by Rick Partlow
The man nodded curtly. “Lt. Lee, go get started on your After-Action Report. I’ll send it to Colonel Savage with the next supply run. And don’t forget the next-of-kin messages for Corwin and Donnelly.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee stood and headed out of the room, looking grateful to be leaving.
“Close the door after you, Sgt. Lewicky,” the tall man said to our guide.
She retreated without a word, pulling the cheap, plastic door shut as she left.
“I’m Alberto Calderon,” the man said. He didn’t offer a hand and he didn’t seem to be in a very welcoming mood. “Who are you and what do you want?”
Divya stepped forward, hands grasped loosely behind her back.
“Divya Reddy, Captain,” she said, almost snapped. “I represent the interests of Andre Damiani, the Director of the Executive Board of the Corporate Council.”
“And what the hell does Andre Damiani want out here in the Pirate Worlds, Ms. Reddy?” Calderon demanded irreverently.
“The Sung Brothers are part of certain deals that he is interested in seeing fulfilled,” Divya answered with her typical cryptic vagueness. “He has concerns that your efforts here have been insufficient to make that happen.”
“Well maybe he should send us some fucking help then!” Calderon snapped, leaning forward like he was ready to hit her. I tensed up, ready to intervene, but he swayed back. “Or loan the Sungs enough to get more than a company out here!”
“What you need, Captain Calderon,” she fired back, “isn’t so much more troops as,” she glanced meaningfully at the woman in the background, “better intelligence. We have reason to believe that the Sung Brothers are not facing just one enemy, the bratva and their Skinganger allies, but two. The raiders who are stealing the Sung Brothers’ off-world weapons caches aren’t working for the bratva.”
“Then who do you believe they’re working for, Ms. Reddy?” The woman asked, speaking for the first time since we’d entered the room. Her voice was a counterpoint to her appearance, distinctive and clear and well-modulated.
“I don’t know, yet, Ms…?”
“Van Stry,” the woman volunteered. “Cameron Von Stry.” She didn’t move from her spot against the wall, just eyed Divya carefully.
“I don’t know yet, Ms. Von Stry,” Divya told her, the tone snide and a bit condescending. “That’s why we’re here.”
Victor shot me a look and I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it, too. Divya wasn’t doing us any favors and these people didn’t seem scared or impressed by her at all. I could see the anger growing behind Calderon’s eyes and I decided to say something to try to defuse the situation, against my better judgement.
“We’re here to help. It would be in your best interest, too, if we can find out who’s behind the attacks.”
“You’re here to help, are you?” Calderon said, not sounding at all placated. “If you’re here to help, Mr. Munroe, then why do we have helmet footage of you killing one of my fucking men?”
Oh, shit. I wasn’t panicking so much that he knew I’d killed his soldier as that, somehow, he knew my name and I hadn’t told it to him.
“Maybe,” I replied, trying to keep the edge of fear out of my voice by squeezing it out with anger, “if you gave enough of a shit to keep your men from taking shots at fucking children, then Corwin would still be alive.”
His eyes widened ever so slightly, and I knew I’d caught him off-guard by demonstrating I knew the name of the man I’d killed.
“I’ve done a lot of shit over the years that I’m not proud of, Captain,” I said, my hands clenching involuntarily into fists, “but I never took a shot at an unarmed kid just because I was scared of my own fucking shadow. Is that the kind of professionalism they teach you on Highland? What kind of an outfit is this, anyway?”
I hadn’t seen either of them push a button, or touch a ‘link, or make a gesture; but the door opened behind us and a half-dozen armored soldiers filed through it, laser carbines shouldered and aimed at the three of us.
“This is the kind of outfit that doesn’t let Corporate Council toadies lecture us about fucking ethics,” Calderon snarled.
I’d turned instinctively towards the door opening, and as I tried to turn back towards him, his fist caught me across the left cheekbone and I went flying backwards, stars erupting in my vision. The floor rushed up and smacked me between the shoulder blades and I felt the wind rush out of me.
