by Jean Johnson
Lifting her unit, Keating nodded at Ia, who hastily raised her own. The orders were synched, then the doctor nodded at her wrist unit.
“I’ll imprint an official chip with the transcript and file it with Captain Sudramara. He’ll probably add his own agreement. You just go out there and get the sonovas who did this to her, Acting Lieutenant Ia. And get your superior officers back. In one piece, and alive,” the doctor added. “That includes yourself, you know. I’m getting tired of patching you up.”
“Sir, yes, sir. I fully agree, sir,” Ia said, saluting her. Keating saluted back, then shooed her out of the ward.
General Sranna was short, balding, and stocky, a fellow heavyworlder. Not from Sanctuary, of course, but from Eiaven. Ia had contacted him with the message that there was a Situation on board the Liu Ji and her superior officer had requested that he handle it.
The first thing he did after coming aboard and being briefed on the situation was to visit Lieutenant D’kora. She was submerged in goo from shoulders to scalp, sedated not only to keep her from injuring her neck, but because of the incisions on the back of her neck, in the hopes that the regenerative fluids would reach her injuries without requiring complicated neurosurgery. She didn’t respond to his presence.
After viewing her recumbent, torture device-wrapped figure in silence, the lieutenant general quietly insisted on being on hand when the prisoners awoke. So did Ia. He didn’t object. She spoke up when they reached the brig. “Do you wish to take the lead on these interrogations, sir?”
“No. Not at first,” he amended. “I checked your file. It’s become rather sticky with several DoI fingerprints. I want to see how you handle an interrogation, Acting Lieutenant. If you mess up on the first prisoner, I’ll step in on the next. If not . . . it’s your show.” Sranna nodded at the guards she had ordered into place. “So far, I like the security precautions you’re taking.”
“Thank you, sir.” She nodded at the nearer of the armed pair of Marines stationed opposite the brig door. “Open it up, Private Gunga.”
“Sergeant, yes, Se—er, sir, yes, sir!” he corrected himself. Stepping across the corridor, he typed in the command key for the door controls. His teammate, Davisson, aimed his stunner rifle at the doorway. The panel slid open and another Marine poked a white and black muzzle out the opening. Both held their fire long enough to confirm identities, then the one inside resumed his inward-pointed stance, echoing his partner. Ia and Sranna stepped inside, letting them seal the door shut again.
Captain Sudramara was already inside, talking quietly with the Navy brig officer. The swarthy, blue-uniformed man nodded at the green-garbed general. “General, sir.”
“Ship’s Captain Sudramara of the Liu Ji, this is Lieutenant General Sranna, 3rd Cordon Army,” Ia introduced briefly. She surveyed the trio of doors with red-glowing “occupied” lights, and panned her finger back and forth for a moment. “I’ll interrogate this one. Open it up, Ensign.”
She picked the door in the middle, which contained the man whose wrist she had slit. Captain Sudramara nodded at the brig officer, who saluted and moved to open it up. General Sranna cleared his throat. The ensign hesitated, glancing back at the lieutenant general.
“Lieutenant Ia, your weapon?” Sranna asked. “Aren’t you going to remove it, first?”
Both of the Marines snerked. The brig officer struggled to smother a smile. Captain Sudramara outright snorted. “You’re talking about Bloody Mary, sir. Medical says the man’s a lightworlder. Even if he wasn’t bound down, he’d never get to it first, and certainly couldn’t pry it out of her hand.”
“You didn’t see the mess she made of their bodies with that blade, General,” the Marine who had met them at the door stated. “The one in that cell is still recovering from what she did to him with it. The others are all very dead, sir.”
Captain Sudramara frowned at Ia. “How did you manage that, anyway? The security vids were at a bad angle and didn’t catch everything, but they did show several unbelievably clean, straight cuts. Plus the fact that you threw a sink, among other things.”
“Let’s save that for the coming interview,” Ia quipped, lifting her chin at the middle door. “Open it up, Ensign.”
