Hitting the Target

by Evangeline Anderson

  The Science Officer drew himself up to his full, diminutive height and got a stubborn look on his pale, bespectacled face.

  “It doesn’t work like that.” He spoke almost primly. “All our equipment is set up to maintain the Barrier and to bring it back up when it flickers because of power failure. Which, regrettably, it does—far more often than we would like. So you see, I cannot shut it off.”

  “That’s a lie,” Mia said, speaking up to Trey’s surprise. She had been almost entirely silent since the Commandant had shown her dark history.

  “What do you mean?” he asked her. “How do you know?”

  “When they were bringing me over from the Republic to the South, I heard one of them tell the Commandant there was a ‘scheduled flicker’ and we had to hurry to make it on time,” she said. “So they do have a way of turning it off and on. He just doesn’t want to show you.” She nodded at the Science Officer who was looking paler than ever.

  “That’s a lie,” he muttered unconvincingly. “Who are you going to believe—me or a woman?”

  “I’ll take her word over yours any day. Even if she is a female,” Trey said dryly. “Now show me the damn controls or I’ll burn a hole through you and just set a charge and blow this entire room and all the equipment in it sky high.”

  Science Officer Hndlr looked like he wanted to protest again but when Trey motioned with his blaster he at last jerked his head in the direction of a small door at the end of the room.

  Trey followed him, walking past the rows of instrument banks which looked important but seemed to be of little interest to Hndlr. Placing his hand flat on the metal door, the Science Officer waited until a red light outlined his palm and fingers and then pushed it open.

  “The stuff outside is just the routine maintenance and power flow equipment,” he explained, when Trey gave him a questioning look. “This is the control room—where we actually turn the Great Barrier off and on.”

  Trey stepped into the room, making sure to keep Hndlr in front of him with his blaster pointed at the skinny back. What he saw was a surprisingly simple set-up. There was a desk with a large black console box sitting on it. The box had a stick-like lever which was currently pushed up to the “on” position. A large vidscreen, mounted on the wall opposite the desk, showed a clear picture of the Great Barrier and the guards who patrolled it. It reached up into the air, vast and blue and crackling with magneto-electric energy like a wave frozen forever at its highest peak.

  It was indeed an impressive sight. Trey had been obliged to fly right up out of the atmosphere to get over it so that it wouldn’t affect his ship’s instruments. Also, he noticed that the guards at the border all carried non-ferromagnetic weapons—there were a lot of copper pulse pistols evident. Obviously it wouldn’t do to have a loaded magnetic gun so close to the vast wall of blue energy.

  “That looks simple enough,” Trey remarked, eyeing the console box with the on/off lever.

  “It might look like anyone could turn the Barrier off and on, but I assure you, it is not true,” Hndlr said proudly. “The switch is keyed to my handprint alone. No other in the entire Republic can control the Barrier—well, other than the Commandant, that is,” he added.

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t kill you,” Trey said, frowning. “So this was your job—sitting here and turning the Barrier off and on whenever the powers that be told you to?”

  “Yes.” The Science Officer straightened his shoulders. “The Ruling Council often scheduled flickers—both brief and prolonged. But I was allowed to turn it off and on as well—trying to catch as many prospective defectors as possible, you know.”

  “So you sat here and waited for people to try and get through the Barrier when it was down and then fried as many of them as you could?” Mia sounded horrified.

  “Well…not always.” Hndlr looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes we had orders to let an especially troublesome dissenter go free. Then I just had to turn off the Barrier and sit and watch as they ran across the No Man’s Land and went South.”

  “But most of the time you were frying people for fun?” Trey growled. “Just watching until they got up to the Barrier, then turning it off, then flipping it back on again as soon as they were in the middle so you could kill them?”

  Hndlr began to look positively pale.

  “It was my job,” he protested. “And besides, it was necessary. Defectors had to be taught a lesson! How else could others learn not to try to escape?”

