The Children of Zegandaria - Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (world best books to read txt) 📗

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE: THE UNMASKING

Detective Boss was buried in an unusual place in the prison, and this was the occasion of much conflict between the wardEn's men and some of the prisoners themselves involved in the plot.

He would have been forgotten by everyone, but the people on his staff decided to show loyalty and go to the trouble of looking for him. And so it was to be.

The detective had died lonely and useless in the company of a suspicious prisoner who just clearly wasn't all his. Shortly before his demise, he had even discovered that this same prisoner was just a cleverly crafted bogeyman who had been mouthing his false words, causing him to waste valuable time.

But Boss had come far, and the men behind him craved not so much for illusory justice as to get the job done. That was the main thing.

Being an assassin had its charms, but it also required a certain psyche. Boss's team decided to stage a raid on the prison, but they had to prepare well. The guards were too strong and impenetrable.

There were highly evolved robot androids roaming around, equipped with artificial intelligence that could learn and evolve. Their number was unknown.

Boss' team felt a certain amount of fear because the prison could have been a graveyard for themselves.

The prison's layout was obviously complex enough, not least confusing as the outer hoop of guard towers included as many as fourteen different facilities and the location of the central building had to be taken into account.

The futuristic equanate tunnels that connected its various wings were hexagram-shaped and covered with thick layers of kevlarite. Perhaps this was the best way to keep some unscrupulous prisoners from thinking of escape.

Imaya, Cowboy, Rento and the others had been instructed to take matters into their own hands in the event of their leader's eventual death. Big John and Averia Downs were with them, and so was Milo. They were all in all six people, which wasn’t enough.

Before the so-called quarantine procedure, they noticed what was actually happening to their boss. He had been brought into what was called the "Space Yard" - it was a special place where the prisoners held their rendezvous. Each one of them was entitled to one and only one summons for His entire stay here - and then only if his behaviour was good. Some of them even imagined they were up among the stars and wished to escape this hell down here. Closing their eyes, they were reluctant to return to their social way of life because they realized they were dying a little bit every day.

The ceiling was dotted with long green and well-secured irEnic lamps that cast lazy glares, like the eyes of a cat about to pounce.

There were quite a few cases of people who had ended their lives from an inability to adjust their psyches to a place like this.

In the past there was what was called hikikomori[64] which was characterised by voluntary renunciation of life and self-isolation, and now Shore Took 2 prison had re-educated the psyche of its residents and they were virtually unwilling to leave it. They had developed a peculiar syndrome that this here was their home and they felt normal amongst their own kind.

The prison cemetery was one of the saddest places that could possibly exist.

The detective's associates wished the prison authorities would take them there. They received an emphatic refusal, but after Imaya presented an electronic certificate personally from Doctor Gad ‘Di Enn  the management changed their position and allowed them to take a look, but for no more than a quarter of an hour.

The cemetery park was like the skeleton of a giant dead mastodon, whose sternum bones were half driven into the ground and he had buried his skull in the dirt - that's what the massive kevlarite beams looked like, which were semi-oval in shape and were driven some distance between the respective cemetery plots.

In the whole cemetery there was room enough for about four thousand dead, so really in that respect the prisoners had nothing to complain about. Every day various acts were done which might provoke an escalation of the conflict with the warders, who, for a corresponding bribe, provided this last refuge for the "condemned martyrs."

After confessing to the priest Bonayas, very often the executions took place the very next morning. But what remained hidden to view was their attitude to life in general. They had no particular desire to live.

They were believed to follow their own particular rituals of conscious purification before passing into eternal life.

Some even invoked the god Erduk in their pleas for salvation, but nothing was able to respect them except the thought of an imminent deliverance.

The execution procedure itself was done by injection with HHermonad’s’s poison or they were simply allowed to enter the quiet room. This room was completely soundproof and no one was spent longer than an hour in it. Once they brought a prisoner inside and after two hours he was dead. It wasn't clear exactly what had happened, but he was basically found dead, and there were no signs of violEnce on his body.

Boss's team encountered a strange wardEn in one of the corridors on the way to the cemetery park.

