Two hundred forty-seven men and women somberly marched in ragged groups across the portway, some whimpering softly to themselves, others in stone-like silence. The group that marched towards the large, grey mass of steel at the far end of the landing zone ranged from teens barely past puberty, and a few even younger unlucky enough to be tall for their age, to hunched centenarians, old and wise enough to know what was likely to come, but still too fearful of the stunbatons the militiamen surrounding them to speak out. Given the pile of limp, unconscious bodies being pulled on the gravsled behind them, the fear wasn’t unfounded.
As they neared the end of their march, the grey mass came into further detail through the haze of the early morning, slowly burning off with the rising sun. A large, if unremarkable long-distance freighter stood before them, PMF Black Maria emblazoned in large black letters along its aged, pockmarked hull. A series of numbers underneath the name provided the true feelings of dread as the registration numbers marked the ship as a duly appointed bounty transport vessel of the Collective. Extra armor-plating and weapons dotting the exterior suggested it had served in the war, most likely under the banner of a force opposed to that very government, the futility of that struggle starkly clear in the ship’s second life.
The mass of marchers stopped at the rear of the ship, collecting in a group around the Black Maria’s open bay doors, revealing the cavernous open space of the ship’s hold within. At the top of the ramp stood a large middle-aged man, his body powerfully built, if a bit slowed by time and gluttony. Around him, a dozen or so crew were arrayed, men and women, all motley and unkempt except for a neatly dressed and groomed young man standing off to the right, with eyes scanning the collection before him neither baleful nor benevolent, but simply sad and resigned. Once the militia had finished herding the masses together, the large man on the ramp touched a button on the side of his earpiece, gave a hacking cough, and then began to speak, the booming words unnecessarily amplified through ship speakers breaking the general silence of the calm landing pad.
“Those of you standing here today have been justly convicted of sedition against the Collective and sentenced by order of local Triumvirate under the authority of the Ruling Council” the large man bellowed, pausing for a moment, his words obviously spoken frequently, but still laced with malice and genuine disdain. The man’s eyes flicked down briefly to an infopad in his hand, checking the specifics of the sentence to be given. “You are all bound to serve for a period of no less than ten years on the labor planet Yukra with transportation to be carried out immediately.” With that, the captain and the visible crew members turned and walked into the ship, taking a lift on the far wall up to the catwalks overlooking the open hold space below.
If anyone in the crowd in front of the now empty ramp felt any surprise at their now condemned fate, they didn’t show it, for while the planet named for their imprisonment, a once thriving colony now little more than a barren rock with minor ore and grain value 120 light years distant, was unknown to them, it mattered little in a punishment predetermined when the Black Maria landed three days previously to find enough prisoners that adequately fit the crime. There had been a Triumvirate of course, made up of the captain himself, the head of the settlement, and a Collective prosecutor - the well-kept young man now making his way to the bridge. After two and a half days of the crew and local militia rounding up bio-readings listed with even the faintest connection to the resistance now over a decade past, as well as a few extras acquired during torturous interrogations, they were tried and convicted in a single evening, stock confessions with little variety signed with two hundred and forty-seven thumbprints, the signatories now criminals for nothing more than who they were, or were thought to be, filed away on datalogs bound for the Collective core as dubious evidence toward the government’s commitment to fairness and justice.
Among the throng now making their way up the ship’s ramp and into the cargo hold/prison cell walked a man and woman holding each other as they went. They appeared to be in their late thirties and not much different than any of the other dozens of couples of all ages and genders now supporting one another as they stepped toward their shared fate. The man stood tall and was likely handsome before life slouched his shoulders and stress prematurely aged his furrowed brow. The woman held him close as they walked, perhaps even holding him up, her pale blue eyes staring vacantly ahead of them without a single shred of hope, instead only worry quivering around their hooded lids. It wasn’t that long ago they were happy, serenely so, living as academics on their homeworld of Pola, a quaint if forgettable world that had made the mistake of supplying supplies to the resistance during the war and whose intelligentsia was thought to harbor further treason, punished through a forced diaspora to far-flung reaches such as the one they were now involuntarily leaving. Even 72 hours ago, the couples’ life on this world was at least contented as they taught in the settlement school, peppering in a few bits of classic Pola works among the mandated Collective curriculum. Such a transgression may have earned an extra ‘subversion of youth’ charge to their files, but it wouldn’t have made a difference regardless as they still would have found themselves on this same walk, same helplessness in the man, same worry in the woman’s eyes. Not worry for what was ahead of them, however, but for something they were leaving behind.
