Failsafe

by David Mack

  The interrogator paced around Stevens, staring suspiciously at him. His steps crunched on the frozen-dirt floor. “Let’s start with something easier,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Hang on, Fabian,” Abramowitz said over the transceiver, which made her voice sound intimately close. “Don’t say anything yet. I’m still cooking up a cover story for you.” Now that the Venekans had, albeit unwittingly, destroyed his, Gomez’s, and Hawkins’s tricorders, Abramowitz now held the away team’s only true high-tech resource. Gomez had opened a four-way channel a few minutes ago, and now the entire away team was listening in on his interrogation.

  “Just relax and play it cool,” Hawkins said, joining the conversation. He sounded like he was whispering. “Abramowitz, did you download any Venekan legal data? Does Stevens have any rights in there?”

  “I’m not sure,” Abramowitz said. “Hold on.”

  The Venekan interrogator stopped in front of Stevens and leaned down until he was almost nose-to-nose with him. He stared into Stevens’s eyes. “Why were you observing our camp?” he said, an edge of menace implicit in his tone.

  “Don’t answer him until we know what they know,” Gomez said. Stevens wondered if having a party-line transceiver in one’s head was anything like having multiple-personality disorder. Probably not, he concluded.

  The interrogator’s breath was hot and foul. It reminded Stevens of curry and cilantro, with a hint of sickly sweet cinnamon. Then he reconsidered—the odor might not be from the man’s breath at all. Could be his cologne, Stevens realized. No way to tell. Can’t really ask. Oh, well.

  “Which of you is in command?” the interrogator said. “Where’s your base?” Stevens realized that the only thing that was keeping him from falling asleep with utter boredom right now was the remote possibility that, at any moment, the interrogator might summon someone else to continue the questioning.

  Someone equipped with painful implements of persuasion. Someone unburdened by the weight of a conscience.

  Abramowitz piped up over the transceiver. “Good news and bad news,” she said. “Good news is, the Venekan Army has strict laws against the use of physical or psychological coercion in the questioning of military prisoners. Bad news is, they have no problem detaining suspects indefinitely without charge, as long as it’s in a war zone.”

  “Where are your weapons?” the interrogator said. Stevens raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Only after he’d done it did he consider the possibility that the gesture might not mean the same thing to Tenebians as it did to humans. Fortunately for him, the interrogator seemed to grasp his meaning just fine.

  “Okay,” Abramowitz said, “I’ve compiled the thirty most popular male given names and the hundred most common surnames for X’Mari men in your age group, and cross-referenced them with demographic data for this region. Here’s your cover: Your name is Menno Yorlik, and you’re a textile trader from Navoc. We’re neighbors of yours, traveling toward—”

  “All right, we’re done,” the interrogator said. He walked away from Stevens and stepped outside through a flap in the front of the tent. “Come get this guy,” he shouted to someone.

  Figures, Stevens thought. Just as I get an alibi…

  A pair of soldiers stepped past the interrogator and entered the tent, followed by another officer, an older man whose hair was turning platinum white at the temples.

  “Did he tell you anything?” the older officer said. The soldiers unlocked Stevens’s handcuffs.

  The interrogator shook his head with disgust. “I’m not even sure he can talk,” he said.

  The soldiers lifted Stevens from the chair and dragged him out of the tent and across the compound, to another empty tent on the far side. They led him inside and ordered him to wrap his arms around the tent’s center-support pole. He did as he was told, and they slapped the handcuffs back on him before marching back out. It could always be worse, Stevens consoled himself as he eyed his predicament. At least I’m not stuck here with Tev.

  “The patrol leader tells me you were the one giving orders to the other two,” the interrogator said, his putrid breath warming the back of Gomez’s ear. Gomez tested the strength of the handcuffs, which bit painfully into her wrists. The chair she sat on was lightweight, but its metal frame was strong—and not the least bit flexible.

  “I know you’re the one in charge of this scout team,” the interrogator said. He shifted his weight and whispered in her other ear. “The penalties for you are going to be a lot worse than for your friends. Unless you want to cooperate?”

