Costigan nodded. He remembered, though there were so many deaths that it wasn’t easy. He supposed it was a stretch to call the deaths of forty-three convicts, with another thirty-six so badly hurt that they had been euthanized, an incident, but in truth that was all it was in the greater scheme of things. An incident and one not even worth remembering. The Hell system held more than 57,000 convicts, so the loss of seventy-nine had caused scarcely a ripple. The head office back on McNair certainly didn’t care. His weekly status report, complete with a short account of the incident, had been received without comment by the Prisons Administration Authority, and Costigan knew why: The magic phrase “without adverse impact on driver mass production schedules” never failed to demotivate even the most inquiring prisons administration bureaucrats, all of whom would have done almost anything to avoid having to come to Hell to follow up on a problem.
“Okay. Let’s do the last group.”
Williams muttered into his whisper mike, and Costigan, flanked by ever-watchful guards, made his way along the catwalk, pausing as the heavy security door slammed open before going through into the next holding cage. The crash of the door shutting solidly behind him was a reminder that this was a risky place to be.
As he came out onto the catwalk, Costigan could sense the difference. Despite the week’s softening up, the group below him was still dangerous; that was not surprising given that every one of them was ex-special forces. Every man probably had been through worse in his training, much worse than anything Hell could dish out, Costigan realized. A quick glance at Williams told him that he wasn’t alone in sensing the difference. Williams was visibly tense, and the guards down on the cage floor were, too, standing farther back with stun guns leveled at the group rather than cradled loosely. One guard stood even farther back with a knockdown gas launcher at hand in case things turned ugly.
As Costigan studied the group, one man stood out. Comonec, that was his name, the team leader. He could almost feel the hate blazing off the hard-faced young man with the dark gold stubble clinging tightly to his head.
He whisper-miked Williams. “The man at the front, in the middle.”
“The fair-headed one, 381123-J, sir?”
“Yes. If he moves even so much as a centimeter, you have my authority to hit him and hit him hard.”
“Sir.”
Costigan launched into his standard speech of welcome, but he could see that his words had no impact. The
Until it had and until they’d won the right to be transferred to a softer mine, they would be given not the slightest bit of slack. Hell-20’s regime was carefully designed to take hard men to the point of death. An eighteen- hour day, a punishing workload, barely adequate food, plascrete sleeping benches with no mattresses, and only one thin blanket even though the temperature barely rose above freezing would break even the strongest and best trained of them. That was, if they survived at all, and even with the best will in the world, many didn’t. Not that he gave a shit. There were plenty more where these came from.
As Costigan stepped back and handed the group over to Williams to move them out, Comonec made his move. Even though he must have known how pointless it was, he made an explosive lunge for the nearest guard. He got surprisingly close before the guard, casually and moving with an elegant economy of effort, stun shot him full in the chest. Comonec dropped in agony, hands clawing at the plascrete floor in a vain attempt to get at the guard. Nice one, Costigan thought. Enough power to stop him but not so much that he was knocked unconscious. And he was pleased to see that Williams’s full attention and that of the rest of the guards stayed on the group, not on Comonec.
Slowly, Comonec’s tortured nervous system recovered from the gross insult it had received, and his writhing subsided. Casually, the guard dialed down the power and stun shot him again, left leg first and then right, ankles first, then calves, then thighs. A real artist, Costigan thought admiringly, such sadistic finesse. He liked that.
Five agonizing minutes later it was all over. Comonec’s body had given up trying to stay conscious, and the man lay limp and unmoving at the feet of his tormentor.
Williams leaned forward, eyes running across the sullen faces in front of him. “Don’t fuck with me, don’t ever fuck with me. 712-M and 978-B, pick up that piece of garbage.” A gentle tickle from his stun gun made sure 388712 -M and 239978-B knew who they were.
“Now go to Door A, and when it opens, keep walking. You’ll be told what to do next. Now move.”
As the group shuffled out, helped on its way by a last touch from the guards’ stun guns, Costigan nodded his approval. “Impressive, Williams, impressive.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll escort this group all the way to Hell-20, so you can rest easy.”
“I’ll rest easy when they are actually on Hell-20, safely in the hands of Major Perkins, and not before.”
“Sir.” A short pause, and Costigan knew that the question Williams had been bursting to ask ever since he first had laid eyes on what were without doubt the two most unusual groups of convicts ever to be processed through Hell Central was coming. If he’d been Williams, he would have wanted to know just who those people were and where they had come from.
As Williams started to ask the question, Costigan’s hand went up, stopping him dead, his voice surprisingly gentle. Embittered and disillusioned though he was, Costigan was not all bad, and Williams had been one of the very few people he felt he could rely on. This was as good a time as any to repay the man for his unswerving loyalty.
“Staff Sergeant Williams. I know what you want to ask me, and I strongly advise you not to ask. I suggest that you forget the question. I suggest you even stop thinking about why you wanted to ask the question. It’s not your business to know some things, and if you want to live a long and happy life, I advise you to forget that you ever even saw the groups we processed this morning. Understand?”
Williams’s face changed, puzzlement replaced in an instant by the blank face of the professional survivor. A few beads of sweat were the only telltale signs of his sudden realization that he had almost crossed a very dangerous line. “Sir. Sorry, sir.”
Costigan waved a dismissive hand. The man would do as he was told. “No problem, Williams, no problem. Just let me know when that particular consignment has been safely delivered.”
Thursday, September 24, 2398, UD
Digby sat back in his chair, physically and mentally exhausted but strangely exhilarated after another grueling day.
By the time he was born, the pioneering days of terraforming new planets and mass migration were long gone and almost forgotten. But now, seeing the promise a brand-new planet offered, he understood for the first time the excitement and vision that had driven millions of Earth’s people to look for a new beginning hundreds of light-years from home.
In front of him, the holovid showed Eternity in all its primal glory as it passed below the orbiting
But after a lifetime orbiting the inhabited planets that made up the Hammer Worlds, Digby found it unsettling to see not even the tiniest speck of green.
