The Gatekeeper Chronicles Book 1: Escape from Prison Base Luna Read online

  He brought his fighter into another ninety degree ascent to put as much distance between him and the wounded freighter as possible; climbing out of range of the pulse cannons.

  Mackey figured now might be a good time to make radio contact with Polanco. “Lunar Command. Opal is down. Engines and missile launcher have been disabled per protocol.”

  “Damn it, Mackey,” Polanco yelled into the radio. “I gave you a direct order to not fire on that ship.”

  Mackey was glad there were no cameras in the cockpit, or else Polanco would’ve seen him grinning. “Sorry, sir. My radio must’ve been knocked out by the radiation from the missile I took out. I did not receive that order. Opal is at full stop. I suggest you alert the Navy as to her condition.”

  Polanco’s response was interrupted by another alert from his display. Mackey knew it couldn’t be a proximity warning. The freighter’s pulse cannons couldn’t reach him at this range or angle and the missile launcher was out of commission.

  But this warning was different. The scans showed the Opal’s nuclear core was in rapid meltdown.

  Mackey turned away in time as a blue light shot out from the center of the freighter a second before the ship blew apart, only to be swallowed by a large circle of blue light a millisecond later. He maxed out his thrusters, climbing higher as his ship was buffeted at the end of the energy wave from the freighter’s exploding core.

  “Oops.”

  Polanco dropped all formalities and yelled into the radio, “What the hell was that? What did you just do?”

  “All I did was take out the freighter’s missile systems and engines with the minis,” Mackey explained. “The reactor must’ve balked at the energy fluctuations and blown.”

  “You sure that’s all?” Polanco pressed. “You’ve got a habit of customizing your ships.”

  Mackey eased the Prowler out of the ascent and brought it back to an even keel. He knew the transmission was being recorded, so he chose his words carefully. “A star fighter doesn’t have the capacity to carry enough payload to take out a freighter, boss. Mini-cannons didn’t cause the ship’s core to explode.”

  “Christ, what a mess. I’m going to have a hell of a lot to explain to Terran Oversight. I’m already getting pinged about that explosion from Carson all the way back on Earth.”

  Mackey knew there were at least a hundred reasons why the freighter had exploded. Most of them led back to the core already being overtaxed by providing enough energy for the six pulse cannons that had been retrofitted to the ship’s exterior. The sudden seizure of the engines probably threw the core out of balance. The excess energy suddenly had nowhere to go and the core exploded.

  But there was no way anyone could prove what happened until they took a look at the data from his Prowler’s sensors. Even then it would be an educated guess because the ship – and everyone on it – had been atomized.

  But Polanco wasn’t an engineer. He was a bureaucrat looking to cover his ass. Mackey didn’t waste time speculating. “What do you want me to do now, boss? Fly back to Command for a debrief or check out that transmitter at the prison?”

  He hoped Polanco would’ve just sent someone else to check on the damned transmitter, but he wasn’t surprised when he said, “If I had anyone else to send to check out the transmitter, I would’ve sent them by now. Was your ship damaged in the freighter blast?”

  He selected the ‘Diagnostic’ button on his screen and reported what he saw. “No apparent signs of damage and my core is running steady. My shields seem to have kept most of the radiation at bay and all systems are go. I’m running a diagnostic anyway just to be sure.”

  “In that case, check out the prison transmitter, but don’t take all day. Get your ass back here as soon as you can for a debriefing. You’ve got a hell of a lot to answer for today, young man.”

  Mackey had to laugh. He was a month away from turning thirty one. No one had called him a young man in a long time. “Roger, that, Lunar Command. I’ll report from the prison when we get the transmitter up and running.”

  Mackey killed the transmission and plotted a course for the Fra Mauro Prison Base. Nothing but the best assignments for him.

