by B. V. Larson
“In the orderly room, sir,” said the soldier, gulping.
“Get him, now!”
“What is the issue?” said Kraxor from where he stood at Straker’s elbow.
“Someone’s been abusing my prisoner, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it. I can’t have marines turning into torturers. This shit has got to stop right now.”
“Perhaps you should delegate this investigation to me. It is not appropriate for the War Male in command to stoop so low.”
Straker massaged his fingers, and then slammed the heel of his hand against the bulkhead. “You’re right. Take charge of it, and use whoever you need—Heiser and Gurung, I suggest.”
“It shall be done.”
Straker reentered the cell. “You won’t be beaten anymore, or otherwise abused—unless it’s at my express order.”
The Lazarus leaned his head back and closed his eyes, an empty broth bowl in his hands. “If only I could believe that, Commodore… but you see, many things are done in our names that we may disagree with.”
“If that’s an attempt to justify yourself, it won’t work. You supervised torture personally, and it was a lot worse than a few beatings.”
“A few?” The Lazarus lifted his shirt to show bruising. “I count twenty-three so far, each severe enough to make me piss blood. And I do not have your genetically enhanced constitution or the benefits of a brush with Hok biotech to heal me.”
Despite himself and all he’d endured at the hands of this man’s brother clone, Straker felt suddenly ashamed—not at the Lazarus’s suffering, which was well deserved, but at his own failings to control his subordinates and to know what was happening on his own ship.
Is this what DeChang had to deal with? Rogue officers under his command, reinterpreting his intent until the results crossed lines that should never be violated? Officers he’d trusted, officers he thought would never turn on him or do anything he wouldn’t?
No matter what, he wasn’t liberating people just so they could take revenge, no matter how well deserved.
“On behalf of everyone I command, I apologize for your treatment,” Straker ground out. “But not for your suffering. You deserve every bit of it. But that doesn’t make it right. I’ve taken steps. You said Loco came to see you. Is that when the beatings started?”
“Yes.” The Lazarus said no more, but merely held Straker’s gaze.
“Was it Loco that beat you?”
“No, several of the guards. But I doubt he cared.”
“Dammit. I’ll review the security vid.” Straker slammed his forearm down on the small, bolted-down table, leaving a distinct dent in its surface and knocking a full cup of caff onto the floor.
“Why not simply ask Commander Paloco about it?”
“He’s on detached duty now.”
The Lazarus sat forward, placing his feet carefully on the deck, and reached for the second, full bowl of broth on the table. “May I?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you, Commodore.” The Lazarus sipped. “So how goes the Liberation?”
“Very well, actually,” Straker snapped.
“But you’re not happy?” Lazarus asked.
“There’s always some fly in the ointment, like this.”
“Yes, the paradox of power.”
Straker glared. “Shut up. You’re not my psych.”
The Lazarus held up a hand. “You told me to be honest with you. If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, command me to be silent. Or beat me further, I suppose.”
Damn the man for seizing the moral high ground, and damn Loco and these guards for giving it to him. What the hell had gotten into Loco lately? It had to be that Tachina. He’d never seen Loco so fixated on one woman. Usually he treated them as interchangeable commodities. What made the concubine so different?
Well, he had a limitless information source sitting right in front of him, as long as he knew what to ask. Straker poured a small portion of the nectar into the cap, and then reached over to dump it into the prisoner’s bowl. The man drank it eagerly.
“Lazarus, what is it with Tachina? She’s a clone, supposedly made to be a pleasure slave, but…”
“But she’s not acting like a bubble-headed sex kitten?” The Lazarus chuckled, his voice relaxed and dreamy with the drug. “I have some hope for you, boy. You’re finally asking the right questions.”
“What are the right questions?”
“How do you maintain power and control without permanent crisis?”
“I dunno—do what you always do. Make laws, give orders, have a system of enforcement.” Straker listened closely. Maybe the nectar would prompt the Lazarus to give up more than he intended.
