For a while I had told myself that the Grotesque was beginning to stand more erect, and her voice less strained on the few occasions she deigned to speak with me. Yet she accepted her injections every three hours and allowed herself be led away by the hooded man without protest, although the pleading soon began. I had thought better of Silverberg. I hoped she would act, but she had done nothing.
As time stretched on, even a nightmare existence like this began to settle into a routine; familiar rhythms lulling my mind into a stupor. Only the growing hunger pangs suggested this could not go on forever.
And then, four days after the Pavnix threw me down here, the plumbing in my cell began to rattle.
Despite all the threats hanging over me, they weren’t immediate enough to grip me. I was bored, and you can tell how bored because I placed my ear to the tiles above the sink recessed into the wall and speculated as to the source of the noise.
It didn’t come from my cell – I was getting an echo from a noise originating elsewhere. Probably a water pump rattling an air bubble against the pipes, but the bang… bang… rattle in the pipes seemed to be trying to tell me something. Or perhaps the sounds were only in my head.
Am I mad? I asked my ghosts.
Do you really need to ask? Bahati shot back. Sorry, NJ. Let me correct and finish your thought for you. Are we mad or are we hearing a pattern?
I’ll rephrase, I said with a grin. Am I imagining a pattern because I want to hear one? My gut says there is meaning in the noise, but I’ve listened and it’s not any kind of code. It’s just noise.
Trust your gut, Bahati told me.
And your friends, added Sanaa. We will listen together.
So we did. As I settled into deep contemplation of rattling pipework, my consciousness expanded. It was freaky. It was something new, and although it reminded me of my mental linking with Silky, this was all me.
Over the past last year or so, I had begun to absorb the knowledge and abilities of my former comrades who had merged with their combat AIs in death and been reborn as ghosts in my spine. I could call upon their expertise as naturally as if it had been my own.
This was different. I was budding, my mind growing into a tight network, multiple nodes in an enlarged consciousness. I hadn’t granted my ghosts independence and yet that is what occurred.
It scared the pants off me. Whoever listened to those waterworks was not me. It was a bigger, brasher group mind that used the corridors of my brain but in which I was not dominant.
Thus was the newest and highest form of human evolution born, meditating on toilet plumbing.
Never mind that metaphysical drent, though. The important point is that we corrected myself.
On my own I had listened and found just noise. The ghosts had done no better. But together as this gestalt mind, we discerned a pattern deliberately hidden inside random noise, a message in Short Pulse Code.
Armed with my new super brain, I took a massive leap of speculation and guessed the message was for me.
It said: “NJ… NJ… NJ…”
— CHAPTER 20 —
Are you hurt? I tapped.
No.
Fed?
Yes. You?
No, I replied. Except I didn’t. Not exactly. I hid short bursts of code inside my best imitation of a faulty water pump. I rested my arm for a moment before seeking a better angle to stretch down behind the toilet and knock on the waste outlet. This wasn’t easy.
Have they threatened you? I asked, presumably of Silky.
When the reply didn’t come immediately, my pulse started racing, and my head filled with memories of the Grotesque’s torture. Only in this version, I heard Silky’s screams.
Don’t be upset… She began in the agonizingly slow mode of communication.
Don’t get upset? Really? My nightmare vision played fast and faster, screaming ever louder as I waited in trepidation for Silky to finish.
… But I think they have picked you as the weak one.
The vision popped. No, I’m strong, I tapped angrily, my body sweating and shaking.
Using me to play psych games in your head.
She paused to give me a chance to reply, but frankly I thought we’d said more than enough.
It’s what I would do, she added. Unhelpfully.
Stay strong, I tapped. Tell them nothing.
You neither.
I thought of Caccamo and his secret spy shed, and fretted about the critical intelligence Silky might reveal because she didn’t understand its value. I looked down at the tiles I’d unscrewed from the wall of my cell with my hands down the back of the toilet. This was not what the manuals call “secure comms”.
But I had to let her know enough of Caccamo’s mission that she didn’t feed information she thought was worthless.
Not just R Squad, I tapped. Don’t tell +anything+.
Roger.
Now the important stuff was out the way, I was consumed by the need to tell her how good I felt to hear from her. Silky was disrespectful, annoying, and looked like oversized fish bait, but I missed her anyway.
Too bad. They would inject the Grotesque in about fifteen minutes. Talk later, I tapped.
Copy that.
I brought my arm back out of the toilet, meaning to replace the tiles, but I hesitated. I needed to say goodbye properly, but what should I say? “Out”, “take care”, “I feel so much better to hear you’re okay”? “Love you”?
Nothing sounded right, and I was wasting time. So I said nothing and instead replaced the tiles on the access panel. I was about to curl up on the floor and feign sleep when I noticed the Grotesque gripping the bars of her cage so hard that her knuckles were white. From inside the darkness of her hood she’d watched and heard everything.
I expected her to turn her back on me but her hand seemed glued to the bars. Sounds impossible, but I swore she had bent those bars outward a fraction. I was a Marine. My arms were bigger than her thighs and I was engineered for bursts of extreme and brutal strength. I’d not budged my bars a nanometer when I tried.
