Eternal Saturnalia, Part II

Eternal Saturnalia is a two part story. You can read part I here.

6...

"Why are they called the 'River Dogs' anyway?" Alysia asked the assembled Eotians. "How many Golets have ever even seen a river?"

"Not many. And that's exactly it," Karima said. "They don't have any dogs on their ship-cities either; waste of food. They just think the name sounds tough."

"But it doesn't; it sounds cute."

"Why don't you go tell Lawrence his gang's name is so adorable? I'm sure he'd love that."

"Honestly, he might. He's a weird guy. Probably insane. But he's nice enough."

"When he's not jumping someone for their socks."

"That was before. Like none of you were up to any shady stuff."

As one of the newly formed affinity groups governing Installation 65 in a loose confederation, the Eotian Council had veered far from the planned topic for today's meeting: deciding who to vote for as the new Head of Maintenance during the next Plenary Session of the All Prisoner Provisional Government.

Yasud, the newly elected leader of the Council, banged a metallic canteen on the bars of the cell they gathered in, restoring the meeting to order. The current point of contention was whether to vote for one of the River Dogs, a competent enough former Golet handyman by the name of Maximilian, or a member of a rival crew known as Sami. The rival crew was a multicultural faction of previously unaffiliated prisoners that went by the name of the Brigade. The Eotians were unsure which group would ultimately hold power, but they knew they had to pick a side. The other factions vying for the seat were too divided and would easily be brought into the fold of either camp.

The increasingly popular underdog in prison politics, the Brigade spoke of a Peaceful Front for Unity within Punitive Work Installation 65. While the River Dogs nominally agreed with the Brigade on the need to reduce squabbling and infighting, there was an unspoken favoritism displayed toward the Dogs and their cronies when it came to labor assignments, room selection, and so on. However, the Eotians, downtrodden and simple, possessed an innate skepticism of liberatory movements that cut across peoples. Such positive thinking was the domain of utopian strivers, not pessimistic survivors. They instead favored the status quo, content with their secondary status as long as it avoided conflict.

But despite her disdain for the Old Ways and atypical fondness for Lawrence, Alysia supported the Brigade. Secretly for now, merely playing devil's advocate on their behalf or putting in a "it's not so simple" when they were critiqued by her peers. But a supporter nonetheless.

By Eotian custom, any debate required a Cycle, and each present member of the Council must speak once before another matter could be broached or a vote taken. Alysia waited for her turn.

The previous Cycle was nonunanimous in outcome, with the blind vote coming out to two for the River Dog's man, one for the Brigade's man, and one undecided. While the small size of the Council made it obvious who was voting for what, taboo forbade broaching this topic, and the Eotians preferred to argue as if speaking to an overcrowded debate hall back home.

Before it was Alysia's turn to pontificate, Yasud and Yafar would make their points first. Yasud began. "I repeat my support for Maximilian. We worked together on a janitorial detail a year ago. He was fair, honest, hardworking, and he never complained. The River Dogs have kept this godforsaken place running well enough so far."

Yasud motioned to his left with a flattened palm, the signal for Yafar to speak. Yafar could only muster a few words, fidgeting about in his seat. "I support Max. I've never seen a thing he couldn't fix." He sent the Cycle onward.

"Are we really going to let these Golets run rampant, stuffing their faces as our gardeners barely scrape together enough food to sustain us?" She spoke with a voice more venomous than she intended. "I'm sure Maximilian is qualified, but the River Dogs will never be more than mafiosos, pulling us down into their filth." Her tone trembled, the hatred fueling her bravado dissipating.

"Sami is competent, trustworthy, and impartial, and I reiterate my support for him." Alysia paused, regaining her composure. "We cannot let the River Dogs run this place like racketeers."

Karima spoke last, softly and carefully in her official capacity, and with an air of motherly authority that entranced one to listen.

"You've all argued well. It's been a difficult decision, but after hearing from both sides, I believe Maximilian is the most qualified and that supporting him is the best choice for our people." She motioned toward Yasud, completing the Cycle and beginning the vote.