“Those are the basics. But the masses need their opiates. The Romans provided bread and circuses, but that only worked for a limited time. Marx thought it was religion, but then his adherents substituted the State for God, which merely created a new deity to worship and hide from.” Lazarus giggled and let his empty bowl fall from his hand. “But we, the Mutuality, we know better. We give our drugs to those in charge. And when those drugs become scarce and our enemies try to extort us with their lack, we create new syntheses, combining the age-old with the new.”
“What does that have to do with Tachina?”
“Tachina, Tachina. Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a Tachina by the toe…” the Lazarus singsonged.
“Come on, Lazarus, focus.” Straker put a cup of cooling caff in his hand. “Drink that.”
He did, and he made a face. “And you call me a torturer. This ship’s bartender is terrible.”
Straker snapped his fingers twice in front of the Lazarus’s face. “What about Tachina?”
The Lazarus focused his bleary eyes on Straker with some difficulty. “Why, my dear Commodore, she’s just like the nectar. She’s addictive. Clearly, your Loco is a junkie, hopelessly hooked, as are all who taste her pleasures.”
Chapter 27
Vespida System, Battlecruiser Wolverine, Edge of Flatspace
Straker sat back, his mind racing. The Lazarus said Tachina was addictive, and with all the talk of drugs and nectar, he didn’t think the man was speaking metaphorically. He’d wondered from time to time whether the woman might not have some special scent or pheromone, but he’d always been far too busy to pursue such a trivial thing. Now, though…
“So men that get with her become junkies? She’s some kind of living love potion?”
“Call it what you will. She’s genetically engineered to be sexually attractive to anyone who likes women. She has glands that secrete hormones and pheromones that excite and stimulate, and all bred pleasure clones are taught a wide range of sexual techniques. Once you’ve had a Tach’, you never go back!” The Lazarus devolved into a fit of coughing, wheezing laughter.
“And how many have these Tachinas?”
“Ask a bigger question, get a bigger answer! Haha!”
“Okay—how many people have pleasure clones of any kind?”
“There you are, my boy! A gold star for you. Every person of great power and influence has one—or more. Many have several. The Director is rumored to have dozens squirreled away in his mansions and estates, with orgies Thursdays and Saturdays like clockwork, where he shares them with his favorites. The Tachinas are common enough and annoying enough that they occasionally get discarded and sent to the camps for re-education, which was how I was able to acquire one for myself, don’t you see?”
“I do see…” Straker stood with the intention of pacing, but turned nose-to-eyeball with Kraxon, who’d recently entered the cramped cell.
“I’ve notified Heiser and Gurung,” said the Ruxin. “They will report their findings to me.” A third large eyeball swung around to focus on the Lazarus. “May I ask the prisoner a question?”
“Fire away.”
“I presume that is an affirmative response.” Kraxor stepped forward to focus on the drugged man. “Lazarus, query: do the pleasure clones often share information a
mong themselves?”
“My, you are an odd-looking Ruxin. I’ve never seen one like you.”
“I am a War Male. You have not had the misfortune of encountering my kind…yet.” Kraxor slashed his spear within millimeters of the Lazarus’s nose.
“Such a belligerent squid. I am suitably frightened.” He didn’t seem frightened in the least, probably due to the effect of the drug.
“Answer the question, bottom-feeder. Do the pleasure clones often share information with each other?”
The Lazarus sighed. “I suppose, when they can. Mine gabbed like a cooped hen when she ran across another, but since she’s attended me she had less opportunity than most to socialize.”
“But one can easily imagine these… stables, these harems, to be hotbeds of gossip… and secrets.”
“One might think.”
“And this Tachina is not only sexually aggressive, but has declared a naked desire for power, according to what I’ve heard. Do you think it possible the pleasure clones, who live and work among the highest levels of your power structure, share this ambition?”
