“How are the others?” I asked.
“Eske’s still asleep.”
“They knocked her out too?”
“Yeah, apparently coming at a nearly blind person with blades can trigger a panic attack. Who knew, right?”
It made sense. Eske always had fun making multiple hair styles since we had been together and had taught many of the mimics how to braid and make other elaborate styles. Losing that was probably like losing a crown to her.
“And what about Bahn?”
She sighed. “Bahn is…trying to come to terms with what happened. He didn’t cut his hair for religious purposes, and now that’s been forcibly taken away from him. It’s hard for him not to feel like he’s been separated from his God.”
I let out a long breath. “Any sign of Mimi?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. They didn’t knock me out, so I tried to observe everything I could, but I didn’t catch a glimpse of her at all.”
I slid to the floor, what little strength I had left fading fast. “What are we gonna do, Ciangi?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, sighing not too differently from me. “But we have to believe we’re going to make it. We’ve been in worse situations before and gotten out of them. Heck, this isn’t even our first time in prison!”
“I know,” I murmured. “But somehow, it feels so much worse.”
“Yeah… Yeah, it does.”
With nothing more to say, the two of us fell silent. And although I tried to steel myself to stay strong, I felt hope quickly fading from me.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
8
Old Chat with Friends
We were given no blankets, no pillows to speak of, and yet I still managed to fall asleep. Maybe I was just that tired, or maybe my mind needed an escape from everything it had endured in the past couple of days. Or weeks. It was strange to think that less than a month ago, I was home on the mimic world just blithely going through life, never knowing that we were about to be betrayed by one of our own kind.
When I awoke, I half-hoped that it had been some horrible nightmare, but no, I was still in the cell with Ciangi across from me. I could see slightly into the cell next to her as well, but I could only catch the edge of Eske’s elbow where she was huddled on the ground.
I’d forgotten that she hadn’t been imprisoned like we had when we were first betrayed by Earth. This was an entirely new experience for her and I certainly didn’t envy that.
I opened my mouth to give her some tips, so maybe I could make her stay a little easier, but before I could, there was the sound of a door opening not too far away and multiple sets of footsteps approached us.
It didn’t take long for them to reach our cells, and of course it was none other than one of the generals that had initially broken the pact with us. His face was still just as red and squashed, and the look he gave me was one of utter disdain.
“I bet you thought you would never see me again,” he said, voice low and raspy.
“I certainly hoped so,” I answered slowly, minding my words. As much as I hated the man before me, I needed to tread carefully. “Sadly, it seems that wasn’t meant to be.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re real sad, but this is just the beginning. We have all of you now, and you’re going to face the trial of the century for what you’ve done.”
“Really?” Ciangi scoffed from her cell. “You want us to buy that you brought us back purely for some litigation? I know you think we’re idiots, but we’re not that stupid.”
“Aren’t you?” he countered. “You’re the ones who were moronic enough to be betrayed by one of their own kind, a child, who’d been sentient for less than a year. We didn’t even have to give them much. All they wanted was you gone and some simplistic weaponry. The best deal we’ve ever cut, if I’m honest.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ciangi continued. Although she was being flippant, I could tell there was something underlying it. A type of rage that I hadn’t seen in her in a very long time, seething just under her skin and her honeysuckle smile. “You wanna stop with all the chitchat to hype yourself up and get to what you need from us, or are we going to stick with the useless posturing thing?”
He turned away from me to glare at Ciangi. “If you want to rush things, fine. I believe we have our first volunteer for interrogation.”
“Interrogation?” she countered, crossing her arms. “How gullible do you think I am? Unlike this place, our world knowledge is open to anyone and everyone. There are no secrets. Anything that we know, Mari knows, so there’s nothing you’re gonna learn from any of us.”
The general faltered for a moment, and even I caught the surprise across his features. However, while it made me curious, it made Ciangi outright howl with laughter.
“Oh man, she snowed you!” The words were nearly impossible to make out between her peals of laughter, but I managed to make out what she meant. “She played dumb and you totally bought it!”
The general was bristling now, and his angry, bulbous eyes scanned over all of us. “She said she was young, that she’d only had time to learn so much.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s true in the sense that she probably couldn’t tell you about theoretical physics or how to build a sub-light engine, but when it comes to her planet and its defenses, she’s one of our lead mimics who helps on those projects.”
Now he was turning several shades ranging from red to outright purple, and his soldier escorts were exchanging nervous glances. “We will deal with her indiscretions later! For now, we have you, so your knowledge will suffice. Take her.”
The soldiers moved forward, as if they were going to hit the button to drop the shield to Ciangi’s cell, but before they could, a high-pitched wail pierced through the relatively quiet hall, causing all of us to clap our hands over our ears to try to protect ourselves from the shrill alarm.
Hello? Sorry about that. Got the wrong frequency.
The familiar voice on his comm made us freeze. None of us reacted for a moment, my heart seeming to stop beating right in my chest. “Gonzales?” I whispered.
