“You’d be right.”
“So what’s happening? Please, I need to know. I can’t … I can’t …” Michael had to stop to recover his self-control. “This might surprise you,” he went on, “but I’ve had it. I just want this to be over.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through, so let me get to the point.”
“Fire away.”
Friday, December 12, 2403, UD
Farrisport Island Prison
“It’s time.”
Michael got to his feet. “I’m ready,” he said. It was a complete and utter lie. Only the last dregs of courage and self-control allowed him to keep a body torn by fear under control.
Two guards stepped forward. Hands locked onto his arms. They escorted him down a succession of short corridors. Kallewi and a posse of observers fell in behind, his lawyer too. Erica Malvern’s eyes were brimful of tears. Michael was led into a room. Its walls were seamless sheets of blindingly white plasteel, its only furniture a single chair bolted to the floor, its back, arms, and legs fitted with broad plasfiber restraints.
Michael’s heart hammered at the walls of his chest. He was eased forward, turned, and pushed gently down into the chair. The guards worked fast to secure the restraints. The awful, unstoppable inevitability of the process threatened to break him apart. With all that remained of his self-control, he made himself stay still.
“Prisoner is secure, sir,” one of the guards said, moving back.
Colonel Kallewi stepped forward to stand right in front of Michael, a single sheet of paper in her left hand. She leaned forward. “Hang in there, spacer,” she whispered.
Michael said nothing. He was too terrified to speak, even now unable to believe what was about to happen to him.
Kallewi cleared her throat before speaking. “Michael Wallace Helfort. Your final appeal for clemency having been denied by the president of the Federated Worlds in presidential order J-557, a physical copy of which document I have witnessed in person and further confirmed by direct comm with the president herself …”
Michael turned his mind inward. His neuronics cycled through his favorite holopix of Anna, pictures of the best times in his life, pictures rich in hope and happiness. But all of a sudden, it was too much, too painful, and Michael could not take any more. He shut his neuronics down. He opened his eyes and waited for Colonel Kallewi to finish.
“… and now, by the authority vested in me as the superintendent of Farrisport Island Prison, sentence of death will be carried out.” Kallewi stepped back. “Proceed,” she said.
A guard-she looked very young and very nervous-wheeled a small trolley to where Michael sat. On it rested a plasfiber cylinder from which two corrugated hoses led to a face mask. With well-rehearsed efficiency, the guard placed the face mask over Michael’s face, tightening the straps behind his head to form an airtight seal.
“Face mask is secure, sir,” the woman said.
“Confirm system is nominal.”
The guard’s fingers flickered across a small touchpad set below a status screen. “System is nominal.”
“Close the vent. Set the system to recirculate.”
“Vent closed. System set to recirculate. Carbon dioxide scrubber is active, sir.”
“Sentence will now be carried out,” Kallewi said.
This is it, Michael thought, knowing with each inhalation that he was one step closer to death as his body burned the oxygen in the system until too little remained to sustain life. It was strange. He felt disconnected from what was going on. As if it were already over. As if he were …
Quietly and with no fuss, the end came, and Michael slipped away into unconsciousness, falling down into the darkness, down to where death awaited.
Why could he not feel anything? Why was did the darkness feel so thick? Why was the silence so absolute?
Was this what it was like to be dead? He was dead, so it had to be.
None of it made any sense, so he lay unmoving until a soft voice reached down to where he drifted. It called him back up from the infinite blackness that cradled his being, urging him to come back to the light. He did not want to go, but the voice was insistent; it nagged at him until he had to leave the warmth and security of the darkness. He drifted up toward a faint point of light. It strengthened as he rose; its brilliance grew and grew until it pushed the darkness aside, and then a blinding whiteness enveloped him, a whiteness so bright that he had to screw his eyes shut against the glare. His head filled with sudden stabbing agony, his heart thrashed at his chest, nausea roiled his stomach.
“Can you hear me?” a voice asked.
He wanted to answer, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too constricted to let the words come. With an effort, he drove air from his lungs and past his lips. “Yes,” he croaked.
“Good,” the voice said. “You had us worried. That damn drug is dangerous. We’re transfusing more nanobots to mop up the last of the toxins in your system. I’m afraid you’ll feel like shit until they’re gone, but it won’t be long, so hang in there.”
“Head hurts,” he mumbled. The pain was terrifying in its intensity; it radiated out from behind his forehead in swirling waves of red-hot agony, each more powerful than the last.
“How bad?”
“Bad, real bad.”
“Bloody cataleptic drugs,” the voice said. “Hold on … okay, I’ve upped your painkillers.”
The pain roared to new heights. He bit down on his lower lip to choke down the scream that built in his throat, his mouth filled with the coppery taste of fresh blood.
“Better?”
He shook his head. A mistake; shards of pain slashed razor-edged through his head. “Stop!” he screamed. “Stop it now! Please!”
“Hang in there.”
But he could not. With brutal force, the pain bludgeoned him back to where he had come from.
In an instant, he was awake. He stared up at the ceiling, which was white and featureless except for a single light panel turned down low. He looked around. Judging from the medibot beside his bed, it had to be a hospital, he decided.
But why was he in a hospital? His mind was blank. Panic engulfed him. He could not remember anything, not a damn thing: who he was, where he was, why he was here. All he knew was what his senses were telling him right there and then.
That was it.
Beyond the immediate lay … nothing. Hard as he tried, he could not see past the nothingness. His mind said he existed, but that was the totality of his universe. He had no idea what lay beyond the Spartan confines of his room; that terrified him. But why? He did not know. But he did know one thing for certain: Outside the door lay unimaginable horrors, horrors that would destroy him with casual, uncaring cruelty, horrors that even now might be coming for him. With fear-fueled desperation, he tried to find a way out, to escape, but he could not move.
Without warning, the door opened. A scream of primal terror boiled up from deep inside, a scream that died before it reached his lips. The man who had entered the room was a marine medic, a corporal, there to help him.
He knew all that without thinking. But how did he know? What was a marine? What was a corporal? Why was the man here to help him? None of it made any sense.
“The medibot told me you were conscious,” the medic said; he leaned over to look him in the face. “How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“Can’t remember anything?”
“No. Who am I?
“You’re Michael Helfort.”
That did not help. Who the hell was Michael Helfort? “Where am I?”
“A place called Karrigal Creek.”