The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3), Page 2

  While the mines and the prison shared the same spaceport—a large platform that hovered well above the lava fields—much of the rest of the prison facility was below ground level. Instead of being built above ground, the way they were for colonies, the containment field had been built under the prison yard. This was where the prisoners slept and ate. Anyone hoping for a reprieve from the heat of the lava fields was sorely disappointed; it was even hotter under the lava than it was at ground level. There was nowhere anyone could go to avoid the feeling of being cooked alive. Besides adding to the inmates’ misery, the underground living quarters served another purpose. The inmates knew they were already under the lava seas, and thus there was no hope of chiseling through a rock wall or digging a tunnel underground without lava pouring inside and killing everyone as rapidly as if they were to jump into the lava fields.

  The spaceport was the only access point into and out of the facility. As such, it was heavily guarded with Vonnegan troopers. And while the Vonnegan officers who served at the Cauldrons of Dagda considered it an honor to be stationed at the most infamous prison in the galaxy, the lowly guards did not share that sentiment. Instead, they considered their posting on Terror-Dhome to be punishment for something they had done, which it often was.

  4

  Death was everywhere.

  Only a short distance away from Vere, bubbles of lava popped and splattered the ground. Not far from where she worked, a Gthothch had been assigned the task of moving boulders from one part of the prison grounds to a different area. Hour after hour the prisoner had bent over, lifted one giant stone after another up to his shoulder, and then lumbered across the rocky surface of the prison yard.

  If the Gthothch stopped moving and stayed perfectly still, his thick stone skin would actually have blended in perfectly with the rocky surface of the prison grounds. Of course, the guards ensured he never had the chance to rest. If the Gthothch did stop to gather his strength, the closest prison guard lashed him across the back with his vibro whip. The electric current that traveled through the whip brought every prisoner to their knees. On almost all prisoners, it took only one strike of the whip for them to know they never wanted to feel that searing pain a second time.

  Only a week earlier, a heavy-set alien with swamp green skin had been whipped once a minute for half an hour. The alien, who had killed people in seven different sectors before being sent to the Cauldrons, was begging and crying to be left alone. Given the choice of jumping into the lava and dying or receiving another lash every minute for yet another half an hour, the murderer jumped into the lava. None of the other inmates had ever learned what the alien had done to earn the guard’s wrath. Most times, the guards were just as miserable as the inmates and didn’t want to be there either. But because they held weapons, they had an outlet for their resentment and irritation.

  The Gthothch, like the other prisoners around him, did whatever he thought he could do to avoid a second lashing. Hour after hour, he had carried boulders across the prison yard. Eventually, though, his body simply gave out. In the middle of hauling another stone across the grounds, the thick alien with rock-like skin closed his eyes, groaned, then fell forward on top of the very stone he had been trying to carry. He had been so afraid of receiving another lash from the vibro whip that he had worked until he died.

  A group of four guards walked over to the Gthothch. Instead of striking him, though, each guard grabbed hold of one of the alien’s limbs and dragged him to the edge of the lava sea. There, one of the guards put a boot against the Gthothch’s hips and pushed forward as hard as he could. The stony alien toppled off the side and sank into the lava without the guards wasting time to see if he had actually been dead or just too exhausted to keep working that day.

  On the far side of the prison grounds, obscured by a haze of hot vapors wafting up from the ground, a short alien with six legs screamed for someone to kill him. Instead, he was kept tied to a giant rock while another guard lashed him over and over again with his whip. Each strike opened a gash on the alien’s skin. At the same time, each lashing sent waves of electrical charges bursting through the little creature’s body. The charges were painful everywhere, but especially deep in the bones and muscles of the area that the whip had opened up.

  After each lashing, the guard waited a few moments until the hysterical alien had his senses about him once more. There was no point in delivering the blows too quickly. The alien would just go into shock or die, and the guard would be sweating and wasting energy in the hot lava fields for nothing. The guard only concluded the punishment when the alien ceased his cries, because it was at that point that the prisoner had ceased to have value at the Cauldrons. The guard ordered two other prisoners to drag the alien’s dead body to the edge of the prison yard. There, that alien was also tossed into the molten sea.

  Vere didn’t look away from her work when the Gthothch collapsed or when the alien was being whipped. All around her, the same thing was happening to every prisoner. That was why she didn’t look anywhere except three feet in front of her.

  Leaning forward, both hands placed firmly against the wood beam in front of her, she planted one foot, inched the other foot forward, then pushed as hard as she could. The thick wood beam she was pushing moved forward slightly.

  The beam extended three body lengths from a metal cylinder that stuck out of the ground. Across from her, the other half of the same long wooden beam extended out another three body lengths. There, a hulking sun-colored alien, with flesh that looked as if it were simmering and ready to catch fire, pushed the other half of the beam. Together, Vere and the alien were responsible for ensuring the beam kept moving circles all day.

  The alien, known as an Ignus Moris, was rumored to be the only creature anywhere in the galaxy that could survive being thrown into the Cauldron’s lava fields. It was also whispered that the guards’ vibro whips would smoke and disintegrate if they touched the alien’s smoldering flesh.

