Stars Gods Wolves by Dan Kirshtein (best classic books .txt) 📕

act, every day, the prisoner would breathe onto one of the steel walls and sign his name in the resulting fog: Martin Collier.

Cursive was very nearly a dead font, only used for signatures of those who felt an attachment to the pens and paper of old Earth. And yet, Martin was well practiced in signing his name, no matter how temporarily it would appear against the wall.

He stepped back, and his small, shrunken frame stood to admire it yet again. It would fade over time, but for that shining moment, he remembered himself: his childhood, his contributions to science, and the woman he loved. But he was not here because of any of that. He was here for what he did. History remembers it as a horrible thing, but history is short-sighted. It bangs its gavel and judges man and his accomplishments for all time.

Collier was to live out the rest of his days within these walls. The cell had been designed as the worst punishment the Heruleans could administer, for crimes unimaginable. Although there were different types of convicts in the facility, Martin was the first in what the civilization hoped would be a very short list of prisoners that would deserve such treatment.

He approached the large window and looked out with tired blue eyes that rested within browned skin. He watched the crescent sun hanging in the sky now that it was finally angled away from his room. Collier never tired of how beautiful the moon was; not from a traditional viewpoint, but a scientific one. It shouldn’t have existed. By all counts, life here was nothing short of a miracle. The sun gave off barely any light, despite his daily morning arguments to the contrary. The red sand that covered the ground provided little in the way of sustenance. And whatever food the refugee Heruleans did manage to grow or cook had very little nutritional value—to Humans, anyway.

Martin had lost so much weight during his stay, any semblance of the gut he had arrived with had long vanished. Malnutrition had taken its toll. His once brilliant and proud eyes had grown desperate and defeated. His fingernails and toenails had grown quite long; he was promised a solution to that was on its way, but promises in this place meant very little. He sometimes imagined that would be how he’d finally die in this place: accidentally impaled on his own fingernails.

As his dull eyes stared out the window, he realized he had been picking at his fingers again. He looked down to see the skin around his thumbnail bleeding, the outer layer of flesh peeled nearly to the knuckle. He winced, covering the area with his palm as if to protect himself. He didn’t know why he had started doing that; he’d just recently felt compelled to do it. He winced from the pain of the sensitive, bleeding skin underneath.

He wondered if the time here was changing him, making him a monster. The worlds would forget about the man who ended a horrible war; they’d hide him away to assuage their own consciences. Martin had been a man of science for so long, and when he first arrived to this desolate cell he insisted that they could not imprison his mind. But, in fact, they had done just that. With no tools, nothing to write with, no books or stimulation of any kind, Martin wondered what kind of man would step out of this place, if one ever would.

Planets were sacred to the Heruleans: a mother made of rock and nourishment. His horrific crime, in their eyes, was his greatest accomplishment in the eyes of the Human Government. He used the Heruleans’ own planet against them, and the deaths totaled in the millions. It was a thing of genius, he was told; he was hailed as a hero, though this victory was bitter and costly. And, even though they would eventually come to surrender to the Humans, the Heruleans sought him out.

He remembered the day they took him, remembered not resisting, as the guilt weighed heavily on his heart. They walked him to their ship, and didn’t even care to blindfold him or handcuff him; all parties involved knew that Collier would never see the Maxian sun again. It had been five years since that day (four and a half since the war ended). Five years staring out the same window, looking at the same scenery.

With its red sand, orange mountains, and a purple sky that had never seen a cloud, Heru was inhospitable to Humans due to its almost complete lack of moisture. The only plant life that he could see was a rantoh root, which grew approximately six inches per month. From his window, he measured the root, using his finger as a ruler. From that he’d been able to surmise approximately how long he’d been there.

As Martin’s forehead and fingers pressed against the glass, he mused that even if he could get out, he’d die out there. The only reason he’d survived this long was because they kept giving him hydration pills, which, now that he thought about it, must be terribly expensive to import. Good, he grunted to himself; let them drive themselves to bankruptcy. Let his expensive suffering deal one last blow to his captors, at least.

His breakfast arrived late again, slid under the door. One lump of dried vitamin loaf and a cup full of hydration pills to dry swallow throughout the day. As much disdain as he carried for the sour biscuit with the texture of drywall, his stomach urged him toward it immediately. He would debate with himself, as he often had in his past, though that was about scientific things. Now it was much more primal: His head knew it was the same garbage he’d been fed for five years, while his stomach needed nourishment of any kind.

As he slowly walked toward the tray, he pondered the amount of dedication it must take for prisoners to starve themselves to