The Final Battle (7 page)

• • •

Michael emerged from the shuttle into a hellish night.

The wind drove thick flurries of snow into his face. The cold was intense. It sliced through his prison jumpsuit; his eyes watered with icy tears. Captain Pillai and his team escorted him to where a mobibot waited on the floodlit apron.
So this is where my life ends
, Michael thought as he was led into the welcome warmth of the vehicle.

With a lurch, the mobibot set off. A few minutes later, it stopped, and Michael was fed into the Farrisport machine, the latest in a long line of prisoners that stretched back to the earliest days of the Federation.

An hour later, the machine was satisfied that Michael was who he was supposed to be. Deep scanned for contraband, checked for disease and injury, and dressed in a new jumpsuit, he was spit out by the machine into a cell no different from the one he had left behind. He dropped onto the bunk, tired beyond belief.

“You have a visitor,” the intercom announced. “Stand up and wait back from the door.”

With a huge effort, Michael got to his feet. The door opened, and a prison service colonel, iron-gray hair cut short above a comfortable round face, stepped in. Her crisp blue uniform was stark against the white sterility of the cell. “I’m Colonel Kallewi,” she said. She waved the guards out. “I’m the superintendent of Farrisport Island Prison.”

“Wish I could say it was good to meet you, sir,” Michael said with a fleeting lopsided smile. Then it hit him hard enough to make his heart pound. “Forgive me,” he went on, “but Kallewi? Are you any relation to the commander of my marine detachment in
Redwood
?”

“Yes, I am,” Kallewi said, her voice soft. “Janos was my son.”

Michael’s stomach turned over. This he had not expected. “You’ve heard … you know?”

“I received notification that he’d been killed in action, yes.”

“I was his captain,” Michael said. Kallewi’s dignity in her grief made his guilt all the worse. “I was responsible for his being on Commitment. It was … I’m so sorry.”

Kallewi said nothing for a moment. “Don’t be,” she said finally. “I won’t say his death has been easy to bear. It hasn’t, but Janos was his own man, and he made his own decisions. And he died doing his duty the best way he could, and I won’t stand here and tell you or anyone else that he was wrong about that. But I would like to know more of what happened. It would help me and his father.”

“Of course.”

“Tonight at 20:00 if that’s okay.”

“I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” Michael said with a crooked smile.

“Not sure about that.”

Michael stared at the woman.
What on earth does she mean by that?
he asked himself.

Kallewi took a deep breath before continuing. “Now, back to business,” she said. “There’ll be a full briefing for you at 09:00 tomorrow morning on the execution protocol—” Michael flinched; he couldn’t help himself. “—and your parents will be arriving at 12:00. You can see them for as long and as often as you wish, though their last visit will have to finish no later than 02:00 on the day.”

Six hours
, Michael thought.
I will be utterly alone for the last six hours of my life
.

“That’s all for now,” Kallewi went on. “Any questions?”

“None worth asking.”

“Okay. I will see you later.”

“Sir.”

• • •

“Sit,” Kallewi said, waving Michael into a seat across a small metal table from her. “Can I call you Michael?” she went on once his escort had left.

“Of course, sir,” Michael replied. He was both embarrassed and surprised by the question. In his experience, colonels, even prison service colonels, weren’t on first-name terms with junior officers.

“Bear with me a second,” Kallewi said. She placed a small silver cube on the table.

Michael stared at the cube to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He wasn’t. He was looking at a near-field jammer; there would be no digital record of anything said or done in this room. Michael did not know much about prison service regulations, but he would have bet what little was left of his life that the device had no business inside Farrisport. “Colonel, forgive me,” he said, “but what’s going on? I’m pretty sure this thing—” He pointed at the cube. “—is not allowed in here.”

“You’d be right.”

“So what’s happening? Please, I need to know. I can’t … I can’t …” Michael had to stop to recover his self-control. “This might surprise you,” he went on, “but I’ve had it. I just want this to be over.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through, so let me get to the point.”

“Fire away.”

Friday, December 12, 2403, UD
Farrisport Island Prison

“It’s time.”