“Who the hell are you?” the general bellowed, turning this way and that. “Show yourself!”
Dude, I am obviously coming through your comm. And are you telling me you don’t remember me? I’m almost hurt.
“Gonzales!” Ciangi cried, rushing to the very edge of her cell. “Is that you?”
You bet your bottom dollar it is. Sorry for the delay. It took me a while to find you guys.
“How did you even know we had been taken?”
Don’t worry about it. All you need to know for now is that I’m coming for you. Oh, and, General? You might want to recheck your security grid, considering I was able to hack into this and I’m just a weapons engineer, not a system specialist.
Oh, and you can totally go kick some moon rocks while you’re at it.
His comm went dead and we were all left standing there, not quite sure what to do. While Ciangi, Bahn, Eske, and I were suddenly filled with a hope that we hadn’t had since this whole thing started, the general was practically vibrating with unchecked rage.
“This. Isn’t. Over,” he managed to spit before turning on his heel and screaming orders to his escort. It was too difficult to repress a laugh as they rushed out, no doubt to hurriedly scramble through their defenses, so I just let myself bellow as loudly as my mind needed.
“That was certainly unexpected,” Bahn said, the first time he had spoken since we were processed.
“Is it?” Eske murmured, sitting up in her cell. “I don’t know about you, but this seems exactly like something Gonzales would do.”
“You know what? You’re right.” I said, crossing to the back of the room and sitting down. “So, I guess now all we have to do is wait. Whatever they throw at us, whatever they try to throw at Gonzales, she’ll have us free and kicking.”
Too bad that was never really my strong suit.
9
&nb
sp; Patience is a Virtue
Our stay this time around certainly was different from our first imprisonment. For one, there wasn’t a guard terrorizing us. However, they also didn’t feed us every day. Or at least, I didn’t think they did. It was hard to tell, because once again, we were given no indication of what time it was. The lights were never turned off or dimmed and there were no clocks. But after two weeks of the same on the ship, I mostly had figured out how to listen to my internal clock.
As far as I could tell, they came about every other day with a set of rations and some water pills. I knew they were trying to weaken us, to make us crumble, but they were doing a terrible job of it. Sure, we were hungry and thirsty, but I’d been through worse when the colony was short on rations when I was a kid and we’d had to work on quarter portions.
As for the supposed ‘interrogations,’ they came around once or twice and injected us with something then asked a lot of questions, but the whole situation backfired terribly.
I didn’t know who was doing their research, but whoever they were had forgotten to check whether the truth serum they were using would even work on us. Although we’d come a long way from the ancient days where sodium pentothal was a thing, there was still no reliable way to shut down the human brain enough time to prevent lying. And it turned out, drugs that lowered inhibitions didn’t really work on any of us.
For myself, like most people who landed somewhere on the spectrum, it just made me confused and become very concerned with textures. Although I was blasted out of my mind for the entire interrogation, Ciangi told me that I kept trying to rub my hands on the soldiers’ uniforms and even grab their shock batons.
Eske didn’t fare much better. Considering that they were still keeping her blinded, refusing to give her the corrected eyewear she needed, she just became hyper-fixated on her goggles and where were they. Although the situation was certainly tense, there was something hilarious about a six-foot woman asking where her goggles were fifty times in half an hour. By the time they gave up, goggles no longer sounded like a word.
As for Ciangi? They should have known better from the satisfied smirk on her face when they went into her cell. I could remember it clear as day. She sat down, asked them if they had medical staff nearby, then raised her arm so they could inject her.
…then promptly had a massive allergic reaction.
That part was scary, and I certainly didn’t appreciate it, worrying that my friend had just been murdered. But thankfully, the medics arrived within a minute and they had adrenaline in her system and she was coming down from the attack.
Once she was fully back, she just laughed and laughed and laughed, telling the soldiers and general that they should have seen their faces They struck her once with the baton then headed out, no better off for all the torture they had handed her.
And then Bahn, taciturn, hairless Bahn. He just went into a religious lecture about the importance of his hair and how many laws they had broken in removing it from him without his permission. No matter how much they tried to get him on subject, he just went back to the legal ramifications of their shaving his head and his hair-care regimen that had given him so many inches of healthy tresses.
It slipped into a sort of routine, with them coming by to get information more than they gave us food. They grew more and more violent every time they came back emptyhanded, but we were usually too high to care. Granted, I hated being high, but I didn’t know that until I came down from each occasion.
Anytime that I started to feel too miserable, I reminded myself of what Gonzales had to endure when she was locked up alone for two months on her own, completely cut off from society and tortured by the insane guard that had taken a shine to her. She never complained about that, even when the memories from it haunted her dreams, so if she could tolerate that, I could deal with a week or two of discomfort.
So as much as I tried to never complain, I could feel myself growing weaker and weaker. I always kept that hope alive, but it was growing more and more difficult to keep myself alive. Often sleep was our only respite, whisking us away from our somewhat macabre reality for a little while.
