Prison Pit
- Characters
- Prison Library
- Logs 1
- Logs 2
- Jailbreak
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prison complex, 19:00 local time 110/1106
What weapons were available had been secured; but the parts and tools needed to fix the life-support unit in the crawler still needed to be located. Returning to the ruined central section of the complex, the three cons clambered down the shattered liftshaft. Bits kept coming loose from the walls, and all three came close to falling, but finally they reached the rubble heap safely. Gripper started searching the heap near where the workshops had been for the things he needed. The other two wandered off down opposite wings, in search of other survivors or anything else useful.
Manx walked cautiously through the wreckage of the west wing of the level. The further he got from the centre, the less serious the damage and the better the prospects of possible survivors. Despite this, all he found were dead cons and the occasional dead warden. Death was definite; no-one who'd died the blueface looked anything but dead. After a while, he paused and retraced his steps, his eye caught by something. Turning the dead warden over with his boot, his face tightened - he'd been right. The body had been rifled; his security pass and weapon were gone.
Returning to his original path, he began searching the ground. Even this far from the crash site, the floors were coated in a layer of dust and bits of concrete shaken loose from the walls and ceiling, and careful examination soon discovered bootprints in this dust - prints clearly left after the catastrophe. They were a little scuffed, but there were two or three sets. They led away from the crash site towards the end of the wing, where the sickbay was located. Manx carefully trod in an undisturbed patch of dust and noted with relief that the print was different from the tracks he'd found - as he was wearing a warden's uniform, these were prisoners. That said, some of the cons on Odegra could be worse than wardens to meet unprepared. He turned back to alert the others.
Alice worked her way from cell to cell, looking inside, hoping for more survivors. There'd been some discussion about whether more mouths to feed (lungs to fill) was a good thing to hope for, but none of the three were quite callous enought to leave fellow prisoners to die here. Most of the prisoners, anyway. If not for their need for comms to keep one step ahead of the law, any one of them would have deep-sixed Hurker quite a while ago; there were worse than Hurker on Odegra.
Her time spent glancing into the cells paid off in the end. Three-quarters of the way along the west wing she found one that looked different to the others. Looking more carefully, she saw that the cell was clear of signs of habitation, empty but for a long flat case lying on the bunk. She tried the door which was locked. It might be worth investigating, she thought, but she was going to need some help to get the door open. She retraced her steps to look for Gripper and Manx.
Gripper had spent his time alone rooting through the insane jumble of wreckage heaped at the bottom of the hole. Smashed concrete, twisted girders, bits and pieces of equipment, lots of bodies and occasional carbonized metal fragments of the shuttle surrounded him, but he had found the remains of the prison workshops. Located at the back, these had sustained marginally less damage than other areas. Some digging had unearthed the tools he needed; their cases were battered and dented but the contents were basically intact. He'd also found a spare air compressor, presumably in the workshops for repair - it was hopelessly inoperable, but many of the parts would be useful in the repairs of the crawler's tank filling system.
He was just stacking the salvage when the other two returned with news of their discoveries. After a bit of thought the party decided to go look at Alice's cell first, on the face of it the less dangerous-looking option. Manx and Gripper spliced the power pack they'd used on the armoury into the lock mechanism, and Alice chipped in some experience with breaking into places, as well as the blue level warder access talisman she'd salvaged earlier. After a few moments, the lock clicked and the bolts withdrew from all four sides of the door - same old doors, they'd all been living behind one for four years! - and it opened.
With extreme care, they approached the case and checked it over. Seen close to, it looked most like a longarm case to Gripper and Alice, and this turned out to correct. Inside was a riot-gun and twelve rounds of pellet ammuntion. Some warden had stashed this here to avoid having to trudge all the way back up to the armoury and book it in.
None of them had any experience with shotguns, but at short range this wasn't a show-stopper. Alice borrowed the hacksaw out of Gripper's new carpentry tool kit and carved off most of the stock and a quarter of the barrel, leaving a longish pistol with a miserable range and a terrifying spread. Satisfied, she shoved it over her shoulder under the straps for the laser carbine power pack and they carried on.
Following Manx's footprints down the other wing of the level, they came at length to the door into the sickbay. The privacy screen was drawn over the small window set into the door, but voices could be heard coming from within. Alice located herself where she could fire the shotgun in through the gap as soon as the door opened if need be, and Manxolio moved out of the line of fire with alacrity. Gripper stood so as to be behind the door when it opened, reached out, and knocked loudly.
