Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  It wasn't just Max White's lawyers, because now there were civil rights people involved. They were everywhere, on every channel and all over the mesh. Each one was louder and more strident than the last. The Navy wanted to interrogate the mute, to treat him as an enemy so they could wring every last drop of information out of him. They claimed they could because he was a mute, an enemy combatant. However no war had been declared and according to civil rights, he was a citizen of the Commonwealth, mute or otherwise. His rights had to be respected. So enhanced interrogation – whatever that meant – was off the table.

  She wasn't sure if she should laugh or cry about that. On the one hand she wanted White interrogated: he was a cop killer and every sharding secret of his should be wrung out of him along with a confession. But neither was she a fan of being stopped every day when going to work, and tested by naval officers to see if she was an android or a mute. It seemed some days that New Andreas had become a military estate.

  There were reports that the Navy had gone too far, and had made its own mistakes, including invading private homes with warbots. Traffic had been restricted to the space-ports, causing no end of annoyance to those who depended on them. Furthermore, they were now attempting to restrict civilian reporters as well. They were being as gentle in their touch as their own warbots.

  And for all that had they caught anyone, apart from Max White? She didn't know. There had been pursuits, apparently, but nothing about who had been chased or why, nor any details on what the Navy were doing with them. The authorities weren't telling anyone anything.

  To add to her woes her father, a lawyer and a staunch advocate of civil rights, was annoying her. Every time she spoke to him he would lecture her about police states and the military overstepping their bounds. Perhaps they had. If this was a crisis then the military were revelling in it, getting a chance to use all their new, expensive little gadgets. There was no doubt this was a blessing for them. A genuine threat they could fight. And when the time for appropriations came up, she knew their budget wouldn't be under threat. Sanitation, law enforcement and healthcare would all suffer, but not defence.

  That was someone else's problem. Hers was simpler: getting out of this prison, and convincing her Captain that she hadn't screwed up and brought ruin upon them all. And getting back to work as a detective. That would take time though.

  For the moment here she would continue to sit here, locked away in her own little evidence cage, watching her butt grow fatter every day she wasn't out there working. And knowing almost nothing about what was happening in the rest of the world. Annalisse hated it – but there was nothing she could do. She kept telling herself that the Navy would find the criminals and leave. And then everything could return to normal.

  She kept telling herself that as she entered a whole twelve items into evidence during the morning. Twelve items in four hours! She could have taken a nap for three and a half hours and then had a coffee break as well! Normally her post would be busier, but with the Navy on every street and patrolling the skies, crime was down. Actually it had plummeted.

  Annalisse tried to tell herself the same thing during her lunch break. By the time the afternoon shift came around, she was almost unable to believe her own lie, which was why she was grateful to hear the sound of someone coming downstairs, even if they did seem to be walking faster than normal. More evidence to enter. Someone to talk to. That was as close as she got to excitement these days.

  But it wasn't someone bringing her more evidence – it was Officer De Vries, running with a panicked look in his eyes. Running fast. At the evidence room door, he thumped on it furiously.

  “Let me in!” he yelled, looking more and more frightened every second.

  “I can't – this is the evidence room.” That was the truth. He wasn't approved to come in.

  “You have to—” he was about to demand access again when his attention was drawn away by a sound.

  Annalisse's focus was drawn too as she heard concrete breaking. She felt the impacts as it hit the floor.

  “What the shards?” But, even as she asked the question, she saw the answer in the form of a warbot breaking through the side wall, violently smashing its way through.

  “Shards!” De Vries let out a shriek and ran the instant he saw it, and then moved as though a supernova was on his tail.

  He ran faster than Annalisse had ever seen him run. Then the bot finally broke right through the wall and raised its weapon, a military issue pulse weapon. What the hell was it doing?

  She had no time to wonder as a blast hit the far wall, causing it to explode and instantly filling the entire floor with fire and ash and shaking the entire building.

  Annalisse screamed in shock even as she attempted to turn away from the inferno and cover her eyes. But human reactions had never been built to be that fast and she immediately felt her skin burning. Then the walls around her buckled and collapsed, bringing the ceiling down, and barely giving her time to throw herself to the floor before something heavy came crashing down on top of her

  After that, lying there reeling and in pain, the unmistakeable sound of heavy steel legs pounded a rapid tattoo as the bot chased its prey.

  Annalisse tried to make sense of it, but there wasn't a lot to be made. The warbot was hunting an officer and wanted to kill him. Why? Were the military after the police? Blowing up buildings? That didn’t sound right.

  One thing did cross her mind though – the speed with which De Vries had run away. It was too fast. She'd never seen him run like that. He was fit, but not especially so. In fact she wasn't sure that anyone could be that fit or that fast.

  Could he be a mute? The question suddenly popped into her brain.

  There were rumours, stories on the holo channels and speculation across the entire mesh. Could they be true? Could there actually be mutes running around the city, or a mute underground? And could one of them be a slightly overweight, prematurely balding police officer with a love of gambling and bad jokes?

