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Page 4.
Chapter 2. Aerag-78 Polar POW Camp for Women
 POW Chief Warrant Officer Amela Brunvik, 28—assistant battlefield triage surgeon, Armed Forces of the Marlan Treaty Bund, seconded to Treaty Marches armed forces serving the Dominion—was one of billions of souls in the Ruby Arm who'd been sucked into the wars, digested by fate, and spat out on the other side of bad luck.
Amela kept going on meager rations, wonderful memories, a thick skin, and a rage to live. Some of the women here in Aerag-78—on the arctic circle of godsforsaken Manaul 5—took their own lives out of hopelessness in the bleak, depressing alien night.
On one occasion, a woman had been caught smuggling a firearm to her lover in another barracks, stolen from a Sekurita woman. After interrogation failed to reveal the culprit from among 42 women, the camp commander held a long, grueling formation in snow and freezing rain. She threatened torture, one by one, until someone broke and named the guilty woman. Major Rulla Texel was a humanian with pale green skin, a ridge of bony dots running left and right across her forehead, and greenish-red hair tightly swept back in a regulation military bun. Her eyes were a beautiful dark blue, tribute to some glorious human genes. She strutted well in a bleach-blue Sekurita uniform—dull knee boots, baggy pants, and dark blue peasant tunic, bound with a plain brown leather gun belt. She also liked to brandish a black lectro-whipsnap under trembling prisoners' chins; or she'd slap it against her muscular thighs as she strutted up and down before a terrified formation of ragged prisoners on the snowy field.
Amela studied Texel carefully, as she did everything else around her, looking for a ray of light, a chink in the armor, a clue about some weakness in this prison.
As the story went, torture was to begin at first light, using to a decimation lottery. Every tenth woman would be tortured to death, until either none were left, or at least three prisoners named the guilty one among them to stop the killing. That night, the entire barracks sealed their doors and windows, and disconnected the exhaust shafts. The women turned on carb stoves, and held hands as they drifted off into eternal sleep—each woman crossing the river and welcomed to the house of her ancestors. Their last words were to recite together the holy anima, the prayer of the soul. In the morning for roll call, the psychopomps would find only a long, dim hall of motionless gray shapes, while the women themselves were all gone. It was one kind of liberation, but not freedom, and not the kind sought by Amela Brunvik.
Amela carefully studied every minute aspect of camp life, looking for any weakness, any error, any fault she could exploit when the day came to break for freedom. She had far better things to do than turn up the smoke, hold hands, and go to her ancestors. On her home world of Belair, she had a handsome husband named Solan and a beautiful son named Solanalos. Time and urgency burned in her, to get back to them before they grew old or passed on, and not to leave her bones broken in the frozen soil of this polar prison camp. She clung to memories of precious life together they had known before the wars, and longed to return home. Any prisoner worth her salt, who wanted to survive, treasured memories in the same manner.
Amela had not, as yet, cracked the information wall, but in her mind she kept clawing at it for a sign or a way out of here. She'd heard of jungles on the equator, with secret hiding places for Runners. Few prisoners dared to run. Of those who did, few escaped—according to official Sekurita bulletins, none; according to barracks rumors, some. Amela chose to believe in the existence of the rumored Runners colony or colonies. If nothing else—if she could not make it off this freezing hell—she would rather die fighting the Swarm than slowly fade, and in another few months be dropped through a wall into the snow outside, to be scavenged by hungry wolvines, or carried to the trench by black-robed figures.
At times, while she carried wood and kept her head down, she would tremble with rage. Bitter tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. But she never kept her gaze down for long, always glancing to the sides to study her surroundings. Most of the women here had given up on life and hope, but Amela remembered her Bund indoctrination well in the big hall at the recruit depot on Bund-Tattang: A prisoner's first duty is to escape and rejoin his or her unit to keep fighting. Whatever it takes to support that is a prisoner's first and final duty, to include staying alive by any means, as an incidental by-process. Vosnes capiscaesh, recruits? Scream yes at me. I want to hear you scream….
Those were not Belair authority words, from her gentle home world Beautiful Air. Those were Treaty Marches high command general orders, dictated by the more warlike OHD worlds who provided generals, ships, lead fighters, and trainers for humankind's ongoing last stand in the Ruby Arm.
At Aerag-78, a few klicks above the polar circle of Manaul, grayish splotches like beached and sunken ships defiled the pristine whiteness of ice and snow. Prison barracks gleamed soft and dingy in arctic twilight. This was a time of year peculiar to the polar equinoxes—the long afternoon between summer and fall, or dusky dawn between winter and spring. As with Manaul's oceans, the seasons came and passed with tidal regularity. Life in the camps had very few breaks in its slow and brutal routines.
The splotches were labor camps for war prisoners. A canvas sign wrapped around an ice pillar on the main road read on both sides: Aerag-78. Smaller letters under that read, in human and alien alphabets, Humansh Women's Camp. Yet smaller letters under that read: Unauthorized entry or departure equals assured death. Beware!
More than 10,000 dots moved about in infinitely weary, depressed slowness in Aerag-78 alone. Which equinox this was, spring or fall, hardly anyone cared. On one side was the endless glare of ice-mirrored light under a purplish blue sky. On the other side lay endless night, punctuated by alien stars far from home and hopelessly beyond reach.
A tiny percentage of the moving dots were either humanian Sekurita, and various flavors of humanian to alienoid camp trusties. There was the occasional Swarm executive—a nightmare figure recognizable by its dark, rubbery pressure suit, compact methane shoulder tanks, and cube-shaped brass helmet with rounded corners and lurid little goggles. Such sightings were very rare. Most Kaarrk stayed in their orbiting fortress. Beside Sekurita regulars, every POW camp also had its mercenary bounty hunters, bottom feeders lurking around the periphery. Their grungy sight alone helped prevent escape attempts.
Most of the women were disarmed female military or police prisoners captured during the many small and large battles of the Treaty March wars. The Old Humansh Dominion had been breaking down for years, abandoning chunks of former marches or border sectors. Two generations ago, time had come to let go of the Ruby Arm of the Magon Spiral Galaxy—lately also known as the Treaty Marches because of laughable protocols signed by humans and Swarm aliens.
Why did the Swarm keep human prisoners alive? Everyone had their own guess. Amela imagined it was to gather information about their human enemies, and to ransom them for resale to signatory nations of the Treaty Marches. The Swarm sent delegates to the assemblies, and left their signatures on treaties, guarantees, and obligations, but it became clear, long ago, that they had no intention of honoring any such treaty.
Amela studied even the minutest aspect of her captivity, looking for the key to a way out of here. Much of the time, she carried firewood and other fuel dumped in a receiving vale by incoming cargo skims. Everywhere she walked, she looked carefully, seeking any weaknesses among her captors.
She kept her thoughts on her husband and son, now impossibly far away on bautiful Belair, Lovely Air. They are who I am. If she let go of that, she thought, she would go insane. She would not embrace the dirtiness of this place or its alien rulers and humanian collaborators. She would forever live in the past, far away, in her town amid the temperate forests of Belair.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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