerous. Edlin, I assumed, would be in Beta. I glared at the blueprint. I’d paid good money to the right people on the wrong side of the law for this file, and it was practically unreadable at points. “Bridge, how many cells in the specified region?”

  “Unknown. Insufficient resolution.”

  Dammit. “Bridge, can you clean up background noise in the image?”

  “Negative.”

  I decided to try another approach. “Bridge, how many cells in cellblock alpha?”

  “Twelve cells present in map designated cellblock alpha.”

  “And how many present in Charlie?” Charlie was the holding area for those awaiting punishments less severe than death. The maiming, beating and branding wing of the prison, as it were.

  “Precise answer not possible based on data quality. I approximate fewer than fifty.”

  I sighed. Beta’s bigger than Alpha and about the same size as Charlie, so if this thing’s to scale, and if it’s accurate, I’m looking at between twelve to fifty.

  I shook my head. There were a lot of if’s in that thought process.

  I stared at the view screen for awhile longer, my mind starting to wander.

  How had the priest been caught? I wondered. I toyed with the bottle of medicine in my console, turning it over and over and listening to the clink of pills dropping from one end of the bottle to the next with each rotation.

  It was five years ago and some odd months that I’d first realized I had the condition. I’d had minor episodes ever since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until the one that sent me to Saints Point Hospital, that I’d realized they weren’t a normal part of life. Not everyone, it turned out, had to stop now and then to breathe deeply while their heart sorted itself out.

  This was back before Driftwood was operational, when I was running with a freighter crew out of Old Jupiter station. The idea was that I’d work someone else’s ship until I could get my own running. It’d been a long week, and I’d pulled a few all-nighters on watch as we passed through the dustbowl. Dustbowl was prime pirate country, since the heavy radiation mucks up the scanners. So you do it the old fashioned way: eyeballs to the skies. We were all on the wrong side of overtired before we were halfway home.

  It started during unloading, and kept getting worse. By the next morning, I was in a pale beige room at Saints Point, hooked up to more medical apparatus than I’d seen in a lifetime.

  Like most of the medical facilities, Saints Point was a religious institution, run by one of the monotheistic faiths. It had taken thousands of Earth years, sure, but The Big Three – the unholy trinity of monotheism, polytheism, and technotheism – tended not to get in each other’s way now. They stopped warring for ruined worlds, and chose instead to split the spoils of worlds at peace. And medicine, under the umbrella of not-for-profit organizations, was the primary industry of the monotheists.

  A pantheon of obscure saints adorned the walls, but I would have sworn the Devil himself oversaw billing. I left Saints Point with a diagnosis that required regular medication, and no money left to afford it. Without medicine, my crew dropped me.

  That was how I met Edlin. Five months after being discharged, I was barely clinging to the wreckage of my fragile existence. I had no avenue to beg, borrow or earn the money I needed. That left just one option: theft. Once I had enough for the medicine, I could get back on my feet, and get a job again.

  So I scoured the city for a mark. The grand houses of worship throughout the city, collecting handsome tithes and building ever larger monuments, seemed the logical choice. I settled after a stretch on Falgir’s church. It was small – not big enough to afford any high-tech gear. All I needed, after all, was enough for a month or two of pills.

  I’m a pretty good engineer, but as it happens a shitty lock pick. I’d been working on the offering box for the better part of an hour when the “ahem” of a throat clearing sounded behind me.

  It was the priest, Edlin Falgir, surveying me with a combination of mild amusement and disappointment. This was a contingency I hadn’t prepared for; it was the middle of the night. The priest, by all rights, would be fast asleep.

  I started to spill out my excuses, though I anticipated they’d do little good.

  He listened for awhile, and then silenced me with an upturned hand. “I think I get the point, Miss…?”

  “Agata.”

  “Miss Agata.” He walked toward the box, and I shrank away. He drew out a key, and retrieved a stack of bills. “It would have been simpler to ask, though,” he said, extending a handful of money toward me.

  I stared at him suspiciously.