  It hardly seemed possible. De Vries would have had a complete medical upon joining, including a gene scan. They would have detected it right then if he'd had any genetic mutations – wouldn't they? Shards! They were going to have to scan her shortly – when she could be moved to a hospital bed. If that happened before the remains of the ceiling above her fell. It was creaking ominously as it was.

  De Vries had seemed so ordinary. She didn't know him well, but she'd still worked around him for years. He was utterly normal: he laughed and shared a joke with everyone. He talked about his weekends, and moaned about the bosses. There was nothing about him that marked him as different. He even had a wife and children.

  Could they be mutes too?

  She groaned. This whole thing was fast becoming a conspiracy. There was an entire underground of mutes living in Aquaria, blowing up reserves, and some of them were police? And she'd got all that from just seeing one man run? Annalisse told herself that it was madness as the weight of whatever was pinning her became too great, making it hard to breathe. She didn't want to believe it might be true.

  Her body was beginning to hurt by then and hurt a lot. The last thing she needed was some sharding dark side conspiracy theory distracting her. She couldn't help it, though. The thought was lodged in there and it wouldn’t go away, and it refused to be quiet.

  So maybe it was for the best when darkness finally began claiming her she thought. At least she could get some peace.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pain. Confusion and pain. That was Annalisse's world. And it felt eternal. She didn't know when it had started or when it would end. Or even if it would end. She knew nothing except that she needed to sleep, but she wasn't being allowed to do that.

  “What did he say to you?!” a man's voice bellowed from the darkness. Annalisse struggled to understand. She was so tired and sore, and the man had been yelling at her for so long.

  She opened her eyes to see a blurry figure in her fiel
d of vision, but then closed them in a hurry. The pain as light hit her eyes was excruciating, like having red hot needles poked into them. So much pain. Her entire body was on fire, as if she was lying in a blast furnace.

  “Who?” Annalisse tried to understand just so she could answer the voice, but what came out was more of a choking sound with a trickle of spittle. She knew what he was asking about, and had known, but somewhere along the way she'd forgotten.

  The one point she was sure about was that this wasn't right. She was tired and hurting, in need of a doctor and a hospital. She needed to sleep not to have some sharding arsehole asking her questions, and doing so over and over again. She had to have rest and some pain killers. Why was she hurting anyway? She was sure she shouldn't be. No one should be hurting these days – pain had been consigned to history. And why was she chained to a table?

  “Officer De Vries.”

  The voice was being patient with her then, but he also sounded frustrated. Annalisse could hear it in his voice, as if he was becoming tired of her answers.

  “Devy!” It took her a moment but Annalisse soon knew who he meant.

  “De Vries!” the voice snapped at her.

  But she wasn't listening to him. She knew he needed to know something, and that she was in pain. He needed to know so that he could take her to a hospital. She needed to be taken to one. So she tried to tell him, to explain to him that she was hurting and needed to see a doctor.

  “Of course you're in pain! We drugged you!” Suddenly the voice was angry. “And we're going to do it again. Now what did he say to you?!”

  She’d been drugged? Annalisse didn't understand. They were causing her this pain? That didn't make sense. Was he lying to her? And had he said that before? She had the strange feeling he had. But like everything else she'd forgotten. Her thoughts swam in and out of focus, unable to hold on to any of them.

  “Green!” It was a pretty colour she thought as it lit up the darkness behind her eyelids. So bright and vivid – though sometimes it was red. But she liked the green better.

  “Not green – De Vries!” the voice yelled.

  She didn't care. She liked the bright green too much. Then someone put their fingers on her eyes, forcing them open, and the green went away. Instead painful white light hit, hurting her. It was burning bright.

  Annalisse screamed – or tried to. Her mouth didn't work well enough for her to make a sound. Her tongue kept getting in the way. Eventually the fingers went away and darkness returned. This time though it was filled with angry redness. She didn't like the red.

  “It's no use Captain. She's told us everything she knows. Now she's just babbling.”

  The voice wasn't speaking to her. Annalisse knew that, but she still wanted to answer and to tell him about the angry red colour. It was important somehow. However, her tongue was still in the way, much too big for her mouth. Instead of letting words out there was drool instead. Little rivulets of it running down her cheeks.

  The other voice said something – Annalisse couldn't make anything out more than mumbling – but she understood it wasn't the first man. The voice was different.

  “If we give her any more we'll fry her brain.”

  Fry her brain? Annalisse liked that. It sounded funny – she had this strange vision of her brain sitting in a pan with some butter and onions and a bit of red wine. Maybe a few mushrooms. It could be quite tasty. The thought made her giggle. But the other voice didn't like that. He grunted angrily and marched off. She heard his feet pounding on the floor. And then the first voice came back to her and she felt a pressure on her arm.

  “Alright, I'm going to let you sleep now. But you owe me. You'd better not have lied to me.”

  Lied to him? Why would she have done that? Annalisse failed to understand. She was sure she wouldn't have lied to him – even if she couldn't remember anything she'd said. The room suddenly spun around as if she was on some sort of strange children's ride. Yet there was a peaceful feeling to it. It was a pleasant ride. It would have been more pleasant if he hadn't continued.

