by Korza, Jay
“I need to speak to the capt—” he paused, “prisoner about our current mission. Turn off the tube and leave the room. This is top-secret information we will be discussing.” The captain had to look away from his former commander.
“Yes, sir.” The guard obeyed as he turned the device off and stepped into the lift. Regulations stated that two officers were to be present during an interrogation of a prisoner, but the guard had seen his great captain suffering for too long and had to leave. He had tortured many of his shipmates before but none had been his captain. To him, it was as though he were torturing his own father, or at least his idea of what he thought a father was.
The lift doors closed and left the room empty of prying ears and eyes. “Don’t even try to escape”, the junior officer began. “The launch bay is undergoing routine maintenance right now and you wouldn’t get very far. Besides, it’s the mid-meal rotation cycle and most of the crew is awake. You would be recaptured quickly if you tried to leave. Now, I have some questions you must answer for me.”
The former captain looked into the eyes of his operations officer. He knew what he was getting at when the new captain had finished speaking. The launch bay was undergoing minor repairs, which meant that it held no atmosphere and the artificial gravity was cut while it was worked on. The conditions allowed for easier access to high placed circuitry for the work crews and due to lack of oxygen offered less chance of an electrical fire starting. The area would also be devoid of personnel at feeding time. The route to the launch bay would most likely be clear of personnel at this time also. He was supposed to escape. That’s why his friend was here now.
“Now,” the interrogation continued, “why did you load up a secondary shuttle with weapons prior to the assault on the planet?” The former captain had done no such thing. “And why was this environmental suit in your ready room?” The prisoner had never seen that suit before; it even looked a little big for the man.
The prisoner knew that his time was now. The young captain had set up the whole escape for him. He looked down at the ground and covered his face with his two upper hands. If the escape didn’t look genuine, his friend would be filling his place in the torture tube from where he had just been released.
The prisoner reached up with his lower hands and hit his friend in the jaw with both fists. The younger officer flew backward. He jumped up from the deck to face the escapee and attacked. The much older combat veteran was more than his junior’s match and would’ve been able to kill him easily, even if the new captain hadn’t already planned the escape for him.
The attack was easily side-stepped and four fists plunged into the young officer’s back. The captain fell into the torture tube. The prisoner quickly turned the device on. The tube automatically latched its new prisoner into place and began to probe for weaknesses. The process would take about fifteen minutes. After the machine decided on which nerve endings were more susceptible to pain and which ones were more likely to lead to unconsciousness and even death, it would begin torturing its new victim. Every victim was different in its tolerances and weakness and this device could be counted on to figure out where each one was. He hoped that someone would find his friend before the torturing began, or before it had gone on too long.
The prisoner took the lift to level ten, where he peered cautiously out the doorway. With no one in sight, he ventured out towards the launch bay with his pressure suit in hand. Once he reached the airlock, he donned his suit and made his way to the shuttle craft and entered the vehicle.
The craft was loaded with weapons and a battle suit with full armor. The personal shield emitter was missing from the stash, but those had to be checked out from the armory. The rest were personal weapons from his own quarters.
He began the start-up sequence and launched before it had finished. He gave the engines just enough time to come on line and then the prisoner was out the launch doors and had effectively completed his escape.
The young captain had made the right choice of who to leave in charge. The even younger ensign was sitting on the bridge when the display alerted him to the shuttle launching. He had no idea what to do.
“Lock weapons on target and hold fire.” He punched the intercom button. “Bridge to the captain, red alert—I mean, to the bridge at once.” He wondered whether he should’ve ordered the captain in that way.
“I have target lock. Shall I fire?” the weapons officer asked.
“Not until we have orders from the captain.” The shaking officer had no desire to end up in the torture tube for disobeying orders or affect orders that were wrong. Especially on his first day of sitting in the command chair.
Chapter 25
Warrior Interrogation Base – At Last We Meet
The general looked at himself in the mirror that his captor had placed in front of him. It was as though he were back in college, sitting in one of his science classes, learning about the human anatomy.
The torture tube that he had been placed in seemed to be finished with the first part of its task. After probing the general for almost twenty minutes, it began to remove the flesh from his right leg. He was actually quite astonished at how the procedure produced no more pain than a scraped knee might have.
The device used a micro laser to cut the flesh into a thousand different puzzle pieces, after which ten small claws proceeded to remove the layer of flesh that protected the muscle tissue beneath. After the muscle was exposed, the claws returned to liberate the delicate nerve bundles that resided deep within the general’s leg.
The same procedure was performed on the general’s left arm and the right rib cage. It was all very fascinating to watch. The general was quite amazed at the lengths his captors had gone to get him to the state he was now in. He wondered whether the aliens had created this technology for medical purposes and then realized how well it could work for information gathering. He shook his head, knowing that most likely not one person had ever been saved by this technology; it was created explicitly for this purpose and it would never have another.
