I followed their scent to a closed door at the end of a corridor. Similar rooms lined the hallway. I looked into one of them. A bare metal table stood in the center, with heavy leather straps at the hands, feet and chest. Metal cranks attached to each strap. A pulley stood above the table, presumably to suspend the victim in the air. Sharpened metal combs, small curved knives, lancets, finger and toe presses, and lead mallets hung on the walls. A small electric brazier stood next to the table with three iron rods of varying thickness sticking out of the top.
Winston Smith, I surmised, was in for an unpleasant time.
The walls were thick, with insulated sound-proofing. Most of the back wall was covered by a one-way mirror. Next to the mirror, another door opened into a second corridor. I poked my head out. The corridor was empty.
Excellent. I walked down the corridor until I came to the last room, which was a bit larger but otherwise much the same as all the rest. Through the mirror, I could see Winston Smith strapped to the table. He was naked, his torso covered with old scars. The woman leaned over him, holding a small, sharp knife. She looked at his chest, cocked her head to the side and pursed her lips. “Where shall we begin?” She said it almost to herself, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Don’t do this, Celeste,” Winston Smith said. “Please.”
She made a small clucking sound between her teeth. “But I’m going to, you silly boy. You know this. It’s why you’re here.” She shook her head. “You simply have to play, don’t you? You can’t help yourself.”
Winston Smith gasped and pulled at the bonds holding his arms strapped above his head. Celeste smiled and stepped back for a moment, inspecting his scarred, naked torso, then she reached forward and carved a thin line on Winston Smith’s abdomen with the knife. He screamed.
“That’s one,” Celeste said. “You owe me two more.”
“No!”
“Oh, David,” she said sadly. “Why do you do this? You won’t be able to keep your appetites secret for much longer, and if you keep this up, I won’t be able to stop. Soon, maybe not this time or even the next, but soon I’ll take a toe or a finger and if you persist in playing games that you cannot win, it will be an ear or even an eye.” A far away look came over her face. “I’ve never taken an eye…”
Winston Smith screamed and Celeste’s eyes snapped back to his face. “You stupid, stupid boy,” she said. “You’re beginning to make me angry. It isn’t smart to make me angry, but then, you’ve never been very smart, now have you?”
The brazier was glowing, the irons smoking. Celeste glanced at them, picked up one by a leather handle and waved it slowly under Smith’s face. The tip glowed red. His wide eyes followed it as he panted and struggled against the straps. She smiled into his face and without taking her eyes from his, she reached down with the glowing iron and touched it to his chest. His skin made a popping sound as the layer of subcutaneous fat melted. His back arched. He screamed again and tears dripped down his face.
“That’s two,” Celeste said. She sniffed and took a step back. “I’ll leave you here for a bit. You can think about the third.” She cocked her head to the side and gave him a lazy grin. “I’m going to get something to drink. Chastising bad little boys is thirsty work. I’ll be back.” Then she shrugged. “Oh, yes, I will. We’ll see how you feel in a little while. Think about it. And do think about your last forfeit. Maybe I will take a finger. A finger seems entirely appropriate.” She turned and walked out the front door, locking it behind her.
Winston Smith slumped back, his eyes closed.
I waited thirty seconds and then walked into the room. Smith’s eyes grew larger as he saw me and his struggles grew frantic. “Hello, David,” I said.
“Who are you?” he gasped. “What do you want?”
“I’m a concerned citizen,” I said.
He stared at me, hope blossoming on his face. “Let me out,” he said. “Please.”
What an idiot. “You’re not very good at this, are you David? Celeste is right. Why do you persist in playing games that you can’t win?”
He looked away from me and sneered. It seemed a rather hollow sneer. He swallowed. “Fuck you,” he said.
“She’s not your biggest fan, is she?”
He tried to shrug, which didn’t work very well since he was tied down by all four limbs.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” I said. “And you’re going to answer them.”
