Prisoner 52 (22 page)

Day 29

The lift screeched to a halt and shuddered against the suspension columns beneath. The doors opened and he was blinded by the light that shined full on him of a sudden, held his hand up against it. About him flowed his own beacon of light within the lift and between these two that engulfed him there was only the darkness and chill of the garage. A pair of shadows manifested to either side of what now appeared to him as the headlamps of an HEV. He stepped down off the lift and stepped forth, squinting at the white light that crept through the spaces of his fingers.

“You Hotchkins?” A voice called to him over the roar of the storm that raged beyond the opened gateway he saw to loom behind the light.

“Who wants to know?” He shouted back.

“My rifle up your asshole.” The man said and Tezac could see the silhouetted angle that was his elbow shift into firing position. “Get in the vehicle.”

He had only his pistol against their two guns, but his hand moved toward it all the same. He thought of who could be sent to escort him if Leargam was right and it was the Overseer he was gone to see. He wondered if they could hit the head off a moving target and in a dark garage, if he could make it into the shadows before they had the chance to fire. They would kill the lights and activate the night-sight of their helmets, but in that time he was confident of placing two rounds through the visors. He looped his thumb through his utility belt instead.

“Alright.” Tezac said. “Kill the lights,
huh?”

The dual glow evaporated and he watched the headlamps fade from dim yellow discs into nothing. He could see now the driving snow and ice that blew nearly sidewise in the force of the winds outside. But in the foreground of that wintry aspect he saw the gleam of gunmetal and the rifles that were
levelled at him. He approached and paid them not a second thought.

“The Overseer sent you?” He asked them as he mounted to the ladder that led to the passenger's hatch.

“In a way.” The man nearest to him said, clad in black armors and invisible behind a blacker helmet, and with his rifle trained on him as he climbed. “Port security.”

“Impressive security.” Tezac said from the roof and bent to pull open the door.

“We've had some resupplies.”

“Any idea what he wants with me?”

“I ain't paid to ask questions.” The man said and jutted his rifle muzzle at the opened hatchway. “Now get inside and secure yourself.”

Tezac nodded to himself and slipped down into the narrow opening and reached up to shut the door behind him. Once inside he restrained himself within the armored chair and heard the men climb to their own hatches outside. He listened for the dull thumps of their closing and then waited as they engaged both the pilot's and the gunner's wombs that not so long ago and in other circumstances had housed Leargam and himself for another such expedition. One that had been bought with the price of his friend's humanity, and so he looked down and to his own unfeeling hand. Then the HEV started into motion.

He could feel and know without seeing the uneven, rocky grade of the glacial terrain and felt his stomach rise and fall with the engagement of the repulsor modules to sail over what was to him some imagined abyss. It was a long going to constant motion, constant shuddering across the barren and icy wastes. The wind howled sometimes of a sudden and blew the vehicle about along its track and he conjured into his mind what he could not see beyond the dim steel around him as the wail of some roaming and gargantuan beast whose passing had thrown them. A deep lowing that sounded for no purpose familiar to humankind and that shook the earth. Perhaps it was the planet itself, pleading with him.

The HEV rolled onto the slight incline of a ramp outside and he heard through the metal
and storm a gate loudly powering open. Then personnel carrier shot forward again in fits and starts until the ice crystals no longer sounded to shatter against its hull. The gate closed again in their wake and the powerful engine died, its equipment with a lilting groan. He undid the fastenings that bound him to the chair and stood to throw open the hatchway and then climbed out again.

He stood in the darkened vehicle bay his escort had pulled into and listened as they disembarked themselves, looking about himself. The two men in their black and sleeker armor took post behind him and
so assembled they moved out onto the incline of the garage bays, up into the vastness of the orbital lift's ground station.

Tezac looked across the emptiness that lay between them and the elevator itself and felt more than he did on arrival that it was the gatehouse of the Wayland itself. He knew not how far its circumference went into the shadows beyond it or how high it stoo
d from floor to distant ceiling. Only that next to it he was a little man of little capability. His eyes followed the light of the amber lamps high overhead to where it glinted off the great rollers that would bear the elevator up along the cable. From that height he found past it and to the left the station's windowed control booth, set above them upon the wall, and the shadow of the man within.

“You got something for me?” A voice crackled over the station's broadcast system.

“One to go up.” The escort said over the channel of his helmet's comms array.

“You'll have to wait, boys. Got a shipment of goons coming down to replace the ones we lost the last few months.”

“It's clearance level 5.”

“Overseer priority or not, it won't make that lift come down any faster. Have a seat, boys; stay a while. You might like it here.”

“Collegia browbeaters.” The other of his two escorts said so only they could hear and Tezac pivoted where he stood to give him a look. “You got something to say, peasant?”