  “Good-news-bad-news time again,” Abramowitz said over the transceiver. “Bad news first: He’s not lying. If they convict you three as spies and decide that you’re the one in charge, they can execute you on the spot.”

  “What’s the good news?” Stevens said, echoing Gomez’s thoughts.

  “I lied,” Abramowitz said. “There isn’t any.”

  “You X’Mari girls love to play soldier, don’t you?” the interrogator said, leaning uncomfortably close to Gomez’s face. “Love to pretend you’re one of the men?”

  “No more than you do,” Gomez said, breaking her defiant wall of silence.

  The interrogator wrinkled his brow and glowered. “Droll,” he said. “Does this mean you’re prepared to start answering questions?”

  “Only if you’re ready to meet my conditions,” Gomez said. The interrogator folded his arms and eyed her warily.

  “Such as?”

  “You need to go shave and wash your face,” she said.

  He chuckled. “Why?” he said, his condescension naked in its intent. “Do my rough looks scare you?”

  “No,” she said with a lethal smile. “I just don’t want you to scratch me when you kneel down and kiss my cold, blue ass.”

  The interrogator sighed in disgust, turned, and stepped outside through the flap in the front of the tent. “You can take her back now,” he shouted to the soldiers waiting outside.

  Hawkins looked his interrogator in the eye, sizing him up from the moment he sat down and felt the handcuffs click shut around his wrists. The interrogator’s face looked gaunt and his eyes drooped with exhaustion, as if he hadn’t had a meal or a decent night’s sleep in weeks. He wore the manner of a man trying to be intimidating, but his body language was that of a man who would much rather leave this job to someone—anyone—else.

  The interrogator rubbed his eyes and sighed. “I don’t suppose you’ll cooperate, either?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Hawkins said casually. “We’re on the same side.” The interrogator blinked and actually did a double take.

  “We’re what?”

  Hawkins looked around, as if he were genuinely shocked by the man’s response. “What? You mean they didn’t tell you?”

  “Huh? Who didn’t—? Tell me what?”

  “I’m a Venekan agent,” Hawkins said. “I’m undercover.”

  “Come again?” The interrogator was starting to sound upset.

  “I’m infiltrating the X’Mari Resistance.”

  “What?” The interrogator sounded incredulous. “All three of you?” Hawkins rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “No, just me,” he said. “I’m only using them to enhance my credibility. They’re part of my cover.”

  The interrogator’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  “What agency are you with?”

  Hawkins snorted derisively, as if the officer had just made the stupidest request in the world. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?” the interrogator said.

  Hawkins shrugged. “You obviously don’t have the clearance for that information.”

  “The hell I don’t!” The interrogator pointed furiously at the rank insignia on his collar. “See these stars?”

  Hawkins tuned out the rest of the away team’s laughter, which came in bursts over his subaural transceiver.

  “If you had clearance,” he said, “you’d have been briefed already. But
you obviously don’t know who I am, so you can’t have been cleared. Sorry, nothing personal.”

  The interrogator inhaled sharply, then held his breath, apparently concentrating on calming himself. He exhaled.

  “I suppose you think you can trick me into letting you go.”

  “And blow my cover? Are you crazy? It took forever to win the X’Maris’ trust. Pull me out now and the whole op’s a wash. No, no way. Not unless you have specific orders for me to abort—which you don’t, because you didn’t even know I was here.”

  The interrogator covered his face with his hands and breathed in and out in a slow, measured rhythm. He massaged his temples with his thumbs. He stopped and looked wearily at Hawkins, who stared back at the man like he owned him.

  “Do you have any evidence,” the interrogator said, “anything at all, that proves you’re telling me the truth?”

  Hawkins arched one eyebrow and smirked at him.

  “Do you have any that proves I’m not?”

  The interrogator stared at Hawkins for a very long moment before letting out a sigh of defeat. He plodded to the tent’s flap, pushed it aside, and walked outside as he issued one final order to the soldiers standing guard outside the tent.