He pretended to ignore me. “First question,” I said. “Why were you in Aphelion, six months ago?”
That startled him. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Jesus, Winston, first ‘fuck you’ and now ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Can you say anything at all that isn’t a cliché?”
He stared at me and said nothing. I shook my head. “I’ll ask you again; why were you in Aphelion?”
“I’ve never been to Aphelion,” he said.
I picked up one of the irons and waved it under his nose, close enough for him to smell the red-hot metal and feel the heat. He hissed. “Don’t lie to me, Winston. I can tell when you’re lying. I will punish every lie you tell me. Now, why were you in Aphelion six months ago?”
He seemed to relax for a moment in his bonds and shook his head slowly. His jaws clenched. He ground his teeth and suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head, the breath rattled in his throat, his mouth opened and he slumped back down to the table, limp.
“Winston?” I said. He didn’t answer. He wasn’t breathing. “Oh, shit,” I muttered. A thin, sharp scent came to my nostrils. I opened his mouth and peered inside. A back molar was crushed. He had carried poison in a false tooth.
He was a small man, I noted; muscular, not at all malnourished but small. Sad little fucker.
Time to be gone, before Celeste returned. I shook my head and walked out the back way. Maybe Jennifer would have better luck with Derek Landry. I hoped so.
“So, I spent some time talking with the ladies,” Jennifer said.
“Ladies?
Jennifer gave me a small frown and raised her eyebrows. “Would you prefer ‘working girls’?”
Something about her disapproving smile made me shift uncomfortably.
“Very few of them would have chosen this life but they weren’t given much choice. There aren’t a lot of ways to get ahead in Gath.”
I nodded. “True,” I said.
“Anyway, they’ll sit and talk with anybody who buys them a drink. It’s part of their job, and maybe a quarter of the customers are women. A lot of them prefer the women, but Derek Landry is a regular client.”
“Go on.”
“He likes his sex straight up, nothing fancy, though every once in awhile, he asks for a two-on-one.”
I nodded. “Two-on-one is a common male fantasy.”
Jennifer smiled. “I mean he likes a woman and another man.”
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s not as common,” Jennifer said.
“I guess not,” I admitted.
“But not as unusual as you might think.” Jennifer sipped her drink, evidently thinking about two-on-one, then shrugged. “Anyway, nobody told the ladies to keep their mouths shut and Derek Landry likes to talk.”
We were sitting in an alcove back downstairs, our escort of troopers sipping drinks at nearby tables. I didn’t want to leave quite yet, not until they discovered Winston Smith’s body. I was curious to see what sort of response that would elicit.
“Landry comes from Neece. He was military. He either got tired of it or was forced out. None of them know. After he left the Service, he tried to set himself up as private security, but Neece is a peaceful little place and there wasn’t much call for it. Winston Smith was recruiting and the pay is better in Gath. They call their division the Foreign Rangers. They’re well paid but they’re never allowed to become citizens. That doesn’t bother most of them. The ones who survive are generally happy to take their money when their tour is up and leave.”<
br />
None of this surprised me, It was barely interesting background but not particularly useful.
“Who is Winston Smith?” I used the word ‘is’ quite deliberately. Jennifer did not yet know that Winston Smith was no longer among the living.
“Ah, now that is an interesting question,” Jennifer said. She gave me a sly smile. “Or at least, it has an interesting answer. The mansion that we can’t penetrate?”
I nodded.
“Smith, or David Lovett as he is known here in Gath, lives in the mansion with a variable number of other people, most of them male. They don’t speak Basic among themselves. They’re all in good shape, but they’re all small.” She smiled. “What does that tell you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, though I was beginning to have suspicions. “Why don’t you tell me?”
At that moment, the elevator doors opened. Derek Landry walked out, accompanied by Winston Smith, who was supposed to be dead. But wasn’t. They threaded their way through the crowd, walked through the front door and were gone.
“Oh, Shit,” I said.
