Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [134]
Notwithstanding its dedication to the rehabilitation of its inmates, the detention center was a modern and secure facility designed to keep those assigned to it from interacting with the public outside the bounds of its smartly landscaped exterior. The unassuming guards carried weapons that would immobilize without killing. Though it presented many of the aspects and qualities of a convalescent retreat, the center's principal purpose remained as one with its earliest predecessor, the gaol that still stood on the south bank of an ancient Terran river called the Thames.
In accordance with and proportionate to their crimes and sentences, detainees had certain rights and privileges. Absolute freedom of movement was not among these. Those who claimed membership in the Order of Null and who had been committed to confinement until the Church order that bound them into custody could be reviewed were not allowed to stray outside carefully marked and fenced boundaries. The majority of the facility's inmates would have happily traded places with those belonging to the Order, knowing that the representatives of the newly arrived group were likely to be released uncharged within a day or two.
It was that same modest time frame, however, that was driving the Order members to distraction. Unless they could quickly regain their freedom to act, the main reason to do so would surely be on his way offworld.
No one imagined that the legal representative who came to converse with the speaker and the Elder would attempt to smuggle weapons into the facility itself. In addition to subjecting him to much more serious criminal prosecution, doing so would automatically and permanently void that individual's professional certification. What the designers of Nur's law enforcement system could not foresee was the utter dedication of the members of the Order of Null to their beliefs, and the fact that their legal agent might subscribe to them with as much fervor as those he sought to defend. The members of any organization dedicated to advancing death have little fear of prosecution, and are quite content to utilize the existing legal system to advance their own extremist ends.
So it was that the visiting counselor managed to slip a handful of shift weapons to half a dozen of his colleagues and lead them out of the facility as their unarmed brethren sacrificed themselves to delay pursuit and facilitate the flight of the seven. Considering how hastily the escape had been organized, it was carried off with considerable expertise. It was greatly aided by the fact that no police officer claiming even marginal insight into criminal behavior would have anticipated a violent jailbreak by inmates incarcerated for only two or three days. Who in their right mind would chance being sentenced to a year's imprisonment or more in order to avoid a couple of harmless nights in stir?
Where authority failed was in assuming that the members of the Order of Null were in their right mind.
While word went out from a dazed constabulary that six hitherto harmless-appearing short-term detainees and their legal defender had shot their way out of the detention facility, the escapees had utilized the counselor's skimmer to plunge deep into the heart of Sphene. Though the city was not a center of heavy industry, there were still commercial districts where those in flight could lose themselves. The escapees proceeded to do so, but only briefly. Having likely sacrificed a considerable amount of future freedom for the opportunity to act fleetingly now, they had no intention of wasting the little time