Michael got to his feet. “I’m ready,” he said. It was a complete and utter lie. Only the last dregs of courage and self-control allowed him to keep a body torn by fear under control.

Two guards stepped forward. Hands locked onto his arms. They escorted him down a succession of short corridors. Kallewi and a posse of observers fell in behind, his lawyer too. Erica Malvern’s eyes were brimful of tears. Michael was led into a room. Its walls were seamless sheets of blindingly white plasteel, its only furniture a single chair bolted to the floor, its back, arms, and legs fitted with broad plasfiber restraints.

Michael’s heart hammered at the walls of his chest. He was eased forward, turned, and pushed gently down into the chair. The guards worked fast to secure the restraints. The awful, unstoppable inevitability of the process threatened to break him apart. With all that remained of his self-control, he made himself stay still.

“Prisoner is secure, sir,” one of the guards said, moving back.

Colonel Kallewi stepped forward to stand right in front of Michael, a single sheet of paper in her left hand. She leaned forward. “Hang in there, spacer,” she whispered.

Michael said nothing. He was too terrified to speak, even now unable to believe what was about to happen to him.

Kallewi cleared her throat before speaking. “Michael Wallace Helfort. Your final appeal for clemency having been denied by the president of the Federated Worlds in presidential order J-557, a physical copy of which document I have witnessed in person and further confirmed by direct comm with the president herself …”

Michael turned his mind inward. His neuronics cycled through his favorite holopix of Anna, pictures of the best times in his life, pictures rich in hope and happiness. But all of a sudden, it was too much, too painful, and Michael could not take any more. He shut his neuronics down. He opened his eyes and waited for Colonel Kallewi to finish.

“… and now, by the authority vested in me as the superintendent of Farrisport Island Prison, sentence of death will be carried out.” Kallewi stepped back. “Proceed,” she said.

A guard—she looked very young and very nervous—wheeled a small trolley to where Michael sat. On it rested a plasfiber cylinder from which two corrugated hoses led to a face mask. With well-rehearsed efficiency, the guard placed the face mask over Michael’s face, tightening the straps behind his head to form an airtight seal.

“Face mask is secure, sir,” the woman said.

“Confirm system is nominal.”

The guard’s fingers flickered across a small touchpad set below a status screen. “System is nominal.”

“Close the vent. Set the system to recirculate.”

“Vent closed. System set to recirculate. Carbon dioxide scrubber is active, sir.”

“Sentence will now be carried out,” Kallewi said.

This is it
, Michael thought, knowing with each inhalation that he was one step closer to death as his body burned the oxygen in the system until too little remained to sustain life. It was strange. He felt disconnected from what was going on. As if it were already over. As if he were …

Quietly and with no fuss, the end came, and Michael slipped away into unconsciousness, falling down into the darkness, down to where death awaited.

• • •

Why could he not feel anything? Why was did the darkness feel so thick? Why was the silence so absolute?

Was this what it was like to be dead? He was dead, so it had to be.

None of it made any sense, so he lay unmoving until a soft voice reached down to where he drifted. It called him back up from the infinite blackness that cradled his being, urging him to come back to the light. He did not want to go, but the voice was insistent; it nagged at him until he had to leave the warmth and security of the darkness. He drifted up toward a faint point of light. It strengthened as he rose; its brilliance grew and grew until it pushed the darkness aside, and then a blinding whiteness enveloped him, a whiteness so bright that he had to screw his eyes shut against the glare. His head filled with sudden stabbing agony, his heart thrashed at his chest, nausea roiled his stomach.

“Can you hear me?” a voice asked.

He wanted to answer, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too constricted to let the words come. With an effort, he drove air from his lungs and past his lips. “Yes,” he croaked.

“Good,” the voice said. “You had us worried. That damn drug is dangerous. We’re transfusing more nanobots to mop up the last of the toxins in your system. I’m afraid you’ll feel like shit until they’re gone, but it won’t be long, so hang in there.”

“Head hurts,” he mumbled. The pain was terrifying in its intensity; it radiated out from behind his forehead in swirling waves of red-hot agony, each more powerful than the last.

