“27!”
This was the moment 27 had been waiting for; the end to her suffering on this mudball of a planet. The shout reverberated in the immense caverns of Kyll, and far, far above bats flew around the spotlights suspended a hundred feet over the shouter. Before the first echo died a second one rang out.
“27! Report to the Whipping Block!”
Officially, the giant square stone in the center of the mining pit was called the Assembly Platform, but the guards and prisoners of Kyll had gotten used to calling it the Whipping Block. Mostly for the numerous times a forgetful or unlucky offender was stripped down and lashed till their blood ran in red lines across the Block. Every miserable soul shrank back into the deepest pits of their minds at the mention of the Block, but not 27: not she.
Slowly, the young girl straightened up; dropping the pickaxe she’d been working with. With her hazel eyes burning up with excitement, she strode across the muddy ground towards the Block. Whispers and murmurs flowed around her as she passed the throngs of workers, each too terrified to work as they watched her march up to the Block. The glaring electric lights revealed the paleness of her face, but it was a face drawn with a fierce determination.
27 jumped, put one hand on the top of the six-foot Block and pulled herself up, grunting a slight bit from the stiffness of the beating only the night before. Even though she was only a woman (and not much of one; barely a slip of a girl) her arms were strong and rippled with muscles brought out by the heavy labor of Kyll.
In the exact center was a stake propped up with two-ton ammunition crates and around it a menacing circle of guardsmen. The man who’d called out her number was a red-faced general with a black-handled, cruel-looking whip coiled up under his arm.
“27!” the general shouted for the third time, even thought she was close enough to punch his beet-red nose in. “You have been condemned to death on the stake for harming a senior officer–” 27 snickered. “–and repeated insubordinate behavior after numerous punishments of varying degrees of severity! Do you have anything to say for yourself!”
His last sentence was a question, but in no way did he mean it as one: he’d had as much crap from 27 as he would take, and she knew it. Without waiting for her to answer, three of the guard grabbed her dirty linen prison dress and tore it down to her feet, flinging the repulsive thing away as if it were infected with a contagious skin disease (which, given the nature of Kyll prison-cells, might have been true). Even then, standing naked in front of a score of men, 27 did not flinch. Hers was a resolved fate, a grim one, an unshakable tower in the veritable explosion of earthquakes around her.
“Step up to the stake,” the general shrieked, and his voiced seemed to echo in mining pit. “Tie her.”
The latter command was directed to the men who’d so neatly undressed her. Grinning from ear to ear, they quickly complied, making the thin ropes cut like wire into 27’s white wrists.
Slowly the general unwound the whip, snapping it in the air for effect. Make no mistake, he was the worst coward from one end of the galaxy to the other, but you couldn’t find a better crack at the whip than from his cruel hands. For punishments he’d been relenting, and had comparatively drawn only a little blood. But now it was time to kill, and he would be as merciless and harsh as the iron shards of his weapon.
Swish! Snik!
A groan rose from the multitude of people surrounding the Block, some of the weaker among then fainted, and even a few of the younger guards paled at the sight of the dirty-brown blood that streaked the small of 27’s back, but 27 herself gripped her lower lip tightly with her teeth and set her mind into a lock. Her entire back burned up with fire, and she’d only tasted the whip, but she knew it would be over sooner than anybody –especially she– hoped.
Swish! Snik!
The whip sang out again, doubling the number of strokes on her body, and opening her soul to death ever so wider. The pain was unreal to 27, almost as if she was set aside from her own body, and yet, at the same time, feeling every deep cut so intimately she could count the knots on the whip.
A hundred times the whip made an ugly trace on 27. Each time the whip sizzled through the air, throwing specks of blood up to a hundred feet away. 27’s lips bled as ardently as her back now, pierced over and over by her pain-clenched teeth. Her back was a pulpy mess of red and pinkish-grey, and the horrible whitish humps of her spine showed through, a sight that sickened most of the guards to the point that even the hardened ones looked away. They were fiends and brutes all of them, but deep inside their hearts they were craven cowards.
“Enough!” one prisoner screamed, but the general didn’t even register the sympathetic plead.
On and on the strokes came, stinging 27 to the point that her nerves no longer carried the pain to her mind. Her hands slipped down the stake until she was kneeling in the pool of her own blood, but still the merciless red-faced general continued, blowing and snorting with the effort each stroke required.
Finally, at stroke number one-hundred-twenty-seven, 27’s indomitable spirit fell under five times the normal death-quota. Average death-whippings ended when the prisoner fell screaming to the ground, his insides spilling out from the rents in his carcass, but it was always below twenty-five whippings –the bodies gave out long after the minds of the poor devils did.
The circle of guards and the red-faced general watched as 27 stared up at them through her brilliant eyes, flashing death warnings and curses to them all without saying a word. Each man that she stared at dropped his gaze or look away, save one: the general. After mopping his perspiring face on a large white napkin, the blood-spattered man looked down on 27’s face with a cruel smirk on his lips. He kicked her head with the tip of his boot and enjoyed the sudden, hapless anger that flew into her gaze.
“Take her away,” 27 heard him say, faintly, as though through a murky distance of water. “Dump her into the Pit.”
Trembling, white hands cut her bonds and hoisted her body into the air, sending her head over heels down an impressive drop that ended only when human sight did. The guards stood around aimlessly, listening to the swish of 27’s body as she fell. Long did they listen, but never a man among them heard her hit the rocks below that ground her into pulp. Not one of them ever saw her again…in that body.
I know it doesn't sound sci-fi, but it will in the later chapters.
*terrible pun*
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