The Eighteen Revenges of Doctor Milan (ebook)

The Eighteen Revenges of Doctor Milan
by Christopher Ruz
Available now on Kindle: [link]

Cover by Chris Newman, AKA viviphyd [link]

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Chapter 1


The prisoner transport was built for twenty men at most, but Cezar had been shackled in the back with fifty others, pressed cheek to cheek, all naked and stinking and crying as they flew across the desert plains of Arundus Seven.

His wrists were bound with a thermopolymer that tightened if he wriggled, but he risked losing circulation and shoved through the mass of prisoners to the transport's only window. Through the thin slit he could just make out the sweeps of rock, the oxidised plains, the stars shining clear and bright through clean, manufactured atmosphere. Black pits vomiting crackling gas, and the pink tumour growths that were some strange unity of plant and silicate. Beyond them all, rising so high it became a silhouette against the stars, was their destination. The bones. The prison. The Pike.

A prisoner who couldn't have been more than twenty - more a kid than a grown man - pushed Cezar aside and pressed his face against the glass. His mouth opened and closed like a fish. "What a fucking day, huh?" he whispered. "I heard it's just a big grave. Toss you in and lock the door."

Cezar grunted. "They don't chip you if they're just gonna bury you."

"You figure? Preacher came to me before they sent me off. Told me about karma and resurrection. They only send preachers to dying men, you know."

He couldn't help but laugh. "We're all dying, kid. A little every day."

The kid quieted at that. The Pike grew closer by degrees, and Cezar found himself holding his breath as they approached. He'd seen the outside of the Pike only once before, when they'd landed on Arundus Seven a decade ago, descending through acid cloud cover onto an untouched plain. From kilometres above the Pike had only looked like another mountain, and it wasn't until they'd touched down that they'd seen the colossal vertebrae that made up its rocky structure, the skull near five hundred meters across with its tunnel of fossilised teeth and its cavernous empty sockets.

There were no creatures like it still living on Arundus Seven. Whether it was the remains of some beast long extinct, or a rock formation carved by alien hands, they couldn't tell. Now, he was headed inside the rotten shell.

The kid looked to Cezar with wide, desperate eyes. "You wanna pray with me? They say there's something after this, you know. You start again."

Cezar didn't reply. He knew all about fresh starts. He'd taken his and drowned it in blood.

* * *

The transport slid through the gates of the Pike, shuddering and clanking as it docked. The guards forced the prisoners out, beating their bare legs with shock prods when they resisted. Few did. Two other transports had followed Cezar's, and he joined a line of more than a hundred men, shuffling with their heads down, sweat dripping from their chins.

They marched Cezar through the airlocks and into a plastic-walled decontamination chamber, where he huddled with the other prisoners, naked and cold. A speaker in the ceiling spat static. "Close your eyes!"

A fine mist of antibacterials sprayed down, stinging across Cezar's bare skin. The thermopolymer binding his wrists hissed and fizzed as the spray ate through the material, falling apart in spiderweb strings. Then came a blast of light that left fine red motes dancing across his vision and a tingling in his fillings. Finally, valves in the walls thudded open. Cezar only had a moment to steel himself before the water jets hit, hard enough to knock him over. He shielded his face as the water pounded on his head. The prisoners howled and swore and slipped, crushing each other in their desperation to stay on their feet. Cezar scrambled on hands and knees, until he reached the back corner of the chamber. There, he crouched with legs pulled up to his chest, holding his breath, waiting for the hoses to stop.

The water finally ebbed away. The speaker crackled. "Go through the door."

They obeyed. There was nowhere else to go.

The corridors grew dark. The prisoners shuffled along with their heads down and said nothing. Their path was lit by tiny bulbs in the floor and in that light Cezar looked at his hands, at the deep grooves and patterns of scars left by knife-fights and broken teeth and back-alley surgeons sealing wounds with glue. He made a quick fist. There was still strength there, enough for what he had to do.

