THE CARETAKER
The Nebari visitors didn't bother him as much as the giant warships hovering above their heads. As misguided as their hobbies were, given their nature (or nurture), the Nebari's wealthy pockets were enough to dissuade him of his doubts. They smiled at him and he smiled back. Business is business.
"Sir, yes, sir."
Korlin's arms were so muscular they nearly ripped his uniform. The head of security sometimes thought he ran this facility, but Ab'andum knew better. Korlin saluted him with his back straight against the wall. Ab'andum passed him in the corridor, pressed his cane on from tile to tile, and nodded.
"It's all set, sir," Korlin spoke. "My men are preparing the docking bay as we speak."
"Is dinner ready?"
"Sir?"
"I'm hungry, Korlin. I haven't eaten all day."
He saw the eyes he flicked towards the other guard. Often he imagined the pair killing him in his sleep. They never would, and ironically he trusted them with his life, but still… They operated on different wavelengths. They got up close and personal with all the inmates, especially when they beat them to an inch of their lives, but Ab'andum preferred a clearer separation between the prisoners and the staff. No mingling. Lest they couldn't tell each other apart.
Life aboard this barren rock was hard enough as it is. It was easy to sympathize with the plight of the inmates when you practically shared their living conditions. Often times the inmates, when their sentence had been fulfilled, left sooner than the guards did. Still, business was business. Life is hard. Get used to it.
THE HEAD OF SECURITY
There they were. They looked so smug and clean in their white robes as they passed through the ship's exhausts. Smoke and blue fire muted their soft greetings.
"I hear they've really tiny… you know…. Down there…"
Giggles and more rude comments joined the last one on the intercom. Korlin tolerated it, and even partook in their banter sometimes. They were rascals, all of them, just unloading some steam.
"Steady," he told Formaz, his second-in-command. The soldiers lined up as they rehearsed. Just like a play.
He liked plays when he was younger. It was something he hadn't thought about in cycles, but just now, just this once, he let it, for it was a good memory. His men did as they were told, operating in the roles given to them. Right now, they were the face of this facility. Their conviction were the pillars that kept this place from being caved in by rubble. Their steady aim kept fear alive in the hearts of all the inmates. Their efficiency kept them from escaping.
And these elitist smug bastards didn't even bother to look them in the eye.
Korlin looked over the men they brought with them, standing at their sides and by the hatch to their ship. Their leaders were friendly and smiled, but their men… They did not smile.
Caretaker Ab'andum seemed to lean on his cane more than before. His hands were shaking. His healthy was steadily declining.
Korlin looked over to his boss and then to the Nebari guests and wondered whether they would soon be seeing a change in leadership.
THE MECHANIC
"I frelling hate this place."
Lee'ack Chun was hungover. Even the stars themselves, pricking through the eternal dark canvas of space above him, hurt his eyes. He tapped the glass of his helmet. His breath fogged up the glass.
Lee'ack wished he could ingest some pills right about now. If only his hands could phase through his helmet (or even better, his head) just to remove his frelling headache.
"Stop shining your beams in my face!"
"I can't help it, Lee'ack," his pal Boros said. "I'm just looking. The lights are bolted to my face."
"Then stop looking at me. What are you, in love with me or something?"
"Frell off. You're too ugly for my tastes. And you whine, like, all the time."
"Frell you. You're just as hungover as me."
"Except I don't whine about it."
"I don't whine. I suffer."
"We all suffer down here."
Maintenance of the turret was mandatory and time-consuming. Lee'ack, Boros and a team of mechanics were out walking across the surface of this barren comet fixing turrets on a daily basis. There were over 300 of them all pointed at the night sky, and when they were done fixing the last one they could start fixing the first one again. Adjusting the gears, adjusting the aim, adjusting the connections and then moving one to the next one. It sucked.
The frozen surface of the comet was lifeless, blackened and pockmarked by craters. Its inhospitable skin was exposed to the freezing elements, covered with icy shards like a crystal skin that could murder you with a paper cut.
Above them, automated floating turrets drifted starkly silhouetted against the blazing hot star at the heart of this system. And of course, who could forget the giant white Emissary ships the Nebari had in orbit?
"Frell! Double frelling damnit!"
Boros stubbed his shoe against a large icy stalagmite. He could've sliced his leg open if he hadn't been lucky.
"I keep forgetting how frelling hard this stuff is. It looks like glass, but it feels like frelling concrete."
Lee'ack laughed. He dug his boot into the icy black ground, wondering how deep below them the facility slept.
THE CARETAKER
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The rubber beneath his cane had been worn down from repeated use walking down the corridors of this buried base. Now the wood of his cane clashed with the tiles that covered the floors of every corridor. Sometimes when he gripped it tightly he could feel the wood of his cane strain within his palm. One day it would break.
"If you look to your left you'll see the great hall where the inmates are fed. We allow them to socialize and form their own communities, their own rules, and their own habitat as it were. Adjustment to this new form of life is troublesome for some of course. The most anti-social ones we keep in isolation."
The Nebari were reviewing all aspects of the facility just as he expected. They followed wherever he went and never asked any questions. They were extremely polite.
"The prisoner you provided us has been kept very comfortable, as per your order. Because of her antisocial tendencies and special status, she has been kept separate from the main housing of the inmates. I will show you. I hear the room they keep her in is quite nice. This way, please."
THE WATCHER
Of all the screens he was forced to watch on a daily basis, there was one in the corner of his eye he liked the most. He couldn't wait for her to wake up, but the base's psychologists had her on a different rotation than the other inmates. It was creepy how they could manipulate someone's sleep cycle like that, Dorrhen thought.