  Chapter 2

  Fra Mauro Prison Complex was like most structures on the lunar surface. It was a squat, bland hanger-like building dug into the gray lunar landscape. The prison structure was seven stories in total, but only half a story was above ground. The Marshall Service added a storage annex several years before for spare ships and other material. It was also where Polanco had ordered Velda to be stored until Mackey gave him access to her systems.

  Since the moon didn’t have an atmosphere to repel asteroids and other smaller rocks, taller buildings were in danger of getting damaged unless they were shielded somehow. The resorts of Lake Armstrong and Aldrin had electromagnetic shields, but Fra Mauro Prison didn’t have that kind of budget. Not for a prison that housed the worst of the worst: cartel members, privateers, and anarchists, as well as the usual mass murderers and other criminals best housed off-planet. Fra Mauro was the basket with all the rotten eggs.

  Mackey hated this part of the moon. The desolation didn’t bother him because the entire moon was a desolate rock. That was the problem. For most of its history, humanity had revered the moon. Some worshipped it and others feared it, but either way, it was important to the way life on Earth evolved. Crops planted and sea voyages planned according to the phases of the strange white orb in the sky. Later, humans dreamed of what it might be like up there. How wonderful it would be to live there, to start over in such a grand, astral place.

  After Mankind made it to the moon, it quickly tired of it like a child tires of a new toy a month after Christmas. Once technology advanced to the point where the moon could be colonized, the wonder of the place had been revived. It became what the American West had once been; a sprawling frontier where new dreams could be imagined and new fortunes could be made.

  But once scientists learned how to bend space to decrease the travel time to Mars to less than a week, the moon took a back seat again to yet another set of dreams. Earth was swept by ‘Martian Fever’ and the moon was expendable once more.

  It had been thirty years since the last major lunar colonization effort had taken place. The moon was just a stopover on the way to the mighty Red Planet and all of the promise it held. Thousands of millions of tons of mining, military, and engineering resources went through the Gate every day to Mars, with no signs of Martian Fever breaking any time soon.

  Mackey had caught it, too. He wanted to be part of the Marshall Service’s efforts to keep peace among the colonies by keeping criminals at bay. But if the price for that chance was to surrender his dream - to hand over his hard work to a gaggle of scientists who would parse his technological advancements into digestible bits for the benefit of all except him – then Mars would have to wait. He’d worked too hard to escape his father’s shadow to let that happen.

  He’d find his own way to the Red Planet one day, even if he had to leave the Service to do it. Until then, he was under Polanco’s thumb. And for now, he had a downed transmitter on a near-forgotten moon to investigate.

  ****

  As he approached the prison base, Mackey cut power to his engines and brought the Prowler to a hover above the complex. He saw lights in the command module and standard warning lights blinking atop the many antenna arrays throughout the complex. A steady trail of vapor escaped from the facility’s waste ducts. At least the power was on. If Polanco hadn’t told him there was a problem, he wouldn’t have known it.

  He brought the Prowler around and let the guidance system guide the ship onto the subterranean airlock that stuck out from the surface like a turtle shell.

  His screen turned green as soon as the airlock was sealed and activated. Mackey undid his harness and set his blast helmet aside. As he climbed out of the cockpit, he stretched his back. Sitting in weightlessness killed his joints. Zero gravity had lost its allure for him long ago.
r />   He took his slug gun from the holster strapped to his thigh and waited for the biosensor in the grip to activate it. Marshall protocol mandated that pilots had to secure all weapons before take-off to avoid accidental discharge in flight. Although he didn’t obey every rule in the book, that one made sense.

  He went to the gun locker at the back of the ship and placed his thumb on the bio-scanner. The door slid open to reveal the standard assortment of weaponry every Prowler featured: gas gun, gas canisters for riot suppression, two additional slug guns with ten boxes of spare ammunition of both rubber and charged rounds. Mackey’s favorite was the old fashioned Remington .12 gauge shotgun with standard ammunition. He removed the shotgun from the locker and fed the magnum cartridges into the weapon.