Each Eotian was given a slip of paper and a thin bit of napkin. They passed around a pen, writing one letter to conserve its precious ink. Alysia knew it was useless to continue. She scribbled an M and placed it in the bowl in the center of the Council. Yasud counted the slips and announced the tally, relieved at the final result.

Maximilian was the victor, and the Eotian Council would place their vote for him at the second meeting of the All Prisoner Provisional Government. It was slated for next week. When the time came, Maximilian was the new Head of Maintenance, and the River Dogs secured another scrap of power.

7...

Punitive Work Installation 65 bore a new name: Saturnalia. The All Prisoner Provisional Government voted on the name three months after the tower paused, an homage to the ancient, pre-Web Roman holiday in which the slave was symbolically freed. But freedom from control is not freedom from necessity, and the Saturnalians toiled in the lunar complex to sustain their meager existence.

There were the gardeners in the hydroponic greenhouses, which pockmarked the desolate moonscape outside the installation proper. The gardeners repurposed dozens of these glass mounds from growing the cash crops of the operators into nourishing the no-longer-prisoners. Staples of the no-longer-prison diet included the hardy potato, that starchy friend of the oppressed; the humble carrot, a new mascot of the Saturnalians due to its orange color matching their uniforms; and the fleshy tobor, a pseudo-vegetable of non-Earth origin that provided desperately needed protein.

The mines were still being worked as well, albeit with severely downsized teams. The precious titanium within them was hoarded for eventual trading with the outside world; perhaps a wayward slower-than-light ship would make its way to their new home, was the thought. Mostly, it gave the veteran miners something to do. They grew restless when detailed somewhere else.

And finally, there was the invisible, socially necessary labor often left unsaid. Cleaning, cooking, maintenance, laundry, and natal care for the new mothers (fetuses previously aborted by the operators, their parents punished).

As the saviors of Saturnalia, the gardeners had become a class above the other workers. Without the garden plot in a remote corner of a greenhouse tended in secret before the eternal holiday, the Saturnalians would never have lasted more than a few months. It was from this plot that the prisoners managed to scrounge together enough seeds to begin sustenance agriculture, and the gardeners were understandably celebrated for this fact.

Alysia was jealous of them—their swagger, the respect given to them, the haughty way they now talked. It made her sick. With a skill set developed for surviving slums instead of running an autarchic microstate, she was instead drafted into dirty work and manual labor. When everyone was forced to scrub toilets, it hadn't bothered her. But now she couldn't help but feed the resentment that gnawed at her self-confidence.

Alsyia donned her gloves and went to work on Level 3's communal shower floors. They reeked of piss, grime, and the nauseating fumes of sexual adventure. The lack of supervision allowed romance to flourish on Saturnalia. Alysia had broken her own dry spell a few days ago with a Brigade member known as Adika. The thought of his firm grip around her waist kept Alysia sane during the current task, and she scrubbed the shower tiles with a tidal rhythm.

Two others worked alongside her. Scrubbing with large sponges on all fours, going slow so as not to have to start cleaning the showers on Level 4 until tomorrow. Keeping watch was the foreman, Dover, who was in theory there to assist them but was in actuality their minder. He didn't bother Alysia entirely; he was better behaved than any of the former operators who would have made a pass, or worse, at one of the three women by now. But whenever Alysia could, she made sure to whisper a joke at his expense.

Lost in thought and hypnotized by her motions, Alysia gradually fell into a trance. Back and forth and back and forth, thinking of Adika. Back and forth and back and forth, dreaming of sleep. Back and forth and back and forth, until an earsplitting scream. Alysia jolted to her feet. Dover ran out of the showers, his foot-long metallic shank in hand. Alysia followed gingerly behind. The other two cleaners decided to mind their own business instead.

