by K. D. Austin
Hanna looked at the man uncertainly. Was he playing with her? No way he wasn’t really a GalMar no matter what clothes he put on? She decided to believe the former, play stupid, and look for a chance to bolt.
“Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just landed for some ship repairs. I got caught up in some crazy firefight near orbit, and—” She realized she was rambling and tried to shut up. Hanna needed to get away from this walking wall as quickly as possible. “So, excuse me.”
“Look. I understand why you’re wary. You were ambushed. I look like a GalMar. You had to see their cruiser outside. But I’m not GalMar. The look’s my cover.”
Hanna shook her head involuntarily. “I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.”
The Lance tightened his grip on her arm slightly. “We don’t have time for games. We need to get out of here before we have problems.”
Hanna was sure she already had a problem. She was trapped.
Chapter 4
As The Lance steered Hanna toward the back door of the terminal, he stuck on a full-face respirator that covered both his mouth and nose. It was a preferable device to the paltry nose filter Hanna carried. Though hers was a lot less obtrusive, it was also a lot less safe. The Lance’s mask would allow him to speak normally outside while preventing the possibility Hanna faced of accidentally swallowing a gulp of the toxic air. If she needed to talk, she’d have to concentrate on inhaling through her nose. His mask would also increase his already considerable advantage if she tried to run away.
Hanna readied her nose filter, but before she could get it in place, the massive man handed her a spare mask he had in one of the pockets of his deep-space-black pants.
“Thanks,” Hanna said, trying to sound like she wasn’t worried.
Quickly sticking the self-adhesive mask over her mouth and nose, she followed the potentially dangerous man out the sliding back doors of the terminal, through another air lock, and into the chill, deadly air of Benn. He guided her through the area of the city surrounding the spaceport, which was mostly restaurants and bars and a few shops. It was not the cleanest-looking part of the city, and Hanna couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking into a trap.
Clutter littered the ground, causing Hanna to realize that if this man really was a GalMar, he could easily kill her and dump her body without anyone noticing. She accidentally kicked a discarded tube of some type of industrial lubricant as if to emphasize her thought.
It would be a simple procedure really. All he had to do was remove her mask, and she’d die in a matter of seconds from the toxic air.
If this guy was really a GalMar, she didn’t understand the ruse. Why not just arrest her in the terminal? That’s when the obvious answer hit her. He was taking her somewhere for interrogation—the intense kind the GalMars said they didn’t indulge in, but Hanna knew better.
Officially, all prisoners had a set of standard rights according to the Galactic Court and couldn’t be questioned without representation. Most importantly, the use of coercion through manipulation of a person’s implants violated Galactic Law. Numerous pirates, though, reported having undergone just such treatment at the hands of the GalMars.
By hacking into a person’s implant, it was theoretically possible to make them do or say anything. There were countless conspiracy theories about how the GalMars routinely employed hacks to convict average citizens as terrorists, pirates, and other criminals to keep their success records up. Through this type of interrogation, The Lance could find out everything about her. All the information she had on the pirate band and her entire criminal past. He could also force her to reveal her fears, her desires, her darkest secrets, and use them against her to make her cooperate.
Hanna shivered at the thought and tried to pass that off as the cold air, because she knew it was more than just a theory. She was one of the best hackers in the galaxy and had hacked people’s implants on more than one occasion. Usually, it was to extract information. A couple of times it had been to change whether someone remembered her and the pirate band she was currently attached to. And once had been just for fun.
She didn’t think anything this GalMar poster boy did to her would be fun.
The Lance brought her around the edge of a large, freestanding rock that had some type of used-spaceship-parts store carved into it. Hanna noticed there was no one in sight, not even a cleaning robot.
The man she was sure was only pretending to be a pirate turned on her suddenly, and Hanna reflexively jumped back and threw up her hands. Now was the time to run, but the GalMar had led her into a dead end.