Chapter 12
In the morning, we unmoored the ship and drifted slowly away from Gath.
Shortly before our departure, our drones reported that ten men and five women left the mansion and boarded two airships of their own. The size of the crews could not be determined but they were large ships, each almost as large as the Endeavor. Both were travelling east, at about the same speed as ourselves. The mansion appeared to be deserted.
A quick search through the news vids revealed that a woman named Celeste Hazan had been found strangled the night before at Club Menagerie. Police were investigating. I assumed that Winston Smith had been a little annoyed when he woke up from his self-induced nap. I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for Celeste, however. I wondered if she had taken a finger, or maybe even an eye, before he killed her.
“I don’t like this,” Captain Jones said.
I grunted. None of us liked it. The two airships kept up a steady pace, always a few kilometers in front of us. They didn’t hail us or acknowledge our presence in any way, but they stayed within sight. A day later, however, they turned off, heading South. All of us breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now that our traveling companions have left us, I think we’ll change our heading,” Captain Jones said to me. “Just in case.”
A wise decision, I thought.
We changed our course to the Northeast. A day or so would be added to the trip, but that was of little importance. Better to arrive late than not arrive at all. We floated on for a day, seeing nothing amiss, and then drifted down to a landing at Hesten, a small independent city known for the mining of fire garnets, the fossilized remains of a resinous, long extinct tree native to Illyria, similar to the amber of old Earth. We moored the ship, gave the crew leave and spent an uneventful night. In the morning, we set out again upon our new course, intending to take a circular route back home.
It didn’t work. Six hours later, our sensors detected two foreign airships hovering on the horizon and a few hours later, they drifted back into view. The Captain looked grim.
By now, the terrain beneath our ship had grown dry and sparse. The rock turned black and then red and soon the grass vanished and golden sand with black and red streaks cutting through it stretched to the horizon. This was the Corona, the blasted remains of an asteroid strike over a million years old. The asteroid had shattered the land, diverting rivers, raising mountains, permanently changing weather patterns, and like the much smaller strike that decimated the Eastern continent a million years later, had caused nuclear winter and mass extinctions over a quarter of the planet.
The Corona was inhabited now only by insects, snakes and small mammals. It stretched for almost 1000 kilometers in front of us.
“Why did we come this way?” I asked. “We’re alone, here.”
The Captain shrugged. “Where would you suggest? Every route we could possibly take crosses desolate areas. There are a thousand spots for a convenient ambush, if that’s what they’re planning.”
It was true. At least a third of the continent was covered by swamps or empty desert. I shook my head and kept any further misgivings to myself, but a few hours later, it became apparent that my misgivings were correct. “They’re coming closer,” Captain Jones said. Jennifer and I stood near him on the bridge. The crew went about their business and otherwise ignored us.
It was his ship and he knew how to run it. I kept my mouth shut.
“All hands,” the Captain announced, his voice thundering over the intercoms. “Evasive action.”
It wasn’t going to work, even I could see that. The air was still, the sky nearly cloudless. The sun glowed hot over our heads and shimmered off the sands beneath the ship. A few black, rocky spires rose upward from the desert, large enough to shelter a few men, perhaps, but there was nowhere for a ship to hide.
They turned with us, creeping closer. A porthole opened and the Captain cursed under his breath. A cylindrical object poked out of the porthole and then glowed. A beam of green light snapped through the air and crackled against our shields. The ship rotated, distributing heat from the enemy laser, but then ten more portholes opened and suddenly the air was filled with crackling beams of energy, booming cannons and the rumble of artillery shells.
“Fire at will,” the Captain ordered.
The second ship floated toward our opposite side and began its assault. We hit the first ship with a missile, which seemed to stagger it for an instant but then it came on. Our lasers licked at both ships’ screens but it was futile. We were doing some minor damage but they had twice our fire power.
