Short Story: Hot Box

The last thing Gregor had expected from his sentence was boredom.

He’d been prepared for the initial shock. The grief, the despair, the rage, all those emotions he’d moved through without questioning them. Even the numbness that set in once he had reached his capacity for anguish made sense to Gregor.

But boredom. That was unexpected.

Gagarin didn’t have a proper jail. The colony’s planners hadn’t anticipated the first-wave pods to be used as long as they had, and they obviously hadn’t considered what shape the colony’s criminal justice system would take. The plan, as far as Gregor had been taught, had been to start colonizing Aspera using the initial drop pods, then ramp up local manufacturing of egg-shaped domiciles using local resources. By the time those habitats were done, subsequent orbital drops would provide additional supplies to build out the colonies, along with a second wave of colonists.

There were a lot of things the planners hadn’t anticipated, Gregor thought. Like how the colonies would develop if those subsequent drops never came. What the colonists would do to survive on this world.

Repurposing what they had and making do was key to survival here. And so, when the need arrived to figure out where to keep people who had run afoul of Gagarin’s laws, an engineering crew had reconfigured one of the large, climate-controlled cargo pods to contain a set of holding cells, a guard station, and in an act of supreme kindness they’d even installed the necessary plumbing for each cell to have its own toilet.

By this point, Gergor had counted one thousand one hundred and thirty six holes in the sixteen ceiling tiles of his cell. The overhead lights flickered once every one hundred and three seconds. The pattern on the floor consisted of eight thousand five hundred and forty four diamonds, not counting the half-diamonds along the edge. The hum of the fan moving cooled air through his cell was somewhere between an E2 and an F2 note, between 80 and 90 Hz.

The lights flickered, then flickered again. Then, the hum of the air conditioning unit dropped, and went silent.

“Well, shit.”

Gregor sat up from where he’d been lying on a narrow cot. The cells had no windows, but he could tell by the sounds from outside that it had to be day, maybe early afternoon. Aspera’s summers were brutal thanks to the star’s intense brightness and the planet’s axial tilt. Being stuck in an unventilated cargo pod without climate control on a cloudless summer day was dangerous. If the cooling system had given out…

Gregor let out a bitter chuckle. How ironic it would be, he thought, to miss his execution because he died of heat stroke in this cell. Death by solar radiation instead of the planet’s gravity.

He reconsidered his circumstances. If the pod had experienced some kind of power outage, maybe the lock on his cell door had been affected as well. He touched the door controls. The indicator light remained red. Still locked, then. Ah well, worth a shot.

Having given it some thought, Gregor decided he would choose gravity over heat.

“Hey! Cristo! You awake, man?” Gregor pounded his fist against his cell door. “Cooling’s gone out. Yo! You out there?”

A sigh, a grunt, and a half-hearted curse signaled that his jailer was, in fact, awake, vertical, and lumbering down the hallway toward Gregor’s cell.

“The hell d’you do, kid?”

Head of corrections hadn’t been Cristobal O’Keefe’s first, second, or third choice of work assignment, but like most of Gagarin’s colonists, he knew better than to petition for a different position. If this was how leadership decided he would be the most useful, then Cristobal would do exactly as ordered. Whatever aspirations he’d had of doing something different with his life, they were less important than keeping Gagarin functional. A dream seemed a small price to pay for the future of humankind.

“Oh, y’know, I was just bypassing the lock on this door as part of my daring escape plan, but I guess I must’ve knocked out the climate controls instead.”

Cristobal fixed Gregor with an unamused, silent glare.

“I didn’t do this, man.” Gregor threw up his hands. “What, you think I’m trying to roast myself?”

“Don’t know. Are you?”

“Look, this jail’s going to turn into an oven real quick. Can you, like, get someone?”

“Not supposed to leave you alone.”

“Well then call someone!”

Cristobal didn’t move, other than slowly shifting from one foot to another, weighing his options.

“Doesn’t seem right. Something’s up.”

“Cristobal, listen to me. You need to call Arya to send someone to look at the pod or we’re both going to be in serious trouble.”

