Empty Jesters by J.S. Morin

Author:J.S. Morin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643554785
Publisher: Magical Scrivener Press

Edmund held two bowls, convex sides angled against one another. His fellow Poets looked in, their stake in the maneuver as great as his. He took the open ends of the bowls, rims nearly touching, and slipped them between a pair of protruding steel ends of the mesh, where separate sections had been hastily joined with tack welds. All that prevented their escape was prying the mesh far enough out of the way for one of them—it would have to be Ichika—to slip through.

“Just have to make use of the tools at hand,” he told his comrades as they waited. Pressing the far ends of the bowls together, he used them like a set of pliers in reverse, prying the two loose ends. Peeling. Bending. Slipping…

Bowls rocketed out of Edmund’s hands, and one glanced off Corbin’s shoulder; the other ricocheted harmlessly off the wall.

“Sorry, Captain.”

Corbin shook his head. “No mind. No mind. All in service of the cause. Keep at it. You had a real bend going there.”

Edmund retrieved two more bowls, the first pair clearly bad luck, and made a second attempt.

The mesh flexed. He relaxed his grip, shook feeling back into his fingers, and tried again with a slightly different hold on them.

Grunting in effort, crewmates cheering him on, he got a wider and wider gap. When he gave up, panting and gasping, Hadrian hauled him to his feet.

“Gone off it! It stayed put. Get yer wind and have another go.”

“I’ll take a try,” Corbin said, stepping in and snatching the bowls from Edmund’s tired fingers. “We got the notion. Down to brute strength and tenacity at this point.”

The door outside their prison slid open.

Instantly, the bowls disappeared behind guilty backs.

“The datapad is ON, you know,” the architect of this primitive prison informed them. She carried a plasma torch and a 30 cm strip of bare steel.

If one of them could snatch the thin steel back from her, jab it through her neck, and use it to pull the torch over to them, they’d be out in a jiffy.

“You know… the captain told me I wasn’t allowed to eat any of you. But if you escape, and there is a mishap, I think she would understand.” The azrin wagged the steel disapprovingly. “However, there was an order, and I’ll follow it.”

When she slapped the steel bar over the weak point they’d been prying at, all the pirates jumped.

A few quick welds later, and their slim hopes of enacting their own freedom through a combination of determination, leverage, and soup had vanished.

“I will also collect the bowls. If there is anything in them but the slimy remnants of soup, I will return and use this cage for target practice. I hear pirates enjoy a good stun cage.”

Edmund tensed. There were worse punishments, but most of them were messy. Getting stunned once in a while wasn’t so bad. It sucked, but hot plasma was always the alternative. Getting stunned repeatedly, randomly, at various settings, played havoc on the nervous system. He’d heard of fellows who developed a stutter, a limp, became permanently incontinent.

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