Engineman

by Eric Brown

  He was dark-complexioned, hatchet faced—good looking and at the same time brutish. A company man, if ever she’d seen one.

  He held out his hand, palm up, and bent his fingers minimally in a horrible, patronising little gesture. “Stand.”

  Taking her time, Ella pushed herself to her feet. The sergeant was expressionless, staring at her.

  “My name, Hunter, is Sergeant Forster,” he said. His accent was tight and clipped. “My speciality is the game of interrogation, a game that over the years I have come to play very well. In fact, I never lose.” He paused, letting his words sink in.

  Ella fought not to let him see her fear.

  “But it is a game,“ he went on, “in which even the loser can win something—or lose everything, depending on how well you understand the rules.” Another pause. He was practised in the art of psychological intimidation, of planting pauses and silences to increase the tension..

  “The rules are these, Hunter. I ask you a question, and you answer it. If the answer is what I want to hear, then it is correct and you gain a point. A certain number of points, and your life is saved. You will be tried and jailed for between twenty and twenty-five years for belonging to a proscribed terrorist organisation. You might even get out in time to bear children. On the other hand, if the answer is not what I want to hear, you are docked a point. At a certain total of minus points, you will be taken out behind the control tower and shot through the back of the head. As an incentive to answer the questions correctly, there will be certain... shall we say, inducements. Now, are you ready to play?”

  Ella just stared at him, knowing that however contemptuous her expression he would have seen it before on the faces of his many victims.

  “How do I know,” she began, her voice steady and calm, much to her surprise, “that even if I do answer the questions correctly, you won’t kill me all the same?”

  Forster flashed a white grin. “You don’t. You’ll just have to take the risk. It is, after all, your only chance.”

  “Go to hell,” she said, her voice almost cracking. “You can take me out now and get it over with.”

  “Noble sentiments, Hunter. But you haven’t heard the questions yet.”

  Ella shook her head. “Shoot me.”

  “The first question. With whom did you spend your first night on the Reach? Name your contacts.”

  “I spent the night alone. I contacted no one.”

  Forster inclined his head. “Minus one point. Question two. Where is your father, on the Reach, or on Earth?”

  “My father?” She stared at Forster, surprised. “What do you want with him?”

  “Answer the question, Hunter.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve no idea. I haven’t seen or spoken to my father for ten years-” Why the hell was her father so important to them? Surely the conversion of a Danzig executive would be no great tragedy for the Organisation?

  “Minus two points, Hunter. Question three. Who are your father’s contacts on Earth?”

  Ella stared at him. “Contacts? On Earth? I’ve no idea! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Minus three points, Hunter. I think a little inducement might be called for. Corporal.”

  One of the guards, immobile until now, stepped forward and reached out to Ella. She never saw the neural incapacitator in his hand, but she felt it.

  Her arm burned and her brain exploded. She hit the floor, her neurones misfiring, and convulsed with an induced grande mal epileptic seizure. She thought later that it was like being insane for thirty seconds. Her chaotic mind, incapable of coherent thought, peered over the edge of everything known and looked upon oblivion or hell.

  Then she was back in the hangar, looking up at her tormentors, her spine arched in pain. She collapsed, sobbing. “You... you-” She wanted more than anything to call them bastards, but the word would not form.

  Forster smiled, kneeling beside her. “How do you like the game so far, Hunter? That was just a little encouragement to play by the rules. We have a long, long way to go yet. There are many more questions.

  Now, let’s go back to the beginning. Who were your contacts on the Reach?”

  Ella closed her eyes, gritted her teeth. She hissed, “We give thanks to the Continuum/ The Infinite, the Sublime/ Into whose munificence we pass/ At the end of this cruel illusion-”

  “Again. Where is your father, on The Reach or on Earth?”

  “We have lived, we are mortal/For our mortality we give thanks/ Without this cruel illusion we would be without immortality-”

  “Again! Who are your father’s contacts on Earth?”

  “All essences unite in the Continuum/ Regardless of circumstance/ For all flesh is heir to the vagaries of conditions/ All flesh is capable of evil-”

  “Corporal!”

  “No!” Ella screamed.

  The Corporal advanced.

  A firestorm of pure pain raged through her; it was as if her very soul were ablaze, might burn away to leave nothing of her essence to be saved. Her neurones fired at random, filling her head with a kaleidoscopic nightmare of irrational memories. She was a little girl again, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Her father was walking away from her, pacing towards the cobalt screen of the interface. Despite her screams he kept on walking, and exploded in a terminal white starburst. To Ella’s shattered mind, it was as if the image was real, and all she craved was oblivion.

  The terror passed, the nightmare ebbed and sanity returned. She found herself on the floor of the hangar, staring up at Forster. The thought of what he might do to her, the thought of the beautiful bullet in the back of her head, filled her with peace.

