by G. P. Eliot
“Hmph,” Alan grumped but threw onto the forward view screen next to the glowing ‘I’ the sensor images taken in the last few seconds before the Dalida warped.
It was an image of the Dalida Attack Fighter Alpha, lunging down straight towards the Bridge of the Pequod. Lory winced involuntarily. Then there was a flash of light as the light destroyer fired one of its heavy laser canons, straight up towards the vessel. It hit the Captain’s craft before it could even get to the shields, and there was a flash as the ship erupted into a plasma ball and broke apart.
“You’re mistaken,” Lory said, as the hope in her heart turned to ash. She was convinced that the Captain’s A.I. had gone mad with the loss of her partner.
The fragments of the Captain’s ship flew apart. The Shimmering Path operative thought that she recognized bits of wing, fuselage–and then they hit the Pequod’s shields and burst in ripples of blue.
“Look!” Steed was jogging towards the large image on the screen, tapping at one of the small objects that was spinning recklessly above and away from the light destroyer. “Freeze frame,” Steed called out. “Magnify!”
The small piece of wreckage expanded in view to become the small form of a man strapped to a flight chair, doing his best to hold onto the arm rests…
It was the Captain. He was alive.
“Hss!” Hank hissed from the latest slap. He wouldn’t give the Jackal the satisfaction of hearing him scream. He sat on a bare metal chair, his arms fixed to the rests with magnet locks as were his ankles to the legs.
“You got anything you want to tell us, traitor?” the Jackal loomed over him.
“Yes. You’ve got a shitty sense of décor,” Hank mumbled through a lip that was swiftly swelling.
The interrogation suite of the Pequod was more sophisticated than the ones that Hank himself had seen before. It had bare steel floors and was almost pitch black save for a singular overhead spotlight that was, perversely, painfully bright. Along one of the walls were the shadowed suggestions of other contraptions–some kind of stand set against the wall with horrid-looking projections and pointy bits.
Slap! Another backhanded slap from the Jackal that bounced the Captain’s head against the back of the chair.
Ow. That was probably the reason that the Jackal hadn’t locked the magnet clamps around his neck too, he thought. Two blows for the price of one.
But a slap–even a good solid one from the metal and plastic prosthetic hands of the Jackal–was still only a slap. Hank had been hit much harder by much bigger men than him.
“You sure you got a good deal on those things?” Hank nodded to the Jackal’s hands. “I know a guy on Ghurul if you prefer…?”
This time the blow that found Hank’s face landed perfectly on the bridge of his nose. There was a blinding flash of pain as the Captain heard his own nose break.
“You want me to do what?” Ryan looked owlishly at Commander Lory, and then around at the other members of the Dalida’s crew.
They know, he thought. They know what I did.
The generation ship still floated in the distant, barren patch of space between the deep space lanes where Cortez had jumped them too. They were light years from even the nearest transport station, and many more from the next colony world.
Which would be Union-controlled, Ryan hazarded a guess. Which meant that he might have a better chance at surviving than out here.
‘Not that you deserve to survive!’ A small, sadistic little voice said inside his head.
Shut-up, he told it. It was nothing. An echo from his past. It didn’t exist.
“Ryan, I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t know you were Shimmering Path,” Lory said slowly and seriously. Her eyes were big and full of trepidation–and trust. “But I think that we can get the Jackal to transfer Hank back to the ship, in exchange for us. You and me…” Lory was saying.
Ryan had heard her explain something about some medical technique that was supposed to make it impossible for them to reveal any information to the Jackal and the Union–but Ryan knew only too well just what the Union interrogation rooms could do to a man.
‘She’s a fool to trust you, Ryan, you never were going to amount to much with them anyway…’ the little voice inside of his head sneered at him. It didn’t sound like his own voice. It sounded like the Union’s ‘Psychiatric Intelligence Officer’ whom he had spent three months with, in a Union-holding facility.
“I, I know…” Ryan swallowed nervously, his eyes flickering to Steed beside Lory who was also looking stern. And then to the Professor a little way away, shaking his head at the terrible impasse that they had reached – and then finally to Drake Madigan, who stood nearby to him, and looking about as angry as a bear.
“It’s just–what good will it do, handing ourselves in?” Ryan stammered a little. “They’ll only torture us…”
‘But you were so GOOD at being tortured, my little Ryan!’ said the ghost-memory of the Psy. Int. Officer.
Ryan didn’t think that spending fourteen hours a day screaming in agony until he had lost his voice meant that he was ‘good’ at torture. If anything–didn’t that prove the opposite?
“We always knew that was a possibility when we signed up, agent,” Lory said seriously to him. She raised her fist across her chest with the elbow high and out–the sign of the Shimmering Path.
If the gesture was supposed to fill him with solidarity and courage, all it did was confirm to Ryan how deeply he had betrayed them.