The first layer of shielding gave way with a flare of light, and the second was close to overload. The Captain shook his head. “The next salvo will finish us,” he said. He hit a red button on his console and klaxons sent a deafening wail into the air: the signal to abandon ship.
Captain Jones turned to me. “Good luck,” he said. “Both of you. I’ve sent a report to Aphelion. At least they’ll know what’s happened.”
Good for them, no help for us.
We ran down the stairs to the pod deck. Most of the crew were already gone. Jennifer and I strapped ourselves in, I flipped a switch and we dropped. The escape pods were shaped like eggs, with three fins in the back and two small wings on either side. They half fell, half glided through the air, changing direction in abrupt jerks and shudders, trying to evade enemy fire.
Jennifer’s face was white. “Take this,” I said, and handed her an open plastic bag with straps. She strapped it over her face. I took another one just in time as the next sudden spin caused lunch to surge up into my mouth.
Jennifer moaned in distress and I probably moaned back. I don’t remember. The next instant, the jets began to fire, increasing our spin, but we leveled out within a few seconds and began to turn. An escarpment of black rock rose ahead of us. “Brace yourself,” I said, as the pod rolled back and forth through the air.
The controls were simple, one stick to influence direction. Everything else was pre-programmed into the pod. I guided us in a descending circle, toward the black escarpment, then the jets cut out and the pod shuddered as the chute deployed. A few seconds later, we hit the sand with a solid thunk. Bolts in the top and sides popped out, propelled by pressurized steam and the pod split open. Jennifer grabbed one survival kit and I took the other and then we stumbled out and ran for the jagged rock, where we huddled under a stone outcropping.
The silence was sudden and abrupt. “Sit tight,” Jennifer whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered.
She gave me a quizzical smile. “I don’t know. It seemed appropriate.”
I took a deep breath. We crouched down under the shelter of the overhead rocks and did our best to stay still. After thirty minutes, one of the foreign airships floated around the escarpment and hovered over our empty escape pod. A laser thrummed and the pod exploded. The ship slowly rose i
n a widening circle.
A burst of machine gun fire and three small explosions sounded over the next few hours. The sun began to set. Still, we waited. It was almost midnight when we finally crept out from beneath the escarpment. I gingerly walked out onto the sand, scanning the sky. Stars twinkled high overhead and both moons softly illuminated the desert sands. I could pick out the heat signatures of small mammals. The two airships may have been hovering over the horizon but if so, they were far enough away that I couldn’t see them. “I think they’ve left,” I said.
She nodded and hefted her pack, then gave a tentative grin. I grinned back. We were alive. At the moment, that felt like victory. “Where to?” she asked.
I looked at my interface but it was purely out of habit. There were no people in the Corona, and no transmission towers. I had no signal.
“What makes you think I know?”
She shrugged. “I know you.” I looked at her. She looked back. I had never spoken to Jennifer of my more unusual abilities. She smiled. Finally, I shrugged. “That way,” I said, and pointed to the Northeast. “There’s water.” I could smell the water, and high over our heads, I could sense the planet’s magnetic field
“Water is good. We need water.”
I scanned the sands and picked up two large heat signatures about a kilometer from our position. They were heading our way and ten minutes later, Commander Boyd walked up to us along with Craig Bowman, one of the crew. “Glad you’re alive,” the Commander said. “You’re the only ones we’ve found.”
“The Captain?”
“They got him with a laser burst. We were in the same pod. We hid in a crevasse.”
I shook my head and silently promised myself that somebody—I didn’t know who yet, not exactly, but Winston Smith at least and whoever else was with him would pay for this. Of course, that would depend on us staying alive—not the most certain prospect...
“Let’s get going, then.” I said.
The Commander nodded and we started off, with me taking the lead. A few kilometers later we came to a small spring bubbling out of some rock and forming a small pond that seeped into the sand. I doubted that this pond was permanent. In the summer, it would vanish, but life was persistent. Tiny tadpoles and brine shrimp skittered away as we shined our lights into the pond.
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