5 - Bottled
Tick.
Belto was not new to prisons. He’d been in and out of them since he was old enough to be thrown in them. Honestly, probably a little bit before he was old enough to be thrown in them. He considered prisons something of a career indicator, a touch stone by which to judge his progress through the skullduggery industry. He’d started in little local jails, small, quaint. The kind of prison where you got to know the warden, got a few decent meals a day. As he’d progressed, the prisons had got more lavish and also much more cruel.
Tick.
To an extent, that was fair. Belto was commiting far more exciting, and by extension far more criminal, crimes. There was a difference between stealing an apple and stealing an apple truck. Of course, at this point, Belto had stolen entire Apple fleets. Belto was a dangerous man, and he was proud of that. There was nothing he wouldn’t steal.
Tick.
This prison was, however, something else. It was an Outsource, a delightful concept that business had come up with early in the history of interstellar travel. You see, big corporations, criminal enterprises, and all the shades and overlaps inbetween, had gotten tired of navigating pesky local governments. It was massively inconvenient to have to hire lawyers on each world, or to treat their enemies differently and fairly under a galaxy’s worth of differing legal precedents. They decided instead to take matters into their own hands, to run their own prisons. The big companies all had their own, but for the smaller end of things, the muckier, shadier end of things, there were Outsources.
For a fair price, an Outsource would hold anyone you didn’t like for as long as you felt was necessary. Belto had not been informed of the gang’s request and payment regarding him, but he assumed he’d be here indefinitely.
Tick.
This particular Outsource was called The Monolith, and it was entirely automated. It functioned like a grand floating clockwork, mechanically perfect in its meticulous storage of criminals like Belto. It was glass and metal and bronze, composed into a spherical cathedral, floating in orbit around a star in a quiet part of the galaxy. It was beautiful, but also custom designed to be as deadly as it could be while keeping a reasonable number of its inhabitants alive. Belto of course had seen very little of it, given his shackles. The ticking came from a giant machine above, tracking time, and presumably triggering the tiny cruelties that made up The Monolith’s schedule.
Tick.
Belto was shackled towards the center of the sphere. Not that the shackles were necessary, as beyond them he was contained within a two meter square cage. Beyond that, he could see hundreds of other prisoners. Utterly terrifying beasts cowered in cells next to people of a far more bookish nature. Belto assumed that he lacked the mathematical skill to understand the crimes the latter had committed, but he had little doubt about what had put the former here.
Obviously, Belto was not planning to be here long enough to make friends. He looked up at the massive rotating markers above his head. It was almost lunchtime. Specifically, it was two ticks away from the moment the gruel dispenser activated, and one more tick until it got to his cage.
Tick.
Belto smiled. He knew he was exactly twenty four minutes from escaping this prison.
“I’m gonna miss the gruel,” he said out loud, to the leviathan caged next to him, “but I’m gonna miss our little chats more. This should be easy.”
He was of course wrong, but as in all things, if he’d had any idea of how tough the next twenty four minutes would be, maybe he wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what had to be done.
“Catch you later, buddy. Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
[intro music]
Tick.
The food dispenser activated, right on cue. Belto strained at his shackles. His toolbox had been taken from him by Grunk before he was dropped off here, and he’d never really built up the upper body strength for brute force solutions. His neighbour chuckled, presumably Belto was not the first person to try to break free.
Belto was worried. The brilliant and meticulous plan required him to jump on to the food dispenser, which would be here in a tick. Was his plan even possible? Gruel was served three times a day, maybe he should give it a few hours, form a new plan.
No. That was the kind of thinking that never worked out for Belto. He was always at his most successful whenever he decided to try the silly thing. The timing only worked if he went at lunchtime, and specifically lunchtime today. He took a deep breath. The shackle problem could be solved later, for now, he had to get out of this cell. How long was it again?
Tick.
The food dispenser whizzed around to Belto’s cage. It was now or never. He ran at the door to his cage, throwing all his weight behind the shackles as he threw them into the lock. Nothing. He ran back to the other side of his cage. The shackles were, of course, massive, to accommodate his arm count. He was hoping that the person in charge of shackle manufacture hadn’t checked in with the person in charge of lock strength, which seemed like a reasonable hope to harbour. Most of what was wrong or overlooked in the universe could be solved incredibly quickly if two specific people actually talked to each other. He took a breath, then tried again. He smashed the lock. The creature next door wasn’t chuckling anymore, it was watching intently. It seemed to suddenly be taking Belto’s plan a bit more seriously.
Belto threw himself out of the cage onto the dispenser, grabbing on for dear life.
Tick.
