A crowd had gathered around me no sooner than we had entered our billet. It’s a little unsettling when I a bunch of little creatures gather around, staring at you in silence with expecting eyes. Imagine it. Spending a whole day in darkness, dodging snakes. You come out into what little light you do have to see that, plus one large fishy creature among them. I don’t know how he didn’t dry out in this place, being out of water. It is probably wrong of me to assume he is a fish. Maybe he is a land fish, the way we have ocean mammals back home.
Anyway.
I told them the best I could what I saw and what I planned to do. Everyone was enthusiastically on board… until I told them the first part of the plan. But I expressed to them emphatically that the first part was the most critical, then everything after was even more critical.
Concerned murmurs washed across the crowd. Apparently they thought freedom would come easily. No one wanted to pay a price or suffer for it. Freedom should come free and easy, right? Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Cough. Comfortable servitude is better than an unpleasant fight for freedom for most, unfortunately.
Typical.
“We will do it,” Jalad said over the crowd.
I knew what he meant and so did they. The most critical part would be carried out by the two of us. Ungrateful little shits. But we would do what we must, no matter how unpleasant. That is the nature of the pioneer.
When we went to bed, I was not without my reservations. Not with the plan. The plan was solid. Or at least as solid as it was going to get given the conditions. The actors in the play had me worried. They were eager to follow along, so long as someone else was doing the work. At least I’d know they would be there for moral support.
Go team.
So, the next morning we set out to execute, lest we be executed ourselves. If my assumptions were correct – and we all know what happens when we assume, something about people’s assholes and they all stink – we would have to start as far away from the cart tunnel as possible. What could possibly go wrong there, right?
Unlike the previous day we marched slow to exit the shack. Slow to join the ranks, complacently trudging to their doom. Move too slow, we’d get the stick. Move too fast and we’d be dealing with fully charged pricks. That sounds weird; I take that last part back.
Begrudgingly, we had to work through most of the day before executing the plan. Yeah, I know. There isn’t much sense in working a fool, excuse me, full day before suicide. The idea was: a machine on low battery will not operate at maximum output, where a living body can tap into reserves even at a most depleted state. You would be surprised what you are capable of, so long as you don’t give up, roll over, and accept defeat. Even then, you would be surprised how long you can be kicked while laying there before you die. It’s going to suck either way. Might as well take what could be yours.
So, we worked. And worked. And worked. For what we figured was most of the day. Sparingly. Carefully not to waste too much energy. I just hoped that their batteries were meant for one day, not two days. But let’s not get too hung up on that. The battery thing is mostly wishful thinking. And what I hoped would be a good pitch to the others. Chances are we were going to be fighting the guards at one point or another. If we could take as many of them out before trying to escape, it would be all the better.
It was time.
I looked at Jalad.
“Ready?” I whispered.
Those large black, lifeless, glassy eyes, like a doll’s eyes, nodded once at me.
I climbed up onto the ledge on the right side of guard. Jalad climbed up on the right.
Lucky me, I got the first poke. Right in the shoulder. My left arm was slightly less useful for a moment.
The guard turned. Buzzing of the stick echoed in the darkness when he clacked my partner. He then pretended to try to get back into the pit.
I tapped it on the shoulder.
It casually turned back around towards me. I relaxed as much I could before it clacked me again.
Right in the stomach. If I had to piss, it wouldn’t have mattered anymore. Same goes if I wanted to have kids. Or at least any more than might already be out there, wandering the universe, wondering who their daddy is, not knowing why they don’t look like all their friends.
I found the edge of the pit. I didn’t mean to. Fortunately, a lot of little creatures caught me before falling into a rocky abyss.
BZZZZ!
Jalad took his second hit.
So far, no alarms. No thundering of footfalls down the tunnels. No additional signs of aggression from the guard. A living thing would have been taking pounds of flesh by the third turn and buzz.
I wasn’t sure who it was it buzzed after it turned again.
But then it turned yet again and buzzed.
And Jalad stood up next to me.
I gave him a confused look.
He smiled.