“I have heard they usually get their way. Mine often did, the minx.”
Kraxor re-aimed three eyes at Straker “So one must wonder who is really in charge of the Mutuality. Who is the power behind the throne, as your idiom goes?”
“Great Cosmos—and she’s got Loco wrapped around her finger,” Straker exclaimed. “That explains everything!”
“It may explain much.” Kraxor pointed a tentacle. “Though I believe we have lost our information source for the time being.”
Straker saw the Lazarus now slept, slumped on his bunk against the bulkhead, a lotus-eater’s smile on his face. Straker nodded. “Thanks for the insight. It makes me feel one hell of a lot better to think that Loco is brainwashed by that bitch instead of trashing our friendship for no reason.”
“He had no reason?”
Straker rubbed his neck, not meeting Kraxor’s many eyes. “I might’ve been taking him for granted. He was stepping up, taking charge of the ground troops, but all I did was give him shit, I guess. Treated him like I used to when we were kids.”
“Sometimes the closer something is, the harder it is to see.”
“A Ruxin saying?”
“Indeed.”
Straker grabbed one of Kraxor’s tentacles. “Thanks, my friend. Now I’d appreciate it if you supervised this investigation and took whatever measures are needed to bring our prisoner back to health and prevent any more abuse. Change the whole guard force if you need to.”
“I can use my own warrior males.”
“If you think it best. I trust you.”
Kraxor performed a creditable bow. “Likewise, Liberator. But I do have one inquiry, if I may.”
“Speak.”
“I long to liberate my homeworld. We are nearly overdue to meet Indomitable there because of your… detour. May we proceed soon?”
Straker fought not to show his disgust with himself. Kraxor was right. He’d been chasing wild geese, when he should have been pursuing the plan—a plan he’d chosen himself. How many leaders had lost their focus and failed for similar reasons?
Well, Derek Barnes Straker, Commodore and Galactic Liberator, wouldn’t be one of them. “Of course. I’ll give the orders right away.”
***
Three days of sidespace transit allowed Straker to regain his equilibrium and his confidence in his crew. War Male Kraxor, aided by the senior noncoms aboard Wolverine, conducted a thorough investigation.
Both Heiser and Gurung apologized profusely for failing to supervise the brig marines properly. The two men—one huge, florid and grim, one small, dark and usually cheerful—now shared equally hangdog expressions of shame. They redoubled their efforts to train the crew and troops, or at least to keep them exercising to exhaustion.
Shit rolls downhill, said Straker to himself as he watched in qualified satisfaction. A mix of a dozen sergeants, corporals and privates now shared cells alongside the Lazarus, but far less comfortably, after their guilt had been proven with audiovisual evidence.
If it had just been taking out their anger on the Lazarus, he might have let the marines off with a good ass-chewing, but the Lazarus wasn’t their only victim. Every single one of the prisoners of war they’d picked up had been beaten too. Not war criminals, just ordinary soldiers doing their duty to the Mutuality. It appeared they were being mistreated just for fun.
The guilty marines had been clever enough to turn off the feeds in the cells themselves when they administered their abuse, but had forgotten to avoid talking about it before or afterwards in the guardrooms and hallways. They hadn’t known everything in the brig area was recorded as a matter of course, a fortunate leftover of Wolverine’s paranoid Mutualist past.
Straker insisted they all confess with their own lips what was proven, and then they were given a choice: being flogged and losing their rank, but being otherwise rehabilitated and allowed to serve, or being biometrically printed and exiled, to make their ways on their own, as outcasts of Liberation and Mutuality alike.
Perhaps not surprisingly, all chose the punishment.
They were flogged before the off-duty crew, who stood in ranks upon the flight deck. It made Straker a little uncomfortable how closely this resembled the methods used by the Mutualist guards in the camps—self-shaming, self-incrimination and punishment of the body—but the difference was, these men and women were proven guilty of military crimes, not merely slapped with political sentences at the hands of corrupt functionaries. He felt each slash of the pain-cat lash across a naked back as he watched, and wished he could grant leniency.