“You’re a bit jumpy, Hanna,” he said, laughing lightly at her reaction. “Now hold out your wrist, please.”
Even though he added the “please,” Hanna understood it as the command it was. Pretending innocence, she held out her right wrist, the one without her implant ports. Most people had ports on their wrists; some, like The Lance, also had them on their necks. Hanna noted now that the ports on both the man’s wrists and neck had cables connecting them to his enhancement suit. Hanna wanted to laugh. As if this guy wasn’t massive and muscular enough, he had on an enhancement suit. Hanna’s hopes of escaping dissipated like a late-morning fog.
“The other wrist,” he said, those supernova eyes blazing. At some other time, on some other person, Hanna would have found those eyes extremely attractive. At the moment, they were simply scary.
“What’s this about?” she asked, not offering her left wrist yet. She scanned the area again, looking for a way out, but behind her were three rock walls, and in front of her was the human wall of The Lance. Unless Hanna could suddenly learn to fly, or tunnel through solid rock, her only path to freedom was through this immovable man. Hanna figured she’d have a better chance against the stone unless she tried a different tactic.
“Are you hitting on me?” Hanna flashed a quick smile at him through the transparent mask and winked. It was the wrong approach.
Before Hanna finished her wink, The Lance was on her, driving her thin body hard against the solid rock of the wall. Her head cracked painfully on a particular jut in the hard surface. The Lance had one forearm pressing across Hanna’s throat, while his other fist captured her left wrist.
“You’re hurting me.” Hanna vainly tried to wriggle free, but The Lance jerked her wrist behind her back and up. A sharp pain exploded in her shoulder. The man definitely knew how to produce pain and fear in his victims like a GalMar. Hanna struggled not to cry out. Goons like this usually enjoyed that kind of thing.
“In case it’s not clear to you now, I’m not here to flirt with you or play with you, Hanna Seldon. And you were right all along. I’m a Galactic Marine sergeant, and I’m here to determine exactly what pirate band you belong to and every tidbit of information you have about them. I told my superiors you were too smart to be fooled by this stupid pirate guise, and I was right. I could see it in your eyes. That’s why you’re going to be so valuable. Smart pirates are a rarity.”
Hanna thought that statement proved how stupid the GalMars were. Most pirates were smart, smart enough not to be a GalMar. She almost said the thought out loud, but the marine didn’t give her a chance.
“So, I can either take that information from you the easy way or employ other methods.” To emphasize his point, he pushed her arm higher, causing her shoulder to scream.
“I’m not a pirate—” Hanna began, but the sergeant increased his pressure on her wrist.
“I guess we’re doing this the hard way then,” he said, spinning her around so her face scraped across the rock wall. He slammed his knee into the small of her back and held her in position so he could take his right arm away from her throat. The pain from his knee ignited inside Hanna’s kidneys like a blowtorch, and bile rose into her mouth.
From the corner of her eye, she could see the GalMar pull some wires from a device he’d taken from one of his many pockets and attach them to the extra set of wrist ports he had. Only GalMars had two s
ets of wrist ports. If she’d been able to see that before, all her suspicions would’ve been confirmed. Hanna recognized the hand-sized black-and-red box, what she’d always called a hackback. It was what she’d feared.
The proof that this marine planned to hack her sent Hanna into a panic, but she forced her mind to relax. Thrashing would not get her out of this. Instead she relaxed her body and hung her head, hoping he’d think she had given up any struggle. Sergeant Lance didn’t let go of her arm, but the pressure from his knee did decrease so that Hanna’s stomach was no longer shoved into the jagged wall and she could breathe freely again, which helped stem her fear.
When she judged that most of his concentration was focused on placing the jacks from the hackback into her wrist ports, she did the one thing she didn’t think the GalMar would expect. Completely raising her legs off the ground, she dropped heavily. Something in her shoulder popped, and she screamed, but she wasted no time. She used the surprise to spin herself and kick out at the marine’s knee, using the leverage to yank both her arms free.
