Escape

Plisken felt a great whoosh of energy rush through his body and he convulsed a little within the confines of the restraints he was held in. His breathing was heavy and his brow wet with a mix of fear and exhaustion. It was day God-Knows and Plisken was as close to breaking, the location of the Time Drive threaten to leap from the tip of his tongue.
His torture had become so frequent that the medical equipment and the cylinder from the white room had been moved to the blood-slick interrogation chamber. To avoid loosing Plisken’s arm, Solomon had tied Plisken to an upright table, his arms held at their sides.
Currently, Josef held within his claw-like hand a flat, circular device that was connected to a large box on the medical table by a narrow tube. This device was what had kept Plisken alive throughout his torture, bringing him back from the brink of death again and again. The specifics of how it worked were far beyond him, though he had been told they were quite simple. Where Solomon had acquired it was a mystery as it was certainly Brittany-Level technology and it would not have been easy to obtain. But they needed Plisken alive and had some how gotten hold of all the best medical equipment, even able to repair Plisken’s broken legs.
“Do not make me ask again, Jack,” sighed Solomon, his sigh grating through his mechanical voice box. Two guards watched Solomon pace back and forward, as did Josef from his usual dark corner.
“You’ve said that quite a lot you know,” Plisken spat, blood carried by the words from his mouth and pooling on the already wet floor.
A sharp jab from Solomon’s steel fist landed in Plisken’s lost eye. The old man gave a loud cry of pain before focusing on Solomon again.
“So where is Emily today? Why is she not giving you orders?”
“She doesn’t give me orders!” Solomon growled, his hand dancing around the hilt of his sword.
“Is that right? Here I thought she was the leader of this pathetic little rebellion you have organised.”
“A rebellion? We are so much more than that, Jack. We are trying to save the lives of possibly billions or trillions by keeping you on the right track.”
“That sounds like something Emily would say,” laughed Plisken. He had enough of it all; enough of the torture, enough of the questioning, enough of being constantly reminded of his mistakes, enough of people dying because he remained silent and enough of the loud shouting. It was time to escape. But he wasn’t going to be able to get out.
But Solomon kept his anger in check and moved his hand away from the sword at his hip. “So, Jack, we have killed your wife, shown you what you’ve done to your only real friend, beaten you to death on countless occasions and you’ve been brought a step closer to us. What more will it take?”
Plisken’s eye lingered on Solomon for a moment, taking in the cold green light of his old friends dead face. But then a smile split across his face as an idea came to him. But it faded quickly as the memory came to his mind’s eye. “Do you remember New Moscow, Solomon, from the old days?”
“The Time Drive, Jack,” Solomon pressed.
“We went there to monitor a peaceful protest, make sure no-one got hurt. Do you remember that?”
“Shut up!”
“You shot her, Solomon,” Plisken spat, “Your own daughter. And because you were afraid of Greyman.”
“Shut up!” Solomon roared again but this time his hand dove for the hilt of his sword, a beam of lethal energy springing from the small black handle. Plisken braced himself for the strike, braced himself for the strike that would end his life. He didn’t want to escape the facility, could he even escape the facility? No, it could all end here.
But the strike never came. There was a brief blast of heat down his side and Plisken collapsed to the floor. Solomon was on his knees sobbing as much as he could from behind his metal exterior. Instead of killing Plisken, he had cut the bonds that had held him. Solomon believed too strongly in the cause he fought for to be able to kill Plisken. No, we was better than that.
The guards raised their guns and glanced at their leader, their eyes begging for the order to fire. On instinct, Plisken dived for the discarded sword, the activated beam still happily humming. He threw it, sharp, at one of the guards. It landed squarely in his chest and the guard collapsed to the floor. The other became to shoot, the entire base on alert within a second of the first shot. With a sudden burst of adrenaline fuelling him, Plisken darted for cover. From behind a table of torture instruments, Plisken was safe; the guard knew better than to attempt to fire blindly in this room and risk damaging any of the equipment or the cylindrical tank that still stood beside the door. Plisken reached on to the table, a bullet pinging of his metal hand, and grabbed one of the many devices on the table. What he had grabbed was a fearsome device, a small grey triangle. He tossed it over his cover and it struck the other guard on the face, the device stuck. A lethal bolt of electricity burst forth and the guard collapsed into a dead pile, the uncalibrated device delivering a deadly burst.