“Not yet.” He said.

Lights began to flash atop the walls and then to cast their red light in revolving cones across the chamber to the sound of the klaxons that had started up. The voice of Master Control announced to all present the imminent arrival of the tactical orbital lift and a hatchway irised open far far above them, an eyelet inset amidst the pair of greater and more massive blast doors around it. The elevator was not long dropping in through the opening that then closed behind it in its wake.

It was small, many times smaller than what it was in miniature, but greater still than perhaps the entirety of the mess hall of Sector 10. He had arrived first, he remembered dimly, in a
hibernation fugue upon the outer and larger of the two lifts; for he had not come as a replacement as these men had, to be a part of the reinforcements. It gave him pause to consider who it was they were becoming and he wondered then if he would not see the same look upon their faces as he had seen vacating the emergency landers of the Ersatz auxiliaries upon a hundred separate battlefields.

The outer doors of the greater lift slid open and filled the air with the echoes of its machinery booming and creaking through the crepuscular station. Figures appeared within the light that filtered out from within and then resolved into men as they trooped down the gangway before them. They made for an HEV that a pair of men was then directing them toward on the far wall and Tezac looked at the unspoiled crisp jumpsuits and the fresh clean-cut faces that he was surprised to see on that planet; they at him and his exo-suit, worn upon issue and worn the more since, and the pale rugged mask of his face. There was a question in their stares and he wondered if they thought him
an inmate. Then they passed on and turned their backs on him and advanced for their own transport going the way he had come. He, theirs.

“She's all yours.” The man in the control booth announced.

Tezac started forward before his escort could say what he knew they would and listened for their footfalls as they followed suit a moment later. The distance he traversed seemed to elongate the more he made of it and came no nearer for him until his boots rang against the loading ramp. He passed beyond the ingress of the airlock and onward into the vast rotunda of the primary elevator, glancing across the tiers upon tiers of personnel restraints along the walls. A small doorway awaited him across the way on the far wall and two men drew up behind to direct him through it.

He found himself within the tactical lift buried at the
heart of the elevator major and looked about himself at the walls that were in no way narrow but appeared constrictive beneath the immediate shadow of its host. The seating, tiered again as before and hardly more than harnesses, could fit two squads but no more than that. Tezac mounted to the ladder nearest him and took it to the highest seat upon the end and lowered the restraints into place. The small forms of his escort below strapped themselves into the seats across from him amd with their feet still able to touch the floor.

“Orbital embarkation engaged. “Master Control said. “Please ensure all passengers are securely locked into place and that any possessions are secured. Insubordination could result in pay demerit. Please remember: a cleanly life is a pure life.”

Day 29

The doors of the airlock parted before him, a line of crooked teeth that sank back into the walls to either side. The far door had already been opened for his coming and beyond it he could see the crystalline light of a gravchalier, below it a sort of foyer of bright wood and plush leather chairs. He craned his neck about and saw on the walls paintings, but there was no holographic glimmer to them; real canvas and real paint upon them, things in their combination unheard of. Tezac gave a last look to the field of stars outside the plastic boarding umbilical and the airlock of the space station that terminated its other end. He approached the threshold between the spare gloom of steel and polymer and the warm opulence that lay ahead and crossed into the latter.

There was a brief, tinny flutter of some wind instrument that played out into the air, from where he could not tell, and it stopped him where he stood. The orchestral piece then began in earnest and in the cadences of some tune that he once knew, but had since forgotten. He looked up at the crystals of the gravchalier that floated near to the vaulted ceiling and then to the painting that flanked him in the entrance hall.

They described scenes of ancient origin. He knew only the one and that of the assault on the mountainside bastion of the Sun God in the ancient mythic life of Man's homeworld and prosecuted in legend when he was yet young. The other, to his right, was only a portrait and of a man in black robes and blacker cuirass and skull cap; behind him, purple curtains blew across pale stone and painted to his right was a pedestal and upon which a skull was set that his hand rested upon. Tezac studied the man's eyes, the chill depths that called to him from across the ages, and the grim face that they were housed in. 'Welcome', they seemed to say, 'for I know your ilk, and once thought myself beyond them'.

“Welcome, welcome.” A voice said over the music. “How do you find my humble abode?
My aerie in the stars. Is it not magnificent? Do you know the expense of such items out here in the void? You cannot. I have built this place. And built the place below, that you call home. Strange, is it not? That one capable of such boundless beauty could be capable also of designing so much pain.”

“Why was I asked here, Sir?” Tezac said and moved further into the reception area, beneath the soft glow of the gravchalier and across the gems inset along the floor that it glimmered across, and then to the threshold of the atrium beyond that smelled everywhere of perfume enough to sting his nose.

“This is certainly not any way to address your master, is it?”

