CHAPTER 9
Cherry had never experienced an actual jail before, though she had been confined for months after the war, just like all the other survivors of the Blue Light Brigade. She immediately discovered that the two experiences held only a few similarities. Her military imprisonment constantly reflected the abject horror and loathing with which the Blue Light survivors were regarded by her so-called superiors in the military hierarchy.
Hail conquering heroes indeed, Cherry bitterly thought, remembering those darkest of days, shrugging at last. We earned it . . . every bit of their fear.
Now, imprisoned as an actual criminal miscreant, an enemy of law and order, Cherry found herself regarded more in the light of an evil child, denied most avenues for personal agency or volition, punitively restricted from common comforts and pleasures, but with obviously little real concern for any violent impulses Cherry might have. However, Bethune’s authorities had no idea that they now entertained such a storied mistake of military hardware within their jail, and Cherry made certain of their ongoing ignorance.
She had arrived on Bethune without planetary officials ever being the wiser, utilizing the smuggler networks for all her travel, and when they processed her into Torino’s jail, she had masked her fingerprints and retinal patterns. Her DNA profile remained a classified military secret back home, so the locals wouldn’t find any satisfaction that way either. The fact that she remained adrift in the general female population of the jail meant that Warren Springer Stowe had kept his scream-hole shut about her actual identity, at least so far.
About fifty times every slow, boring day Cherry contemplated escaping, simply to get some edible food and a glimpse of the outdoors, but every time she managed to talk herself out of the impulse, only because escape would likely result in injuring or killing at least one or two Torino constables. Cherry silently wished that those military lab-coat stiffs back home could see how infinitely gentle she behaved when a couple of worthless specimens of humanity were all that stood between her and a decent meal.
If she examined her feelings candidly, though, Cherry could not argue that she waited with some degree of curiosity to see if Mr. Stowe would actually honor all his talk and legitimately utilize whatever influence he still possessed to free her. He certainly seemed to think Bethune’s baffling secession from the Confederated Worlds would only prove a temporary setback. But as the weeks passed, Cherry began to wonder if Warren might be attempting to ditch her. She quietly vowed that if such a betrayal became clear it would become the most permanent mistake of Stowe’s storied career.
Still . . . she had to acknowledge that the dark voice of the abyss that had once called so urgently now seemed strangely subdued despite the long, empty hours of incarceration. As the women in the dayroom began to screech about one of their frequent dramas, Cherry grimaced to herself. Maybe that dark internal call simply couldn’t compete with the regular ruckus that now served as ambient noise in her confined little world.
Slipping off her hard, metal bunk, Cherry stepped through the open cell door into the dim and dingy common area they called a dayroom. Two women stood just outside their own cell doors, yelling and gesticulating in their tiresome fashion. “I told you I would kick your teeth in if you didn’t quit that damned tapping!” the first woman shrilled.
“Are you completely out of your damned mind, Verna? I ain’t tapping on shit. It’s just them voices back in your head making you think everyone’s trying to get you.”
Verna, Cherry observed, was a sturdy red-faced specimen, shaped very much like a swollen thumb, and it seemed likely she was about to tackle her equally unattractive tormentor.
As Verna opened her mouth to begin another round of braying, the sound of metallic tapping began to ring out. “There it is!” Verna yelled. “You hear it, don’t ya? Who’s doing that?”
As several women began commenting on the tapping sound, Cherry lost interest and turned to return to her cell, but a sequence of taps rang out, and she turned sharply, listening.
A fellow prisoner slumped at a nearby table looked up at Cherry saying, “Whaddya think that—”
“Shut up,” Cherry snapped, attuned to the sound ringing out from the pipe. As the woman sat mumbling quiet curses and threats, Cherry heard the coded message begin again, this time catching the whole thing.
Cherry strolled over to the exposed pipe, hardening a fingertip to a rigid point, and rapped out a short sequence of ringing notes.
Verna and several of the others looked suspiciously at Cherry, already prey to her earlier biting words, but she shrugged and trailed back to her cell, only allowing a small personal smile in the semiprivacy of its confines.
The coded message told her that for the moment Warren Springer Stowe ostensibly remained engaged in her well-being, and he evidently had hatched a plan.
Whether his plan worked or not, Cherry decided it was enough. She would let him live, regardless, just for the effort.
Now, how long must she wait for some change of scenery . . . ?