Escaping from prison was the easy part. Krontayeff Camp #473 is deep in the Jurgathon Desert. High thick walls and kraal-sharpened fences were not part of its design. The Jurgathon was the real barrier. Four hundred vrusts of sand, volcanic rock, scorpians and the heat of the two suns was thought to be more than enough to keep anyone from escaping. Few had tried. None had succeeded. Until me.
Maybe convicts are supposed to claim their innocence. If so, I never got the instructions to do so. And it’s not as if I murdered little old ladies like some of the other inmates had. I made a comment to a neighbor that was construed as anti-state and reported to State Security as such. At my very short trial, the comment was read into evidence, rather embellished from what I’d actually said, but even that was tame compared to what I really thought of the Leader.
I was of course subject to the usual thuggish beatings, whippings and “fun with electricity” that State Security is so famous for while I was being held in the sub-basement of the citizen governor’s summer headquarters, and I must admit that I was slightly comforted by the fact that the judge’s traditional spit in my face was probably mostly water given the huge number of sentences he handed down that day. No man can be asked to produce that much saliva without outside assistance.
After the obligatory “20 years or the people’s wisdom, whichever is longer,” I joined the five hundred or so other prisoners for the thousand-vrust journey east across the grasslands of Inner Vaangrod, the scrubland of Outer Vaangrod and finally deep into the Jurgathon. Through much of Vaangrod we were packed into box cars belonging to State Security but marked as owned by the People’s Revolutionary Abbotoir of Inner and Outer Vaangrod. After two hot days without food or water (12 bodies were pulled from my car) we were each given a ghrü (pressed dates and grain, formed into a brick about the size of a bar of soap) and a cup of brackish water. We spent the night in a kraal compound and left the next morning before the first sun rose, walking east into the Jurgathon while about 30 guards rode Ekvins and a dozen more rode the giant Paahks carrying everything needed to resupply Krontayeff Camp #473 until the next batch of prisoners was sent there.
As I was later to find out, those batches were sent on no fixed schedule. In the six years I spent at 473, the shortest interval between the arrival of new prisoners was six days. The longest was eight and a half months.
4
Q
(2 players - 2 are all in)
T