  The reliability of the Remington with him made him feel better. Technology had improved firearms a great deal over the centuries. Slug guns were favored in pressurized environments - like space stations and the lunar colony - where one stray round could go through a wall and depressurize the entire facility. Slugs were denser than bullets and traveled at a slower velocity, but delivered a hell of a punch without the depressurization threat. Shotguns were permitted because the pellets spread when fired and posed less of a threat to the re-enforced walls.

  Mackey hit the button that opened the airlock hatch and climbed down the ladder to the subterranean tunnel leading to the prison’s control hub. The tunnel was the same as any tunnel in the rest of the complex; a pressurized, precast shell the construction drones laid in a trench fifty years before. The entire facility consisted of three large pre-fabricated circular buildings, with the storage facility where Velda was housed at the far end of the complex. All of the buildings were attached by subterranean tunnel.

  The inside of the tunnel was dull gray and brightly lit. It wasn’t pretty, but the damned things lasted forever with a minimum of maintenance. And on the moon, just like on Earth, people didn’t like to spend a lot of money to house prisoners.

  He reached the terminal at the end of the hallway and allowed it to scan his retina, giving him access to the terminal and the prison’s control unit inside.

  Under normal circumstances, he would’ve simply walked inside, but these weren’t normal circumstances. The prison had been out of communication with Lunar Command for over three hours. It was probably just a busted transmitter or a glitch in the system. It could also be a full scale riot just behind the doors. Mackey always made it a point to know what he was walking into ahead of time.

  As a Captain in the Marshall Service, Mackey had access to run a limited diagnostic on the facility’s major functions from the terminal. A systems check showed all external seals on the facility were working. The duty log showed Officer Owen Johnson was the duty officer that day; a newbie from the academy. Mackey knew Johnson was new because an image of the man’s face hadn’t been uploaded to the duty roster yet. Polanco liked to put rookies in charge of the prison. They couldn’t do much harm and they could study convicts safely before heading into the field. Mackey had served at a similar facility in Nevada before becoming a Gate Keeper.

  He ran a log of the prison’s automated prisoner supervision drones to see if they’d carried out their duties as scheduled. Everything looked normal. The prison was automated so that a single officer could run the entire facility from a console in the main hub without ever seeing an inmate. Drones prepared and delivered pre-programmed rations to prisoners through slots in their doors. Inmates were confined to their cells and weren’t allowed to congregate or speak to other prisoners. Each of the facility’s four hundred prisoners was allowed into the central common area for thirty minutes each day. Only twenty five were allowed out at any given time and were released at random. The practice cut down on the likelihood of gang formation and violence.

  Any infraction or even bending of the rules and the guard pushed a button. They were gassed unconscious and dragged back to their cells by the drones. They were then held in their cells in perpetual darkness for the next month.

  If a prisoner misbehaved or damaged their cells, the officer in charge could retract their bed, sink, and toilet into the wall; leaving the prisoner in solitary confinement within his own cell. All medicine was administered via aerosol spray from vents in each cell. There were no environment suits in the facility, except one for the officer in the command module. Escape from Fra Mauro was virtually impossible.

  All the officer-in-charge had to do was monitor the entire operation, make sure the drones did their jobs and the prisoners behaved themselves. There hadn’t been a viable escape attempt or riot in the prison’s fifty year history.

  Many of the governments back on Earth had labeled the facility draconian. They complained about the inhuman treatment of the prisoners and issued repeated calls to have the prison shut down. But every one of those same countries kept sending the worst of their worst to this inescapable hell whenever there was an open cell. Governments had been threatening to close the place for forty years, but no one had gotten around to actually doing it.

  Every scan he ran from the hallway terminal came back fine. The facility was functioning properly. The prisoners seemed to have been fed and in their cells. Power was on and oxygen was flowing. It was probably just a downed transmitter after all.

  From the home screen on the monitor, he selected the ‘OPEN DOOR’ option. The door slid open with a gentle hiss and he stepped inside.

