Scrapyard Ship 7: Call to Battle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Shall I instigate?”
    “Yes, of course you should. Do so now!”
    “Course change instigated. Affected departments will be notified. Superintendent, I was told to remind you of the importance of this morning’s other directive.”
    “I’m well aware of the other directive. Mind your duties, AI—I’m quite busy here.”
    The truth of the matter was Gettling was unable to think about anything other than the two dissidents currently held in pit-11141. He’d never held higher-profile prisoners in confinement, nor had his actions been so closely monitored. Gettling had no family of his own that he was aware of, but he wondered how the late Lom would feel, knowing his niece had been sent to this unholy place—would he be doing summersaults in his grave? Gettling always knew Ot-Mul was beyond ruthless—his exploits as commander of the Vanguard fleet were notorious. But sending Lom’s niece here, among these realms of despair and torture—this place of pain … Gettling stood while pondering the question. He spun the cold metal wheel on the hatch and heard the internal latching mechanism disengage. Using both hands, he pulled the two-foot-thick door open, stepped into the corridor and secured the hatch closed behind him. The sounds of Dreathlor prison, the sounds of misery, had just increased in his ears by a factor of ten.
    Pit-11141 was on the far side of the basically circular, slightly oblong prison barge. He calculated the distance in his head, somewhere around six hundred miles away from his current location. Although the prison was anything but high tech, and for good reason, its transportation system was state of the art. As superintendent of the prison, he was not only afforded a personal transport terminal, but also his own anti-grav railcar. One of his few perks.
    The superintendent made his way to the group of terminal buildings and entered the smallest one. His railcar was still there, waiting from when he arrived on it in the morning.
    “To the pits, 11141,” he said. He sat and felt the car immediately start to move forward—G-forces pushed him back into his heavily cushioned seat. Within moments the anti-grav car was speeding along ten times the speed of sound. Although muffled, sonic thuds resounded off the tunnel walls and vibrated up into his buttocks. A sensation he’d come to appreciate over the years.
    The car slowed and came to a stop at a terminal similar to the one he’d left minutes before. He got to his feet and exited the terminal building. He didn’t make this trek to the pits as often as he used to. Standing there on the metal catwalk, his breath caught in his chest. The view before him, the spectacle and enormity of what encompassed the Prisoner Isolation Trenches , even now, was mesmerizing. Black as obsidian, there were thousands upon thousands of thirty-foot-deep holes—each with a surface smooth as glass. Like well-organized craters on a lunar surface, the hole-pocked landscape stretched out as far as the eye could see.
    Adjacent to the crisscross of security catwalks were constantly moving, and stopping, tram-plates. Nothing like the high-tech anti-grav cars, these were nothing more than moving plates of metal, primitive but effective in moving someone from one pit location to another.
    Gettling pressed a series of buttons that would take him to Pit-11141. Holding tight to a metal cross bar, the tram-plate jerked forward then changed direction at the first intersection it came to. Gettling swayed as the tram-plate gained speed, his eyes catching movement and then momentarily tracking indecipherable figures along the base areas of several of the pits.
    The tram-plate began to slow and changed direction again. Each pit was sectioned to three others, and tied together by a center-hub management station. It was there that the tram-plate came to a stuttering stop. Gettling jumped off and headed for the hub station that managed pits 11140 through 11143. A winding metal staircase led