by John Scalzi
Lee answered with facts when she could, informed guesses and estimates when she couldn’t and wild supposition when she had to, making sure Two understood which was which and why, so there would be no margin for misunderstanding between the two of them.
“You are certainly being forthcoming,” Two said at one point.
“I don’t want a shotgun to the face,” Lee said.
“I mean that you are offering rather more than your surviving compatriot,” Two said.
“I’m the lieutenant,” Lee said. “It’s my job to know more than the soldiers under me. If I’m offering you more than Private Hughes, it’s because I know more, not because she’s holding out on you.”
“Indeed,” Two said. “That’s good news for Private Hughes, then.”
Lee smiled, knowing now that Hughes was the other soldier held and that for now, at least, she was still alive. “What else do you need to know?” she asked.
“At the moment, nothing,” Two said. “But I will be back with more questions later. In the meantime, Six will tend to your needs. Thank you, Lieutenant Lee, for your cooperation.”
“Delighted,” Lee said. And with that, she assumed, Two had wandered away from his microphone to do whatever it is that he did, presumably talk to fellow conspirators (of which Lee assumed there were at least five).
She heard Six moving about in the room. “Do you mind if I talk?” Lee asked. “I know you can’t answer. But I have to admit this entire incident is making me nervous.” She began talking, primarily about her childhood, while Six fed her and gave her water and then tended to her bodily needs. After twenty minutes, Six went away and Lee shut up.
It was the room’s acoustics that had given her the idea. Lee had spent years as a performing and recording musician, and part of her job was to make sure the room, whatever room she was in, wouldn’t defeat her instrument or her band. She’d played enough basements with stone and concrete walls to know just how much the sound bouncing off the walls would mess with the performance and also what sorts of materials made what sort of sonic response. She could close her eyes, strike a note in a room and tell you, roughly, how large the room was, what materials the room was made of and whether there were objects in the room bouncing sound off of them. She wasn’t, alas, good enough at it to be able to make an entire map of a room that way.
But her BrainPal was.
For two and a half hours Lee had talked, almost constantly, moving her head as much as she could, risking a neck chafe from her restraining strap. As she talked, her BrainPal took the data from her voice (and from Two’s) and used it to paint a picture of the room, marking every surface that sound reflected off of, polling the delay between the ears to locate the surface in the room and adding each additional piece of data to give a complete audio portrait of the room, of Six and of everything within earshot.
What Lee had learned:
One, that Two was (or, more accurately, was speaking to her through) a PDA set up on a table a meter and a half away, directly in front of her. This was the same table on which Six kept the bottles from which she fed Lee soup and water.
Two, Six was a woman, about 165 centimeters tall and weighing about fifty-five kilos. When Lee was talking directly into her face, she got a reasonably good “look” at Six; she guessed Six was roughly forty to fifty years of age, presuming she was not ever in the CDF.
Three, to the side of the chair was another table, less than a meter away, on which sat a shotgun and various surgical, cutting and shearing implements. Which confirmed for Lee that Two was full of shit about the torture assurances, and that she wasn’t likely to get out of the room alive—nor was Hughes going to get out of hers.
What Lee suspected: Six would return at some point, Two would declare regretfully that they would have to go over answers again, this time with some added incentive in the form of pain, and then at the end of it she would be fed the shotgun while Two and his friends reviewed any discrepancies in her stories and the stories they got from Hughes. Which meant Lee had an indeterminate but short amount of time to escape the chair, rescue Hughes and escape from wherever they were.
She had no idea how she was going to do that.
“Come on,” she said to herself, and thumped the back of her head against the headrest as much as she could with the restraint on her neck. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was enough to clack her jaw, driving her left incisors into the edge of her tongue. There was a small nip of pain and then the odd, not-at-all-coppery taste of SmartBlood, oozing out from the wound.
Lee grimaced. She could never get used to the taste of SmartBlood. It was the stuff the CDF used to replace human blood in its soldiers for its superior oxygen-handling capabilities; the nanobiotic machines could hold several times more oxygen than red blood cells could. It meant that a CDF soldier could survive without taking a breath far longer than a normal human could. It also meant that SmartBlood could become so superoxygenated that a favorite party trick of CDF soldiers was forcing the nanobots in the SmartBlood, which could be programmed via BrainPal, to incinerate themselves in a flash. It was a surprisingly excellent way to get rid of bloodsucking insects: Let them feed off your flesh and then, as they fly away, ignite the SmartBlood in their bodies.
If only Six were a vampire, Lee thought. I’d show her. She spat the SmartBlood that had accumulated in her mouth and did a poor job of it, spattering it onto her right wrist and the restraint over it.
Hello, her brain said again.
As it did so, the door opened. Lee opened up a visual window of the room and started tracking the new sounds and their reflections on them. In a few seconds, Six came into view, positioning herself between the chair Lee was restrained in and the table holding the shotgun and surgical implements. Lee “watched” Six almost disappear as she stopped moving and her sounds ceased except for her breathing and then became silhouetted again when Two spoke from the PDA.
