2954-10-14 – Tales from the Service: The Restless Prisoner
“If she was just after any man in a uniform, why did she bother with the new guy?”
“That’s what I said.” Sorab Bokori took a sip of synthetic coffee from his insulated metal carafe. Though the badly dented, he would not part with it for anything; after all, it had been a gift from his sister back home on Philadelphia, and the insignia of his favorite hiking park, Nova Adirondack, was still clearly visible on its surface.
“Did it work?” Jaster McCallum, another camp guard who had the dubious honor of sharing a guard-tower shift with Sorab, glanced over his shoulder down at the camp enclosure for a moment.
“She threw her drink in my face and stormed out of the club.” Sorab chuckled. “So I would say so.”
McCallum rolled his eyes, probably doubting the veracity of the tale. Sorab didn’t mind. He was not above exaggerating a tale for entertainment value on a long, dull shift in a camp guard tower, where most forms of alleviating tedium were prohibited by regulation, but this time, the story happened to be as true as anything. His last posting, a prisoner camp on Maribel, had been close enough to the spaceport for leave cycles. Naturally, some of the local women of questionable reputation sought out the younger, more impressionable men, and just as naturally, Sorab generally found himself playing chaperone and fending them off.
Now, of course, he was posted to a remote camp in a safe, rural sector of Håkøya, there was no settlement worthy of the name for a thousand kilometers. Technically, they could get leave and hitch an hour-long ride on the transport to Kinzinger Junction, where there was a skimmer ferry service across to the resort complex at La Meuse Meri, but they’d only have a few hours in the intact but almost deserted resort area before catching the dusk ferry and starting on their way back. Most guards only tried this once before deciding that nature was a sufficient companion on leave days.
Most of Kinzinger Junction hadn’t left with the evacuation, so one could theoretically stop there and spend the day among the old hands and wizened woodsmen who had simply melted into Håkøya’s lush forests with their families when occupation troops showed up. A few of the camp’s personnel did this regularly, too. Sorab was one of them. As an avid hiker and occasional long-haul backpacker back home on Philadelphia, he shared the stubborn locals’ love of open skies and the quiet solitude of the wilderness. He had bought their unique form of trail pack and was working with them to master the posture required to use it correctly. Back home, he suspected, the innovation would prove quite popular.
McCallum started telling a story about a fight he and a compatriot had gotten into on the transport into the Håkøya system. Normally, Sorab liked a good fight story, but almost as soon as it started, he caught sight of a figure in a dark gray tunic creeping between the barracks buildings in the camp below.
Nodding absently as the story built toward its predictably explosive climax, Sorab watched the figure peering up at each of the guard towers in turn. He didn’t need to see a face to know it was Prisoner 5514043, the very one he’d marked as trouble a week earlier as her batch had marched into the enclosure. She was always skulking around, even though she had to know every spot in the camp was plainly visible to the occupants of at least one tower. She always seemed to be up to something. Planning her escape.
McCallum noticed Sorab’s attention flagging, and gestured down behind himself. “Let me guess. Old ‘43 is nosing around again?”
Sorab nodded. “She’s going to try a break.” He shrugged. “I’m just not sure when, or how.”
McCallum looked over his shoulder just as the dark-haired woman looked up at their tower. She made no attempt to hide her contempt for the two men watching her as she slunk back into the grid of barracks buildings, and out of their sight.
“Does she know there’s nothing but swamp and forest outside the wire for five hundred klicks?” McCallum chuckled. “Except that way, where it’s thirty klicks to the cliffs on the coast.”
“I’m sure the orientation covered that.” Sorab nodded. “But sometimes they just have to try it. It’s like a compulsion. Maybe they think we’re lying about what’s beyond the cordon.”
“They’re conditioned to accept nothing we say. Even when we spike the implants...” McCallum tapped his temple, where the cranial implant of an Incarnation soldier would be. “Some of that conditioning gets baked in.”
“Yeah.” Sorab glanced back down to where the woman had disappeared. “And sometimes someone’s got to shoot them. Just hope it isn’t me.”
Sorab hadn’t yet been required to fire his service weapon in anger, in his two and a half years on prison guard duty. Sure, he’d practiced every week as the regulations indicated, and he knew he could do the needful if it came down to it, but it seemed so pointless at this particular camp. As far as he was concerned, let them run for a few days. They’d be more obliging when they were hauled in after sleeping rough and shivering in the trackless woods.
“If she goes for it this shift, I’ll do the shooting.” McCallum sighed. “I won’t have any second thoughts. My cousin and her husband were on Margaux. They never got out.”
Sorab winced. He’d heard only horror stories about the extended fighting on Margaux. It seemed impossible that any of the civilians who hadn’t fled could have survived, and those who did, could find little mercy in that world’s toxic biosphere.
Obviously, being too eager to fire on prisoners because of a personal grudge is hardly a flattering portrait for our submitter to paint of his compatriots. Perhaps this is only bluster. Obviously, I have altered the name of the guard who is shown in this light, though the story as we recieved it used real names that I was able to verify.
Because our submitter here freely acknowledges his having no problem embellishing a story for entertainment effect, I rather suspect many elements, from the prisoner’s shifty attitude to the fellow guard’s grudge, have been somewhat amplified. Still, as far as I can tell from public records, this story is a legitimate account of events that actually took place.