The corridor widened and opened into a long grey chamber. Guards stood behind walls of reinforced glass. They carried long microwave-rifles with dark mouths and their eyes were hidden behind black visors.

The prisoners stopped. Some hunched and covered their nakedness with their hands. Others watched the guards with teeth bared, daring them to pull the triggers. Cezar waited at the back, keeping a wall of flesh between himself and the guns.

At the far end of the chamber was a small glass booth, and in that booth was a man wearing a light blue suit and a pair of white gloves. Beneath his vest was the unmistakeable bulge of body armour. His eyes were a dark shade of blue, so dark they could've been purple, or black. He coughed, and the cough was amplified by hidden speakers, echoing off the walls.

"I am the warden," the man said, "and I own this prison. I own you. During your time here - however brief, long, or terminal - you will obey all directives given to you by myself or my guards. The penalty for disobeying a directive once is solitary confinement. The second time, the penalty is vivisection."

He coughed again, the noise echoing like a pistol shot. "I don't care why you were sentenced," he said. "I don't care whether you blackmailed the mayor or piloted a starship into an orbital orphanage. Your crimes on Arundus Seven mean nothing to me. This, here, is my world, and you're under my thumb from now until the day your implants blink off and say you're free to leave. Understand?"

Cezar nodded in time with the other prisoners, but he was concentrating on other things. The floor, the walls, the gaps where the walls met the ceiling. He looked at the guards, and the straps that bound their armour to their limbs, and wondered exactly how much force it would take to wrest one of those microwave-rifles away, how many kilograms of pressure it would take to shatter their facemasks and gouge out their eyes.

The warden clapped his gloved hands, and a door slid open in the concrete wall, revealing more black corridor. "Take a uniform and choose a cell," he said. "If there's somebody already in your cell, that's your problem." The warden's smile was only the slightest curve of the lips. "How you behave with each other is not my concern, so long as you treat my guards with respect. This is your only warning. Welcome to the Pike."

The prisoners filed past the warden's sealed-off cube one by one, squeezing through the door and into the darkness, and the warden nodded to each of them in turn, as if sharing some private joke. Cezar stayed at the back, his gaze fixed on the space between his feet. It wasn't until he was right beside the warden's cube that he looked up and met the man's eyes.

The warden jumped back. One gloved hand flew up to his throat. "You-"

Cezar turned away and was swept along by the tide of prisoners, into the dark.

* * *

They passed through slim black tunnels where the only sound was the echoes of their footfalls. A pile of rough cloth was thrust into Cezar's hands. A uniform. He dressed as he walked, until he emerged, blinking, into the light of the Pike cellblock.

Shortly after landing on Arundus Seven, Cezar had gotten drunk in a desert bar and heard stories of the first settlers, how they tunnelled inside the corpse-mountain of the Pike, blasting through weak ivory walls in search of treasure and instead finding a great hollow too cold and dark for any sane man to endure. The stories hadn't worried him. He'd had his own problems at the time, scratching out a living on the far side of the planet, earning his bread with knives and pressure-pistols and teeth. But mistakes had been made, and he'd been hunted down and dragged to the mountain in chains. Now he was inside, and the stories were his stories.

As he stepped from the shadowed corridor into the hollow cone of the Pike he found himself mute. The walls were hard grey rock stretching up, up, up, to a central peak so far overhead that all was lost in shadow. A scattering of tiny lights were the prisoner's chambers, thousands and thousands of rooms twisting with the grain of the rock, bored into the skin of the mountain like honeycomb cells, like alveoli. The walkway he stood upon ran around the inside circumference of the Pike like the groove of a colossal screw, spiralling both up and down into what felt like infinity. Cezar risked a glance over the edge. The cells were a helix of tiny lights becoming smaller and smaller as the Pike extended down past ground level, into the bedrock of the planet.

Eight thousand prisoners. Five percent of the total population of the Arundus Seven colony. And here he was, in the centre of it all.