“I’m afraid I have some very bad news, Lieutenant Lee,” Two said. “I took the information you gave me back to my colleagues, and as impressed as they were with your willingness to share, that same willingness has made them suspicious. They believe a CDF soldier would never willingly volunteer the information you have, or as much information as you have. They suspect that while you are telling some of the truth, you may not be telling all of the truth.”
“I told you everything I know,” Lee said, putting an edge of panic in her voice.
“I know you have,” Two said. “And I for one believe you. It’s why you’re still alive, Lieutenant. But my colleagues are skeptical. I asked them what it would take to relieve them of their skepticism. They suggested we go through the questions again, but this time with a certain added…urgency.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lee said.
“I do apologize,” Two said. “I told you that we would not torture you. At the time, I thought it was the truth. I regret it is no longer the case.”
Lee said nothing to this. She knew by all outward indications it would look as if she were trying to keep from crying.
“Six is a medical practitioner of some note,” Two said. “I can promise you that you will be inflicted with only as much pain as is necessary and not a single bit more. Six, you may begin.”
Lee opened her mouth just slightly to offer what she hoped would sound like a frightened, keening wail.
Six reached over to the table, picked up a scalpel and moved it toward Lee’s right ring finger, slipping the very edge of it underneath the fingernail.
Lee, who had bit her tongue quite severely for several seconds, spat a gout of SmartBlood at Six, covering her arm and the hand wielding the scalpel. In the reflection of the spitting noise she saw Six’s chin move sharply, as if she had moved her head to look at Lee quizzically.
“You’re going to make some noise now, Six,” Lee said, and ordered all the SmartBlood she’d spit out to ignite as furiously as it could.
Six became a bright spot of noise as she jerked back
, wailing, arm and hand incinerating. She wheeled in reverse, colliding with the desk that held Two’s PDA. It dislodged from its position and fell forward, leaving Two in the dark about what came next.
Lee wailed as well as the bit of SmartBlood that had landed on her wrist burned like hell against her skin. Then she gritted her teeth and as hard as she could started yanking against her right wrist restraint, currently being weakened by the SmartBlood burning into its fibers.
One yank, two yanks, three yanks…four. There was a ripping sound, and Lee’s right arm was free. Without bothering to put out her wrist or uncover her eyes, she reached over to the table and grabbed the shears and as quickly as possible started cutting her other restraints: left wrist, neck, waist and ankles.
It was when she got to her ankles that Six exclaimed through her pain; Lee guessed that Six had finally figured out what Lee was up to and scrambled toward the table with the shotgun on it. Lee cut through the final restraint and leaped for the table, too late; Six had the shotgun.
Lee yelled, grabbed the scalpel Six had dropped and pushed up, getting inside the radius of the shotgun and driving the scalpel up Six’s abdomen. Six made a surprised gasping sound at the sharp, slicing pain, dropped the shotgun and slid to the ground.
Lee finally removed her blindfold, turned off the audio map and blinked down at Six, who was looking at her with something akin to wonder. She was, Lee noted, a bloody mess.
“How did you do that?” Six whispered between panting breaths of agony.
“I have good ears,” Lee said.
Six had nothing to say to that or anything else.
Lee grabbed the shotgun, checked the load and then moved quickly to position herself by the door. Less than twenty seconds later, the door burst open and a man came through, sidearm at the ready. Lee dropped him with a shot in the abdomen and then pivoted to get a second man in the doorway square in the chest. She dropped the spent shotgun, picked up the sidearm, checked the clip and went through the door.
There was a hallway with another doorway five meters down. Lee grabbed the second dead man, dragged him down the hallway with her, kicked open the door and hurled the corpse through. She waited until the second shotgun report and then walked in herself, sighting and hitting center mass the man still holding the shotgun. He went down. Lee resighted and aimed at the PDA sitting on a table, blowing it to pieces. She went into the room and looked at the chair to find Hughes, naked, restrained and understandably anxious.
“Private Hughes,” she said. “How are you?”
“Ready to get the fuck out of this chair, Lieutenant,” Hughes said.
Lee reached over to the table that held surgical instruments and then cut through Hughes’s bonds. Hughes pulled the blindfold over her head and looked at her naked lieutenant, blinking.
“This was not what I was expecting the first thing I would see to be,” Hughes said, to Lee.
“Knock it off,” Lee said, and pointed toward the corpse of the man she’d flung through the door. “Check him for a sidearm and let’s get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hughes said, and moved to the corpse.
“What did this one call himself?” Lee said, pointing to the man who held the shotgun.
“One,” Hughes said. “But he never called himself it. I didn’t even know he was a he until right now. Someone calling himself Two called him that.” She found the sidearm, checked its load.
“Right,” Lee said. “I killed three more, including that one and one called Six. So that’s four dead and at least two still alive.”
“Are we going to wait around to meet them?” Hughes asked. “Because I’d prefer not.”
“We agree,” Lee said. “Come on.” They went to the door; Hughes took point. The two of them made their way back down the hall, toward the direction Lee had come from. Another door lay five meters past the door of her room; they opened it and found it empty except for a chair and a spray of gray matter and fluid on the bar floor.