  “I’m done,” he said. “Put ’em on a jumper and get ’em outta here.”

  A steady fall of snow had shrouded the ground surrounding the Venekan camp during the two short hours that Gomez, Hawkins, and Stevens had been held for questioning. The snowfall was heavier now, but, Gomez noted, not heavy enough to keep Venekan aircraft from flying. She, Hawkins, and Stevens—with their hands cuffed behind their backs—were escorted at gunpoint toward a waiting aircraft, or “jumper,” as the Venekan soldiers called them.

  The gray-and-white camouflaged vehicle’s jet-turbine engines gave off a loud and steady whine, and wavering ripples of heat distortion rose from the thrusters’ exhaust ports. Its two-person flight crew sat side by side in the cockpit, which was separated from the troop compartment by what Gomez concluded was a very durable-looking metal door.

  Gomez was the first to climb the wide metal ladder and step through the jet’s right-side hatch, just behind the wing, into its main compartment. Hawkins followed close behind her, with Stevens and their three-person armed escort boarding last.

  “You three sit there,” one of the soldiers said, pointing at a long, flat bench that ran the length of the compartment’s right side. The trio sat down. Two of the soldiers kept their rifles aimed at them while the third shackled the trio together at the ankles. As soon as he backed away and sat down, the other two soldiers did likewise.

  “Commander, I’m monitoring the signal traffic from the aircraft you just boarded,” Abramowitz said over the subaural transceiver. Though she’d addressed Gomez, Gomez could tell from Hawkins’s and Stevens’s subtle reactions that Abramowitz was using an open channel to keep everyone on the team equally informed.

  She could barely hear her over the engine noise inside the jumpjet. “Your pilot just received orders to take the three of you to a place called ‘Samara.’ I checked the—”

  The engines shrieked then roared, and the jumpjet wobbled slightly into a vertical liftoff. The hellish din drowned out Abramowitz’s voice for several seconds. Outside the still-open side hatches, Gomez saw the horizon recede as the craft gained altitude. A pair of amber-hued lights next to the side doors activated. The doors slid shut and locked closed, then the amber lights turned pale blue. Once the doors closed, Gomez was once again able to hear Abramowitz.

  “—appears that Samara refers to the Mount Samara prisoner-of-war camp, located roughly one hundred twenty-point-seven kilometers northeast of your current position,” Abramowitz said.

  Gomez felt her weight shift in response to the sudden acceleration as the jet’s afterburners kicked in. “I’ll try to access schematics for the camp and maps of its surrounding terrain before you—” Abramowitz stopped abruptly. Gomez glanced sidelong at Stevens and Hawkins, who wore similar expressions of concern. Seconds passed before Abramowitz transmitted again. “Um, Commander,” she said, sounding worried, “I have company.”

  Abramowitz quickly deactivated her tricorder and concealed it in a pocket beneath her serape. The sound of approaching footsteps drew closer, muffled only slightly by the freshly fallen snow. Whoever it is probably saw the smoke from my fire, she realized, and she chastised herself for not staying more aware of her situation. She’d been staring at her tricorder display for the past two hours and had lost all sense of time and place.

  As the footsteps grew louder, Abramowitz steeled herself for a much-dreaded confrontation with a Venekan soldier. But the face that peeked around the camouflage drop was young, female, and dark blue. The girl’s clothes were of distinctively northern X’Mari origin. Abramowitz surmised that the girl couldn’t have been much older than twelve or thirteen. The teenager stared at her with wide, doleful violet eyes.

  “I’m Lica,” the girl said. Abramowitz hesitated, unsure what to say. The girl continued to stare unthreateningly at her.

  “I’m Kinara,” Abramowitz said, slipping into the cover identity she’d prepared for herself while convalescing here.

  “We saw the smoke from your fire,” Lica said. “Are you all right?” Abramowitz concealed her immediate wave of concern: We?