A wave of movement formed around us. One by one, the others were climbing the ledge, taking their zap. The zaps grew in frequency. Light from the electrodes became a nearly constant flicker of light. There was growling and hushed excitement. It was a little creepy, not going to lie. Plus, if things went sideways now, who knew what wrath would be incurred?
There was a grunt. The blue flickering light halted a moment.
Then the snakehead lit up like a toaster in a bathtub at the Hotel Kevorkian.
In the glow of the sparks, my fellow inmates jumped up and down with joy, hooting and hollering. The little bastards took our lead. A spark of inspiration, pun intended, is sometimes all it takes. Spectator syndrome is easily broken. All it takes is one person to jump in. Then it becomes a mob. Or a party, depending on the circumstances. A revolution if you’re lucky.
The guard writhed and squealed. Finally, an electric hiss and pop filled the tunnel with char and ozone.
And the mob went wild. They leapt in bobbing unison down the tunnel, screeching with glee. Jalad and I watched only for a moment in awe before we followed suit.
Quick, they were. We had a hard time keeping up with them. Not to mention we were a little woozy from taking a few zaps. What had before felt like miles in darkness became only seconds in a cacophony. The train of goblins hushed, with actual shushing noises. No more than a half a second of silence later, another snakehead lit up like the Fourth of July. The mob screamed a deafening scream. And now I suspect there were two hobgoblins with stun clubs. Soon there would four. Then eight and so on.
Like a virus in a bad zombie movie, the prisoners in the second pit sprung to life with the same furor as their liberators. That’s a lot of bodies to inhabit the cramped tunnels, screaming and running.
Jalad and I followed behind at a leisurely pace. It wasn’t long before the echoes of screaming and buzzing echoed from all directions. The mob split and spread like wildfire, faster than we could see. They would clear a path to freedom faster than I could have ever imagined.
“We did it,” Jalad said, shaking my shoulder.
“It is impressive. But we’re not done yet.”
“No,” he said unswayed. “I can feel it.”
Never underestimate the intuition of a fish. They can smell blood in the water after all.
And so it went, to my amazement. Just as things fall apart, they fall into place. We walked with ease through the rest of the mines. An all too familiar feeling washed over me. And I’m not just talking about my nervous system returning back to normal after taking a few thousand kilowatts. I dare say I became lost in a reverie. Returning to an old battlefield. Walking through a school after graduating years before. Suddenly everything feels smaller. Empty and lifeless even. Just a stack of memories. I had only been there, what, a week? A week and a half? What had I got to know of my fellow captors besides their daily habits and routines? What is anyone beyond that anyway?
“Napolean,” a voice to my side called.
I walked on in my arrogance thinking I escaped yet again. Because of course I escaped yet again. It’s what I do. Yet again.
“Napolean?” the voice came again.
“Huh?” I suddenly remember who I was. “Yeah?”
Jalad gave me a skeptical look. Apparently he had his time to think too and I let slip a card or two.
“You’re not Napoleon, are you?”
I took his shoulder in hand, firmly, giving it a firm shake.
“Today…today I am, my friend.”
“I knew when I met you there was something different about you,” he said endearingly. “You are who you need to be.”
“That I am. That I am.”
“It doesn’t matter. You are who we needed. You showed us that we can be free. And before us we are about to make our freedom. If we die, then we die free.”
“That’s the spirit!” I gave him a slap on the back. “You are probably one of the first to truly understand me. Er, at least as much as I understand myself. I’m still working on that.”
My talk was beginning to lose him, I noticed. A look of concern crept onto his face. Of course, I could have just been projecting.
“Onward and upward!” I interrupted his thoughts.
We were nearly at the cart tunnel. All around us the chaos still echoed in the tunnels. I didn’t want to ruin the mood, but I didn’t know what the other end looked like yet. Though I had seen it once before, that was before I dragged the place into chaos. Chaos was the order of the day. A dish I best prepared. A dish best served cold as an appetizer. Next on the menu was vengeance, and a liberty shake for dessert, hold whip and the cream.
