Atrophy (2 page)

Chapter Two

Administrative Office, Erebus Spaceport

“W
hat do you mean you gave the old Nirali class ship permission to land?”

Tannin Everette glided the stylus across his crystal display screen. He stared blindly at a report on the inward-bound supply orders and pretended he
wasn’t
listening while the colonel marshal questioned the air squadron officer who’d authorized a ship to land for emergency repairs.

“The commodore sanctioned it, Sir. She’s being piloted by Major Captain Rian Sherron.”

Silence met the officer’s announcement and Tannin had to resist the urge to turn around and see how the old colonel marshal had taken the news. But, the last thing he wanted was for them to remember he was here and send him out.

He might have been imprisoned on Erebus since the age of sixteen, but he’d heard plenty of stories and once met a prisoner who’d claimed to know Major Captain Rian Sherron personally. The man was some sort of war hero. And if Sherron wanted to land his damn ship here, there probably wasn’t anyone with enough balls to tell him no. Especially since if rumors were true, Sherron would be just as likely to blow a hole through the middle of the spaceport as he would to leave peacefully.

But, why in the fiery pits of Erebus was a war hero flying an old junker of a Nirali class supply ship? That category of ship had been used by the IPC to fly provisions to outposts during the Assimilation Wars and had been decommissioned years ago.

“Well then, get the man down here, I’ll buy him a brew myself,” the colonel marshal announced.

Tannin turned his head just enough to see the colonel making
shooing
gestures at the younger officer and then take out a square of material to wipe at the beads of sweat gathering along his graying hairline. It didn’t matter how hot or cold it got, the heavy man always sweated as if it were two hundred degrees out. The colonel tapped open a comm-channel on the main crystal display set into the large administrative desk.

“Someone tell me which dock the Nirali class is coming into and how long they plan on staying.”

There was some white noise and unintelligible chatter before a clear voice came through. “Port delta eight. They need to assess damage when they land, but expect to be here at least one rotation.”

“Good, good. Make sure they get anything they need. Send their clearance codes through to here and I’ll upload them onto my commpad.”

Tannin kept the colonel marshal in his sights as the man set his palm-sized, personal communication and data storage device down on the display, the unit emitting several short beeps as it received information.

The air squadron officer returned and leaned into the room. “Sir, there’s a situation with some prisoners developing that the commodore wants you to take care of.”

“There are at least five lieutenant marshals in this building alone. Get one of them to see to it.”

The officer shook his head. “The commodore specifically asked for you, Sir.”

The colonel pushed his overweight frame away from the desk and muttered about incompetent officers as he left the room.

Tannin watched the soldiers until they’d disappeared from sight and then looked at the commpad still beeping away on the display.

It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

A sense of disbelief, of being in a strange sort of waking dream, settled over him, making him feel numb, detached. For the first time in memory, a ship which wasn’t an IPC government sanctioned vessel would be landing on Erebus. And all its clearance codes, everything he’d need to sneak aboard and stow away, sat only meters from his finger tips.

This was why he’d volunteered to do administrative work in Erebus’s spaceport twelve years ago. The reason he’d devoted his time slaving away at tasks so boring no one in their right mind would ever spend more than five minutes doing them. In case one day, somehow, an escape opportunity presented itself.

He’d tossed up other getaway plans over the years, but couldn’t have gone through with any of them. In the meantime, he’d learned every staff member’s rotating roster, how the spaceport reacted in an emergency situation, security protocols, and studied ship-data—anything that might become useful one day. Because ever since he’d arrived here, he’d searched and planned for a means to escape.

The IPC justice system didn’t have an appeals process. Once sentenced to Erebus, that was the end. The only answer lay in breaking out, something no one had ever done with success. Escapees never got far, and as he’d seen with his own eyes, most often they came back dead.

The fury at the years he’d lost so far burned an ever-present blaze in his soul. But, unlike those who’d died trying to escape, he’d maintained his patience. He’d always sworn he’d be smart about it. He wouldn’t go on some ill-conceived suicide mission.

