Under the circumstances, Intertech had no choice but to seek acquisition by some more viable corporate entity. Reluctantly, a bid was accepted from Space Mines, Inc. (later the United Mining Companies). Aside from the necessary cash, the only obvious price SMI had to pay was an amendment to its charter, requiring SMI as a whole to forswear genetic engineering and to protect humankind from genetic corruption by the Amnion.
If Intertech had been able to preserve its integrity, much of the history of human space might have been different.
ANGUS
When the order came to have Angus Thermopyle frozen, it arrived by gap courier drone straight from UMCPHQ, tight-beamed to Com-Mine Station Security as soon as the drone resumed tard.
The order was signed by Hashi Lebwohl, director, Data Acquisition, United Mining Companies Police.
Angus had suddenly become a very special prisoner.
Even Milos Taverner could only speculate why that had happened after all this time. Any number of people discussed the subject with him: his chief; most of his fellow officers in Security; several members of Station Center; two or three people who, like his chief, sat on Station Council.
They all asked the same questions.
Did you know this was coming?
No, Milos hadn’t known this was coming. He could say that honestly. During the months since Angus’ arrest and conviction. UMCPHO had paid only the most routine attention to his case. Copies of his files had been reqqed: that was all. Even the information that a UMC Police ensign, Morn Hyland, had arrived with Angus and left with Nick Succorso had prompted no particular response—not even from Min Donner, who had a reputation for almost fanatical loyalty to her people in Enforcement Division. No action had been taken on Morn Hyland’s accusation that the UMCP destroyer Starmaster had been sabotaged by Com-Mine Station. Security’s requests for instructions concerning Ensign Hyland had been ignored.
Well, then, what makes him so special?
Milos had no new answer. Angus Thermopyle was exactly what he’d always been. He was valuable for his purported knowledge of piracy and smuggling, of bootleg shipyards, of merchants who could handle stolen ore and supplies in vast bulk, even of forbidden space. He was no more and no less special than ever.
So what did change? Is this what UMCPHQ wanted all along? Were they just waiting for the authority?
That’s my best guess, the deputy chief replied candidly. Unquestionably it was a change that the authority for such a demand now existed. The recent passage of the Preempt Act had granted jurisdiction over all human space, including the separate Security entities of each individual station or company, to the United Mining Companies Police. Prior to the act, Com-Mine Security had been required to supply the UMCP with nothing except cooperation. Now Hashi Lebwohl—or any UMCP director—could demand the cryogenic encapsulation of as many convicts as he liked.
Unfortunately the passage of the Preempt Act shed no light on the reasons for UMCPHQ’s interest in this individual convict.
All right. So they must have wanted him all along. They just didn’t have the authority to take him. Why do we have to freeze him? Why go to all the expense of cryogenic encapsulation? Why can’t we just armcuff him and turn him over to the next ship that happens to be heading for Earth?
Those questions made Milos’ stomach hurt: they came too close to things he shouldn’t have known. He rubbed his scalp helplessly and reached for his packet of nic.
To preserve him? he ventured.
What for? Who in hell would want to preserve the likes of Angus Thermopyle?
Milos had no safe answer. He tried again.
To transport him?
Why bother? With an armcuff and a few precautions, he could be carted like cargo anywhere in human space. That would be as safe as some damn freezer.
Most of the men and women Milos had conversations with concentrated on that issue. Com-Mine Station’s chief of Security simply had more right to demand an explanation.
“Why? Why freeze him?”
Because he felt he had no choice, Milos risked a degree of honesty. Squirming inside, he replied, “To silence him? Keep him from talking to us? UMCPHQ is delighted we haven’t been able to break him. They don’t trust us. They don’t want us to know the things he might tell us.”
To Milos’ relief, his superior had come to essentially the same conclusion. Fuming, the chief said, “By hell, I won’t have it. That bastard has been making life miserable around here ever since I can remember. He’s committed so many crimes, and gotten away with them so completely, it makes me sick. If anybody takes him apart, it’s going to be us.”
That wasn’t exactly what Milos wanted to hear. He wanted to be rid of Angus, and the sooner the better. Stifling a twinge of nausea, he asked, “What will you do?”
“Talk to Center,” said the chief. His personality was as harsh and simple as his loyalties. “Talk to Council. They’ll back me up—at least for a while. They don’t like this kind of treatment any more than I do.
“That damn Preempt Act is new. We can pretend we don’t understand it. We can claim we don’t know the right procedures. We can even demand confirmation. UMCPHQ might not let us get away with it for long, but we can buy a little time.
“Goddamn it, Milos, break that bastard.”
“I’ll try,” Milos promised, groaning inside.
He relayed this decision to people who were interested in it. Then he and his subordinates redoubled their efforts to crack Angus’ silence.
Of course, no one mentioned any of this to Angus himself. He experienced a sudden upsurge in beatings of all kinds; in the use of drugs which reduced his skull to a hive of skinworms; in the application of sleep deprivation and sensory distortion. But he was given no explanations. He was left to draw whatever conclusions he could from the change in his treatment.