Alysia peered out from the doorway of the showers. About twenty feet down the hallway, she could spy Dover standing over a pair of men who were grappling on the floor. Lying next to them on the ground was a woman, the progenitor of the scream. She was unmoving, face down on the concrete, her dirty brown hair forming a mop over her head. Dover was cheering one of the men on. A fellow River Dog, Alysia assumed. The two locked in combat were unable to formulate words beyond grunts of pain and determination, the irregular rhythm of battle beating in their cries.

"Choke him out, Harold! Choke this little bitch out!" Dover howled a darkly guttural howl, unlike any true animal. It was the war cry of the River Dogs. Alysia had never heard it for herself. Harold took control of the fight soon after, the other man lacking the strength to fend him off. He subdued his opponent with the foretold chokehold. The other man slumped to the floor as the air left his lungs.

Harold stood up, released a howl, and grabbed the shank from Dover's hand. He plunged it into the defeated man's chest, twisted it, pulled it out, and gouged at him again and again and again, until the hole was a blazing sun of crimson gore. Alysia turned away, holding herself back from spewing bile on the cleaned floors.

She peeked out again, unable to resist. Dover and Harold imposed themselves triumphantly over the lifeless body. She watched with disgust as the two men conversed.

Dover patted Harold on the back and walked toward the showers. Alysia returned to her work, praying neither of the two men noticed her watching the brawl. While unsure what prompted the killing, she was streetwise enough to know an unaffiliated witness to a murder would either have to take their secret to the grave or face death themselves.

She scrubbed, like she was scrubbing deep bloody pools off the white tile floors, back and forth and back and forth, thinking of death and its wet stench.

8...

A single screen glowed in the center of Student G17's dorm room. The fuzz of white light formed a soft halo around him. He was fortunate enough to have a double room all to himself, and he nested in the center aisle between two beds in a pile of mismatched cushions. He was in a dreamy haze, dozing off to sleep while clinging to the waking world. The tablet in his lap displayed a checkerboard of surveillance camera feeds from Installation 65. Many of the feeds were black, with the lenses of their cameras painted over or their circuits ripped out. Some cameras were cracked beyond repair, displaying a kaleidoscopic picture or a tiny sliver of their intended area. But dozens more were well hidden in crevices, nooks, peepholes, furniture, and tiles and stayed undetected.

G17 scanned the display back and forth and back and forth, his eyes making their unending search across the surface of the screen. He occasionally jotted down notes on a pad with timestamps and small descriptions: 12:44:31, inmate appears sick; 13:32:17, inmate steals bowl. Nothing interesting so far.

He continued to scan, his eyes straining at the bright light in the darkness. The fourth panel on the top row caught his attention. A woman and a man argued in the corridors on Level 3. They were animated, the woman talking with her hands, the man coming closer, dominating the petite woman with his height. She was slim and athletic, a delicate ballerina. He was spindly as well, tall and cut, with a nervous tic in his step. Student G17 looked voyeuristically on, a peeping Tom from the stars.

He groped her, his hands invading her thighs. She slapped him, then screamed, a shrill noise loud enough to trigger the audio feed of the weakened recording device, piercing the silence in G17's headphones. The man pounded her out with a savage blow. She fell limp to the floor. He knocked her out! Student G17 scribbled notes furiously: 14:32:58, sexual harassment; 14:33:10, assault. These savages! These animals!

He was no longer on the precipice of sleep, eyes glued to the screen as his premonitions of chaos came to life. Another man ran up to the attacker from down the hall and tackled him. He had a similar build to the violator: a strong yet poorly nourished body built through stress and slavery. They began to scrap, their bodies contorting around each other as they vied for the dominant position. 14:33:25, fighting. G17 flipped to the next page in his notepad, pen gripped tight at the ready.

The researcher was giddy, reveling in the violence. He whispered at the top of his lungs, quietly cheering with each hit. He didn't care who won, but he enjoyed the spectacle. He remembered the beatings in his life—his father with the rod, his childhood bullies with their harsh words and harsher kicks to the ribs. His eventual revenge on them both, the rage and passion within him swelling up without release.