Gloved hands yanked me upright and I tried to blink my vision clear.
“Get these people into a holding cell,” Calderon was telling the soldier in charge of the team. “Tell the medics to prep for an interrogation.”
“You’re making a mistake.” The voice was Divya’s even if I couldn’t see her yet. It was calm and even, as if she’d been expecting this. And maybe she had.
“I think you’ve made the mistake here, Ms. Reddy,” Von Stry said as we were dragged out of the room. “You’re working for the wrong Damiani.”
Chapter Seven
We’d been sitting on the bare, concrete floor of the holding cell for an hour before any of us said a word. It was Divya, of course.
“She’s DSI,” she mused, staring straight ahead into the shadows thrown by the single chemical strip-light, almost as if she were talking to herself, “but she works for Patrice. Interesting.” She was talking about Van Stry, I got that much. I’d caught the meaning of “the wrong Damiani” loud and clear despite an incipient concussion.
“It’s fucking fascinating,” I agreed, finally starting to feel like I could think again. Calderon packed a hard punch, and it took a while for the nanites to repair that kind of damage. “Mostly because she knows exactly who I am and is probably going to turn me over to Mom.”
“It’s fascinating,” Divya corrected me, eyes and tone sharpening, “because it means that Patrice is manipulating this situation with the Sung Brothers and these mercenaries. She has Von Stry here for the same reason Monsieur Damiani sent us.”
“And what might that be?” Victor muttered. He was sitting propped against the wall, hands cushioning his head, legs stretched out.
Divya spared him a scathing glance.
“If I intended to tell you at all,” she pointed out impatiently, “I certainly wouldn’t do it here.”
Almost on cue, the heavy, metal door unlocked with the slam of a heavy bolt yanking aside and ground open with a nerve-jarring scrape. It was the same fire team as last time, but this time they were carrying sonic stunners instead of pulse carbines.
“Lay face down and put your hands behind your head,” their leader snapped over his helmet’s exterior speakers. “Do it immediately or you’ll all be stunned and the exact same thing’ll happen as would have if you hadn’t resisted. The only difference’ll be you wake up with a killer headache.”
I took a quick but careful assessment of the fire team and noted they seemed ready, interested, almost keyed up and eager to fire. I nodded to Victor.
“Do what they say,” I told him, then rolled onto my belly and interlaced my fingers behind my neck.
They took Divya first. I could see them pulling her up out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t say a word as they hauled her out the door, then slammed it shut. It locked with a solid thump and I rolled over and sat back down, unhurried. There was nothing I could do, no way out of the room.
Victor looked like he wanted to say something, but I waved him to silence, pointing to the walls, indicating we were being monitored. He nodded, then sat back with a look of resignation.
“Don’t try to hold out,” I said to him, after a moment’s deliberation. “You don’t know anything they won’t know already, and there’s no use getting yourself beat up for nothing.”
He grunted by way of response, and I sighed. I knew Victor, and he’d be tempted to make them work for it; but if we were going to get out of here, I needed him ready to go at a moment’s notice, and I didn’t want him getting stunned unconscious or beaten to a
pulp.
I felt exhaustion dragging at me and it felt like I hadn’t slept in days.
That’s because I haven’t slept in days, I realized.
I closed my eyes; when I opened them, I realized that I’d dozed off and that the door was opening again. I didn’t have my ‘link anymore, so I had no idea how long it had been, but from how worn and disheveled Divya looked, it had been a while. The soldier in the lead pushed her inside, forcing her to catch her balance against the far wall.
“You know the drill.” It was the same voice as last time, I thought. Probably the same guy.
I was half tempted to see what my medical nanite suite would do against a sonic stunner, just as an experiment, but I rolled onto my face instead. Better to get them to let their guard down, get them complacent before we tried anything. I expected them to take me next, and I tried to stay loose and not give them any reason to restrain me, but they went to Victor instead.
“Yeah, yeah,” I heard the big man mumble, heard his boot soles scraping on the floor as he got up. “You sure need a lot of guys for just the two of us and a skinny little desk jockey.”