Nevertheless through abuse and deprivation, damage and pain—and despite his visceral horror of incarceration—he persisted in his intransigence by the simple heroism of cowardice. He believed that as soon as his tormentors got what they wanted from him they would kill him. Therefore the only way he could keep himself alive was by keeping his mouth shut.
And he’d made a pact with Morn Hyland. It was tacit, but he stood by it. She hadn’t betrayed him. Instead she’d escaped Com-Mine with Nick. He knew this because no one had accused him of imposing a zone implant on her. And no one had accused him of the crime which had caused the Hyland ship, Starmaster, to go after him in the first place. If she’d remained on station, he would be dead by now—and not necessarily because she testified against him. The simplest routine physical would have revealed the presence of the implant. Therefore he knew she’d kept her part of the bargain. So he didn’t betray her.
In this stubborn refusal to speak, he had certain advantages which no one could take away from him.
One of them was the life he’d lived, the long years which had taught him more than even his roughest guards would ever know about the uses of brutality. The beatings which stressed his bones and the stun which made him puke were, for the most part, no worse than the abuse he’d received throughout his childhood and adolescence, or during extended periods of time since then. Indeed, his present mistreatment was no worse than some of the things he’d done to himself, in order to stay alive when the odds were large against him. The years may have weakened his body, but they hadn’t diminished his understanding of pain—or his dedication to survival.
Man for man, he was tougher than anybody who hurt him. And he was accustomed to being ganged up on. He was at his best when he was most afraid. His dread of his own helplessness made him almost superhuman.
Another of his advantages was that he knew how to make his interrogator break into a sweat. The same degraded and costly intelligence which grasped what the sudden increase in his tortures meant—Com-Mine Security had run into an unexpected time limit, and if they didn’t break him soon they would lose their chance—also guessed a great deal about Milos Tavern
er’s role in this protracted questioning.
The primary charge against Angus was a fabrication. Prior to his arrest, he’d learned that Nick Succorso had dealings with Security. And of course Nick couldn’t have used Station supplies to frame him without Station connivance—without the help of a double agent in Security. Taverner’s behavior during the months of interrogation made Angus sure he knew who the double agent was. He had a coward’s intuitive hearing: he could tell when the man asking him questions didn’t really want answers.
So he clung to his silence, despite the new ferocity of his treatment, and waited for the deputy chief to run out of time.
The pose he took in the meantime was that of a beaten man ready for death. His guards naturally distrusted this pose; and they had reason. But he didn’t care. Now all he cared about was conserving his strength until something shifted.
Earlier he’d used the pose for other reasons.
At first, immediately after his arrest—during the preliminary interrogations, as well as his trial and conviction —he’d had no need for a pose. Ordinary truculence had sufficed to defeat every challenge, every demand. If he felt anything beyond his normal black hate, it was relief. He’d managed to avoid a sentence of execution. And hidden inside his relief was a helpless, visceral gratitude toward Morn Hyland for keeping her part of the bargain.
But that was before they’d told him Bright Beauty would be dismantled for spare parts. When he’d heard that his ship, his ship, would be destroyed, that it would cease to exist, the logic of his emotions was altered. Anything resembling relief or gratitude vanished in a hot seethe of horror and outrage; a distress so intense that he howled like an animal and went berserk until he was sedated.
After he recovered from the initial shock, he adopted the pose that he’d lost the will to live.
He continued to glare umremitting malice at Taverner during their sessions together: he didn’t want to let his questioner off the hook. When he was alone, however, he became listless, unresponsive. From time to time he neglected his food. Sitting slumped on his bunk, he stared at the strict, almost colorless walls of his cell, at the floor, at the ceiling—they were indistinguishable from each other. Occasionally he stared at the lighting as if he hoped it would make him blind. He didn’t so much as flinch when the guards came after him with stun. They had to manhandle him into the san to keep him clean.
They were suspicious of him. That was inevitable. But they were also human—susceptible to boredom. And he had a coward’s patience, a coward’s stubborn will to endure. Despite the incessant, acid seethe of his emotions, he could wait when he had to. On this occasion, he waited for a month without showing anything except doomed resignation to anyone except Milos Taverner.
Finally the idea that he was slowly dying took hold. By degrees, his guards became careless around him.
At last he took his chance.
In the small hours of station night—although how he knew that it was night was a mystery, since the lighting in his cell never varied—he tore a strip off his sheet and tied it around his neck so tightly that his eyes bulged and he could scarcely breathe. Then he collapsed on the bunk.
He was monitored, of course; but the guard who came to check on him was in no hurry. Suicide by self-strangulation was difficult, if not impossible. Only Angus’ general weakness gave him any chance of success.
He was retching with anoxia and practically insane when the door opened and a guard came in to untie him.
Lulled by weeks of boredom, the guard left the cell open.
He had a handgun holstered on his hip, a stunprod in his fist. Such things didn’t deter Angus. He took the stunprod and blazed the guard in the face with it. By the time the observers at the monitor realized what was happening, he’d freed his neck, helped himself to the handgun, and jumped through the doorway.