The brawl continued. The woman beater was on top of the other man, punching him in the face. A third man appeared in the frame. He was clearly with the groper by the way he carried himself, parading about puffed with chauvinistic pride, but for now he stayed on the sidelines. He carried a shank, more of a sword, in his right hand, waving it around in quick circles. G17 hoped he would let the fight play out fairly.

The man who intervened was losing stamina and desperately trying to grab anything he could to reorient his body into a more favorable position. But it was a lost cause. He was brought into a chokehold as the assaulter wrapped his arms around his neck from behind. The defeated man slumped, and the victor pushed him off his own body and sprang to his feet.

With his foe rendered unconscious, he took the shank from his accomplice. He raised it up to the sky, the intervener reduced to a sacrificial lamb ready for slaughter. The blade came in frantic stabs, blood splattering passionately from the vicious incisions. Student G17 could hardly control himself. He felt the rage as his own, and the sheer ecstasy of murder exploded within him.

"Yes! Yes! Fuck yes!" Student G17 screamed. He was manic, cackling to himself uncontrollably. He stabbed the pages of his notepad with his pen, tearing a neat hole through the middle. "I'm a fucking genius!"

9...

Infected with anxiety, Alysia drifted back to her cell in a daze.

Alysia found Tania sleeping soundly in the top bunk and considered waking her. She positioned herself awkwardly in the center of the dimness, weighing the option of confession with the alternative of repression. Since the tower's pause, the two had redecorated against previous regulations. Tania adorned the wall opposite the bunk with a multitude of Aseyan circles: crimson, violet, indigo, maroon, beige, and viridian, each with their own size and esoteric ritual meaning.

Alysia was strangely drawn to the collection of circles, inspecting them deeply for the first time. There was a subtle grace to them; the outlines of the circles were painted in one thin stroke, each colored with a perfectly smooth fill-in. She let her eyes wander between them, the visual pilgrimage calming her nerves. Her eyes reached beyond the circles, their quest incomplete.

The pair had added a metal shelf at the back of the cell, expropriated from the kitchens. The cluttered shelf held their collection of worldly possessions. Two extra pairs of slip-ons and work boots, mismatched socks, a tiny mirror, too small for Tania to apply fresh color to her forehead circle without constant readjustment, eating utensils, water bottles, toenail clippers, undergarments, extra shirts, a laser for shaving, assorted rags, a bottle of painkillers, shampoo, soap, and a book of Lnurian poems left in a guard's locker, their prized possession.

Her eyes continued their trek, traversing to the other side of the room, where the walls met the bunk bed. The bottom bunk where she slept was unmade; her blanket was strewn about, its shape forming soft mountains and valleys. She possessed two pillows, a decadence after living so long with one. She was loathe to give Lawrence any credit at a time like this, but the River Dog leader allocated the resources of Saturnalia somewhat fairly. She blinked back to reality.

Lawrence. She made a decision—the type made while in shock. Laughing at the authorities as they arrest you, jumping into the frozen water as a ship capsizes, giving an ex-lover one more chance after a breakup—that kind of decision. She left Tania sleeping and slunk out of their cell. She was going to see the king.

An audience with Lawrence was no easy feat. As the de facto overseer of Saturnalia, he kept a tight schedule and was constantly surrounded by his men. The River Dogs had commandeered the guard's dorms, though in truth, these were hardly roomier than the cells. They were, however, far more secure, with a reinforced door as the single point of egress. And unlike the cells, their walls provided an escape from snooping eyes and prying ears.

There was no longer a curfew, but the overhead lights still dimmed at the same time each night, and the installation was difficult to navigate in the dark. The guard’s quarters were on Level 0, and Alysia recalled when she first met Lawrence as she stepped onto the yard from the stairwell. She looked up at the unmoving tower, finding its presence surprisingly calming. It was a steady constant in recent months: a monument to their captivity, a reminder of their powerlessness, but a constant all the same.

