The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) (2 page)

The average pirate or smuggler was more than welcome to stop by the Cauldrons of Dagda. He would either never want to break the law again, or else he would say or do something stupid, become an inmate himself, and face having his lifeless corpse tossed into lava a few days after his arrival.

Morgan’s circumstances were different, though. She found it hard to believe that Mowbray’s troops would knowingly let the general of the CasterLan forces, or any of Vere’s close allies, go wherever they pleased, even a prison where no one wanted to go.

“If I were them,” she had told the others in her group as they planned their course of action, “I’d let the ships land right outside the prison before signaling all nearby forces to descend on the area. From there, it would be a matter of escorting the new inmates into the very prison they had been trying to sneak into.”

When she had said it, Baldwin had almost thrown up. Cade had laughed, as if the danger involved wasn’t real.

Looking down at the smoking red planet and thinking about their plan again, she had to admit it seemed incredibly foolish all of a sudden.

3

Terror-Dhome was primarily a mining planet, the majority of its surface flowing with lava, rich in minerals and rare gases. It was, in fact, one of the few places known to have the liquid form of some of the rarest metals in all of space. But despite the fact that the Cauldrons of Dagda accounted for less than one percent of the planet’s population, the prison facility was what most people thought of when they heard the name Terror-Dhome. They didn’t think of mines; they envisioned the facility where many inmates killed themselves rather than face the pain and torture that awaited them every day.

It was said that the Cauldrons of Dagda were conceived by Maximillian the Bloody. The ancient Vonnegan ruler had realized that it was satisfying to win wars and conquer planets, but there were always uprisings and secret attempts to reclaim these kingdoms. It was Maximillian who figured out that creating vast amounts of misery was the best way to keep each vanquished kingdom in check. The choice for the recently conquered people was easy: behave and follow their new ruler or be sent to the Cauldrons. Maximillian never faced another uprising.

In the millennia since its creation, the prison had been the site of inconceivable brutality. One Vonnegan ruler had become incensed by a Meekquay whom he felt had refused to greet him respectfully. To show the rest of the galaxy what happened when someone failed to offer demonstrable respect, he sent the entire Meekquay population, a race of mutes incapable of vocal greetings, to the Cauldrons of Dagda, where they soon became extinct. The prison was also where King Lutan the Incorrigible was sent after being defeated by the Vonnegans. Shinty the Kid, one of the most notorious alien gangsters in the history of the galaxy, had died there after two weeks of imprisonment. Tone-Murd, the warlord who had defeated every other rival leader in the Detth Sector to temporarily unify that region of the galaxy, had only lasted three days at the Cauldrons before perishing.

The miners who worked on the planet stayed as far away from the prison as possible, but every so often a new member of the mining crews would have to visit the facility as part of their initiation. Most of these people, humans and aliens alike, never wanted to speak about the horrors they had seen. A few quit their mining job after the first day, deciding to work on a different planet, far away from the things that took place at Terror-Dhome.

As the Griffin Fire and Pendragon approached, a crew of miners hovered above the lava fields, chiseling away at the occasional boulder of black rock that protruded from the thick, red liquid. Each crew member wore a suit of thermo armor that closely resembled space armor but was designed to withstand intense heat. After collecting as much of the rare minerals as they could find, the mining crew got back in their vessel and departed for a different area of the lava fields.

Every once in a while, the miners had to demolish a portion of rock protruding from the lava in order to gain access to the interior portions of the mass of stone and metal they were mining. When this happened, they called in an explosives expert to set up a targeted charge that would clear a precise path into the stone. There was no career in all the galaxy with a shorter lifespan than an explosives expert on Terror-Dhome. No matter how careful each demolition expert was, a bubble of lava or a burst of heat would often get too close and set off the charges before the worker could set the timer and get to safety.

It was each miner’s preference to search for minerals as far away from the Cauldrons of Dagda as possible. Only when they had surveyed every possible area on the day’s itinerary did they head back toward the spaceport that the mining facility shared with the prison. Even when they weren’t particularly close to the Cauldrons, it was said the miners could hear the wail of prisoners being tortured and begging to die.

