The prisoners were helped out and into the first compartment. I went with them.
“Where are you going?” Valia asked.
“Sir,” I reminded her.
“You’re going onto the prison ship?” She was stunned.
“Yeah, I need to talk to some people. I’ll be fine.”
“Are there any Kommilaire on there? Sir.”
“Nope. Just prisoners.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Five thousand? Eight thousand? I’ll be back in a bit.”
I closed the doors between us and waited for the locks. I then opened the next hatch and moved the prisoners over. Gravity increased gradually at every seal until it matched that of Belvaille.
I opened the last door.
Four prisoners were waiting. They were surprised to see me.
“New citizens,” I told them.
They got stretchers and helped the new men to the medical bay, which was also run by prisoners.
I looked around. The Royal Wing was an enormous metal cocoon. It was cleaner than Belvaille because they couldn’t afford to have trash or waste. Everything was put to use. Their housing was little more than bare beams or rods that demarcated spaces. They built up towards the ceiling which was maybe a hundred feet above. The apartments that stretched up that high only had floors and maybe a blanket or two for privacy.
They were a busy lot, constantly repairing and rebuilding their city.
The town was crowded with dirty men—most of them were men—and they wore pretty much the clothes they had come in with. So you could see styles that stretched across the decades just by taking a stroll.
People stopped what they were doing and stared at me for a moment, but only a moment. They were occupied with surviving. I put most of these people here and they didn’t have time for me.
This place knocked me out. It was filled with the worst offenders from Belvaille but run so efficiently.
And the solution had been simple: take away everything so they had nothing to fight over. Put them in a decaying bathtub surrounded by the void of space. Then if anyone ever acted up, the mob killed them and used their body parts as building materials.
The Royal Wing had an exceedingly low crime rate from what I understood.
And I was here to meet its mayor.
I finally found him. He was using a makeshift saw to cut a pipe.
“Hank!” He exclaimed. “When did you get here?”
“Just now. Dropped off some new citizens.”
Uulath was an emaciated, dark-skinned man with dreadlocked brown hair. He looked slightly less dirty than his compatriots, but only slightly. He had no shirt and every muscle on his gaunt upper torso was defined. His pants were cut off at the knee from wear and he had no shoes. You would guess he was an energetic middle-aged man, but prison life adds years.
No one died of natural causes in this place, because no one was living naturally.
“Are the ones you brought good workers you think?” Uulath asked.
“They’re beat up. Went to the medical bay I assume.”
He sighed.
“You’re looking really huge, Hank. How do you get so big?”
“Mutation. You’re looking small.”
“Starvation. What else you want?” he asked, putting down the saw.
“Can we talk?” and I was about to say, “privately,” but I realized it didn’t matter who heard. They had no radios here. No one talked to them. I could shout out my darkest secrets and it would be as if I hadn’t told anyone.
“Go ahead,” he said.
A strange thing happened to inmates on the Royal Wing. Everyone who came here died here, eventually. No one said they would take care of you on the inside because no one had access to the inside except the Kommilaire. No one said they would fight to get you released early, because no one was ever released.
Whatever you were before you came here, Olmarr Republican, Totki, Order of Transcendence, banker, mother, father, whatever, you were now a prisoner of the Royal Wing. Everything else about you was gone.
Uulath got information on what was happening on Belvaille from new prisoners. Information that they wouldn’t tell anyone if they weren’t otherwise doomed. If people didn’t want to talk out of some residual loyalty to their old lives, well, they eventually came around.
A prison colony run by prisoners with punishments meted out by prisoners was not a place to be anti-social.
“Two Clem,” I said. “You know him?”
“The actor?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I heard he was kidnapped. The Order says Olmarr Republic. Olmarr says not them.”
“Hmm. 19-10. An assassin. Or bounty hunter.”
“Never heard of him. You have an election coming up, right?”
“So they say.”
“You have a lot of candidates,” Uulath said.
“Really?”
He laughed.
“Hank, do you remember why you arrested me?”
“You murdered a little girl.”
“And do you remember what she was wearing?”
A silent pause.
“A dress. A green dress.”
“That was almost thirty years ago. You,” he said, pointing at me, “were born for that job. The gods made it for you. But you’re crap at politics. And Belvaille is politics now. That’s all the new people talk about.”
He smiled at me.
“Do you know how many people I’ve killed since I’ve been here?” he asked.
“I suspect a lot.”
“None. I look to you for guidance,” he said.
“What?” That struck me as an odd statement for the mayor of the Royal Wing to make. I was immediately suspicious.
“You are the strongest person on Belvaille but you hardly ever kill anyone. You use your head more than your fists. It’s something I wish I had known when I was younger.”
“Do you guys have any urgent needs?” I asked.
I didn’t know if he was trying to sweet talk me, but we weren’t friends. When the Totki had put duct tape so effectively on my eyes, it made me realize that they had been sitting around concocting that strategy. A strategy based specifically on fighting me. How much time did Uulath have to think about me and how he might manipulate me?
“Ten rolls of mylon plastic and two water filtration systems would be great. We have eight different water containment areas based on how clean it is. The eighth one is like liquid rust.”
I took a deep breath and pondered his request.
He chuckled and wore a wistful, melancholy expression.
“You’re thinking, ‘What can I give them yet still leave this place a living hell?’ You are our sun god, Hank. We fear you like the insects that crawl around in the safety of the night.”
CHAPTER 12
There was a little bit of a hassle at the entrance to the four block district that was the Ank Reserve.
The guards demanded I remove all my weapons, but I had too many and I didn’t feel like it. Finally, I simply walked past them. The guards thought better of firing on me.
Besides, I had been personally summoned.
The Ank were, or at least had been, the bankers of the galaxy. They had nearly been exterminated in the war. Not because anyone particularly bore them ill will, but the Ank were never very populous, and when one side wanted to end the funding to the other side during the civil war, they would attack the Ank planets. Eventually, they were almost wiped out.
My motto was to never take sides.
The Ank seemed to have a motto of take every side equally. Some people even blame the Ank for increasing the scale of the civil war, because they funded so much of it.
Between losing the Ank home worlds and our teles, the financial system across the galaxy simply ceased to exist. Barter and trade became the most common form of conducting business.