She stopped outside the door of the River Dog headquarters. Her eyes followed the rivets around the metal portal. She counted each one, her stomach fluttering as she did, her body frozen in place. She took a deep breath. She pictured the murdered man, blood seeping from his wound, unholy thoughts on his upturned chest. She held her finger before the intercom, realizing she hadn't planned what to say.

But as she stood statuesque, a calm came over her. She felt the eyes of the tower, the two orbs watching over her in reassurance rather than as an agent of oppression. She pressed the TALK button on the intercom. There was a click and the hum of an open line.

"Good evening. I am Alysia of the Eotian Council. I request an audience with Lawrence."

There was no response. She tried again, repeating herself. Again, nothing. When she turned to leave, the tower was staring right at her, encouraging her to stay, a glint off the glass through the darkness acting as a furtive glance of support.

She TALKed once more, her voice roaring, Dover's battle cry echoing in her skull and inspiring her defiance. "This is Alysia of the Eotian Council. You killed a man today. Open this door right now, or by the power of Them, I will grab an excavator from the mines and blast this door into slag."

Still nothing. She slumped against the entryway, her hands cupping her face. A few minutes later, she fell backwards as the door opened. The back of her head banged on the concrete floor. She looked up; standing over her was Lawrence, his wicked grin and pale face like an apparition in the night.

His smile expanded, canine teeth protruding from his mouth in a confident snarl.

"You rang?"

10...

Lawrence was taken on his way home. Stripped from his daughter, his wife, and everything in his world. He could never figure out how they kidnapped him on Arcasia, the flagship ship-city of his clan's slower-than-light fleet. Well, he knew how they did the act itself: they jumped him in the night on an empty corridor, 'arrested' him on unstated charges, brought him to a transit module, and stuffed him in a Web crosser. Like everyone else. But how did they get into the Arcasia? And how did they get out?

What troubled Lawrence was not that it was impossible or even particularly difficult, but that he was the Arcasia's Deputy Secretary of Security. Unlike everyone else on Saturnalia, he was actually responsible for his own demise. For never seeing Anne or Sophia again. Never gazing out on a derelict salvage from the viewing deck. Never seeing his friends, his clan hall, his ship-city, or anything but this blasted prison.

This thinking about getting in and out, replaying the possibilities thousands of times in his head, kindled a fire within him. Lawrence needed to escape. His guilt and the loss of dignity he sustained could only be soothed with one-upmanship. If they broke into his domain, he could break out of theirs.

He pondered these things every night before bed, lying face up on his bunk in the recommissioned guard dorm. He had taken the warden's room, which was much more spacious than what was available to his men in the barracks. It wasn't so much that he needed it or that he felt it was fair for his station as their leader. Rather, he knew the old adage of military discipline: that officers and enlisted men should never mix as equals.

He was basking in the memory of his daughter Sophia's third birthday, the elders of his clan tossing her up in the air three times for the occasion, Anne by his side. Golet birthdays didn't follow any planetary rotation but were instead celebrated whenever the fleet returned to the point in space where the child was born. Due to their habitual migration patterns, in the Arcasia's case, a trip around the Belicosa star, this was approximate enough to become a standardized length of time.

He went to her next birthday, and the next, and the next.

His time with Sophia on her 13th birthday was cut short when the intercom buzzed. She vanished from his mind’s eye, and Lawrence sat upright, listening to what the late-night visitor wished to say. "Good evening. I am Alysia..."

Alysia. Lawrence thought of her often. Not sexually or romantically; she was too young for him, albeit beautiful. No, she reminded him of Sophia. The same jet-black hair, the same doe-like countenance of innocence, but with a strong and unflinching personality behind her mask. He talked to her in the halls occasionally, finding that she (and her obstinate cellmate) were some of the few people left in this cage who could face him without a shred of fear.

He decided to wait, hailing the man on watch to ignore her. He heard her first plea and then her second. Then a pause, then a threat. Lawrence knew about the killing, though he wasn't sure what he had to do with it. Harold and Dover had stopped a rapist in the act. Or so they told me. Lawrence frowned.