“Shut up.” There was a muffled thump and I figured one of them had smacked him in the shoulder with a buttstock because all the combat boots shuffled towards the door.
“You know what I was doing in the war, tough guy?” Victor’s voice was in the hall now, just outside the door. “While you were shifting soy pallets from one shuttle to another, I was on Demeter, slicing Tahni throats. You cut-rate action movie commandos don’t fucking impress me.”
“Let me stun him, Sarge,” a female voice begged.
“Shut up.”
Then the door was closed again. I shook my head and moved over to where Divya was slumped against the wall. She hadn’t been beat up, not that I could tell; there was no bruising on her face, anyway, and no blood. But she was pale and drawn and her hands were shaking. Her pupils were dilated and I guessed that they’d used chemical interrogation on her.
“Did you give them anything?” I asked her. I didn’t show any sympathy for her, both because I had none and because she wouldn’t have appreciated it.
She shook her head in a jerky, unnatural motion, like she was about to have a convulsion.
“Monsieur Damiani doesn’t send people like me into the field without precautions,” she said, her voice quavering and soft.
She’d had counterconditioning, that’s what she meant. Psyche probes, hypnotherapy, maybe even an implant to keep drugs from working on her. They hadn’t gotten shit from her, and probably wouldn’t have even if they’d used physical interrogation. That left the bigger question, the one I wanted to ask but didn’t: had she gotten anything from them in the process?
“You gonna’ be okay to move if we have to?” I wondered. “You don’t look so hot.”
“It’s not pleasant,” she admitted, her back straightening slightly as she pushed herself up with her palms on the cold, concrete floor. “But I can do what needs to be done, Munroe.”
“Relax, we probably have a while. You had to have been gone at least an hour…”
I’d barely got the words out of my mouth when the door crashed back open and Victor was tossed through, landing limp as a rag on his back. His cheek was bruised and already swollen, his nose looked broken and his face was slack before he hit the ground, drool and blood trailing from his split lip. He hadn’t been beaten unconscious though, I decided; he would have looked even worse because it would take a lot to knock Victor out. I was fairly sure they’d used the sonics on him, and I was also sure he’d made them do it to avoid being interrogated, because I hadn’t been honest when I’d spoken to him before---he did know something they didn’t. He knew where the ship had landed, and he knew Vilberg had been heading back to it.
“Up,” the leader motioned to me, not bothering to tell Divya to get on the ground. He knew she wasn’t a physical threat. “Make a stupid move, like the big idiot did, and I’ll stun you just like I did him, then we can start all this again in an hour, when you’re awake again.”
“No problem,” I promised him, hands raised, feeling the corner of my mouth turn up. “I wouldn’t want to miss this.”
The room they took me to wasn’t a cell; as far as I could tell, it was an infirmary or clinic, or some such thing. It was brightly lit and full of medical equipment: diagnostic scanners, growth vats for cloned tissue, and not one but two very expensive auto-docs. Lining one wall were folding cots, and set up in the center of the room was a sturdy-looking gurney with straps for buckling down an unwilling “patient.”
Calderon and Van Stry were there, and so was a harried-looking medical technician, her coveralls a dull white with dark stains on the sleeves. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had made those stains. The soldiers prodded me towards the gurney, then two of them pushed me down onto it, holding my shoulders and legs in place as they strapped me in.
Calderon didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked as if his head was coming to a boil and about to erupt in a steam explosion like one of the geysers Gramps had taken me to see in Yellowstone when I was a kid. I could imagine why. Van Stry looked unhappier but less out of control.
“I’m going on record here, Alberto,” she said to Calderon, her generic face yanked downward in a frown that was almost a grimace, “that I’m recommending against this. Ms. Damiani won’t be happy if your field medics bring harm to her son.”
“I don’t give a shit about Andre and I don’t give a shit about his sister,” Calderon ground out. “Ferguson,” he snapped at the med-tech, “Give him the dose.”
