by Tim C Taylor
He could do that.
“Pity,” said the torturer, replacing the hammer on her rack. “I would have liked to play with you for longer. But I defer to our Supreme Commander.”
“What did you say?” Arun asked, trying to keep the pain from his voice.
“Your worst nightmare, Number 106. Supreme Commander Tawfiq Woomer-Calix is displeased with you. You may pray to whatever human deity watches over you that you will be granted swift release. Your prayers will be wasted, though, because I shall ensure the spark of life persists in your body until such time as the Supreme Commander gives you permission to die.
The hatch opened and a Hardit marched through in a uniform shot through with gold.
Instantly, the torturer fell to her knees and kissed the deck, not daring to raise her head.
Tawfiq, if that were truly her, ignored her inferior’s groveling and drew a pistol on Arun.
She shot him.
Twice.
Arun ground his teeth together but refused to give Tawfiq the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. He wouldn’t even close his eyes.
“I know it hurts,” she said, and shot him again.
Arun screamed.
“Two shots to the gut and one in your chest.” Her translated words sounded a whole lot calmer than Arun felt. “I don’t seem to have hit anything too vital. Shall we try again?”
Arun took a deep breath.
“I wasn’t speaking rhetorically,” said Tawfiq. “Shall I shoot you again?”
“No!” Arun calmed his voice. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Your request is noted… and I shall accede to it for now. The ammunition for this weapon is low-velocity, and the padded bulkheads mean there is little chance of ricochet damage. I can shoot you many more times before you die. But special pleasures, such as killing you, are so much more satisfying when I draw them out a little. Let us talk a while instead.”
“What about? Your surrender?”
“Your defiance bodes well for my immediate future. And talking of the future, I wish to share mine.”
The pain was so all-consuming that Arun didn’t dare try to speak. All that would emerge would be agonizing groans. Instead, he imagined a future in his head. One where Tawfiq was hanging here and Arun held the pistol.
“I have heard you Human Legion commanders prattle away for many years now. Freedom will be yours, apparently. Ingratiate your human selves with allies with a few brain cells – such as your mysterious mudsuckers – and you can win a few battles against the White Knight forces. Bravo. It is like watching two children fighting with paper swords. Pathetic! None of you would stand a chance against the full strength of the Hardit New Order.”
“We’ll beat the imperials,” growled Arun in a voice drenched in pain. “And then we’ll come after you.”
“Yes, I’m counting on your precious Legion coming after us, as you put it. It’s a shame you won’t be around to lead them. And I do mean that sincerely, because with your imminent demise your Legion cannot fail to pick a more competent leader.”
His shattered ribs made every breath an agony, but Arun wasn’t about to let Tawfiq’s jibes go unanswered. “The Legion is not about leaders. It’s an idea, a rallying cry for those denied their freedom. That’s why we’ll win. No matter how many defeats we suffer, we will win in the end.”
Tawfiq shook her snout from side to side, a gesture Arun recognized as mocking laughter. “You have it wrong. You have been deceived. Freedom will be won, but not freedom for the humans. It is the Hardit destiny to win our freedom from you lesser races. To be fair to you, your limited powers of perception did manage to correctly sense one aspect of the future. Your mistrust of the Night Hummers is well founded.”
“What do you mean? The Hummers are our allies.”
“No, 106. They are ours. They have led you here to the stronghold of the White Knights so you can wipe yourselves out, leaving this part of the galaxy free for the New Order to claim what is rightfully ours. One race! One scent! We shall permit the Hummers to live their peaceful and pointless existences floating in their gas giants because they have proved their worth and their loyalty. The future for all other species is extermination.”
“Words,” spat Arun. “Lies are your strength.” And yet the claim struck a chord; he’d always been suspicious of the Hummers, and had thought that by installing them on Legion ships he had been using them in a way they hadn’t anticipated, but what if they were using him all along?
