Against A Rock

by Kalin Ringkvist

  “Huh?”

  “How do we disable the virus?”

  “Oh… that…” she sighed. “That’s a long… complicated process… requiring… stuff…” Her head fell backwards as she mumbled. “…also known as things… and requires physical actions that can be done by a person… with the right intentions… to do such things… if they so choose… all it takes is the right mind-set, you see…” and her rambling trailed off.

  “Just give me the codes to disable the virus, Floreina. If you do this, I can give you the choice of a quick and painless death or a day of prayer before your quick and painless death… if we somehow survive…” He shook his head slowly, his eyes remaining fixed on her, two half-slits of calm, yet unadulterated hatred. “How could you do this to us, Commander? You betrayed everyone… your fellow crewmen… you spit on us… you spit on Amarria… and you spit on God.”

  And she blocked his words with her own. “I live in a zoo…” she mumbled melodically. “I feed the animals in the morning and answer the visitors questions and warn them not to feed the creatures… and I go in their cages… I play with them… to see life from their angle… and sometimes… at night… with the big furry ones… I lean up against them and take a nap… because animals in cages… they like to sleep a lot…”

  Smierdol sighed. “Commander… you can still pull out of this disgrace… Floreina, listen to me…”

  “And sometimes… at night… I’ll take one or two out and we’ll run around the field and play… then… come early dawn… they’ll be hungry and eager to get back to their cages…”

  “Floreina, I can do a lot worse than what you feel right now…”

  And her head popped up. “Not without killing me, you can’t…” And she laughed.

  “You’d be surprised how resilient little girls can be… which is why I think we’re going to try another approach…” he tapped the mirror and a moment later it turned transparent. Floreina looked up to see other soldiers packed into the monitoring booth behind the window.

  “You know the concept of a whipping boy, Floreina?” started Smierdol, standing before her, blocking much of her view into the adjacent chamber. “You know something about whipping boys that most people don’t know? …they were actually quite effective… at least for certain types of people… the only drawback is that it doesn’t do much for the boy,” he chuckled. “But there’s times when it’s worthwhile.”

  Smierdol stepped to the side. In the middle of the monitoring room, a slave stood, separated from the soldiers surrounding him. A wire hung from the ceiling and surrounded his neck, his hands unseen behind his back. His mouth hung open, and his eyes stared wide, directly at Floreina.

  “Oh…” she started, her defiantly humorous thoughts suddenly ending. She sat motionless.

  “You recognize him, Commander?”

  She nodded minutely.

  “You exploited this one to help sneak you out of the cargo bay…”

  And her heart began to ache, almost to the degree that it overwhelmed the burning of her thigh.

  “He doesn’t deserve this…” she said.

  “That’s exactly the point, Floreina… that’s why whipping boys are so effective… a few of the officers on this ship claim that you care too much for these Minmatar… as though you’ve forgotten what they truly are… I suppose we’re going to find out.”

  He touched the intercom next to the window. “Do the first one.”

  She saw one of the other soldiers through the window walk to the center of the room holding a small bolt gun.

  “No,” Floreina said, shaking her head. “You don’t want to do this…”

  “You’re right… we don’t. You’re the one doing this.”

  She shook her head. “This is a disgrace to use Minmatar like this… just like Allihence is a disgrace.”

  “She’s true to her people and to her word and to our Lord… you, on the other hand, took a minor disagreement and used it as an excuse to spit in the face of our entire society, to murder our people, to join in league with terrorists, and to become one with the soulless animals… you’re a disgrace to everything Amarrian…”

  He could have gone on, Floreina knew, if he had known just the right combination of words, or he could have simply kept on the same verbal path and demolished her emotionally, she knew. But he did not. Every time we speak to people, we have the opportunity to change their lives forever, if only we could find the perfect combination of words.

  All Smierdol had to do was mention her father, and what daddy might have thought of her now… ready to die in failure, marked, spiritually and literally as a traitor, and laughing as though it were some kind of joke.

  And this innocent, loyal subject was about to suffer for her decisions.

  The soldier brought the bolt gun to the slave’s knee, as the Minmatar looked back and forth in rapid succession from Floreina to the device. He trembled dramatically, and while his feet were not bound, they remained planted on the floor, ever obedient to their masters.

  “Okay, okay,” said Floreina, brainstorming her response. “What do you want to know?”

  “How do we disable the virus?” shouted Smierdol.

  “Okay,” she started slowly. “You need to find the transponder that’s sending the security signals and disable it.”

  “More specific.”

  Floreina watched the soldier, who was paused now, still holding the bolt gun to the man’s knee.

  “It’s attached to a drone that’s wandering randomly through the ship… I don’t even know where it is… for security purposes, you know… but it’s programmed to return at a specific time and place… and it’ll respond to my voice… but it can only be shut off with my own mental connection… which you guys have rendered retarded…”

  “And…?” asked Smierdol.

  “That’s it,” she replied. “That’s how you shut down the virus.”

  The window turned reflective again, and Floreina looked at herself.

  “Excuse me a moment,” said Smierdol as he turned and exited the room, shutting the hatch behind him.