  Either because this one alien was impervious to the two punishments most commonly dealt out at the prison, or because he had done something specifically to earn Mowbray’s wrath, the Ignus Moris was stationed at the Circle of Sorrow, across from Vere.

  The Circle was considered the most grueling and senseless of all of the tasks carried out on the prison grounds. Each inmate pushed the wood beam in a circle until they could no longer perform the task. When they couldn’t carry out their duty anymore, they were dropped into the lava. Many inmates couldn’t budge the wood beam at all, let alone after being exposed to Terror-Dhome’s intense heat for hours or days or weeks. No one knew if the Circle’s motion propelled some kind of hidden internal mechanism that actually benefited the prison. Most, Vere included, suspected it did nothing except kill the people who were tasked with pushing it. This was one of many psychological tricks devised to destroy the spirit of prisoners who eventually came to realize that their mindless feats of endurance had no value whatsoever. At least a prisoner moving stones saw a stack of rocks where there was previously nothing. All Vere and the Ignus Moris had was an endless circle that sapped their strength each time they pushed with all of their might.

  All around the prison yard, there were dozens of guards torturing and tormenting hundreds of prisoners. To discourage a mass riot—after all, the prisoners vastly outnumbered the guards—an additional deterrence was added. The monster of the Cauldrons stalked the prison yard, killing anyone and everyone who caught his attention. Without the threat of being burned alive or of the pain of a vibro whip, something had to keep the Ignus Moris in line, and Balor, the monster, did that.

  The monster’s skin changed colors depending on the time of day. Early in the morning it was a pale yellow, the color of granules on a beach. As the day progressed, the monster’s skin turned darker and darker. By dusk, Balor’s skin was the color of the black rocks that the nearby miners excavated for minerals. The beast was as tall as a Llyushin fighter stood up on its end. So tall was it that it was known to accidentl
y step on and crush prisoners who were working near its feet. Its hands, like its lone eye, were disproportionately large. Although Vere had never gotten close enough to it to be sure, she estimated her entire body could fit in one of the monster’s palms. If that happened and the monster made a fist, she would be pulverized. This was not a tale told by prisoners to scare the others, it was something Vere had actually seen with her own eyes. During her first week at the Cauldrons, she had witnessed Balor pick up a half human-half lepton prisoner and had caused a sickening crumbling of bones that turned the inmate into a sack of gore.

  The colossal creature was feared throughout the galaxy, and along with the lava and heat, was a big part of why everyone dreaded being sent to the Cauldrons of Dagda.

  Most inmates didn’t fear being crushed by Balor. They feared his single, bulbous eye. One look from the monster was lethal. Balor’s eye was positioned in the very middle of its head, and it emitted a constant stream of lethal gas. The gas dissipated, so at a distance it wasn’t deadly. But if the creature was close enough to reach out and touch you, it was already too late. The noxious gas released from Balor’s eye would kill you in a matter of seconds. And not in any kind of pretty way.

  The gas caused almost every kind of liquid to dry up. Because most species, humans and aliens alike, have water as the majority of their body composition, nearly every alien species in the galaxy that Balor looked at would die of dehydration in less than ten seconds.

  The most gruesome deaths were the ones where Balor only glanced at a prisoner for a second. It was long enough that the inmate was brought to his hands and knees and felt terrible pains shoot through his body, but not long enough for the monster’s single eye to kill them instantly. These were the prisoners who begged for death.

  Vere wondered if the alien at the other end of the wooden beam from her could possibly have any moisture in his body. It didn’t look as if he would, but he obeyed all of the guards’ orders, so she could only conclude that the monster could indeed kill the Ignus Moris if it wanted it to.

  Together, Vere and the Ignus Moris pushed the wood beam in a circle from the time they woke up until the time they were allowed to go to sleep. In return for their labor, they were given three meals a day and they were allowed to stay alive for as long as they could keep performing their task.

  It was an expectation that Vere refused to follow. Upon arriving at the Cauldrons, she had killed a guard with his own vibro whip. Afterwards, three other guards had lashed her until she was nearly dead. Instead of being pushed into the lava seas, however, she was taken to the medical bay and allowed to heal. The scars across her back and arms still reminded her of the punishment she had endured that day.

  Mowbray, she guessed, wanted her to die on his terms and not on her own. If she was going to die at the Cauldrons of Dagda, it would be because she could no longer stand it. He wanted her to quit of her own volition, to walk into the lava sea, or else drop dead the way the Gthothch had. He must have felt she was getting off too easy if the guards killed her like any other prisoner they became unhappy with.

  As soon as she had regained her health after the beating, she was sent to the Circle of Sorrow. There, she spent the next two years of her life pushing the same beam in a circle. Every week or so, after the alien across from her died and was dropped into the lava, a new alien appeared across from her and aided in the task.

  She dug her foot into the ground, braced herself, then pushed once more. Again, the beam, thicker than her body, groaned as it moved another foot forward. Across from her, the Ignus Moris did the same thing.