A drop of sweat wound its way down the side of Cristobal’s round face, through the jungles of his graying beard, and disappeared below the collar of a uniform that had fit him well once.

If he called the chief engineer for an urgent repair on the pod, that would be logged as an emergency maintenance request and count against his own resource allotment. If he flagged the malfunction as a minor fix to be addressed as soon as there was an availability on engineering’s schedule, that’d be considered routine maintenance and come out of engineering’s budget.

He could simply decide not to decide.

“Not my problem.” He turned to walk back to his post.

“Not your… Are you serious? Hey! HEY! Cristobal! Wait!”

The jailer paused. Gregor couldn’t tell whether it was pity or cruelty that slowed his steps.

“Look, what if I pass out? You’re sweating already, and it’s only been a minute.” The air was getting stale, Gregor noticed. “Do you really think they’ll just let it slide that a prisoner died on your watch? Come on, man.”

Cristobal turned back with an angry energy in his step.

“You saying they’re gonna blame me? ‘Oh, look at Cristobal, dumb old Cristobal, can’t do anything right,’ that it?”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“Shut your face! I’m in charge. Nobody’s dying on my watch. I don’t know what this is, but I’m not going to waste resources to make a dead man’s last few hours more comfortable.”

“Please, I’m begging you, if you could just listen—”

“Hello? Anybody in here?” Both Gregor and Cristobal turned to look down the hallway. Gregor had to press his face against the small window in his cell door to get a better look, leaving a smear of sweat on the polycarbonate.

Somebody was standing down there, carrying some kind of toolbox.

“The hell you want?”

“I was walking by and I noticed your pod’s cooling system was sending an error code, so I figured I’d take a look since I was already here.” The figure stepped closer, and Gregor’s breath caught in his throat. There, under the glaring overhead lights of the pod, stood Harlan Starkweather.

His friend.

The son of the woman who’d put him in this cell.

“Just passing through, huh?” Cristobal eyed Harlan suspiciously. “Isn’t that lucky.”

Harlan shrugged. “I’m just trying to be useful, officer O’Keefe. With your permission, I could run a quick diagnostic. If it’s something simple then I can fix it right now, and that way you won’t even have to log the malfunction.”

Cristobal drank deeply of the soupy air. No matter how hard he tried, his lungs never felt quite full, his breath short. The cloying smell of outgassing plastics stung his nostrils, mingling with the musk of his own sweat. Yeah, maybe getting some cold air would be lovely. Besides, the idea of getting to skip the paperwork appealed to Cristobal’s sense of efficiency.

He flapped a hand at Harlan. “Do what you need to do.”

“Thank you, officer.” Harlan looked around. He located an access panel on the wall next to the door to Gregor’s cell. Perfect. Cristobal leaned against the opposite wall, breathing heavily. Harlan suspected that the offworlder’s lungs and heart were working overtime, fighting both the star’s heat and Aspera’s gravity. He bent down to retrieve some tools from his work pack and began to loosen the access panel.

“Excuse me, officer, can you hold these for a moment?” Harlan passed the bolts to Cristobal, who took them without questioning the order, slipping them into a breast pocket. Harlan looked up, seeing Gregor watching him work from the other side of the cell door’s window. His friend’s face was drenched in sweat. His normally sun-kissed skin looked slick and pale under the lights, and the wild black curls in his damp hair were stuck flat against his skin.

But the glint in Gregor’s warm, brown eyes was undimmed.

Good.

“Hey.”

“Hey to you, too.” Gregor hadn’t expected any visitors, and none had come. He took a slow, deep breath. His heart beat steadily in his chest, measured, powerful pulses. Gregor wasn’t sure whether his pulse was quickening from the heat, or from seeing Harlan, his friend, in this miserable hour, on this miserable day. Maybe both.

“Do you come here often?”

“Oh, you know,” Gregor smiled, appreciating Harlan’s attempt at lightening the mood, “I heard this place was highly rated, but the service around here has been just dreadful.”

“Hey!” Cristobal wheezed as he placed his hands on his knees. “Less talking, more fixing.” He glared at them, but his energy was starting to run low.