While that thought distracted him, Tawfiq shot him in the foot, shattering bones and showering him with bolts of agony.
He screamed despite himself and couldn’t help but look down, squinting through the pain at the damage. His foot was a bloodied mess. A detached part of him realized that it would have to be amputated.
“Lies are my strength? No, 106. My strength is that I can crush all opposition. I can destroy your precious warfleet as easily as I can shoot your disgusting human body. Shall I demonstrate again?”
Arun shook his head.
“No? Soon, 106. But we shall delay your destruction a little longer. I have a task for you to perform. A decision I need you to help me make. You see, the Hummers tell me that the futures that lead to the ultimate victory of the New Order require our fleet to withdraw, so that your Legion can wipe out your Imperial adversaries – those you call the New Empire. But your Legion is so weak that you could not possibly hope to overcome the New Empire defenses. Either you would disperse or you would wait here, cracking your bone heads against impregnable defenses until you starve or are crushed by the New Empire relief force that is on the way. Oh, yes, you have been lured here. And now you need help. You need a key to victory. And I possess that key.”
“We don’t need your help to win, Hardit.”
“I do enjoy the stupidity that drips from everything you say. Of course the Legion requires my help.”
“Why would you ever help humans?”
“Not through choice. However, there is a truism so obvious it is ubiquitous even across non-Hardit species. The enemies of my enemies are my friends. I have many enemies, Number 106. Old Empire. New Empire. Human Legion. Muryani Accord, and above all the Amilxi. We hate you all. We will crush you all. You are our enemies and yet that means you must also be our friends. I could help you – perhaps – because my erstwhile allies of the New Empire would extract a heavy price before you defeated them. You will leave this star system weaker than if you flee now.”
Arun knew that Tawfiq was the Queen of Lies and didn’t believe this for a moment; the Hardit was messing with his head, trying to torture him mentally as well as physically while puffing up her own grandiose sense of importance. “Could? Why so weasel-worded?” he said, calling her bluff. “Why don’t you make a decision and help us, rather than talk about it?”
“Because the thought of helping you is too unpalatable. I need you to sweeten it with your begging. Your death is inevitable. Nothing you could say will lessen my pleasure at torturing you first. But if you beg for my help as your master–”
“Master? I thought you preferred mistress. We have several Legion species with fluid genders, good soldiers all, but I always thought monkeys were more static.”
“Dolt. Master, mistress… the confusion is but a failing of your language. I am not male any more than I remain female. We of the New Order have transcended the weakness of gender. One race. One scent. Gender divided us. It was a weakness that I have eradicated.”
“How about compassion? Or all emotions? Aren’t they all weaknesses? For that matter, death. You Hardits are so damned clever at technology, so ready to tinker with your biology. Are you telling me you cannot conquer death?”
Tawfiq seemed to consider the idea seriously.
“Got you thinking, hasn’t it?” Arun taunted. “Only one problem. If you create a species of post-Hardit super-beings, why would they take orders from a serial loser like you?”
Tawfiq growled and raised her pistol. She
played its aim over Arun’s body without firing.
Arun shook with the anticipation.
And then the weapon was firing, pumping bullet after bullet into his legs, shattering his knees and shins, gouging bloody chunks from his thighs, Arun twitched and jerked, which only brought fresh explosions of agony until it the pain blurred into a single overwhelming force.
The firing ceased.
The pain did not go away as such, but the torturer had been wrong. His nerves had shredded so badly that they were no longer able to convey the message of pain.
As soon as he could muster his reserve of fortitude, Arun spoke back. “That’s right…” He groaned. “You’re a loser, Tawfiq. Can’t… can’t even control your temper tantrums, can you?”
“Beg for the key, 106! Beg me for the sake of your friends! They will live longer if you do. Maybe I miscalculate and they do have a chance of defeating the Hardit New Order. Beg! Now!”
