fredbassett (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fredbassett) wrote2014-05-20 04:14 pm
fredbassett) wrote2014-05-20 04:14 pm
Entry tags:
- connor,
- danny quinn,
- fic,
- finn,
- joel stringer,
- lyle,
- nick,
- ryan,
- stephen
Fic, Within These Walls, Part 23 of 30, AU, 18
Title : Within These Walls, Chapter 23 of 30
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Ryan, Stringer, Lyle, Finn, Danny, Nick, Stephen, Connor
Disclaimer : Not mine (except the OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 59,000 words in 30 chapters of approx. 1,500 – 2,500 words each
Spoilers : None
Summary : Ending up in Dartmoor prison for refusing to recant their belief in evolution is only the start of the problems facing Nick, Stephen and Connor. And Sir James Lester soon ends up with other problems on his hands than just an over-crowded prison population.
A/N : 1) For acknowledgments etc please see Part 1. 2) There will be a short hiatus in posting until next Tuesday as I'll be away without access to my laptop over the weekend. Normal service with then resume.
“Joel, withdraw your men!” Ryan ordered as he hurried down the corridor, speaking into the mouthpiece of his radio headset. “D Wing’s a lost cause. Anyone not involved will have holed up in their cells by now.” He waited a moment for Joel Stringer’s affirmative response and then demanded, “Lyle, what’s the score with A Wing?”
“Seen worse,” Lyle declared laconically, his voice surprisingly clear over the comms link, despite the noise in the background. “We’re winning, but I think Joe Wilder’s lads are under pressure in G. Do you want me to get over there when we’ve mopped up here?”
“Yes. I want this place sewn up as tight as a virgin’s cunt.” But before that, he wanted Cutter and his friends out of C Wing.
The last contact he’d had with young Rob Finn had been when he’d been making a dash back to the relative safety of an unoccupied cell with the governor’s latest protégé and his friends. Too many prisoners stood between them and the exit from the wing for them to break out by themselves. It would be up to Ryan to send in the cavalry to get them out of a seething mass of rioting prisoners, all hell-bent on doing as much damage as possible. He was just grateful for the fact that he still had a working comms link to Finn.
* * * * *
“Get the bunks against the door!” Finn ordered as they piled unceremoniously into an unoccupied cell.
Danny promptly turned around to do exactly that. The soldier looked young, but he’d done a good job of getting them out of the maelstrom of violence in C Wing and his voice had held the whiplash crack of command when the chips had gone down. Finn had very effectively fought fire with fire, not hesitating to react with an overwhelming display of force, putting bullets into the heads of at least three prisoners who had decided to express their dislike of the guards as they’d fought their way through the riot to the nearest cell. He’d also taken two more off at the knees, quite literally blowing their legs apart, leaving them screaming on the ground. If the men didn’t get medical help soon, they’d die. Danny knew exactly what Finn was doing by not killing them outright. A wounded enemy tied up more resources on the other side than a clean kill, and the chances were that the injured prisoners would have some friends amongst the rioters who would do their best to get them out of the melee.
Danny had tried – and failed – to feel sorry for the men. They were rapists, murderers and drug dealers who had decided that there was more to be gained from plundering the system than simply getting their heads down and grafting through their time. Two of the dead men had been Gordie Frazer’s close associates, and he’d certainly weep no tears for them.
“We’re holed up in cell 25, boss,” Danny heard Finn telling Ryan. “Safe enough for now, I think, but if you want Cutter and co in a hurry, there’s nowt I can do about it.”
The sound of screaming beyond the metal door suddenly took on a different note, no longer the chilling yells of prisoners gone feral, but afraid now, menaced by something outside their control.
Finn clambered onto the bottom bunk and pressed his face up against the small hatch on the door to get some idea of what was happening outside,
“Oh shit…” Finn moved back from the door, a look of disbelief on his face. “Professor, take a look at this.”
Cutter took his place on the bunk and put his eye to the small hole in the door. “An anomaly’s opened up out there,” he said, sounding almost unconvinced by his own statement.
He moved aside, and Danny took his place. The professor was right. A bloody great big anomaly was hanging in the air in the middle of the free association area. Something that looked like it had been made redundant from the set of Jurassic Park had just come through the sparkling ball of light and was already stalking one of the rioting prisoners. In response to the yells from his confederates, the man grabbed a chair and turned to take on the feathered dinosaur.