“Certainly a way to do your employer.”

“Ah but you see that is where you are wrong.” The voice said and he knew then it was transmitted over the same frequency as the symphony, that its speaker was not within reach. “You would say a man who controls your fate is your master, yes? You would agree. You would say that I desired you here, so I had you fetched. Down below, I clothe you and I feed you. And up above, here, I decide who is to come and who is not to come.”

“That what this is all about? You think I'm spooked by what I saw in maintenance? Hightailing it the first chance I get?”

“Tezac Hotchkins. War hero and sole survivor of the Niflheim campaign. The only Lord-Knight to remain in the Outerverse. No, no. Of course you would not run.” The Overseer said and he could hear the sneer in the man's voice and trembled and clenched his fists at it. “Please. Come in, settle down. We have only a small item to discuss and then you may return to whatever sweating, stinking, menial recreation you on the planet surface have taken to.”

He took his hand away from where he had laid it upon the back of the leather chair beside him and stepped full into the chamber beyond the high, broad archway that was filigreed with the gilded story of a merchant caravan. Another gravchalier buoyed near the tall ceiling, but
greater and more elaborate than the first. Great mirrors hung upon the walls to either side of him and in them he could see his reflection duplicated endlessly, stretching away with him into the dark.

There was a doorway ahead, beyond the marble columns that upheld the walkway that lay above it. He saw atop the walls there the edges of the mural that was painted across the domed ceiling and thus followed the ends of tendrils to their host in the great cephalopodan head that loomed above him, the ocular window that was its eye and that looked out on the stars. He stared long into
its benighted regions and at length it forced his eyes downward again. The music continued, but there was no voice. He tested the sit of his boots upon the hardwood floor, frowned at the grease stains they left behind across its gleam.

A man appeared upon the balcony overhead and he studied the straight posture and effete glide to his steps through to the balustrade. He was dressed up in some mockery of a captain's uniform, Tezac could see, but did not deign to wear the Colors. He stopped at the balcony's middle and leaned onto the rail so that his arms made a pyramid of him. They locked stares for but a moment, as though seeing some foreign entity for the first time. Clear bronze skin and groomed bronze locks set against the pale shorn ghost on the floor below. Rusted and battered armor against rich alien textiles.

“I have a thing,” The Overseer said. “That I very much would like to show you.”

“I'm standing here.”

He clucked his tongue and shook his head and said, “You footmen.”

The man straightened from the rail and turned away and made for the door behind him. His polished boots sounded across the floorboards of the terrace and then the corridor he disappeared into. Tezac glanced about the room and his eyes fell again upon his reflection in the mirrors. Alone with all of his selves, he did not recognize the
man who he saw. The drawn, wan face. Bags beneath the sunken eyes and above the sunken cheeks. It was worse than he had looked months ago, yoked to the autohypos, for it was a new kind of fatigue that he faced and for which there was no simple remedy.

“Come along.” The Overseer called, over the broadcast system again. “We should not tarry overmuch.”

Tezac looked away from himself and started into the corridor ahead, into the deep shadows beneath the walkway. He traversed the short hall and came into an orbicular chamber, gloomy and as wide as it was tall. A figure navigated the stairwell that curved round the wall and so the Overseer descended into the light of the glowglobe that was set within a small ornate table between the two armchairs before him, them all before a great window that was the entirety of the far wall and which looked out on the space station as through the eye of some immense insect that preyed through space upon the dreams of mankind.

“Please,” He said and gestured toward the chairs and navigated the last
of the steps. “Sit.”

Tezac glanced between the Overseer and the chairs he had indicated and set his features against them as hard as the stone. He nodded and then crossed to the chair nearest and sat down. His host circled round beside him and took up one of the glass flasks set upon the table there and took its cork out with a squeak and a pop. A sour and pungent aroma eked out into the air and Tezac watched the swill of th
e maroon liquid that gave off the stench.

"Would you like a woman before we begin?" The Overseer said and started to raise his hand to whatever hidden odalisque presided over such requests. "Or a girl? Man, boy? There are many."

"Why don’t we just begin."

"
A drink then?” He offered and Tezac shook his head.

"I know,"
He said and poured enough for the both of them into a single goblet of crystal, etched with gold, and replaced the cork into the mouth of the bottle. "That you are not of the most temperate kind."

“Is anybody?”

“I have found it hard to trust a man,” The Overseer said and took the seat across from him, the cup into his fingers by the rim. “That does not drink with his enemies.”

“I find if a man's an enemy
then he's an enemy.”

“And you are here because I am your employer.”

“Is there some point to this conversation we're about to have, or did you just want to show somebody all these nice things you got?”

