“Why?” he asked aloud. Because he had been defiant to her? Was this her way of making an example of an errant convict? She had to know her reputation preceded her; no such demonstrations were necessary. Or was this personal for her?
No possibilities seemed too farfetched. With Muscovy, a scant few meters away from him, separated by only a single barrier, he didn’t doubt for a second she truly hated him. Ward felt he might black out again, so much so he almost didn’t notice Muscovy speaking again.
“So, what shall we talk about? My little chat with the Administrator? Told her things about you and what you did.”
Ward slumped back onto the only horizontal surface in the room, a small rectangular slab, jutting outwards from the wall at the rear. Essentially the cell’s bedding and couch.
“Why not?” Ward asked, resignation heavy in his voice. “Not like either of us is going anywhere.”
“Good. You should know, she was quite happy to hear about our last trip. She said some interesting things about you too.”
“Really?” Ward felt another tinge of anxiety. Against his better judgement, he asked. “Like what?”
The sound of Muscovy’s faint laughter reached him. “Like how you get people killed, back when you were big investigator for Interpol.”
Ward’s lip curled. “You don’t say.”
“Oh yes. She told me all about how you get two people killed because you were a, how do you say. . . narkozavisimost?”
As descriptions went, Muscovy’s was without doubt accurate. A tad colloquial perhaps, but the ugly word unquestionably captured Ward’s mental state at the time of the incident. At least, that was what Ward had called it. Negligence was how Interpol summarized the incident. Their ruling ensured he was robbed of his duties, his commission, and his enhancements as an officer of System law. Now, thanks to Sandoval, Muscovy knew all about the incident too.
“She told you all this, did she?”
“Eh, might have been her. Might have been the svin'yoy, what’s his name? Banks. He does not like you much either.”
Ward didn’t respond right away. The last thing he should do now was react too strongly to Muscovy’s baiting. Instead, he curled his fist, squeezing his fingers until they turned white. His only option was to carry on with feigned indifference. Muscovy’s tale had the ring of truth about it. Between Sandoval and Banks, the security chief was far more likely to have equipped Muscovy with some juicy gossip to use against him. Perhaps it had been Banks who had arranged for him to have the cell next to him as well. Ward couldn’t imagine why who had arranged the cell allocation would matter, but the thought of it made him feel better.
Muscovy’s voice droned on, describing in detail all he remembered about how Ward had been disgraced. Ward sat and tried his best not to listen. Try as he might, though, his mind would not wander happily to any other place or any other thing. All his mind saw was dark blue walls, piercing blue light. The enclosing surfaces around him with the single opening in his universe. An opening through which additional torment flooded in.
“The thing I wonder,” Muscovy said finally. “How do the others take orders from you, boss? You were a svin'yoy too, once. A gearhead. Why do they listen to you? Do they think you are one of us because they took away all your gears? You are one of us now?”
Ward considered Muscovy’s statement and, much to his surprise, found himself agreeing with the Slav, after a fashion. As a native Martian, Ward was once as Extro and gear-headed as they came. He had been an Investigator, to boot. But time and a few tragic mistakes had deprived him of all that. There had been a brief inquiry, a conviction and a sentencing. His implants were all removed once the inquiry was over. He had become one of them, a Retro in all but name only.
How to explain to the man in the cell next to him why Guernsey and the others had come to trust him? How to convey to a hardened, murdering son of a bitch what that was even like? To men like Muscovy, trust was a concept as alien as empathy and love.
Ward knew the other reason for their loyalty was relatable enough. In their current confines, the non-violent offenders were known to stick together. Regardless of what Ward had been before he landed on the Rock, he had been entrusted with people’s lives and knew how to keep them safe. And he had.
He had.
“Well, Jerry?” pressed Muscovy. “Why do they listen to you? You know in any other hole in this fucking System what they would do to you?”
“I imagine you do, Zory. You’ve probably been to more than a few.”