  “You sick bastard,” Trey growled. He could just imagine the thin, pale Hndlr sitting here in the dark, surveying the Barrier on the view screen, flipping it off and on for fun and trying to fry as many people as he could like they were so many bugs in a giant insect zapper. And to think, he’d believed this male was innocent because his beast hadn’t smelled the torture chamber on him. This little bastard had probably killed more people than all the other guards put together!

  “I assure you, I was only doing my job,” Hndlr protested again. “Only doing what the Ruling Council ordered! It’s not my fault if the Barrier killed people—they shouldn’t have been trying to get out in the first place!”

  “Yes, Goddess forbid they should try to find a better way of life for themselves when they were in a living hell,” Trey growled sarcastically. “And you only killed them because your bosses said so. How many did you fry, Hndlr? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  “I didn’t keep count of the subjects I terminated,” the Science Officer said primly. “It was enough for me to do my duty to the Council and to The EYE. And sometimes a let a few get through, here and there—otherwise it wouldn’t look random.”

  Trey couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Turn it off,” he said, motioning for Hndlr to take hold of the control lever. “Now—I want to see you do it.”

  “Very well.” Giving him a nervous look, Hndlr sat behind the desk and reached for the lever with the ease of long practice. With a quick jerk of his wrist, he flipped the lever to the off position.

  The effect was immediate. On the viewscreen, the vast, crackling wall of blue energy abruptly disappeared, as though it had never been there. The wide No Man’s Land—the empty space it usually occupied—was a scorched swathe of blackened ground where nothing grew.

  Immediately a walkie-com hanging on the wall beside the desk crackled to life.

  “Major Hndlr, do you read me? Major Hndlr, this is Captain Grnstng here at the Barrier. What in the hell is going on there? We weren’t informed of a scheduled flicker today!”

  “Answer him,” Trey said when the Science Officer sat there looking at the walkie-com helplessly. “Go on—pick it up. Tell him it’s a special drill ordered by the Commandant.”

  “A drill?” Hndlr frowned.

  “Yes. Tell him that he and all his men—all the guards along the border—are to walk up and lay all their weapons in the no-man’s land,” Trey ordered.

  “What?” Hndlr sputtered. “But he’ll never believe that’s a real order!”

  “Do it. Now.” Trey prodded him with his blaster. “Tell him it’s a direct order from the Commandant himself.”

  Hndlr gave him another alarmed look but complied at last, picking up the walkie-com and repeating Trey’s words. As expected, there was some pushback from the Captain but Hndlr outranked him and the Commandant outranked them both—or he had, anyway, before Trey had killed him.

  Also, even more than most soldiers, the PR guards had been trained to follow orders exactly. It probably helped them sleep at night when they thought of all the innocent people they had gunned down, Trey thought grimly. They could always just claim, as Hndlr had, that none of the deaths were their fault— after all, they were just following orders.

  Grumbling, the Captain complied with the order and compelled his men to do so too. They watched on the viewscreen as all of the guards walked carefully to the edge of the No Man’s Land and placed their weapons where the Barrier normally stood.

  “Tell them to leave
all the weapons and step back now,” Trey said to the Science Officer.

  He was tempted to have Hndlr tell the guards to stay in the No Man’s Land and turn the Barrier back on with them there, frying them all. But he and his beast had dispensed enough justice today. They’d had to kill the guards in The EYE’s headquarters in order to get to Mia—there was no choice about that. But he hadn’t been sent here by the Goddess to deal death to everyone he saw.

  Let the mobs that would doubtless come charging over the border once the news spread that the Barrier was down for good, take care of the guards, he thought. It would be poetic justice and a fitting end for them all, to be mobbed by the very people they had oppressed and kept imprisoned on this side of the Barrier for so long.

  “Now turn it back on,” he told Hndlr.

  “But…but that will ruin all the weapons!” the little scientist sputtered. “They won’t be able to stop defectors from leaving!”

