Patience is a Virtue
Our stay this time around certainly was different from our first imprisonment. For one, there wasn’t a guard terrorizing us. However, they also didn’t feed us every day. Or at least, I didn’t think they did. It was hard to tell, because once again, we were given no indication of what time it was. The lights were never turned off or dimmed and there were no clocks. But after two weeks of the same on the ship, I mostly had figured out how to listen to my internal clock.
As far as I could tell, they came about every other day with a set of rations and some water pills. I knew they were trying to weaken us, to make us crumble, but they were doing a terrible job of it. Sure, we were hungry and thirsty, but I’d been through worse when the colony was short on rations when I was a kid and we’d had to work on quarter portions.
As for the supposed ‘interrogations,’ they came around once or twice and injected us with something then asked a lot of questions, but the whole situation backfired terribly.
I didn’t know who was doing their research, but whoever they were had forgotten to check whether the truth serum they were using would even work on us. Although we’d come a long way from the ancient days where sodium pentothal was a thing, there was still no reliable way to shut down the human brain enough time to prevent lying, and it turned out, drugs that lowered inhibitions didn’t really work on any of us.
For myself, like most people who landed somewhere on the spectrum, it just made me confused and become very concerned with textures. Although I was blasted out of my mind for the entire interrogation, Ciangi told me that I kept trying to rub my hands on the soldiers’ uniforms and even grab their shock batons.
Eske didn’t fare much better. Considering that they were still keeping her blinded, refusing to give her the corrective eyewear she needed, she just became hyper-fixated on her goggles and where were they. Although the situation was certainly tense, there was something hilarious about a six-foot woman asking where her goggles were fifty times in half an hour. By the time they gave up, goggles no longer sounded like a word.
As for Ciangi? They should have known better from the satisfied smirk on her face when they went into her cell. I could remember it clear as day. She sat down, asked them if they had medical staff nearby, then raised her arm so they could inject her.
…then promptly had a massive allergic reaction.
That part was scary, and I certainly didn’t appreciate it, worrying that my friend had just been murdered. Thankfully, the medics arrived within a minute and they had adrenaline in her system just as she was coming down from the attack.
Once she was fully back, she just laughed and laughed and laughed, telling the soldiers and general that they should have seen their faces They struck her once with the baton then headed out, no better off for all the torture they had handed her.
Then Bahn, taciturn, hairless Bahn. He just went into a religious lecture about the importance of his hair and how many laws they had broken in removing it from him without his permission. No matter how much they tried to get him on subject, he just went back to the legal ramifications of their shaving his head and his hair-care regimen that had given him so many inches of healthy tresses.
It slipped into a sort of routine, with them coming by to get information more than they gave us food. They grew more and more violent every time they came back emptyhanded, but we were usually too high to care. Granted, I hated being high, but I didn’t know that until I came down from each occasion.
Anytime that I started to feel too miserable, I reminded myself of what Gonzales had to endure when she was locked up alone for two months on her own, completely cut off from society and tortured by the insane guard that had taken a shine to her. She never complained about that, even when the memories from it haunted her dreams, so if she could tolerate that, I could deal with a week or two of discomfort.
So as much as I tried to never complain, I could feel myself growing weaker and weaker. I always kept that hope alive, but it was growing more and more difficult to keep myself alive. Often sleep was our only respite, whisking us away from our somewhat macabre reality for a little while.
It had to be at least a week later before I was suddenly roused from my sleep by loud footsteps stomping toward me. I opened my eyes groggily, only to have a stun baton slam into my ribs.
My entire body jolted, and a chopping cry escaped my throat. I convulsed for several seconds, before seeing the red face of the general leaning over me.
“How did you deal with the alien threat?!” he screamed, veins popping out all over his face, right and left.
“We asked real nicely,” I said, my voice cracking from the aftershocks of the electrical jolt. While it was nothing compared to what I had endured on the ship, it certainly wasn’t pleasant either.
The stun baton landed again, this time on my arms as I tried to protect my face. My muscles locked, and I faintly heard my friends protesting in the background.
“Enough with the coy little banter, and your group’s quirky reactions to drugs. I’m done with it. You’re all a group of nobodies and you never should have been able to make it this far! So why don’t you stop wasting my time and tell me what I want to know?!”
When I could finally speak again, I could taste blood in my mouth. Great, because I really needed to deal with a busted tongue again.
“I could tell you,” I answered slowly. “But there’s really no point. You see, if I stay quiet, you’ll hit me a lot. If I tell you beans, you’ll hit me a lot, then kill me, then go back to our planet and try to kill our friends. It’s really a lose-lose situation so I might as well antagonize you as much as I can.”
“You insolent—”
This time, he pulled his fist back and struck down at my face. But I used the self-defense that Eske had taught me, knocking it to the side with one arm and chopping at his throat with a flat palm.
He fell back, gasping, and I bet regretting that he hadn’t come with his usual entourage. But that was what happened when people let their anger rule them—they made mistakes. Mistakes that would certainly help me.