The dispenser spun around, to feed another bank of cages, as Belto clung to it. His fellow prisoners were not as happy for him as he’d have hoped, jeering at him, laughing as he scrambled around trying to stay on top of the dispenser. Many seemed angry at the way his attempted escape was interfering with their lunch, spraying gruel on cages many stories below. Quite a few very dangerous people were going to miss out on a meal because of him.
Tick.
The next move jerked the dispenser down. The move itself didn’t dislodge Belto, but the sharp stop at the bottom did. He fell, but as he was already at the bottom, he didn’t do himself too much damage.
Lying there on the ground, looking up at hundreds of cages, including the one he almost ended up spending the rest of his life in, with its door hanging open, he decided two things. The first, was that he was going to stop counting ticks. The second, was that he was going to allow himself two minutes to lay there, and laugh, before getting to the next step of his plan.
---
At the bottom of the pit was a small corridor. No guards in sight, Belto moved forward. The brass cages from before had given way to stone and wood. The second you got away from the inhabited section, things started to resemble a stately home, or a government building people actually visited.
In front of Belto was a large door, heavy, made of wood. It had an intricate mechanical lock. Belto looked around the abandoned space, noted the continued absence of guards. Hubris, he thought. Hubris was the biggest flaw in any invention, and in his experience, hubris was a common trait of people who decided to devote their creative energies to trapping and controlling other people.
There wasn’t much in the corridor, but in a dusty corner, presumably knocked there by a cleaner bot, was a key. It was tiny, but beautifully engineered, with moving parts and ornate metalwork. It couldn’t be this easy, surely?
It wasn’t that easy. The key didn’t fit the door’s locking mechanism. Belto pocketed it anyway, Belto pocketed things, that was his default play, and this particular thing was pretty looking. Belto saw only one way through, the junction box next to the door. If he could overload it (and he could definitely overload it) that’d probably disable the lock. It might be noisy though.
Belto looked around. If The Monolith, so far, had one defining trait, it was the absolute absence of prison guards. This machine, floating in the vacuum, was designed perfectly to keep people in, so perfectly that its designers presumably thought guards would present too many unknowns into the equations of its operation. A bit of noise wouldn’t be a problem then.
He started his junction box fiddling. It was significantly trickier than usual, thanks to his shackled hands. Belto had lost track of the prison’s ticks, and like everyone who doesn’t know how much longer they have, he feared he didn’t have any time at all.
Oaken door mechanics were definitely not compatible with his particular brand of junction box fiddling. He doubted these doors even plugged in, so an energy disruption wouldn’t work. For that reason, he would be going for his usual Plan B: Make something blow up, and hope that doing so somehow helps. His goal was not to brilliantly use mechanical engineering to open the doors, it was to utterly obliterate all the brilliant mechanical engineering in a thirty meter radius, hoping that a fine mist of oak would make for an easier path out from the prison.
That would definitely make noise.
He connected the right cable to the wrong power core. It started to glow, and he ran. He ran back to the room of cages, and had just ducked around a corner when electrical fire consumed the corridor. Noise and fury blasted from the explosion. The walls shook, the entire prison shook. Belto looked up and saw the cages above rattle, several very dangerous creatures suddenly quite uncomfortable and even more unhappy about the little thief down below, and his brilliant escape plan. Fortunately the cages held, and Belto was safe to return to what remained of the door.
The impressive corridor was now blackened and in tatters. Belto pushed through the rubble, and past the splintered door. He emerged through the dust and smoke into a large atrium, and found himself face to face with fifty rotund clockwork soldiers, each holding a blaster, each utterly still.
---
Belto had not been rude to think of the soldiers as rotund. They were rotund, in fact they were spherical. Giant balls of brass, with long legs poking out the bottom, and strong arms (to accommodate their large guns) poking out of the sides. They were about seven feet tall, and incredibly heavy looking. Belto immediately wanted one.
They were still, and not still in the way you’d think of as ‘waiting’ or ‘idling’. They were still, not as in dead, but perhaps not yet alive. They were arranged in concentric rows around the door, presumably as a defence against any attempted break out. Belto laughed, they had clearly failed.
Belto regretted laughing immediately, as he almost always did. A small green light began to pulse on the nearest guard’s chest. Quickly, similar lights on the guards either side of it did the same. The pulse spread. A signal. A response, no doubt to the door, or rather, the lack of door.
This was old technology, it was probably technology that had never actually been activated. Nobody had ever had the audacity to blow up the door. They would likely take a few moments to switch on. Belto hoped they would need a system update, and that that might take time, but this technology was old, it was from an era when things.. Just worked.
Belto wasn’t going to wait to find out the boot up time. The room now glowed green with reflected light from the guards. He sprinted between their legs, He missed climbing, he missed swinging. Having four of his six limbs rendered useless was jarring.
