"We're expecting a prisoner transfer in five minutes."
"Yes, sarge," David responded automatically, grabbing a thickly padded, thermally insulted coat from beneath his desk and pulling it on. It was the sort they used for arctic expeditions. He looked like the Michelin man as he followed at Merley's heels out of the office, into the lift, and down into the walled compound that surrounded the MI7 buildings.
After Step Day, there had been the obvious problem of prison containment. Prisoners had escaped their cells en masse, jumping away into their alternate realities, leaving behind empty prisons filled with open portals. The government had mandated that each prisoners had to be tracked down and returned to Earth Prime to serve out their sentence. It was a hell of a manhunt, still very much ongoing, and even when they were brought back there was still the question of what to do with them when they could simply Step away again at any time.
Several solutions had been trialed. The first had been building a prison on the top floor of a skyscraper yet, even after instilling at great lengths into the criminals the consequences of jumping to a different world at that height, many had still done it, and had subsequently plummeted to their deaths on realities that had never heard of a skyscraper.
The second had been to build it underwater - it had flooded within hours.
The third was to place the prisoners in deep mine shafts, where they couldn't Step because the corresponding location on the alternate earths was blocked by stone, which had worked perfectly right up until the point that it flooded with lava.
The only recourse was to transfer the prison population off Earth Prime, into somebody else's world where it was impossible to Step. David's had been that world.
"Here it comes," Merley said as the prison bus entered through the compound gates. The prisoners were escorted off one by one by thick set guards with shotguns. Their hands were tied in front of them by bulky handcuffs linked to a transmitter. If they moved out of range of the transmitter, such as by sliding, the handcuffs would stun them with 10,000 volts. Harsh but effective.
They stood watching the prisoners as they lined up on the cold, overcast yard. Most of them were men. One was not. She had to bow her head to fit under the door of the bus. She was seven feet tall with long, muscular arms and legs, dark bronze skin, and a pair of slender, furred ears, like those of a hare, that sat on top of her head. She moved with a gangly, animal lope, and attractive in a feral sort of way. Her fingers came to sharp claws with which she kept slashing at her own prison clothes. She didn't seem to appreciate being clothed, and the orange jumpsuit hung from her body in torn strips.
"What is she?"
"An immigrant," Merley replied. "She killed the unlucky sod who slid through to her reality, and by the time we managed to track her the portal had sealed. Until we can find a way to send her back to where she came from, we're containing her on your Earth."
"I'm not sure I feel comfortable placing her with the other inmates."
Merley chuckled darkly. "If you'd seen the fight she put up, you'd be more worried about the rapists," he said. "Right. Looks like we're all ready. Slide across."
David closed his eyes, picturing his world. In no time, he felt the crackle of electricity over his skin, then a freezing cold wind bite into his skin, flakes of snow landing wet on his face. He opened his eyes. White snow stretced to the horizon the horizon, broken only by the black, cuboid boulders that lay scattered. The drifts rose up to his knees.
David turned. There was the portal, hanging like a window in the air. On the other side, Merley still stood on the damp concrete of the yard, buttoning his overcoat against the frigid wind that blew through the hole in reality.
Not far away, situated almost exactly where the MI7 building should be, stood the fortress. It was vast, built to the scale of a mountain out of the carved, black monolithic stones. David had found it deserted and empty on his first step. With no signs of the original occupants, MI7 had appropriated its vast underground dungeons for the storage of prisoners while they searched for a more permanent solutions.
"Start sending them through," Merley barked. The prisoners were led through at gunpoint and marched towards the fortress. The tall rabbit girl had to hunch right over to fit through the portal, her bare paws sinking into the snow. The wind buffeted her long ears, but she seemed not to notice the cold. Flakes of snow steamed on her bare skin.
David followed after the miserable procession. The front gate of the fort loomed like a cave mouth, blocked by a portcullis but one of such a vast scale that it was possible for the humans to squeeze between the bars. Whoever had built this place must have been two or even three times human size. They had found food stores in the fort that held long strips of tough meat from animals the size of mammoths, salted and frozen solid.
'Whoever they are, I just hope they don't come back,' David thought to himself, as they proceeded down the echoing, cavernous hallways.
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