The great doors banged closed, magnetic locks thudding into place. The other prisoners jumped but Cezar didn't flinch. He pushed through the crowd and made his way up the twisting walkway that lined the inner surface of the Pike, passing the open cells. Most of the cells were occupied and the men inside watched him with shadowed eyes. They were stained with something like coal, or grease. Blades of wood and bone shimmered in their hands.

He walked for half an hour, up the winding stair, completing more than four revolutions around the corkscrew of the Pike, until he found a cell where the man sitting inside wasn't holding a knife. He was small, thin, naked to the waist, and his beard was stained with smoke. There was something tattooed on the back of his hand; two circles, interlinked. He looked up at the sound of Cezar's footfalls. Their eyes met, and the small man licked his lips. "Already got a bunkmate."

Cezar nodded. "Is he as big as me?"

"Bigger."

"You like him?"

"What's it matter? This is his place."

"Where's he now?"

"Working in the pit." The small man ran his fingers through his beard, dislodging flakes of ash. "You're fresh, right? They tell you about the pit?"

The cell had no bars, only a single window of reinforced glass and a door that slid open on hidden rollers. Cezar eased through the gap and sat down on the rotten mattress beside the man. He held out his hand. When the man didn't shake, Cezar said, "Only thing they told me was that I'm here until I die."

"They tell you what you're guilty of?"

"Little bit of everything."

"Hrm." The man pulled something from inside the hem of his pants that might have been a cigarette rolled in scraps of linen. From inside his other pant-leg he pulled a battered laser valve, and shone its green beam against the end of the roll. It lit and he sucked deep. "You going to stab me in the night?"

"I've got no reason to hurt you."

The man nodded. "Lauris."

"Cezar."

"Big man who sleeps here, Old Arthur, he's gonna fight you."

"I can fight okay."

"You killed a man?"

"A few."

"What's a few?"

"Seventeen, now."

Lauris didn't move. The cigarette trembled between his lips. Then he said. "That what they send you here for?"

"They didn't send me here." Cezar stretched out on the narrow mattress and folded his hands beneath his head. "I came."

* * *

Cezar dreamed.

He was not himself. He was a young man, slim, bowed beneath the weight of a satchel bag. His name was a number. He was trembling despite the downers he'd taken less than an hour before. His palms were sweaty. It was hard to breathe.

He entered LaGuardia Airport with his head down, sidling past security. His leather shoes whispered against the carpet. He walked very slowly, not wanting to jostle the contents of his satchel. He didn't want to know what would happen if the detonator slipped, or the alarm clock was tripped too early. He wasn't the bomb-maker. He only followed instructions.

He'd been given a key to a locker by the luggage carousel, and he placed the bag inside before connecting the wires that ran between the alarm clock and the battery. It was a delicate process, and his fingers shook. It was hard to keep from glancing over his shoulder at the red-eye crowds. He checked his watch twice, confirming the time when the target would land.

The man with the dark blue eyes. The man in his dreams.

He zipped the bag shut, closed the locker, dropped the key inside an abandoned paper coffee cup and dropped the cup into a bin. His heart thudded in his chest as he hailed a taxi. Again, he checked his watch.

Twelve hours. The plane would land, and the target would go to the carousel to collect his luggage, and the bomb would tear him open.

The dreams would stop. He would be free.

And

Cezar woke and blinked away sleep. The light in the cell was thin and grey. It was night in the Pike, all the lamps inside the hollow mountain shuttered or dimmed. Lauris was asleep in the corner, chin against his chest, hands folded beneath his beard. The glass door was closed.

Three figures stood beyond the glass. One was a guard, face hidden behind his helmet. The second he recognised. The warden, arms crossed, the gloves on his hands immaculately clean, his lips curled in distaste.

He touched some hidden panel on the glass and the door slid open.

