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  PRISON PLANET

  The Green Zone War – Book 3

  By Jake Elwood

  Copyright 2018 by Jake Elwood.

  This is a work of fiction. A novel. Totally made up. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, prisons or pirates is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Author Notes

  Chapter 1

  The brig stank.

  The ship was called CR518. She was a heavy cruiser, one of the ships that had shot the frigate Kestrel to bits, and the ship to which Tom Thrush and his crew had been taken as prisoners at the end of that disastrous battle.

  Now Tom sat along one bulkhead in a cell designed for four prisoners. Twenty men filled the room to bursting, four of them stretched out on narrow bunks, the rest sitting on the floor, each man’s feet touching the feet of the man across from him. Prisoners pressed in on either side of Tom, hip to hip, elbow to elbow. The room had a single toilet and a small sink, but no shower. The air was thick, but Tom could no longer smell it. Not after all this time.

  Has it only been two weeks? Fourteen days could feel like a lifetime. Already his time on the Kestrel felt like a dream, like another life.

  He had no idea what the future held. Summary execution, torture, or years spent in this very cell with these men – anything was possible. At first, the fear and uncertainty had consumed him. He'd watched the others deal with it, each in his own way. Some paced, though pacing was difficult with men jammed in on every side. Some raged. Some fought back tears. One man punched the bulkheads until his knuckles were bloody. Others retreated inward, becoming grim and silent.

  By the second day – hell, by the end of the first day – the worst of the stress faded. It was simply more than the mind could sustain. And it was replaced by something that was, in its own way, worse.

  Boredom.

  The idleness, the sense of futility, the gnawing absence of anything, anything at all to do that would have any significance, weighed on him until he half wished armed troops would burst in and slaughter the prisoners where they sat. He'd embrace the instant of variety that came right before the end.

  With that dark thought filling his mind he felt a rush of genuine alarm when the door to the cell slid open. They weren't due to be fed. Something unexpected was finally happening, and he struggled to rise, hampered by the men around him who all reacted the same way. I want to die on my feet.

  “Come outside. Form an orderly row.”

  The Dawn Alliance officer in the doorway was unarmed, but Tom could see armed troops behind him.

  Tom said, “What's this about?”

  “Come outside now.”

  The other prisoners looked at Tom for guidance. He was the only officer in the cell. For a moment he thought about resisting, until the absurdity of it hit him. I finally get to leave this bloody cell, and I'm thinking about fighting to stay? Even if this is the end, at least I'll get to see a different set of walls. “Go ahead,” he said, and gestured toward the doorway.

  Prisoners filed out, meek as lambs, with Tom in the middle of the group. The cell opened into a central holding area in the middle of the brig, the armed troops fading back until their backs were to the bulkheads. The man who'd ordered them out of the cell – he wore the shoulder stripes of a unit leader in the Dawn Alliance military, the equivalent of a lieutenant – indicated a stretch of deck plate with one sweeping arm. “Line up here.”

  The prisoners milled around with a mix of honest confusion and what looked to Tom like deliberate mischief, forming little clumps instead of one line. He saw the occasional smirk as the unit leader raised his voice, trying to get the prisoners into a row.

  When the man's face had the color of a ripe tomato Tom said, “All right, do as he says. One line.”

  The spacers reluctantly straightened out, and Tom found a spot for himself between a couple of technicians.

  The Unit Leader, his hands balled into fists, needed a moment to compose himself before he could speak. He glared at the line of prisoners. “Disobedience will be punished, is that clear?”

  No one spoke.

  “Punished severely!” His hands opened and closed several times, and Tom felt a pang of something almost like sympathy. The man was bad at his job. He'd allowed the prisoners to goad him, and allowed them to see how well the goading worked.

  Things will only get worse. Until this poor damned fool snaps and does something we'll all regret. It was a sobering thought. The Dawn Alliance had a history of atrocities against prisoners. I may have to rein the men in.

  A uniformed man stepped forward, a coil of silver rope in his hand. The Dawn Alliance had a unified military, Tom recalled. There were no marines, no spacers. Only soldiers. The soldier looped the end of the silver rope around the wrist of the first prisoner in the line. The man made a half-hearted attempt to pull away, then shook his arm as the soldier moved down the line.

  The rope remained curled around his wrist.

  The soldier moved from prisoner to prisoner, making a quick loop in the rope, slipping it around each prisoner's wrist, and pulling it tight. Resistance was clearly hopeless, so the men stood docile, allowing themselves to be tethered.

  When it was Tom's turn he allowed the soldier to slide the loop over his forearm. The rope, cool against his skin through the sleeve of his shirt, became rigid as soon as the soldier let go. Something touched the skin on Tom's forearm, like the tiny feet of an insect, tickling and scratching. He tried to tug the loop of rope farther down his arm.

  It stuck. It clung to the fabric of his shirt, and it clung through the fabric to his arm. He felt the scratch of tiny filaments against his skin and shuddered.

  “All right,” the unit leader barked. “Prisoners will come with me! Failure to cooperate will be punished severely.”