The technician seemed hesitant, but also scared of Calderon. She took a drug patch off its backing and laid it against the skin of my neck. I felt a slight itching sensation there, then an immediate light-headedness as the drug worked its way into my bloodstream and from there to my brain. I blinked as everything began to get blurry around me.
“Tell me something, Calderon,” I said, trying not to slur my words and working hard to focus on the officer. “What’s your boss going to say when you get his charter revoked for killing civilians and using armed, autonomous drones? Think he’ll be happy you got this piss-ant job done on this piss-ant little piece of shit planet?”
I giggled, unable to stop and frankly, unwilling. “Think he’ll be happy that he has to move his whole operation out here and work exclusively for these half-assed crime bosses scratching for their little corner of hell-holes like this?”
“Is the shit working yet?” Calderon demanded, rounding on the technician, his fists clenching and unclenching like he really wanted to hit me again.
“It’s had enough time,” she confirmed, looking at me doubtfully. “It seems to be lowering his inhibitions.”
“You think I needed this shit to lower my inhibitions, lady?” I asked her, laughing again. “I’d have told this tin-pot wannabe exactly what I thought of him ten minutes ago if he’d have stood still for it.”
The guards who’d brought me in weren’t saying anything, and their visors covered their faces, but I had the sense they were staring at Calderon, and I think he sensed it, too.
“Sgt. Rose,” he said to the team leader, “take your people and wait outside.”
“Sir, are you sure…,” he began, but Calderon cut him off.
“Now, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” The NCO waved at the others and they filed out of the infirmary entrance, then pulled the door shut behind them. It was a solid door, more like the holding cell I’d come from than the plastic pieces of shit they hung on offices in buildfoam structures like this, and it closed with a solid, metal sound.
“Got all the witnesses out of the way, huh, Calderon?” I taunted him, grinning more broadly now, feeling a looseness that was less the chemicals and more the excuse of having been drugged. “Gonna’ rough me up like you did my troop? Slap around a drugged prisoner strapped to a table? That how you get your rocks off? I bet you go beat off in your cot thinking about the k
ids you killed here, don’t you?”
The chiseled features of the mercenary commander loomed over me, twisted with rage and frustration, and I felt my head jerked towards him as he grabbed my collar and yanked it upward. His other hand cocked back in a fist, ready to smash my face in and be damned with the interrogation. That’s when I did it.
Of the several implants and upgrades I’d had over the last few years thanks to Roger West and the technicians who worked for him and Andre Damiani, the most useful were the medical nanite suite and the audio transceiver I’d had grafted to my mastoid bone that let me connect to my ‘link remotely. I used the mastoid transceiver daily, and the nanites way too often. But the one Cowboy had suggested that I’d nearly rebelled against was the pharmacy organ, the extra sack of cloned tissue squeezed into my abdomen that could produce various drugs when it sensed the need from my body’s various systems. I’d figured it was a waste of time; if I needed a painkiller, my armor’s systems could deliver it, or I could get one from my medical kit or slap on a smart bandage.
It had one capability that I’d never used before, and I’d honestly never wanted to. With the right prompting, it could deliver me a massive dose of adrenalin combined with an equally massive dose of painkillers. It wasn’t something you’d call on lightly, because it held the very real possibility of making your heart explode in your chest or causing a brain bleed or allowing you to break your own bones or tear your tendons or cartilage without feeling it.
Now seemed like a good time to give it a shot.
I clenched my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut, tensed every muscle in my body and imagined a solid white wall. The lethargy, the fuzziness in my head and all the other effects of the drugs disappeared like they had never been, replaced by a preternatural clarity that seemed to freeze every detail of the room around me. There was Calderon’s fist, half a meter from my face, as Van Stry tried to lunge forward to stop him. His eyes were wide and wild, while hers were narrowed and resolute, the word “don’t” halfway out of her mouth. There was the technician, cringing backwards, trying not to get caught in the middle of it, an abused dog who knows what’s coming.
