Chapter 3: The story of two prisoners
Manual of the Soldier of the Universal Front – Excerpt – 5th Edition
The young soldier embodies the purity of the cause.
His blood, still untouched, mixes with the conquered soil and legitimizes the Empire’s future.
—Hiram Leverite
There was no sound.
The Nullity of everything was an unbearable void, even after so long.
Only in moments like this did Nolan hear his father’s voice. It wasn’t a precise memory, but a mental echo repeating like a curse: “You’re a traitor. You earned it.” He didn’t know if his father had ever said those words aloud, but in his mind they were already part of the landscape. He heard them as often as the dripping of water in the cell or the trembling of his bones. They didn’t hurt anymore. They were simply there, installed, like a constant background.
Nolan did what he always did when he wanted to silence his father: he remembered. His mind had long ago started living in past times whenever nothing happened.
The first day in captivity had been a whirlwind of screams and blows, a baptism in shadows marking the beginning of a year without light. Tau Ceti IV had quickly become his prison.
First, the Capitol.
For weeks they were kept in the collapsed basements of the Communications building. The walls still smelled of burning and melted wire. Outside, the distant echo of combat still pulsed, as if the war itself breathed through the ruins.
The Universal Government had lost control of the East, and the separatists were using the Capitol’s intact structures as improvised detention centers. It wasn’t a camp, nor a prison: it was a warehouse of bodies.
They didn’t know who was alive, or who was still an enemy.
The prisoners slept one on top of another, with no room to move.
Sometimes they were left for days without being spoken to. Silence became a form of punishment, a reminder that the outside world no longer existed.
That’s when the first interrogations began.
Nothing elaborate: repeated questions, sharp blows, long pauses where the sound of a boot on the floor was a threat in itself.
Then came something worse: calm.
They were left alone for hours or days without human contact. Harlan murmured the names of comrades; Nolan only heard his own breathing and the sound of rain falling over the Capitol’s ruins.
When they were moved, one dawn, without warning, no one told them where they were going.
They were chained, loaded into a closed transport, and driven for hours along unlit roads.
The air grew heavier, wetter.
Someone whispered a word Nolan would never forget: “Lumen.”
Thirty kilometers west, they were unloaded among rock formations where the ground glowed faintly under a phosphorescent light.
They were led down through underground ramps, rusted stairs, doors that seemed to throb.
The Chamber of Lumen.
That’s what the separatists called it: a beautiful name for a hell that never slept.
The walls were made of a translucent mineral that emitted its own light: a sickly white that never dimmed. The guards said that was Lumen’s gift: “There’s no shadow to hide in.”
The ancient galleries that once carried energy now seemed to breathe. There was no darkness, but no life either. To Nolan, those entrails of the earth weren’t a place but a state: total abandonment.
“Welcome to your new home,” one of the separatists mocked, a robust man with a scar crossing his forehead. “We made it comfortable for you.”
The ritual of humiliation began immediately. They tore off their armor with deliberate violence, as if stripping them of their humanity. The blows came without warning: closed fists, rifle butts, boots falling like hammers. Nolan tried to protect Harlan, but it was useless. Every movement only brought more punishment.
At some point, they were left on the floor, barely breathing. Their bodies were mosaics of bruises and shallow cuts. The pain was sharp, but the humiliation was worse. Nolan lifted his head, lips split, eyes fixed on Harlan, who could barely move.
“You still breathing?” Nolan muttered through clenched teeth, an effort just to break the silence.
Harlan nodded weakly, his pale face slick with sweat.
“We have to hold on… they’ll come for us. I know they will.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Nolan didn’t answer right away. The words hit him like a stone in the gut. He glanced sideways at Harlan, pale, drenched in sweat, but his eyes still burned with stubborn faith.
The cells were boxes of damp metal, barely large enough to sit in. No windows, no steady light, only occasional flashes from passing torches or lanterns. Silence wasn’t the absence of sound, it was pressure that filled the bones. Nolan could hear everything: the steady drip from the ceiling, the distant rumble of explosions above, and on the longest nights, the muffled moans of other prisoners.
The separatists were methodical in their cruelty. Torture became routine, varied, unpredictable. Some days it was physical: precise blows to already bruised ribs, cold electrical shocks to the limbs, deliberate cuts in non-vital areas. Nolan learned to stay silent, to absorb pain without reaction. He knew screams only gave them power.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Nolan spat once, after a shock left him shaking on the floor.
The separatist smiled, leaning closer.
“Another one who wants to be like Rodrick Viulk. You’re tough. I like that, makes it more fun.”
