Brute Orbits Read Free Page B

had to be isolated. We had to get rid of them, because our worth exceeded the worth of these predators, pure and simple. The annual cost of incarceration in supermax prisons, in fact any prisons, was more than what it cost to give someone a university education. Most convicts stood to be released from prisons, but these ten to twenty percent were our failures. Yes, our failures, as much as the law-abiding citizens were our social successes. But we just didn’t know what else to do with the worst failures. It was too late to prevent them. Remember that the prison gangs had their tentacles to the outside. They ran businesses and could even bring down local governments. They killed efficiently at a distance. By shipping them out, we broke their influence. Sure, in some profound sense we created their kind, but there was nothing else to do except get rid of them and start over.”
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    Yevgeny Tasarov’s leadership of the Dannemora breakout remained for many years an unequaled prison revolt—admired by later analysts for its detailed planning and understanding of the forces that would stand in its way, as well as for its implied criticism of social currents and goals.
    North American culture of the 2050s, with its guilt-ridden efforts to lessen both the physical and social effects of global warming, its gated enclave suburbs surrounding the old cities, its often excessive concern with clean air, food, and water from basics factories, was particularly vulnerable to a convict force willing to do anything to get its way, because the culture was not willing to do as much to defend itself.
    Tasarov knew this unwillingness, and counted on it. Just too many middle- and upper-class citizens were looking forward to lives of a century or more, and preferred to keep out of his way for as long as possible, and too many lower caste police and soldiers were reluctant to do their jobs and pay the price in blood when sent against him.
    The prison population around Tasarov included men who were not considered dangerous. Most of them were inside for nonviolent, or slightly violent crimes; but what the medium-security prison did not take into account was the level of violence possible among these same prisoners, based on crimes for which they had not been convicted, and about which the prison authorities knew little or nothing.
    Section Two of Dannemora was composed of violent criminals, mostly lifers, and it was a maximum-security prison.
    All of which set the stage for an unexpected uprising, run by someone with military training, which could be put down only by an equal military response; but by then it would be too late.
    The method, rehearsed and made second nature, was deceptively simple: a prison break by careful stages. At first, guards began to disappear. They were killed and their bodies hidden or destroyed whenever possible, using prison facilities. One day in the mess hall, all two dozen remaining guards were killed by the convicts next to them—by stabbing, breaking necks, even breaking backs—followed by escape through the kitchens, where those inmates who would not join in were also killed.
    At each step, no one was left alive. Surveillance cameras were blinded at the last possible moment by cutting the cables to the outmoded monitoring stations. Within the hour, the entire administration of the medium-security section was dead. False orders were being given, and uniformed infiltrators were entering the maximum-security section to recruit a merciless army.
    When the army came out into the nearby towns, they took the satellite radio and television stations and cable offices, and disabled all wireless communications. The entire area became a dead zone, with no communications going out to the rest of the state.
    Armed with every weapon that could be seized from stores and private homes, the convicts forced marched to Lake George, where they seized a small resort community, murdered all the inhabitants, and used it as a base from