Van Terra III: Blackout [PREVIEW ONLY, NOW PUBLISHED]

Chapter One ~ Steering The Course

Three days, five hours, twenty-eight minutes.

That was how long Jasper had until she'd be escorted to her execution.

It had been just over two months since her sentencing. The Earth date was December 3rd, and she couldn't care less what the Kronos date was. At the moment, all she cared about was the narrow window of time today that she had to speak to Dr. Charon Steer.

Dr. Steer was kept near the north edge of the prison, a considerable distance from the center where Jasper's cell was. But they weren't always so far apart. Jasper had glimpsed him occasionally leaving the dining hall while she was being escorted in for her work shift. After all, why hire employees to come work in a prison full of dangerous criminals when you could make the prisoners do all the work instead? The lucky ones were even paid a fraction of a jano a day. That was sure to get them far if they were ever released.

Jasper spent her first few weeks at the Shark Tank hoping to be put on a shift with the scientist, but of course, she wasn't that lucky. She did finally manage to get her hands on a copy of the work schedule, at which point she realized the next few weeks didn't look so good either. Steer was mostly given work in the medical wing, given his skillset. That forced Jasper to come up with a Plan B.

Today, Steer would be in the infirmary while she was in the kitchen.

Before the guards came to fetch her for her shift, Jasper practiced her breathing. A mental timer clicked on as she finished sucking in a deep breath, and she was briefly grateful that she'd been kept solo in her cell since her sentencing. No nosy cellmate to ask what she was holding her breath for. Or to steal one of the few flimsy hair ties she was allowed to have, like the woman she'd been paired with before her sentencing had.

Five minutes, thirty-two seconds. New record, and longer than she theoretically needed, even once her plan was actually in motion and she wasn't simply sitting cross-legged in a quiet cell. Assuming her estimates weren't too far off, that was. An anxious part of her insisted it still wouldn't be enough, but there wasn't really anything she could do at this point but hope.

The door at the end of the hall clanged open, and the sound of footsteps followed. No matter how quickly Jasper jumped to her feet, how quietly she waited by the door, perfectly still, hands in the air to show she was unarmed, the guards were always a little rougher than necessary as they yanked her out of the cell. Today was no different.

"Hey guys," Jasper said as they began the journey down the hall. "How's the family?"

"The closer we get to your execution date, the more annoying you get," the guard at her right grumbled. His grip on her arm tightened, wrinkling the bright red material of Jasper's prison jumpsuit. The material was reflective, making it easy to spot any prisoners who made it outside of the prison with searchlights. Not that anyone ever made it outside the prison.

Jasper restrained a grimace of pain. "Thanks."

While they walked, she scanned the neighboring halls with her x-ray vision. She did it every day, everywhere she went, and had long past memorized the sections of the prison that mattered. She scanned again anyway, burning every last detail into her memory, ensuring nothing had changed.

Her various vision modes and advanced computing abilities were all she really had at the moment. A network shield over the prison prevented any communications that weren't sent through the prison's specially coded channel from going in or out. Even with her cybernetic components, Jasper had no way of sending messages or accessing the net. Same went for anyone who somehow managed to sneak in a smartsphere or similar device.

On top of that, any files stored in Jasper's memory card had been wiped with a magnetic pulse on her way in, just as Starr had done when she'd tried to take video evidence of his involvement with the child-abducting bounty hunters. But she'd known this was likely to happen, and she'd known about the network shield. She'd planned around it. Planned as much as she could. And for the things she couldn't plan, she'd come up with a dozen different ways to handle every possible scenario. At least, she hoped she'd thought of every possible scenario.