— CHAPTER 21 —
There was no escaping the gaze of the Grotesque.
Since establishing pipe comms with Silky the day before, I had talked with her as often as I dared. And every time I finished, when I looked behind I would always see the Grotesque gripping her bars and staring at me so intensely that even when I shut my eyes and looked away, I could still feel her gaze burning into me.
I hope the police come for you early, I thought as I faced the glare of her scrutiny after finishing my latest pipe conversation. I immediately felt crushing guilt to wish such a wicked thing.
“You are not culpable,” I told her.
“I know that, NJ. You don’t have to tell me.”
I felt a chill spread over my body. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m bandaged and caged but not deaf. The pipes make for an impressive communication network that spreads throughout the building. I could hear your wife calling you for a day before you finally heard her.”
“Oh.”
“I find your simpering sympathy for me to be unendurable, and to come from a low specimen such as you is simply humiliating. Furthermore, the infernal racket you make on those wretched pipes would be annoying enough, but it is excruciating to hear you and your wife beat out your inability to acknowledge let alone express your feelings for each other.”
“Madam, you are a turd-wrangling, snooty, sneering skangat. In any other circumstance I would tell you to go vulley yourself. But you deserve better than what that veck in the hood does to you. Do you know who he is?”
“That knowledge is dangerous. It could get you killed quickly.”
“I doubt it would be quick enough to make a difference,” I replied grimly. “I’m not betting on great life expectancy here.”
She laughed, an inhuman laugh that was wet and low. “That’s very true. No, NJ, I don’t know the identity of that veck in the hood, although I have my suspicio
ns. I will tell you this much. He never speaks and my eyes are always covered before he turns on the lights. He is a man who does not wish to be recognized. I do know that I am here for his sadistic pleasure. I am the Grotesque, and that is his name for me. I am made to perform.” She choked that last word.
“I’ll make him pay,” I told her.
I waited while she struggled to control her rage enough to reply. “Add his unknown name to your list, eh?”
“I shall.”
It probably sounds like hopeless bravado, coming from a man incarcerated in a cell for special cases, but I meant every word. Whoever the sadist was, he was a dead man.
— CHAPTER 22 —
They came for the Grotesque later that day, or maybe it was tomorrow. The ceaseless light had driven out the natural rhythm of life. Once, I had timers in my head that could calculate the passage of time to the millisecond, but they had been blown out at the same time as my original eyes.
Now the light was only interrupted by sudden darkness and frantic terror.
The party arrived, cloaked as ever in absolute darkness. They clearly had no idea my highly rated artificial eyes could probably see better in the darkness than they could through their heavy night-vision goggles. I acted blind and panicked, which wasn’t hard to do.
The police officers trusted to the darkness, but the man whose sick tastes they indulged wore his usual additional protection of a heavy cowl, and though I tried to glance into its depths, he kept his head down.
Something about him looked familiar.
I nearly laughed when I realized what that was. He held himself like a soldier, and the city was filled with soldiers.
Even so, that gave me an idea.
I poured myself back into my memory of the Fifth Battle of Tallerman. Along with the rest of the company, I’d railed against Captain Gyngolcin’s insistence that half my battery should be deployed at any one time. The constant breaking down and re-assembly of the heavy weapons was exhausting and slow. All the more painful when every instinct screamed at us to press ahead and engage the enemy tightening the noose around the 53rd Tallerman Division.
I hated the Jotuns in our regiment – Gyngolcin, more than most – but they made effective officers.
I vividly remembered the moment when she had been proved right.
“Sir! Inbound Hardit fighters,” I shouted into the darkness of my cell with the urgency that comes from knowing death could be only seconds away. “Two squadrons. Dukas fighter-bombers. GX-battery acquiring targets now.”
I was acting out an incident from my own memory, but I’d guess that the hooded man was haunted by similar nightmares.
I was right. Scrambling to take in the sudden change to the tactical situation, he looked me straight in the face.
Confusion was written there, but so too was a distinctive scarring pattern that glowed like fireworks bursting over his left eye and radiating over his cheek. The last time I had seen that face, it had been glaring out the big viewscreen in the Slaughterhouse bullpen.
This was Philamon Dutch, the mayor of Port Zahir!
I saw the mayor’s lips move as he cursed me silently.
“Frakking moron,” mumbled a woman’s voice in my head.
It was Tech Specialist Zawditu Sy, and I hadn’t heard from her in years. Her reappearance must be the fallout from the group mind episode.
Moron? That’s a fine hello, I said internally. But it’s good to hear from you, Zawditu.
I felt her pause, confused, before she explained, No you, drellock. That’s what the mayor said. I can lip read.
I never knew. Guess I was still shaking out my ghosts’ abilities.
Zawditu, get your frakking head together, said Sanaa. What else did the veck say?
Oh, yes. Let me see… ‘I wonder how you’ll babble when you hear your wife’s screams as I torture her in front of your face? It’ll be your turn soon enough, chodwit.’ Oh… that’s bad, isn’t it?