The sound of alarms and the thundering of booted feet echoed in the hallways outside and Plisken grabbed one of the dead guards’ guns, but he had no intention of fighting them off. Battered, broken and exhausted, Plisken would not be able to survive fighting his way out of the facility. This would have been fine before, he had welcomed death not a moment ago, but some survival instinct within him kicked in and he suddenly found himself wanting to live.
Solomon had stopped crying but he still sat there on his knees with his eyes staring at the ground. Josef had escaped during the commotion and was no where to be seen.
“Sol,” said Plisken, kneeling down to his level, “It’s not too late.”
“You can’t possible know what damage will be inflicted on the universe if we change the timeline.”
“But we know what damage will be inflicted if we don’t.”
“No, Plisken, we can’t let you risk the lives of trillions.”
“But you can sacrifice the lives of billions?”
“The cold calculus of war…”
Plisken sighed. “Indeed.”
There was a moment of silence. Solomon, Plisken’s former friend and former torturer, sat there with his dead eyes still fixed to the ground.
“Leave me,” Solomon ordered, a hand flicking to reveal the sword within his arm’s armour.
Plisken didn’t say anything but stood up away from Solomon. It was time to leave this place but he would have to take something with him, something he couldn’t leave behind. He walked to the cylindrical tank, an almost fully formed silhouette within the blueish liquid, and tapped on a few controls. In a society filled with faster than light travel, weapons able to reduce a civilisation to dust in mere moments and the ability to travel in time, people still had time to invent the little things, like anti-grav lifts for heavy weight cargo.
The container rose a few inches of the ground as the purple jets at its base powered up. Plisken turned it so that the fragile glass front was facing him and he began to push it forwards out the room. There was a buzz from behind him as Solomon activated his sword. Before Plisken closed the door, he heard the sound of metal armour being stabbed and the collapse of a mighty man on the floor. Without looking back, Plisken pushed the container down the corridor.
The interrogation room was part of a basement level filled with jail cells that held a variety of defectors, moles and spies that threatened Time with No Boundaries. Already guards were swarming the narrow passage ways and Plisken was firing controlled shots from behind the hovering container, using the sturdy metal cylinder as cover.
In between the silence of reloading rifles, Plisken could hear the sound of rushing water echoing through the cold, metal walls. Clearly, this was not a space station then but a grounded base, though where this could be was anywhere. But it was a start.
Plisken pushed forward on the cylinder tank, firing burst of bullets as he did so, killing a guard and wounding another. Alarm bells and shouting filled the air as Plisken pushed on. In lulls of the barks of rifles, growling shouts stabbed the air as dogs were let loose.
He reached a grating set within a wall, reaching the far side of the level without so much as a scratch, the adrenaline fuelling his instincts that had been drilling into his brain since his birth. The old man drew in a long, slow breath as he readied himself and his frail and broken body. With all his force, he slammed his shoulder against the grating, the metal of his shoulder denting and breaking but the new and modern prosthetic seemed to keep functioning. The grating clattered to the floor and a few shouts told Plisken the guards had a fix on his location now. He hurried through the newly created doorway and into the long tunnel.
Dirty water splashed at his bare feet and the simple rags he wore on his legs were splattered by the spray thrown up by the anti-grav jets of the cylindrical tank. Bright day light broke through the dank light of the tunnel as up head salvation presented itself. The tunnel opened up into a vast jungle, a thick forest of trees and wildlife surrounding the lake and river at the bottom of the gushing water that emptied from the base’s sewer.
“Jack!” called a voice from further back in the tunnel, the sound bouncing around the walls. Plisken glanced back to see Emily running towards him, a squad of black armoured guards following closely behind her. Plisken pushed heavily on the tank and ran for the exit of the sewer. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dived off the edge, plunging into the water below. The last thing he saw before he hit the cold, unforgiving lake was Emily’s angered face and her outstretched hand, Plisken already out of reach of her telekinetic powers. Plisken had escaped.