The last of the three figures stepped through. He was huge, his head almost brushing the rock ceiling, and he held a stone hammer loosely in one hand. The head of the hammer was wide enough to crush a man's skull.

Lauris woke and rubbed sleep from his eyes, but when he saw the warden he jumped to his feet and backed against the far wall. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. "Please," he whispered. "Not yet..."

"Relax, old man," Cezar said. He got to his feet and stretched, spine popping. "They're here for me."

Lauris nodded, his eyes still bulging with fear. "I didn't mean it," he said, and Cezar realised he was talking to the man with the hammer. "Arthur, I couldn't stop him. He just took your bed, see? He-"

Old Arthur, Cezar realised, back from the pit. The door slid closed, sealing the three of them in, the warden and his armoured guard safely outside the glass. Cezar crouched low, balling his hands into fists. He looked Old Arthur in the eyes. "Warden bring you up to kill me, huh? Better walk away. I've fought bigger than you."

Old Arthur looked back over his shoulder at the warden. The warden nodded, and Arthur hefted the hammer.

"Warden's just a man," Cezar said. "He doesn't own you. Don't make me hurt-"

"Sorry," Old Arthur said, and brought the hammer down.

Cezar rolled sideways. The hammer burred through the space where his head had been, crashing into the concrete with a boom like cannonfire. Stone chips spat into the air, and Cezar darted forward through the cloud of dust, into the circle of Old Arthur's arms.

He drove his right fist up into Old Arthur's solar plexus. The big man grunted. His eyes bulged. Then he fell back, the hammer still clenched tight in his meaty paw. His head cracked against the stone. His left leg kicked spastically, and fell still.

Cezar uncurled slowly. He shook out his arms and popped his knuckles one by one.

The warden took a step back from the glass. His mouth was a thin white line. He turned to whisper to the guard, and then turned back.

The warden's words burred through the glass. "Did Milan send you?"

Cezar didn't reply.

"Of course he did," the warden said. "He always worked sideways. Couldn't ever do a job himself. Too scared to come at me like a man. You can't fool me! I know why you're here! I know your game." The warden stabbed at Cezar with one white-gloved finger. "You think you'll do me like you did Childers? One week, and you're gone. No, one day. The Song'll wipe the floor with you. You're charcoal. They'll never find you, not with a fucking spectrometer, you hear me? You hear me?"

Cezar didn't move. He fixed upon the warden, unblinking.

It was the warden that finally broke, retreating into the shadows of the corridor. Only when he had vanished entirely did Cezar relax. The body of Old Arthur steamed at his feet.

"What now?" he said. "Someone going to clean this up?"

Lauris was still pressed against the wall, his bony shoulders shaking with every breath. "Nobody but us," he whispered. The old man's hands were clasped together as if in prayer. "Just us now."

"We have to sleep with a dead man?"

Lauris scowled. "You're a mongrel." He finally stepped away from the wall and crouched by Old Arthur's body, whispering something that Cezar didn't catch. "Isn't right, the warden setting Arthur against you. He didn't deserve this. You must've really gotten up the warden's ass."

Cezar didn't reply. He tugged the lone mattress into the corner, away from the body, and lay down with his hands folded as a pillow. His knuckles ached. "We have to take shifts when we sleep, or what?"

"Doors are locked," Lauris said. "Safe until morning."

"What if the warden comes back? What if he wants me... removed?"

"Warden can't just have a man killed. There are rules. But if he really wants someone gone, they end up in a room with someone that doesn't like them, like you and Arthur. That, or they get sent to work in the pit. People don't come back from there so much. I figure that's where you'll be after morning services, you bastard." Lauris looked up. There was something like wonder in his eyes. "What'd you do to that man, to make him hate you so much?"

Cezar turned away from the old man and closed his eyes. He thought back to better times. He thought of a woman he'd once known, and a ship called the Siloh.

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The rest of The Eighteen Revenges of Doctor Milan is available now for Kindle, for just $2.99: [link]