Muscovy laughed again. “You think this place is hard, you have no fucking idea. I’ve been places where svin'yoy like you are nothing but meat. You know my favorite? Pax, on Luna – the place they keep from the old days. Nothing but hard labor, sleeping underground, and no fucking machines in your head to keep you from killing. And no women. Just men crammed in a tube, falling over each other until only a few were left.”
“Sounds like a vacation,” Ward said. Muscovy’s voice sounded closer when he spoke next, dripping with venom instead of slime. Dismissing his old haunt was plainly a touchy subject for him. He wanted Ward to know precisely what life would be like for him if he had been there.
“Little pink-ass like you. They would cut your lying tongue out, first night you were there. Rip it right out with a rusty hook. Then they would cut out your eyes, make holes in your face to piss in. And then, then they would take turns, make your ass into their woman, use you until you bled and cried like a little suka.”
Ward’s skin tingled coldly, like insects were crawling all over his skin. Muscovy was taking some severe and perverse pleasure in this. Not just the thought of making Ward uncomfortable. The Slav was deriving a deep, animal satisfaction from the idea of seeing Ward broken and battered, even raped. Ward knew such a thought had to fill Muscovy with sick, twisted joy.
The Slav’s voice dropped to a low, rumbling tone. “And then, if you were lucky, they would kill you. And you would thank them for their mercy.”
Ward felt something new then. A critical limit had been reached. A line had been crossed. How often had he heard such talk from assholes he had hauled in back when he still wore his shield? And how had he responded then, in every case?
Pieces of shit like Muscovy were always supremely confident so long as they believed it was they who were in control. That was their weakness. Their Achilles heel: it was a matter of making them lose control. All you had to do was find the pressure point and strike.
“Tell me, Zory. They ever make a woman out of you on Pax? I mean, there weren’t women around, as you say, and a guy like you isn’t too scary to look at.”
That got him a laugh, but he could tell he’d made a slight dent. Time to expand the dent into a full-fledged piercing wound.
“I mean, it would explain a few things. Your asshole attitude, your predilection for sick shit. The way you’re constantly eyeing me.”
Muscovy went on the offensive, a good sign. “I eye you because you are weak little –”
Ward cut him off. “Bet you got a real taste for it after a while. Bet you got so in love with the feel of another man inside you, you were sorry to be shipped off to the Rock.”
A string of half-garbled, half-shouted Russo expletives escaped Muscovy’s mouth. Ward was hitting the mark and a tired smile tugged at his lips. Soon enough, Muscovy would be hit with the realization he had no chance of silencing the source. That was where Ward hoped the moment of reaction would come. Time to dig deeper into the wound.
“I bet that’s why you keep following me around. You’re hoping to relive that experience, aren’t you? To remember the feeling of being dominated by another man. You like me because I’m a pig. I’m a reminder of all the men who ever fucked you.”
Muscovy slammed his fist against the cell door. He wasn’t quite there yet, but he was close.
“If I were in there with you right now, you would know what it feels like!” screamed Muscovy.
“But you’re not, are you? All
you can do is talk, and that’s not working out so well. In the end, Zory, a guy like you is always somebody else’s bitch.”
“Ya sobirayus' ubit' tebya Tvoya mat' chertovski –”
“I bet that’s what your mother thought every time she looked at you. She must have cried when she realized what a weak, pathetic disappointment her little Zo-Zo was!”
Two loud yells echoed down the corridor soon followed by a scream of primal anger, followed swiftly by a scream of excruciating pain. The second one clipped and aborted, as the electrical charge from the neural spike coursed through Muscovy’s neurons, causing a jolt of pain and instant coma.
A muffled thud followed, Muscovy’s body hitting the floor.
Silence.
Ward sighed.
“Ah, finally.” Just him and his mental demons now. No real demons to intrude on his solitude or torment him with discussions of his harrowing past or horrible present. Now, only the unwanted visitors waited to torment him.
Seems appropriate, he thought. They’re so much better at the torment.