  Floreina looked at the slave behind the table, as he stood with his back to her, hunched over the desk along the wall, staring at an interface terminal. He looked up momentarily to glance nervously at the mirror, the sweat and redness across his face betraying his sense of disturbance.

  “Master Floreina… ” he said. “No… I don’t understand what you’re say—“ and he stopped short.

  “What?” she asked.

  But the slave did not reply, simply continued staring at the terminal.

  And Smierdol returned hastily, slamming the hatchway closed. The window became clear again and she saw the same soldier with the bolt gun look up at her to grab her attention and immediately bring the tool down to fire into the slave’s waiting knee.

  His face turned color, twisting grotesquely and his mouth curled downward and specks of fluid flew from his face as he screamed his silent exclamations of suffering. The wire pulled tight against his neck despite his frantic attempt to balance. Floreina’s eyes snapped shut.

  “Your every pore betrays your lies, Floreina!” Smierdol shouted. “Without your implant, you’re worthless to control your nervous twitches.” He flipped a switch on the communications panel and the slave’s screams pierced the room, reverberating metallically against her skull.

  Oh, God, why are you punishing me…

  And Floreina realized it had been a mistake not to kill herself while she’d had the chance. She hadn’t known it would be like this…

  “Look at him!” screamed Smierdol, bringing his face close to hers, his voice cracking painfully over top of the slave’s. “Look at him, Floreina!”

  She turned away, sealed her eyes, and began her own scream, trying to focus on it, as though her voice was all that mattered in the world, the only thing that could drown out everything else.

  Smierdol slapped her thigh and the pain expanded outward from her tatte
red limb, building rapidly upward into a physical entity. A bubble of agony hovered above her thigh, yet, at the same time encompassed her entire existence. As though warping a deeper realm of time and space, it pulled all emotional and intellectual existence in on it.

  From a distance she heard the Amarrian’s shouts, “Look at what you’ve done, Floreina!” His hands were on her face, directing her head, grasping a clump of hair, and squeezing her jaw to quell her screams. “This is all you, Floreina!”

  “Please kill me!” Floreina screamed her reply. “It’s not worth this… it’s not worth any of this!”

  “You’re not taking the easy way out on this one. If you have any courage or honor left, you will open your eyes and take a look at what you’ve done!”

  And the physical pain subsided suddenly as a different sort of pain took hold. He was right. This was her obligation to experience everything. And she opened her eyes to look through the window at the Minmatar.

  Smierdol returned to the comm panel and clicked the audio connection, a peaceful silence enveloping the room.

  Floreina prayed silently as Smierdol spoke to her. “Floreina, you’re in a situation now… I’m going to be straight with you and tell you that there’s no chance for you getting out alive. You’re going to die, one way or the other… if you were anyone else I’d be trying to make you believe that you could still walk away from this…”

  He came forward and knelt before her, looking upward slightly to connect with her eyes. “You thought you were doing the right thing, and I can understand that… listen to me…” He put a hand to the side of her head, much more gently now. “I sympathize with your disgust at what our captain was doing with those slaves. I honestly do. It’s cruel, it’s pointless and it makes all of Amarria look bad… I certainly don’t support it, nor do I participate in it… and I don’t support this—” he motioned toward the window. “But what you’ve done here is far worse than anything our captain has done. You’ve already killed more people and more slaves in the last hour with your own hands than our captain kills in a year, and affected the deaths of many more. You’ve betrayed our people… your friends… we were a family here, Floreina, and you stabbed all of us in the back… and for what? Do you even care about those slaves? Is this about fighting for what’s right, or is this about control and power? Or is this about vengeance?”

  He paused again and Floreina whined as he brushed the damp clumps of hair from her cheek and brow. “Or is this just about making yourself feel something… like you have something to prove… at least allow us the dignity of knowing why…”

  She stared at the Amarrian, careful not to allow focus to return to the scene behind the window. “I don’t think I know anymore…” she said.

  “You have the opportunity for redemption, Commander. You can pull yourself out of this. You’ve always been loyal to our people and our Lord, and I believe in my heart, Floreina, that you are still that person, deep down inside… search your soul, Commander. You know what’s right. We’re your brothers and sisters here, and we do what we’re doing now out of fear and desperation… and you have the power to stop it, if you can simply remember who you are inside, and do what you know is right, and give us the information we need to survive.”

  She looked back at the slave standing to her side as he looked over his shoulder from his computer screen. His eyes caught hers for a moment.

  And what was stopping her from simply giving up Mahran’s location and computer access codes? Did it even matter anymore? They were both dead, one way or the other. It was only a matter of time.

  “Master—“ said the slave from behind Floreina.

  “Not now,” replied Smierdol.

  She glanced back at the slave to see him looking back and forth from his computer screen, to Smierdol, to Floreina.

  “You’re working with another Amarrian aren’t you—“ Smierdol cocked his head and gazed at Floreina. “There’s another Amarrian on board, working with you, isn’t there…”

  She pulled her head up and allowed it to drop, as though allowing the laws of nature to lie for her.

  Smierdol looked back at his Minmatar assistant. “What do the facial analyzers return?”