- "Beware," he whispered to them, "this place is cursed. If I were you, I'd get the hell out of here."

His face was hidden behind the visor of his high-tech spacesuit and illuminated by a pale greenish light. Without waiting for a reply, he walked away with quick steps.

They stared at each other. They knew it all too well without him telling them.

Then they began to take in the strange metamorphosis that unfolded before their eyes.

Boss had walked into a death row cell, and it was no accident. It was she who was beyond the jurisdiction even of Om Gur Nal. It was believed that no one had the right to interfere with the wardEn when he was guided by the statutory procedure.

Joseph Zerdakil's own father was the Jail Superintendent Jeramiah Zerdakil who knew no mercy and was capable of anything for the sake of maintaining his position.

"Shore Tuk 2" served as a moral corrective to the New Order imposed by Om Gur Nal. And so it had to be.

In his own mind, Jeramiah Zerdakil was something of an archangel dispensing justice. He wanted to be remembered as the one who purged the viciousness and vulgarity from this place.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX: JOSEPH ZERDAKIL

As the old saying went, "The pear tree didn't fall farther than the tree," and Joseph had inherited his father's bloodthirstiness at a young age. "The old man" as he called him had taken him places to make him a man. And he had definitely tried to build a character of a killer and a maniac in his offspring. Joseph spent his childhood basically understanding the difference between the poor and the rich and the reasons for that inequality. Many had passed through the neighborhood where he had grown up, so he could clearly appreciate the quite different types he had encountered. Once he graduated from Ronson College, where most of the thugs sent their kids, he realized that he still had a purpose in life - that of killing.

The two of them, along with Swept Ames, had taken it upon themselves to form a hit squad to handle investigations and criminal raids, as Joseph was extremely intelligent.

He had excelled at various languages back in college and had made great strides in mastering the intergalactic language and the common universal language. He was also fluent in a few rarer dialects such as Myeranian, Ceburnag and Ufurganian. There was also no doubt that with his deep knowledge of languages, he could have pursued a career as a diplomat, but such were not his father's plans.

Though extremely bloodthirsty, he did not fall into raptures when Joseph hinted his intentions to him.

"Bounty hunters aren’t as revered as they once were," his parent stated haughtily. "I'm sure you can do better than that. But if it will temper your character, then I'm all for it. Just be careful you don't lose direction in life.," and patted him on the shoulder paternally.

The youngling felt this as a kind of encouragement and set about clearing up the formalities with Swept Ames.

At the school in question he also met Namuro Kenji - this was the son of the famous Vice Admiral Kenji Nolsuro[65] Even then Namuro's demeanor was disgusting. His father had long since died of an incurable disease - he had caught some strange space plague, perhaps on one of his walks on Ufur Gan, and from then on things in his life went downhill. Namuro was a little younger than Joseph - maybe no more than a year, but he passed for the head of the school and took every chance to prove it. He wished to become the absolute master of the situation and he did!

At one of their meetings, the gang of Swept Ames inquired quite seriously whether they should not include him in their raids and other operations. But he had to go through the initiation procedure.

It took them a while to grasp that Namuro's mentality was more of a creepy school bully and nothing else. He also liked to educate himself, but was on the verge of being expelled on several occasions.

Still, they decided to give him a chance and test his capabilities at a special ceremony.

There was an isolated hall in Enzok Ra where the gatherings were made between the gang members who were constantly forced to change their territory to survive.

Namuro had to repeat the gang's simple formula:

"I vow to always be loyal to my brothers, to help them to the best of my ability, not to condemn their actions without thinking them through, and not to betray anyone in the group to outsiders. I have sworn!"

Then they had to give him a new spacesuit with hidden initials to show his affiliation with their brotherhood. Somewhere in there, he was to undergo a wrist burn that symbolized his breaking away from worldly mores and starting a whole new life for him.

Namuro went through all these ordeals with gritted teeth because he was a man and he did not tolerate failure.

So he became a member of them and began to go deep into the activities of the group.

At first, like all young men, they were sniffing around Enzok Ra for some holy order, but later they decided to organize things and