Boy, was that a bright light. I couldn’t tell you if it was the light or just the arc of whatever juice was left in the hunk of junk I was standing on. There was a serene moment afterwards. I think. The peacefulness of floating through nothingness. Stars winking at me. Welcoming me into their embrace. Not a coldness. A nothingness. Of simply being. Or not being. I don’t know.
Then of course some asshole comes along and ruins the experience.
There I was minding my own business in a deathlike state in the cold abyss calling me to a new womb.
They had found me.
I guess that flash of light was bright enough that those ships turned right on around and picked my ass up. That was the impression I got from some vague sensory memories. I went from nothingness to being the waning energy of ball lightning. Warmth. Warmth everywhere. Too much of it. Corridors. Dark and gray corridors.
I heard myself laughing then a blurry figure punched me in the face. It must have been a particularly good insult.
Darkness.
The dark and gray returned. This time it wasn’t flat and drab. Glistening points. Course coal. Obsidian. Amethyst. Glowing yellow orbs.
Yelling.
Crack.
Yelling.
Crack.
Couldn’t tell you if there was a trial that I just don’t remember, but I had a pretty good idea where I was.
Prison.
For what I had done – and had been framed for – I don’t readily know why they didn’t outright kill me. That would have been the smartest thing to do knowing me. In typical fashion, as it would turn out, I found myself to be the smartest – if not the smartest assed – person in the room.
And for a hot moment as I began to regain composure, I could have sworn I was on the set for the mines in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Clinking and clinking and clinking. It echoed everywhere in the darkness.
Sneakheaded creatures stood tall over hunched over beings. They hissed and yelled. Beating and berating. Their hooded heads were powerful, stone like, and glistened much like the breath dampened rocks around us. Two of them walked behind me.
I then realized I was walking. Stumbling, moreover. My head throbbed. My skin writhed with burning tendrils. A heavy hand met my back.
The floor disappeared.
Once again I was falling, but only for a moment. Several somethings broke my fall, hurriedly squirming out from beneath me.
Hands.
I squirm to think of the memory.
Hands in the darkness, grabbing me. Disembodied. Moving my corpus for me. I was righted up; something was forced into the grip of my hands.
Eyes still adjusting to the darkness, I looked blearily about. There were faintly glowing eyes surrounding. And just like that they turned away and the clinking noises resumed.
I was in a hole I realized. All around me the moving bodies materialized. Each chipped desperately at the ground with a pick. Up and up the walls, I saw a snakehead staring down at us from a ledge barely out of reach.
“Hey, dickhead,” I yelled at him.
The pseudo dick shaped head looked down at me. Or on me. Probably both.
“What-”
Before I could finish, dickhead jabbed me with a shoulder height staff I didn’t realize he was holding.
There was a flash and a crack. I had the sudden urge to quietly toil at the rock and not interact with anyone or anything else.
For maybe another hour or two that’s what I did. Halfheartedly anyway. Sandbagging was one of my expertise. The biggest mistake one can make is to allow others to see how much you are capable of. If they find out you are competent, the bar is set high. From there on you won’t have a good time, because, you know, people start to expect things of you. They know you won’t fuck it up and you’ll get more done.
I daintily, just convincingly enough, chipped away at the rocks with what the Spanish would call golpecitos. Lots of little hits not requiring much energy. With a proper rhythm it was rather therapeutic, like meditating, as I plotted my next move.
ERRT!
Always with the loud noises against my pounding head.
The tinking stopped. A commotion came around me. The others all turned away to another direction. I was moved along with the flow of their bodies as they marched into the darkness.
We marched for quite a while in quiet darkness. By my pace count it was a little over a kilometer. Details of the walls grew more and more around, until the light came.
Like a train tunnel, a bright orb of white light grew up ahead. Heads of various sizes and shapes bobbled before me in the gloom. A chill crept through the tunnel. It smelled like winter, minus the pleasant smells of fir and fireplace.
Wait. There was something else. The faint smell of frozen shit.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn was right. At least it wasn’t burning shit.
Yay.
Abruptly out in the open, the light wasn’t all that bright. It still hurt, though.
A gray hazy sky loomed over us, a loose chain gang of ragged creatures. Rock still seemed to be all around us in the open. A coliseum formed naturally. It was some kind of canyon or crater. Massive, but perilous walls encircled crude single level buildings at its center.
The cold was bitter. It blew in ebbing pockets, a massive airfoil within the crater.
Guards loosely lined the long walk across the open. Not that we’d get far. About two thousand feet of sheer rock face separated us from whatever was up there. They marched along slowly, only paying so much attention to us. The prisoners were totally compliant.
Then I noticed something.
On the back of one of the snakeheads’ heads. Well, I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a Zalud Enterprises logo. A kind of pretentious Z in a wreathed circle. Nothing says fueling your empire like slave labor in a part of the galaxy no one has even heard of. Funny thing about the lowest bidder and governments is it’s not actually the lowest bidder. It’s the highest kickbacks.
Shuffling along in silence, we neared the buildings. I realized I had no idea which one I was supposed to go to. There was no instruction given to me that I could recall. No recollection of being here to have an inkling. The group began to splinter off towards different shacks.
I tucked my head down, following the nearest one to me. Everything told me I wanted to be in one of the ones closest to the edge to minimize the distance to the outside. Maybe, maybe not. There was no time to decide; I didn’t want to get zapped again. Blend in. Fly under the radar. The best bet for survival while I pull a Nicolson.