Without a word of instruction from the captain or his crew, but mindful of the rifles and autoguns they had trained on them, the prisoners broke off into smaller groups and sat on the squares of cargo netting bolted to the floors at regular intervals, knowing that hanging on to the straps would provide the only restraint during the rough process of take-off and eventual landing at Yukra. The walls of the hold were bare and smooth as to eliminate the possibility of climbing to the catwalks that provided access to the rest of the ship, reached only by the lift that would now stay locked in its elevated position until the journey had finished and the prisoners would be forced out of the ship by Collective guards. The sparse amenities they would have on their journey were already present in the hold; four toilets left completely exposed along one wall ready for when a prisoner’s need finally overcomes their embarrassment, two sanipods where they can get blasted by chemicals for a few moments to remove the worst of their bodily odors, and six small portholes, now closed, but would later open to distribute tasteless survival rations twice a day and water three times unless the captain was in a foul mood. The purpose of the hold was starkly apparent to all those who temporarily resided there, to keep them alive, at least in the barest sense, until they reached their final destination. After all those able to walk had made their way up the ramp, the gravsled containing the still-unconscious bodies of those who had thought to resist their fate that morning followed and unceremoniously dumped the load just past the doors, leaving their fellow passengers to see to their safety, lest they awake with a broken leg or cracked skull obtained during a rough takeoff. With that, the sleds and militiamen turned from the closing ship doors and made their way back to the settlement, if any of them gave a second thought to those condemned, they didn’t betray it with a second glance back.
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After giving a quick look to those assembled below and not finding any trouble, the captain nodded and began to make his way towards the bridge, some crew following and others scattering to their stations on the Black Maria. At the front of the ship, the young prosecutor was already strapped to his seat, deep in unknown thoughts. The captain gave him quick derisive hmph, well used the young man’s melancholy after several identical, and profitable, operations together. “Systems check” the captain grunted as he dropped his significant mass into the well-worn captain’s chair, pulling up readouts on the viewscreen in front of him. One by one, the various officers on the bridge in within the ship chimed through the comms, signaling the Black Maria was ready to depart. Once satisfied, the captain touched the button on his earpiece once more to broadcast over the ship’s speakers, “Prepare for liftoff” he stated simply before activating the freighter's surface engines, leaving the quarry of the past three days scrambling in the hold to secure themselves to the cargo netting however possible as the ship shook and strained against the forces of gravity that were quickly losing their grip.
The captain sat silently and watched out the vidscreen as the Black Maria’s thrusters kicked in and arched the ship through the outer atmosphere and into the blackness of space beyond. “Valov, plot the jump course to Yukra, I’ll be in…” he started as he rose with some exertion from his seat, speaking to his navigator before a fast series of beeps alerted the bridge to an incoming transmission. “What is it Bales?” the captain sighed, turning towards his longtime first officer, a stout and fierce-looking woman already scanning the message screen in front of her. “Incoming message from Yukra control…” she said as she read, pausing as she would when she knew the next words would upset the captain, “We’ve lost our bounty rights, another ship beat us there...the Raven, sir.”
“Mikhail?!?!” the captain bellowed, face contorting with rage, as he considered his counterpart and frequent competitor aboard the Raven taking his bounty rights again. “God damn it!” he screamed as he crashed a meaty fist into the armrest of his chair. Organized religion and belief in the divine had been banned in the Collective generations ago, but the curses persisted long after the faith was lost. “If I ever get a hold of that bastard in port, I’ll wring every last credit from his neck!” the captain continued, the color in his face rising with his volume. With a howl of fury, the man threw himself back down into his seat, the metal and leather creaking dangerously, but withstanding the assault and not sending the captain sprawling to the floor. Taking a few deep breaths to calm himself and lower the pulse pounding in his ears, the man forced his mind to return to the situation. “Are there any open bounty quotas in the region?” he asked, voice full of gravel, already knowing the answer. Still, Bale dutifully typed at the screen in front of her. “No, no quotas available in the sector...nothing anywhere,” she replied, reporting a situation that seemed more and more common these days. The captain muttered another curse under his breath, his mind already doing the calculations on how much this trip was going to cost him. “Well, that’s it then.” he said in a resigned tone, calling up the datalogs of the two hundred forty-seven imprisoned aboard his ship. With a few simple keystrokes on the console in his armrest, he adjusted the same line on all the files at once, changing the judgment from ‘Internment’ to ‘Execution’. The pittance that the Collective pays for executions wouldn’t even cover the cost of bringing his ship out to this rock, the captain thought darkly, but now it was the only option that would keep it from being a total loss. With a few more taps on his console, he activated the bioscanners in the cargo hold, and an instant later two hundred forty-seven data streams emerged, to be attached to the files as proof that the sentence had been meted out. The entire bridge was silent for a moment before the captain spoke again, “At your leisure, Prosecutor Alber.” he said with mild impatience, turning towards the young man.