  Over the months and years, the act of putting all of her strength into moving the giant beam for hours at a time had the opposite effect that Mowbray had intended. Because the prisoners were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, and because she was performing grueling work every day, she had lost every ounce of fat on her body. Instead of becoming weak and frail, she had become an imposing figure. Her arms were twice as thick as they had been. Her back bulged each time she pushed. The veins in her forearms rippled each time her hands braced against the beam. Even her neck was stout with sinew and muscle.

  Not only did she look like she belonged amongst the galaxy’s deadliest criminals, she acted as if she did. One night, after ten hours of pushing the wooden beam, a completely black alien, devoid of any color or skin pigment, had walked up to her at the mess hall and motioned for her to give him her plate of food. Without saying a single word, she killed the alien and left his body in the middle of the cafeteria for everyone else to see.

  But her true legend at the Cauldrons was earned by the mere fact that she had lived as long as she had. Two years. Most of the prisoners she saw being brought in each day didn’t last a week, their bodies tossed into the lava beside her. She couldn’t guess how many inmates she had seen receive that fate during her incarceration. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Some of them cried as they were dragged to the lava. Some begged to be allowed to jump in if it meant they could die quickly and stop their suffering. Some died at the hands of guards with vibro whips. A few had turned into withered corpses after having Balor look at them. Their fate, in the end, was always the same. Death.

  The only exception was Vere, who managed to survive as the others perished, becoming a hero for breaking the record set by Ewan the Resilient many years earlier, for enduring anything the worst prison could give her.

  Day after day she pushed the Circle of Sorrow, and day after day she wondered if Mowbray was regretting his decision to let her live. Instead of becoming a symbol of why everyone should fear the Vonnegan leader, for everyone to see what happened when they dared face him, Vere had become a symbol of strength and fortitude and resistance.

  In fact, the previous alien that had toiled across from her on the Circle of Sorrow had turned to her in the middle of their task and grunted in his thick Turgurian accent, “You will be called Vere the Tenacious.”

  A guard who had overheard the comment had whipped the prisoner into unconsciousness, then kicked his body into the lava. The Ignus Moris had taken the Turgurian’s place at the Circle.

  Indeed, Mowbray must be regretting his decision.

  5

  “We won’t have long,” Morgan said into the Pendragon’s communicator.

  Beside her, Baldwin and Cade waited at the cockpit doorway, staying silent until they were told what they should do next.

  “Understood,” Quickly said from the Griffin Fire’s cockpit. “In and out.”

  This wasn’t a mission where they would have to sneak into the prison, recruit guards to assist them, or even wear Vonnegan uniforms and pose as guards themselves. There was no need to show identification or register at the entrance.

  The problem was getting out.

  There was one path into and out of the facility. None of the intelligence they had been able to gather could identify what kind of security measures were in place to keep visitors from racing back to their ships other than the things everyone knew about. Weapons were confiscated on the way into the facility. Access was controlled with a series of steel doors. Groups of Vonnegan troopers patrolled the area.

  Morgan had been able to plan for a few things. The unknown, however, was their worst enemy. She had a feeling that once she and her accomplices were identified, additional security measures would be unleashed and every nearby Vonnegan force would descend upon them.

  “Quickly, you know the plan,” Morgan said.

  The pilot was going to remain aboard the Griffin Fire. As soon as he saw the first signs of security having been alerted to their presence, he was to take off and provide air cover to the Pendragon so the rest of the group could get aboard and get to safety. It went without saying that if Quickly failed in his job, it didn’t matter if Morgan and the others were able to free Vere from the prison grounds; they would end up back at the spaceport without a way of escaping.

  “Roger that,” the pilot said.

  The three-dimensional hologram of Quic
kly that appeared in front of Morgan gave a nod. His shirt sleeves were barely long enough to cover his shoulders. Below that, Morgan saw one normal arm and one that was made of metal, the gears of which flexed to release the tension filling up inside him.

  He turned to someone outside the hologram’s image and said, “Be safe, guys. I’ll be here waiting for you.”

  After shutting down the comm link, Morgan turned to Cade and said, “You’ll do the same thing here.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. We need someone to keep this ship ready for takeoff as soon as we get out of there.” She turned and pointed at Baldwin, “He can’t pilot anything, so that leaves you.” When Cade started to complain again, she added, “You’re a sitting target here so I need someone who can use a blaster. As soon as the alarms begin, you’re going to have security trying to keep us from getting back aboard the ship. I need you to provide cover fire for us.”

  Cade opened his mouth to complain about Baldwin being allowed to go into the prison while he wasn’t. It had already been explained that the medical care Baldwin could provide might be invaluable when they found Vere. Thinking better about saying anything, Cade closed his mouth without having uttered another argument.

  The entire plan sounded simple enough. Quickly, piloting the Griffin Fire, would provide cover fire for the Pendragon. The Pendragon, piloted by Cade, would provide cover fire for Morgan and the rest of the rescue party.

  The problem was that in the long history of the Cauldrons of Dagda, only two men had supposedly escaped. The Anglin brothers, a pair of half human-half Tyllin pirates, had tried to escape over two hundred years earlier and had never been seen again. Half of the galaxy liked to think the brothers had somehow escaped and managed to disappear for the rest of their lives. The other half thought it likely that both men died in the lava fields. Either way, no trace of them had ever been found.