Harlan went back to hooking his diagnostic kit to the connections under the access panel. His back was starting to feel damp. He briefly wondered if he’d miscalculated. Harlan pushed worry to the back of his mind. There was something he needed to say to his friend.

“I talked to my mother earlier.”

“She hasn’t had a change of heart, I take it.”

“We’ll tame Aspera before that ever happens.”

“I don’t think that woman could change her mind to save her life, no offense. Not a great quality to have in a leader, if you ask me. But what do I know, I’m just a guy stuck on death row.”

The flinch was subtle, but Gregor knew his friend well enough that the language of his body was an open book to him. There was something Harlan wanted to tell him, but as usual, his friend found himself on shaky feet. Which Gregor found endearing, given how self-assured Harlan was in so many other ways. He supposed his friend shared that trait with his mother.

“Look, if there’s something you want to say, just say it. We don’t have much time, you know.”

Harlan paused, and set down the handheld display he’d connected to the pods innards. He glanced over his shoulder to where Cristobal was mustering a heroic effort to keep from sliding down the wall onto his butt.

“The night when… when Arkady died.” Harlan placed each delicate word with care, as if assembling some complicated clockwork mechanism. “I wasn’t there. I was angry. I am sorry.”

“It’s okay, Harlan. It’s not your fault.”

“No, it’s not okay. Look at you. Look at what they’re doing to you! This is not okay!” Despite the heat, the hairs on Harlan’s neck stood up. “It’s not fair. They have no right to treat us like this.”

“What are you saying, Harlan?”

He wasn’t quite sure himself. He thought of his mother, back at their pod, rage and betrayal and grief hanging over her like a thundercloud. He thought of his father, running into the woods, the storm whipping the pseudotrees like the fist of an angry god. He thought of Alexandra, whose father had died in that same storm, in those same woods. Harlan thought of his mother’s determination, up there on that hill.

“I think I’m saying a future built by people who just go along with whatever they’re told to do isn’t gonna be any good.”

“Dammit you two, I said—”

Cristobal never got to finish his sentence. Harlan launched into the older man with unexpected fury, shoving him backwards, tripping him, sending him stumbling into the cell opposite Gregor’s. Harlan slammed his palm on the lock controls he’d just overridden using the access panel, sealing Cristobal in. 

Then, he unlocked Gregor’s cell.

“Harlan, what—”

“We don’t have time for this. There’s a backpack with gear and rations at the front. Go. Run.”

“I—”

“I’ll be fine. But you need to leave. NOW.”

There was another feeling Gregor hadn’t expected: Hope.

He pulled Harlan into a tight embrace, feeling his friend’s skin slick with sweat against his own. They held each other for a moment, knowing there wouldn’t be another.

Gregor ran. The cool air outside the pod filled his lungs, and his legs carried him forward with long, powerful strides. People pointed; some made half-hearted attempts to stop him. Some cheered, though they’d later swear up and down that no cheers were heard that day. Gregor didn’t know what awaited him beyond the woods; death, most likely. But when death would come, it would find him free, beneath an open sky. There were worse fates, he now knew. Gregor would never let himself forget.

Back at the jail, Harlan felt a weight lift off his shoulders he hadn’t known he’d been carrying.

“Hey! Starkweather! You gotta let me out! Please, I’m roasting in here!”

Harlan turned his gaze to Cristobal, defeated, on his knees in a cell, pressing sweaty palms against an unmoving, uncaring cell door. Oppressive heat bore down on both of them.

Harlan calmly packed up his tools, ignoring the increasingly desperate pleas from the cell. He shouldered his backpack and turned to leave.

“You know, Cristobal,” Harlan said over the jailer’s meek sobbing, “not making a choice, that’s also a choice.”

As he walked out the jail’s front door, Harlan heard the pod’s cooling system kick back in, sending a gentle breeze of cold air after him as he walked back into the Aspera afternoon. Turns out he’d timed it just right.

Harlan figured it wouldn’t be long before Gagarin’s militsiya would be here to arrest him. No sense in making their job harder than it needed to be.

He found himself a nice spot in the shade, and got comfortable.