He found a vent at one side of the Atrium and climbed in. Behind him, he could hear the guards activating, and beginning to search for him. They were slow, and seemingly not very bright. One particularly confused looking guard was holding a piece of the door, and repeatedly attempting to place it back into the door frame, like it was fixing a jigsaw puzzle. Having spent some time with Alpha, it was odd to see these clumsy robots from a bygone era.
Clumsy didn’t mean not dangerous though. A number of them had spotted his ashy footprints and were making their way to the vent, ponderously. He had no interest in waiting to be found, so closed the vent and clambered away.
The Monolith was small, at least, it was smaller than he’d assumed. The vent he’d climbed in seemed to circle its sphere like surface. The prison was a small satellite. He wondered if it had been built as a prison, or had been repurposed. It certainly seemed to be too beautifully engineered for the likes of him, but then, he wasn’t the customer. Perhaps cruel people liked to know their enemies would be encased in such ludicrously ornate surroundings. Belto was not cruel, so struggled to understand those who were.
Gravity seemed to emanate from the centre of the sphere, so as Belto crawled through the shaft, down was always down, even as the curvature fell away towards the horizon. Eventually, he couldn’t hear the guards, so decided to stop and reassess his situation. He climbed out of the first vent he found and emerged into a dark room.
He had absolutely no idea where he was. His brilliant escape plan had, as usual, failed almost immediately. The way he saw it, he had two key goals to achieve, getting out of the shackles, and getting out of the prison. He found a switch on the wall, flipped it, and lights came on.
He was in some kind of engineering room, seemingly a maintenance station for the guards. It was a robot hospital, basically. It was mildly interesting to see all the parts for them laid out, but utterly mystifying to him. This technology was so old as to be completely incomprehensible. He had just about managed to explode that junction box, but even that had been about ten times as potent as he’d expected. He would not be messing with this arkane tech any further. He did however see an old fashioned zero point energy saw in the corner, so got to work on his shackles.
---
Belto had managed to remove the shackles while keeping every single one of his arms. That left only one job: escape. The work crew who presumably occupied the space in which he was stood had to have lifeboats, or shuttles to take them off the satellite. They were long gone, but maybe there was a contingency.
A map pinned to a wall in the workroom marked a docking port not far from where he was. It also marked several guard positions along the way, each of them a potential choke point, a potential opportunity for the guardbots to catch him, to put him back in a cage, likely one with a slightly better thought out lock.
Belto was confronted by a very simple choice, to be bold and a bit silly, or to be cautious and careful. It was a particularly simple choice, because in these situations, Belto always took the first option.
He was going to make a run for it. More specifically, thanks to his newfound freedom of movement, he was going to make a run swing hop flip jump slide for it. He did some stretches, he limbered up, and then he darted out of the robot hospital.
He ran down a metal corridor, far less expansive and beautiful than the ones he’d seen before. Immediately, two guards ran at him, blasters blasting. He dodged their shots, swinging up into the ceiling pipes and cabling which always seemed to be present in these exact kinds of utilitarian corridors. Their shots ricocheted, knocking out lights until all that lit the corridor was the green glow of the guard’s power indicators and the red heat of their blasters.
“Missed me!” he goaded. Of course, there was no way they understood him, but for Belto a certain amount of swagger was instinctive. He realised that in these moments, he insulted his assailants more to boost his own confidence than to throw them off. It is important to be mindful as a master criminal.
He kept running and jumping, swinging around corners and making his way through junctions, remembering the map he’d left behind in the maintenance room. Countless guards tried to shoot him down, or grab him as he swung through the air above their heads, but he was too quick, and far too determined. Eventually, he found his way to the docking bay, where multiple airlocks offered opportunities for escape. Only one seemed viable, with an enormous, beautiful ship docked.
The ship was shaped like a giant wheel, all beautiful brass and intricate patterning. It was elaborate and very expensive looking. Its style matched the prison, and Belto assumed it had been here since the facility’s creation. Something that ancient and beautiful had to belong to the ones who built this place. He wondered why they hadn’t taken it with them. He wondered if maybe the new owners of The Monolith had not given them a chance to escape either. Whatever the story, it seemed likely that nobody would miss it, or rather, nobody who would miss it would notice it missing until he’d fired up whatever type of engine it housed.
The guards were not built to think with such nuance. As he approached the airlock to get onboard the grand wheel ship, three of them burst through a door at the other end of the room. The airlock had another locking mechanism, and with no conventionally explosive junction boxes nearby, Belto was somewhat stuck. More guards entered from the other side of the docking bay, Belto was surrounded.
His escape was almost within his grasp, painfully close, but the guards were closer. He couldn’t help but notice they weren’t shooting anymore. Belto guessed that what passed for AI in those globular chassis had decided he was cornered, and therefore his value would be better maintained by capturing him alive than vaporising him.