  “Kill me...” she demanded.

  Forster smiled. “Kill you? But that would be too kind a way out. You don’t think for a second that you’re going to get off so lightly, do you? Remember—I have been playing this game far longer than you.”

  He stood and walked away, the guards joining him. Ella tried to sit up, but the effort exhausted her and she lay back down. Her breathing came with difficulty, her chest heaving. Her left forearm was raw from where the incapacitator had burned her, but not as raw as the nerves of her brain. She felt as if her head had been marinated in acid, and when she closed her eyes fireballs exploded. She relived the fleeting, terrible images and brief thought-impressions of entropy and annihilation—the antithesis of everything in which she believed. It was as if her subconscious was mirroring her conscious belief in an afterlife with the exact, terrible opposite—to make her appreciate the wonder and vitality of the realm towards which she was heading.

  Her torturers returned.

  All she wanted was the promised bullet. Surely she had reached the requisite number of minus points by now? Surely, if they were playing by the rules, she was due her reward. But she should have known. She was dealing with an opponent whose motivation was less fair play than victory at all costs.

  Forster knelt, placed his hands on his knees. “Now, Hunter, how would you like to go through that all over again? You can spare yourself the pain, the horror, and at the same time save your life, simply by answering the questions.”

  She braced herself for the shock of the incapacitator.

  “Now, who were you contacts on the Reach?”

  How could she inform on the old woman in the bar? Or tell Forster that Max Klien, Rodriguez and Jerassi were her contacts, and in so doing implicate Conchita and her daughter?

  She closed her eyes, tortured with the anticipation of the brain-fire and desolation. Through gritted teeth she chanted, “We become riders of the Infinite/ Shedding our egos-’’

  “Two,” Forster continued. “Where is your father? On the Reach or on Earth?”

  “Loosing the burden of self/ Becoming One with all things.” Her body tensed with the expectation of imminent neural annihilation.

  “‘Three. Who are your father’s contacts on Earth?”

  “Bless each one of us as we pass/ From illu
sion to reality-”

  “Corporal!”

  “No! Oh, no—please Fernandez, no!”

  She screamed. Her brain was burning and would burn forever, the eternal combustion feeding on the oxygen of her pain. All her fears came back to her, all her doubts—her lack of faith, terror that not the afterlife awaited her but oblivion; fear of loneliness, abandonment; images of loved ones walking away from her, ignoring her screamed pleas for protection, affection and love.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, the pain sluiced away, leaving only an echoing residue in her head, an ever-present but elusive spectre of all the agony and terror.

  Great breaths wracking her body, aware that she’d vomited over herself, she gazed up at Forster. He was standing, staring down at her.

  “Kill me!” she gasped.

  He gestured to the guards. “Unshackle her. Take her away.”

  She closed her eyes in relief. Soon it would be over.

  The guards unlocked the leg-iron and assisted her across the hangar. She found it hard to walk. The incapacitator had scrambled her co-ordination and she shambled from the building like an old woman. The sunlight was wonderfully soothing on her face. They followed Forster across the tarmac to the control tower.

  It struck her in a second of panic that her father might never find out what had happened to her—or that, if he did, he might blame himself for her death. She wanted to tell him that it was not his fault that she had come to the Reach, merely the end result of so many random factors.

  She asked herself why the Organisation might be so interested in her father. What did they mean by his contacts on Earth?

  They marched her around the back of the control tower. She expected to be put up against the wall and summarily executed. The guards held her between them, looking across the tarmac to a blast-barrier used to test the engines of fliers, twenty metres away. With Forster, they seemed to be watching, waiting for something.

  Was this yet another psychological trick, a delay to let her dwell on the fact of her death; as if she might weaken at the eleventh hour, tell him what he wanted to hear?

  A truck crossed the tarmac and drew up beside the blast-barrier. Six militia-men jumped from the back of the truck, pulling after them two civilians—one in peasant’s garb, the other wearing radiation silvers. They had their hands bound behind their backs, their heads bowed. The guards bundled them across to the blast-barrier.

  “Disciples,” Forster informed her. “Caught trying to sabotage the Zambique-Guernica mono-link.”

  She watched, unable to look away or close her eyes. The Disciples were made to kneel, facing the barrier. As they did so, the men raised their heads in a gesture Ella found at once hopeless and dignified. She heard their chant drift through the warm morning air. “We cast off this cruel illusion...”

  The guards placed pistols at the base of the Disciple’s skulls and fired, the recoil pushing their arms into the air with a flourish like that of a pianist. The Disciples crumpled, legs tucked beneath their bodies in a tragic recapitulation of the foetal posture. The guards took their arms and legs, staggered with the bodies and swung them like sacks of grain into the back of the truck. Then they turned and stared across at Ella.

