Red Cells

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 cellmate, 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, they were all of them 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 ribcage. 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 nonEarther 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 that 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.”