  Floreina looked back at the slave as he gave a slight nod toward his master.

  Smierdol continued, “That means that whoever is working with you can still affect the door locks and environmental controls…” He stopped and pulled away from her, then looked back through the window into the control room.

  “There’s no computer virus, there’s another Amarrian directly linked with the system…”

  “Master…” said the slave, just as Floreina saw the window turn reflective again.

  “What?” Smierdol shouted.

  “The commander is trying to communicate with me…”

  The officer looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “She…” the slave started, “she’s sending messages to the network linkage on this terminal.” He pointed at the screen.

  “That would be her friend…” Smierdol replied. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Maybe five minutes at the most…” he replied.

  Now he cocked his head at the slave and stood rapidly. “You allowed this to go on for five minutes?”

  “I wasn’t sure what was happening!” the slave blurted. “I wasn’t sure—“

  “Get out!” shouted Smierdol. “Get yourself to the holding down the hall and stay there.”

  “Yes, sir,” the slave replied and hopped toward the door. He punched in his code and pulled the handle but stopped short. He tugged again, returned to enter his access code, and again, nothing.

  Smierdol breathed heavily as he watched, then silently returned to the comm panel to press the intercom and did not seem surprised when it offered no connection. He marched to the exit and the slave moved obediently out of his way to allow him to type his own access code into the terminal. Still, the hatch did not budge.

  The officer looked back at Floreina, then brought his gaze calmly back to the slave. “Go stand in front of the commander.”

  The Minmatar obeyed, and Smierdol retrieved the precision torch from the table, marched back to the slave and wasted no time snatching him by the neck and shoving him onto Floreina, forcing her against the back of the seat. Smierdol clutched the slave by the front of the neck and held him in place on Floreina’s lap as she tilted her head back and cried.

  “You want to play a desperate and cruel game, Floreina? We’re scared… we won’t lie to you… you’ve terrified us, and torn us apart as human beings… and if you and your partner want to see what desperate and terrified men are capable of, then you’re about to see…”

  He pressed the Minmatar by the neck against Floreina’s face and forced the torch into his mouth.

  But Smierdol had made one mistake, and even without a tactical readout, Floreina knew to take advantage of it.

  She turned, brought her lips to the slave’s ear, and whispered, “Sometimes Amarrians lose their way… Our Lord gives you permission and guidance in making your stand… ”

  The sudden movement tore against her thigh. She heard the click of the torch trigger and saw it light up within the slave’s mouth as he lurched forward in a violent surge of energy.

  Their screams echoed through the room as the Minmatar’s knee drove into his master’s groin. The torch ripped from the slave’s cheek in a searing spray of blood and flesh. The torch dropped, its flame ceased and it bounced against floreina’s left leg before dropping to the floor.

  The slave moved rapidly, driving hard against his master. He pulled his face away in sudden, tortured anguish, but didn’t allow it to deter his forward momentum. He slammed the Amarrian against the window and brought his right hand up, to grab Smierdol’s face like a basketball and slam his head against the reflective surface. The officer went limp, his eyes rolled to the back of his head and his body slumped slowly to the floor. The Minmatar fell backwards, tossing his head and scr
eaming as his legs slipped out from under him.

  He struggled to pull himself away from the Amarrian, holding his face and rolling on the floor, his body curling uncontrollably into a fetal position.

  “Get up!” Floreina shouted. “Please don’t go into shock now! Get up and release my restraints and I can get you some relief!” She looked at the medical kit on the table. “Hurry! Please, my son…” She looked up at the mirror, centrally aware of the Amarrians watching everything. “Hurry… please… get up!”

  And the slave dragged himself to his knees and crawled across the floor, one bloody hand pressed to the left side of his face, dragging himself on his knees toward the officer to find the tiny keycard that could unlock her restraints. As he turned to force himself across the floor, she noticed the blood surrounding his hand on his face, soaking into his sleeve.

  “Please hurry…” Floreina coaxed. “I know it hurts… but you did the right thing…”

  An agonizing period passed, and just as the slave moved behind her, she noticed the twitching of Smierdol’s face and fingers. A second later, his eyelids fluttered.

  She felt the slave’s hand on hers, smeared with Minmatar blood as he fumbled with the keycard against her cuffs. “Please hurry!” she repeated.

  Smierdol’s eyes opened, and within a second, she saw him focus on the welding torch at Floreina’s feet. She felt the keycard slide against her hand and the blood draining down her fingers. It neared the proper slot, and Floreina tried to adjust her hands to point the key slot to a more convenient position.

  Smierdol’s shoulders moved. He pushed upward, propping himself off the ground. He paused and swayed, his arm twitching under his weight, and his left eye forcing itself suddenly shut as his face twisted and grimaced.

  The card slipped into the slot, but twisted and jammed. The slave coughed and gagged behind her, an ugly slurping sound echoing through the chamber, and she felt him sway, gripping her hands and restraints for balance as his hand slipped off the keycard.

  She imagined the card hanging, halfway in the slot, without a finger to support it as she watched Smierdol’s face even out again. He looked up for only a moment before lurching forward toward the torch.