The guard whimpered, “On the third floor. In the large room to the right after you leave the up tube.”
Talon released the guard. The guard fumbled for his weapon. Jessica said, “I do not want to kill you. My fight is not with you. Go and go now if you want to live.”
The guard forgot all about his weapon. He dropped all pretense of trying to stay and fight. He ran like a waddling duck, which would’ve been funny under any other circumstances.
The prisoners had realized that they were in the middle of a takeover. They shouted and screamed from inside their cages. Some he even risked throwing objects into the ionized bars. Talon had to duck when one object flew between the bars, shattered, and left a shower of dust and debris flying around the hallway.
Jessica said, “I don’t trust the up tube.”
Talon said, “We have no choice. There are no stairs. Look.”
She did look around in her face registered dismay. “If they catch us in the up tube, they can trap us.”
Talon said, “I know. I think I have an idea.”
He hastened toward the end of the hall and stood looking upward. The bottom of the second tier of cells jutted out slightly, forming a small walkway. He said, “I think I can just make it.”
Jessica gave him a look that mingled both amusement and disbelief. “What are you going to do? Jump for it?”
Talon said, “Yes.”
Then he backed up and took off running back toward the wall fast as he could: his legs pumping in his arms moving rapidly at his sides. His feet left the floor, and his fingertips brushed the underside of the walkway. For a moment, he was sure that he had made it. For another second he was sure he hadn’t. Then his abnormally long fingers closed around a small metal bar just enough for him to catch a grip on it.
His body swung there back and forth like a pendulum, and it took several tries before he could settle his hand into a position that would allow him better leverage and balance. Eventually, he got it, and he managed to pull himself up. Once on the second floor, he found himself faced with a new conundrum, however. There was no way to back up and run from the edge of the walkway to the other. He climbed to the top of the railing and managed to grip a railing on the third floor, suddenly finding himself incredibly grateful for his elongated height.
He was now on the third floor. Jessica still stood below. He called her, “You take the tubes. I’ll be right here holding off anyone who attempts to hijack it.”
He raced towards the tube station, not bothering to look down or to wait for an answer from those who were still below. The truth was if whoever was in the control room could control the up tube, they could take that tube all the way to whatever floor they wanted to, and that was nothing he could do about it.
The tube was swift however, and Jessica and the others were on the floor and with him in a matter of seconds. They stormed down the hallway, ignoring the screams from the prisoners as they searched for the control room. The sound of weapon fire continued as more and more of the crew did away with what few guards were willing to try to fight it out with them.
The control room was locked. Talon blasted the door open with the last bit of fire from his weapon. He dropped the weapon on the floor, knowing that carrying it would be useless and it would just slow him down now.
The men inside the control room were pale and very shaken. One of them immediately threw his hands up and screamed, “We are prisoners here too! We are not trying to stop you! The Federation bred us to run this control, and we have no quarrel with you.”
Talon’s jaw sagged open. “What do you mean they bred you for this job?”
One of the men spoke in a slow and tremulous voice. “We’ve never been outside this prison. We were born here. The women’s side is opposite this one, and they breed them whenever control room operators and guards start getting low.”
An absolute rage started within Talon. He had to kill the guards that were standing in their way, and it was as wrong as anything else. These guards had never been out of the prison? They had been born there and basically enslaved into its walls? No wonder they had put in such a fight! They were probably not fleeing for their lives simply because an armed group of people had stormed in, but because they had never known a life outside that prison and now they had the opportunity to see something besides those walls.
Jessica pointed her weapon at one of the control room operators. “Open the cells for those who fought in the resistance.”
Talon said, “Open all the cells.”
Jessica gaped at him. “Talon! Some of the people within this prison are killers!”
Talon said, “I wouldn’t mind having a few killers on my team.”
One of the men who operated the control spoke in a squeaky voice. “There are several that you don’t want, if you don’t mind my saying so. They kill only for pleasure. They wouldn’t fall under your order, or anyone else’s either. They live to eat flesh, human flesh some of them, and some of them are just child killers or women killers. I know which cells are which. I can show you which cells we’re opening.”
Jessica and Talon stood behind them as the men sat at their long thinks of controls. Files came up, showing what each person was in the prison for. Jessica easily picked out members of the resistance party and Talon quickly scanned records for those who were in for petty theft and so forth and demanded that those bars be opened as well.
He could hear noise, screaming, and fighting from below, and he knew that those whose bars had been released were now fleeing. There was only one place for them to go, which was onto the ship. He looked over to see Jessica staring at him with a question in her eyes. Talon looked down at the men and asked them, “Would you want to see what lies beyond these walls?”
Jessica hissed in a breath. “We can’t trust them. We should kill them!”
Two of the men bowed their heads and said that they did not want to leave. The man who spoke in a squeaky voice exhorted them to do so, saying that the Federation would kill them anyway now that they had betrayed their owners so seriously. Talon could tell from Jessica’s face that she wanted, badly, to either shoot them or incapacitate them to a point where they could make their getaway, but he couldn’t see that happening to them.