“How bad?”

“Bad, real bad.”

“Bloody cataleptic drugs,” the voice said. “Hold on … okay, I’ve upped your painkillers.”

The pain roared to new heights. He bit down on his lower lip to choke down the scream that built in his throat, his mouth filled with the coppery taste of fresh blood.

“Better?”

He shook his head. A mistake; shards of pain slashed razor-edged through his head. “Stop!” he screamed. “Stop it now! Please!”

“Hang in there.”

But he could not. With brutal force, the pain bludgeoned him back to where he had come from.

• • •

In an instant, he was awake. He stared up at the ceiling, which was white and featureless except for a single light panel turned down low. He looked around. Judging from the medibot beside his bed, it had to be a hospital, he decided.

But why was he in a hospital? His mind was blank. Panic engulfed him. He could not remember anything, not a damn thing: who he was, where he was, why he was here. All he knew was what his senses were telling him right there and then.

That was it.

Beyond the immediate lay … nothing. Hard as he tried, he could not see past the nothingness. His mind said he existed, but that was the totality of his universe. He had no idea what lay beyond the Spartan confines of his room; that terrified him. But why? He did not know. But he did know one thing for certain: Outside the door lay unimaginable horrors, horrors that would destroy him with casual, uncaring cruelty, horrors that even now might be coming for him. With fear-fueled desperation, he tried to find a way out, to escape, but he could not move.

Without warning, the door opened. A scream of primal terror boiled up from deep inside, a scream that died before it reached his lips. The man who had entered the room was a marine medic, a corporal, there to help him.

He knew all that without thinking. But how did he know? What was a marine? What was a corporal? Why was the man here to help him? None of it made any sense.

“The medibot told me you were conscious,” the medic said; he leaned over to look him in the face. “How are you feeling?”

“Confused,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Can’t remember anything?”

“No. Who am I?

“You’re Michael Helfort.”

That did not help. Who the hell was Michael Helfort? “Where am I?”

“A place called Karrigal Creek.”

“Never heard—”

With all the shocking impact of a dam bursting, memories exploded inside Michael’s head, a torrential, confused kaleidoscope of people, places, and events, a churning mess of sensations that Michal struggled to make sense of. His heart lurched as he remembered with an awful clarity the moment when the prison guard had slipped the mask over his face.

“I’m alive,” he whispered. He felt stupid the instant the words came out. Of course he was alive. That had been Colonel Kallewi’s promise to him. He’d wanted so badly to believe the woman, but he never had, not even for a second. Throughout those last awful days, he had convinced himself the woman had only wanted to make the inevitable less terrible. But she had been telling him the truth.

“You sure are, spacer,” the medic said with a cheerful grin. “Now, let’s get you hydrated,” he went on, handing Michael a beaker of pale blue fluid. “Get that down you.”

All of a sudden aware of how thirsty he was, Michael took the beaker and drained it in one long swallow. “Thanks, Corporal,” he said. “Any chance of another one?”

“As many as you like,” the man said. “I’ll go get a refill.”

“Thanks,” Michael said. He put his head back and closed his eyes, happy just to luxuriate in the sudden rush of energy surging through his body.

The door opened.

“That was damn quick, Corporal,” Michael said. He opened his eyes and looked up, and there she was, a tall, spare figure in Fleet black. “You,” he hissed at the sight of Admiral Jaruzelska. “What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Michael,” Jaruzelska said, closing the door behind her. “Welcome to Karrigal Creek.”

“I am going to kill you,” Michael shouted, fists clenching and unclenching as rage surged hot through him, “and that’s a fucking promise you can depend on.”

“Hold your horses,” Jaruzelska said, a trace of iron in her voice. “There’s a lot you don’t know, so you need to listen before you kick my head in.”

“Why the hell should I?” Michael shouted, his voice hoarse. “You lied to me, and then you betrayed me. Do you have any idea—” He tried to sit up, hands reaching out for Jaruzelska. “—what I’ve been through? Well, do you? No, you don’t, you callous bitch! If it’s the last thing I ever do, I
will
kill you.”