Red Cells (6 page)

Stake launched himself from his bunk and backed flat against the far wall of the cell in one movement, while crying out, “Hey! Help! Help us in here! Wake up…wake up…help us in here!” Yelling to his cell mates and, if it were functioning, the cell’s security camera at the same time.

The figure had taken one step toward him, but it turned its head, distracted, as Stake’s two cell mates awoke and cried out in terror themselves. The Dacvibese was closest to the intruder, on the lower level of a bunk bed occupied up top by Kofi…who, afraid to leap down, pushed himself into the corner and tucked into a ball as if he hoped to evade notice. The Dacvibese screeched horribly and ejected two malodorous streams of mucus toward the intruder from glands at the corners of his mouth. At the same time, he took hold of his mattress and hoisted it up in front of him as a shield.

This flurry of distractions gave Stake a chance, however brief, to take in the figure in greater detail.

He could see why Blur had called it a skeleton. A demon’s skeleton, at that. The entity was roughly manlike in size and outline, but it seemed to either have the exoskeleton of an insect or to have never developed flesh upon its bony armature. He might have thought the being was mechanical if not for the organic,
grown
appearance of its composition. Thin arms and legs formed from odd sections of bone. A bare cage of ribs that were curved and yet also, inexplicably, multiply jointed. A complex pelvis, twisted but symmetrical. And a ribbed mask for a face, without eyes or other features, although it was ringed with a fringe of rippling cilia. From the back of its head, like windblown hair, white banners streamed in the air, though there was no breeze in the cell to blow them.

Its hands were raised—long, fleshless digits spread wide.

Then it swiped one of its arms in a vicious backhand. The mattress the Dacvibese had used as a shield was torn out of his hands and thudded against the wall. The Dacvibese’s screams increased to an ear-piercing level. He backed against the side of the bunk bed—the farthest he could go.

Instead of advancing on him, however, the creature with its glow like white phosphorus turned its eyeless face toward Stake again, and started forward.

It was just slightly out of focus…insubstantial, or at least not fully substantial in this environment. It hurt Stake’s eyes to look at it. No, not his eyes…it hurt his
mind
to look upon it. Pinned against the wall, Stake let out an inarticulate cry.

Then, beyond the entity, Stake saw a guard framed in the doorway. The human guard was out in the hallway, on the other side of the red-tinted barrier, but he was raising his pistol in both hands and taking aim.

Stake slid down the wall, into a crouch, out of the line of fire.

The guard fired energy bolts straight through the closed barrier, streaking red like tracer rounds. Right into the back of the unsuspecting creature.

It whirled around. It looked like it should be screaming but it lacked a mouth to do so. If it had meant to feed, it must feed by some other means, Stake thought in the midst of his paralyzed panic. And even as he experienced it, this panic angered him. He had never known such an immobilizing fear before. He had always been able to respond to danger with a trained imperative for survival. It wasn’t so much the creature’s appearance that inspired this new irrational fear, however, but some force or vibration it emanated. Despite the uncountable nonhuman races he had encountered as a citizen of Punktown, this being was something entirely
other
.

The guard in the hallway triggered more molten red bolts, piercing the intervening barrier.

With the energy bolts seeming to connect with its body and penetrate its animated bones, the creature appeared enraged. Despite its insubstantial aspect, it didn’t seem able to step through the barrier to counterattack the guard. Instead, it suddenly reached to the side and caught hold of the Dacvibese, gripping his head between both its wide hands.

An explosion, then, deafened as opposed to deafening. A soundless nova blast. Bursting in every direction: the Dacvibese’s rotten-smelling blood, black as ink.

Then they were both gone, like particles of matter and antimatter mutually annihilated.

Immediately the guard was deactivating the barrier. Stepping into a pool of black blood. Calling in other guards over his helmet mic. Stake saw the name in white on the man’s left breast. It was Hurley.

“Jesus mother-loving Christ!” Kofi blurted, cowering on the upper bunk.

“Amen,” Stake murmured, sliding up the wall to stand again. Blood speckled his face.

Hurley looked at Stake, though the guard appeared as faceless as the creature had been. “You all right?”

“Yeah…considering that thing came here to kill me,” Stake said. Because whatever else remained mysterious to him, that much had seemed very clear.

Nine

Components

Again, a human guard and a robot removed Stake from his cell so that he might be brought to the warden; to relate what he had seen, the human guard explained gruffly. The guard was Flaquita, not Hurley. Hurley had gone on before Stake to be interviewed by the warden separately. So had Stake’s surviving cell mate, Kofi.

As the flanking guards escorted him away from his cell, prisoners roused from their sleep by the commotion stood close to the barriers of their own cells looking out at him. As he passed, they called, “What was it, Stake? What did you see?” But he couldn’t linger to reply.

When the three of them at last entered into the tubular corridor connecting to the administrative wing, Stake was already craning his neck and looking sharply from side to side, watching for interstitial life forms out the windows that lined the tunnel. He was not disappointed. The creatures were more readily apparent this time, closer to the windows and seeming to gaze inside as if they had been expecting the trio. Though widely varied in form, all of them were white and luminous. Clinging to the outside of the tunnel was that large animal with the multiply jointed crab legs. Eel-like forms swam in place, their tails rippling. And a creature resembling a trilobite, with a segmented shell, hovered in place with the help of its wavering fringe of legs, like those of a centipede—or the cilia of a microorganism.

Stake stopped in his tracks, his eyes locked on the trilobite-thing as it floated out there, stationary, at face level. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed.