The young man hesitated again, glancing at his captain and the general. When both nodded agreement, he pressed his thumbprint to the scanner. The red light by the door shifted to green. Ia stepped up to it and palmed the door open.
Inside, the man whose wrist she had severed sat on the plain, air-cushion lined cot. He was naked, stripped of all his clothes, and his wrists were shackled and held apart by a spreader bar. That bar was kept from being lifted higher than abdomen level by a set of chains attached to manacles at his ankles and to the foot and the head of the bed. His right wrist was wrapped with a short length of lumpy bandaging tape strapped just above the metal cuffs; the lump was actually a small regen pack, sealed over the stitched-together wound on his wrist.
“Naked?” Sranna asked. “With that . . . thing holding his hands apart?”
“It’s to keep him from picking open the wound and bleeding to death. He can’t move more than two feet in any direction, bound like that.” Ia stated, stepping inside. She met the glare of their captive with a slight smile. “Their clothes were taken away, their hair checked for garroting wires, their digestive tracts scanned, and even their teeth examined for poison capsules. Which is ironic, since we discovered each already had been dosed with a specific poison. If they didn’t receive the antidote within half an hour after attempting their attack . . . well, they would have died about twenty minutes ago.”
Their prisoner frowned at her, his jaw dropping.
Ia smiled. “Yes, you’ve been sedated that long. I suspected it when I saw you trying to kill your two companions and yourself, when your attack against myself and Lieutenant D’kora failed. While your friends were sleeping off the tranquilizers, and you were anesthetized for surgery on your wrist, the medical staff ran all those tests. They determined what you’d been doped with, and concocted antidotes for all three of you . . . since each of you had been dosed with something slightly different from the rest.”
“Clever,” General Sranna praised from behind her. “Both of you. A means to ensure no one can tell tales if they’re captured . . . and the wit to realize the possibility and stop it.”
“Oh, this idiot didn’t devise it. His masters did,” Ia dismissed. She stepped into the cell. The prisoner dipped his gaze briefly to the hilt of her sword and back. Ia smiled slowly. “I see you remember me. Did you like seeing your companions cut down by my blade? Their deaths were swift and merciful . . . well, as swift and merciful as dying from severed limbs and massive blood loss can be. But then, I am Bloody Mary. It’s an occupational hazard around me.”
He curled his lip in a sneer. “Do you think you scare me? You don’t. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. You’re nothing.”
“At the moment, I am dealing with a little pissant nothing who is naked and bound in a military brig. If you mean your masters, they’re not here to whip you to death.” She planted her hands on her hips and shrugged, tapping into the timestreams. “I guess that means I’ll have to do it.”
He snorted, glancing at the blue and green clad officers watching the two of them beyond the open cell door. Straining against his bonds, he leaned back against the wall on the far side of the cot and lifted his chin at her. “You can’t do anything to me.”
Her right hand snapped down, slashed out, and flicked back again. Touching blade tip to scabbard mouth, she slid the sword home again. Behind her, the general, captain, and even the ensign all sucked in a sharp breath. Ia kept her gaze on the prisoner.
He blinked, and tried to lift his hand to his scalp. The chain and the stretcher bar wouldn’t let him. Hesitating, he finally shook his head a little . . . and stared as a couple tufts of his thumb-length brown locks drifted down over his shoulder and chest. “What the . . .”
Ia snatched her sword
out of its scabbard again, this time flourishing it on the other side of his head. Whirling it back to the sheath, she slid it back into place. Again he blinked, and again a moment later, hesitantly shook his head. More locks fluttered down.
If he hadn’t been leaning against the wall as he was, chained so firmly in place that he couldn’t really move much, she wouldn’t have dared. While she had taken the time to repaint the flaked-off spots silver again, her blade was still what it was, beneath the gilt disguising its nature: Deadly sharp.
He swallowed and lifted his chin again. “I’m not scared.”
Again, she smiled slowly. “You should be.”
“Of what, a big-asteroid razor?” he countered.
