Page 1 of Hidden By the Convicts
Chapter One
BOWEN
Bowen punched Harlis in the face, sending the younger man hurdling toward a table in the greenhouse. The man’s foot caught the edge of the table, nearly taking it down with him.
“Watch it!” Gavin shouted as he grabbed the edge of the table where he’d been sorting hundreds of seeds. The man cared more about his seeds and plants than the fact that Harlis had two bombs in his pack.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” Harlis said, rubbing his chin.
“To keep you from getting yourself killed.”
“I wasn’t going to blow the guards up. Just their quarters.”
Gavin headed to the door to watch for guards. The sides of the greenhouse were not transparent like traditional greenhouses. Light only entered from the top in the front section of the greenhouse while the back was intentionally kept dark. Gavin needed the dark spaces for growing narni, a mushroom-like fungus that grew on Narkos in the deepest mines and was exceedingly hard to extract because of the poison in the air at those levels. Since narni had medicinal properties that The Company was researching, Gavin had been tasked with growing the fungi in the greenhouse.
“Two guards heading this way,” Gavin warned as he raced back to his worktable.
Bowen nudged Harlis’s canvas bag under the table, where Gavin then pushed it behind bags of phosphate. He and Gavin worked well together, seamlessly after five years in the same unit on the forsaken prison planet. Harlis had only been there for a year. He had to be the smartest man Bowen knew, but he also had the patience of a kuvak in heat. The twenty-seven-year-old chemist still didn’t quite understand just how miserable the guards in East Side could make his life, and he didn’t care to listen to Bowen on the matter either.
“Trouble?” Mozely, the head guard asked as his partner Elkin kicked a leg out from Gavin’s work table, dumping hundreds of seeds all over the floor.
Bowen heard the slight intake of Gavin’s breath, but the man knew better than to strike back or even curse at the guards. He’d suck it up and spend the next few hours picking up and reclassifying every last seed.
Harlis, on the other hand, didn’t know better. Bowen put his foot on the younger man’s chest to keep him down and quiet. Harlis would jump to Gavin’s defense in a heartbeat. He was brash, impulsive, and reckless, but he had heart. It’s the only reason Bowen tolerated him.
“Problem, Bowen?” Mozely asked, pointing to his foot on Harlis’s chest.
“Harlis slipped and fell under my foot. I was about to help him up,” Bowen said without moving. Harlis was keeping the guards’ attention right now, which Bowen needed, or they might see the prisoner hiding behind a potted nelim tree.
Harlis squirmed. “Let me the fuck up.”
Bowen ignored him, keeping his eyes trained on Mozely. If Mozely found that prisoner hiding in here, he’d blame Gavin, or Bowen’s entire unit, adding more years to their prison term. Per The Company, Level 4s received a maximum of a ten-year prison sentence. Dresden, the prison planet’s manager, had a nasty way of adding time to a man’s sentence, even though The Company didn’t authorize that.
Gavin had already been here twelve years and had another four to go. Bowen had only been on Narkos for five years. He still had a shot of leaving at the end of his ten years. If he or someone in his unit didn’t screw it up for him.
“Just see to it that your unit meets its quotas, Bowen. West Side needs that food.”
“Of course,” Bowen said, giving a strained smile. He was starting to consider letting Harlis blow up the guards’ quarters after all, starting with Mozely’s.
Once the guards left the greenhouse, Bowen removed his foot from Harlis. Gavin offered the man a hand up and then promptly shoved him back down when Harlis lunged for Bowen.
“Don’t press your luck,” Gavin warned. “Bowen should have turned you in just for thinking up such a stupid ass idea. There are all of eighteen prisoners on this side of the mountain. You’re the only chemist. Who do you think they’d accuse? Vi’Jen? Charlie? Me? No, you, dickhead.”
Harlis pushed his hand through thick, sandy-blond hair. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just. . . Shit, I hate everything about this place.”
“I get it, Harlis,” Bowen said as he headed toward the nelim tree. “You’re frustrated. Cragin added another year to your sentence for something you didn’t do. Get used to it. The managers here don’t exactly follow Company rules.” The Company ruled this sector of space, including most of the planets. While Argus Company was the official name, because The Company was based on Argus, no one called it that. From time to time, other minor companies tried to take over a planet, but The Company was simply too large, too powerful. Like Manager Dresden on Narkos.
“I shouldn’t even be here. I was a Level 2 back home. It was a trumped-up charge. I didn’t blow up the research center. Not all of it. And there were extenuating circumstances.”
“Blowing up things here won’t make you look innocent, will it?”
Bowen inched toward the tree. Bright green eyes with long thick lashes peered above the rim of the pot. He caught a glimpse of the prisoner’s face.
Female.
Fuck. That’s the last thing he needed. A woman on Narkos meant trouble. With a population of two thousand convicts, men fought over women here. Killed for them, too.
There had been five women sent to Narkos years ago, but he’d heard only two had survived. But that was a year ago. Dresden didn’t care what happened to them, never bothered investigating their deaths. What the fuck was one doing in East Side?
