Transmission number 12.A
"Evening Cycle on REDACTED
En Route to REDACTED
Found amongst the possessions of REDACTED in the township of LEITH.
The material contained herein is provided by Lord-Captain Bex Tarring of the Bramber Company
-------------------------------------------------
If you find it difficult to comprehend fully the true nature of internment and the physical and mental exhaustion that one feels because of it, I envy you.
I envy you with every fibre of my being.
I seethe with a jealous rage that the feeling of calluses covering your hand doesn't come readily enough.
I choke with a profound venom that you have not endured a time where every waking moment is documented, controlled, and monitored.
I want to curse you, that you have not felt a need to quench thirst so profoundly that you have considered the darkest means possible to obtain sustenance.
I was interred two standard years ago. I remember it with little fondness and have, at times, replaced elements and fragments of the experience with altogether different remembrances, in a vain attempt to evoke a little more sanity and a chance of sleeping soundly at least once a week.
I don't know where I was interred. I know that seems absurd but it's true. We knew it was within Order space, of course, otherwise, their jurisdiction would be threatened on the daily. And we never saw anybody from 'outside'. Not once. We saw each other whilst we worked and the multitude of faceless Imperial troopers and officers.
We weren't even sure there was an outside to see. With the way we were kept, we weren't even sure we were planet-side.
One inmate, Tanker we called him, swore he'd heard a guard mention the 'gravity well' or something. Odds were on that we were in orbit.
Tanker didn't make it out. Took a slug to the head one rec-break. Mouthed off some rookie 'Keeper' and paid for it with a trip to the morgue. Or wherever they got sent. All we knew was that it was one way.
The work was hard. We had large amounts of rock, real industrial quantities, delivered to the work floor every day. In our work shift, there were four-five hundred. One shift worked whilst the other shift slept.
After the indignity of tearing muscles, sweating buckets in the intense heat with little to no fresh air, rations of water so limited you'd suck the sweat out of a cloth that you'd used to dab yourself with, you'd go back to your cell and wake up your cot mate. You see, you shared a bed. Not just your cell but your bed. One 12-hour shift belonged to you, the other belonged to your cot mate. Whilst he worked, I slept.
You got to clean once a week. No water. Just blasts of sanitized air. It got the dirt off if it wasn't caked in too thickly, but the smell lingered. You not only had to contend with your own stench but that of the person whose bed you were due to lying down in after their own. It was undignified beyond measure.
It was done, I believe, to humiliate us. To make us less than. To break our spirits quicker than we could break the very rocks we were there to handle. We had no idea where the ore went. It got collected between the two rotating shifts.
I fancied it didn't go anywhere important; it was an entire industry set up to keep us numb and bored and tired. But it made me angry.
New Imperial Order. Ha. I laugh at those words now. They don't frighten me anymore. I was arrested for a minor traffic offence. I hadn't submitted the proper paperwork to enter into a taxable route in my speeder.
If you believe that, you'll believe anything.
It was because my kid sister had attended what they would have deemed 'a sinister and seditious assembly.' One thing the NIO doesn't like is groups of liberal, free-minded individuals getting together to discuss just how rotten their lot is under the regime.
We paid the price of freedom. After my escape, I found out that Denii had been executed publicly with fifteen other 'traitors'. Her body was paraded on the internal Holonet for all the citizenry to see what became of traitors to the Order. I'm sure in certain circles there were cheers. Not all but in most, I'd wager. At least, publicly.
-------------------------------------------------
It was a day thirty-eight days ago now. My cycle had finished, and I made my weary way through the complex to the Habi block.
Level 2. Corridor 8-C. Cell 438. That was my holding and the holding of seven other individuals. Four beds. Eight people.
I shuffled into the dark room, which was kept dark for most of the day, except for inspection. There was always somebody in the cell, sleeping off their shift. I worked 12-24, whilst Yanna worked 24-12, if you get my workings out. Some folk did 3-15, some did 6-18 et cetera.
I had shuffled, kicking somebody's lazily scattered water cantina. I checked to see if it had spilt, using my hands. A less honest person would have swigged some, but I recognized if we wanted to make it through, we all had to work together as a team, and build each other up.
It was wet. I cursed quietly, mopping it up in the darkness with my sleeve. Maybe we could ring it out and salvage as much as possible. I didn't feel too guilty-the idiot had left it by our cot and therefore invited the chaos in. Clumsy and foolish, I thought to myself.