This time, she drew her sword slowly. Bringing the pointed tip of the schlager down on the spreader bar resting in front of his shins, she tapped it with a ting-ting-tinngg. “This bar—indeed, the whole setup confining you—was crafted for us by the station’s machine shop while you were unconscious. It’s made from solid steel.”
Whipping the blade around, she whacked the bar with a TANG that echoed through the cell and out into the rest of the brig. It bounced against its bindings with a clatter of loops and eyelets . . . and something else tingtinged onto the floor. Point now hovering close to his throat, pinning him in place without a word, Ia slowly bent and scooped up that sliver. Eyes locked with the prisoner’s, she rose and displayed the slice of metal. It was nearly ten centimeters long, slightly oval and pointed and both ends. Her blade descended, tapping the spreader bar once more.
“Solid. Steel.”
The bar looked like it had been flattened in a narrow, pointed oval roughly ten centimeters long. Brown eyes wide, he stared at the shaved section between his knees, the sword in her right hand, the sliver in her left, and her face. Back to the bar, to the blade, the sliver . . . and her face.
“What the shakk is that thing?” he whispered, watching the tip of the blade rise with visible fear in his gaze.
“You know, I’m really not quite sure,” she quipped, tucking the sliver of metal into her shirt pocket. “I just like to call it the Reaper’s Blade . . . for it will cut down anything, and anyone, that gets in my way.”
“So, what does that make you?” her would-be assassin challenged, regathering some of his attitude. “Death?”
Ia shook her head at the sneered word, her tone soft, almost gentle. “No. I am not Death. I am merely Her herald. I stand before you now, ahead of the coming of Lady Death, singing a warning to all to get out of her way. And you,” she murmured, tapping the tip of the blade very, very lightly against the flat section of the bar in between each phrase, ting, “—are in—” ting, “the way.”
Ting . . . ting . . . ting . . .
The slow, rhythmic tap was barely audible. Quiet enough, they could all hear the ventilators whooshing faintly, feel the faint thrum of the ship’s generators. Sense the soft intake and exhale of each person’s breath. Like a wind chime in the distance, it seemed almost sweet, each tap somewhere between metallic and crystalline. She kept tapping the bar, tap . . . tap . . . ting . . . ting . . . and stopped.
Silence stretched. Her eyes never wavered, though her eyes itched with dryness from holding his gaze.
“Ohhh, Death. Ohh, ohhh Death. Ohhh Death . . . The herald came, the herald said, Death is comin’ to claim Her dead. No wealth, no weapons, no silver nor gold, nothing will stop Her hands so cold . . . Ohhh Death,” she sang softly, quietly, paraphrasing an old Appalachian dirge. Bracing her knee on the edge of the cot, she stared him down, and pinned him down, with the ancient melody. “Will She spare your soul another year?”
Ting.
Ting.
Ting.
The blade stopped striking the bar, suspending sound, song, and everything for a long, long moment.
“I am Her herald,” Ia whispered, lifting her free hand toward his face. “And your death is near.”
Her fingers skimmed over his skin. Slid. Stayed.
Ia dragged him into the future, and forced him through Time itself. Force-fed him just a fraction of what she herself endured, in a fraction of the time he needed to consciously comprehend.
His breath hissed inward in a long, pained inhale, then hurled outward again in a scream, body bucking to try and get away. An unending, repeating, breath-catching series of screams. She jerked her sword arm back and away, as much to keep her two startled superiors out of the room as to prevent the prisoner from injuring himself. Her left hand stayed glued to his cheek, riding through his frantic thrashing.
“Enough!”
The shout came from General Sranna. Gentling her touch, Ia hauled her target’s mind out of the timestreams. She mentally shook his dripping, chilled soul dry, and settled him back into his body. Pushing off from the cot, she released the prisoner. He shuddered and panted, eyes blinking rapidly without seeing. Ia waited patiently while he recovered.
Finally, he focused on her with a last trio of blinks. Ia tapped the spreader bar with the tip of her blade, once more sending that cold, cold chime ringing through the cell.
Ting . . . Ting . . . Ting.