The din became a murmur in the cart tunnel. Jalad followed in silence. It was difficult to say what I would face once we emerged on the other side. An angry nest of hornets was most likely. A self destruct sequence would be scary. Maybe I had overestimated the enemy yet again. Thus far that has been a successful tactic in my repertoire. Can’t argue with success.
On the other side, the carts had stopped. The lights previously blinking around the walls, one by one, blinked out as the guards dispersed into the tunnels. Tunnels plural, Jalad and I said with a look. We weren’t the only ones. Of course we weren’t. That’s not how systematic interment works. No. It’s a whole network of isolated colonies. No communication. Out of sight, out of mind. Both intercolony and intraplanet.
This time, the rocket that transported the ore was on its pad. No smoke, no sound, just parked because us ungrateful serfs had not filled it yet.
“You think you can fly that thing?” Jalad nodded to the ship at the center of the massive cavern.
Disclaimer here: it was dark and it was a big cavern. I am aware that normally, blasting a rocket off in such a silo would typically mean utter destruction for anything below it. I just work here. So bare with me.
I took a deep breath before answering.
“Sure,” I told him. Reassuringly.
If he had eyebrows they would have raised to the ceiling.
“I mean,” I began to clarify as we continued to evaluate the room. “The fundamentals are the same. I suspect this thing is mostly automated. How different could it be than the many other things I’ve stolen, I mean commandeered, over the years?”
That brought a reluctant smile to his face.
We crept out into the silo. The snakeheads were nearly all dispersed. After even a week in the mines and in the shacks, the openness of it was nearly oppressive. You wouldn’t think much of it, but the noise of being in a tunnel is different than being in a cavern. I felt like I was nearly deaf. Even Jalad’s words next to me felt to be swallowed into the openness.
In typical, nonsentient fashion, the room was not designed for a bunch of assholes to just go waltzing across it. Nearly breaking my ankles, the bottom was solely for the railcars and blast off. There was one problem when we got there.
I had not taken into consideration how autonomous this thing was. Where were the doors? Was there even a cockpit?
The only thing I could see was a lift that took the carts of ore, presumable dumping it into its haul. No stage, no platform, to be seen.
There I was, standing before the massive, phallically shape ship in its dark chasm. Its thousands of phallic progenerators chasing us through the ova’s veins. All unknowingly wanting to be alive. To be free. But it was I who might have been about to get the biggest shaft of them all.
In typical fashion – I was surrounded by dicks.
I took off towards the rocket.
“What are you doing?” I heard Jalad yell.
Not seconds later, he panted beside me.
There was a lift. That was all I could see in way of entering. We didn’t have all day to figure out the rest of the machine. I need on, and I need off that planet.
The lift was empty. It was just a square platform in the gloom. No levers. No buttons. Just a platform and the mechanisms that carried it up into the bosom of the ship.
“I will go,” Jalad gasped, shoving himself in front of me.
“Don’t trust me all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know how to fly.”
“Well then how does that help?” I might have yelled at him.
“If you die, we die.”
I still wasn’t sure if his suspicions of me had grown into something else. Jalad was certainly not an idiot. The plausible deniability of his statement was solid. If I died going up the chute, there may not be another bush pilot on that rock. If he was on the ship with me and I tried to take off without them, he’d stand a chance to stop me. Or else get off of the planet with me.
“We go together,” I decided.
A quick nod and both of us were on the tiny platform in an otherwise empty mine cart. Not a moment after thinking at each other our skepticism of its mechanism, it began to move.
We got real cozy real quick. A cart didn’t need a cage or guardrails to guide its way past the gears and bars on upward. Neither of us was too keen on losing a limb to either. So we rode awkwardly, my face in his chest. He smelt like old dry sushi, I realized, never having been quite this close with my internment and escape companion.
It clanked along. I hoped we were not going to be dumped into a grinder. That would be fitting. Escaping one machine meant for grinding on walking corpse after another until the end of time, just to jump unwittingly into the interlocking teeth at its other end.
Up from the esophagus, into the stomach. We came up into another void. By chance, the jolt of the platform sent us reaching about for something to grasp onto.
I found a rail.
The platform heaved, wanting to dump its two lumps of coal into its gullet.