A small sparking sound caught my attention and I realized that the general had dropped his stun baton. It had fallen to the ground right between us. I dove for it, but of course he did too, and we were suddenly locked in a wrestling match that I had never seen coming.
Despite his age, the general was bigger than me, more fed and certainly more rested. I felt him quickly overpowering me, positioning his body so that I couldn’t get any cheap shots in. I figured I only had one option considering our current situation, so I relaxed one of my hands on the baton just enough so I could flip the switch for it to discharge.
The corresponding shock went through both of us, knocking us back and leaving the baton once more lying in the middle of my cell. Just as I had hoped, I recovered first and was able to roll back to the baton, grabbing it for my life.
Only to get kicked right in the head.
The world spun for a minute and everything was pain, scrubbing all thoughts from my mind. When I recovered a few seconds later, the general was outside of the cell and had already activated the shield again.
Well…at least I had a stun baton now. A lot of good it would do in my cell, but I guessed I should be grateful for the little things.
The general stood, chest heaving as he glared pure murder at me. I gave him a little shrug, twirling the baton in my hand like a dare.
“You son of a—”
A massive explosion cut him off, rocking the hall and sending dirt raining down around my head in a little halo.
The general stumbled, swearing up a storm. I was tempted to say something snarky like Ciangi would, only to be deafened by alarms and blinded by flashing lights.
“What was that?” Eske asked, jumping to her feet and looking around wildly.
“I think that’s Gonzales!” Ciangi said, also eagerly scrambling into an upright position.
The general righted himself. “T
hat’s impossible,” he spat before turning to rush out the door at the end of the hall.
He never quite made it. Just when he was almost there, an entire section of the wall blasted itself to smithereens, sending him slamming into the opposite partition with enough force to knock him unconscious.
The hall was filled with smoke and dust for a minute, causing me to cough, but when it cleared, there was a solid hole where the wall once was, and three figures were walking through it.
“Heya, friendos,” Gonzales said, lifting the gun in her hand. “Welcome to our little rebellion. I heard someone was in need of a rescue?”
10
Looking for Group
I stared in a wide-eyed wonder at my friend. She had changed quite a lot in the months that we had been apart. Gone was her eye patch, and even her scanner-patch, instead replaced with an eye that had to be bionic, considering the bright blue light it glowed with. While she had a large blaster-rifle in hand, she also had what looked like a stun-staff strapped to her back and another, smaller blaster in a holster on one of her thick, muscular thighs.
“Hey there, Higgens,” she said with a smile. “Did y’all miss me?”
“You better believe it!” Ciangi answered, interrupting me. But I didn’t mind, because I had no idea what to say.
“Whoa, girl. Did you get a haircut? Wait, did all of you get haircuts?”
Ciangi shrugged, handling it about as coolly as humanly possible. “Processing, apparently.”
Gonzales let out a long curse. “Well, we’re making sure that they get theirs. But first…” She gestured to the two people beside her. One was a tall, absolutely jacked man who was somehow even more armed than Gonzales, and the other was a short, Ciangi-sized woman who had full body armor and what looked like an entire bandoleer full of bombs. “Meet my friends.”
“Hello,” I said weakly, wondering who they were and how they got caught up in our mess.
“Hello,” the tall one responded while the smaller one remained silent.
“Fregos, this is Higgens, Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske.” She motioned to the woman standing next to her. “And this small, silent one is Jannin.” She nodded, as if she was satisfied with that introduction. “Now that that’s taken care of, how about we get you guys out of here?”
“I think that would be the best course of action, yes,” Bahn said, practically pressing himself against the forcefield of his cell.
The three rescuers spread out, pressing the buttons on each of our cells to free us. Gonzales was the one to let me free, and she looked curiously to the stun baton in my hand. “Where’d you get that?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.
“The general and I had a little disagreement.”
“Ah, makes sense.” And that was it. Our grand reunion and she was already turning away to address the others.
Disappointing.
But I didn’t have time to voice that opinion, because she was already speaking again.
“Alright, there’s a back exit toward the fire escape that we can go through. I have a number of our forces fighting it out on the upper levels, but please don’t delude yourself that this is going to be nearly as easy as last time. We’re—” She paused, looking around. “Where’s Mimi?”
“You don’t know?” I asked, my stomach sinking.
“You mean you don’t know? What exactly is going on here?”
“We were separated ever since we were captured,” Eske said, approaching with her hand on the taller man’s—Fregos, I believed—shoulder. “We have no idea where she is.”
“Oh, right! Eske, these are for you.” Gonzales stepped forward and gently pressed something into the woman’s hands. Her grin was near blinding when she realized that it was a brand-new set of corrective goggles and put them on happily.
“Goodness gracious,” she breathed, looking around. “You have no idea how much I missed that.”
Gonzales just pointed to her still-glowing eye. “I think I might a little.”
“Ha, good point.”
As I much as I appreciated having Gonzales back, and all of the humor that came along with her, there was something more pressing to deal with.
“We need to find Mimi,” I said, perhaps a little more forcefully than I should have.