‘Betrayal is such a strong word, Ryan…’ this time the voice purred and cooed at him soothingly. It had been like that sometimes in that holding cell–it wasn’t all pain and torment, sometimes it was understanding and calm, even a twisted sort of compassion.
‘You didn’t have a choice. You had to deliver your Shimmering Path contacts to the Union. The Union MADE you do it…’
“YOU made me do it!” Ryan burst out, his hands balling into fists.
“Huh?” Steed looked confusedly at him.
“Uh…Ryan?” Lory frowned at him. “The Shimmering Path doesn’t conscript people. We aren’t the Union…”
“No, I mean…” Ryan shook his head.
‘Pull yourself together! They’re going to find out what you did!’ His tormentor’s voice inside of him said.
Rayn reeled where he stood. They were going to find out that he had been a double agent all this time. That the Union forces had known that the Confederacy or the Shimmering Path had agents on X3-2e, and it had been his job to route them out. Which he had done.
And he would have got Lory too, if she had stayed at the facility for just a few days longer.
‘Well, NOW is your chance!’ the Psy. Int voice inside of him said. Ryan didn’t know if it was a ‘real’ personality or some weird psychological disorder that made him have his oppressor’s voice inside of him. Maybe it was some new type of Union re-programming technique. Maybe he really did never have a choice.
I need to buy time, he told himself–the two lots of ‘himself’ inside his head. If I can get a tacking beacon in place somewhere on the Dalida, then I will be able to tell the Jackal that he can follow the rebels anywhere… Ryan’s mind contracted to a small, terrified dot of worry.
“Ryan? Talk to me…” Lory was saying, walking up to him and even reaching out a gloved hand, and about to put it on his arm comfortingly.
Pathers! A part of Ryan sneered, and for once he wasn’t even sure if it was him or if it was the memory of the Union medical officer. The two of them had apparently merged into one at last.
In a flash of neurons, the disgust and hatred surged through the double agent. This was precisely the sort of lie that the Shimmering Path had offered him when he had joined–that he would have eternal solidarity and comradeship–that they would always be there to catch him when he fell.
But they weren’t there, were they? Their friendship only extended to the end of their mission–and now one of the Pather’s was even asking him to give him
self up to be interrogated for ‘the good of the cause!’
What a pathetic, sick joke!
Lory’s hand was lowering on his arm just as Ryan snatched it his wrist, pulled Lory towards him at the same time as his hand sought out her laser pistol. If he could get to engineering, then he could install the listening device…And even if he couldn’t get that far–now that he had a hostage, he could demand that the others transmit their coordinates to the nearest Union outpost.
“What the hell are you doing!?” Lory was shouting, before he pressed the cold nub of the pistol’s muzzle against her exposed neck.
“Everyone back off!” Ryan was shouting. “Stand back or I’ll shoot!”
“He’s a double agent! The Captain was right!” Steed hunched his shoulders into a warrior’s crouch, his hand hovering by his laser pistol.
“Stand back! I’m warning you!” Ryan said–but it was in that moment that he made a mistake. It wasn’t his fault, he was stressed, and his mind was fractured and useless. He pointed his pistol at Steed.
Ryan hissed as the back of Lory’s boot scraped down his shin in a line of white pain.
“Ach!” It was enough for his grip on her wrist to lessen a little, and for Lory to throw herself into a roll across the floor.
But Ryan was quick, he swept the gun to the most-valuable Shimmering Path agent in the entire Union—
Just as Madigan hit him over the back of the head with something very solid, and very painful. The double agent went out like a light.
18
Hank cuffed the man around the side of the head–a good, solid blow.
No, the Captain thought. He remembered hitting the man across the head. It had been a dissident–not one of the Shimmering Path, but someone from one of the other groups. There had been so many cells, cabals, and underground groups that were itching for a piece of the Union.
I don’t blame him, Hank remembered thinking, as the dissident had lurched forward, before being yanked back by Hank’s second Lieutenant. Their team had just busted down the door and raided the basement-style apartment where this latest nest of violent extremists had been hiding.
It hadn’t taken them long to neutralize all those who had dared to reach for their guns–and a couple who hadn’t.
“Tell me where the others are!” Hank remembered shouting at the man, trying his best to sound every bit the fanatical, obsessed, Union Marine.
“Screw you!” the dissident had glared at him–and for the briefest of moments Hank had seen the light of determination and courage in the man’s eyes.
What the hell am I doing? Hank had asked himself. He had paused as he looked at the sheer hatred that he saw in his opposite number. It was a hatred that he felt himself, but he had buried it deep down in his heart.
“Boss?” Ida whispered into his ear. “I’m not sure this interrogation is going to go anywhere…” she said. “This man has just seen his friends die, and psychological analysis reports state that a man with nothing left to lose well–has nothing left to lose…”
Hank had been too heavy handed in the assault. He hadn’t been paying attention to his team and how they operated. He had been too jumped up on battle stimms.