The creature stood as tall as a Dartmoor pony, with plumed blue feathers cresting its bony head, running down its neck and body to join seamlessly with a tail that looked like it had been stolen from a peacock. Despite its undeniable beauty, it had a vicious streak a mile wide. Instead of attacking the bloke with the chair, it leaped past him, striking an onlooker in the face with its strong beak.
Danny blinked in shock. The creature had just pecked the man’s eye out. He moved to one side and pulled Connor forwards. “Come on, genius, what the hell’s that?”
Connor squinted through the open hatch. “Can’t see anything…” Followed quickly by, “Raptors of some sort. There’s more of them coming through, oh hell, they’re….”
The sound of screaming could be heard all too clearly through the steel door. Connor scrambled away, looking pale, and swallowed hard before vomiting into the toilet. By the sound of it, pecking eyes out was something of a party piece for the newcomers. Danny didn’t blame Connor for throwing up.
“Some sort of bloody great big bird-thing, boss,” Finn said, relaying the latest information to Ryan. “Like a peacock on steroids with one fuck of an attitude problem. Tell the lads to keep their visors down if they come in. The sods like going for eyes.”
“It’s carnage out there,” Stephen said, a note of desperation in his voice. “We need to do something.”
Finn shook his head. “We need to stay alive, and that means we stay here. Just thank fuck those things turned up, because if not, that lot out there would be hammering on our door. So no fucking heroics. Stay put, stay quiet. Stay alive,” he said, fixing Stephen with a hard stare. “You’ve seen what they’re capable of. You can’t reason with a mob, mate. Trust me, been there, done that, seen a friend ripped apart like a fucking scarecrow.”
It was the longest speech Danny had heard from the soldier. And by the look on Stephen’s face, it had done the trick, which was good. They had enough to worry about without Stephen Hart playing at being the cloaked crusader.
Something slammed hard against the door. Danny wasn’t sure whether it was another prisoner trying to get in, or simply a body being flung aside in the increasing chaos outside. The door rattled and scraped inwards by a couple of inches. Danny and Finn promptly put their shoulders against the bunk and pushed it back into place.
“Come on, boss,” Finn muttered into his throat mic. “It’s not sounding healthy out there.”
* * * * *
“Visors down, shields up!” Ryan ordered. “If it’s not human you’ve got my say-so to kill it.”
“Never thought Gordie Frazer was very human,” someone commented. “Shame he’s not still in there.”
“Can’t have everything,” Ryan said. “If anyone in C wing gives trouble, I won’t be asking any questions afterwards, and neither will the governor.” Frazer had been moved to G wing after raping Stephen Hart and had almost certainly been amongst one of the ring-leaders instrumental in kicking off all the current shit. Ryan knew perfectly well that Joe Wilder would have done his best to take down Frazer, and if he’d succeeded, Ryan doubted he’d get anything other than Lester’s thanks.
The governor had explicitly given permission for the use of deadly force if needed. Their instructions were clear. So far as C wing was concerned, their job was to get Cutter and his cellmates out alive and lock the rest down. Starve a riot of oxygen and it would soon fizzle out. Lester’s view was that if prisoners wrecked their own accommodation, that was their problem and they could live with the consequences. In one of his previous positions, he’d simply starved the rioters out; in another, when they’d started to set fire to some furniture, he’d borrowed a water-cannon from the local riot troops and deployed that, with interesting consequences. Their only option was to go in hard and fast. If they got Cutter and the others out alive, Ryan would count it as a win, anyone else was an acceptable loss.
Damage limitation weren’t words that figured heavily in Ryan’s vocabulary in circumstances like this. It was one area in which he agreed with Oliver Leek.
“Get to cell 25, get Finn, Cutter, Temple, Hart and Quinn out of there alive and in one piece. Any questions?” Ryan looked at the ten man squad he was sending in. They were all hard lads who were trained to take no shit off anyone. They had a mate holed up in there and they were intending to get him out. Simple.
There were no questions. There hadn’t even been any when he’d told them to stay away from the big, shining diamond in the middle of the recreation area and to be on the lookout for something that looked like a cross between an emu and a peacock, with the attitude problems of a pitbull terrier with a wasp up its arse. After what he’d seen from the cell, Finn had embellished his description in subsequent reports.