She was beautiful, though. He used to think she was crazy, the way she pounded the walls with her fists until they bled. It was sad to see her give up.
In his youth, Dorrhen lived on his uncle's farm. There were beasts of burden roaming around the fields. Wild beasts, strong beasts, without which his uncle could never survive the winter and create his crops.
Dorrhen never liked that farm. As he sat at his desk, moving his joysticks to control the cameras, he looked down at his hands from time to time and appreciated their softness. He had an artist's hands. Beautiful hands. He hated working on his uncle's farm. His uncle had big callused hands, wrinkled and red. Lines like metal grates and veins like a road map. As a young boy, he knew, he never wanted his hands to ever look like that. And the farm ruined hands.
His uncle ruined those beasts too.
"…if you care to follow me."
Muted voices and then a door opening. Dorrhen turned back to his work of aligning the cameras to monitor the inmates in the main hall.
"This is our main security hub."
The cane kept tapping. The sound was a good giveaway to the boss's comings and goings. He should've heard him coming if he hadn't been so distracted. Why had he been so distracted?
The girl. He shouldn't be dreaming like that. He knew she was probably in that room for a reason. She must've done something particularly bad to be locked up in there, in that room without a key. What went wrong with her life that she'd end up there? What wrong turn did she make?
"As you can see, the room where she's kept is under constant surveillance," caretaker Ab'andum spoke. Dorrhen didn't see the people he was speaking to. His gut instinct was telling him he was better off ignoring them. Still, he saw the white reflections in the screens. A chill ran up his spine. They were like ghosts. Smiling ghosts.
"We have her asleep for now. We activate the lights every morning at 3700 to maintain her artificial body rhythm. Chiana lives and breathes as per our schedule, our whims."
Dorrhen's eyes flicked to the dark screen where the woman slept. He never knew her name. It was still too dark, but he knew the position of the camera, and the position of the bed.
"Our best and finest men are watching her every move," Ab'andum spoke, gently tapping Dorrhen's shoulder when he did. "There are two chutes. One for food and one for waste. And there is no door. We had her entrance sealed shut on her first day here. The walls are solid denatium. There is no escape for her there."
"Pray tell," a voice said behind Dorrhen. It was almost as if he could feel the chilling breath in his neck. "you obviously went through quite some trouble to install her here."
"That is the service we provide," the boss said. "If need be, she can grow old in that cell. We are not cruel!"
"Not at all. But what if we would have her moved? Given time, our preferences might change."
"Given Chiana's track record with escape from incarceration we thought it naturally best to…"
"Remove doors? An exaggeration, surely."
The boss was beginning to lose his patience. People rarely talked back to him like that. Dorrhen remembered the last time someone did and he was instantly transferred to an even worse prison, but Dorrhen wasn't sure if he'd arrived as staff or inmate.
"Listen to me, there is no way anyone could possibly get out of that cell! We have a no-escape policy!"
Something moved in the corner of his eye. A shadow within a shadow.
"Sir…"
"No-one has ever escaped our prison and no-one ever will!"
It must've been a trick of the light. When he upped the brightness of his screen he could clearly see Chiana lying asleep in her bed. Clearly alone, until…
She shot awake. Something startled her. She was looking into the corner. There was more movement. So Dorrhen quickly put on his headset and grabbed the joystick. He moved the view of the camera in her room. His boss saw the screen change, but he still wouldn't stop talking.
"Sir. There's something you should see."
Dorrhen unplugged his headset and raised the volume of the audio in Chiana's room.
There was the sound of a cup rolling along the floor. You know that sound it makes when it won't stop spinning on its own accord? It goes on and on and on and faster and faster and faster until it just suddenly stops. And then it's quiet again.
The caretaker gripped Dorrhen's shoulder and leaned so far towards the screen he was practically falling over him. He felt the gaze of the Nebari guests peering over him. The sound of the cup deafened the entire room.
"Don't mind me. I'll be out in a moment," a soft, gravelly voice spoke.
A tall figure rummaged around in the dark.
"Turn on the lights! Turn on the lights!" his boss hissed in Dorrhen's ear.
The most impregnable prison in the Uncharted Territories was designed to be inescapable. But no-one had ever said anything about not getting in.
THE PRISONER
There was a frown somewhere in the dark.
There was a time she would have jumped out of bed to grab a gun at the slightest sound. She never tolerated any unauthorized entry. She always knew who she let into her bed and who she didn't.
But now she just stood hopelessly still. Paralyzed. It wasn't fear that got her. It was just something she realized a long while ago. Something she'd come to accept.
There were old lines in her face now. A weariness in her bones. A dull invisible weight she carried on her body wherever she walked.
The voice was soft and sort of gravelly deep. There was a ring of nonchalance to it. A dash of intelligence that shouldn't exist within this compound of drones and rotating shifts of guards.
She still thought it was a dream, really. He couldn't be there. Then the lights went on and her eyes burned. When they adjusted, the figure was still there. He was real.
At first he was blurry, till her eyes adjusted. His face was old and full of lines. His hair was short and grey and he wore a long black jacket with red inner lining with sleeves poking out of the end of it.
"This is a very small room. Do you live here?" he said.
Chiana tried to make a sound, but had almost forgotten how to speak. Her throat was sore and dry. It took a moment.
"Are you here to kill me?" she asked.
For a second, she wondered if she would let him.
THE DOCTOR
"Why would you say that?"
What a strange way to say hello.