Flaquita spun around and seized his arm. “What are you doing?” he said. “Come on.”

Stake pointed. “That thing! You see that?”

Ignoring him, the guard tugged him along. “I said come on.” The robot took hold of Stake’s other arm.

Stake looked back over his shoulder. That clinging spider-creature, its long white legs curved like a human rib cage. Those eel-things, rippling like long hair fluttering in a breeze. And that circular trilobite, like an ominous mask devoid of features…

“That’s its face!” Stake cried, struggling against the two guards, but they only gripped him more tightly, forced him along more insistently. “Will you just
look
? That’s the face of the thing that came into my cell!”

Flaquita stopped, and so the robot followed suit. The human guard glanced back down the corridor the way they had come, perhaps a bit spooked after hearing of his fellow guard Hurley having fired at an unidentified intruder. “What are you talking about? Where?”

“Outside the windows,” Stake said. “It’s those interstitial animals!”

Just then, the lights went out.

For a moment, the three of them were swallowed in utter darkness, except for the interstitial life forms themselves, glowing against the churning blackness like a field of stars. But then a string of red lights came on in the ceiling as an emergency backup power source kicked in. This was no mere power fluctuation…not this time. The corridor’s regular lights did not return, and a loud buzzing alert had begun to sound.

“What is it?” Stake asked.

“What’s it look like?” Flaquita said. “The power’s down. Don’t ask me why. Come on, let’s get you to the warden…if he still wants to see you with this going on.”

* * *

When they stepped into the warden’s office, they found the lighting subdued but his array of holographic monitors and their associated controls unaffected. He at first ignored the trio aside from a disapproving glance, engaged as he was in conversation with the chief of maintenance. “You’re certain we won’t lose power to the cell barriers?” he was saying.

“Sir,” the face on his central monitor replied, “this is a prison, so the importance of maintaining the cell barriers was top priority when the power system was designed. We won’t lose the barriers unless we lose everything we have left—which includes auxiliary life support. In other words, if we lose that, it won’t matter because we’ll all be dead, anyway. Well, aside from the robots…until their individual power sources slowly wind down.”

“Yes…the robots.” The Tikkihotto glanced again at the three figures standing across the room from his desk. “All right, Klaus, stay on it.” Dinhoo Cirvik brushed away the virtual monitor and pointed to the mechanical guard. “What’s that doing in here, Flaquita?”

Confused, Flaquita stammered through his helmet, “Just following usual protocol, Warden.”

“This is not a usual situation anymore, is it? Our automated systems are no longer secure. Get it out.”

Flaquita turned to address the robot. “You heard the warden; you’re dismissed. I can manage the prisoner on my own.”

Without protest, the machine turned away and let itself out of the office. The door slid shut behind it.

Stake spoke up when the robot had left. “It can influence electrical fields, can’t it? Technology…machines…even the minds of your robots.”

“What are you talking about?” Cirvik snapped.

“The creature that tried to attack me in my cell. I think it spoke to me through one of your robots when I was in the med unit. The robot said to me, ‘Your kind are not the only prisoners.’ This power outage…it’s angry, isn’t it? I should say, angrier than usual.”

Cirvik sighed, swiveling side to side in his chair as he surveyed Stake with his profusion of ocular tendrils, which writhed restlessly. “You’ve stirred things up, Mr. Stake. Poking around…asking questions…”

“All the prisoners aren’t asking the same questions? And from the ones I’ve talked to, I wonder how many of your guards know what’s going on. If any.” He motioned toward Flaquita, standing beside him. “You don’t trust them, do you?”

Flaquita looked back and forth between the two men uncomprehendingly, as if to confirm Stake’s suspicion.

Cirvik sat forward, and said, “Do you know how hard I worked at my career, how many years…
decades
…it took for me to achieve my current position, Mr. Stake? You’re a mutant; you should know the truth of these things. The Earth Colonies can paint on their benign face…talk about the glorious rainbow that is Paxton, with all its sentient species living in harmony. But we know the reality is that Earth people control that colony, stole the city from the native Choom and nudged them aside. For a non-Earther to achieve any position of real importance in the system is rare and difficult.”

“I understand that you want to protect your own interests, yes. Assuming that the home office doesn’t know what’s been going on here, I understand perfectly that you don’t want them to realize you have a dangerous situation on your hands.”

“Despite what I just said,” Cirvik growled, his eye tendrils becoming even more agitated, “it isn’t just about protecting my career! My job is to protect this prison, maintain order here, keep these dangerous inmates secure! I have been facing a challenge the likes of which you, or the home office, couldn’t imagine!”

“To your knowledge, no interstitial life form has ever acted in a hostile way before all this?”

“It’s unprecedented, yes!”

“Well, don’t you think the home office should know it? And shut this place down…not just the prison, but close up the pocket it’s in?”

“And do what, then? Build new prisons where? Do you know what’s at stake here? How much rides on the success of my prison? They want to open
more
of these pockets…build
more
prisons like this! We can’t cease those projects because I can’t deal with a single aggressive life form!”

“But it isn’t really a single life form, is it?” Stake said. “Outside the windows just now I saw the components of the thing that attacked me—or at least, other creatures just like them.”

Cirvik sat back slowly in his seat. “Now I see why people rent your services, Mr. Stake. And before that, sent you in to infiltrate the enemy. No…you’re right…it isn’t just a single creature. It’s more like a group of prisoners itself.”

Ten

Severed

“Just like it told me,” Stake said. “It’s sentient. It can communicate intelligently.”