The Grey Chronicles Part One: New Declaration of An Old War

Chapter 27: The Escape.

Calx Urbs complex, Satus Pyrotus Six, June of 7434 AL.

Salem took a jagged rock, his makeshift knife, and went to work cutting open the dead beetle. His escape was planned for that night; the Stonehaaryn interrogator had been taking him daily, late in the evening. Salem thought it was less than effective as a torture technique, but the guard hoped that seeing the other prisoners would kill his spirits. As he'd soon find out, that had proved a fatal mistake.

He sliced down through the soft underbelly of the creature and pulled it open, revealing its entrails. He sifted through the now familiar organs until he found the stomach, which he cut open and emptied of its contents. Salem was sitting beside a fire, with acid boiling inside of a pot, though it wasn't really proper cookware; the "pot" was a rock that had been carved into a deep bowl. As Salem watched, the bottom of the bowl was being slowly corroded by the acid. The chains that the interrogator used to bind him were old and partially rusted, they would be easily corroded by the acid. It would take a few minutes, but he was sure he could do it.

Salem checked to make sure the stomach was clean, then picked up the pot and poured a small amount of the acid into it. He set the pot down and looked into the stomach, pleased to see that the acid couldn't eat through the mucus in the stomach lining. He picked up the pot once again, and very carefully poured every drop of the acid into the stomach. After emptying the pot, he set it down and picked up a shard of rock.

The shard was thin and sharp, about half the size of a pencil. A piece of rough cordage was tied to the end; a sewing needle and thread. He stitched the stomach closed and held it up. It fit perfectly in the palm of his hand and could easily be concealed. He grinned and stood up, walking out of the small hole he had been living in for the last four days, right next to Arabe's den. The leader had insisted that Salem take his own room, but Salem refused to take what little comfort the elder had. He was young, he could take a few days on hard rock.

He smiled and looked around the encampment; the former slaves and miners were hard at work, grinding the tips of their pickaxes and the edges of their shovels against rough rocks to sharpen them. Several were drinking from the pool of water in the center of the camp. They had climbed the walls to the ceiling and drilled through the thin rock to the water tank. It had taken several days, but eventually a miner had found a weak spot and broken through with a pick. Clean, cold water had spilled out of the hole and into the basin below, and the entire camp had cried and shouted with glee. It wouldn't take long for the Stonehaaryns to figure out where their water was going, so they had to attack soon after. Since none of them had fought anything but bugs for the last decade, Salem had set up training drills for the soldiers to practice their hand to hand skills. Within two days most of the soldiers had remembered their training and were happier than they had been in years. They'd reclaimed a piece of their old lives; they were marines again, not just prisoners and slaves.

Salem turned and walked into Arabe's hole, nodding to the guards. Both smiled, even the one with a massive bruise where Salem had beaten him. The Machinae were like that; in most cases, beating the shit out of someone would earn you nothing but their resentment. However, more often than not it would earn you a Machinae's respect.

He ducked under the low doorway and smiled at the old man sitting in the corner. Arabe grinned at him from his seat, and raised an eyebrow as he noticed the sticky, smelly stomach in Salem's hand.

"You do know, your majesty," Arabe said sarcastically, "That when you shit in your chamber pot, you're supposed to leave it in the pot. There's no need to show me!"

Salem laughed and sat down on the floor opposite of Arabe, "If I did bring that in here, I would have brought a full chamber pot to dump on you, old man."