Sergeant Lance grunted but did not even flinch. Hanna had already forgotten about his enhancement suit. She realized she’d been able to free her arms only because he had been holding the jacks for the hackback also.
His face darkened, and Hanna tried to scrabble past him, but his left foot flew out and viciously introduced itself to her jaw. Hanna spun from the ferocity of the kick, bounced back off the wall, and landed heavily on the ground.
The GalMar didn’t let up for a moment. He followed the first kick with another. Hanna felt ribs crack as the heavy standard-issue marine boot crunched into her side. She curled into a fetal position in a futile attempt to lessen her suffering. That only brought her several blows to her arms and one powerful kick to her head that threatened to send her on a one-way cruise to unconsciousness.
Hanna fought against it. She could feel the blood beginning to stream down her neck from a gash in her head. She tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that head wounds always bled profusely, but she couldn’t shake the belief that her skull was fractured. She’d encountered some nasty GalMars in her days pirating, but nothing like this. Nothing this man did was within protocol, a blatant violation of Galactic Law. However, she didn’t think pointing that out would help her at the moment.
Hanna rolled in an attempt to be free of the relentless assault. But Sergeant Lance was right there kicking as she tried to get up. On her second attempt to stand, the vicious marine let her get up on her knees before he slammed his boot into her chin with a mighty upward kick.
Hanna’s jaw clacked together, catching her tongue. She felt the hot blood flow down over her lips. She flipped backward from the force of the kick and thudded onto the ground flat on her back. One of her legs twisted at an unnatural angle behind her, and something in her neck felt wrong.
The darkness that had been at the edge of her vision was now advancing rapidly toward the center. Hanna found herself floating, not even feeling the ongoing punishment the murderous marine still dealt. She decided she was either seeing double or hallucinating because as the Galactic Marine sergeant reached down for her left wrist, there was another giant man behind him reaching out also.
Then darkness overtook her.
Chapter 5
Hanna awoke some time later to find herself in a dark room. Her head felt like it had been on the wrong end of an asteroid collision. And her head felt better than the rest of her.
“Where have you landed yourself this time, Hanna?”
She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious, but clearly someone had moved her while she was out. She lay in a semi-dark room with grayish-silver brushed-metal paneled walls and ambient bioluminescent ceiling tiles. The room was only slightly longer than the cot Hanna found herself on, which extended from the wall about three-quarters of a meter off the ground. The room was only slightly wider than it was long. She couldn’t discern a door. That, with the barrenness of her accommodations, reinforced Hanna’s belief that she’d landed herself in a GalMar prison.
Struggling to sit up caused her head to swim and almost caused her to vomit. Hanna managed to reach up and feel something soft encircling her head. Whatever it was, it made her scalp itch. But remembering the vicious kicks to her head, Hanna decided not to remove it, afraid it might be all that was holding her head together or her brains inside her skull.
She took stock of her body, noting that there were few places on her that didn’t hurt, and realizing her right leg had been wrapped in a transparent healing film, indicating that it had been broken. She felt her ribs and noted the same healing film there also. Apparently, someone had tended her wounds, which likely meant the GalMar still planned to interrogate her. Lovely.
With the exception of the transparent film around her ribs and leg, she was completely naked.
Oddly, as she took stock of her body, she discovered that her possessions, her clothes and a few personal gadgets, lay on the floor beneath the cot. She didn’t know if that was a good sign, an oversight as a result of the extensiveness of her injuries, or possibly just some type of Galactic Marine trap.
Taking a deep breath, Hanna reached under the cot and pulled up the stack items and clothing. Her entire body protested the movement, but she gritted her teeth and retrieved her possessions. Then she collapsed onto her back, gasping and sweating. She’d had an idea that she could get dressed and escape, but since reaching for the floor caused her to feel like she’d just run a marathon on a double-gravity planet, she realized it was a delusion, at least until she recovered more.