  Chapter 3

  The air in the prison smelled the same as the air in the hallway. Slightly stale with a hint of burned rubber and plastic. Some people got used to the smell, but Mackey never had. It was one of the many reasons why he wanted off that rock and to serve in the Martian colony where everything was new and clean and spacious. Every building on Luna, even the high-end developments in Aldrin, was cramped and spare with the ever present hum of the air scrubbers that kept you alive.

  Mackey held his Remington low, but ready as he walked through the entryway to the heart of the command module. This last hatch was kept locked by an old fashioned keypad that couldn’t be hacked. It wasn’t tied into the rest of the facility’s mainframe and could only be opened by punching in the correct code. This door and all doors leading into and from the prison itself had the same fail safe measure. Even in the late twenty-second century, technology from the twentieth century still had a place.

  Mackey entered the code and the bulkhead buzzed. He pushed the hatch in, expecting to see Duty Officer Johnson at the console. Maybe checking the monitors or surfing the datanet to kill time.

  Mackey didn’t expect to see Officer Johnson with his shoulder against the hatch leading to the prison, pushing with all of his might to keep it from opening any further.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Johnson yelled, “but you’d better get your ass over here because we’ve got a problem.”

  Mackey laid the Remington against the wall and bolted across the small room, throwing his shoulder against the door. The sudden impact was enough to get the hatch shut. Johnson spun the wheel to engage the primary lock, but knew that could be undone by the wheel on the other side as well.

  He quickly entered the code in the keypad, which shut the door for good.

  Dozens of hands slapped and pounded the other side of the hatch as Johnson leaned against it, catching his breath.

  Mackey got his first look at Officer Johnson. He didn’t look like any rookie officer Mackey had ever seen. The black man was bald-headed and well-muscled; wearing the familiar green jumper that prison officers wore – as opposed to the black flight suit pilots like Mackey wore. Marshall jump suits were designed for comfort, but Johnson’s seemed too small for his muscular build.

  A long white scar ran from behind his left ear down past his collar. He looked to have been at least thirty, well past the optimum recruitment age for the Marshall Service. That meant Johnson must’ve been a veteran, probably of the Pan American War. The Marshalls didn’t usually take veterans, preferring raw recruits who were easier to m
old into the Marshall system than hardened veterans who knew how to handle themselves.

  Mackey let Johnson catch his breath before asking, “What the hell happened here?”

  Johnson stood up to his full height, which was half a foot taller than Mackey’s six feet. He was also much wider, putting him at six feet, six inches tall and about two hundred and forty pounds of solid muscle.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” Johnson said. “One minute, everything was running fine, then I get an alarm telling me the communications array is down. Then the whole place goes dark and all the systems reboot. Next thing I know, the animals are out of their cages and they start working on that door. Luckily you got here when you did or they would’ve gotten me.”

  “You sure? Cell systems are on a different power grid than the rest of the prison.” Rookie or not, Johnson should’ve known that.

  “I don’t care whether they are or not,” Johnson said. “That’s what happened and it happened fast.”

  Johnson might have been a rookie and this was his first day on the job, but what he’d said just didn’t make sense. But as big as he was, he still looked shook up over it and that was understandable. Mackey tried putting the big man at ease by offering his hand to him. “Captain Kyle Mackey, Gate Keeper Unit. I was patrolling the Gate when Lunar Command told me about the downed transmitter. They sent me here to help.”

  The big man’s grip impressed Mackey. “Name’s Johnson and this ain’t the kind of first day I expected.”

  “That’s the job. Years of boredom followed by a few seconds of terror.” Mackey watched Johnson flex his sore left arm. The bicep was nearly as big as Mackey’s head. “Where’d you serve before you joined up?”

  Johnson grinned, motioned at his scar. “That obvious, huh? I was Navy ICAR. It was my team that tried to get back the Nebula last year. Got hurt during the boarding and got mustered out a year ago. The Marshalls were hiring, so I joined up. Here I am.”