The Unstoppable Truth

[Laowai]

Lights out.

The banging of batons on energized iron bars echoes across the rooms. The LPI guards amused themselves by hitting them across the doors of the prisoners cells. Usually by this time, most of the inmates were asleep. It seemed to amuse the guards to walk down the line of cells, trailing their batons across the iron railings, the loud crack of energized baton on metal waking up any prisoner who had tried to preempt the lights out by falling asleep early.
Adam lay on his bunk, the LPI officer strode past hitting his cell door with his baton. "Lights out smartass" he called as he walked by, "if you feel the urge to talk, let us know, we LOVE to listen". As he said this he smacked his baton against the rails again, a loud crack echoed around the ward as blue sparks shot out from the guards baton. Adam ignored it. This kind of puerile intimidation no longer had any effect on him.
The beatings it seemed had had the opposite effect on him then had been intended.

"We'll get out of here", The Xeno, Matthew Flax muttered as the guard walked by. These same events were played out, night after night. Adam no longer heard them.

"So youre the **** stirrer from California" The warden had said. "We have something for you, a special cell in which we put our most favourite guests"

That cell was the decommissioned Liberty Navy Gunboat the LNS Merrick; The personal trophy of the warden. She sat docked at Huntsville and was the place where prisoners that the prison authorities had a personal dislike of ended up. They were kept in special cells on board, always in solitary. The guards would manipulate the gravity in each cell, meaning those locked on board existed in a permanent state of nausea and helplessness. Some days, the warden would take her out, eject a pod and use the ships sole remaining gun to vaporize the unfortunate soul within it. Adam had done two voyages on the Merrick already.
He did not want to do a third.

He and Matthew Flax worked on the prison factory floor. They made kitchen goods mostly, ovens, machines used to process food, real food of the kind that people like Adam and Matthew never saw in prison, and could barely ever afford before they were locked up. The work was tedious and repetitive; the guards would amuse themselves by walking by the prisoners, shocking them with their batons and then docking their food ration when their work quota was not met. Deaths in Huntsville itself were common, though no records were obviously kept prisoners would often just disappear.
It had taken months, but slowly while they worked; Adam and his friend had stolen machine parts, begged and borrowed others enough to construct a short range communicator. At first, they had heard nothing, but a well scrounged battery had the night before, suddenly opened up possibilities they had not considered:

"This message is for anyone out there on LPI Huntsville" The voice had said "We are the Xenos, we are out here, and we have not forgotten you".

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