The Prisoner and the Commissar

The prisoner only smiled when they told him about the greenskins landing.

He was a slight man, with chaotic curls of red hair and pale, almost colorless eyes. He wore the standard prisoner’s white shift. A faded blue-green serpent tattoo wound its way around his legs and arms, his chest, his neck, and came to a snarling end on one cheek.

“A better death that you deserve,” the guards sneered through the steel door’s window. “We won’t even have to waste a bullet on you.”

The prisoner, lying in his bunk, just waved lazily. “So we’re all doomed,” he said. “We’re all going to die then?”

That put an end to the laughter. The two guards glowered sullenly.

“That’s right, smile about it,” one snarled. “You won’t live to see it.”

“Doesn’t have to end this way, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“It could end some other way.” The prisoner’s lips quivered, a flickering snakelike smile, like a man barely containing his laughter.

“Could end now, with me putting a bolt through your brain,” said one guard.

“What other way?” the second guard demanded, voice rising. “What way? What do you know?”

The prisoner wouldn’t answer, only stared at the ceiling and giggled to himself.

The next day the sounds of battle could be heard through the prison walls: The crump of artillery fire, the metallic chatter of projectile weapons, the tinny whine of lasguns, guttural ork war-cries and the screams, the pleading, the moans of the dead and the dying. Shells landed close enough to shake the walls and rattle the furniture in its fittings. Armored vehicles chewed the streets outside beneath their treads, and belched dirty diesel fumes through the window bars.

The prisoner lay in his cot, breathed deeply and whistled. It was tuneless, skittering, as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard.

The next morning, the commissar went down unlocking the doors cell by cell, offering each inmate a choice: a place on the battle line or a bolter round through the head.

He marched into the prisoner’s cell, the two guards at his shoulders. “Get up,” he bellowed at the prisoner, bolt pistol brandished in one hand. “Get up and fight and die for your Emperor, or die here and now.”

The prisoner looked up at him with pale blue eyes like chips of ancient ice and did not get up. “Are you losing, commissar?”

“I won’t ask again.”

“Nobody has to die commissar,” the prisoner said, and smiled, and sat up slowly, jerkily, oddly, like a puppet pulled by strings. His head hung at an angle, his arms flopped forgotten at his sides. “You could save them.”

The commissar leveled the bolter, aimed it right between those wide and empty eyes that looked right through him. The hand that held the bolter shook. The commissar blinked hard. “I can’t save anyone,” he said hoarsely.

“Sure you can. Let me help you.” The prisoner held out one hand, palm up. The scaled tattoo seemed to ripple as he moved.

The commissar shook his head, but the bolter pistol wavered, and drooped. “It’s too late.”

“Not if you take my hand.”

“It’s too late!” the commissar screamed, whirled about and fled. The two guards stared after him, looked at one another, at their prisoner, back at one another and shrugged, helplessly.

“Can you…” the second guard paused and wet his lips with his tongue. “Can you really save us?”

The prisoner winked at them, and the serpent winked with him. He flopped slackly back into his cot and did not watch the two guards go.

In another day, the fighting reached the prison.

Guards and armed prisoners fired from the rooftops, from loopholes knocked in the walls, lasgun beams falling so thick they merged into a single, scarlet sheet ripping across the ground. It was not enough. The orks charged in endless waves, heedless of casualties, clambering over heaps of their own dead to batter at the walls, blast open a breach and pour inside. The first guard fell, headless, blood pumping from the stump of his neck. The second fell too, carved open by a heavy steel axe.

The commissar rallied the men on the rooftop, leaving those inside to their fates. The prisoner’s cell was lost to the greenskins. The men gathered in a circle, guns trained on the stairwell, and waited for the end.

The floor beneath the commissar’s feet grew hot. Mild, at first, then hotter, and hotter, still hotter, hot enough to burn his skin through the soles of his boots, hot enough the rubber began to melt and run, soles of their boots sticking to the floor, bubbling and burning, the whole surface beginning to glow hot-white, and then.

Nothing.

Silence. Deafening, total silence. No bellowing war-cries, no snarls or grunts of weapons fire. Nothing.

The commissar led the men back down the stairs, step by cautious step. The ground was cool to the touch now. They found the first cinder corpse at the bottom of the stairs. More in the hall beyond. The orks were dead, every one of them. Burnt, charred, carbonized. Blackened sticks frozen in agonized shaped, contorting themselves, whole piles of them stacked like charcoal near the breach where they’d tried to escape.

And blithely sitting cross-legged in his cell, they found the prisoner.

“Changed your mind?” he asked the commissar.

“What?” the commissar couldn’t form the words. “How?”

The prisoner leaned forward, eyes hard as frostbite, and held out his hand again. “This once was a freebie, but they’ll be back. Can’t do it a second time, not without a price. Just wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t be fair. But you could. You could do it.”

The commissar looked down at the offered hand for a long time. “What do I have to do?” he asked at last, voice a whisper.

“Just hold out your hand.”

The commissar reached out—and the tattoo slithered across the prisoner’s fingers and coiled up the commissar’s arm.