He took a deep breath in through his nose, counted ten seconds, and exhaled. If they fucking lied to me...

11....

Two bodies hung from the railing of the viewing deck on Level 1. Executed after a divisive, month-long trial, Harold and Dover swung as cadaverous pendulums back and forth before hundreds of onlookers on the yard. Tania bowed her head, etching a circle with her finger over her heart and murmuring prayers to speed their souls onward.

Lawrence oversaw the imposition of justice himself, with Alysia as the primary witness. It would curry the River Dogs enough favor to survive the scandalous murder of the Lnurian man, Mikael. Down two men and lacking a popular mandate, they were undeniably weakened, and Tania felt the Brigade was sure to win the Special Elections that were slated for the next Plenary Meeting.

Tania was in a cadre of the Brigade as of two weeks ago, recruited for a leadership role in the Rationing Working Group. She remained part of the Aseyan Council, but what made the Brigade so powerful was their ability to pull together the disparate groups that composed Saturnalia's population. And the Brigade had no official leader, leading to intensely boring and overly long meetings but keeping any one member from wielding too much power. She weighed the pros and cons of this system as she watched Lawrence approach an improvised podium with Alysia and another man in tow.

As Tania looked closer from the back of the crowd, standing on her tiptoes to see above the throng, she could now make out the mystery man's features and realized she was witnessing an even more momentous occasion than she initially thought. Tall, even taller than Lawrence, an androgynous face; plain but with feminine grace; strawberry-blonde hair tied back in a ponytail; three ink-black arrow tattoos pointing upward from his neck to his cheekbones. It was Adika, the chairman of the Brigade's Election Working Group. The most politically powerful man in the Brigade, despite the group's horizontal operation. Tania liked him well enough, though she was slightly annoyed by the frequency of his rendezvous with Alysia. She wondered why they couldn't use a different cell from time to time.

Lawrence fell behind Adika as they came closer to the podium, and Adika ultimately took the stage. Tania felt a mixture of pride and suspicion as he began his speech. Adika's voice boomed throughout the yard, the scratchy sound of the PA system doing little to stifle his voice. His Web Speak was fluent, but with touches of the Saturnalian pidgin that had developed organically in the past months. His opening lines were cliche, but properly so, thanking the assemblage for coming together, championing the power of truth and fairness, extolling the virtues of peace and prosperity, and recounting the recent increases in production. The speech moved from successes to challenges, with Adika relaying the shortage of medicines, confirming that the effort to establish contact with the outside world had hit a roadblock due to a lack of equipment, and, soberly, mourning the loss of the dead.

Of the dead, Tania only knew the murderer, Harold. She partnered with him a few times on various work details in the past. She was overcome with sadness for him, knowing his immaterial form was suffering cosmic horrors in the Antes, the Aseyan Death God's punishing domain. She remembered his affable laugh and the way he appreciated her dry humor on the job and thought maybe there was something she could’ve done to calm the beast within him. But then she pictured him caked in blood, hacking a body to pieces after brutalizing an innocent woman, a woman like her.

She stifled a tear as Adika's speech swelled, the orator declaring that the River Dogs had joined with the Brigade and that the Peaceful Front for Unity was complete. The majority of the crowd was celebratory, with a few refusing to cheer. Tania managed a polite clap.

Adika gestured to Lawrence, inviting the deposed strongman to say his piece. But when the first words came out of his mouth, a familiar groan shook the installation. It was unmistakable, drowning out any other noise. The crowd faced the surveillance tower in unison.

12...

"We're putting an end to this vanity project at once," the Dean announced after a fierce monologue. "You've let Installation 65 go completely out of control! The Accreditation Board is starting an investigation. We could all lose our jobs for this circus act." The Dean sat high on the throne in his office, without all the pomp and ceremony of an ancient emperor but with the same exact haughty tone. The Professor sat upright like a loyal soldier across from the Dean's desk, taking the verbal lashing in stride.