“You know what I know.” The Overseer said and sipped the drink he had poured and then leaned to set it down on the table again, returned himself to the deep cushioned back of the chair. “Perhaps you kn
ow more. Wisely you would like to leave; but you would like to bring with you the allegiances you have made in your short stay here and this is most unwise. I cannot let this happen, you understand.”

“Who told you?”

“I must tell you,” He said and crossed his legs at the knees and clasped his delicate hands atop them, looked on Tezac from within the warmth of the glow-globe. “It is sometimes a bad thing to be an honest man, and not have a drink with one's enemies.”

“Put us under surveillance and it'll be just as suspicious. Keep us here and leave us alone and I'll let it slip to the whole installation before the week's out.”

The Overseer cocked his head and smiled a smile that glimmered like ivory beneath the diffuse moonlight of a jungle land and was as sly and smooth as the rivers that run through such a place. He raised his bracer to his eyes and then looked to Tezac, then out the immense window and pointed slightly. A distant and cruciform shape of white floated through the void, out from the occlusion of the viewport's extent. He watched it move slumberous through the emptiness and its running lights blink distant and welcoming. The great cargo domes of a carrier vessel were arrayed along its awkward and cumbersome length and it was making to dock with the space station that hung dark and massive above the white of the planet surface. He saw in his periphery the Overseer enter into the holointerface of his wristband a series of commands and then it began to speak.

“
Hangar Control this is Arbitronix vessel 129-R, Hauler class, requesting permission to dock.” A tired voice said over the open transmission. “Over.”

“You are a-go to dock, 129'er, prepping to receive.” Hangar Control answered. “Over.”

“You are free to act.” The Overseer whispered into the channel, but the two men said nothing in response.

The stars distorted briefly in three places and a curious assemblage of lights, looking more as distant characters than simple glows, flickering in and out of being. It was all that Tezac saw of the three ships that dropped out of a runic cloak. From where they idled a cascade of flashes burst small and large into the blackness of space and smothered that of the stars. He watched as the contrails of the mass drivers elongated, the projectiles that spawned them invisible with speed and distance, toward the carrier vessel that the Overseer's ship looked out upon.

It rocked suddenly toward him and the flank of the hull shown to him was perforated along its length. Debris floated lazily from the gaping metal wounds and among them he knew, though could not pick them out, were the drifting carcasses of dead men not even yet awoken from hibernation. Its thrusters winked out, fell cold and silent, and the ship went on rolling toward and beneath the Overseer's vessel. The brightness of alien suns wavered once more, the queer diminutive symbols manifested and vanished, and whatever quiet death the void had risen from its hollows was gone.

Tezac stood and cast aside the table and it struck the composite window, bounced harmlessly away, and he took
the Overseer into the air with a great hand beneath the sharp angles of his jaw.

“You want to kill me.” He said and held the pillar of Tezac's arm with both hands
, but gave no struggle to dislodge it. “You would rip away my arms and my legs and then my head; but you would not leave this ship alive. Your allegiances down there on the planet surface, they would leave their world; but not in the way that you would like, yes? Take my life then, honest man. Take it. It is in your blood, eh? Do what all violence you are good for to me.”

He hurled him away into the bookshelves that crowded beneath the spiral staircase of the chamber and around its doorway and the Overseer crashed into them, knocking the ancient leather-bound tomes to the ground with him. Tezac looked across them as the man wheezed and rubbed his throat and they down on him, and in his notice sought to beseech him.

“You cannot kill me, and you cannot maneuver around me. For you see, the Maerazians have come. For the warlock that those soldiers deposited here in my prison. They have overtaken the station, yes? Our orbital defenses are adrift and in ruins and no one may leave but in death.”

“Those were innocent people.” Tezac said and turned away to the window. “From the Collegia.”

“Innocent people.” The Overseer said and got to his feet, but stood hunched over now as some animated thing of unassailable madness. “Innocent people. A soldier talks of innocents.”

“They'll come to see about that ship.” He said and faced him. “And it won't matter about any damned Maerazians then.”

“The transport that brought you here and cursed me with your breath made a journey of 3 months from whatever waste-world they deposited you onto. Yes come they may, but too late. By this time you pine for the troubles here will be ended and this installation will be a lost asset that nobody could care about. Much like yourself, Enforcer, but you are my investment and I cannot lose you. Not yet. Try to make yourself a toxic asset and I will punish you. I will make it known that the Maerazians are devious and walk amongst us in the skins of our friends and no one can be trusted that appears out of sorts. And you are so very often out of sorts. There are enough down there that would turn you over to me. Dead in that way you are of no consequence to me and anyone to find it suspicious will be treated just the same. You may go now. Return to that life you cannot escape, though you have traveled so far to escape it. I am the one who escapes. I go on. I am eternal. You are the earner, the honest man. So go and drink with your allegiances. Go guard your silly principles.”