Teacher had been in the electric chair for two minutes; he could smell his own flesh burning. His synapses overflowed and his muscles jerked involuntarily. . The whiplash effect had already broken six of the restraints placed on him, two of which had been made of metal. The two head restraints had gone first, and the violent thrashings of Teacher's head were in danger of breaking his neck. An unsavoury mix of phlegm and blood from ruptured capillaries made its way from his nose to his lungs, which had stopped inflating a minute ago. His heart had also resigned, with a violent contraction that had burst blood vessels all over his body. His ears were bleeding, his hair visibly smoking, and the remaining restraints were so hot that they had begun to burn into his flesh. Three minutes. He could feel his blood bubbling. Now only arm and leg restraints remained. With each volt, his torso was thrown upwards out of the chair, back arched, promising him freedom. Promising........promising...........
And denying. Four minutes in the electric chair. Brilliant white sparks flew across the room, and lights all around the prison dimmed. Fuses burned out, backup generators kicked in. Still Teacher's body writhed. The smell of his burning body began to permeate the control room, where technicians stared in disbelief, or covered their eyes from the glare, or retched violently. Five minutes. Teacher no longer felt any pain. As welcome as the sensation was, he knew it ultimately wasn’t good . But for a moment, he succumbed. He stopped jumping, relaxed, let himself be free. His eyes closed, his mind drifted...............
“Cut the power! Switch it off!” shouted one of the technicians in the control room.
“Fuck him. Let him fry,” said Cleyff, without lifting his eyes from his newspaper.
“No, he's right,” warned another technician. “We’ve got to shut down before-”
There was a large bang, and then darkness. The prison power system had shut down.
After four minutes of panic and profanity, the backup generators kicked in, the lights came back on. As the smoke cleared in the execution chamber, Cleyff found himself staring at an empty electric chair, which was on fire, with all its restraints broken.
Hossam Mustafa Cleyff now sensed he was living on borrowed time. As a clone, he had no doubts as to how expendable he was. If clones failed, or broke, their masters simply went and got a replacement. And knowing Kane, he probably had three or four lined up already. As a Secretary of State Cleyff had had more autonomy than most. Still, his remit was little more than to slowly leach information and resources away from the Menland executive, and transfer these assets to Kane. But in intercepting diplomatic transmissions, conducting espionage insertions, plotting assassinations, black-ops missions, he had begun to crystallise power for himself; and he had enjoyed developing newer and more varied ways to progress towards his manumission. This time, in his creativity, he was sure he had overstepped the mark.
“Sonofabitch-”said a technician. “-There’s gonna be another jailbreak! Call the guards! Call the guards!”
“Someone get in there and kill that son of a bitch.” said Cleyff, but he could hear the fear in his voice overriding his power of command. “You go in there and kill him. He's probably one 'a your pet psychos anyway-”was the technician’s reply.
Cleyff poked handgun into the execution chamber and began firing indiscriminately into the room. For his efforts, a single bullet found its way into Black Knight's right shoulder. The reaction was less of a scream of pain, more of a battle cry. Cleyff watched in astonishment as the the man he had sent to the electric chair now ripped that same chair from its floor supports and threw it through the window of the control room. One technician was quick enough to move out of the way, but as the chair burst through the plexiglass, it threw the other technician backwards and pinned him to the floor by his head, crushing his skull. He was out of bullets, and Black Knight was still standing. Six armed guards came through the doorway, which Cleyff took as his cue to leave. He scrambled through the hole in the broken window ; leaving the guards to suppress or destroy Black Knight as they saw fit. But thirty seconds later and Teacher had killed the last of the six; he armed himself with a selection of their weapons, and made his way into the maze of corridors in the prison. Somewhere within himself, Cleyff found time for jealousy; for a moment, he wished he'd been made as lethal as Black Knight or Bianco.
A turbolift at the end of the corridor. Ejecting the spent cartridges in his handguns, Teacher stepped out of the shadows and towards the lift. There was a ping, and the lift doors began to open.
Teacher dropped to the floor and slid along the corridor on his back, inserting a fifteen round magazine into one gun even as the lift doors began to inch apart. He identified the men and women in the lift as guards as he loaded his other gun and rolled onto his front. As the lift doors slid two inches apart, he could hear the release of safety catches on rifles. He was going to kill all these people. Four inches apart. Teacher began firing. Eight inches. Three guards were already dead, three more were waiting for the lift to open, one had realised something was not right. Sixteen inches. Those guards still alive were suddenly aware of someone sliding towards the lift, firing at them. Teacher had already got off twenty rounds. Two feet. The only guard still alive started firing back. Four feet. The doors were now fully open, and everyone in the lift was dead.
