When Fantine had learned she was to be sent to the Ursa Luna Double Max Slam Facility she had made it her business to learn everything she could about the prison. She had found a former inmate who'd turned trader and merchant between the prison population and the universe outside and squeezed all the information she could out of him during her trial. Her lawyer had overheard the prosecutor and the judge talking; there wasn't going to be any hope of acquittal for her. Which, granted, she had rather expected. She'd plainly done the crimes for which she'd been accused; the only question remaining was what would end up happening to her. It was either women's top-security detention, or the Slam.
The commodities broker had told her that it would probably be better if she kept a low profile, at least for the first few weeks. If she survived that long in the Slam without turning into someone's helpmeet or slave, she'd survive whatever time she'd be in there. At the very least her odds would improve astronomically. It was the first few weeks that would be hard. She started forming a plan the second she'd heard that, and gone to the broker again with odd requests for equipment, information. She hadn't told him her plan.
He could provide her with some prison issue luxury clothes that would help her disguise -- for a price, of course. He had even offered to find her a protector. That part she had flat-out vetoed, suspecting that he would cut himself in on a percentage of whatever the would-be protector would pay him for the privilege of having first crack at her. He was so disappointed when she simply handed him a list of the rest of the items she needed. She could damn well protect herself.
She had, however, accepted his offer of securing a place for her to sleep before she got there. She'd even paid him exorbitant amounts (or at least what she considered exorbitant amounts) to get it. He was relatively honest, which meant that he knew full well the consequences of double- crossing anyone he did business with; once word got out, no one would do business with him again. He'd be free meat for anyone who wanted. She paid the price, and got what she paid for.
As she walked along the rows of cells in the women's block she was glad that she had paid, noticing the men wandering easily in and out of some of them. There were certain cell blocks that just had no guards on them; a closer inspection saw that the red covering on the alarm lights had been smashed on all but those blocks. Some traditions just never died. These were the so-called red-light districts, and the guards pimped out the weaker female inmates as whores for the prisoners who (most likely) were especially well behaved, at least within the range of the guards' sight and hearing. Fantine muttered something nasty under her breath, vowing never to end up in those cell blocks. Gang rape, even organized, sequential gang rape, was not her idea of a good time.
The last cell-block in the women's wing didn't have a guard, but it didn't have a red light either. This was probably the VIP wing, reserved for high- profile criminals and prisoners who, again, had earned special privileges. And true enough, on the way down to her cell she passed a couple ferroglass enclosures, three maximum security cells, and one person who even warranted guards outside the cell itself.
Fantine wondered what she had done.
She got to her cell: fifteen down and on the third floor, in the corner. Which meant it was about five square feet bigger, a luxury she could definitely appreciate in this kind of crowded setting. It was probably meant for two people, maybe even four, but unless the prison's population of women suddenly increased dramatically, it was all hers. Satisfactory, at least. No lights; there were hardly any lights in the Slam, except for the alarms and the few helmets that inmates manage to scrounge from the guards. But there were a couple indentations in the wall for candles and matches, both of which rivaled cigarettes and alcohol for value here.
She examined the bed; mattress, blankets, and frame. It was all surprisingly clean and new, but these days they probably just recycled the materials. Poking it revealed that it was a foam-stuffed rectangle of fabric, nothing fancy, but at least it didn't have vermin or bodily fluids or diseases lurking in it. The frame was sturdy, metal and spring. Good enough. She walked over to the sink and tested the hot and cold taps; they worked. The toilet flushed. The wall and floors were solid; no mice, rats, or worse. The couple shelves tacked up against the wall were solid enough for her to do pull-ups on; she did a few, experimentally.
"Well, it's not the Carrington House, but it'll do," she murmured to herself.
"It might as well be," came a voice from outside her cell. Fantine spun around, falling automatically into a defensive crouch before forcing herself to relax. Whoever it was hadn't come into her cell itself, which meant they weren't forcing her to accept them in a dominant position. She could work with this.
"The welcoming committee?" she ventured a guess.
"Close enough." The woman, who actually had long hair for a prisoner, was leaning nonchalantly against the doorway as though she was as comfortable in Slam City as she was in the safety of her own home. Then again, maybe she was. Lifers tended to view the prison as their home, and got very edgy when someone took them out of the familiar environment. And she did look to be in her late forties, early fifties. Fantine put her at forty eight, with a twenty year stint in the Facility.
What the hell, it couldn't hurt to at least be polite and see what she wanted. Fantine stuck out her hand. "Fantine St. Germain."
The older woman shook it. "Nicole Patterson. I hear you're our new ward."
Interesting choice of words. "Something like that. Felony murder, arson, armed robbery... many counts. You?"