Feeling like he had a bright red target on his head, Tannin stood and tightened his grip on the commpad he held. He approached the central administrative desk with slow steps, sure that any moment someone would demand to know what he was doing and lock him up in solitary for the next two rotations.

Every now and then, an officer or two would pass by the open doorway, but none even glanced into the room. From somewhere beyond the walls of the spaceport, the clatter of another inmate conflict echoed with a hollow resonance. His breath shortened and heart pounded with unforgiving relentlessness as he set his commpad next to the colonel’s. One swipe of his stylus and information transferred, codes duplicated.

The jagged sound of automatic nucleon rifle fire outside came like an electric shock, jacking his already high heart rate into orbit. He yanked his commpad off the display and took a second to wipe any trace of the data transfer then retreated to his seat. Drumming his foot against the wall brace holding the desk down, he shoved off the urge to take his commpad and return to his apartment until Sherron’s ship had landed. Sweat dampened his lower back. No matter how keyed-up he might be feeling, he had to act normal. If he didn’t stay until dinnertime and finish the supply schedule, someone would notice. Even when he’d caught that revolting Kesar flu three winters ago, he’d still dragged himself in to work every day.

“Damn repellant parasites.” The colonel marshal returned, still muttering, though whether he referred to the prisoners or his fellow officers, it was hard to tell. The colonel took his commpad from the larger display and pocketed it then left the room again.

Tannin returned his attention to the coma-inducing boredom of checking the incoming provisions, but it became slow going with the knowledge he now possessed, eating at him like acid in his veins.

About an hour later, the old furniture around him shimmied with latent familiarity. He looked up to the frosted window, the dark shadow of a ship blacking out the sun for a moment as it passed over the building. The small clock in the top right corner of his commpad read two hours until dinnertime.

“Everette, they’re closing the administrative center down for the rest of the day. Between the unrest and the ship landing there aren’t enough officers left to man this post.”

Tannin looked up from his display to see Officer Jase Nevan standing there, one of the few people he’d actually called a friend on this hellhole of a world.

The totality of what he planned struck him hard in the gut, knowing Jase would likely face questioning and hell-knew-what-else after he left. But nothing would change his mind. He might have only downloaded a few clearance codes at this point, but his course had been set and there would be no going back.

The news they’d be shutting up shop early made him want to jump out of his seat, but instead he leaned back and stretched, something he often did when he’d been sitting at this desk for too long. “You sure you couldn’t just lock up and leave me in here to finish? This supply inventory—”

Jase shook his head. “You know the rules, bro. Come on. Don’t you want to go see if you can catch a glimpse of that famous bastard, Rian Sherron? Who wants to sit here calculating how many ounces of ass-powder we need when there’s a real-life war hero docking?”

“Ass-powder?” Tannin raised an eyebrow. Joking around with Jase was easy, familiar, a way for him to temporarily forget the plan he’d finally enacted. “Anyway, you really think they’re going to let me anywhere close enough to see Sherron or his ship?”

Jase walked farther into the room and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him up from the chair. “Of course they will, especially if you’ve got me as an escort. Everyone ‘round here trusts you.”

The acid eroding him from the inside turned into a full, white-hot blaze of guilt. He slid the commpad into his pocket, wondering if Jase would understand.

He followed Jase out of the room and down the long hallway that led out of the administration center, pausing as the officer closed and locked the heavy doors behind them. The sun shone weakly through murky greenish clouds and beyond the high wall surrounding the spaceport, the sound of chaos continued to echo, the inmate conflict still unresolved.

“What set them off this time?” He caught sight of a rock, pitched over the tall fence, blasted into dust by the nucleon guns operating automatically at intervals around the cluster of government buildings.

Jase shrugged as they crossed the open paved area leading to the docking bays and prisoner processing center. “The usual. Someone from the Shanese gang killed one of the Dakari. Since the clash broke out this morning, both sides have lost about a two dozen members. The colonel marshal barely did anything but stand there and watch. Ordered the officers on duty to leave them be unless they turned on the authorities. I think he’s hoping they’ll kill enough of one another that there won’t be sufficient members left to carry on the conflict.”