He couldn’t do that.
He could, however, acknowledge his own failure.
When all had been flogged, Straker signaled the former Mutuality bosun—for the Hundred Worlds didn’t use the whip—not to put the pain-cat away in its case. Instead, Straker unbuttoned his tunic, removed it and folded it, handing it to Engels. He then did the same with his undershirt, leaving his muscular torso as naked as those of the criminals.
“What’re you doing, Derek?” she said as she recognized what was to come. “What they did wasn’t your fault!”
“It was my responsibility,” he replied. “This wasn’t some unpreventable one-time backroom brawl. This was more hundreds of beatings over forty days, beatings of ordinary prisoners in my power and in my care. Beatings that make us no different from the thugs in the camps. Beatings in violation of all the laws of war.”
“Laws of war? The Lazarus deserved worse, and you don’t,” she insisted. “What’s done is done. You can’t do this! I won’t let you!”
Straker turned his calm eyes to her worried ones. “I love you, Carla, but this is why you put me in charge. You have all the knowledge and the theory, but there comes a time when the boss has to show he’s not just a commander, but a leader who’s accountable.”
“I veto it!” she hissed. “That was our agreement! I’m senior, I get a veto!”
He locked eyes with her. “Yes, I agreed to that. You can veto this. But you know what happens if you do, right?”
Slowly, she lowered her eyes, eyes that filled with tears. “Yeah. Everything changes. Because you’ve just got to have your way.”
He reached out to cup her cheek. “I know you want to spare me, but it’s just pain. I’ll heal. I’ll be the better for it. It’ll remind me I’m mortal, like the Caesars. And it’ll show our people I’m not above the law.”
“You’ll do what you want, like always,” she choked. “But I don’t have to watch.” Engels slapped Straker’s clothes into Kraxor’s grip, and then turned on her heel and stalked off.
Straker sighed and nodded to Kraxor, and then strode to the grate that had been erected against a cargo pallet. He lifted his forearms to place them in the open manacles. “Seize me up.”
“No, sir,” said Redwolf, who stood in attendance on the punishment.
“No way, boss,” said N
azario from the other side.
“You will carry out my instructions or I’ll drop you off on the next habitable planet and banish you from the Liberation. I won’t have troops under me who won’t obey a lawful order. That’s the whole point of this. Now seize me up!”
His bodyguards wilted under his stare, his threat of banishment more effective than any conventional punishment. Slowly, reluctantly, they snapped the cuffs closed on his wrists, then his ankles, leaving him spread-eagled and tilted forward against the grate, helpless.
“Give me thirty-nine, bosun,” he called loudly. “If you spare your strikes, I’ll add more.”
“Sir…”
“If you care about the Liberation, then lay on, man. Put your back into it.”
They say the first stroke is the worst—except for all the others. None of the miscreants had taken more than fifteen. Thirty-nine a day, Straker’d read, had been the most a ship captain of the Old Earth navies had been allowed to assign, because forty or more was considered a death risk.
For the first time since he’d escaped Camp Alpha he felt the jolting, stinging pain of physical punishment, a feeling different from that of combat injury. The waiting, the helplessness—even if self-chosen—the whistle of the nine cat-tails of braided superconductor energized with pain fields, the slow pace of the strokes perfectly designed to allow the nerves to recover just enough so the next blow would agonize all the more.
He refused to let himself faint, though he felt it coming on. The bosun, to his credit, did exactly as he was told… and if the point of punishment was to teach a lesson, Straker told himself he’d learned it, and would never need to again.
When the last blow had fallen and his fetters were removed, Straker faced his people. Blood dripped down his back and onto the deck. He caught a towel tossed his way and wiped his hands, slowly, thoroughly. As he did, the crowd murmured, and then a chant broke out, and swelled.
Straker!