The Cauldrons of Dadga had gotten its name because the entire planet was like a kettle of lava, and because the prison was situated atop a patch of rock surrounded by the Dagda lava sea. Three sides of the prison yard faced out to such molten oceans. Prisoners who got too close to the lava often had it bubble up to their feet and ankles, incinerating whichever part of their flesh it came in contact with. If they stopped whatever manual labor they had been assigned, even if it was to care for their injury, the prison guards lashed them with a vibro whip. If they were too badly injured to continue working, the guards simply pushed them off the edge of the rock and watched as the screaming prisoner sank under the burning seas.

While the mines and the prison shared the same spaceport—a large platform that hovered well above the lava fields—much of the rest of the prison facility was below ground level. Instead of being built above ground, the way they were for colonies, the containment field had been built under the prison yard. This was where the prisoners slept and ate. Anyone hoping for a reprieve from the heat of the lava fields was sorely disappointed; it was even hotter under the lava than it was at ground level. There was nowhere anyone could go to avoid the feeling of being cooked alive. Besides adding to the inmates’ misery, the underground living quarters served another purpose. The inmates knew they were already under the lava seas, and thus there was no hope of chiseling through a rock wall or digging a tunnel underground without lava pouring inside and killing everyone as rapidly as if they were to jump into the lava fields.

The spaceport was the only access point into and out of the facility. As such, it was heavily guarded with Vonnegan troopers. And while the Vonnegan officers who served at the Cauldrons of Dagda considered it an honor to be stationed at the most infamous prison in the galaxy, the lowly guards did not share that sentiment. Instead, they considered their posting on Terror-Dhome to be punishment for something they had done, which it often was.

4

Death was everywhere.

Only a short distance away from Vere, bubbles of lava popped and splattered the ground. Not far from where she worked, a Gthothch had been assigned the task of moving boulders from one part of the prison grounds to a different area. Hour after hour the prisoner had bent over, lifted one giant stone after another up to his shoulder, and then lumbered across the rocky surface of the prison yard.

If the Gthothch stopped moving and stayed perfectly still, his thick stone skin would actually have blended in perfectly with the rocky surface of the prison grounds. Of course, the guards ensured he never had the chance to rest. If the Gthothch did stop to gather his strength, the closest prison guard lashed him across the back with his vibro whip. The electric current that traveled through the whip brought every prisoner to their knees. On almost all prisoners, it took only one strike of the whip for them to know they never wanted to feel that searing pain a second time.

Only a week earlier, a heavy-set alien with swamp green skin had been whipped once a minute for half an hour. The alien, who had killed people in seven different sectors before being sent to the Cauldrons, was begging and crying to be left alone. Given the choice of jumping into the lava and dying or receiving another lash every minute for yet another half an hour, the murderer jumped into the lava. None of the other inmates had ever learned what the alien had done to earn the guard’s wrath. Most times, the guards were just as miserable as the inmates and didn’t want to be there either. But because they held weapons, they had an outlet for their resentment and irritation.

The Gthothch, like the other prisoners around him, did whatever he thought he could do to avoid a second lashing. Hour after hour, he had carried boulders across the prison yard. Eventually, though, his body simply gave out. In the middle of hauling another stone across the grounds, the thick alien with rock-like skin closed his eyes, groaned, then fell forward on top of the very stone he had been trying to carry. He had been so afraid of receiving another lash from the vibro whip that he had worked until he died.

A group of four guards walked over to the Gthothch. Instead of striking him, though, each guard grabbed hold of one of the alien’s limbs and dragged him to the edge of the lava sea. There, one of the guards put a boot against the Gthothch’s hips and pushed forward as hard as he could. The stony alien toppled off the side and sank into the lava without the guards wasting time to see if he had actually been dead or just too exhausted to keep working that day.

