Red Sky: Chapter 7
A bright light and a harsh buzz. No warning. No gentle awakening from a restful night’s sleep. In a millisecond all lights switched on. There was a brief sense of disorientation as the combination of light and noise forced me to wake against my body’s will. A yellow uniform was placed outside my cell. Next to the uniform was a small white bottle. There was a straw sticking out of its top.
The shields lifted. “Get dressed,” Hades said.
I took off my orange jumpsuit and slid on the yellow pants and work shirt. I put my shoes back on and looked at the orange jumpsuit lying on my bed. I looked down at the yellow uniform as it hung off my body. These were the only two pairs of clothes I would have for the next five years.
We were ordered to stand at attention outside our cells. I expected Hades to give us an order to march, but there was no order to march. He walked towards the back wall. There were three small latches in the wall. Hades pulled on one of the latches. It opened a door no larger than one meter by one meter and a naked man fell out and crumpled to the floor. With a touch of an electrified lance, the man jumped to his feet, his legs wobbly, his posture still bent. Another touch and the man was standing straight.
A uniform was thrown to his feet. He tried to put it on. Seconds turned to minutes as he struggled, his fingers and hands mangled from his time in the wall, his body trembling from exhaustion, fear, dehydration. When the man was dressed, Hades gave the order to march. Everyone picked up their bottles and started drinking from them so I did as well. I took a sip. It tasted of grass. I looked down the straw. The shake was purple. I was sipping purple grass.
We reversed our march from the previous day, this time walking out of the gray prison and into the red air of the red moon. It was hotter than the day before. I started sweating almost immediately. I heard a quiet hum and a laser chain tied us all together. My wrists snapped into place and my hands were restricted and my shoulders were pulled taught as the chain forced me into an orderly formation behind the prisoner in front of me. I looked at the back of his yellow uniform covered in patches of brown dirt. The red of the moon framing the picture in front of me.
I felt a pull on my wrists and the march began. The moon’s home planet, Janus, hung low on the horizon as a burnt orange monster. I was used to seeing our small grey moon high in the sky back on Earth. It was strange to have the positions reversed. I was worried the burnt orange monster would crash into us at any moment.
The march continued and we could see smokestacks blowing smoke into the air off in the distance. I followed one of those streams of exhaust as it made its way up to the red clouds. It disappeared, hitting the ceiling of the prison in the sky.
After thirty minutes we reached our destination. We stopped in front of four towers like needles pointing to the heavens above. Each line of inmates had their own tower. The fourth tower, the largest one, remained unused. Two of the guards entered the first tower and closed the door. Thirty seconds later the door opened and they had disappeared like a magician’s assistant.
Two by two, we were taken off the laser and tethered to the person next to us with a long rope. I was paired with the man behind me. He looked old, broken down. I stared at the lines on his face. The old man paid me no attention as we waited. He just stood and smiled. An unusual smile. It wasn’t a smile of happiness. It was the type of smile I had seen in my youth down at the market when I was selling the small amount of synthetic fruit that was available. Before we opened there would be lines of men and women with this awful perplexing mouth-watering smile as they waited for their only source of nutrition for the day. This was during the down-market period when food was scarce. Those faces never left me. They had been buried in my subconscious during the subsequent years of work and life. But there was that look again in the most unlikely of places, on the face of the man who stood tied to me while we waited for our day of forced labor to begin.
It was the first truly human moment I had seen on the red moon.
*
The doors closed shutting out the natural red light. We were bathed in the blue of the elevator. The inside was small and cylindrical with only enough room for the two of us. The old man turned to me with his crooked smile, “welcome to my office.”
And then the drop.
“It hurts, don’t it?” The old man shouted over the loud whir of the falling elevator.
The one hundred thousand meter drop into the heart of the moon left me queasy.
“I remember my first time. I thought I’d piss myself, but now, hell, it’s the highlight of my day.”
We hit the bottom. My new friend picked me off the floor. “My name is Max,” he said, as he offered his hand.
We stepped off the elevator and it shot back to the surface to capture its next two victims. There was a large open area. Inmates were milling around in a more informal way than they had above and tunnels branched off in all directions. The exposed rock was more like the dirt and soil of Earth than the red desert above. Everything was lit by freeze lights that lined the walls giving the mine a bluish tint.
“Every team is judged by their amount of Qalladium. No Qalladium and we’re in big trouble. The more Qalladium the more perks. So don’t get any ideas. We are down here to work.” Max led me over to a locker with mining tools. I was surprised by their simplicity. We had jumped through space and time to use simple pickaxes, hammers, chisels and shovels.
“Why can’t we use machines?”
“The magnetic field of the Qalladium does something to them. At least that’s what they say. It might be because it’s cheaper to use inmates. The reasons don’t matter. This is what you will do for the rest of your life, so take some pride in it. You don’t want to get caught with nothing to show for a day’s work.”
“Is that why they put that guy in confinement?”
Max laughed. “Cal? Hell, I don’t know why they put him in the box. Maybe it was because he didn’t mine enough. Maybe it was because they didn’t like the way he looked at them. Maybe it was to scare you new guys. You can get thrown in the box for any number of reasons and sometimes no reason at all.”
Max handed me a pickaxe, a sifter board and a freeze light. He piled more implements into a bag, slung the bag over his shoulder, and started walking. The best mining was at the farthest reaches where few would take the time or effort to go. Most of the groups stayed close to the elevators, which meant they would have to dig harder and longer in areas that had been thoroughly excavated. After an hour of walking, Max turned to me with that crooked smile once again.
“This is my favorite spot.”
He took out his hammer and chisel and went to work. We worked in seclusion. For sixteen hours we scraped, chipped, hammered and chiseled our way through rock. The dust was so thick you could see particles of dirt lingering in the air. My lips had the constant taste of soil on them. Little granules of sand popped in between my teeth. My ears grew numb from the sound of metal hitting rock then dirt over and over again like a metronome.
Max filled our time with a monologue that spanned everything from his favorite mining spots to various childhood friends from his days back on Earth. It was background music to our work. By the end of our first day, I knew more about Max’s childhood friends then I could remember about any of my own. I was also surprised to learn he was only a few years older than me.
“Some of us don’t age as well as others,” he said. “Of course, the two years I’ve spent here hasn’t helped.”
“You’ve only been here two years?” I tried not to stare at his face. The face of an old man tacked on to a younger body.
When we reached hour seventeen, with less than a palm’s worth of Qalladium, our collars buzzed.
“That means there’s an hour left. It’s time to head back.”
“I guess some modern technologies still work down here.”
“The collar. That always works.” Max showed me his crooked smile again.