"Multi-million dollar graft and felony murder. I was a white-collar criminal." Nicole smiled ruefully, shrugging her shoulders as if to indicate that she'd somehow learned better. Fantine doubted that, but if the other woman wanted to play she was willing to play. "We all do stupid things when we're young."
Fantine arched eyebrows at the comment. It wasn't what inmates Slam City were supposed to say, but apparently it was part of her game. At least she didn't sound as though she believed it, although she did seem to expect Fantine to swallow. "And what would you have done differently, knowing what you do now?"
"Not gotten caught," she replied immediately. Both women laughed. Game over. Fantine relaxed just the tiniest bit.
"I'll drink to that. Where's the canteen around here? It's been about twenty four hours since I had a decent meal..." Actually she knew exactly where the canteen was; up-to-date maps of the Facility, both actual and official, were some of the first things she'd purchased from her contact on the outside. But she figured a meal with the woman would help them both open up a little, maybe establish her status as off-limits, maybe even get her a bit more information on the place.
"Women's canteen or general?"
"General."
Nicole grinned. "Women's is usually pretty empty anyway. The guards actually enforce the women-only rule there. Come on, I'll take you down to it."
"I'm sorry, Richard, I can't help you. I really wish I could, believe me..."
Riddick slammed a fist against the wall in exasperation. Despite the rarity of female inmates, and despite Doc Weller's usual ability to get into most of the patient records, he wasn't having any luck when it came to learning the female fighter's name. There had been three prisoner drops that evening, a record number even for Slam City, and a handful of women all told. Most of them under false names, and half of them 'blonde' with 'blue' eyes. Though if they were all natural blondes, or light enough to be called blonde, Riddick would eat his shirt. No one cared about the color of the eyes in the Slam, unless you were one of the fortunate few who survived having your eyes silvered. Riddick was the only one he knew about who had regained full sight.
"I'll find out sooner or later, Doc, don't worry about it." He started pacing up and down the small infirmary, cracking his knuckles absently. "She's good, I know that much. And she's not the type to roll over for the usual prison toughs. She'll make a rep for herself, and then I'll find out who she is."
"Assuming she actually tells anyone her real name," Doc pointed out.
Riddick scowled. "I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up."
"Richard, you know as well as I do what the chances of you learning her name are if she doesn't want you to know who she is. Given the dramatic way in which she entered our illustrious facility, she could probably have you barred from the women's wing if she wanted to. She looks like the sort of lady who is very much aware of her capabilities, and uses all the resources available to her to achieve what she wants."
"Just my kind of woman," Riddick muttered. "Stubborn, tough, and smart." Resources. The Doc had mentioned something about resources. "What kind of resources do you think she has?"
"She entered here in somewhat more of an equipped fashion than the average inmate. In order to do that she would have to bribe both someone on the outside, or at least halfway to it, to give her the materiel and several of the guards to let her pass through with it. Which means she comes from money."
Riddick frowned. "Where the hell did a girl like her get money? And why didn't she use it to hire a fancy lawyer?"
"Might I suggest you approach her with caution, Richard?" the Doc said sarcastically, ignoring the questions. Riddick glanced sharply up at the doctor. "Far from knowing where she acquired her dubious riches or what she uses them for, you know nothing of what she might want. For all you know she could be planted by... by the Company to facilitate their surveillance on our fair city, or by other organizations, even governments. That would certainly explain her entrance, her ... oddities."
The Company. Code for the organization that had gotten Riddick sent to the Slam in the first place. He knew what they were like, and intimately. They wouldn't be above hiring a woman sent to the Slam to check on him. "She could be a paid assassin for all I know..."
"... she could very well have been..."
"... or care. She's here now, I'm more concerned with what she's going to do than who she's going to do it for or how much money she's getting paid to do it." Lie. A flat-out lie, but he'd get a closer look at her and see if she was really from Them. They all left a stamp on their people, the mark of a religious zealot that was hard to disguise. Even if you could avoid talking the talk, the walk had the annoying tendency to stay with you.
The doctor frowned, and Riddick winced inwardly. Although his remarks had been flippant more for show, he knew he was in for it just for being so off- hand. "You should care who she's going to do it for, and how much money she's getting paid to do it. Lest you forget, my impetuous friend, you are not exactly possessed of the lowest of profiles here, and the interest you've generated has only increased with time. You've earned yourself a black mark in the Company books, and you've quite likely achieved a little listing by your name that says 'too dangerous to live.' They may have sent her to take care of the problem you present. Think about it, Richard. What other sort of prisoner would be so guaranteed to capture your attention so quickly, yet not in such a way as to be endangered by your quirks of behavior? Who else knows you so well?"