  She looked at Forster, shaking her head. “You can’t intimidate me. I’m ready to die. This is one game you’ve lost-”

  Something cunning in his expression made her stop. “Lost?” He smiled. “I don’t know the meaning of the word. What you experienced in the hangar was merely the first round of the contest.” He signalled to the guards. “Take her inside.”

  She wanted to scream; she wanted to beg them to kill her. They escorted her through a door and into the control tower, along a corridor. She was taken to a small room furnished with a bed and a chair. A window overlooked the tarmac and the blast-barrier where the execution squad still waited. The door was locked behind her. She sat on the bed, staring down numbly at her shaking hands, watching them through a film of tears.

  She wondered what further horrors Forster had in store for her. Would they resort to physical torture? Would she be able to withstand protracted physical pain any better than the attention of the incapacitator?

  At a sound from beyond the door, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. Forster entered the room smartly, leaving the door open. He looked Ella up and down. “Hunter, your clothing is a disgrace. Would you like to change?”

  She just stared at him, non-plussed by the banality of his question.

  He turned to the door. “Corporal.”

  The guard stepped forward and handed Forster a folded garment. Forster dropped it on the bed beside Ella. “Why not try it on?” he suggested.

  Ella stared at it, her pulse accelerating. She picked it up; it hung from her grasp like a sad, discarded epidermis. She would have recognised Eddie’s silversuit anywhere. The name-tag was missing.

  Oh, Fernandez... She’d left it at the hillside shack two days ago.

  “You do recognise it, don’t you?” Forster asked.

  “What do you mean?” Ella stammered. “I haven’t... I’ve never seen it before.”

  “No? Forensic tests revealed that tissue samples found on it belong to you. We found it yesterday, on premises belonging to Conchita Rodriguez.”

  She looked up at Forster, anguish burning inside her. “What have you done with her?”

  Forster smiled, cocked a finger pistol-fashion, indicating through the window. “Rodriguez is in the best of health,” he said. “For the time being.”

  Ella turned, knowing what she would see. Conchita Rodriguez stood before the blast-barrier. Her daughter grasped her legs, face buried in the folds of her skirt. Conchita laid her hands protectively on Maria’s head. She seemed to be staring straight at the control tower, through the window, at Ella.

  “No...” She shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t...”

  Forster. just looked at her. “No?” he asked.

  “But they’re innocent. They’ve done nothing-”

  “Rodriguez harboured Disciple terrorists,” Forster snapped. “And that’s a capital offence.”

  “But Conchita isn’t even a Disciple. She doesn’t believe! You can’t do it-”

  “Harbouring terrorists is a capital offence,.” He paused, considering. “But... I might be able to see my way to commuting the sentence. What do you think?”

  Ella looked from Forster to Conchita. There was something noble, almost arrogant, about the way the woman stood, straight-backed, holding her daughter to her skirt, her head high.

  “What do you want?” she asked, knowing with a sick inevitability full well what he wanted.

  “I want answers—answers to every question I ask. Correct answers, this time. Then Rodriguez and the girl survive. If the answers are not the ones I want, or prove on investigation to be false, then all three of you die.” He walked to the window, turned. “What do you say?”

  Ella looked past him to the woman. She recalled their conversation. Conchita was not a Disciple—she had no religious beliefs. For her, this life was the only one. Ella could only imagine the woman’s terror.

  She shook her head wearily. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but I know nothing about my father. Please believe me.”

  Forster was nodding. “We’ll begin at the beginning, Shall we? Question number one. Who were your contacts on the Reach?”

  Ella hesitated. “Max Klien, Emilio Rodriguez and David Jerassi.”

  Forster nodded. “The terrorists who sabotaged the interface. Did you accompany them?”

  “I left them in the morning, rode to the Falls.”

  He stared down at her, as if considering her reply. She looked through the window, at Conchita, her heart beating rapidly.

  “Very well. Question two. Where is your father, here or on Earth?”

  She looked up at him. “I have no idea... I thought he still lived here. I came here to meet him. That’s why I went to the Falls-”

  “Careful,
Hunter. Be very careful. That’s a minus point. More than just your survival rests on your answers. You can’t play the martyr now.”

  “It’s true. I thought he was still at the Falls.”

  “When did you last see your father?”

  “Ten years ago, a few months before I left for Earth.”

  “When did you last hear from him, and contact him yourself?”

  Ella hesitated. “I contacted him seven years ago. I sent him a photograph. That was the last time. Then he contacted me a month ago. He sent me a disc.”

  Interest quickened in Forster’s jet eyes. “What did he say?”