It was wishful thinking. The rival gangs of the Shanese and Dakari were the two strongest groups on Erebus, their numbers in the thousands. When he’d landed here as a teenager and been thrust out into the general community, the Dakari had gotten to him first and tried to recruit him. He hadn’t wanted to join a gang and been forced to escape the run-down apartment building the Dakari used as their base of operations. He’d barely made it free before two Shanese members had tried to take him out.

Those first forty-eight hours dirt-side, the lessons had come hard and fast; the scar bisecting his neck and upper chest a permanent reminder of how close he’d come to death here before he’d even gotten his footings.

When he and Jase reached the largest building where the docking bays were, they joined another group of officers coming from the other direction. A few of them nodded to him in greeting and Tannin could almost pretend he was one of them, just another officer working a wage. He stayed to the back of the crowd, keeping to himself as they moved through the double doors and down the short corridor to a bank of elevators. He missed out on fitting in with the first group, waving to Jase, who’d managed to squeeze in. In all truth, spending time with Jase was eating a hole in his conscious right now.

The next group went up a few minutes later and when the doors
whooshed
open on level D, there were so many officers present, it was hard to imagine how any more could fit into the landing zone. Jase was nowhere to been seen, so Tannin slipped out of the elevator and moved along the wall, skirting a stack of electro-thermal cables and stopping by a tool bench.

The Nirali class ship had its identification numbers and the word
Imojenna
painted on the side with a six pointed star in the background. A few inches from the image was a good sized hull breech, big enough to suck a person out whole. A pressurized field of part energy, part crystal had been patched over it from the inside. An emergency repair job like that was only meant to stabilize small holes for a short period of time, certainly nothing over a square half-meter. That answered the question of why any captain in his right mind would request to set down on Erebus. The man hadn’t had a choice.

The
Imojenna’s
cargo loading hatch shuddered out of place and lowered with the squeak of tired metal. It took a few moments for the ramp to hit the floor, and the chatter in the docking bay hushed. Looking around at the expectant faces made him wonder what it’d be like to be a hero instead of a nobody. How he’d feel if people gathered in crowds when he arrived somewhere, just to see his face.

“Major Captain Sherron, welcome.” The commander stepped forward from the crowd to the bottom of the ship’s ramp as a man came swaggering out of the hatch.

Tannin didn’t know what he’d expected of a war hero, but Rian Sherron wasn’t it.

He had wavy hair that fell in a mess around his ears and upper jaw, and a few days worth of whiskers roughened his face. He wore a pair of loose brown pants, ripped in both knees and sitting low around his waist; his gun belt looked to be the only thing holding them up. There was a pulse pistol strapped to each thigh, a nucleon gun on his left hip, the long blade of a knife on his right hip. The tight grey T-shirt he wore might have once been long sleeved, but they’d been torn off, leaving jagged edges over his biceps. On his right wrist was a thick-set band of beads, some shiny ones glinting in the overhead lighting as he reached up to push his hair off his face.

No. He didn’t look like a war hero. He looked like the guy who robbed the war hero and maybe ended up with a room overlooking Execution Square here on Erebus.

“It’s just captain these days, Commander.” Sherron shook the commander’s hand and then greeted several other high ranking officers introduced to him. Tannin looked into the interior of the ship, his attention snagged by a couple of other people standing in the dimness of the cargo bay. One of them shifted forward the slightest bit, long, honey-blonde hair catching the loading lights along the ship’s outer bulkhead.

Tannin straightened from where he’d slouched against the tool bench as a flash of shock surged though him. He hadn’t considered Sherron’s crew. Not that it should matter. If all went to plan, he’d find somewhere to hide, and they wouldn’t even know he was there until he skipped out on their next stop. But some primitive part of his brain awakened, telling him if he used the
Imojenna
to escape Erebus, it would put Sherron’s crew and that woman in danger.