It had to be at least a week later before I was suddenly roused from my sleep by loud footsteps stomping toward me. I opened my eyes groggily, only to have a stun baton slam into my ribs.
My entire body jolted, and a chopping cry escaped my throat. I convulsed for several seconds, before seeing the red face of the general leaning over me.
“How did you deal with the alien threat?!” he screamed, veins popping out all over his face right and left.
“We asked real nicely,” I said, my voice cracking from the aftershocks of the electrical jolt. While it was nothing compared to what I had endured on the ship, it certainly wasn’t pleasant either.
The stun baton landed again, this time on my arms as I tried to protect my face. My muscles locked, and I faintly heard my friends protesting in the background.
“Enough with the coy little banter, and your group’s quirky reactions to drugs. I’m done with it. You’re all a group of nobodies and you never should have been able to make it this far! So why don’t you stop wasting my time and tell me what I want to know?!”
When I could finally speak again, I could taste blood in my mouth. Great, because I really needed to deal with a busted tongue again.
“I could tell you,” I answered slowly. “But there’s really no point. You see, if I stay quiet, you’ll hit me a lot. If I tell you beans, you’ll hit me a lot, then kill me, then go back to our planet and try to kill our friends. It’s really a lose-lose situation so I might as well antagonize you as much as I can.”
“You insolent—”
This time, he pulled his fist back and struck down at my face. But I used the self-defense that Eske had taught me, knocking it to the side with one arm and chopping at his throat with a flat palm.
He fell back, gasping, and I bet regretting that he hadn’t come with his usual entourage. But that was what happened when people let their anger rule them—they made mistakes. Mistakes that would certainly help me.
A small sparking sound caught my attention and I realized that the general had dropped his stun baton. It had fallen to the ground right between us. I dove for it, but of course he did too, and we were suddenly locked in a wrestling match that I had never seen coming.
Despite his age, the general was bigger than me, more fed and certainly more rested. I felt him quickly overpowering me, positioning his body so that I couldn’t get any cheap shots in. I figured I only had one option considering our current situation, so I relaxed one of my hands on the baton just enough so I could flip the switch for it to discharge.
The corresponding shock went through both of us, knocking us back and leaving the baton once more lying in the middle of my cell. Just as I had hoped, I recovered first and was able to roll back to the baton, grabbing it for my life.
Only to get kicked right in the head.
The world spun for a minute and everything was pain, scrubbing all thoughts from my mind. When I recovered a few seconds later, the general was outside of the cell and had already activated the shield again.
Well…at least I had a stun baton now. A lot of good it would do in my cell, but I guessed I should be grateful for the little things.
The general stood, chest heaving as he glared pure murder at me. I gave him a little shrug, twirling the baton in my hand like a dare.
“You son of a—”
A massive explosion cut him off, rocking the hall and sending dirt raining down around my head in a little halo.
The general stumbled, swearing up a storm. I was tempted to say something snarky like Ciangi would, only to be deafened by alarms and blinded by flashing lights.
“What was that?” Eske asked, jumping to her feet and looking around wildly.
“I think that’s Gonzales!” Ciangi said, also eagerly scrambling into an upright position.
The general righted himself. “That’s imposs
ible,” he spat before turning to rush out the door at the end of the hall.
He never quite made it. Just when he was almost there, an entire section of the wall blasted itself to smithereens, sending him slamming into the opposite partition with enough force to knock him unconscious.
The hall was filled with smoke and dust for a minute, causing me to cough, but when it cleared, there was a solid hole where the wall once was, and three figures were walking through it.
“Heya, friendos,” Gonzales said, lifting the gun in her hand. “Welcome to our little rebellion. I heard someone was in need of a rescue?”
10
Looking for Group
I stared in a wide-eyed wonder at my friend. She had changed quite a lot in the months that we had been apart. Gone was her eye patch, and even her scanner-patch, instead replaced with an eye that had to be bionic, considering the bright blue light it glowed with. While she had a large blaster-rifle in hand, she also had what looked like a stun-staff strapped to her back and another, smaller blaster in a holster on one of her thick, muscular thighs.
“Hey there, Higgens,” she said with a smile. “Did y’all miss me?”
“You better believe it!” Ciangi answered, interrupting me. But I didn’t mind, because I had no idea what to say.
“Whoa, girl. Did you get a haircut? Wait, did all of you get haircuts?”
Ciangi shrugged, handling it about as coolly as humanly possible. “Processing, apparently.”
Gonzales let out a long curse. “Well, we’re making sure that they get theirs. But first…” She gestured to the two people beside her. One was a tall, absolutely jacked man who was somehow even more armed than Gonzales, and the other was a short, Ciangi-sized woman who had full body armor and what looked like an entire bandoleer full of bombs. “Meet my friends.”
Mimic Betrayed (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 6) Page 6