But the true war wasn’t physical. It was in the mind.
Once, they tied him to a chair in front of a monitor. On the screen, they showed footage of his squad being executed, some real, others clearly fabricated. Harlan was forced to watch too, sitting beside him, silent tears running down his cheeks as his hands trembled.
“You’ll see… we’ll get revenge,” Harlan whispered.
“That,” said one of the captors, turning off the monitor, “is exactly what our people went through. What we went through. Everyone ends the same, dust on a planet that doesn’t matter.”
Harlan fought his own battle. The young man had begun talking in his sleep, muttering fragmented words Nolan couldn’t piece together. During the first months, he still clung to sparks of hope. Sometimes he said things like:
“They’ll come for us. They can’t leave us here. The Union doesn’t abandon its own.”
His eyes were sunken, his lips cracked, but in them still flickered something like belief. Nolan held him upright when he could barely stay sitting. He adjusted the tatters of cloth around Harlan’s wound without a word.
There were moments when nothing happened, no shouts, no footsteps, no pounding on doors. Only the persistent drip from the ceiling and the echo of their breathing. In those stretches of absolute silence, time turned liquid, formless. Minutes? Hours? Days? Impossible to tell.
One morning they were jolted awake by an electrical current surging through the cell walls.
The separatists had gathered several prisoners. In the center, a man in rags knelt while a guard toyed with a knife, testing its edge.
“Today we teach you a lesson,” the separatist said, smiling. “We’ll show you obedience, though, hell, you probably know more about that than we do.”
Each prisoner was ordered to step forward and strike the kneeling man. Those who refused paid for it.
When Nolan’s turn came, he stood still, staring at the man on the ground. His face was covered in blood, but something in his eyes refused to break.
“Do it,” the separatist demanded, pressing a rifle to Nolan’s back.
Nolan slowly raised his fist. In his mind he repeated the phrase he’d heard so many times before: “It’s not your fault. It’s war.”
But when his knuckles met the man’s face, he felt nothing, no relief, no hatred.
Harlan was growing weaker, barely able to sit upright. His eyes were hollow, every breath a struggle. Nolan held him as best he could, adjusting the filthy rags around his body.
At first, they tried keeping track of time, marking the wall with a shard of metal Nolan had found. One line for each day. But they soon gave up; without natural light or any reference, they lost all sense of whether they were counting days or nights.
Food arrived twice per full cycle: a metallic plate with gray paste that tasted of rust and salt. Nolan swallowed it without thought. Harlan, instead, studied it as if it might hold a message: a secret code, a sign they hadn’t been forgotten. Sometimes he left it untouched, convinced that something better was coming, that rescue was near. Nolan would then quietly eat the portion himself. To him, it wasn’t Harlan’s kindness; it was just another illusion.
The smells were the worst. The damp cell reeked of stale sweat, rust, and something faintly rotten. Every time Nolan tried to sleep, the stench seeped into his nose, a reminder of what they were: bodies trapped in a metal can stinking of slow death. Sometimes the smell grew stronger, that only meant one thing: someone in the neighboring cells hadn’t survived the night.
Habits became routine. Nolan counted the steps between the door and the wall, though he already knew them by heart. Harlan murmured in his sleep, each word carrying a childlike tone of faith:
“They’re almost here… maybe tomorrow… maybe they’re already planning to get us out…”
Nolan listened, awake in the dark, unable to decide whether to despise that hope or envy it.
But the worst were the new sounds.
Every metallic creak in the ducts, every thud in a nearby cell made them hold their breath. Nolan tensed, expecting another torment. Harlan, instead, would stir with a flicker of life in his eyes.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered. “That’s them. It has to be.”
But it never was, only a guard adjusting his rifle, a prisoner collapsing, a rat scurrying in the trash. Then Harlan would sink back against the wall, yet even through his coughs and fever he’d still mutter the same phrase Nolan already knew by heart:
“They’ll come. They always come.”
Their conversations shrank to fragments. Nolan replied with tired monosyllables; Harlan kept spinning plans of escape, dreams of rescue, stories of what they’d do once it was over.
“How are you?” Nolan would ask.
“Ready… ready for when they show up,” Harlan answered, forcing a brittle smile.
“That’s something,” Nolan said.
And when the guards opened the door, time started moving again.
That night, Nolan looked toward him. Harlan slept, face sunken in shadow, and still looked peaceful, as if dreaming of a future only he could see.
“I’ll get us out of here, Har,” Nolan murmured, though he wasn’t sure he believed his own words.