“Wha...what?” the Collective prosecutor stammered, seemingly coming back to life in that moment as his mind struggled to process the situation. “Oh, yes...of course,” he said softly as he stared at the image of a complex machine pattern superimposed over a bursting star that had appeared on the touchscreen in front of him, the seal of the Collective. As Prosecutor, the young man had the sole authority to carry out executions, a process he knew was as simple as placing his thumb against the digital seal, but one he had never had to do in his seven years since leaving the academy. Of course, he had heard of other prosecutors performing the task, with increasing frequency these days, and some even bragged of the thousand plus they had condemned with a single touch, but still the weight of two hundred forty-seven lives now on his thumb made it seemingly impossible for him to raise his hand. He could feel the eyes of the crew on the bridge burning through him, the captain rapping his knuckles on his armrest as he waited with barely suppressed irritation.
The prosecutor knew any further delay would only cast suspicions on his ability and hinder his, until now, relatively exemplary career, so with every ounce of strength he could summon, he raised his hand and calmed the tremors shaking through it. With a breath, he silently gave a prayer his great-grandmother had once told him as a boy. This would be enough of an infraction to have earned him a trip to the reeducator had there been a psychreader on board, but fortunately the bounty hunters scoffed at such Collective means of mental control. He then pushed his thumb against the seal, holding it until the symbol disappeared with a soft beep. His eyes glazed over as he placed his hands back down, his gaze still on the vidscreen now displaying multiple camera feeds from the cargo hold, but his mind drifting far away from Black Maria, a coping mechanism often used when Alber was faced with the realities his constitution couldn’t withstand.
Within the cargo hold, lights flashed and warning sirens blared, shaking the occupants out of their stupors. While what was coming was obvious, it still took a moment to register and generated many different reactions when it did. Some ran and pounded on the walls furthest from the bay doors now slowly beginning to open with a hiss of escaping atmosphere, the space beyond neither home nor the prison they expected. Others attempted to wrap themselves in the cargo netting or fought each other to hold on to the toilets or locked sanipods, the only objects available. However, the netting weave was too small and the fixtures too slick to provide any real purchase against the unrelenting vacuum of space pulling them towards their inevitable death. The majority simply held those close to them as they were violently lifted and forced out of the now-open doors. Some held strangers, becoming brothers and sisters in a shared fate, while others had the embrace of someone they loved. Two figures in particular locked together, managing to maintain their grip on one another as they were ejected from the ship, and then simply stared upon the other, his furrowed brow relaxing slightly under her pale blue gaze, as their expressions froze over in silence.
Watching as the last biosign went red, the captain rose from his seat once more. “Set course for Mos,” he said, voice more troubled by financial concerns than anything else. “I’ll be in my quarters,” he added as the navigator set course for the ship’s homeport within the Collective core. As he walked, he spared a glance to the still vacant prosecutor, lips curling in a dark sneer, but said nothing. His mind turned towards the ventures he could partake in once rid of the man, something which the captain suspected would soon come to pass.
Outside the ship, two hundred forty-seven frozen corpses floated silently behind as the Black Maria’s antimatter reactors glowed to life. Most were instantly vaporized with the ship’s jump, the same forces rending time and space doing the same to their much more fragile frozen bodies. Others were carried by the grav wave either into the atmosphere, burning up as a tiny invisible shooting star, or out into the blackness of space, an empty vessel starting an unknowable journey, but no consciousness to comprehend it.
In the settlement far below, a boy of about ten stares up into the clear midmorning sky. He stands tall for his age, fortunately not tall enough to be mistaken as an adult, and his brow furrowed with stress beyond his years. His pale blue eyes squint against the glare of the sun, the Black Maria’s jump flash just barely perceptible to his gaze.