Ryan unlocked the first set of doors while one of the soldiers kept him covered with his riot shield, and then they were through the next set, moving in tight formation, like a Roman testudo, riot shields up, using brute force to sweep away any opposition. Ryan and Blade stayed out of the main formation and were prepared to pick off anyone who looked like causing serious problems. Two prisoners made a break for the door as soon as it opened. They were both promptly tasered. A brightly-coloured bird-thing stood over a body sprawled on the floor, pecking at the man’s chest through a blood-stained teeshirt. Ryan shot it and the creature crumpled to the floor in a mess of electric blue feathers. Another one had already had the tables turned on it, quite literally, pinning it against the wall while a couple of prisoners bashed it with plastic chairs.
Furniture bounced off the plastic riot shields and was kicked aside. The appearance of the soldiers fanned the flames again, distracting the prisoners from the rip in time that had appeared without warning in their midst. It was fucking chaos on the wing, but the soldiers were well-trained, well-protected and very determined. Opposition was bludgeoned hard, knocked to the ground by the lead-tipped extendable batons that were as good as guns at close range.
“Finn, get ready to move,” Ryan instructed, speaking into his radio. “I want you out of there and running on the count of ten.” As his mental countdown reached one, the door of cell 25 was yanked inwards and Danny Quinn came out at a run, holding tight to Connor Temple’s arm. Behind him came Cutter, with Stephen Hart and Rob Finn bringing up the rear.
One of the bird-things chose that moment to lunge forward, shrieking like a banshee. Hart grabbed a chair and slammed it into the creature’s head without even breaking stride. A second one scrambled over the body of the first. A moment later, its chest sprouted a black-handled knife. Blade retrieved his weapon and promptly decapitated the bird.
As the soldiers broke ranks and then equally quickly reformed around the men they’d been sent to protect, Ryan realised that the ball of fractured light was starting to flicker and go dim. By the time they’d retreated off the wing, it had winked out of existence, leaving two of the birds behind. Ryan managed to pick one off with a lucky head shot. The other went down under a broken table leg wielded by one of the prisoners. For a change, Ryan felt like cheering the man on, despite his rap sheet for multiple rape.
Ryan grabbed hold of the door and yanked it closed while Blade stood at his side, a long-bladed knife sufficient deterrent to anyone who might have been considering making a bid for freedom. He turned the key in the lock and the tight knot of soldiers moved back behind the second set of doors that Ryan equally promptly locked.
Objective achieved. Ryan pulled his phone out of his pocket and prepared to deliver the good news the governor.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Ryan, Stringer, Lyle, Finn, Danny, Nick, Stephen, Connor
Disclaimer : Not mine (except the OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 59,000 words in 30 chapters of approx. 1,500 – 2,500 words each
Spoilers : None
Summary : Ending up in Dartmoor prison for refusing to recant their belief in evolution is only the start of the problems facing Nick, Stephen and Connor. And Sir James Lester soon ends up with other problems on his hands than just an over-crowded prison population.
A/N : 1) For acknowledgments etc please see Part 1. 2) There will be a short hiatus in posting until next Tuesday as I'll be away without access to my laptop over the weekend. Normal service with then resume.
“Joel, withdraw your men!” Ryan ordered as he hurried down the corridor, speaking into the mouthpiece of his radio headset. “D Wing’s a lost cause. Anyone not involved will have holed up in their cells by now.” He waited a moment for Joel Stringer’s affirmative response and then demanded, “Lyle, what’s the score with A Wing?”
“Seen worse,” Lyle declared laconically, his voice surprisingly clear over the comms link, despite the noise in the background. “We’re winning, but I think Joe Wilder’s lads are under pressure in G. Do you want me to get over there when we’ve mopped up here?”
“Yes. I want this place sewn up as tight as a virgin’s cunt.” But before that, he wanted Cutter and his friends out of C Wing.
The last contact he’d had with young Rob Finn had been when he’d been making a dash back to the relative safety of an unoccupied cell with the governor’s latest protégé and his friends. Too many prisoners stood between them and the exit from the wing for them to break out by themselves. It would be up to Ryan to send in the cavalry to get them out of a seething mass of rioting prisoners, all hell-bent on doing as much damage as possible. He was just grateful for the fact that he still had a working comms link to Finn.
* * * * *
“Get the bunks against the door!” Finn ordered as they piled unceremoniously into an unoccupied cell.