“Urgh,” Hank remembered shaking his head, turning and walking away.
“Sir? Sir!” the other Union Marines had been calling after him.
“Not this one. He’s useless,” Hank had called back. He was crashing–the stimms were evaporating from his bloodstream as quickly as snowmelt on a warm spring day.
Which was probably why he had made the mistake of not explicitly telling the Marines to save this one. To instead put him in the holding carrier that waited outside.
Hank remembered flinching when he heard the heavy Union blaster go off behind him.
“Captain! Glad to see that you are finally awake!” the voice of the Jackal met him as he opened his eyes. It was hard to open them, and he realized that his entire face must have been swollen.
“Ubd-?” he slurred, his voice losing its way somewhere around his aching jaw and puffy lips.
“Oh, I’m so sorry–I can’t hear you,” the Jackal was saying, and then he saw the man’s blurry shape grow suddenly larger and then there was a stab of pain in his cheek.
Hank coughed. But the pain lessened a little, and it seemed that he regained movement once again in his jaw.
“A very localized nano-med procedure,” the Jackal said. “It’ll rebuild your face a little, but I’m afraid that it won’t do anything for the rest of you…” the Jackal stepped back, and this time Hank’s eyes cleared, and he could see the man perfectly, admiring his own handiwork.
Hank’s soldier suit had been the first thing to go of course–he wished that he still could hear Ida. And then the form-fitting encounter suit underneath had been cut from his body.
Hank remembered a small surgical laser flashing in the Jackal’s hands, and the lines of pain lancing across his chest.
“Now, Captain Snider…” there was a scrape as the Jackal brought up a chair and set it in front of him, before sitting on it in an almost sedate fashion. The Jackal gestured to his own foot. “Thirty minutes in the medical unit,” he referred of course, to Hank’s recent knife attack.
“It was a bit rude of you,” the Jackal went on to say, and the threat in his voice was obvious.
“You did shoot me first,” Hank countered.
Hank didn’t even have time to scream as the muscles in his entire body froze in a paroxysm of pain as the entire chair burst with electricity.
“Grrrrrgh!” he growled through his locked jaw, shaking and trembling until the Jackal turned off the electricity with a wave of his hand. The Captain slumped forward, his heart still hammering in his ribcage as he panted and gasped.
“There. Politeness doesn’t cost anything,” the Jackal said sweetly. “Now tell me where the Dalida has gone! Tell me what you know of the Message? Where were you taking it!? What does it contain!?”
Hank was still heaving great lungsful of air as he sought to calm his overtaxed heart. His tormentor took the opportunity to lean forward and whisper into his ear…
“You know what I will do to you if you don’t tell me. You know what I can do, Captain Snider…” the Jackal whispered almost seductively. “We’ve only just gotten started. I once kept a man alive for two weeks–we had the information out of him on day one, of course, but I was bored and we all need our little hobbies, don’t we…?”
Hank groaned. His body felt like it wasn’t his anymore. It wasn’t the youthful and strong, tall form of Hank Snider–it was just a sack of meat. And it hurt. All the time, and everywhere.
“It can all go away so quickly, Captain…” the Jackal was whispering lower. “It doesn’t have to be like this for us. I only want the information–I don’t want to hurt you. Just tell me what you know about the Message, and all this will be over. Tell me everything, Hank…” the Jackal was saying.
Hank’s head shivered as he slowly raised it from his chest. The pain was a cloak that surrounded him completely.
“What message?” he said.
19
“Jump.” Lory said, standing in front of the forward viewing screen as the silent stars in front of her became a chaos of light and color. She had no time to feel the slight eeriness or the rising nausea that FTL jumps can provoke–instead her heart had hardened into stone in her chest.
“I can’t believe he would betray us,” Lory muttered to herself.
There was someone listening though. “The Shimmering Path should use drones instead. Waaay less fragile,” The second Ida pulsed cheerily on the screen.
“Huh,” Lory didn’t think that it was a joke, but she read it as one anyway.
The man in question–Ryan–was currently trussed up like a Beetlegeussian Hog at Midwinter, out cold at the rear of the Bridge with Madigan standing guard over him. Lory wondered if there had ever been a part of him that had been loyal. She realized that she almost felt sorry for him…
Which I almost certainly ever won’t, she sighed.
“Lory–you don’t have to do this,” she heard Steed say awkwardly behind her. “I hereby volunteer to take your place. I’m a Confederate General. They’ll dance in their boots to have me…”
“Which is why I’m not giving you to them,” Lory shook her head. She had only one card left to play, and she hoped that she was strong enough to play it. “I was a double agent too, remember. Well–sort of…” Lory had been a loyal Shimmering Path operative who had specialized in infiltration, and she had masqueraded not only as a Union research scientist, but also as a Union military officer.