“Jefferson,” Lee said. Hughes nodded, unhappy, and they continued onward.
A final door stood near a stairwell. The two banged through and found a small office with a PDA on a desk and very little else.
“This was Two’s room,” Lee said.
“Where did the son of a bitch get to?” Hughes asked
“I think I scared him off when I set a friend of his on fire,” Lee said. She picked up the PDA. “Watch the door,” she said to Hughes.
On the PDA were a series of video files of Lee, Hughes and Jefferson as well as other documents Lee didn’t bother with. She swiped past all of them to look for the PDA’s file system for a specific program. “Here it is,” she said, and pressed the button that appeared on the screen.
Lee’s BrainPal suddenly came alive with a long queue of increasingly urgent messages from her sergeant, her captain and the Tubingen itself.
Hughes, who apparently received a similar queue of urgent messages, smiled. “Nice to know we were missed.”
“Make sure they know where we are,” Lee said. “And make sure that if I tell them to, they’ll flatten this place into the ground.”
“You got it, ma’am,” Hughes said.
The two of them moved out of the office and went up the stairs, Lee taking the PDA with her and tucking it under an arm. The stairs emptied out into another short corridor that looked like a wing of a hotel. The two soldiers stalked through it carefully, turned a dogleg and were confronted by a closed door. Lee nodded to Hughes, who opened it and pushed through.
They came through the side of a lobby filled with lumpy-looking older people in ordinary clothing and very attractive younger people wearing almost nothing at all.
“Where the hell are we?” Hughes said.
Lee laughed. “Holy shit,” she said. “It was a brothel!”
The lobby quieted as the brothel workers and their potential clients got a look at Lee and Hughes.
“What?” Hughes said, finally, not dropping her weapon. “You all act like you’ve never seen a naked woman before.”
“I don’t think I can tell this story again any differently than I’ve already told it the last three times, ma’am,” Lee said, to Colonel Liz Egan. Egan, as she understood it, was some sort of liaison for the State Department, which had taken considerable interest in her abduction and escape.
“I just need to know if there’s any additional detail you can give me regarding this Two person,” Egan said.
“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “I never saw him or heard him except as a heavily treated voice over that PDA. You have all the files I made, and you have all the files on the PDA I took. There really is nothing else I can tell you about him.”
“Her,” Egan said.
“Beg pardon, ma’am?” Lee said.
“Her,” Egan said. “We’re pretty sure Two was Elyssia Gorham, the manager of the Lotus Flower, that brothel you found yourselves in. The office you found the PDA in was hers, and she would be able to keep anyone out of the basement level you were in. The rooms the three of you were held in were private function rooms for clients who either liked rougher pleasures or wanted special event rooms which would be built up and torn down quickly. That also explains the signal blockers. The sort of people who would rent those rooms would want to be assured of their privacy. In all it made it a perfect place to stash the three of you.”
“Do we know who drugged us in the first place?” Lee asked.
“We tracked it down to the bartender at the hofbräuhaus,” Egan said. “He said he was offered a month’s salary to drop the drugs in your drink. He needed the money, apparently. It’s a good thing he has it, since now he’s been fired.”
“I didn’t think we could be drugged,” Lee said. “That’s supposed to be one of the benefits of SmartBlood.”
“You can’t be drugged with anything biological,” Egan said. “Whatever you were drugged with was designed with SmartBlood in mind. It’s something we’ll be needing to look out for in the futu
re. It’s already been noted to CDF Research and Development.”
“Good,” Lee said.
“On the subject of SmartBlood, that was some good thinking on your part to incapacitate your captor,” Egan said. “The idea to map your surroundings with sound is also clear thinking. You’ve been recommended for commendation for both actions. No promotion, sorry.”
“Thank you, but I’m not really concerned about a commendation or a promotion,” Lee said. “I want to know more about the people who killed Jefferson. When they were interrogating me, they were asking me a lot of questions about what I knew about separatist movements and groups wanting to align their colonies with the Earth instead of the Colonial Union. I don’t know anything about that, but it got one of my people killed. I want to know more.”
“There’s nothing really to say,” Egan said. “These are strange times for the Colonial Union. We’re busy trying to bring the Earth back into the fold, and in the meantime our colonies are trying to deal with events as best as they can. There’s no organized separatist movement, and the Earth isn’t actively trying to recruit any colonies. As far as we can tell, these all are the works of isolated groups. The one here on Zhong Guo was just a bit more organized.”
“Ah,” Lee said. She knew when she was being lied to, but she also knew when not to say anything about it.
Egan stood, Lee rising to follow her. “In any event, Lieutenant, it’s nothing I want you to worry about right now. Your commendation comes with two weeks of shore leave at your leisure. May I suggest you take it someplace other than Zhong Guo. And that you stay out of hofbräuhauses for the time being.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lee said. “Good advice.” She saluted and watched Egan walk away. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the ship around her.
Also by John Scalzi
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