Planet 9 was once a proud, thriving mining colony. Before the war it was a wealthy planet that extracted its resources carefully to ensure the longevity of its wealth and the sustainable wellbeing of its people.
Major mining corporations built cities to support their workers, some independant companies built towns. Occaisionaly a miner would prospect on his own and set up a village by an area of ore concentration. Over time this would flourish and the settlement would grow.
However when the war broke out the corporations accelerated the mining extracting as much resources as they could viably to sell to the highest bidder. As the resources drained from the planet as did the wealth.
People began to leave as the mining work dried up. Others left because the processes were haphazard with vast expanses being layed to waste due to the stripping back of the ground to get to the ore quicker resulting in the creation of large desert wastelands - some even radioactive where large scale blast mining had been employed.
The surface of the planets continents now scared and wretched, are mostly devoid of human life appart from small concentrations here and there.
The planet now serves host to a penal colony. An island off the coast of one of the most desolate areas of the planet. It's inmates are of the most undesirable types. Some are ex-military, dumped as far away from the propoganda networks so to hide their crime from the enemy. Others are mass murderers. Some are political prisoners or simply those not trusted by the powers that be.
Most of the surviving inhabited towns and cities work to serve the prison guards and keepers. The capitol city hosts the Govenors residence as well as some of his most trusted men and the police headquarters.
The prisoners that can be trusted work in chaingangs manually extracting the resources that still remain. These are often dangerous and were unviable for corporations that could be sued. No one cares about the rejects of society, no one blinks an eyelid if one dies whilst working from dehydration. It simply frees up another cell for yet another criminal to inhabit.
The prisoners that have a sentance and see it out are allowed to walk free from the gates to walk along the Bridge of Retribution to eek out a life in the wastes. Having been branded on arrival they are unable to enter the capitol cities walls.
Some towns are sympathetic, others are towns founded by ex-cons. However most places tend to reject them altogether leaving them to set up settlements of their own and band together in groups to try and live and support eachother against the dangers the wilds contain.
Bella looked around the dark, cramped transport compartment of the Hopper. They were designed for practicality, for military use – not as transport for civilians who are used to traveling in comfort.
ReplyDeleteShe sighed quietly to herself. What did she expect? She was going to one of the most notorious of prisons in the alliance. The Hopper, in all its simple crudeness was the ideal vehicle for this task, not unlike the cell that her father had been incarcerated in for the last 14 years.
It had taken this long for an appeal for him to be allowed visitors to be accepted. She had waited since she was 12, and a long wait it had been.
Now she sat huddled in one corner of the metal lined room with the armoured door to the cockpit to her right. It appeared that it was locked from the other side, no doubt convicts in the past had somehow managed to overpower their guards and attempt to take control of the craft.
This thought struck her with a sudden pang of fear, for she was not alone. Along the opposite wall from her were three men. One hulking, muscled athlete of a man that wore fatigues and a vest and who was cuffed, hand and foot, to secure rails. To either side of him were two security enforcers – the guards of the prison and protectors of the law on the planet.
To her left and on the same line of seats another man sat hunched over his lap listening intently to some unknown voice stream through his ear piece. He looked more like a military type than a prison guard but both were present on Planet 9. The helped each other, many of the inmates of the prison were ex-military types court-martialed for war crimes. Some were enemies captured and tried, others were friendlies that had committed crimes whilst wearing the uniform of the alliance. Either way it was deemed that a military presence was needed.
The mood in the cabin was grim, the prisoner sat with an air of arrogance, a pride that had yet been broken. His eyes were a mysterious black, perhaps an example of some of the strange outer planet humans that were said to have experienced climate forced evolution, some rumours suggested that they had even ‘mixed’ with aliens. Either way this particular man did not carry himself with the air of a common criminal, there was something altogether calm about him, too calm, it made Bella shiver down her spine.
The two guards seemed the most nervous, one looked to be in his 30’s, the other was much younger perhaps as much as half the other’s age. He looked almost too young to be a guard. He was the more nervous of the two, he sat leaning back against the little padding there was between his back and the rusting, stained metal wall behind him, one hand on his constantly shifting left leg and his other on the handle of his holstered slug pistol.
His colleague appeared to be made nervous by the fact that he was the more experienced and the fact that the man they were escorting was unflinching, unmoving and without normal eyes with which to read his emotions. He sat with his assault rifle across his lap his right hand tensing and releasing, tensing and releasing on the handle bellow the trigger.
Bella didn’t feel too confident in either of them who would probably be much happier in the prison where there were more guards and more secure boundaries between them and the inmates. She wondered what crime the prisoner had committed but was not about to breach the silence to ask – a firefight on the ground was deadly enough but up here there was no escape.