Five
Ward couldn’t be sure how much time had passed. The guards had long since come and dragged Muscovy away. Upon learning he had spiked, they undoubtedly realized their little plant wasn’t going to have the desired effect. The sounds of their angry mutters and those of Muscovy’s feet being dragged against the floor were the last thing passing for Ward’s contact with the outside world.
Now there were just the four walls and the faint humming of the room’s recessed lighting.
There was no way to divide the days from the nights, even if the usual process for these things was totally artificial in Prokofiev. With only the blue lights remaining fixed on their low setting, no false sunrise. No dark. No timepieces to keep note of the hour. Ward was adrift in an endless sea of gloom.
The gloom was made worse by the painful withdrawal symptoms. Were he to measure the expanse of time based on the progression of his symptoms, he was sure of the first forty-eight Standard hours. Once the initial shocks passed, he settled into a steady state of cold sweats, disorientation and restlessness.
Aside from the regular deposits from the food dispenser, kindly placing the requisite pastes on the tray by the bed, there was no way to measure the passage of time. Three servings daily. For all he knew, they were intentionally feeding him at random intervals to fuck with his mind. Clearly, they were withholding his meds on purpose.
Yes, one day to the next felt much like the last. There was no way to know how much time had passed when the first of them arrived.
“Isn’t this perfect? You used to cut such an impressive figure.” A female voice, familiar yet. . .
Ward sighed heavily, wiping the sweat from his brow. His eyes weren’t the best right now. Concentrating, he vaguely made out the shape of a woman sitting in the corner. Her outline was simple enough, a slender woman of Martian ancestry, a tad taller and leggier than the Terran norm. He squinted to get a better look at her face, and saw the visage he remembered from years past.
“Hello, Baella. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I haven’t seen you either, technically. To look at you now, I’ve got to say that’s a good thing. You’ve really fallen pretty far.”
Ward issued a verbal shrug. He knew to expect abuse from her and her compatriots. There was no sense in getting offended or hurt. Not so soon into their conversation.
“Well, you look the same as I remember you.”
“I’m amazed you do remember me.”
Leaning forward, she brought her face ever so slightly into the light, what little there was. Baella was staring at him with those piercing jade eyes, the kind of green which couldn’t possibly occur naturally. The blue light enhanced the presence of the fine gold nanowires crisscrossing her pupils. At her wrist, Ward made out the slight discoloration indicating where her arm ended and the bioreplacement began. A little gift from her employer, after he took the old one.
How accurate a representation of her. And how ironic Baella accused him of forgetting. He would have thought by now some aspects of her would have faded from memory.
“I can never forget,” he said, accidentally sounding sentimental. “You and Alia were special to me.”
Baella scoffed. “Not as special as some of your other preoccupations. Tell me, how high were you when they told you my brother and I were dead?”
Ward remembered the moment. The memory wasn’t something he cared to confess to right now. “Last I checked, you two weren’t related.”
Baella’s voice hinted at growing anger. “Alia loved me, and I loved him. We had a bond deeper than blood. We suffered together. And you promised to get us out. You promised to protect us.”
“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?’
A wave of pain and delirium hit Ward. He closed his eyes tightly and groaned.
“Don’t you fucking try to shut me out! You’ve avoided us long enough!” Baella yelled at him. Her voice deeper, uglier and more guttural, like it was dredged up from some terrible death.
Ward raised a hand defensively. Her sudden change of tone inspired real fear for a second.
“I swear to you, Baella, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m dealing with some things right now, which makes your timing a little less than perfect.”
He expected another terrible outburst. His eyes remained shut and his hand remained outstretched, as if the hand might ward off the evil directed at him. To his surprise, she sounded like herself again. Like Baella, beautiful, sardonic, caustic Baella.
“Yeah, so I can see,” she said, a small glimmer in her eye. “Withdrawal is a bitch, isn’t it? The funny thing about abusing mind-altering substances, isn’t it? The coming down part, where you can’t get high again, is the fucking worst.”