  Bombastic little twit. A hatch slid open on the far side of the holding area, and the officer started forward, gesturing to the prisoners to follow. No one moved until Tom said, “Let's go.”

  The corridor beyond was utterly ordinary, but Tom and the others gawked and stared as if they were in a theme park. They followed the unit leader up a flight of stairs, through a twisting maze of corridors, and into a wide compartment with bulky airlock doors on the far side.

  The doors to the airlock, outer and inner, stood open.

  “You're not my problem any longer,” the man said with malicious satisfaction. He gestured through the airlock to a steel-walled tunnel beyond. “Get off my ship.” Then, when no one moved, he screamed, “Go!”

  After that display, no one could quite to resist the urge to dawdle. The prisoners milled around as if uncertain which way to go, while the officer's face darkened.

  “I'm ready for a change of scenery,” Tom said at last. “Let's do as the man says.”

  The prisoners snaked their way through the airlock and left the cruiser behind.

  More troops met them at the far end of a short tunnel. Three men with shock batons and light body armor stepped forward, grabbing the first spacer by the upper arm and yanking him forward. Another soldier fell in beside Tom while the third brought up the rear. The sold
ier in front directed the chain of prisoners, not with words but with silent, forceful yanks on the hapless lead spacer's upper arm.

  It seems like a lot of work if all they want to do is kill us. They put us out through an airlock that was attached to something, after all. There should be another lock on the other side of the cruiser, and that one will open up on hard vacuum. So I guess they want us alive.

  It wasn't an entirely convincing chain of logic, but it was all he had, so he clung to it. The idea that he might be on his way to his execution gave him a perverse longing for his earlier boredom, and he shoved that thought aside and turned his attention to his surroundings instead.

  The prisoners walked along a broad concourse with a railing along one side and open air beyond that. The ceiling above was quite distant, two decks high, or two stories, as he would have said in his civilian days. That was a lot of space, which told him he wasn't on a ship. It could be a planet, he supposed, but a space station was a better bet.

  Two weeks' travel from Black Betty, the rogue planet where he'd been captured, meant he could be just about anywhere in the Green Zone. This might even be Dawn Alliance space – if you didn't count the whole Green Zone as Dawn Alliance space now.

  The concourse was far from crowded. A pair of young women went past, giving the prisoners curious glances. They wore loose-fitting burgundy uniforms with the Dawn Alliance logo on their shoulder patches. A man dressed as a civilian overtook the prisoners from behind, hurrying past without giving them so much as a glance.

  Ahead, twenty or thirty meters away, another line of prisoners plodded along with their own trio of guards. They wore United Worlds uniforms, and Tom recognized several spacers from his crew. It was strangely comforting to know that at least part of the crew was still together, even if they were utterly powerless.

  The causeway had a faint curve, and Tom amused himself by trying to calculate the size of the station, assuming it was circular and the wall beside him was the outer skin of the station. He got lost in the math and had to abandon his computations. The station was bloody huge, and that was that.

  The prisoners plodded down a broad staircase, then a narrow one. They moved through a guard station with force fields and steel barriers protecting a handful of armed troops, then followed another endless corridor until it opened on a broad room with data stations along one wall. An officer waited there, flanked by a pair of clerks. He looked them over, then said, “Which of you is Sublieutenant Thrush?”

  “Captain Thrush didn't survive the battle,” said the man ahead of Tom on the rope. “A shell took his head right off.”

  “Lies,” said the officer calmly. “Further lies will be punished.”

  “I'm Thrush,” said another man.

  “No, I am,” said somebody else.

  “Enough,” said Tom. “Stand down, gentlemen.” To the officer he said, “I'm Thrush.”

  The man looked him up and down. Tom's uniform was a darker blue than the uniforms of the enlisted men, but after two weeks in the brig everyone was so rumpled and filthy it was hard to see the difference. However, the rank bar on his chest was visible if you looked closely. “You are wise to cooperate.” He nodded to the clerk to his right, who took Tom's wrist in a hand covered by a silver glove. When the glove touched the rope the loop relaxed and the microscopic tendrils connecting it to his sleeve and wrist retracted. Tom pulled his arm free.

  A few prisoners made optimistic attempts to brush the rope from their own wrists. It didn't work. They remained trapped as Tom, responding to a curt gesture from the officer, moved around the line of prisoners to stand beside the man.

  “Come with me.” The man turned toward the exit.

  Quick obedience looked like the sensible play in the short term, but it didn't lead anywhere good. Tom said, “No.”

  The officer froze, then turned to stare at Tom, his jaw hanging open. “What?”

  “I demand to know-”

  The nearest guard reached Tom in one long stride, his baton slashing out. If he'd had a moment to think, Tom would have tried to dodge, but instinct brought his forearm up in a block. Pain exploded through his arm as the baton touched him. He felt as if he'd plunged his arm into a deep fryer, up to the shoulder. The agony lasted only an instant, fading to pins and needles that were merely excruciating. He cried out in spite of himself, clutched the arm that now hung useless at his side, then screamed as the end of the baton jabbed into his ribs.