There was a sudden startled noise from within, and a voice answered. "Who's there?" On the face of it a ridiculous question. "Gripper," answered Gripper. "Who?" came one voice from inside. "Shut up - I know him," responded another. "Bloody hell, Gripper," it continued, "How did you survive?" Alice, realizing there wasn't going to be a hostile response, interrupted. "Let us in!" she called. "It's open," was the reply.
Manx cautiously pushed the door open and peered in. Two cons, still in their boiler suits but surrounded by spare air tanks, were gathered at one end of the small, badly-equipped surgery, watching the door apprehensively. A third was sprawled on the floor near them, face mask dislodged, complexion distorted by the Blueface. Manxolio grinned. Unlike the other two, he knew every con in the prison and a little about each. "Hi Spanners," he said cheerfully, "Slippers. How you doing?"
The heavier of the two chuckled under his breath. "Ciencia's tits, Manx!" he said, "How did you survive that?" The other two lowered their weapons, as these two didn't look much of a threat. Manx glanced past them at the body. "What happened to Zonker?" he asked. Spanners shook his head. "Rushed in here shouting Drugs, Drugs! and ripped his mask off. Arsehole. Dead in seconds." Gripper started rummaging around the sickbay, muttering more mouths to feed under his breath, as Spanners continued. "What happened?" he asked. "One minute we're tooling up for the next shift down the mine, next all hel's broke loose, the roof's in, the air's out, everyone's dead; what was it?" Manx shrugged. "There was a crash," he said with casual understatement. "We bagged the mine crawler - bit beat up, but works - we're getting off this rock if we can." Spanners started to ask for details but Alice cut in again. "Are you with us or against us?" she asked flatly. Spanners chuckled. "If you're offering us air, we're with you," he said equably.
The sickbay yielded an assortment of useful medicines, including some AnaRad, drugs to treat radiation sickness. Though no-one could think of any possible reason to need them, they took them anyway. There were also scapels, ranging from the usual small ones to the big knife-like ones used to cut muscle during an amputation. As big as a dagger but sharp as surgical steel, their only drawback was a tendency to be brittle.. "Scarrow's gonna love these," commented Manx, taking a few. Alice slipped a tiny but well-maintained las-scalpel into her pocket.
On the way back they stripped all the warden corpses they could find, until every con had a commo helmet and there were enough for the rest of the survivors back at the crawler. A stop at one of the large and not very clean kitchens equipped them with more knives and cleavers and more food, enough for the whole group to survive not only the trip to the science base but to the spaceport as well.
Enough time had been spent. Maybe other areas of the complex might yield other useful or valuable salvage, but all were aware that their decoy message to the depot would only hold off investigation for a while, and felt it was time to get away before they were trapped.
Scrambling down the rubble-heap and out of the prison, they retraced their steps up the spiral path to the top of the Pit and back to the crawler.
pit Crawler Park, odegra, local time 19:45 110/1106
As they reached the lip, they slowed and ducked down before peering cautiously over the edge at the crawler. There was no cordon of armed wardens surrounding it with drawn weapons, nor was it a smoking ruin. In fact, someone had rigged up some sort of internal lights and a nice warm homely yellow glow spilled from the windows and from the massive rents in the superstructure. All looked well, and so they radioed the General. "We're back, sir," said Gripper, "we have a couple more survivors - Slippers and Spanners." Burkins chuckled. "Good," he said, "they're both harmless enough," he said, "Spanners could be useful." There was a snort over the radio. "Thanks a lot," muttered Slippers dryly.
Alice, Gripper and Manx climbed onto the flat and walked into the park to join their companions. Once introductions were completed, and new equipment passed out, Alice suggested Manx might want to reprise his broadcast to reinforce the effect. Hurker set up the call, and the preacher took the mike again. He started off well, but tripped over some of the jargon; Hurker hastily simulated an equipment malfunction and Manx put the mike down, sweating. Slightly belatedly, they decided to prepare the statement and get the tech right before going on the air again.
While Manx got his composure back, Gripper stepped close to Alice. "Do we need Gorkan any more?" he asked quietly. Alice eyed him. "Are we murderers?" she asked thoughtfully. Gripper snorted. "You killed Rivers," he replied. "This isn't murder; it's survival."
