“Dual-path integration? That’s a lot of neural real estate for a translation device.”
“Hold still,” he repeated, and I felt the tip of the tool press against the skin behind my right ear.
Then the drill engaged.
The sound came first. A whine so high it lived behind my eyes. Then the pressure built and built until it broke through bone and became something worse. Pain that didn’t have a name. Pain that lived in the architecture of my skull, reshaping it, threading something foreign through the channels of my hearing and into the meat of my brain where language lived.
I didn’t scream. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper, and I gripped the armrests until my finger joints screamed, and I breathed through my nose in sharp, controlled bursts because I’d be damned if I gave this place my voice on the first day.
The drill stopped. The whine faded. And the room changed.
Acoustically. The guard to my left muttered something in that gravel-crush language, and I understood it.Another human. Fragile.The insectoid guard near the door clicked a rapid seriesof sounds, and I understood that too.Shift change in forty. Hurry this up.
My brain wanted to marvel at the engineering. My body wanted to vomit. I compromised by swallowing hard and breathing through the nausea until the clamp released.
The meaning arrived clean, laid under the speaker’s actual voice like a caption pinned to music. The Bead translated words, not feeling. Whatever the gravel-crush language carried in its tones, I got the transcript; the voice itself still reached me raw. Alien music with subtitles. It would have to do.
“Prisoner 4471.” The technician didn’t look up. “Block assignment pending. Step to the right for classification.”
I stepped to the right on legs that felt borrowed, and that’s when the woman in white appeared.
She stood apart from the guards and the technician, positioned near a secondary door I hadn’t noticed until now. Everything about her was wrong for this place. Clinical white coat over pale skin, gray hair pulled into a bun so tight it looked surgical. She held a data-pad the way a surgeon holds a scalpel, with total confidence in its purpose.
She was watching me.Her eyes moved from my face to the data-pad and back, and her expression held the detached interest of someone cataloging a specimen.
“Interesting markers.” Her voice was cool. Modulated. She spoke to the technician without taking her eyes off me. “Process her into Block C. Near the Life-Support Hub.”
The technician glanced up. “Block C is overloaded. Block A has—”
“Block C.” She tapped something on her data pad, and a Consortium priority seal flashed across the technician’s screen. The discussion was over.
I filed that away. A scientist who overrode housing assignments, cared about proximity to the Life-Support Hub, and looked at prisoners and saw “markers.” Nothing about that combination comforted me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She looked at me then. Directly. Her eyes were pale blue and watery, and behind them, something calculated at a speed that had nothing to do with warmth.
“Dr.Corsine. Station research lead.” A perfunctory smile that engaged no muscle above her cheekbones. “Welcome to Vexar-6.”
She turned and left through the secondary door. I watched it seal behind her, noted the locking mechanism was biometric, and added Dr.Corsine to the list of things on this station that would kill me if I stopped paying attention.
***
They marched us from the processing bay into the main corridor, and the station revealed itself in pieces.
Mining tunnels converted to prison hallways. Rock walls reinforced with metal sheeting that was rusting at the seams. Overhead pipes sweating condensation that dripped onto the grated walkways. The lighting shifted from blue to a sickly amber, and the air got worse. Denser. A layered smell of machine oil, old sweat, and something organic and rotting that I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.
The station hummed. The vibration came up through the floor and settled in my teeth, a constant low-frequency tremor that told me the main power systems were running at capacity and losing the fight. The strain read like a bridge flexing under too much weight. The whole station was a system on the edge offailure, and nobody was fixing it because nobody here mattered enough to fix it.
Cell Block C was exactly what the name promised. Cells carved into rock on either side of a central corridor, sealed with metal doors that had narrow viewports at eye level. The corridor dead-ended at a common area with long metal tables, a food dispensary built into the wall, and surveillance cameras mounted at every junction. The cameras were old models. Wired, not wireless. I clocked the cable routing out of habit.
My cell was four meters by three. A metal slab jutting from the wall served as a bunk. A thin mattress that smelled of disinfectant and the person who’d slept on it before me. No pillow. A toilet with no privacy screen. A single overhead light that I couldn’t control.
I sat on the bunk, pressed my palms flat against my thighs, and forced my breathing into a rhythm. Four counts in, four counts out. The Comm-Bead throbbed behind my ear, a foreign object my body was already trying to reject, the skin around it hot and swollen.
I was on Vexar-6. A prison moon orbiting a gas giant in a sector of space so remote that the transport had burned fuel for six days to reach it. The atmosphere outside was toxic. No ship, no escape. I was prisoner 4471, convicted of sabotage I didn’t commit because my captain had needed someone to take the fall for his smuggling operation, and the tribunal hadn’t cared about evidence when they had a convenient engineer to sacrifice.
Four counts in. Four counts out.