Arun took deep breaths to gather the last of his strength. “Here’s what I think, Tawfiq-Loser-Catnip. That key you’re talking about… you’ve already sent it… Or you haven’t and nothing I say will make the slightest difference. Either way, you can take your generous offer and shove it up whatever shriveled old passage you have left after you eradicated gender.”
“Curse you, human.”
Arun laughed through the pain. “All these years, Tawfiq, and you still haven’t invented a decent translator. Curse you! Is that really the best you have? Well, I’ve been around spacers and their foul holes for decades. Translate this, loser: your turd-wrangling New Order are a pig-licking slurry of… of bakri chod chod… wixers. You’re… you’re…”
But the burst of defiance had deserted him, and with his strength spent, Arun’s head sank. When he recovered enough to look up, he expected to see Tawfiq so incensed with rage that her three sulfurous eyes would be spinning on separate tracks. He laughed, remembering when he’d had that effect before by ramming an exploding flash-bomb in her face.
He slowly sobered when he realized Tawfiq was no longer there. The guards had left too.
When had they done that?
He had the sense of time draining away.
The expanding red stain on the deck told of something else draining away.
The torturer’s drugs kept his guttering consciousness from snuffing out, but he had the barest presence, an existence drained of the dynamics of bodily sensations. He could sense nothing more than a dull, extended ache as he watched his blood pool beneath him on the deck.
He imagined he heard an explosion. Gunfire. Voices. Human voices, but far away and drifting farther.
Despite making one last effort to call for help, he no longer had the strength to raise his head.
He hung there, too tired to even close his eyes, and waited for the last of his blood to drain away.
— Chapter 20 —
“Report!” commanded Admiral Indiya, annoyed that she’d been summoned from her preparations for the critical, pre-battle conference with only the flimsiest of explanations.
“We’re getting strange reports from Lance of Freedom, sir,” answered Captain Lorcaen.
“Don’t give me ‘strange reports’, give me somebody who knows what’s going on!”
Lorcaen patched through Captain Cythien, commander of the Lance, who had clearly been waiting on standby.
“Cythien here. My ship has been infiltrated by Hardit commandos. They slaughtered General McEwan’s bodyguard. My guess is that they have snatched him and already left the ship, but considering they boarded the Lance undetected and scrambled half of my ship systems, they could be anywhere, and on any ship. This happened several minutes ago. We’ve only just been able to reestablish comms.”
Old feelings of guilt threatened to overwhelm Indiya. Irrational as she knew the idea to be, her gut told her that she didn’t deserve to win; that somehow this was her fault.
“Former Squadron leader Romulus is missing too,” continued Cythien, “as is Deputy Ambassador Tremayne. And about Tremayne…” Captain Cythien rarely hesitated, and like most Jotuns her reports were so stripped down to their essentials that they sounded bland. Hesitation meant Cythien was resorting to hunches and guesswork. “The Khallenes contacted me directly to enquire as to Tremayne’s well-being. This is highly uncharacteristic. They know something, but I can’t extract a rational answer from them. I regret I find communication with aliens extremely difficult, though my long experience dealing with humans might obscure this from you.”
Indiya nodded. That seemed to be Homo sapiens’ role in this endeavor they called the Human Legion: to be the glue that stuck the disparate races together. But Cythien would have to wait for a moment, because this was too big.
“Flag Lieutenant Hood, signal the fleets to move to battle stations. Scramble all X-Boat squadrons. Once that’s in train, get me Ambassador Sandure.”
As Hood relayed her orders, she allowed time for her mind to embrace this change of events while her command chair sealed itself into an acceleration cocoon connected to numerous data feeds. She could run the fleet with her eyes closed, and began to do precisely that, splitting the focus of her augmented mind into dozens of separate cognitive threads.
Despite all her mental enhancements and experience of command, when she closed her eyes, a primitive part of her brain often insisted on the need for ghost images in her mind. She saw small figures with three yellow eyes peering derisively down furry snouts.