However, Hanna didn’t know how much time she’d have before someone came to check on her. And if she still had her possessions by some mistake, she couldn’t afford to lose the opportunity. If the whole thing was a weird GalMar trap, she’d just have to fall for it, because she was too injured to worry about too many possibilities. Anyway, what trap would be worse than what they had in mind for her anyway?
More likely, she thought, they don’t consider me a threat at all.
Hanna nodded at the realism and wisdom of this thought and closed her eyes to try to quiet the jackhammer that had started up in her head as she’d retrieved her stuff from the floor.
After what seemed like both an eon and nowhere near enough time, since the construction zone inside her head had only increased in intensity, Hanna decided if she was going to have a chance to escape, she had to move now. She raised herself slowly to a sitting position. She toyed with the idea of dressing and got as far as placing her left arm into the sleeve of the thin synthcotton shirt she’d been wearing under her flight suit, but as she raised her right arm, fiery pain exploded in her right shoulder.
“Bova!” She tossed the shirt to the floor, panting and sweating again.
The section of the wall directly across from her cot swished open.
A giant man loomed in the doorway. He made Sergeant Lance look like a child. Hanna slid back against the wall, crossed her legs as best she could, and tried to cover her breasts with her arms.
“You’re finally awake,” the giant spoke in a booming bass. Hanna noted that though the man was massive—he had to be closer to three meters than two and had to turn sideways to slip through the doorway—he didn’t wear a GalMar uniform nor sport the regulation haircut. In fact, his hair hung down nearly to his shoulders, and his face had a scruff of a beard. That scruff and the smoothness of his face caused Hanna to guess he was around her own age, somewhere in his mid-twenties or so. His eyes, which were the color of freshly cut walnut, reflected a youthful playfulness that contrasted with his massive size.
“My name’s Arden Mann, and while I appreciate your attempt at modesty, you have been lying naked in a room full of cameras for nearly forty-eight hours. I’ve seen all there is to see. I would apologize, but I must be honest and admit I did enjoy the view. Of course, we only removed your clothes so we could treat your extensive injuries.”
“Right. I’m sure it’s what you tel
l all your prisoners before you rape them,” Hanna said without thinking through the possible consequences. She’d like to blame that on her head injury, but in reality it was how she’d always been.
“That’s exactly it. After we save people’s lives and then heal their wounds, we repeatedly rape them. It makes our evilness more twisted,” Arden said, quirking the side of his mouth into what was possibly a smile and then stepping slowly toward Hanna.
His height was matched by his weight, though Hanna doubted there was enough fat on the man to pinch with tweezers. Arden Mann was the largest person Hanna had ever seen. His size seemed inhuman. The sight of him would probably be enough to unnerve most people—even a GalMar like Sergeant Lance, which may account for how she got here, Hanna thought. In any case, even though his face was pleasant and now wore a smile that seemed genuine, his size frightened her.
“So, who have I had the pleasure of ogling all this time?”
Hanna closed her eyes briefly to gather her thoughts. Her head still pounded, making everything difficult. She decided this man didn’t intend to rape her, well at least not at this moment, though she’d keep her guard up no matter what. She’d now had time to process what she knew and what he’d said. Someone had saved her from Sergeant Lance. Someone had treated her wounds. She had to assume that this Arden Mann was at least associated with that someone if he was not the person himself. Also, if he really didn’t know her name, that indicated a level of respect she had been afforded that wasn’t regularly given to prisoners. Had they wanted her name, they only had to plug a bio-cyberscanner to her wrist ports. That would’ve given him her real name with her fake credentials. Of course, he may have already done that and just wanted to see if she’d lie.
She decided to go with the truth. “Hanna Seldon.”
“It’s good to meet you, Hanna. Welcome to The Scourge of the Stars.”
“A pirate ship?”