  “Exactly,” Trey said dryly. “You’re beginning to grasp my plan, I see.”

  “But—” Hndlr started to protest again.

  “Do it.” Trey nudged him with the barrel of his blaster. “Now.”

  Reluctantly, the Science Officer threw the lever up into the “on” position once more. At once, the Great Barrier reappeared, frying the assembled weapons to so many charred and smoking lumps which could only dimly be seen through the vast wall of energy.

  “Hey! What the hell?” squawked the Captain over the walkie-com. “What the—?” But Trey reached over and snapped the damn thing off, plunging the small, dark room into a blessed silence.

  “Now turn it off again,” Trey growled.

  Hndlr pulled the lever into the down position and glared at him.

  “Now what? Do you expect me to sit here turning it off and on all day long?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for years?” Trey demanded. “But no—I hope you enjoyed our little exercise just now. It’s the last time you or anybody else is going to put up that damn wall. From now on, it stays down.”

  Hndlr stood to face him, a look of desperate determination on his face.

  “I don’t care what you say, the Barrier must be maintained! You can’t turn it off for good—you can’t!”

  “Watch me.” Trey turned his blaster to the maximum setting—which he hardly ever used because it was so needlessly destructive—and aimed it at the box with the Barrier-controlling lever.

  With a wild cry, Hndlr jumped in front of the box just as Trey fired. The blast of super-heated light passed right through him like a hot knife through soft cheese, making a gaping hole in his abdomen. He fell backwards and the metal of the black box melted into the hole, as though it was trying to fill back in his missing guts.

  “Must…protect. The EYE…always…watching,” Hdnlr choked and then he slumped over the desk, the metal of the melted box almost filling the cavity where his internal organs had been only a moment before.

  “Ugh!” Mia took a step back, her face drawn into a look of pity and revulsion. “What a horrible way to go,” she whispered.

  “He died protecting what he loved,” Trey said shortly. “Come on—“I’m going to set an electronic pulse blast that will fry the rest of this equipment and then we need to get back to the ship.”

  He turned to go but Mia caught him by the sleeve of the ill-fitting uniform he was wearing.

  “Please, Trey,” she said urgently. “Did you go to the basements? I’m so afraid—what if my grandmother is down there?”

  Some of the coolness he’d been feeling towards her thawed a little when he saw the fear and anxiety in her lovely blue eyes. He remembered Teela’s words—saying that people were forced to spy for The EYE and the position of VAR—Voluntary Agent of the Republic—was anything but voluntary despite the name. Maybe her grandmother was why Mia had started spying in the first place. Maybe they held the one she loved most over her head and threatened her harm unless Mia did exactly as the Commandant wanted.

  “No,” he said. “I started on the ground floor and made my way up—I was looking for you.”

  “Can we check now?” she asked urgently. “I have to know—have to be sure she isn’t there.”

  “All right, but quickly,” Trey said. “We’ll go, but stay behind me. I think I got rid of all the guards in the place but there might still be some down there.”

  She nodded agreement and he led the way to the lift and pushed the last button—a black one with no name or number on it. The lift hummed to life and began its slow way down.

  “Trey…” Mia’s voice was soft and halting, as though she could barely get the words out. “Trey, I…there’s something I need to tell you. Something we need…need to talk about,” she said hesitantly.

  “If it’s what the Commandant showed us before I killed him, we can talk about it later,” Trey said shortly. He wanted to hear Mia’s side of things, but they really didn’t have time right now.

  Mia shrugged her narrow shoulders unhappily. “We do need to talk about that but it’s actually something else.”

  “Mia…” Trey tried to keep the impatience out of his voice but didn’t succeed very well. “This really isn’t the time. The minute those doors open, we might be fighting for our lives.” He nodded at the dull silver doors of the lift.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right—it can wait.” She looked down at her feet, which were clad in paper slippers, he saw, which matched the dull gray prison-type dress she was wearing. Her long black hair was damp and a faint whiff of harsh chemical disinfectants came from it, as though she’d been through some kind of decontamination shower before he’d come from her. Maybe that was the scent his beast had noticed when he said Mia smelled “wrong.”