Danny promptly turned around to do exactly that. The soldier looked young, but he’d done a good job of getting them out of the maelstrom of violence in C Wing and his voice had held the whiplash crack of command when the chips had gone down. Finn had very effectively fought fire with fire, not hesitating to react with an overwhelming display of force, putting bullets into the heads of at least three prisoners who had decided to express their dislike of the guards as they’d fought their way through the riot to the nearest cell. He’d also taken two more off at the knees, quite literally blowing their legs apart, leaving them screaming on the ground. If the men didn’t get medical help soon, they’d die. Danny knew exactly what Finn was doing by not killing them outright. A wounded enemy tied up more resources on the other side than a clean kill, and the chances were that the injured prisoners would have some friends amongst the rioters who would do their best to get them out of the melee.
Danny had tried – and failed – to feel sorry for the men. They were rapists, murderers and drug dealers who had decided that there was more to be gained from plundering the system than simply getting their heads down and grafting through their time. Two of the dead men had been Gordie Frazer’s close associates, and he’d certainly weep no tears for them.
“We’re holed up in cell 25, boss,” Danny heard Finn telling Ryan. “Safe enough for now, I think, but if you want Cutter and co in a hurry, there’s nowt I can do about it.”
The sound of screaming beyond the metal door suddenly took on a different note, no longer the chilling yells of prisoners gone feral, but afraid now, menaced by something outside their control.
Finn clambered onto the bottom bunk and pressed his face up against the small hatch on the door to get some idea of what was happening outside,
“Oh shit…” Finn moved back from the door, a look of disbelief on his face. “Professor, take a look at this.”
Cutter took his place on the bunk and put his eye to the small hole in the door. “An anomaly’s opened up out there,” he said, sounding almost unconvinced by his own statement.
He moved aside, and Danny took his place. The professor was right. A bloody great big anomaly was hanging in the air in the middle of the free association area. Something that looked like it had been made redundant from the set of Jurassic Park had just come through the sparkling ball of light and was already stalking one of the rioting prisoners. In response to the yells from his confederates, the man grabbed a chair and turned to take on the feathered dinosaur.
The creature stood as tall as a Dartmoor pony, with plumed blue feathers cresting its bony head, running down its neck and body to join seamlessly with a tail that looked like it had been stolen from a peacock. Despite its undeniable beauty, it had a vicious streak a mile wide. Instead of attacking the bloke with the chair, it leaped past him, striking an onlooker in the face with its strong beak.
Danny blinked in shock. The creature had just pecked the man’s eye out. He moved to one side and pulled Connor forwards. “Come on, genius, what the hell’s that?”
Connor squinted through the open hatch. “Can’t see anything…” Followed quickly by, “Raptors of some sort. There’s more of them coming through, oh hell, they’re….”
The sound of screaming could be heard all too clearly through the steel door. Connor scrambled away, looking pale, and swallowed hard before vomiting into the toilet. By the sound of it, pecking eyes out was something of a party piece for the newcomers. Danny didn’t blame Connor for throwing up.
“Some sort of bloody great big bird-thing, boss,” Finn said, relaying the latest information to Ryan. “Like a peacock on steroids with one fuck of an attitude problem. Tell the lads to keep their visors down if they come in. The sods like going for eyes.”
“It’s carnage out there,” Stephen said, a note of desperation in his voice. “We need to do something.”
Finn shook his head. “We need to stay alive, and that means we stay here. Just thank fuck those things turned up, because if not, that lot out there would be hammering on our door. So no fucking heroics. Stay put, stay quiet. Stay alive,” he said, fixing Stephen with a hard stare. “You’ve seen what they’re capable of. You can’t reason with a mob, mate. Trust me, been there, done that, seen a friend ripped apart like a fucking scarecrow.”
It was the longest speech Danny had heard from the soldier. And by the look on Stephen’s face, it had done the trick, which was good. They had enough to worry about without Stephen Hart playing at being the cloaked crusader.
Something slammed hard against the door. Danny wasn’t sure whether it was another prisoner trying to get in, or simply a body being flung aside in the increasing chaos outside. The door rattled and scraped inwards by a couple of inches. Danny and Finn promptly put their shoulders against the bunk and pushed it back into place.
“Come on, boss,” Finn muttered into his throat mic. “It’s not sounding healthy out there.”
* * * * *
“Visors down, shields up!” Ryan ordered. “If it’s not human you’ve got my say-so to kill it.”
“Never thought Gordie Frazer was very human,” someone commented. “Shame he’s not still in there.”