My hands had patted and dabbed as much as they could. I felt a creeping urge come over. I raised my hand to my mouth, daring myself to taste the water. It had been hours since my last drink and the primal desire to feel the lukewarm water in my mouth was too great.
I covered my teeth with my lips and sucked hard, the water flowing from between the fibres of my standard-issue jumper.
I spat. It tasted rancid. I wanted to scream in frustration. What I wanted most in all of existence, right there and then, was water to swig to take the taste of the foul-tasting tangy ichor away from my tongue.
I smelt the liquid in my fingertips once again. I tried it again. There it was again, a sharp acidic taste that was altogether dull and yet visceral at the same time. I slipped into the puddle, losing my balance, and praying I didn't brain myself on one of the steel wrought beds that could so easily be the death of someone in the dark.
I fell onto my cot, hands catching the edge with enough force to make my bones ache a little on impact. I let out an exasperated cry, a blend of anger, frustration, and pain.
I righted myself, only to be kicked in the face by a boot. Not a hard kick, a sort of tap. I had no idea what was going on. My brain couldn't explain what I was feeling or experiencing.
I managed to right myself again, feeling the wall for the light. We tried not to engage the lighting system in the cell very often. It certainly attracted the attention of the guards who couldn't help but take the opportunity to peek in with the cell illuminated fully. There was also some sort of delay on the light which meant that once it was on, it wouldn't deactivate for at least half an hour; which was very frustrating in such a sleep-deprived environment.
I hit the switch with my fist and closed my eyes, waiting for the luminescent bulb to kick in, its searing light almost threatening to burn out our corneas.
I finally opened them and turned to see what had made the mess.
The lifeless form of Yanna. He had hanged himself. I was struggling to compute what my eyes were seeing. His bloated, lifeless and unmoving face was locked in an almost peaceful grimace, his eyes focused on some distant world far away from the holding cell he had hanged himself in. I started trying to look around our cot, my brain eventually catching up to the fact that not only had he downed a little ration of water he had left (he wouldn't need it once he was dead) but he had also urinated in his death throws, the acrid taste now becoming altogether clear to me.
I took a moment. I don't know why. The right thing to do was to call for the alarm. I hesitated though-the undoubted attention we would receive from the administration would cause nothing but disruption for all of those in the cell.
Damn it.
I called out for help. A little quiet at first, my voice still not used to making a sound louder than a whisper. It soon found its strength, building in volume and urgency. Believe it or not, two other prisoners had slept through the entire ordeal-maybe he had only been dead an hour at most. In this environment, if you could get to sleep there was nothing waking you. I wasn't shocked.
They were awake now, one cursing the light, the other shocked and, rightly so, appalled at the sight of poor Yanna hanging there.
The guards of the corridor soon arrived, brandishing their polearms and their blasters. One of the officers muttered to himself, clearly disgruntled at the number of clerical forms he would have to fill out in the wake of an inmate's untimely death.
During most shifts, the cell door wasn't locked. This was to facilitate the comings and goings of the inmates between various shifts and allow them access to the communal areas where at least food was provided once a day. You could eat when you fancied it, but it was usually restricted to just once. Most inmates had built feeding times into their own routine – it was the only way of having some control of your otherwise absurd life.
Three or four troopers marched in; I don't recall too accurately at this point. They were brandishing their shock batons, used to keep the more violent inmates in line. The loud voices called for order, barking instructions to us as they went about surveying the scene. An officer walked in, looking up at the girder which the inmate had utilised for their final act of defiance. He tutted, making some disparaging comment about one less mouth to feed.
My hands were placed above my head, and I was escorted out of the cell, and walked 100 paces or so down to the detention block that was the heart of the corridor's administration portion. I had only been inside of it once before, some trumped-up charge of being aggressive towards an orderly. That wasn't the case, they just wanted to teach me a lesson. I was one of the quiet ones and those were the ones they wanted to watch. Because they kept inside their heads and spent too much time thinking. And thinking generated ideas. And ideas could hurt them.
At this point, I wasn't thinking of anything untoward. I was thinking of Yanna. I was thinking of the insatiable need to drink water. I was thinking of anything other than what might happen next. You get like that when you're incarcerated. Just think upon the next moment, day in and day out.
