The Prison

By Robert English

In the future, capital punishment has been outlawed in favor of exile. A distant planetoid has a mere two inhabitants, a guard and a prisoner. Unfortunately, both are stuck there alone with each other. The guard turns out to be a troubled individual that heaps abuse upon the prisoner who is struggling to remember his crime or how he got there. Somewhere, locked up in his memory, he harbors a secret that will change them both.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert English
• Release date: Jun 28, 2011

Robert English

Robert English is a licensed attorney in the State of California. He attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and also has a B.A. in Geography from the University of Southern California. He is a military veteran, having served as an Armor Officer in the U.S. Army during the Persian Gulf War I era. His writing focus is on fiction, primarily in the mystery/suspense and science fiction genres. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Winchester, California.

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THE PRISON

By

Robert C. English

Copyright 2009 by Robert English

Smashwords Edition

© Copyright, Robert C. English, December, 2009, All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First printing: December 2009.

Second printing: March 2010.

Printed in the United States of America.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family. Without family, life is a prison.

With special thanks to

My wife, Jenn English, for her support during the writing, her motivation, and for making about a thousand cups of coffee;

My daughter, Lexi, for showing me the world through the eyes of a seven-year old;

My friend, Shayna Hefner, for helping me realize that I could write a novel in the first place;

My brother, Mike English, for watching Star Trek with me when I was a little kid and introducing me to Science Fiction;

My brother, Ric English, for reading my works and encouraging me with positive feedback;

NaNoWriMo, for giving me yet another deadline.

Chapter 1: PARSONS

Date: 2255 A.D., The ship

Glenn Parsons looked out the window and sighed deeply. The view from the window showed nothing but black with a few small pinpricks of light. He shivered involuntarily. The temperature controls were clearly set far too low for his comfort, but he wasn’t entirely certain if his shiver was from the chill or from the sinking realization of his fate. His fate, he thought ruefully, was a near certainty now, coming as the result of a string of bad decisions. Nothing he would do for the rest of his life could change that. He pressed his hands against the cold glass of the window and hung his head. In all likelihood, he would never leave his next destination. Part of him wanted to fling his body against the window, to pound clenched fists against the walls, or any number of other possible expressions of his rage and frustration. Inside, however, he knew that it would do no good. It would change nothing. He was, all in all, a man resigned to his fate.

Glenn gazed around the small cabin that he occupied. Intellectually, he knew that the ship was moving, but he had been on it long enough that he barely registered any sensation. It was the longest journey that he had ever been on, both physically and mentally. Every second on the ship took him farther from family, friends, and comfort of any kind. It was a very lonely feeling and bleak despair flooded through him. He gathered what inner strength he had and focused on the contents of the cabin. It was rather spartan and clearly no one had ever bothered with any form of decoration. On the window side there was no interior wall, merely the unfinished inside of the outer hull. Conduits, piping, and shielded cables ran along the wall in what seemed to Glenn to be a wholly haphazard jumble. To the casual onlooker, it appeared as if the ship had been designed and constructed in a hurry with things shoved in wherever they would fit. The ship was old and had gone through several modifications to fulfill its current role. Glenn surmised that it probably had been retrofitted in a hurry several different times to achieve its myriad prior roles. It had started life as a scientific exploration vessel. Subsequently, it had been a mining ship, then a warship, a light freighter, and even a shameful period as a garbage tow. Finally, it had been decommissioned for years before being revived and given new life in its current role of light transport. Bottom line, the ship was old and not unsurprisingly, it smelled.

Aside from a bunk, a small desk, and a terminal, the room was empty. Glenn had virtually no possessions. He no longer owned anything of value and even if he did, he would not have been able to bring it with him. He was wearing most of his worldly possessions and the miniscule remainder was contained in a small cabinet. There was no outward sign as to whether he had been in this cabin for ten minutes or ten years. In fact, it had been nearly four years. He had spent four solid years in the black ocean of space, wrestling with his very sanity. Four years of looking out of that same small window with the view that remained largely unchanged, black space and distant stars. For the most part, it didn’t matter that much how long he was on the ship. Nothing would be that different at the destination. There would be nothing there to combat the gnawing loneliness.