Teacher clambered over the dead bodies and got into the lift, which had already been called. “GROUND-FLOOR-ARMOURY.” It forewarned. The doors slid shut, and the lift began to descend toward the weapons store on the ground floor. Teacher assessed his situation. Seven dead guards........ Seven assault rifles............... maybe a dozen handguns...............a half dozen hand grenades, a couple of clips, cellular phone........binocula-
The lift touched down on the ground floor. Bullets were ripping into the lift doors before they had opened. Teacher sensed that less than ten armed men were emptying their handguns into the lift doors , together. They were not aiming their shots. Just as they began to reload, the doors hobbled open. Teacher saw the guards in the armoury look in horror at their dead comrades in the lift. Even as accusations and counter-accusations flew across the armoury, Teacher erupted from the pile of dead security guards, liberally tossing grenades into the armoury and bagging a few more guards before sending the lift back upstairs and returning to his cocoon of dead bodies. The explosions rocked the lift and fire spat through the bullet holes in the lift doors as if from miniature flamethrowers, setting the bodies of the dead guards aflame. Smoke. Fire. Oppressive heat. Burning bodies. As the turbolift rocked its way to the top of the prison, Teacher reflected; this seemed all too familiar.
~~~~~~~~~
“There’s a high risk job. Will you accept?” the Clone Security Operative asked Bianco via holoscreen
“They’re all high risk”. Bianco informed her. “What’s the fee?”
“Thirty million Merits”
Bianco froze for a moment. Ten million was enough to secure manumission, citizenship, land, and then retire. He’d done enough jobs on this planet to know that not even the Menland government had that kind of money to throw around.
The Operative pressed on, interrupting his pause for concern. “The first part has to be completed in the next ninety minutes. The first five million are available now, with the remainder being sent when the client is satisfied that you’ve done a clean job”.
His every instinct screamed at him not to take the job. He ignored them all. “Here’s the account. Send the job” He opened up another holoscreen with the job details, and quickly clenched his teeth to hide the shock of revelation. She’d just instructed him to kill Black Knight, a soldier he’d served alongside for longer than she’d been gestated.
“They’re all high risk”. Bianco informed her. “What’s the fee?”
“Thirty million Merits”
Bianco froze for a moment. Ten million was enough to secure manumission, citizenship, land, and then retire. He’d done enough jobs on this planet to know that not even the Menland government had that kind of money to throw around.
The Operative pressed on, interrupting his pause for concern. “The first part has to be completed in the next ninety minutes. The first five million are available now, with the remainder being sent when the client is satisfied that you’ve done a clean job”.
His every instinct screamed at him not to take the job. He ignored them all. “Here’s the account. Send the job” He opened up another holoscreen with the job details, and quickly clenched his teeth to hide the shock of revelation. She’d just instructed him to kill Black Knight, a soldier he’d served alongside for longer than she’d been gestated.
Served. What had they served? It hadn't been their war. It wasn't even their planet. He had been programmed to destroy the Xienom. They had never been given cause to question why they were fighting these crustacean-men, or what they were supposed to be defending. They simply received the signal, that excruciating vision, projected over and over until and unless the mission was complete. Then, and only then, could they return to stasis, receive the comfort of sedation.
It was strange seeing the look in Black Knight’s eyes on a holoscreen. Is that how he had looked? As if he’d suddenly been wakened from a dream? Bianco still couldn’t remember his own arrival on this planet, and he had struggled for months to come to terms with being anywhere other than Earth’s solar system, because to his mind such things had not been possible.
But now he knew only too well the sensation of awakening from a dream, from a nightmare, from both. He remembered coming to, pinned under a mound of jagged rocks at the bottom of a cliff , half submerged in an ice-cold stream, his wounds being kept open by vengi rats feasting on the marrow in his bones. Presumed to be a mere clone, he had been left for dead. Insignificant collateral damage. In the strangest of circumstances, his involvement in the Colonial Wars came to an end. And when he had managed to free himself from under his rocky headstone, he found his mind could once again think for itself. And his body had begun to heal itself, which was something he recalled seeing no other soldier's body do.
Except Black Knight. Whom he had just given himself eighty eight minutes to kill.
He opened another screen to reveal the identities of his two other targets; Dr Karl Salum, Kane’s chief scientist, and Hossam Mustafa Cleyff. Secretary of State for Defence for the Republic of Menland
Salum. He gladly received the directions and access codes to Dr. Salum’s laboratory as he stepped into his pilot gear, strapped an ion jet to his back, and put his helmet on. The nanowave transmission system that turned them all into zombies, the thousands of injections and transfusions and surgeries to turn them into indestructible killing machines; they had all been Salum’s design. He would enjoy wiping the doctor’s blood from his sword. But first he would find out everything the doctor knew.
He knew Salum would have answers. He was sure Black Knight was just another failed Salum experiment.
Maybe he was, too.
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