It’s the little things.
Norm had been expecting another long walk, but this passageway was much shorter. And soon, wider. Also, it had… well. They were cages, set in the wall, and there was no getting around it. Twenty on a side, big enough for a man, and thankfully empty of anything, either living or dead. But they smelled. They smelled so rank, Norm wondered why the stink hadn’t reached as far as the antechamber behind them.
There were also lights in here; modern ones, that could glow indefinitely. They pushed back the gloom far enough that the two could see that they were now in a large, rectangular room, with another, formidable door on the other side. The room itself was all concrete walls and floors, with large drains in the floor and more of that rank smell.
It all looked horribly… familiar. “I didn’t think the seccys went in for mental readjustment centers,” Ashelyn said with obviously false bravado. “All the reports said they just stripped their weakest reeds naked, and sent them out to die in the cold.”
“They were guerrillas,” Norm pointed out, distantly wondering if this room had anything that was flammable. Burning down a Peep internal security facility had been one of his life goals ever since two weeks into his original conscription. “They wouldn’t have had the time or the space to break down and re-educate their problem recruits. I guess here they had both. Check the cabinets?”