Free Ruthless by Robert J. Crane

heard him gulp. I think he believed me. He should have.
    The door opened without any fanfare. A firing line of armed guards stood to our right. We left our other escort behind and walked down a long, narrow corridor that looked like it had been shaped out of steel. It wasn’t; it was some metal harder than steel, some alloy whose proper name I’d never caught. They made meta handcuffs out of it, and it stretched a hundred yards straight ahead and slightly down, a grim warning that we were entering a place of darkness and seriousness.
    Simmons took it all in with an air of uncertainty. His cockiness was all evaporated now, and so was his limp. He was dripping a little on the floor, but I saw his eyes take in the steady succession of men staring out at us from portholes with rifles to our side. The guards called them murder holes, and that was an accurate description. There was one way into the prison and one way only, and anyone unauthorized was to be riddled with bullets until such time as their body was nothing but splatters of tissue and bone.
    I didn’t take any chances with safety.
    We reached the other end of the hallway of death and were buzzed in thanks to the camera above our heads. I pushed open a heavy door and there we were, in the Cube.
    I heard Simmons make a gasping noise as he took it in. It was metal all around, too, with inlaid lighting behind bulletproof panels. There was room for eighty modular cells, with an option for another unit further down as maximum security if we ever needed to expand. For now it was just the Cube, though, so named because it was four floors up and down. Only the top floor was presently occupied, though, and not even fully. The rest were reserved for future inmates.
    I pulled Simmons along the first row. We passed one of my favorite prisoners, Anselmo Serafini. Reed had run afoul of this particular pig in Italy a couple years earlier. I’d had his cell speaker muted so that he couldn’t be heard, and had personally supervised a reconstruction of his cell that allowed only a small window for him to look out of because—I’m not even kidding—every time I or another female guard came past his cell, the bastard would expose himself to us. While I considered neutering a valid option, cooler heads than mine prevailed, and I settled for giving him a two-inch by three-inch mail slot to look out on his limited world.
    Speaking from experience, it’s a shitty way to go through imprisoned life. When I put him in the new cell, I’d threatened him with covering that last slit up as well. Happily, I’d now gone a year and a half without having to see his genitals. It had been a good year and a half.
    I pushed Simmons down to the end where one of the guards was waiting with a cell door already open. “Are you putting me in that gel again?” His voice wavered. I couldn’t blame him; I’d tried it once, just for the experience. It feels like being trapped in a Jello mold, unable to move at anything other than a snail’s pace, and all the while trying to keep your head above the surface. It burns when you get it in your eyes, too, though I was assured it’s non-toxic.
    “No,” I said, shaking my head. I felt a little pity for him, and he relaxed slightly in my grasp. “Our tech department developed a less invasive version of it for use when prisoners aren’t being transported.” I brought him up to the door and let him look into his new home.
    “Aw, man,” he said.
    The nullifying gel was still very much a part of the decorating scheme. It was a requirement for all our prisoners who had a certain level of strength or ability to project physical force. In the case of the permanent dwellings, though, we’d found a way to incorporate it into sealed packets that lined the cells. “It’s still in there,” I said, “ready to stop your quakes if you try and shake the walls. Also, I gotta warn you, if you burst open any of the packets, we will flood the cell up to your neck.” I