  “You will make no further demands.” The officer's voice was calm, unruffled. Tom couldn't have said what the man's expression was. He was doubled over, gasping, with a view of nothing but his own knees.

  “Now compose yourself, and come with me. I am not a patient man.”

  Tom made himself straighten up, telling himself it wasn't the implied threat that made him fight through the pain. He wanted to look strong for the crew. Taking shallow breaths and doing his best to suppress his fear, he limped after the officer as the man marched out of the room.

  After a dozen steps he was able to straighten fully and to fill his lungs. He glanced over his shoulder, hoping for a last glimpse of the other prisoners, but a curve in the corridor – and the bulk of a soldier following close behind him – hid them from sight. The man, blank-faced, lifted his baton as Tom paused.

  Shrugging inwardly, Tom gave the man a bland smile, turned, and hurried after the officer.

  They rounded two corners and entered a room so similar to the room he'd just left that Tom found himself looking around for his erstwhile cellmates. A young woman stood at a data console, and she pecked at a screen as the officer gave her Tom's name and rank. She made one final tap and a section of wall slid aside with a hiss.

  “In there,” the officer said, nodding toward the hatchway.

  The dark opening looked ominous, but the guard beginning to lift his shock baton was a much more immediate threat. Tom crossed the little room and stepped through the hatchway.

  The door closed behind him, leaving him in darkness. He stood frozen, peering around, and felt a sudden pressure against the back of his body. It pushed against him everywhere, from his heels to the back of his head, even thrusting at his arms until they stretched out before him like a parody of sleepwalking. He stumbled forward, fighting for balance.

  He was in a narrow corridor, metal walls on either side so close he could have touched them both with his elbows. Then, after two meters or so, the corridor ended and he the pressure of the force field against his back disappeared.

  For a time he stood there, blind, peering into the darkness and listening. He could hear human sounds, the rustle of clothing and the sound of people breathing, but he couldn't see a thing. Someone chuckled, close by, and Tom squinted in the direction of the sound.

  “Welcome to the wardroom,” a dry voice said. “I'm afraid the standards of service might not match what you've become accustomed to on the finer vessels of the United Worlds' armed services, but what the place lacks in fine amenities, it makes up for in coziness.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom Tom began to see dim figures on all sides. One shape leaned forward, and someone sniffed loudly. “Actually, we have one amenity you seem to have been missing. We've got a shower. I do hope you'll take advantage of it.” Several people chuckled, and the voice added, “In fact, I insist.”

  Tom said, “Where am I?”

  “The wardroom, weren't you listening?”

  A gruff voice said, “Oh, give it a rest. You're in the officers' cell aboard the Sky Princess. It's a Dawn Alliance space station tethered to Freecastle.”

  Freecastle. That was a Dawn Alliance world on the fringe of the Green Zone. It could have been worse. He could have been in the heart of Dawn Alliance space. But still, he was a very long way from home. He said, “Officers' cell?”

  “The one and possibly only.” When Tom looked in the direction of that voice he saw a slender man, his face a pale blur, sitting on some sort of bench along one wall. “We don't actually know if we
're the only officers here. We're the only ones we know of.” The man rose to his feet and stepped closer, and Tom was finally able to make out his face. He was middle-aged, with a large nose and an easy smile. “Commander Dawkins.” He stuck out a hand.

  “Cap – er, Lieutenant Thrush.” Tom shook the man's hand.

  “Welcome to our little vacation property, Thrush. I'll show you around. It'll take at least five seconds.” Dawkins made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “This is pretty much it.”

  The room – the cell, he realized – was about twice the size of the cell he'd shared on CR518, and it held only half as many people. His vision was improving every moment, and he was able to make out the essential details. There were six bunks mounted to the walls, and nine men sitting on bunks or benches. Instead of a toilet and sink along one wall there was a door leading, he assumed, to a bathroom.

  Metal slid against fabric behind him and a shaft of light washed the room in a sudden harsh brightness. Men cursed and shielded their eyes. Tom turned, squinting, and saw the outlines of two men stumbling down the short corridor behind him. He stepped deeper into the cell to give them room as the door slid shut once more.

  “Where are we?” said a familiar voice.

  “Lieutenant Harper,” Tom said happily.

  “Captain?”

  “It’s back to ‘Lieutenant’ now.”

  “I can’t see a thing,” said Harper.

  “Give your eyes a moment to adjust.” Tom had lost most of his vision again when he’d turned to face the light. Harper was a hulking outline with a much slimmer man beside him. “Is that you, Dr. Vinduly?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the surgeon and the Marine Lieutenant from the Kestrel,” Tom said to the others.

  “We'll do a full round of introductions shortly,” Dawkins said. “First, if you'll forgive me for saying this, I'm afraid Noribu was right when he said you were badly overdue for a shower.” He gestured at the doorway in the back wall. “Why don't you go ahead and clean up? We'll wait.” As Tom moved past him he said, “I'm afraid we've got an awful lot of time.”