On the far side of the prison grounds, obscured by a haze of hot vapors wafting up from the ground, a short alien with six legs screamed for someone to kill him. Instead, he was kept tied to a giant rock while another guard lashed him over and over again with his whip. Each strike opened a gash on the alien’s skin. At the same time, each lashing sent waves of electrical charges bursting through the little creature’s body. The charges were painful everywhere, but especially deep in the bones and muscles of the area that the whip had opened up.

After each lashing, the guard waited a few moments until the hysterical alien had his senses about him once more. There was no point in delivering the blows too quickly. The alien would just go into shock or die, and the guard would be sweating and wasting energy in the hot lava fields for nothing. The guard only concluded the punishment when the alien ceased his cries, because it was at that point that the prisoner had ceased to have value at the Cauldrons. The guard ordered two other prisoners to drag the alien’s dead body to the edge of the prison yard. There, that alien was also tossed into the molten sea.

Vere didn’t look away from her work when the Gthothch collapsed or when the alien was being whipped. All around her, the same thing was happening to every prisoner. That was why she didn’t look anywhere except three feet in front of her.

Leaning forward, both hands placed firmly against the wood beam in front of her, she planted one foot, inched the other foot forward, then pushed as hard as she could. The thick wood beam she was pushing moved forward slightly.

The beam extended three body lengths from a metal cylinder that stuck out of the ground. Across from her, the other half of the same long wooden beam extended out another three body lengths. There, a hulking sun-colored alien, with flesh that looked as if it were simmering and ready to catch fire, pushed the other half of the beam. Together, Vere and the alien were responsible for ensuring the beam kept moving circles all day.

The alien, known as an Ignus Moris, was rumored to be the only creature anywhere in the galaxy that could survive being thrown into the Cauldron’s lava fields. It was also whispered that the guards’ vibro whips would smoke and disintegrate if they touched the alien’s smoldering flesh.

Either because this one alien was impervious to the two punishments most commonly dealt out at the prison, or because he had done something specifically to earn Mowbray’s wrath, the Ignus Moris was stationed at the Circle of Sorrow, across from Vere.

The Circle was considered the most grueling and senseless of all of the tasks carried out on the prison grounds. Each inmate pushed the wood beam in a circle until they could no longer perform the task. When they couldn’t carry out their duty anymore, they were dropped into the lava. Many inmates couldn’t budge the wood beam at all, let alone after being exposed to Terror-Dhome’s intense heat for hours or days or weeks. No one knew if the Circle’s motion propelled some kind of hidden internal mechanism that actually benefited the prison. Most, Vere included, suspected it did nothing except kill the people who were tasked with pushing it. This was one of many psychological tricks devised to destroy the spirit of prisoners who eventually came to realize that their mindless feats of endurance had no value whatsoever. At least a prisoner moving stones saw a stack of rocks where there was previously nothing. All Vere and the Ignus Moris had was an endless circle that sapped their strength each time they pushed with all of their might.

All around the prison yard, there were dozens of guards torturing and tormenting hundreds of prisoners. To discourage a mass riot—after all, the prisoners vastly outnumbered the guards—an additional deterrence was added. The monster of the Cauldrons stalked the prison yard, killing anyone and everyone who caught his attention. Without the threat of being burned alive or of the pain of a vibro whip, something had to keep the Ignus Moris in line, and Balor, the monster, did that.

The monster’s skin changed colors depending on the time of day. Early in the morning it was a pale yellow, the color of granules on a beach. As the day progressed, the monster’s skin turned darker and darker. By dusk, Balor’s skin was the color of the black rocks that the nearby miners excavated for minerals. The beast was as tall as a Llyushin fighter stood up on its end. So tall was it that it was known to accidently step on and crush prisoners who were working near its feet. Its hands, like its lone eye, were disproportionately large. Although Vere had never gotten close enough to it to be sure, she estimated her entire body could fit in one of the monster’s palms. If that happened and the monster made a fist, she would be pulverized. This was not a tale told by prisoners to scare the others, it was something Vere had actually seen with her own eyes. During her first week at the Cauldrons, she had witnessed Balor pick up a half human-half lepton prisoner and had caused a sickening crumbling of bones that turned the inmate into a sack of gore.