  “I thought you needed money for your medicine?”

  “I do.” I frowned. “But why are you giving it to me?”

  “Because you said you need it.”

  I took the bills, numb with confusion and desperation. “You’re just…going to give it to me?”

  “If you need it, then yes.”

  I stared at the bills. Some faded and wrinkled from use, others crisp and new – and all of them, a gateway to my old life. And yet, somehow, being offered the money, given it after being caught mid-theft, felt wrong. “I…I can’t accept, priest.”

  He watched me quizzically, as I in turn offered the money back. “You’d rob the offering box, but not accept the money? You prefer theft to charity, Agata?”

  “No. It’s just…I don’t…deserve it,” I answered honestly. It was one thing to rob a conman, a profiteer who got rich at the expense of the fears and desperation of the common man. But a charitable churchman was a rare churchman. I would not take advantage of that.

  Edlin Falgir laughed, a great rolling laugh that echoed off the high ceiling and around the interior. “You are an uncommon thief, Agata.” He returned the cash to the offering box. “But it is as well that you won’t take the money. There are more economical ways to get what it is you need. I’ll see to it in the morning. In the meantime…come. I can give you a hot meal – you look like you haven’t had one of those in awhile – and put you up for the night.”

  It was the beginning of a long and strange friendship. The priest was a believer, of course. I was a skeptic. He was an eternal optimist; I, a jaded pessimist. He believed helping people would make a difference; I thought we were too far past that point. He was a veteran, and I feared the military for its allegiance to church and state. He followed an old Earth shepherding deity; I reminded him that shepherds either fleeced or devoured their flocks, and I had no desire to suffer either fate.

  And yet for all that, we were friends. He saved my life. He put me in contact with black market contacts who could get the medicine I needed at a fraction of the cost, and he covered the first order.

  I got my old job back. I finished my ship, the Driftwood, and started my own cargo runs. I’d drop offerings off at his church when I was in the area, and stop by for a meal now and then. And, I think, he enjoyed our conversations, an
tagonistic though I could be at times.

  But then they came for him. I guess it wouldn’t do to have a shepherd caring for his flock, much less the strays like myself. People might start expecting similar works of the other houses of worship. Works, Falgir had told me, justified faith. “Faith that leaves men to die as rats is dead faith.” It was a pretty bit of heresy.

  And now he was paying the price for it.

  I chewed at my thumb, trying to push away past to focus on present. Memory would not save Falgir. “Bridge,” I decided at length, “I think we’re going to just have to do this the old-fashioned way…”

  “Not too old-fashioned, I hope, Captain. Remember, I need power to operate.”

  It was after midnight and the changing of the guard that I moved. I was dressed in an assortment of rags, my hair tied back and covered, with my communicator tucked into the humble headdress. I’d picked a corner of the courtyard among the city’s homeless, huddled under a blanket. I brought a bottle of low grade moonshine, and popped the top. Alcohol was a pleasure I was denied due to the fluttering – but to judge by the odor that assailed my nostrils, this was more punishment. I flecked spots of liquid over myself until I reeked. The rest, I drained on the ground.

  Staggering and shouting incoherently, I made my way from the corner. Troubled glances greeted my performance. Some pulled away. Others pretended not to see.

  The homeless were at the mercy of the constabulary; no one wanted to be in the way of trouble.

  “Sing with me!” I urged, slurring through a few shanties I’d picked up on freight detail. I forgot half the lyrics, but that just added to the overall flavor. People pulled further away. The constables at the borders of the courtyard seemed not to care. I suppose they’d seen their fair share of drunks here.

  I decided to amp up my performance. I meandered toward the Citadel, singing as I went. I stopped near a group of three, a father it seemed and a young man and woman. His children, I supposed. “A pretty family,” I called. “Such a pretty family.” They observed me with concern, moving closer together. “Here, have a drink with me, eh?” I lifted the bottle as if to drink. “I’m empty. Have you any to spare? Just a sip, it’s all I need.”