All of the major ship functions were computer controlled and there was no crew whatsoever. In fact, there were only two passengers on the whole ship and Glenn had no interaction with the other one. He had not spoken to a live human being in four years. The only voices he heard were either computer generated or recorded messages from the now distant Earth. His home was now nearly a full light year away. Any transmission would take almost a year to reach him as would any message he tried to send back. Realistic two-way communication was an impossibility. Of course, there were some outer solar system outposts that were inhabited, but even the closest one would require at least a two months for the signal to travel one-way. Also, any personnel there would be complete strangers to him anyway. What could he possibly have to say to an unknown voice in the dark?

The ship was currently in the deceleration phase of its journey. Not much longer, Glenn thought. The ship had left Earth and undergone a slow acceleration to almost .5 light speed. At only one-half light speed the time dilation effects were acceptable. Even if he traveled at that velocity for a subjective ten years, it would only equate to approximately eleven and one-half years on Earth. Additionally, he had not traveled at that velocity for the whole trip due to acceleration and deceleration. The average speed for the trip was roughly .25 of light speed or 46,500 miles per second. It sounded fast to Glenn, but it still meant a four year journey to the outskirts of the solar system.

His destination was Niflheim, a remote icy ball at farthest reaches of the solar system in the area referred to as the Oort Cloud. The Oort cloud contains billions of icy objects made up primarily of water, methane, or ammonia ice. Many Oort Cloud objects end up visible to Earth as comets, while others remain at the far edge of the solar system beyond Pluto, beyond the Kuiper Belt, beyond the Scattered Disc Objects, and beyond Hills Cloud at the gravitational edge of the solar system. Located a thousand times farther from the Sun than Pluto and fifty-thousand times farther from the Sun than the Earth, Niflheim was a lonely 300 kilometer frigid chunk of ice just barely close enough to the Sun to maintain an orbit. Small, dark, isolated, and frozen, Niflheim could well be considered the far end of hell.

Billions of similar icy minor planets populated the Oort Cloud and Hills Cloud, but Niflheim was likely the farthest. Mankind had finally found a good use for all of these wretched space faring icebergs. They made damn good prisons and this particular one was the final destination of Glenn Parsons.

Chapter 2: WARS

Date: 2112 A.D. through 2242 A.D., Earth

Mankind was tired of death. Mostly, it was tired of killing. In the early 22nd century, a string of wars began that lasted well into the 23rd century. There were the Famine Wars of 2112 that flashed hot when a number of third world countries developed nuclear capability and technology that far exceeded their ability to feed their people. Heavily factionalized East African warlords attempted to blackmail a number of the more industrialized nations with disastrous results. Suffice to say, neither France nor East Africa were ever the same again.

The Pandemic Wars began in the middle 22nd century. A viral outbreak that spread rapidly through India caused that nation to embark on an aggressive campaign to expand their territorial domain. Human waves of disease-crazed riflemen were not a sight that anyone watching world news was soon to forget.

War, by its nature, tends to spark technology and development. The space race re-ignited following the Pandemic Wars as every nation with sufficient technology attempted to gain its foothold in the stars. Alliances changed rapidly as developed nations fought, made peace, and fought again in the Expansionist Wars. When the smoke cleared, spaceflight technology had reached a pinnacle of rapid development and mankind had produced colonies on the Moon, Mars, and several other moons within the solar system.

The early 23rd century brought the last set of big wars which were collectively known as the Religious Wars. After almost a century of war, people fervently believed the apocalypse of mankind was at hand. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, Famine, Disease, War, and Death, as depicted in the Christian bible had all been clearly present symbolically in the wars of the 22nd and 23rd centuries. As a result, religious factions rallied, believing the final days to be at hand. Misguided religious fanatics crusaded to purge the unbelievers and save the world according to their own particular creed. Hawkish religious leaders achieved political power in numerous nations which truly led to a war to end all wars. In the end, peace was achieved from the ashes of war. A new more unified and tolerant religion arose and swept the globe. The new religion, known as the Universal Unity Church of Mankind, became the dominant religion on the planet. The supposed end of the world had come and then it passed. The survivors gave deference to the tenets of all of the world’s dominant religions and melded into a more unified belief system. Mankind needed hope and the UUCM provided it. The number one commandment of this new world religion was a prohibition against killing, regardless of reason.