  Trey had an impulse to ask if she was all right, if anything bad had been done to her, but he squashed it ruthlessly. They had to concentrate on the business at hand right now. Time enough later to deal with everything else, including the distance that now lay between them.

  The rest of the trip down was silent but the moment the dull silver doors opened at the bottom, they heard a sharp slapping sound. A hoarse groaning and a voice begging, “No more—please, no more!” accompanied it. The smell of pain and fear and tears came wafting in like an evil wind.

  Someone was being flogged.

  It made the healer in Trey want to rush out at once and stop the abuse, then start treating the patient. But the warrior in him made him cautious. He motioned for Mia to stay behind him and stepped out of the lift.

  They were going to have to be very careful down here if they didn’t want to wind up as guests in the basement themselves.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Mia kept behind him, her stomach tied in knots. She was beginning to feel sick and shaky, but she wasn’t sure if it was the constant tension inside her or the poison at work. She’d been trying to tell Trey about the poison—about the fact that she was feeling worse all the time. But she couldn’t bring herself to insist when he cut her off so sharply. They would have to talk about it later.

  Besides, now she was worried for a different reason. Was Neemah down here? She hoped not but she couldn’t be sure what the Commandant might have done, and she hadn’t gotten a chance to ask him before Trey killed him. If only he hadn’t showed that awful vid of her killing that patient before he died! If only—

  “Stay back! There’s a guard ahead but I think he’s the only one,” Trey whispered to her, breaking her train of thought.

  The basement was dark and lined around the perimeter with cells. There were support pillars placed at regular intervals and Trey made her hide behind one while he went to deal with the guard. The man didn’t even notice the massive Kindred coming up behind him—he was too busy flogging a man with a pain lash. The hapless prisoner was stripped to the waist and tied to an overhead beam and he jerked with every blow of the whip. It was his cries and moans they had heard when they first exited the lift, Mia thought.

  “Stop it!” Trey barked sharpl
y. The guard turned, shock and anger registering on his brutish features almost at the same time. He raised the whip as though to strike Trey with it, but the big Kindred was too quick for him. He shot the guard with the sleek, deadly weapon that had killed both the Commandant and Major Hndlr. Then he went looking for more guards.

  Mia hurried to help the man who was tied to the overhead beams. His eyes were swollen almost shut as though someone had been punching him in the face and his back was a mass of bloody lacerations. The healer’s aide in her wanted to help and she lowered him as gently as she could to the ground so that he was lying on his stomach.

  “I’ll see if I can find a care kit,” she told him. He only moaned and shook his head. Mia wondered sickly how long he had been down here—how much torture he had endured.

  As she was about to go search for a kit, Trey came back.

  “There was only one other guard and I took care of him,” he informed her. “Do you want to look for your grandmother now?”

  “Oh, yes!” Mia jumped up, somewhat clumsily since it seemed to be getting harder to feel her feet. “But I was also going to look for a care kit—this man needs medical attention now.”

  “So I see.” Trey frowned. “You go look—I’ll stay with him.”

  Starting in the far corner so she didn’t miss a single cell, Mia made a trip around the perimeter of the basement. She had to come back almost at once after finding the cells locked. But luckily, the first guard Trey had killed had the keying mechanism clipped to his belt. So she was able to go back and start opening them one by one.

  The first few were empty—just dark holes in the wall with barely enough room to sit on the tiny, narrow bench at the back. No one but a child would be able to stand in the cramped cells, Mia thought, though she thankfully didn’t find any children.

  She did, however, find many, many sick and injured people. Some of them cried when she let them out, some begged for death. One or two simply huddled in their cells and refused to come out at all even when Mia coaxed them and promised that no one would hurt them.