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

10

Unsurprisingly, that rubs off pretty quickly. Prison colonies are not holiday camps at the best of times, and Plethin is pretty tough. It's the kind of planet that Central loves; liquid water and CO2 atmosphere, totally pre-life. Seas and beaches and dust and rock. Scorchingly hot in the day and freezing at night, thanks to the atmosphere and the day length; which means you work outside at dawn and dusk and you sleep through noon and midnight in your underground complex. At least you only need a breathing mask: the atmosphere is not toxic to skin, there just isn't any breathable oxygen, although they are dropping asteroids to increase the amount of water, so you have to know when that's happening in case they miss.

It's a terraforming job, not that anyone would ever live there; eventually it will just be robots, growing grops. They've dumped tons of algae into the ocean, and are watching the happy little green slime multiply and fart out good old O2. In the meantime, the boffins need feeding and looking after and so there are vast underground farms, fields of wheat and barley and corn, all quietly growing under lights. They provide a lot of the breathable air, so it's not as stuffy as it is on the prison ship, and farming is not such a bad job, even if you never get to see the outside. Harder is the work of digging new sections of the colony. Most of the real effort is being done by robots, but there is a lot of dull shovelling and wheelbarrow drudgery. And of course no one wants to work on the shit farm or the wormery, but it all needs doing and you get your rota the same as everyone else, along with all the more mundane jobs like working in the laundry or peeling spuds.

It's actually quite a clever idea. People learn simple colonist trades, and blokes who've never seen a chicken suddenly discover they actually rather enjoy looking after them. And, guess what? At the end of your sentence, sometimes they have a little word, offering you a place on a much easier and more established place a dozen light years away. Obviously there are die hard cons who just gob it all back, but some fellas look at their lot at home, and it doesn't take much to convince them that this could be a better life.

Of course, with all the cash waiting for me when I get back, I have a little chuckle about that. I spend a reasonable amount of time smoking locally grown puff in one of the wheat fields under the electric lights, daydreaming about my life as wealthy man, wondering how Alpha Green are getting on with their toys, imagining seeing my mates again.

And then the last straw.

I don't get much mail. No one does, really, and we have pretty limited net access. Messages have to be sent by some mad FTL mechanism from the router on Rhodun, two light years away, and it takes weeks to get anything from here to Earth, so it's not like you can just hook up to the internet and surf. But one late-day – that's what we called the evening half of the Plethin day – I get a message to go and see the guvnor, because he has an important message for me. This is pretty unusual, so, off I trot, and I think you can guess the look on my face when I hear what he has to say.

'They found the money you'd been paid by that company. They've confiscated it. They want to put you on trial for perverting the course of justice, amongst other things. You, and the people who paid you.'

I don't say anything. All I can do is open and close my mouth, like a concussed goldfish.

He swivels the monitor and shows me.

Two things hit me. First, it's not all the money; it's not even quarter of it. They got two accounts, but I covered my tracks very carefully. I used to do bookkeeping, remember? There are a bunch of others on other planets, under different jurisdictions, different variations of my name. Some even under made-up names. However, I know the filth; it's only a matter of time before they get them.

Secondly, the maximum sentence for the crimes is... another ten years. Ten years! I'll be an old man.

OK. Stop. Think.