Riddick scowled, but he had to admit, the doctor had a point. Several, actually. Doc Weller knew him well, just about better than anyone else in the known universe and certainly better than anyone else in the prison. He was the doctor Riddick had gone to for the shine job on his eyes, having heard that Weller was the best of the prison surgeons. They'd talked, come to an arrangement, and agreed on payment.
But in the end, Riddick realized that he hadn't just paid the doctor in cigarettes. Cigarettes would have been enough to buy the eyes, maybe even the post-op treatment. But as he'd listened to Weller's constant babbling as he recovered and slowly regained his sight, he realized what else he'd given. Twenty menthols would not have been enough to buy the trust doctor and patient had to have in each other to perform the delicate surgery. Riddick had bought the doctor with protection as well, by bringing a little order to the doctor's rowdy clientele. He had bought the doctor with the increase of both their reputations. And, ultimately, he had bought the doctor with friendship.
The end result being that the doctor knew him very well. Riddick sighed. "So what do you want me to do about her?" And then, just in case the doctor hadn't gotten the message and because Riddick was getting tired of feeling like an indulged child, "I'm not going to let this go, you know that."
Doc Weller snorted. "If the challenge to what passes for your mind were not sufficient, the challenge to your male ego as well as the stimulation to your libido would certainly do you in. Just take care with her, Richard. Watch your back. Act as though I had installed optic sensors there," he poked the back of the bigger man's shaved head with two fingers, pushing it forward. "as well as giving you your so-called shine job."
Riddick smirked. The comment had given him an idea. "Don't worry so much, Doc. Your arteries will harden." He walked out.
The doctor shook his head slowly as the door closed softly behind Riddick. "It's not my arteries I'm worried about."
"So, what's the deal around here? I don't think I've ever seen a max- security facility as sex-integrated as this one." Fantine started the conversation nonchalantly, as though she hadn't spent the last eight weeks researching the place.
"Well, as you may have noticed, we've kind of got our own little empire going here... at least, some of the cons like to think of it that way. The guards don't really care what we do as long as no high-profile prisoners get shivved while they're still in the public eye, and there aren't any riots. Facilities for men and women are only nominally separate... unless you pay extra. Then you might actually get the guards to care who wanders into who's building."
"Like a little private empire."
The older woman smirked. "You're not far wrong. Rumor has it that the Russian Mafia runs this one as well as the Slam City on Beta Minor. Personally, I don't know about Russians, but someone organized runs this place. Not that it matters to us, I guess." They shared a brief laugh. Her words had intrigued Fantine, however.
Nicole gestured around, "Over there is the sports center, which translates to a track and an open space for dodge ball. They only give us balls and running space to work out in, and they play vicious here. This is the general canteen, men's is over there, women's over there... they only care that the guys don't go in the girl's canteen. You saw the women's cells, guy's cells aren't much different, it's just that there's more of them. And they tend to be dirtier. Guards only care who goes into the VIP block, and only when we can scrape up the cash. Women's warden handles that end of it... this year we've got a pretty fair one, tells us when the outside buyers have scraped up enough money so that those of us on the inside don't have to pay."
"Down below used to be a lot of tunnels with storage facilities, now they're just general chaos. You've got your fight clubs, run by the prison gangs... the top three are the Pit, the Cage, and the Ring. Sometimes you'll get your specialty fight in the canteen... on jello-days they like to pair up chicks who'll go for that kind of thing and watch them smear jello on each other."
Fantine made a face. "Okay, that's definitely not my sort of thing."
"Might want to make it your sort of thing, honey." Nicole sized her up, her tone one of friendly and patronizing advice. "If you can stomach it, being one of their prize-fighters isn't such a bad way to go. You get beat up less by the guys, and they treat you pretty well."
Yeah, thought Fantine, they don't gang-rape you till after you're too old or too beat up to fight. Not for her. Never for her. "What else is there?" she asked.
Nicole leaned back. "Oh, let's see. You can freelance, take on the guys one at a time, go for the bigger and stronger types so they'll keep you safe from the rest of them. Obviously you passed the whorehouses on the way in, I wouldn't recommend going there. Fifteen, twenty guys a day. Ten, if you're lucky. It's not a good way to go."
Fantine shuddered.
"You could just keep to yourself, but it's probably best if you find someone to take you around for the first month or so... show you the ropes. Get a native guide, that kind of thing. And someone to keep an eye on you." Nicole eyed Fantine especially hungrily after that shudder, "I mean... no offense, but you really don't look big enough to handle yourself..."
She was starting to get an idea of what the other woman wanted. Goosebumps trailed along her skin, although she knew that revealing too much of herself too early could be fatal. "I'm tougher than I look," she said, feigning nonchalance as she sipped her tepid water and tried not to shrink away too much. "Thanks, though."