The gun was an impact pistol, a relatively low-powered weapon primarily intended to shoot down prisoners at close range; but it sufficed to deal with the only people Angus encountered in the corridors outside his cell, a patrolling guard and a minor functionary, probably a data clerk. He was still monitored, of course. However, Security knew he couldn’t escape. He had nowhere to go—they thought. So they were quicker to check on the people he’d stunned and shot than to give chase.
As a result, he almost reached his goal. He came that close—
For months while he stared at the walls and ceiling and floor as if he were dying, he’d been busy studying Com-Mine in his mind, collating what he knew about the station’s infrastructure with what he’d observed about the layout of the Security section. With an accuracy that made him seem almost prescient, he’d deduced the general location of the nearest service shaft which led to the waste processing plant.
If he could get down into that shaft, he had a chance. By its very nature, the plant itself was a labyrinth of shafts and pipes, crawlways and equipment. He might be able to elude pursuit for days—or kill anybody who came after him. In fact, the only sure way to deal with him would be to gas the entire plant; and something like that would take days to set up. Which would leave him time to do the station itself as much damage as he wished. It might even leave him time to escape into DelSec or the docks. And from there he could hope to stow away on some departing ship.
If he could just get down into the service shaft—
The guards caught him while he was trying to force the shaft cover.
They shot at him: he returned fire. For a moment he achieved a standoff.
Unfortunately one of their shots hit the shaft cover and bent it, jammed it. Without an avenue of escape, he was lost. When his gun ran out of charge, he was recaptured.
Predictably enough, the abuse he received became much worse after that. He’d humiliated his guards, and they required him to pay for it. And his pain was made all the more excruciating by the knowledge that he would never get another chance. Even terminally bored guards wouldn’t fall for the same ruse twice.
On the other hand, his first session with the deputy chief after his escape confirmed his suspicions about Milos Taverner. The fact that he wasn’t prosecuted for killing one of his guards demonstrated that he still had a lever he could use. If he needed to, he could trade Taverner for his life.
Despite everything Com-Mine Security had done to him, he still wasn’t broken.
Eventually the beatings and deprivation and drugs eased back to their former levels. When they increased again later, he knew how to interpret the change. So he resumed his listlessness, his pose of self-abandonment. He let himself grow thinner and weaker as if he’d lost the capacity to care—and to hell with whether anybody believed him or not. That no longer mattered. He was simply conserving his strength.
Pain was something which was done to his body; but its power was a function of his mind. He couldn’t stop his guards from hurting him, but he could defuse the effect of the beatings and drugs. By an act of will, he withdrew into himself until his brain existed in a different place than his distress. If he lost weight or muscle, that meant nothing. Let his physical self suffer: he’d never counted the cost of the things he did to survive. Precisely because he was determined to live, he risked growing so weak that he might die.
The truth was that Angus Thermopyle had never tried suicide, not once in his whole life. He’d done horrible things to himself, things which could easily have resulted in his death; but he’d always done them in order to survive. During all the time he was held prisoner on Com-Mine Station, he never thought about killing himself.
Later he wished he had.
Nobody told him what was in store for him. Increased abuse was his only hint of his doom until the day when Milos Taverner visited him in his cell.
That in itself was a surprise. Angus had always seen Taverner in the interrogation room: the deputy chief was too fastidious to have much taste for the state in which the guards kept Angus—or the state in which Angus kept himself. Except for his nic-stained fingers, Taverner was so clean
that Angus wanted to puke on him, just for laughs.
Nevertheless Taverner’s unexpected visit wasn’t as surprising as the fact that the deputy chief wasn’t alone.
He had a woman with him.
She was tall, handsome, and lean, with streaks of gray in her jet hair, an uncompromising mouth, and hot eyes. The way she moved left no doubt in Angus’ mind that she was a match for him: even the small flexing of her fingers was at once smooth and tense, poised between relaxation and violence—a balance she’d acquired through years of training. On her hip, she carried a handgun, a sleeker and far more powerful version of the impact pistol Angus had used in his escape. Her gaze gave the impression that she could see everything without shifting her eyes. Although she had an air of authority, she wore nothing more elaborate than a plain blue shipsuit. It was unmarked by any ornament or insignia except an oval patch on each shoulder: the generic starfield emblem of the UMCP.
Before she entered the cell, she turned to the guard who’d accompanied her and Taverner.
“Switch off your monitors,” she said crisply. “I don’t want any record of this.”
Milos nodded in confirmation, but his support was probably unnecessary. Her tone was that of a woman who knew she would be obeyed. And the nervous alacrity of the guard’s salute guaranteed compliance.
When the guard left to relay her order, she came into the cell and closed the door.
Her nose wrinkled in disgust as she surveyed Angus and his quarters. “You don’t waste care on your prisoners, do you, Milos?”
Taverner’s shrug looked vaguely helpless. He wasn’t happy. As if involuntarily, he pulled a packet of nic out of his pocket. Then he caught himself. Scowling, he shoved the packet back.
“He does this deliberately,” he replied with an effort. “The psy-profile indicates he’s suicidal, but he’s faking it. The only time we believed him, he nearly got away from us.”
Forbidden Knowledge: The Gap Into Vision Page 13