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Manxolio was ready to have another try by then, so they set the call up and handed him the mike. This time, with a script, his performance was faultless, and they signed off confident they'd convinced the depot that a relief crawler was approaching a downed shuttle to pick up the crew.
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As he put the mike down, Gripper stepped quietly up beside Gorkan where he sat still cuffed to his seat, took hold of his head almost gently and twisted sharply. The warden's neck snapped with a sharp crack and his body slumped in the seat. Gripper glanced around to see if there was any comment, but the only person who spoke was Burkins. "What was that?" he asked calmly. "One less liar," anwered Gripper, uncuffing the corpse and unceremoniously dumping it out throug the back door.
With that, there was no need to hang around any more, and "Taxi" Ardan slipped into the driver's seat of the crawler, flipping switches to power up the motors and feed power to the tracks. Manx sat next to him, intending to observe how the vehicle worked; though he couldn't learn to drive it simply by watching. Alice and Gripper came through and leaned over his seat as Taxi turned the crawler to face the park gate.
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"When we reach the science base," said Alice, "the first thing we need to do is knock out their long-range comms. If the depot find out we're running for it, or the spaceport are ready for us, we're cooked." Gripper nodded, and Manx shrugged; it sounded reasonable - he'd leave this military stuff to the experts. Gripper disappeared back into the rumble to work on the life-support system, and the crawler accelerated through the gate and off down the cinder road towards the science base.
Their plan was to drive until they were about ten minutes away from the science base, and then walk the last bit along the road to avoid attracting attention; the crawler was incredibly loud, even from inside, with its' archaic tracks and loose sections of bodywork. In their favour was the fact that the gas giant Koutala had risen, its' vast curve occupying three-quarters of the sky and casting a pearlescent orange illumination over everything, enough to see and drive by. It was a stunning and magnificent sight and four years of it had rendered all the cons utterly immune to its' beauty.
road to science base, Odegra, 20:04 local time 110/1106
About half an hour after setting off, Manx suddenly sat forward in his seat, staring out of the hole where the co-driver's window had been. In the headlights ahead, what looked like a flow of dark liquid had washed out of the jungle, covering the road, and was flowing to meet them. "Stop!" he yelled, and Taxi stood on the brakes. Both watched as the ... whatever it was ... came closer and almost together realized what it was. "Insects!" said Manx, and "Spiders!" yelled Taxi in horror. The 'liquid' was a swarm of black spiderlike insects the size of tennis balls. "Floor it!" yelled Manxolio and Taxi complied, sending the crawler clattering towards the creatures at its' top speed of fifty miles an hour.
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The sound of the tracks was suddenly underlaid by a hideous crunching, and black shapes started arcing up towards the windscreen as the spiders leaped for the vehicle. Others swarmed onto the bonnet and started crawling towards the crew. Startled cries of alarm from in back showed that some had leaped in through the holes in the side as well. Taxi was largely protected by the windscreen on his side, but Manx's screen was a few fragments around the edge and the insects were coming straight for him.
Manx thought of drawing his pistol, but dismissed it, instead grabbing a loose tool and batting off as many spiders as he could. "I need something to block the window!" he bawled over the chaos. There was the sound of the locker's iris opening, and then Spanners appeared, unfolding a thick tarp to cover the missing windscreen. Manx rammed it up against the hole, frantically stuffing the edges into the gaps where the hull was holed.
With his arms occupied, it was thus a nasty shock when one of the creatures that had managed to get inside the crawler bounded up onto his chest and started chewing through the warden uniform ballistic jacket he was wearing...
Alice swung the heavy torch two-handed, sending the smashed mess that had been a spider splattering against the bulkhead. "First Serve!" she cried, stamping on a second. The main compartment of the crawler was alive with swearing, thrashing prisoners, using whatever they could lay their hands on to fight off the spiders that had made it in through the holes in the hull. There'd been a nasty moment when Slippers had tried shooting them with his carbine, but by some miracle the crazy ricochets of the resulting bolt hadn't killed anyone and he too had fallen back on blades and boots. Gripper slashed another one in half and turned to see Alice scuttling along the deck with an empty medikit tin, trying to capture one. It evaded the box, twisting to try and reach her hands, but bumped into the lid she was bringing up and was scooped into the box. Gripper raised his eyebrows at her as she wound duct tape around the box and chucked it into an overhead locker, but his attention was soon drawn elsewhere as Burkins gave a strangled gasp and pitched out of his seat, red bite-marks at his throat.
