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ex-slam employees buried Outside. One had not reacted soon enough to his
animal's drastic mood shift. The other had made the mistake of teas-ing a
large male by withholding its food. The enraged hellhound had eaten the
guard's face instead. That was a gaffe every other guard handler was careful
not to repeat.
The name of the creatures derived from their ap-pearance, which was vaguely
caninelike without pos-sessing so much as a single strand of earthly doggy
DNA. At times they could also appear strikingly fe-line, though there was no
more cat in them than dog. They were wholly alien, imported from a world noted
for the ferocity of its native fauna. That they were manipulatable at all was
a tribute to a few small dedicated families who had settled on their home
world and made quite a nice business out of training and exporting the
animals. In nowise, however, could the hellhounds be called domesticated.
Their inherent and unsuppressed wildness made them that much more useful in
such occupations as prison work.
Occasionally, as a special treat, they got to eat a prisoner.
Just watching them deploy was a lesson in verte-brate efficiency. Flying over
a walkway, their scaly, slate-gray skin changing color as the chromatophores
within reacted to the animals' heightened emotional state, they were a perfect
image of racing terror. Seeing them, the last thing anyone, down to the
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toughest of inmates, would want to do was get in their way. Relaxed and at
ease, knowing that the path ahead would be cleared for them by the eager
patrolling beasts, armed guards followed.
Word traveled quickly throughout the prison. Shouts of warning made the rounds
of the ranked tiers, descended to areas inhabited only by those who scavenged
for food in the sulfurous depths. Cell doors slammed shut; not to keep
prisoners in, but to keep four-legged berserker carnivores out. The
in-quisitive crowd that had gathered around Riddick evaporated as convicts
sought shelter in open cells or among the rocks.
"Here they come!" The shouts rained down. "Slot up, slot up! Get off the
tiers!"
Head back, the Guv all but shook a fist skyward. "A herd! A goddamn herd.
Is that all we are to you
?"
Pushing frantically past his fellows, the man who had first questioned Riddick
scrambled around him toward safety. "Flee now, talk later! The cull is on!"
Lowering his gaze, the Guv turned to Riddick. Without saying so, he had
apparently come to a de-cision regarding the new prisoner. "Just don't let the
howlers catch you out. Find an empty cell, a crevice, anything. Make sure it's
solid you can't believe how strong the bastards are. If they think they can
get at you, they'll try to bite their way in right through the rock. And if
you're confronted, do not
do not
make eye contact. Play deaf and dumb and you might get away with it." He
started off in the opposite di-rection. "Or you might get to be lunch."
Above, more guards were descending via the lift. One hound was giving its
handler added trouble.
Snarling and hissing, it snapped at the guard's maul-stick but was finally
jabbed into compliance. Its ear tag identified it as #5, but the nameplate it
wore was considerably more evocative: Thrash.
Circling the prison singly and in pairs, hellhounds did their work, making
sure level after level was clear of prisoners. To their disappointment, it
usually was. The slam on Crematoria had no need of elaborate scan and check
systems, no need for guards to inspect every cell and hiding place
individually. The hell-hound pack did it for them. Furthermore, the pack could
not suffer from systems failure, or electronic breakdown, or a power outage.
Should any of those events take place, either as a result of an escape
at-tempt or naturally occurring breakdown, all prison administration had to do
to secure the entire complex was release the hellhounds and let them run free.
Years earlier, a trio of prisoners had tried just that. They had succeeded in
shutting down all electronics in the hope of reaching the landing hangar and
over-powering the crew of the regular supply ship. They were found in the
transport tunnel, barely ten meters from the prison access station, with half
a dozen snarling hellhounds on top of them. By the time the handlers managed
to pull the pack off the would-be escapees, there was nothing left but a pile
of bones, cracked and broken to extract the marrow.
That was the one and only time anyone had tried such a stunt.
Continuing on their patrol, multiple animals leaped gaps between tiers that no
human could man-age without mechanical aid. One brute, hungrier and more
hopeful than its fellows, disdained the ramps in favor of sliding down the
solidified lava fall. Its claws left grooves in the rock.
The overall effect was one of controlled panic, if that wasn't a contradiction
in terms. Stumbling over one another, shoving fellow prisoners out of the way,
grim-faced convicts scrambled to find cells with doors that closed tight.
Caught out far from their chosen abodes, one group resorted to grabbing a
de-hinged door off the ground and frantically propping it into place, wedging
it tight with rocks and what-ever other materials they could find.
Loping along one of the lower levels toward her own residence, Kyra found
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herself cut off. Ignoring the ramps, one of the hounds had come down a
serv-ice chute. Half crazed with longing for the taste of human flesh they
might be, but they weren't stupid. Repetition prompted learning. One day she
would not be surprised to see members of the pack using the lift in an attempt
to beat unlucky prisoners to their cells.
Spotting her, the hellhound lengthened its already impressive stride, then
leaped. Instead of trying to dodge the animal, she accelerated straight toward
it. At the last possible instant she dropped, sliding feet-first beneath it,
and was up and running on the other side before the creature hit the ground.
It turned within its own body length, but by that time she was on a rope and
rappelling her way to the bottom of the cavern.
One group of guards was methodically patrolling the upper tiers, whistling
menacingly as they walked.
The second group made its way downward via the central lift. A couple of them
carried powerful spot-lights. These were used to pick out prisoners foolish
enough to remain out of their cells. Whether it was done for reasons of
security, to provide a quick snack for the hellhounds, or simply for the
guards'
amuse-ment it was impossible to say. It was just the way it was in Crematoria
slam.
At the bottom of the cavern, a pair of sulfide scav-engers vanished into a
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