“Can’t have everything,” Ryan said. “If anyone in C wing gives trouble, I won’t be asking any questions afterwards, and neither will the governor.” Frazer had been moved to G wing after raping Stephen Hart and had almost certainly been amongst one of the ring-leaders instrumental in kicking off all the current shit. Ryan knew perfectly well that Joe Wilder would have done his best to take down Frazer, and if he’d succeeded, Ryan doubted he’d get anything other than Lester’s thanks.
The governor had explicitly given permission for the use of deadly force if needed. Their instructions were clear. So far as C wing was concerned, their job was to get Cutter and his cellmates out alive and lock the rest down. Starve a riot of oxygen and it would soon fizzle out. Lester’s view was that if prisoners wrecked their own accommodation, that was their problem and they could live with the consequences. In one of his previous positions, he’d simply starved the rioters out; in another, when they’d started to set fire to some furniture, he’d borrowed a water-cannon from the local riot troops and deployed that, with interesting consequences. Their only option was to go in hard and fast. If they got Cutter and the others out alive, Ryan would count it as a win, anyone else was an acceptable loss.
Damage limitation weren’t words that figured heavily in Ryan’s vocabulary in circumstances like this. It was one area in which he agreed with Oliver Leek.
“Get to cell 25, get Finn, Cutter, Temple, Hart and Quinn out of there alive and in one piece. Any questions?” Ryan looked at the ten man squad he was sending in. They were all hard lads who were trained to take no shit off anyone. They had a mate holed up in there and they were intending to get him out. Simple.
There were no questions. There hadn’t even been any when he’d told them to stay away from the big, shining diamond in the middle of the recreation area and to be on the lookout for something that looked like a cross between an emu and a peacock, with the attitude problems of a pitbull terrier with a wasp up its arse. After what he’d seen from the cell, Finn had embellished his description in subsequent reports.
Ryan unlocked the first set of doors while one of the soldiers kept him covered with his riot shield, and then they were through the next set, moving in tight formation, like a Roman testudo, riot shields up, using brute force to sweep away any opposition. Ryan and Blade stayed out of the main formation and were prepared to pick off anyone who looked like causing serious problems. Two prisoners made a break for the door as soon as it opened. They were both promptly tasered. A brightly-coloured bird-thing stood over a body sprawled on the floor, pecking at the man’s chest through a blood-stained teeshirt. Ryan shot it and the creature crumpled to the floor in a mess of electric blue feathers. Another one had already had the tables turned on it, quite literally, pinning it against the wall while a couple of prisoners bashed it with plastic chairs.
Furniture bounced off the plastic riot shields and was kicked aside. The appearance of the soldiers fanned the flames again, distracting the prisoners from the rip in time that had appeared without warning in their midst. It was fucking chaos on the wing, but the soldiers were well-trained, well-protected and very determined. Opposition was bludgeoned hard, knocked to the ground by the lead-tipped extendable batons that were as good as guns at close range.
“Finn, get ready to move,” Ryan instructed, speaking into his radio. “I want you out of there and running on the count of ten.” As his mental countdown reached one, the door of cell 25 was yanked inwards and Danny Quinn came out at a run, holding tight to Connor Temple’s arm. Behind him came Cutter, with Stephen Hart and Rob Finn bringing up the rear.
One of the bird-things chose that moment to lunge forward, shrieking like a banshee. Hart grabbed a chair and slammed it into the creature’s head without even breaking stride. A second one scrambled over the body of the first. A moment later, its chest sprouted a black-handled knife. Blade retrieved his weapon and promptly decapitated the bird.
As the soldiers broke ranks and then equally quickly reformed around the men they’d been sent to protect, Ryan realised that the ball of fractured light was starting to flicker and go dim. By the time they’d retreated off the wing, it had winked out of existence, leaving two of the birds behind. Ryan managed to pick one off with a lucky head shot. The other went down under a broken table leg wielded by one of the prisoners. For a change, Ryan felt like cheering the man on, despite his rap sheet for multiple rape.
Ryan grabbed hold of the door and yanked it closed while Blade stood at his side, a long-bladed knife sufficient deterrent to anyone who might have been considering making a bid for freedom. He turned the key in the lock and the tight knot of soldiers moved back behind the second set of doors that Ryan equally promptly locked.
Objective achieved. Ryan pulled his phone out of his pocket and prepared to deliver the good news the governor.