Manx writhed and struggled, but the spider continued to work its' way up his chest. It was within inches of his throat when a long kitchen knife whicked past his face and pinned it to the co-driver's seat with a thunk. He looked up into Scarrow's cold pale blue eyes. "You want to be careful with those," he said ironically in his quiet, dry voice, "you could hurt yourselves." The blade snicked another one off the ceiling that had been working over towards Taxi and then Scarrow was gone, leaving Manx to tread on a third insect that had crawled across the floor and was trying to bite through his boot. He and Taxi exchanged shaken glances.
Abruptly, the steady crunching of crushed insects from beneath the crawler cut out and they were past the swarm. Taxi slowed the crawler to a gentler pace as Manx cautiously lowered the tarp, then scrambled out of his seat to go and check on the others.
Back in the main section, Gripper had got Burkins prone and was frantically rummaging through both the medikit and his own memory to try and find something to help the old man. His face and hands were congested and his breathing was laboured as the poision worked through his body. Benkin was badly shaken by his failure to protect the old soldier, for whom he seemed to feel responsible, and wasn't much help on the medical side. Finally Gripper chose a mix of drugs and injected them into Burkins. Nothing seemed to happen, and he returned to the case and started looking for something else. As he did so, Burkins' breathing shifted and he started to struggle for air. "You're making him worse!" yelled Benkin despairingly. Gripper pushed two ampoules of adrenaline aside and spotted one marked 'Antivenin' that he'd not noticed before. Without much hope, he loaded it into the injector and blasted it into Burkins' bloodstream. The old man gasped and collapsed. Gripper flinched, but then Burkins took a deep breath and he gave a deep sigh of relief. Gripper grinned, and dug through the other medikits, assembling six more ampoules of the same drug.
science base, odegra, 20:32 local time 110/1106
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Crouched in the undergrowth at the edge of the jungle, Alice, Gripper and Manx stared across the cleared area at the science base. A large central dome was connected to several outlying buildings by tunnel corridors. Most of the outbuildings were smaller domes, but one was much larger, roughly triangular, with high windows. An airlock on the outside of the main dome provided foot access. There was no external crawler park; the road led to a large door on the side of the dome. Two long-range radio comms dishes decorated the top.
There seemed to be no access ladders onto the roof, and apart from the windows the airlock and crawler door appeared to be the only entrances to the structures. The cleared area around the base wasn't floodlit - little need with the pale radiance of the gas giant - and few of the windows were lit.
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"Do we have any information about the inside?" asked Manx. "Try the gov's handcomp," suggested Alice. This made a lot of sense, so Manx dug it out and located the science base files. The device's holoprojector came on and it presented a 3d wireframe of the facility, hovering an inch above the computer and glowing faintly green among the darkened trees. Manx was glad they were out of direct sight of the windows as he peered at the layout. There were not one but two comms rooms marked, one in the main dome and one in the large annex. There were also areas marked "Reagent Extraction" and "Jump Field Simulation", which caused some head-scratching.
"We could try and bull our way in as wardens," suggested Manx. Alice shook her head. "We'd need a reason for a small group of them to be here, other than looking for us," she said, "also, wardens would come in a crawler and ours doesn't look the part." Gripper pointed at a couple of locations. "We could kill the power and LS with explosions here and here," he said thoughtfully. The others exchanged glances. "That would wipe out the occupants," said Alice, "and I'm not comfortable with that." Manx shook his head in agreement and Gripper shrugged; it was true - mass murder wasn't their way.
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After a careful circuit, the three approached one of the smaller domes, marked Geology on the plan, and listened for sounds of activity. Hearing nothing, they worked around the base to the doors, discovering that the door to the crawler garage was no more than a seam from the outside; any controls were inside and probably aboard the crawler. The personnel lock was another matter; it looked exactly like a standard starship lock, with which all three had been familiar all their adult lives. A security panel on the wall next to it secured it, and Manx turned with confidence to the handcomp to obtain the access code. Which wasn't there.