The alien who had supervised the process pressed a button on his console and spoke to whoever was on the other end of the comm system. A door behind the operator’s console opened and shed light into the interior of the room. The general realized that he was in a circular room and figured that some of his men were going through the same process in other tubes around him. He could hear the faint humming of another laser to his right.
The two aliens spoke to each other for a moment before the second came to the general. “You are different from your companions.” He spoke in English. “The others,” he gestured with a sweeping motion to the area behind the general, “could not stand to look at themselves being opened as you have. Although almost no pain was caused by our methods, most screamed in agony at just the sight of the procedure. Why have you not?”
The general wasn’t prepared to give answers to a science survey. What could he say? That he had been tortured seven times in his life and that he was used to it? Or maybe he could tell the story of how he cut off his own left foot after it got caught in a pneumatic airlock door when he was just a midshipman at the academy.
The general was not the slightest bit disappointed in his men for their reactions to the live autopsies they were forced to be a part of. His decision not to answer encouraged the alien to make a decision of his own.
He pulled out a small board, which had a schematic of the general’s body on its display. After keying in a couple of commands, the alien moved the board closer to the general’s leg and compared the map on the display to his prisoner’s anatomy. The alien reached out with one hand and pinched a nerve bundle that protruded from the general’s shin between two of his fingers. The general winced slightly.
The alien frowned and looked at his display a second time. Reaching out again, he gripped a second set of nerve endings in his other hand and twisted. The general could not keep from screaming. “Ah, that’s what I was looking for”, the monster said as
he typed in some notations on his pad. “It seems that you have answered the question for me after all. You have an unusually high tolerance for pain. In fact, my scanner has found that you have many nerve endings that are damaged and even destroyed. It leads me to believe that you have been questioned before?” He let the query hang for moment before he touched the second bundle of nerves again.
“Yes!” the general let out. “If you promise not to do this to any of my men, I will tell you everything I know.”
“You’ll tell me anyway. Besides, I have a new class of students who need the practice. They tend to over-stimulate their subjects too quickly, resulting in a premature death. So your men will come in handy, and such good timing, too. We had just run out of the last few prisoners from one of your colonies.”
The alien stopped and thought for a moment before speaking in his own language to the technician who was still behind his console. The technician walked out of the room and returned a moment later with a small viewing screen, which he set down in front of the general.
“If the sight of your own flesh being pulled away doesn’t bother you,” he began, “then maybe seeing it happen to your men will. I’ll be back to continue our discussion later. One of my students has accidentally killed the ship’s second in command during the exposure process. This is a good chance for me to review the error with my students.”
“You son of a bit—” As the general began to lunge towards his captor, three claws simultaneously reached out and gripped exposed nerves in his chest. The pain reduced the general to a quivering ball of flesh.
“You’re lucky I was in control and not one of my students. You may not have survived that otherwise.” The alien stood and left the room.
Lucky my ass, the general thought. At least he knew of one possible way to end it if he had to.
Chapter 26
Dig Site One – Got Room for One More?
The escaped prisoner made his way towards the area the humans had designated “site one.” His anger and disgust for these aliens grew with each step he took.
While in the process of escaping his ship, the captain had encountered two crewman who were running late to the mid-day meal cycle. They did their best to stop him but were quickly dispatched by the more experienced soldier. He would make the humans pay for their deaths.
Once he reached the excavation site, the captain removed a small transmitter from one of the pockets on his combat vest. The transmitter put out a signal that would open the emergency escape hatch that was in every installation built by Supreme Command for almost two thousand years.
The indicator light on the transmitter blinked blue for a moment until its signal reached the proper receiver within the bunker. The light switched to a steady blue while the transmitter and receiver shared information and pass codes until the latter was sufficiently assured that the proper access sequence had been given.
The light changed once more to a steady yellow when the captain heard a hatch cycling open in the near distance. He ran to the opening hatch and stepped back when he smelled the stale air of a thousand years blow by his face. When the hatch was completely open, he entered with blaster weapons in two hands, a knife in a third, and his datapad in the fourth.
He swore an oath of vengeance as he entered the empty corridor. The humans would pay; he would see to that.
Chapter 27
Dig Site One – Unexpected Company
Scan stopped in mid-step and held up his arm to signal his team to stop. He would have made the “closed fist” gesture but his hand was still growing back and his other was occupied with the weapon it carried.
Emily came up alongside him. “What’s wrong? Do you sense someone?”
“I don’t know.” Letting his rifle hang from the sling, he used his remaining hand and clicked a knob on his VR goggles and began to echo the display from everyone else’s visors into his. After he went through all of the inputs, he looked at the lieutenant. “I don’t know what it is. I sense hate. Just raw hate. I think we have company.”