The howling wind ceased when the wood like door closed behind us. I found myself standing alone in the middle of the simple shack, an open room lined with bunks crammed together. Everyone else disappeared to the bunks like mice peeking from their hiding places.
From the far end of the shack emerged a much larger creature. It was blue, black, and pale bellied, leather amphibious skin all over. Tall and bald with broad shoulders and black, shark eyes it strutted up to me.
I’m not short. I’m not particularly tall either. Taller than most of the others, yes. But this thing was about seven foot, easy. It walked up to me, opening its webbed hands out to its sides. I knew what this meant.
We were nearly chest to chest. Or chest to solar plexus. Careful not to telegraph my action, I put my fist into his fishy chin as hard as I could.
Law of the jungle, baby.
“What the hell, man?” it said stumbling back.
It’s head flopped around like its neck was made of rubber. After shaking off the hay from my haymaker it approached again. This time keeping a distance.
I spun around, expecting the rest of the attack. Those faintly glowing eyes peered from the shadows. I turned back to King Fisher. It took another slow step backwards.
“It’s alright,” it said in a smooth, soft voice.
I did one more spin to make sure it wasn’t a double bluff.
Unlike most people, I am a huge fan of being proven wrong. Especially for someone like me, a cynic whose usually always right. It’s often confused with being a pessimist. I prefer to be called a realist. One of my greatest skills is mitigation. And the key to mitigation is foreseeing what can possible go wrong.
Either way, I feel I achieved my goal – asserting dominance.
“We have to work together,” I heard it say. “It’s the only way to survive.”
He had me there. He certainly wasn’t wrong. I just wasn’t used to getting to that point so quickly with others. The other concern it raised, though, these people might be a little too compliant. Never trust someone who goes along so easily with tyranny.
There’s no winning with me, I know.
“I am Jalad,” he said bowing slightly.
“Of Tanagra?”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“Never mind,” I said. “Call me Napoleon… of Saint Helena. On my way back to Corsica.”
“We will find you a place,” he said extending an arm.
Several others scurried out from the shadows. They returned from somewhere with a pitiful excuse for a pillow, blanket, and a set of rags also known as clothes. The gaggle made its way to a bunk at the far end of the billet, where the one I slugged came from.
I walked over to it. Jalad walked beside be, the hint of what I guess was a smile on his face. There sat the pile and a yellow brick of what I supposed was food. I gave a slight frown to compliment his smile. Nothing I hadn’t experienced before.
“Please. Sit. Relax,” he said. “We only have a few hours of rest.”
“Ugh. Some things never change.”
He gave me another perplexed look.
“More than what I have been getting as of late. So what’s the deal here?”
“What do you mean?”
I could feel the eyes of the others on me, the tension rising in the room.
“Why are you all here?”
The fish creature Jalad turned another shade paler.
“We are forbidden to speak of it.”
“Then you are probably forbidden to speak at all then.”
He sat on the bunk across from me, lithely.
“We risk much if they hear us,” in hushed tones.
“Of, course. Some things never change,” I mumbled through stuffing a piece of the tasteless brick of nutrition into my face. “Not my first space rodeo. Got any hooch here?”
Jalad shifted about before nodding to someone I couldn’t see behind him. Whoever it was scampered off and back with a bag of what I guessed was fermented food brick. I took the bag. It was going to be bad. Really bad. But I needed a stiff one.
I cuffed the opening of the bag in my hands, bringing it to my pie hole.
And once again I was pleasantly wrong. It was sweet. Almost like the cornbread it looked like originally with an aftertaste of old potato. That would be the booze. Ten out of ten, would recommend in prison. I just try not to think where they got the yeast from.
Ten out of ten, would recommend against forced internment, too, though.
Things weren’t adding up.
For one, I was alive. I said before, Zalud may be vain enough to have a grand monologue while keeping me alive to watch me be tortured. Maybe if I died I would be considered a martyr to all those who stood against the empire. Most of all, though, I’m the good guy in this situation. Never leave the protagonist alive when you have him hamstrung. It never ends well for the villain.
Another thing. Not even a show trial. There’s always a show trial. Not always before the execution either. It’s possible the trial aired and I just haven’t seen it because I don’t have much access to TV. Nor do I always care to watch the state sponsored propaganda devices. I was out of it for a bit. There have been a growlingly alarming number of times now that I have been rendered unconscious.
But then there’s these inmates. Not hardened. Not typical of what one would expect. They were too damned nice. I’d have to keep a close eye on them.
“So what’s everyone in for?” I asked my host.
“In for?” he scratched his fishlike chin. “Some political prisoners. Most of us are hostages. Minus the ransom. Single unarmed ships at space, overpowered and boarded by these pirates.”
“Mmm. I’ve been here before.”
“Here?”
“Not here, sorry. In this situation before. It’s surprisingly common.” I sighed.
That would explain why no one bothered to ask my name… that I could remember. I should probably see a real doctor at some point. Might explain the headaches. It means though, that they didn’t ask my name because my name doesn’t matter. I was just some body ready for use, floating in space.
So, I’m in Zalud’s sweatshop and they don’t even know it.
Oh, hoh. Oh, hoh, hoh.
This is going to be fun.