After several minutes struggling and muttering, Alice reached over his shoulder. "Try there?" she suggested. Flushing slightly, Manx opened the file - the Governor's personal list of codes and passwords - and extracted the code. Alice tapped it in and the outer door slid open. The inside of the 'lock was empty, and standard enough - nice big green triangle and red circle buttons for easy operation in the most stressful of situations. Gripper pressed the green button and the 'lock closed. There was a brief hurricane as the noxious air of Odegra was sucked out and replaced with clean terranormal atmosphere, and then the lock gave a quiet, self-satisfied ping and opened the inner door.
The cycle process had seemed very loud to the three intruders, but on the other side of the thick pressure doors couldn'd have been more than a whisper. Despite this, all three jumped in shock as they saw what looked like a dozen people waiting for them, lined up along the walls. Or perhaps racks of pressure suits hung up ready for use... Alice chuckled. "Not battledress, more's the pity."
Cautiously they tiptoed into the base itself. The prep room opened into a central common area, dotted with chairs and tables, dark now in the evening. A spiral stair led up to the dome's cupola they'd noted from outside, marked Obbo and Bar on the plans. The comm room was across the common room, and they gathered around its old-fashioned hinge door. Alice listened, but all there was to hear was the hum and whine of electronics and the occasional status beep. Gently they opened the door and looked inside.
Racked all around the walls were blocks of radio gear, long and short range, and also an internal intercom system - none of it particularly sophisticated and by the size of the units fairly low tech. Several seats faced the consoles but all were unoccupied. They stepped in and quietly closed the door.
Simply smashing the equipment would do the job, but might make noise or trigger alarms; likewise disconnecting the power. What they needed to do was disconnect the link between the equipment and the transmission aerials. Manx stuck his head under the racks, and tracked the output cables to the wall. There he cut them, pulled back a metre or so and cut the piece out.
That left the comms systems in the Terbium wing, the large triangular annex. Following their plans, they located the stub corridor leading to the wing, and examined the manual hatches seperating it from the main base with extreme care. Neither seemed to be locked or set up to trap intruders, so they opened the first and listened at the second.
For the first time they could hear voices, several of them, speaking quite loudly across each other in a declamatory fashion. Odd other sounds came and went, engines running, drilling, rumbling, occasional explosions and machinery running, birds in trees. Baffled, the intruders 'tidied up' Manx and Gripper's warden disguises, readied weapons, and opened the door.
On the plans, the area joining the Terbium Wing to the main base was marked 'Maximillian Hall' and what they found inside fitted that description pretty well. A long, wide corridor leading into the wing, the walls covered with exhibits, replicas of awards, displays, and looping holodisplays extolling the virtues of Maximillian Industries' various ventures. These were the source of the 'voices' they'd heard. Reassured they were not yet discovered, they walked the length of the hall and passed through the open iris valve at the far end into the Atrium.
The Atrium was a large, diamond-shaped hall with a large tree growing in the middle and a high glass roof. This was a real tree, possibly even a Terran or Vilani species, rather than one of the unpleasant and poisonous ones growing outside; transporting it here and keeping it alive must have cost a fortune. At the foot of the tree was a pool and a fountain with comfy chairs dotted around. A short passage led to the main security for the wing, a second iris valve, firmly locked this time with a state-of-the-art TL14 electronic lock. The Atrium confirmed the impression that had formed in the cons' minds when they first saw the science base; while the basic dome and outbuildings were quite old and low-tech, probably built by the scout service when they first surveyed the system, the Terbuim Wing was much more modern and constructed on a much bigger budget. Gripper dismantled the control panel for the iris, and Manx spliced in the hand computer. He and Alice examined the display for a while, and got to work on the encryption.
terbium wing, Science base, odegra, 20:48 local time 110/1106
After nearly half an hour of struggling, Alice and Manx sat back and sighed. What they needed here was a cracksman, or some cracksoft for the computer; but lock-picking software was not common fare on prison governers' computers, and the only cracksmen on the planet were dead under tons of rubble back in the Pit - with the exception of "Slippers" Moir, a mile away in the crawler. Gripper tried to put the panel back without leaving any signs, but the facing was marked. "Well, let's set it up so that no-one can come out after us," he said, and shorted the power across the system board. The expensive lock controls fried with a sizzle and a faint smell of burning electronics.
Session Date: 20th April 2010 (109/-2507 Imperial) |
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