“You will tell me . . . everything. And you will tell it to me before I open the gates to hell.” She let the implications otherwise sink in, blade shifting but not quite touching the partially carved bar. “Who your masters are.” Ting. “Why they stole our soldiers.” Ting. “Where they were being taken.” Ting. “What is to be done to them.” Ting. “And when it will be done.”
Ting.
“Everything,” she commanded, and spread the fingers of her left hand, not quite reaching for his face.
Pale and shaking, swallowing hard under the implacable weight of her gaze and the unspoken threat of her touch, he complied.
“How the hell did you do that, soldier?” General Sranna demanded as soon as they were outside in the corridor. At least he had waited until both cell and brig doors were shut, but this wasn’t the place for that question.
Ia held up her right hand, stalling his own interrogation. With her sword re-sheathed, she was free to do so. The sliver of steel was still caught in the fingertips of her left hand. “With respect, sir, I’d rather wait until we were somewhere private?”
Sranna looked at Sudramara, who lifted his chin at the nearby lifts. “My office.”
They held their silence all the way up to Deck 3 and into the captain’s quarters. Only after Sudramara ordered the petty officer on duty in the front half of his office to hold all requests and sealed the door to the back half of his office did Ia speak.
“You wanted to know how I got him to talk?” she asked both men. Sudramara nodded and gestured for them to take a seat in one of the quartet of chairs grouped in the corner across from his desk. Sranna nodded and spoke.
“That, and how the hell you cut off a chunk of solid steel with a flimsy little blade,” the lieutenant general stated, settling into one of the seats. “Unless you prepped it somehow beforehand, like a magician readying a stage trick?”
Sudramara gestured toward the caf’ dispenser in the corner of his office. Sranna nodded. Ia shook her head. She remained on her feet as Sudramara fetched two mugs of the hot drink. As much as Ia wanted to claim it was just a trick, she knew she had to be honest with her superiors. Lying outright in this moment would come back to bite her on the backside a few years down the road. Even if technically she was protected by precog’s law, she knew she had to tread a lot closer to the truth than that.
“For the first part . . . you heard what he said,” Ia reminded them. “This ‘Lyebariko’ has been gathering information on the TUPSF’s actions in this corner of space, and specifically on all the ships involved in thwarting their attempts at taking over the Oberon Mining & Refinery Consortium. They knew enough, and were powerful enough, to bait their trap not only with the best and brightest in live entertainment, but they came prepared for me.
“The fact that I am resistant to electrosonic shocks, including stunner grenades, sir
s, is buried in my military file. Deep in my files,” Ia emphasized. “At the insistence of the Department of Innovations and the Department of Military Security. They don’t want that information out in the general public, as much to give the Marines an ongoing edge as to keep people from taking random potshots at me with other weapons. Yet these people tracked me down with an air gun loaded with tranquilizer darts. Not with a stunner pistol, or another stunner grenade. They came after me with tranquilizers.
“That flunky came into this knowing my reputation. Or rather, having heard about it thirdhand.” She shrugged her shoulders, hands resting lightly on her hips. “Hearing about it, and being faced with the reality of it, are two different things. Even in the criminal undergalaxy, it’s rare to be surrounded by literally a body’s worth of spilled blood. Never mind the blood from two bodies. I just . . . used that reputation. Played psychological games with him, which I reinforced with the tapping of my blade. Sort of a . . . a death knell sound effect, if you will.”
“And the screaming when you touched his face?” Captain Sudramara asked.
Ia smirked. “My hands can sometimes get a bit cold and clammy. Particularly when I’m nervous. It was an important interrogation. I used it, hoping that those lines about Death’s cold hands reaching for his soul would still be lingering in his brain. Which they apparently were. Combine the song, the sound effects, the fact that I am one scary-crazy bitch by reputation . . . and it all combines into one pure punch to his gut from psychology.”
“Either you are one lucky meioa, or you really are one cold, crazy, calculating bitch.” Sranna saluted her with his mug. “Not bad, meioa. Not bad at all. If you ever want to change branches, the Special Forces just might want to snatch you up for their Intelligence Division.”