Peace followed the end of the Religious Wars. In all nations, capital punishment was abolished. Murder, which had always been considered a heinous crime, was elevated to the status of a crime against humanity and mankind itself. Without capital punishment available, mankind turned to an older form of punishment as the ultimate deterrence. In times past, prisoners would be shipped to places such as Australia or Devil’s Island. Technology made a new form of exile possible. Murderers were exiled from the very Earth itself. Space became their prison. Billions of tiny ice planets existed in the solar system, each one forming an individual prison cell. As it turned out, a great many prisoners would have preferred death row.

Chapter 3: THE CRYO-CHAMBER

Date: 2255 A.D., UMS Pilgrimage

The UMS Pilgrimage continued its deceleration toward Niflheim oblivious to the thoughts of its two passengers. UMS stood for Universal Mankind Ship, which was how all spacecraft were designated in the PRW, post-Religious War, era. The name Pilgrimage was slapped on it after it was brought back from being decommissioned for use as a prison transport. Glenn wondered if the name was somebody’s idea of a sick joke, or if it was just in line with the current religious fervor of the world. The original name for the ship, when it was commissioned as an explorer vessel, was the NAS Hell and Back from the good old days of the North American Alliance. Glenn had no doubts as to why the current regime had renamed it. Universalists really didn’t have a good appreciation of irony.

He stood up slowly from his bunk. Due to power and space issues, the gravity within most spacecraft was either non-existent or generated by rotation to produce a centrifugal effect toward the hull of the ship. The Pilgrimage had a centrifugal effect equivalent to about .8g or roughly 80% of normal Earth gravity. One of the unfortunate side effects of a rotational based gravity field was a difference in the effect the farther one was from the hull. As a result, when Glenn stood up, the gravity at his feet differed slightly from that at his head, which generally tended to make him feel a bit light-headed. After almost four years, he had gotten rather used to it, but he still didn’t like to move too quickly unless absolutely necessary. Things would be different on Niflheim, which would have a gravitomagnetic generator utilizing superconducting magnets that would reasonably approximate Earth normal gravity. Yeah, Glenn thought wryly, that was really something to look forward to. But, when you are at rock bottom, it is in fact the small comforts that get you by. Normal gravity meant fewer headaches and fewer headaches would indeed be one of those small comforts.

Cycling open his cabin hatch, Glenn stepped gingerly into the hallway. He had been neglecting to work out properly for the last few months and it was going to truly suck when he had to transition from the lighter .8 g to an Earth normal 1.0 g. Without any particular hurry, he made his way through the ship to the cabin containing the other passenger. There had been no real reason to go there in the last four years, but now, at the journey’s end, Glenn just wanted to look him in the eyes. With somewhat shaky hands, he cycled the door to the ship’s only other occupied cabin. There was no need to signal the occupant as Glenn knew he would be asleep. In fact, he had been asleep for the last four years. Glenn cursed him silently as he entered and took in the sight of the individual cryo-chamber bolted to the floor of the cabin. Moving to the edge of the chamber, he peered through the transparent faceplate at the seemingly peaceful expression of the man in full frozen cryo-sleep.

Miserable bastard, he thought. It gnawed at him that the other passenger had gotten to sleep through the last four years while he had been forced to be awake. It wasn’t fair that he had to suffer this misery while this asshole got a pass. He peered at the face and wished for horrific nightmares to be delivered to the man inside the chamber. It was truly unjust, Glenn thought as he suddenly yelled out loud at the man in the chamber. His voice cracked and sounded gravelly from lack of use as he bellowed, "It isn’t fair, God damn it! It shouldn’t be like this!! Why do I have to suffer?! It’s your fault damn it – your fault! I’m the guard!!! You are the fucking prisoner! You’re supposed to be suffering!! Glenn sank to his knees and cried in anguish, repeating over and over, It shouldn’t be like this … damn it … I’m the guard, I’m the guard."

Chapter 4: DMITRI

Date: 2255 A.D., UMS Pilgrimage

Dmitri did not reach consciousness all at once. It began as a