Fang keyed in his comlink. “I don’t smell or hear anything up here. But Scan and I don’t always agree or sense things at the same time, either.”
“Understood.” Emily turned to Bloom. “Have you had any luck finding internal scanners in this complex?”
“No, but I do know where some external sensors are. Problem is there are some relays out and they can’t be accessed from my unit. The main communications room is almost two hundred meters down the corridor. If we can get there, we can see what’s going on outside.”
“All right, Fang, head towards the communications room”, Wilks ordered from the first team. “El-tee, second team should stay here until we’ve secured the area. No need for us both to get whacked. We’ll let you know when it’s all clear.”
Emily looked at Scan. “Move up to team one. I want them to have all the warning possible if something happens.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.” Scan handed Davies’ weapon to one of the other members of team two and took up the rear slot on team one.
“I want a two-man team thirty meters in front and thirty meters to the rear while we wait.” Emily had no sooner finished her orders when four men broke off and took up their positions as ordered. “Bloom, Davies, and Doc, come with me. There was a room back about ten meters that I want to check out now that we have the time.”
Bloom looked at Emily. “It’s just an infirmary. There probably won’t even be any access terminals in there.”
“Humor me”, Emily said flatly.
“Besides,” Daria jumped in, “there might be some supplies I can get from there. I’m running pretty low. If their infirmary stacks up to the rest of this place, then I’m sure that something useful survived in there after all of these years.”
The room automatically became lit as they entered the doorway. Lucky for Bloom, it seemed that every internal door they encountered had a simple push button activator to open and close them. Daria began going through the cabinets and pulling out alien medical equipment.
In the corner of the room was a large cylindrical object with an oval opening in the front. To either side of the unit, there were micro cutting saws and surgical gear attached to probing arms.
Davies knelt closer to inspect the unit. “Hey, Bloom, there’s writing over here that my visor won’t translate.”
Bloom walked over with a disappointed look on his face. He couldn’t believe that his program had failed. After a couple of minutes of tapping in commands to his datapad, he turned to face Emily, who was staring over his shoulder. “It can’t read these symbols because they’re individual letters. The AI in my program doesn’t know what to make of it. So far, every one of the hundreds of thousands of words it’s translated has been made up of two or more characters. There hasn’t been any occurrence of a single character word yet. It might be able to translate it but not anytime soon.”
Emily turned towards the console next to the apparatus. “Well, let’s not waste time with that. Let’s work with what we do know. Try to access that terminal and find out what this thing is. I don’t know why but I think it might be useful.”
Bloom went to work on the console and Emily joined Daria at a smaller console in the back of the room. “Find anything we can use?”
“Not really. There aren’t any first aid supplies in here. A lot of surgical equipment, though. I think that this might have been a surgical suite if anything, but probably not your usual sickbay.
“I’ve been trying to locate medical documents that show the physical make-up of our alien friends. Nothing yet, but if I can find something to add to my own scans of their tissue, we might find out more about their vulnerabilities.”
“Good idea. Keep it up and let me know about your progress.” A little louder, she spoke to the other two members of her research team. “I’m gonna go check out our perimeter guard, see what’s shakin’. Be back in a few.”
Davies continued to examine the tube while Bloom accessed
the computer. Daria just looked at her screen as information scrolled on her scanner pad and was stored in its memory for future recall.
Chapter 28
The Interrogation Planet
In the week since the general’s capture, Surgeon and his team had followed the ships to a planet in the system that seemed to be a small colony or military base for the enemy.
Surgeon sat in his pilot’s chair with his helmet off while he and Seth ate their dinner. With their helmets off, the interior of the ship could be set to a visual display that mimicked the inside of their helmets. Each curve of the smooth ship had fiber-optic relays built into them so the interior surface became one large, omnidirectional view screen.
Seth looked out towards a distant nebula. “You know, it is a very beautiful region of space. There are several nebulas nearby and a lot of comet activity.”
“Pretty or not, I just want to find a way to rescue the general and get out of here.” Surgeon finished his meal and put the scraps into the recycler to be used as part of his next meal.
“Why haven’t they come for us yet? Do you think that our cloaks have concealed us that well from them?” Seth was just finishing the last of his meal.
Surgeon thought for a moment before he tapped a key to open a comlink to the other craft in hiding with him. “Cadet wants to know why we haven’t been dealt with yet. I have a few thoughts of my own but I thought that I’d open the floor to any ideas that you guys might have.”
Joker was the first to respond. “I figure either they haven’t spotted us yet or they just don’t care enough to do anything about our presence. If they have spotted us, then they know that we’re no real threat to them so why not just save us ’til later when they get bored?”
“They must have detected the placement of the mines so they have to know that we’re here”, Beast started. “Knowing that we’re here and knowing where we are, those are two entirely different things.”