Augustus opened one prison cell after another, each separated by steel plates or even iron bars. In the dim rooms, which lacked sufficient lighting, the prisoners were skeletal, gaunt, withered, or tortured beyond recognition. Only those who had been imprisoned for a relatively short time still had the strength to shakily rise to their feet.
The Kel-Morian Combine had once claimed that Federal prisoners received the most humane treatment and three meals a day in their detention centers, but that was clearly not the case. Of course, Kel-Morian prisoners in Federal prisons fared little better.
"We're the Federal Marine Corps," Augustus told every prisoner. "If you can still fight, get up and take up a weapon."
"Blood for blood."
They were all still wearing the clothes they had been captured in, which had now become little more than rags wrapped around their bodies. A foul stench clung to them. In the wasteland where Detention Center 34 stood, water was scarce, and prisoners often went a week or longer without bathing.
Yet when these prisoners, indistinguishable from vagrants, gathered around Augustus and his Marines, their seemingly haggard and frail bodies erupted with the strength of rage and hatred.
At that moment, the detention center was in utter chaos. The rest of Warfield's 1st Company had already taken two hills. Meanwhile, a battalion of resocialized soldiers, advancing with support from two Arclite Siege Tanks, had begun attacking from three directions. The Kel-Morian troops in the detention center soon realized that they had nowhere left to retreat.
As the crowd followed several Marines out of the barracks and back toward the landing zone, Augustus's Fourth Squad was guarding crate after crate of airdropped weapons and ammunition. Electromagnetic Rifles and ammunition belts that could be slung across the shoulders were immediately handed out to