You would know, he thought. Of course, he didn’t say that. In addition to being inappropriate, the observation was also utterly meaningless. She only knew what he knew, and what he knew of her. Any knowledge he bestowed right now would be precisely that, a gift fabricated from the vagaries of memory. But the knowledge Baella possessed on the subject had been lost long ago, vaporized with the rest of the matter making up her person.
“Thing I can’t figure out is, Alia and me, we were forced to go through that. People made us take Glow to get us all fucked and in the mood for what they did to us. We had to suffer through the downside of that filthy drug, we had no choice. You. . .” She waved at him vaguely. “You put yourself through that. Now that’s what I call fucked.”
Another wave of pain, this time with accompanying nausea. His symptoms, like Baella’s words, were becoming increasingly biting.
“I notice your grammar hasn’t improved much,” Ward managed to get out between ragged breaths.
“You don’t get much in the way of education out on the Rim. Xaver didn’t exactly prioritize proper syntax and diction when picking his victims, asshole.”
Ward imitated a chuckle. “Nice choice of words. Very apropos.”
“You always did have a bad sense of humor.”
The change in intonation brought his eyes open. He didn’t know why he would be surprised. They always came as a group, one after the other. And they always seemed to shift at the most inopportune moments. He could never anticipate what would motivate one to pop up at any given time, or to give way to another.
Hearing the name of one usually was enough.
“Xaver.” Ward breathed the name like some dirty word.
“Good to see you too, Inspector.” Xaver ran a hand over the locks hanging from one side of his head. On the other, the light reflected off the naked skin, drawing attention to all the ink marks he had there. They swam under the pale blue light, performing a dynamic dance, periodically forming into characters and symbols.
Xaver’s eyes shone. Not from embedded displays as Baella’s had, though. In his case, the rhodopsin and phosphorous implants gave his eyes that creepy glow, and impeccable night vision.
“Oh, but I forgot,
that’s not who you are anymore, are you? You lost your badge the day you let those people die.”
“Bet you enjoyed hearing about that, made you feel a little less beneath me.”
“Beneath you?” Xaver laughed. “I’ve done some bad shit in my time, but I never let anyone die out of sheer incompetence. That shit’s weak.”
Ward felt something pressing from behind his eyes. Everything in his face felt like it was being stretched or crushed. He wanted to scream, to lash out at something. With nowhere else to put his anger, he sent it Xaver’s way. He was the one making him feel worse right now.
“Fuck you, you scumbag. You trafficked people all over the System and killed people for fun. I’ve never done anything to compare with that.”
“No, I pulled the trigger. You were the one responsible for killing them. You told them to put their trust in you. To tell you what they knew. You told them you could protect them. In the end, you failed. That’s why they’re dead. You might as well have been the one to blow them to pieces. That was all that was left of them in the end, you know.”
The pain became a bright flash. All sensation ceased as a stabbing light blazed behind his eyes, showing him things from that night. The remains of the transit hub. The broken car. The remains of all those inside. The indistinguishable remains.
“Yeah, you remember. You remember the day you fucked yourself forever,” gloated Xaver.
Ward was unable to take anymore. All the pain and bright light came bearing down onto a single, luminescent dot, directed into the corner of the room, right at Xaver’s head. He let the dot take the form of an endless stream of cutting words, slicing at the specter all at once.
“Fuck you, you filthy cocksucker! I’ll be gone from here someday and when I am, I’ll find you and I’ll end you! No shield! No arrest! I’m going to wrap my hands around your neck and watch the life drain right the fuck OUT OF YOU!”
His eyes must have shut momentarily. Either that or he had blacked out again. Time passed. When he opened his eyes again, Xaver was gone. The far side of the cell was unoccupied. Ward was once again alone with the low light, the hum, and the worsening symptoms.
The Cronian Incident (The Formist Book 1) Page 5