I dropped to my knees. Yes, it was frakking bad.
Horrid fascination made me look up and watch the mayor and his debased police stooges escort the Grotesque to her secret hell. My heart plummeted into freefall when I thought through the implication of there being no additional victim this time. The mayor’s silent words took on new and hellish dimensions. He had no need for a cheap life to snuff out today, because this was the final time the mayor would indulge himself with the Grotesque. It would be the misshapen woman’s corpse that would be paraded in front of my cell in a short while.
And tomorrow or the day after, it would be Silky’s screams ringing in my head.
What made it so much worse was that my eyes had seen the mayor. Seen the silent threats on his lips. Watched the sick torture detail disappear into the secret room.
All stored in time-stamped and tamper-proof sections of my mind.
In theory you could plug me into an evidence recorder and dump out enough incriminating evidence to bring the mayor to justice.
Tears of frustration wetted my eyes. Only my short-term memory still functioned. Within an hour all that evidence would flush away, leaving a residue of worthless hearsay.
The mayor had no idea I’d identified him. And I couldn’t do a damn thing with that knowledge.
I spun improbable scenarios through my head about how I could use what I’d seen, but even with my ghosts helping, nothing workable emerged.
I could imagine how the scenarios would play out, even if I could attract the attention of the guards after the mayor had left.
“Thank heavens, police officer,” I would say. “I need you.”
“How can I help, sir?”
“Please, officer. I have memory evidence I need to give you.”
“Very good, sir. Who is the accused?”
“The Mayor of Port Zahir.”
“Right you are, sir. We will take your evidence and see justice is done. Come with me and don’t be alarmed if you see a large officer with a garrote, or a looped belt hanging from the overhead. It all for your personal protection, sir.”
Mader zagh! This was sheer torture.
Then from the secret room the screams began, and my frustration seemed utterly trivial.
— CHAPTER 23 —
I had shut down my eyes and was burrowing through my head to find a deep enough bunker to shelter from the world, when the screams outside reached down inside and slapped me around until someone in my head paid them proper attention.
It was Zawditu Sy who voiced the question: Who’s screaming?
The screams were mostly being wrung from male throats. The cries were coming from the police officers guarding the Grotesque!
I looked.
The door to the secret room was open to a blur of movement and death. Before I could track the action, it was already over. The Grotesque crouched over the corpses of the guards, her body twisted and compressed, like a powerfully coiled spring ready to unleash with devastating effect. Triumphant. Proud. Bestial. Was she an alien? No human I’d ever known stood like that.
One other figure faced her, fringed with an inexplicable outline in my IR vision. The mayor, I thought. Was the Grotesque keeping him alive for her revenge?
She raised a captured pistol and shot him, three kinetic rounds straight at his heart.
When the rounds hit his aura, they slowed so much that when they kissed his clothing they fell harmlessly to the floor.
Personal force shield. I’d known friends in units equipped with these portable devices. However, they were unstable, and when one failed, the resulting chain reaction made a nuclear missile seem as dangerous as a feather duster.
I guess that was a risk the mayor was willing to take. While the Grotesque carefully laid down her pistol and searched the heap of bodies for an alternative weapon, he fled.
The mayor was passing my cage when the Grotesque unloaded a plasma pistol’s full charge into him.
I was close enough that I should have been incinerated in the backwash of superheated
air. All I felt was a warm breeze, and saw such a searing explosion in infrared that my eyes overloaded.
By the time they had rebooted, the mayor had gone, and the Grotesque was standing outside of my cage, regarding me.
Other than her still-hooded face, she was naked and that left her fearsome power unmuted. I fought to pull my gaze away, but the power flooding from her made the air hum in supplication to this demi-goddess, and drew me in like a moth to a fusion grenade. She was both hideously ugly and divinely beautiful, and simultaneously beyond such pitifully corporeal comparisons. My mortal attempts to look away were ludicrous, but I’m a stubborn bastard and tried regardless. And failed.
I shall not kill you today, NJ.
Holy Horden’s hindquarters. She had made no sound. She was communicating through telepathy.
My skin itched, my body stinging. I couldn’t tell whether the pain was my imagination, real, or something the Grotesque made me feel. I’d been hacked. I was a mortal play doll for a goddess.
“Indeed you are,” she said, mercifully using her speaking voice now. I thought she hesitated, but my brain was throbbing so wildly in her presence that I couldn’t be sure of anything.
“Your ghosts as you call them – they serve you well. You are not easily controlled for a human. Good for you. But I perceive what you have done for me. You and that policewoman, Rachel Silverberg. I shall spare you two. And, of course, your spouse, the mystery Kurlei. Even a goddess can be grateful when it suits her.”
She left, her bare feet padding quietly and unhurried along the floor.
“They are honest mostly,” I called after her. “The police, I mean. Plus, the city needs them more than ever. Spare them. Please.”
She laughed, an inhuman sound like icy water, black with disease, that sucked the air from my lungs.
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