The Hardits…
Naval intelligence was convinced the Hardits were a spent force, more concerned with hurting the non-Hardit races they detested so much than formulating a coherent war strategy. She had discussed this many times with Arun who remained convinced, despite the lack of supporting evidence, that Tawfiq was playing a game too cunning for them to fathom.
Arun McEwan had been a constant in her life ever since that day when she had cryo-frozen him. They’d been kids then, really. Children sent to war. And now that he wasn’t there, it was as if she had lost a crucial organ of her body: she was incomplete. Without Arun, she had no one to explain what the chodding hell these wretched Hardits were doing on the eve of the final battle.
She opened her mouth and allowed the oxygenating buffer gel to enter her throat. Signals intelligence had intercepted a heavily encrypted data burst around twenty minutes earlier. She had assumed it was an automated feed from a hidden New Empire sensor station that they’d intercepted by chance – she had no illusions of secrecy: everything they did was being viewed by the Imperial forces – but what if the transmission had come from the Hardits?
“Sandure here, Admiral.”
Indiya blinked a command gesture and meta data about Sandure’s call instantly appeared in her mind. He was on the Repulse, a fast cruiser in ‘Z’ Fleet. “I have need of a Xeno-diplomat,” she said, her voice using the same thought-to-speech translator system her non-human personnel used to talk to her. “Get across to Lance of Freedom ASAP. The Khallenes have information that could be vital, and we can’t afford to lose precious time to cross-species miscommunication,”
“And my deputy?”
Indiya briefly explained the situation, why the one person who could consistently make sense of the Khallenes was missing.
“I suggest an alternate course of action, Admiral. The comm lag from Holy Retribution to Lance of Freedom is minimal. There’s no advantage to me being present at the Khallenes’ physical location. I shall establish contact with them while crossing to Holy Retribution. I could be useful to you personally, especially if the Hardits contact you, as I suspect they will shortly.”
Indiya thought a moment. Sandure was closer to the Lance, and shuttling between craft was risky when they were at battle stations and could be in combat very soon. But the ambassador knew the risks. “Agreed. Meet me here and liaise with Captain Cythien while you transit. Indiya out.”
The sensor officer pinged for her attention.
“Picking up two ships a few hundred klicks
out from Lance of Freedom. One looks outwardly like a Type-S36(A) ammunition carrier, but with power readings of a kind I’ve never seen before. The other is completely new but is approximately the size of a stork shuttle.”
The comms officer butted in. “Incoming transmission from Lieutenant-General Lee, Admiral. She is on one of the ships.”
“Put her through, and then raise the priority on decrypting that signal intercept to maximum.”
Lieutenant-General Lee began reporting her situation, explaining that she was reporting now because she’d just blown the stealth function of everything in a 10-klick radius. The implication gnawed at Indiya’s guts. The Legion had incorporated Hardit designs encountered near Tranquility and were only able to stealth small craft, smaller than that Hardit ship Lee was on. There could be an entire Hardit fleet out there…
Indiya listened to Lee with a small part of her mind, but concentrated on protecting her command. “Admiral Indiya to all ships. Implement Case White. I say again, implement Case White. A possible Hardit fleet is present and invisible to our sensors.”
Holy Retribution was already at battle stations, and now swung into even more frantic activity. Case White was a scenario of last resort, when the entire fleet was caught unawares by a hostile enemy. In a few moments, ships across this region of space would be firing clouds of defensive munitions: smoke, decoys, reflective and ablative powered streamers. In the confusion, they would scatter, seemingly at random, like lifting a rock to reveal a nest of scurrying insects. The difference was that Case White finished with the fleet converging into an offensive formation, ready to launch a counter blow.
Indiya had complete confidence in her commanders. As soon as they began acknowledging receipt of her orders, she left her captains to carry them out and returned her attention to Lieutenant-General Lee’s voice as she continued her report, which concluded with a list of the Legion personnel who had leaked information to the Hardits – if the Khallenes were right.