The Eleventh Dimension or, a Series of Events that were NOT MY FAULT

9

After joking about the cabins on that cruise liner, I am somewhat gratified to see that the cells on the ship are actually only slightly worse. But that's about it. It's proper soviet submarine claustrophobic, with an exercise space and a dining room being the only two big spaces for us lags, and a maze of narrow corridors, tunnels really, connecting everything. The gravity is predictably shonky, and there are great stretches of the place with none at all, so I end up constantly banging myself on metal walls and doors until I get the hang of it. The water is always on the blink, the food is at best unidentifiable, and the air always smells slightly stale because the recycling can't quite cope. Frankly, I'm amazed I made it one piece.

One thing that I wasn't expecting is the company. Maybe it's because you get a better class of prisoner on the colony ships, or maybe I had a reputation from all the lurid stuff in the press, but I wasn't given any serious bother. I think it is partly because a spaceship is somewhere that you can't smuggle booze and drugs into; we make half a dozen fuel stops along the way, but not at inhabited systems, just automated filling stations orbiting gas giants, so there is nowhere to smuggle from anyway. Having said that, you can't keep fifty cons locked up in a metal box for three months and not see the odd rumble, and that certainly happens.

The other thing, of course, is that we are under interstellar law, where the good old fashioned death penalty applies. No judge or jury beyond the captain, a lethal injection and you are put in the freezer to be taken home for grieving relatives. I don't know how much effect it actually had; but as I sit at meal times, eating grey mush with my plastic spoon, there is always some kind of rumour flying around and sometimes it's about some bloke who won't be going home. Communications are pretty limited when you are travelling faster than light, so I don't believe it all, but I'm sure it happens occasionally.

And so my nights are spent in my cell listening to my cell-mate snore, and my days are spent in badly fitting denim, reading, exercising, playing cards and eating. It's kind of like the most boring holiday I've ever been on – not counting that one in Scotland. Oh, and having jabs. Constant bloody injections, mostly retroviruses but some inoculations and steroids. Yeah, that's right, steroids. Place we are going to is one point one three g, which means you need to be that much beefier. Given these are good clean modern pharmaceuticals you get nicely buff with no nasty side effects, so the lads are queuing up for them all right, and then hitting the gym. The viruses are to modify various internal clocks: the day is a staggering fifty six hours long, but you do it as two twenty eight hour shifts, and all this genetic monkeying about makes it easier to handle, apparently. Ship time switches to the Plethin day as soon as we take off, and, frankly, I never really get the hang of it.

After a week of this, you start to feel a bit crazy, but like anything you get used to it and your world shrinks to the cubic kilometre or so of spaceship and you almost forget that there is anything else. I sometimes wonder what the screws' part of the ship is like; poor bastards, they are just as locked up as us, but they haven't done anything to deserve it. Although, judging by the tales I hear, none of the inmates have, either. Innocent, down to the last man; the number of miscarriages of justice that must have occurred is staggering!

Seven weeks later, the usual deal; everything is stowed (that's ship speak for 'randomly flung in whatever cupboard you can find'), we sit in our flight seats and then the ship starts its deceleration. That horrible feeling happens in my gut, everything shudders, and we drop into the Plethin system, moving at the far more sociable speed of point two c. When the automatic locks on the seats release us, we all pile out to look at our new home, tripping over whatever crap wasn't tided away, looking like a bunch of kids pressing our sticky noses on the glass.

It's not much to see, really. Just a bright star. Not a huge surprise, when you consider the amount of deceleration and manoeuvring we've got to do; they've left plenty of space. The ship's gravity being what it is, I guess they don't want to risk any high-gs, in case they arrive with prisoner pate.

I really hate this bit. I always will. You look at your spaceship, three kilometres long and half a k wide and high: and you don't click that when it turns, you will feel it. You have to, because of the sheer bloody size of the thing. There are rules, like, stay towards the centre of the ship, which for us is the dining room; but, flying in economy as we are that is still some distance from the actual fulcrum, so you still get that horrible feeling of movement. A lot of fellas spent time on the metal phone to God, and I loose my lunch at least once. This is made worse by the constant din of the thrusters as we decelerate, a low roar that shivers through the hull day and night, keeping us awake, forcing everyone to shout all the time. We are all dizzy, tired and deaf for a week, and you can imagine how everyone gets on just great, especially after all the steroids.

But, fortunately this only lasts a week or so – I say 'only', but by the end there had been a dozen punch ups, a suicide attempt and someone had come this close to being stabbed to death with a plastic fork – and we are in high orbit around Plethin itself. The sun is bathing the ship in its rays, the planet is a fist-sized blue and yellow disk, and we are no longer shouting or puking. It's funny to say it about being on a prison ship, but I felt like a king of the galaxy at the moment, sentence be damned. Down there was my new world, for a time.