Nicole reached out and put a hand on the other woman's, stroking her thumb over the back of Fantine's hand. "Seriously, dear, you might want to think about it... hey. I could protect you... I've already got a cozy spot in the women's wing, and the boys know enough not to mess with me either. I can make things very unpleasant for them. Very. Unpleasant." She spoke as though she had just thought of the idea, but Fantine had the feeling she'd been planning the overture ever since Nicole had laid eyes on her.
The unspoken threat in her words, of course, was that she could make things unpleasant for Fantine as well, if the younger woman didn't agree to be her little girlfriend. It made Fantine's skin crawl just thinking about it, and she slid her hand away. "I said, no thanks. I'll work it out on my own. Trust me..." Fantine leaned forward, letting the falsified emotions drain from her eyes and shifting her weight slightly so as to be ready to leap up from the table if it looked like Nicole would get ugly. Her type usually got ugly, but it was always a matter of when. "I can handle myself. Trust me." Her voice was a whisper by the time she'd finished.
Nicole's expression was, indeed, starting to become unpleasant. "Fantine, you do not know how big of a mistake you're making..."
Feet and a familiar step caught Fantine's attention. She missed the next half of the sentence with trying not to turn around and make sure it was who she thought it was. Something of the distraction must have shown on her face, because Nicole scowled and reached out to slap the younger woman in the face, hard. "Look at me, bitch, when I'm talking to..."
She didn't get any further. Fantine grabbed the other woman's hand, slammed it down on the table hard enough that she heard bone crack, and slapped the other woman as hard as Nicole had been intending to slap her. "I said I'm tougher than I look, bitch," she mimicked savagely. "I meant it." She would have said more, but the footsteps were coming up directly behind her, and the altercation was drawing a crowd anyway.
"You just keep making a spectacle of yourself, don't you," a deeply amused and familiar voice rumbled over her shoulder. "Hi, Nicole. Trolling for girlfriends again?"
Nicole threw the man a venomous look and slid off the bench and away from the table without a word. Riddick moved over to take her seat and lounged across from Fantine as though he was perfectly at ease there. For all she knew, he was. He looked at her with abstract interest, nothing like the possessive lust Nicole had shown a second ago. It was highly preferable. "I really hate that woman," he said conversationally.
Fantine chuckled. "From the way she was looking at you I'd say the feeling's mutual," she murmured. "What's up? Come to try and offer me your protection as well?"
"You don't seem to need it," he shrugged. No sudden movements, no lewd gestures, just two people talking in that easy way that said neither of them had decided how to think of the other just yet. "I just wanted to talk to you. Find out a little bit more about you. Like your name. Or how you knew mine." He was still smiling, but the tone in his voice wasn't too friendly. She smirked slightly. She must have hit a nerve going off the way she had. But he was interesting enough, and could probably be trusted with the truth. Or at least a part of the truth.
"When I heard I was being sent to the Slam, I got some of the halfway housers and asked them everything they knew about the place. Your name came up in the list of people not to fuck with. As for my name..." she paused. It couldn't hurt, not anymore. He probably wouldn't have heard of her anyway. "Fantine. Fantine St. Germain."
"Fantine?" His eyebrows arched again. "What the hell kind of a name is that?"
"An Aquiline one," she replied, amused.
"You're Aquiline?"
"Aquiline... From Avignon-sur-la-Reine. So, sort of."
"What are you in for?"
"Felony murder, armed robbery, arson..." she shrugged. "The list goes on. I hear you're in for mass murder and other crimes too ghastly to mention."
Riddick grinned, leaning back so that his eyes shined in the bare minimum of light in the canteen. She had the feeling it was a posture he practiced often. It probably worked to scare off some of the smaller predators, but she just found it amusing and vaguely attractive. "That's me. Sociopathic stone killer."
"Mmm." She shoved her tray to one side. "So why weren't you in the Cage?"
He shrugged, looking uncomfortable for the first time since she'd met him. "I don't like getting put on display. I like to pick my fights."
"Fights you know you can win?"
He gave her a very direct look. "Fights that are worth fighting."
It was an odd answer, coming from him, what she knew of him. And yet somehow she didn't think he was talking about the standard definition of 'worth fighting,' the usual moral prerequisite. She stared into his silvered eyes, trying to figure out what thoughts were racing behind them. She couldn't now but someday, she decided, she would make it her business to know each and every thought that passed through the man's brain. He wasn't the typical sort of inmate; he wasn't even the atypical sort of inmate. This was something new and different. And Fantine loved a challenge.
She grinned, breaking the tension of the moment, and raised her glass of tepid, dirty water. "I'll drink to that."