Jalad found my waist.
The floor was gone. Our lives rested in my two sweaty hands holding onto what I did not know.
The platform reset and descended.
For being lean and sinuous, Jalad was heavy.
“Garr,” I said, which translated roughly to: “Jalad, you are heavy. Hurry. Climb off of me before we both plummet to our demise.”
“I can almost,” he strained.
I wasn’t sure what he was doing. It was dark. I might have been a little scared. He was writhing, trying to rip me from my perch.
“Hur-”
Then a great burden left me. My weight was halved and my hands felt merely wet instead of greasy.
“Uh oh.”
It took a second for the panic to set in.
“Jalad!”
There were only echoes.
“Shit…sh sh…it it…shit shit.”
Something grabbed my wrists.
I did not scream like a little girl.
“Be quiet!” The voice sounded vaguely familiar. “I think there are others up there.”
Jalad’s black glossy eyes stared down at me. I could see the strain, though he didn’t have eyelids as he slowly heaved me towards his feet.
My chest hit the rail. Then my waist. My knee found the edge. It was hard and metallic but didn’t matter. It wouldn’t hurt as much as falling a couple dozen stories on to jagged rock and angle iron. But then I was flipped over another rail, face down on a grate. That was great.
“Where did you…”
He motioned for me to shush. There wasn’t much I could see besides his luminescent skin under his neck. He was looking about in the darkness. Those creepy eyes must have been made for such places.
I would say I assisted in evaluating our situation, but all I could see was darkness above and an even darker ness below.
Jalad disappeared into the darkness. I don’t even know where he went. He didn’t even make a sound. He just poofed, gone. Without the poof part.
“Ahhhhhhh,” howled from above.
Then beside me.
A blur whizzed by me with a rush of air as the screams continued down.
“I think that was the only one,” Jalad said. Somewhere. I wasn’t quite sure.
I felt about. The rail didn’t go far. There was a latter. One. Two. Three rungs and I could feel the platform above.
There I found Jalad. We took off down the corridor lined with dim yellow lights. It curved and ascended. Then there were ladders and doors. We had no idea where we were going but we were getting there in a hurry. T’would be but a matter of time before we found what we wanted.
And we did.
Unmistakable, at the highest platform was the wheelhouse. Silent and dark. Lights blinking uncaringly on the controls.
“Ahhhhh,” again.
“What the hell?” I asked the noise.
“I think I missed one,” Jalad said.
We split apart in time for another figure to appear with a wrench raised, running at us. In his blind rage, whoever it was ran right by us, over the rail.
The screams trailed into nothing.
“I love when problems solve themselves,” I chuckled.
“He must have been hiding.”
I thought of a few smart things to say, but decided not to.
The rest from there was a logistical headache. I won’t bore you with all the details. I wanted to get out of there. Jalad wanted to save the whole planet. Not that I didn’t want to help. I just didn’t want to do it while on the planet. So I stuck around long enough to devise a plan. Turned out there were other ships. One for each colony, arranged at the center of this mountain we were in like the barrels of a Gatling gun pointed at the cosmos. The structure of the captors fell like dominoes. Before long we had what was probably thousands of freed minors. I felt like Moses yelling, “Let these assholes go.”
Most of each colony was more of the same. Deckhands and low level technicians, shanghaied off of ships in the parsec. Some petty criminals. Some erroneously labeled political prisoners. If it had been entirely dregs we would have been in poor shape trying to get all of them into my commandeered vehicle. Fortune would have it, there were enough among them to get the ships off that rock.
The tale of Napoleon, exiled to imprisonment, only to form and army, overtake the planet and return to the Zalud Empire, spread nearly as fast as the uprising. Come time to laden my ship with bodies, many pushed their way to the bridge to lay their praises and exultations upon me. I wanted to get the fuck off that rock.
And eventually we did. I think it took longer to do than it did to free those mooks. But they were my mooks, as a great wizard once said. Better mooks than the mook drones that let Zalud’s mining planet crumble between my fingers. It was not how I expected to start my journey of revenge. There was certainly a lot more fuckery to come.
But it was a good start.