The first guard got close, and grabbed him by a leg, lifting him upside down. It shook him, not in a cruel way, but more out of some base level interest in how the physics of all those limbs worked. Things fell from Belto’s pockets. The key from before, cards from one of At-Un’s card games. Belto missed At-Un and the rest. He wondered if they’d made it to Proxy Clausula Five yet. They must be close at least. He hoped the humans had found some closure, and that the answers didn’t disappoint.
The key laid on the ground, utterly boring in the way all keys unavoidably are. The dangling Belto picked it up, fiddled with it while he waited for the guards to surround him. He turned it over in his hands, it was, like everything here, rather beautiful.
Huh, he found himself thinking, it was also exactly the same size as a conspicuous hole next to the green light on his captor’s chest.
“No way!” He exclaimed, still, somehow, constantly surprised by his own luck.
He pushed the key into the hole, turned it. One loud click followed by a hundred smaller ones from inside the machine. The light dimmed, the hands of the guard released, and it crashed to the ground, like an exceptionally heavy feather. Next to him fell the guard’s blaster.
After untangling himself, when Belto stood up, he had two things: A massive headache, and an almost as massive Orion class dual action blaster.
The remaining guards opened fire immediately, their shots blowing chunks out of their deactivated colleague. Belto returned fire, and while he was a terrible marksman, the weapon didn’t really require a great deal of precision. The guards’ creator clearly didn’t have much faith in their cognitive ability, or the skill to fix it, so had solved the problem laterally by giving them weapons which only needed to be somewhat vaguely pointed in the direction of any enemy to have the desired effect.
The guards kept coming, using what cover they could. Belto managed to hold them back, but knew that no gun could keep up this damage for very long without a reload, and he had absolutely no idea how to reload this particular antiquated blaster, or indeed what he was supposed to reload it with. He used his second to last shot to fire into the ceiling above the approaching guards, collapsing the space around them and setting up a hopefully permanent barricade against more interference.
He retrieved his key from the collapsed parts of his would be captor, and made for the airlock. The complex locking mechanism was still in place, but now, he had a blaster. He used the last shot in the chamber to blow the mechanism, dropped the weapon, and headed inside.
----
The ship’s air was as stale as the ration packs Belto had lived off for weeks on a particularly unpleasant job a few years back. Nobody had set foot onboard in years, centuries maybe. It was a ghost ship. He made his way to the hub of the wheel, to its bridge, and found the navigation controls.
There was still power, or at least, there was enough to get away, maybe even enough to get to North Star. He activated the ship’s engines, and set a course for Proxy Clausula Five. Around him, the ship hummed back to life, its opulent bronze interior, with beautiful wooden details, was bathed in rich light. It felt like warm sunlight, it felt the way Belto remembered his childhood, playing in the summer with his friends. This was truly a great ship, he was very happy to be stealing it.
The ship strained at the airlock it was docked to, at the pylons and other umbilical paraphernalia which held it in place. Belto had massively underestimated the number of jobs required in take off, and expected he’d end up taking some bits of The Monolith with him.
“Glad I’m not coming back.” He muttered.
With one last scraping, scratching strain, the ship pulled itself away from the prison. Belto watched through the viewscreen as the bronze sphere he’d temporarily been forced to call home receded. He wouldn’t miss it.
Gaining speed, the ship began to spin. Layers of the wheel split, they separated into cascading forms. The wheel became a gyroscope, its many alien parts spinning in different directions. This was old technology. Somewhat forbidden technology. Technology which didn’t so much move through space as warp it, punch holes through its very fabric. It was exciting, and probably very dangerous. The ship warped into an impossible shape and then warped space to match it.
From inside, for Belto, all this was beautiful. He’d heard people say that there was an elegance to the older forms of faster than light travel, and he could see what they meant. This was light and form and beauty in a way he’d never imagined. Modern ships stretched stars into rainbows, but here, the rainbows danced. This was a form of space travel that had always been kept from those like him. It had been withheld from him, like his liberty, with so little thought as to be offensive. It felt good to take it back.
As things settled, and the ship carried on along its path, he explored a little. The previously dingy corridors, while still dry and dusty from lack of use, were now lit and magnificent. It was utterly superior to the North Star, in every aspect but its crew.
Belto was surprised to find that the ship did indeed have a crew, of sorts. Housed in a large hold on an outer ring of the ship were several more of the guards. They were not powered, probably they’d never even been activated, but that struck him as an interesting project for a rainy day. Something for him to fiddle with on the way to Proxy Clausula Five, perhaps.
The ship was incredible, but for now, it was a means to an end. Belto had only one objective left, to get back to his friends, and help them figure out who or what had sent the ship to Earth to capture them.
It had taken him twenty seven minutes, three minutes more than he’d planned.
He only hoped he would get to his friends in time.
He absolutely would not.