ReplyDeleteThe flight was dragging. 9hrs flight to the other side of the planet with nothing but the dark night outside to look at for entertainment. She had tried sleeping but any little bit of turbulence was exaggerated through the simple construction of the hopper. She eventually started trying to imagine what her father would have to say, how his experiences inside had been. Other than the odd holo-photo she had received nothing. Letters were allowed to be sent to inmates but special privileges had to be granted before they could send any in return. Having been granted these at the same time as visiting rights Bella hadn’t waited for the prison services to ‘edit’ anything he would write.
Eventually the gentle hum, boredom and length of the flight Bella lost the fight against her eyelids and fell asleep. She dreamed of what would happen on arrival at her destination, the huge walls of the prison, the shadows they cast over the violent waves lapping against the grey rocks of the cliff faces.
Just as the dream was drifting towards her entrance in through the giant doors of the prison she was awoken by a strange shuddering sensation. At first, as she shook herself out of sleeps grip, she thought it was a severe case of turbulence. A quick glance around the cabin and he senses coming back to reality told her otherwise.
The two guards were checking their seat belts and the shaven headed military type to her left was talking rapidly into his headpiece. The prisoner sat as if nothing was happening, still in the same position with the same look on his face.
“Hello?!! HELLO, damn it answer me pilot!” the man was now angrily shouting into his headpiece. He glanced up and looked at the guards and their prisoner and then across to Bella.
“Buckle up lady! This could get rough.”
“So this isn’t turbulence then? Damn!.” Bella replied.
“I’m not sure, I can’t contact the pilot or his co-pilot. Can’t get hold of any ground units either.”
Bella double checked her seat belt, a system that crossed in an x over her chest with the buckle just bellow her ribcage. She also slipped on her small rucksack so that it sat to her front. She began to wish she hadn’t chosen this particular rucksack, a small day sack made to look like one of her favourite fashion icons. On the streets of the capitol city this would not have been a problem but in the cabin now in this situation it made her feel inadequate.
She looked up to find two black eyes staring at her. The prisoner had shifted his gaze to her and the corners of his mouth turned up to a very subtle smile, a glance and she may have missed it but she noticed. She wasn’t sure how to respond, this was meant to be a criminal, someone who had committed some hideous crime. But her father hadn’t.
The Hopper shook violently again. The guards had given up clasping on to the rifle of their weapons and instead secured them alongside themselves and instead gripped the edges of their seats or the bracing handles either side of their heads.
The man to her left finally buckled himself up and leaned across to her so that she could hear his voice over the sound of the Hopper vibrating and its contents rattling.
“Hold on tight! But try to relax, your body will deal with the impact more that way. Once we are down stay where you are unless we are all dead. I will try and get us all out. I am Ltn. Grant, I’m sorry to meet you in such circumstances.”
He extended his hand to Bella and she was all too pleased to shake it, she was becoming more and more anxious and although his words meant well it only escalated her emotions. All she could manage in reply was and garbled “Thank you.”
ReplyDeleteOver the next few moments the noise amplified to the point that it filled her head so much that she couldn’t hear her own thoughts. The Hopper’s engines began to scream as the craft lurched into a dive. The younger guards face had turned to a pale cream colour, fear etched in every movement of his body. The other guard sat with his eyes closed mumbling to himself. The prisoner still held his gaze and upright sitting position, as if nothing at all was out of normal. Lt. Grant held onto his seat harness his head bowed.
Suddenly the cockpit door came loose and started to bang open and shut. Both Bella and the officer were able to glimpse into the space beyond. It wasn’t good.
A body lay strewn across the floor of the cockpit with blood splattered liberally about which looked to have come from a serious head injury. Another, the pilots, sat limply slumped forward over the controls. The control board and flight sticks sparked and smoked, some burned to a crisp. The pilot also looked to have received some horrible injury to the head. The door then slammed shut once more and remaining there as the catch finally caught snapped into place.
There was just enough time for Bella to utter a quick prayer to the god of traveling before everything suddenly went white, a brilliant pure and bright white.
The Hopper had survived impact although only in a good enough condition to be recognised as being a crashed craft. Smoke billowed from the engines as they started to grind themselves apart. There was no fire – just a huge trail of debri displaying the point of impact and the slide of the craft along the rough, dusty wasteland ground to the point it had stopped.
The door lay a few feet away from the cavity it was meant to allow access to. Five bodies hung lifeless and upside down, held in place by their seat belts. Oxygen masks dangled in front of them, joined by the dog tags the guards, prisoner and the officer wore hanging from their necks. Bella’s hair hung down, once an expression of vibrant life, now one of stillness.
Bella came round very slowly. She couldn’t see very well at all, all she could hear was a low, soft grumbling. She felt limp but understood that she was lying out flat against a cold metal object that appeared to shield her on one side. She briefly felt a strong but warm hand hold hers delicately for a brief moment. It wasn’t much but it was enough to reassure her that she was alive. She drifted back out of consciousness.
She drifted in and out, every time being struck by a sudden wave of pain and with slowly returning senses. In between she dreamed of one thing, two black eyes gazing at her neutrally . . . . . .