"Investigators are breathing down my neck. You remember you told them this would be a four-week experiment at best?"

"Of course, Dean, I recognize the situation has deteriorated. Shut everything down as soon as you desire; you have all the reason to. But we're learning things that shake the foundations of the field! We're seeing things we haven't seen since Installation 568! I mean, this is a paradigm shift. I think we're seeing the potential for a fully productive installation with a skeleton crew of guards, if that. Possibly, we could do away with the need for operators entirely after some fine tuning. I mean, these people want to work. Give them nothing to do, nowhere to go, some social conditioning, a sell-out or two, and it's punitive labor on autopilot."

"What I'm seeing the potential of is a one-way trip for you and me to our own prison. If word gets out about what we're doing, if one of them escapes or rigs up a communication array—you destroyed any ability to send messages off site already, right?"

"Yes, Dean, that was in the proposal."

"Don't take that tone with me, Professor. If you expect me to treat you charitably, you shouldn't have mucked things up like this. I wasn't going to tell you, but it's too late for you to do anything about it. I'm sending in the fresh Enforcement graduates to bring Installation 65 back under our contractor's control. You better hope it goes smoothly. New graduates always have something to prove."

"Yes Dean." The Professor suspected her career was over. Not over in the sense of never working in academia again, but over in the sense she'd be stuck babysitting undergraduates in Social Discipline 101 or forced to oversee field research on a remote planetoid where the best entertainment was watching meteorites go by, wishing one would blow the entire place to bits.

Yet she knew the Enforcers wouldn't be able to bring the installation to heel, as if this were merely a disorganized prison riot. The Dean was handling this all wrong. And if I'm fucked, he's fucked too.

The meeting ended, and the Professor walked to the middle of the quad. She admired a bed of synthetic roses, breathing in their artificial scent.

13...

Captain-Professor Decker surveyed the desolate moonscape of Secunda IV through the viewing port of his Enforcement team's Web crosser. On the horizon was Punitive Labor Installation 65. The crosser was silent as it came to a halt at the station's transit platform, the hair-width line of Silk track that brought his crew light-years in hours finally reaching its terminus. He ordered his team to attention and began the routine check for combat readiness, then ran his fingers over the heart-shaped pendant on his neck.

He signaled to Enforcer Ryan to take point on the breaching stack. The nine recent graduates of Enforcement Team Alpha performed their own personal good luck rituals before taking their place in the line, though to call them rituals would be a misnomer. A ritual requires repetition; other than Decker, this was their combat mission.

Decker, now positioned as the third man from the front, gave the order to enter, the door to the crosser opening to an empty corridor that connected to the yard on Level 0, just as the installation blueprints promised. The corridor was narrow, and they went down it single file. Two Enforcers stayed at the crosser, guarding the sole way out. Once a beachhead was established, they were to set the crosser on a return trip to pick up reinforcements and join the rest of the squad.

Enforcer Ryan held his projectile shield like the well-drilled yet untested soldier he was, leaving no space for incoming enemy fire. The Enforcers were kitted to the teeth with vacuum-sealed helmets and body armor, gas canisters, stun grenades, rifles at the ready, safeties off, sidearms on their hips, and bayonets attached for close-quarters fighting.

The prisoners had managed to cut off all non-essential power to the installation two days earlier, obviously suspecting something. The Enforcers were going in mostly blind. The emergency lights barely illuminated anything, yet the thin strip of white ominously guided the team forward. While the surveillance cameras captured the Saturnalian's early preparations, with the power cut, there was no telling how far they had progressed, what traps they had set, or how ready they really were for war.

As the team went further, Decker barked an order to slow their pace. Ryan was jumpy, moving too fast at the front. Decker's heart pounded. The stack reached the first door to the installation proper. It was locked.