  “I'm sorry for what happened to your friends.”

  Something had happened to her friends? That sounded ominous, and something she needed to know about.

  But even as Annalisse attempted to find out, she found she couldn't. Not when the greens and reds were quickly giving way to black as she spun away into darkness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hospital wasn’t Annalisse's favourite place to be, not by a long shot. But she supposed she should be grateful she was there and not in the ground. More of her comrades had been buried. And this time it wasn't Max White who’d put them there. It wasn't even Officer De Vries. It had been the Navy. The sharding Navy! That was an outrage.

  Some had been killed by warbots as they’d rampaged through the station trying to bring down De Vries. They’d been brutal, having little understanding of structural integrity. They simply knocked walls over or blew them apart, uncaring if ceilings fell down. Other officers had been deliberately killed by them. There were those who, seeing the warbots heading for them with weapons hot, had panicked and drawn their own weapons. They hadn't lasted long.

  As terrible as that had been however, more had died during the subsequent interrogations. The ‘enhanced’ interrogation she supposed. The process the Navy wasn't supposed to be doing. The drugs they’d administered were not simple medicines, but torture drugs. Such things had no place in society, breaking minds as well as bodies.

  She understood only too well what those drugs could do to the mind and body. She remembered her time in the room or at least some of it. She recalled the pain and the lights as well as the crushing need for sleep. She remembered the endless questions.

  She had been one of the lucky ones. She’d only been on that rack for three days, and only because De Vries had spoken to her once while being chased. Annalisse had told them everything he'd said. Which was just that he wanted in the cage. Now that some of her memories were returning she remembered telling her questioners that – over and over again. It had never been enough, though. Annalisse had been pressed for something more damning. And when they hadn’t found it, they'd pressed some more.

  If that was what they’d perpetrated for a few fleeting seconds’ worth of conversation she couldn't even imagine what they’d done to De Vries’ fellow officers and friends. She doubted it would have been a mere three days – in fact she knew it hadn't been.

  By the time she'd woken in the hospital six days had passed. Three officers had been killed in the raid while three more had died under interrogation, and yet another dozen were suffering from severe traumatic brain injury and had a ward all to themselves. Not all of them were expected to survive let alone recover. The rest of them, fifty or sixty officers, were recuperating in the general wards.

  Annalisse was angry about that. Relieved she was alive, but undeniably furious. This shouldn’t have happened, neither to her nor her colleagues. Not to anyone in fact, but especially not the police. The Navy had claimed it was an emergency and that they were all terrorist suspects, saying they had the right. The government seemed to agree with them.

  The worst of it was that she didn't know how many others had gone through the same procedure, how many cops in other stations or how many civilians who might have known De Vries. Or those who weren't related to him at all. There had been stories on the news channels – reports of chases. As for how many of those being chased had got away and how many had been caught, she didn't know. But she hadn't realised the Navy would be going after their suspects' colleagues, friends and families as well. She'd never suspected such a thing.

  It was wrong. They were the Navy. They were supposed to be the good guys, the defenders of the Commonwealth. They protected people from smugglers and pirates. They rescued broken-down ships and regulated the spaceways. This was a betrayal of everything the Navy was supposed to stand for.

  Now she was starting to see that the Navy wa
s far more brutal and less law-abiding than she'd believed. That civil rights meant nothing to them. And that all those annoying reporters who’d driven her crazy with their questions on most days, were more important than she'd realised. Most of all, her father had been right: you either had rights for everyone or you had rights for no one.

  Maybe even that wasn't the worst aspect – it was that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Nothing that anybody could do.

  Her Captain had gone to his bosses when he'd woken up. The commissioners had in turn had gone to the Ministers in the Aquaria planetary government with an official complaint. The Ministers had been unable to do anything. The Prime Minister when he'd been called upon had been unable to do anything either. The Commonwealth itself, when the matter had gone further, had been unable to take action. This was a Navy matter, a military crisis, and they’d been given jurisdiction. The media couldn’t do anything either. They'd exposed what had happened and the Navy’s only response had been to take channels off the air and according to some, arrest reporters if they got too annoying.

  How could that be?

  Good men and women had been abducted off the street, tortured, injured or even killed and no one seemed able to stop it. Abductions were probably still happening. This wasn't the world she knew, nor was it Aquaria. It wasn't even the Commonwealth. It was a police state – save that ironically the police themselves were its victims.

  In fact they'd been interviewed as victims by the reporters. That had been unexpected. Reporters had come not to interview her as the investigating officer, but as the victim. It had horrified her, as did seeing her own face on the holos. Being on the other side of a story had come as a profound shock.

  Still she'd told them what she knew. Every officer in the room and in the hospital had. And there was no shortage of bad news for the Navy about its ill-treatment of ALEB officers over the channels. They just didn't care. In fact she wasn't even sure that they'd responded. Not even when they'd been accused of killing members of the authorities.