Gonzales fixed me with a look but still went on to press the button on her comm. “Hey, Lim, can you do a scan for any sort of unusual concentration of containment fields? We’re missing our queen lady.”
Yeah, but it’ll take a couple of minutes. This facility is even bigger than our scouts were aware of.
“That’s the way life is sometimes.” She looked over all of us and sighed. “I’m gonna arm up the objectives and do a floor-by-floor sweep going up until you get back to us. I have a feeling that if we stay here for long, we’re gonna end up surrounded.”
Roger-roger. I agree with that.
Her comm went dead and she nodded to Jannin, who handed a smaller ion-blaster to Ciangi and Bahn. Eske, however, Gonzales handed her stun-staff with a wink.
“You strike me as the type of person who knows how to use this.”
“You would be correct,” Eske said, taking the staff in hand before twirling it.
“Showoff,” Gonzales said teasingly before heading back toward the hole. “This way, guys. There are bulkheads at either side of this hall and they immediately shut down in the event of an alarm being tripped. If we want to get out, we’re gonna have to use the path we made up to a higher floor where we can start doing sweeps.”
“You seem…entirely too comfortable with this,” I murmured, following her with my stun baton ready. Fregos and Jannin took up the rear, no doubt to protect us. “And who are all these people?”
“Well, it’s been one heck of a journey since I saw—watch your step—you last. Trying to find Eske’s family caused me to build some connections with a lot of people who have a beef with our current government or have been actively burned by this coup.”
She continued explaining while we walked through the jagged, gaping tunnel that she had blown through. It only went a surprisingly short distance before suddenly cutting upwards, and it was then that I realized they had blown a hole in the floor of the level above us just to get to where we were. Those explosives had to be pretty darn powerful.
“You know how it is, you stop a kidnapping or two,” Gonzales kept on, “you break up a hit fight, word starts getting around. So, when I was almost back home with all of Eske’s family and picked up on the peace negotiations that were really anything but, I knew that I had to do something.
“So, I dropped them off on the planet, since little traitor Mari seemed to be hitching a ride with the humans and hadn’t started her plan of total conquest yet, and went back to Earth. From there, I started recruiting and calling up favors on people who had the skills I need. The next thing ya know, I’ve got my own little task force. Actually, Jannin here is an escapee from the same holding place we broke out of. Small little galaxy, isn’t it?”
“So, what’s you’re saying,” Ciangi said, sounding about as flabbergasted as I felt, “is that in the span of two weeks, you managed to assemble an entire rebellion?”
“Well, I don’t know about an entire rebellion,” Gonzales answered, crouching down and cupping her hands to give me a leg up into the room above us. “But it’s enough to get started.”
“Apparently,” I muttered, but then I was stepping up and being thrust upwards. I gripped a piece of jagged rock sticking out of the floor, using it to pull myself up. Once I was solidly in, I laid on my belly and offered a hand down to help someone else up.
One by one, we all ended up in the same room. Although I was concentrating on making sure everyone got up safe, I was beginning to hear the sounds of a firefight outside. Yelling, blaster fire, things falling over, people running, it was a very particular sound that one didn’t forget.
My mind was starting to flash back to the grand battle we’d had during the Great War with the invading aliens
, but I shoved that down.
“Are all of you ready?” Gonzales said, crouch-walking forward to the door. “Because once I open this, we’re going to be embroiled in a whole lot of awful, and although I’m going to do my best to make sure we all get out of here, I can’t guarantee it. This isn’t the kid stuff we’re used to, where they constantly underestimate us and think we’re not a threat, just something to be used. These soldiers are aiming to kill, and the leaders of the coup are very angry.”
“We’re ready,” I said, shoving down the fear. Once, long ago, she had beaten terrible odds to come rescue us, so the least I could do was return the favor.
“Alright, guys. Let’s go show these upstarts what a little bit of loyalty can do.”
She gave me a wink, her bionic eye closing and opening with the slightest of whirring sounds, then opened the door. She leaned out carefully, taking inventory of the hall only to jump back immediately as several bolts of blaster fire streaked past her.
“Jannin,” she said, moving to the side. “I believe this is a situation for you.”
The smaller woman still didn’t say anything but crept up to the door and took one of the bombs from her bandolier. With expert aim, she tossed it into the back of the hall then slammed the door shut.
But even the closed door couldn’t buffer the large explosion and I felt a wave of heat wash over me. It lasted for a few seconds, then dissipated, and when I turned back to the entrance… Well, there wasn’t really a door there anymore. Or a doorway. Just a gaping hole that was dripping molten metal.
“Fregos, wanna hit that with your coolant?”
The bigger man nodded and walked forward, pulling something from the many pockets in his pants and spraying it onto the superheated metal.
There was a whole lot of crackling and popping, with sparks going everywhere. Once more, I ducked away to protect my face, and when I looked forward, the broken entrance was no longer a fiery opening of death.
“Alright, let’s try that again,” Gonzales said, peeking out into the hall. This time, there was no hail of blaster fire and we headed out.
Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 47