The Callisto Protocol

CH/\PTER 07: Elias

This level of the cellblock looked about as appealing as the previous one.

He came to the bottom of the stairs, his stance defensive, ready for anything. What he found was more of the same: freshly spilled blood, broken bodies, sparking machinery. Utter chaos. Only this time he found a man inside a cell who wasn't either dead or dying.

"Hey! Over here, bruv!" he called, sticking an arm out between the bars and gesturing urgently. Jacob jogged over, his mind still settling into place, (he was sure that it wouldn't fully settle as long as he was in this kind of environment, which was not a bad thing). "Yo, what the fuck is going on!?" the inmate demanded as soon as Jacob was closer.

"I have no goddamned clue!" Jacob replied, then coughed a few times and took a quick look around, paranoid suddenly that this might be some kind of a trap. Maybe there was another inmate or, shit, even a crazed guard somewhere nearby, using this guy as bait, even if he didn't realize it.

But they remained alone, the shadows held nothing. For now.

"My fucking ship crashed," he continued, "I got captured, put through fucking wringer, and thrown in here! I literally just woke up in my cell two minutes ago!"

"Aw shit," the man replied, for a moment losing his focus and looking past Jacob anxiously. Almost as quickly, his resolve returned and he looked Jacob squarely in the eye. "Okay look man, I've been in this place half my goddamn life. You're the pilot they fished out of the snow and brought in, yeah?"

"Yeah, I'm a pilot," Jacob grunted.

Like that fucking mattered anymore. His ship was gone, his best friend was dead, his life was–

"Don't get lost, bruv!" the man said urgently. "Look, I can get us out of here. I know this place like the back of my hand. I've been working on a plan to get out for years now." He spoke quickly, concisely. Jacob felt a bolt of fear shoot through him as the man reached behind himself suddenly. His hand came back with a wrench, the end of which had been sharpened to a fine point. "You help me, I help you, yeah?" he asked, offering the shiv through the bars to Jacob.

He studied it for just a moment, then studied the man in question. He had a head of short, dark hair that was staring to go gray in some places. He was a few inches shorter than Jacob and a lot leaner, his body hard and trim beneath his jumpsuit. His skin was dark brown and scarred in several places. His accent put him as growing up in one of the British colonies. Not Earth though, he had that spaceborn aura that people born on stations or moons seemed to have, some indefinable thing that they couldn't seem to shake.

By his own admission, he'd been in the hardest prison in the solar system for half his life, and it seemed like it had been a long life. Could he trust this guy? Did it matter? Jacob didn't know jack from shit in this place. Did he really have a choice?

He took the shiv. "Okay," he said.

"You can use this to get inside the control room in the tower there," the man replied, releasing it reluctantly. "But don't lose it, might save your life."

"Got it," he replied, studying the shiv for a moment. It was a good, solid tool. He wasn't happy about the fact that he knew for sure he could, and would, kill a man easily with it. "What's the actual plan?"

"I can get us a ship but it'll take a bit to explain and this place is falling apart," he replied. "For now, go over to that gate right there," he said, pointing to his left. Jacob turned and looked, spying a metal dividing wall that cut off access from this part of the cellblock to the next just across the from the base of the stairwell he'd traversed. "Get through it, and then immediately to the right is a walkway to the control tower. It's open, I been looking at it for a fucking hour now. Get in the tower, find the control panel, open my cell. Then we can meet up and get the fuck outta this place."