  “No,” Abramowitz said. “My leg is broken. I—” Before she could continue, Lica waved someone else over to join her. Abramowitz heard more footsteps, slower and heavier than Lica’s. Sounds like more than one person, she thought. Two adult women joined Lica. Both were gaunt and bore haunted expressions; one looked to be in her forties, the other in her sixties or older. Lica pointed at Abramowitz.

  “She’s hurt,” Lica said. “Her leg is broken.”

  The younger adult woman knelt next to Abramowitz and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I’m Nedia,” she said, then gestured toward the older X’Mari woman, who was garbed in robes that Abramowitz could tell had religious significance. “This is Mother Aleké. What’s your name?”

  “Kinara,” she said.

  “I’m going to check your wounds, Kinara. Is that all right?” Abramowitz nodded, afraid to refuse lest it raise suspicion. Nedia looked over the makeshift splints that Gomez and Hawkins had made for Abramowitz’s left arm and leg. The woman’s hands smelled strongly of antiseptic iodine.

  “Who set these?” Nedia said.

  “My friends,” Abramowitz said.

  “They left you behind?” Nedia said, alarmed.

  “They were captured,” Abramowitz said.

  “By the Venekans,” Nedia said. Abramowitz nodded.

  Nedia turned her head toward Mother Aleké. “Her injuries are severe, and her friends have been taken by the enemy. We can’t leave her here.” Mother Aleké nodded gravely.

  “Get a stretcher and some more help,” Nedia said to Lica. The girl sprinted away, back the way she’d come. Nedia began to gather Abramowitz’s supplies for her, while talking over her shoulder in a low, angry voice to Mother Aleké.

  “How can the Venekans be such savages?” she said. “How can they treat women and children like this?”

  “Because they seek to extinguish in us what they have lost of themselves,” the elderly woman said. “They are empty.”

  “Yet they rule the world,” Nedia said, her bitterness threatening to spill over into rage.

  “To rule is to govern and care for one’s people,” Mother Aleké said. “The Venekans rule nothing. They merely hold people hostage.”

  Lica returned, accompanied by four more X’Mari women ranging in age from late teens to mid-fifties. One of them carried a crude stretcher. Nedia and another woman gently lifted Abramowitz and slid the stretcher beneath her. “Everyone,” she said, “this is Kinara.” The women surrounded Abramowitz and lifted her stretcher. “Don’t be afraid, Kinara,” Nedia said. “We’ll take care of you. It’s going to be all right.”

  The cluster of women carried Abramowitz and followed Mo
ther Aleké up a knoll and away from Abramowitz’s redoubt. Heavy, wet flakes of ash-gray snow fell from a dreary sky and smothered the surrounding hills. As the group crested the hill and began descending the other side, Abramowitz saw the narrow road that snaked through the Scorla Hills, reaching from the plains in the south toward the higher ground in the north.

  Stretched out on that road, for more than a kilometer in each direction, was a column of tattered-looking X’Mari refugees, almost all of them women and young children. Many of them were wounded and wrapped in crude bandages freshly stained with their sapphire-tinted blood. Those women who weren’t holding wailing infants bore the burden of carrying what few possessions they’d salvaged from their former lives. Most were poorly clothed, considering the quickly dropping temperatures.

  The women carried Abramowitz on her stretcher into the middle of the refugee column, which resumed its grim and wordless march away from civilization, into exile.

  Chapter

  6

  The flight to the POW camp was brief. Hawkins estimated the trip had taken only about twenty minutes from liftoff to landing. He, Stevens, and Gomez were ushered off the aircraft. They stood at the base of a small mountain, in the mouth of a gigantic off-round nook in its side.

  The nook’s sheer, rocky walls were almost completely vertical, rising several hundred feet toward the crescent-shaped lip of a snow-covered slope. Hawkins could barely see the top of the cliff wall through the falling snow.

  The trio was met by a platoon of armed soldiers, who led them past several Venekan troop vehicles and through the camp’s outer gate, into a wide-open parade-and-assembly area that was more than forty centimeters deep with fresh-fallen snow.