"Prepare to breach!" Ryan announced. He tapped the man behind him, sending the signal down the line. Fire Team One took position, with Ryan moving aside at point, preparing himself to be the first one through. Enforcer Amalia was the breacher, her palms sweaty as she primed an explosive charge and a gas canister. Captain-Professor Decker and Enforcer Olaf were now the last two men in the stack, and their job was the most dangerous. To enter directly after the breach and respond to any threats.

Another group of four, Fire Team Two, waited in the rear. There had been friendly banter in the crosser over which team deserved to get some action first, but now no one on Fire Team Two wished they were up at the front. Egos deflated, they shrank in the shadow of Fire Team One.

There was no time left to hesitate. The charge went off, blowing the door and a heap of debris forward. Amelia tossed the gas canister, its white cloud spewing forth. Ryan pounced through the destroyed door. Decker and Olaf fanned out from behind him, rifles scanning the room. A gigantic slag of metal rocketed from a makeshift sling atop Level 1, scoring a direct hit on Ryan's shield. It bounced off harmlessly.

Decker ascertained dozens of targets on Levels 1 and 2 and fired, his helmet providing heat signatures through the darkness. He dropped two of them with laser precision, one falling onto the floor below. A hunk of slag nailed Olaf moments later, the blunt force of it shattering his rib cage and knocking him unconscious.

Amalia came in next and set down a cover generator. It produced a two-by-four-meter force field. With the slight overhang above the corridor's door, the team was shielded from enemy projectiles. Ryan discarded his suddenly superfluous shield and dragged Olaf to cover.

The gas rose higher. Fire Team Two would now push past Team One and deploy another cover generator further afield. Decker knew this would be messy; the circular nature of the panopticon meant the prisoners could rain death from every direction. We just need a little more time.

Decker put four fingers on his back, the gesture for Team Two to make their move. His gaze lingered on the surveillance tower in the center of the yard, its eyes peering into his exposed soul. He sank behind the cover generator as fist-sized rocks whizzed overhead, steadied his breathing, reloaded, and returned fire.

With each tremor of recoil, the heart-shaped pendant beat against his chest.

14...

The stink of burnt flesh oozed from the crosser. Alysia’s vomit underneath mixed with someone else's blood. She cradled a captured rifle in her arms, shifting its weight back and forth. Lawrence stood at the crosser's control panel, attempting to override its security system, but it was no use. The surviving Saturnalian's milled about in the corridor and the yard, shell-shocked. Dozens were wounded, hundreds were dead, and perhaps a hundred more remained alive.

Alysia could still see the faces of Tania and Adika, their corpses strewn in a pile at the foot of the surveillance tower. The massacre was near total. When ammunition ran out for the slings on Levels 1 and 2, the signal was given for the crowd hiding in the guard's quarters to swarm the unsuspecting soldiers. The fighting was brutal. Totally and completely outgunned, the prisoners barely managed to overwhelm their enemies. The first wave through the door was instantaneously gunned down. The next group managed to make it to their targets, beating down the soldiers in intense hand-to-hand combat.

Alysia saw a man heft one of the spent heaps of slag directly atop the leader of the invaders, crushing his head into a pancake of brain splatter.

But the gas made the short-lived victory nearly worthless as it asphyxiated the victors, the wet cloth around their mouths unsuitable for combating true exposure. Only by returning to the guard's quarters and sealing the door did they manage to outlast the death cloud. The knocks at the door and muffled pleading over the intercom haunted the survivors.

Despite the losses, Lawrence's plan ultimately worked. He had led a strike team of the remaining River Dogs onto the surface of their slaver's moon with space suits created from a mixture of mining equipment and scrap. They punched a hole through the transit station's wall using an excavator, catching the two Enforcers guarding the crosser by complete surprise. As long as the crosser occupied the Silk track, it would be impossible for anyone to send reinforcements.

Lawrence cursed and bashed the panel to bits. There was no escape, but there was life on this little rock. The central surveillance tower rotated to mark the new day, grinding against the bodies laid at its sacrificial altar. Alysia embraced Lawrence from behind, sobbing into his back.

One experiment was over, but another was just beginning.

Illustration by organism.zero.