-------------------------------------------------
I sat in that block for what felt like a lifetime. It might have been 45 minutes to an hour, there was no real way of knowing. This sort of incident occurred every so often. Not commonly-how he'd managed to get the cord or rope was a mystery. There were all sorts of contraband that was pushed about between inmates and getting hold of something like that wouldn't have been impossible.
There was some disquiet outside the block. Some raised voices. Every so often an officer or trooper would enter the block, have some hushed conversation with another person and rapidly leave. After a while, an alarm began to sound. That wasn't altogether uncommon either; an inmate was dead and there would be disruption spreading among the other workers. I watched as the block began its typical lockdown policy, the durasteel doors closing and a technician heading over to the console to engage the large blast doors.
The loud explosion I heard from what sounded like the belly of the facility was not a common occurrence. In fact, it was surreal. The sound of blaster fire began to be heard outside the block and the technicians inside were rapidly beginning all sorts of protocols. They were of little effect. The steel doors, still unprotected by the stronger blast doors, threw open with a forceful rush and heralded a team of strangely armed fighters, armed to the teeth with large blasters that dealt out a punishing level of blaster ordnance, killing all inside. I made a big show of throwing myself down and I cried out as loudly as I could. I told them I wasn't one of them, that I was a prisoner, heck I even began citing my prisoner number and name as was typical of our interrogation and registry routines.
They took one look at me and moved outside the block as quickly as they had entered, a path of destruction strewn before and after them. I couldn't believe what was happening. For the second time that day, I was in disbelief. What was once an otherwise monotonous existence was now as close to death-defying as it could be. I didn't know what would happen when the crackdown began when the forces of the Order returned to process the prison and exterminate these rebel forces.
I sat for a while longer. I don't know why. You might think me strange but there wasn't anything I thought I could do. When you have had your agency and self-control taken from you forcibly, the idea of generating the next sequence of events for yourself to follow is an alien and difficult one to process.
I woke up. I stood up and walked toward the door. The bodies of the administrators and guards lay where they had fallen, struck down by the sudden appearance of the armed attacks. I didn't even begin to think of who they were or what they were doing. I made a right turn out of the block, headed towards the central concourse where all the floors and corridors of the habi-block stemmed from.
There was a sea of carnage. Bodies littered the floor, stray shots heard in the distance still as I walked across the tiled marble floor. I headed towards the large double doors, usually patrolled, and guarded by a platoon of very armed Imperial soldiers. There were some remaining, but they were clearly dead; most humans didn't survive long with that number of holes and exit wounds on their being.
I walked out of the concourse, realizing rapidly that I had never been to this part of the detention centre. I breathed heavily, noticing for the first time in nearly two years that I had a cool, fresh breeze filling my lungs and flowing on my face. It was unbelievable. The entire day so far had been unbelievable.
I passed through two more checkpoints, with clear signs of struggle and conflict at each of them. Here a few of the masked attacks lay dead, surrounded by far more Imperials. They had gone down fighting it seemed.
I wandered aimlessly for a few more minutes, maybe ten, until I came upon what looked like a functioning hangar. A real-life functioning hangar with actual starships. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
What even was I thinking? I had no actual plan to get off…wherever we were. I'd be caught no doubt, sooner rather than later. I looked about me. The bodies of the fighters lay where they had fallen, some on the ramp of the transport freighter that had brought them in. They had burst into an Imperial facility with the express intention of Hoth-knows-what but they had given their all. They had lived. They had done something bigger than themselves for a few moments, the last moments they would have to give.
I found myself walking towards the freighter, not even worried about the repercussions. I couldn't believe my luck. I had simply walked out of an Imperial detention facility, past countless checkpoints during an all-out assault and here I was, after near two years' incarceration, boarding the ramp of a freighter.
-------------------------------------------------
That was a few weeks ago. I won't say too much about where we are and where we've been or who I'm with. But we're out here. Doing things. Making changes. Fighting the fight. Keeping the Imperial Order on their toes. We're meeting a cell of resistance fighters this evening who have hidden out for as long as they could against Imperial forces. We're their last hope and we're going to get them out. We need every free-thinking person we can in the fight against the Order.
I thanked the group for rescuing me. They told me I had rescued myself. I liked that.
We're headed to Galidraan III. I don't know it but it's where they've been hiding out. They call themselves the
Fortans. I don't know them, but they've saved me.
I'll be safe here.
We'll be hiding out in the town of
Leith.
I have to go now.
* THE TRANSMISSION ENDS*
This material has been designated as contraband by REDACTED
TO BE DESTROYED
