They left the heat and noise of the factory level and travelled through warrens of halls and holds and storerooms. If a ship like this had a proverbial basement, she felt sure that was where they were headed.
She heard a scream cut short, and adrenaline pumped through her. Fran had said they questioned her for details of how the Jumpships worked, and she had insisted that she hadn’t given up any secrets. Were they now torturing the new crew for info?
Janlin’s lip curled at the knowledge that the only way they could do such a thing was through Fran’s translations. Which meant the woman would get to stand and watch her being put through hell.
So, who was in there now? Had they worked Stepper over? Here she’d thought he’d gone scouting for an escape route, and instead he’d been tortured to unconsciousness.
Great.
Another scream punctuated the air as a shielded door dissipated before them, making Janlin stare. The smell of burnt flesh with undertones of excrement struck her senses. Janlin started to struggle, unable to stay brave, and the Imag simply shoved her in and reset the shield.
She threw herself against the shield, clawing despite the electricity that poured through her fingers. Hands grasped her and hauled her backwards, and she became aware that the gibbering she heard came from her own mouth.
Janlin struggled for dignity and clamped her mouth shut. The aliens pushed her into a cylinder-shaped prison that reached her chest. Somehow the unit held her immobile from the gut down. She gripped the edges, fingers scrabbling for any purchase, and surveyed the room.
The smells made her gag, but the view was worse.
In another cylinder stood Fran. At least, she was pretty sure it was Fran. Blood flowed from the woman’s nose and crusted around her chin. Her eyes were both black, and her bottom lip puffed out beyond the upper one. Fran held a thousand-mile stare, but one of the aliens tapped at a console, and her neck snapped back. When she straightened again, she focused, noticed Janlin, and laughed.
“Ah, fresh meat,” she said, her voice marred by the swollen lip. Her head lolled again, but she pulled it up with a little shake. “Stupid nits, they picked the wrong leverage to force me to talk.”
“Fran—”
“Doesn’t matter what you say, Janlin. I’ll never tell them.” She flashed a macabre grin, her teeth stained red. “You can confess all you want, and you will, but I’ll never tell, never tell, never tell.”
Janlin watched this, her breath coming fast. The temperature in this room was several degrees cooler than elsewhere, yet sweat slicked under her arms and breasts.
“They think if they threaten you, I’ll give in. The Imag know now I’ve been lying . . . at least they’re pretty sure.” Fran’s words thickened, as if she were drunk. “They want to be sure.”
“I’m sorry, Fran,” Janlin said.
“Fuck you, Janlin,” Fran said without any feeling. Her head rolled, and her eyes blinked again and again. She touched a finger to her nose, grimaced, and turned a hard stare on Janlin. “I wish they’d kill me instead of you. I really do. Don’t know what I was thinking making myself indispensable.”
The aliens busied themselves at their console panels, ignoring their exchange. “Fran—”
“Give it up, Janlin,” Fran said, cutting her off. “They can kill the whole lot of you off before my eyes—I’m never gonna tell them how to work the Jumpships.”
“Good!” Janlin said. “I’m with you on that, don’t you see?”
“Maybe if you’re all dead they’ll finally let me die, too.”
Janlin stared. How could she just give up? She had power with these idiots; she could use it to lead them astray, build trust and find a way free, or something. Janlin opened her mouth to say so, to shout at Fran until the woman saw some sense, but sudden fire ignited in her legs and groin.
The torture session had begun.
They used both technology like the nerve whips to send agony through her lower body and simple physical blows to the head and face. They twisted her arms and crushed her index finger into a device ironically reminiscent of a medieval thumb press.
It took far longer than she’d hoped before the Imag realized Fran wasn’t going to tell them anything new. Janlin bore each blow the best she could, but it wasn’t long before she babbled endlessly about home and Rudigar and even the Hope. Fran didn’t seem to relish the abuse like Janlin thought she would. She kept her gaze lowered and only spoke when they beat her. Janlin wondered how she’d managed to refrain from telling them what they wanted to know.
It seemed like hours before darkness welled up in Janlin’s vision, and she welcomed the release of unconsciousness.
Chapter Thirteen
EVERY FEW DAYS the torture sessions resumed, always random, always brutal. Fran would pretend to question her; Janlin would attempt to engage her in planning some kind of strategy to get free. It all came to nothing, and the aliens were clearly losing their patience.
Afterwards they’d bring warm broth and tend her wounds. Or they’d do nothing, leaving her gasping on her bunk. Always they played with their minds, until Janlin wept with the futility of it all.
Janlin struggled to heal from the sessions while still working the battering labour shifts. At first Stepper nearly went ballistic on the guards when they brought her in bleeding and bruised, but she managed to convince him it would only make things worse. It wasn’t like she was the only one undergoing such treatment. He looked as bad as she must. When her head throbbed, she saw the goose egg welt on his forehead. When her eye swelled shut, she saw his shiner sealing away a sad brown eye.
The aliens worked their way through a few others, but again and again they returned to her and Stepper, as if they sensed the antagonism between her and Fran, and the link that Stepper had to it all.
When she couldn’t rise from her bunk after one particularly bad time, she’d thought for sure she’d be shipped out the airlock—or maybe to wherever they sent the injured—but they left her alone. She felt relief mixed with disappointment. The idea that her dad might be alive somewhere drove her mind in tight circles. By being one of those “disappeared” she would either find out, or at least be free of the pain once and for all. Yet neither opportunity seemed as easy to reach as she first thought.
She healed, went back to work, and underwent more torment. It was a routine of hell, and she fell into it against her will.
Once, Janlin regained consciousness to find a girl bent over her, prodding a particularly sore spot on her head.
“Ow,” Janlin said, swatting her hand away.
“Let her check, Janni,” said Stepper’s voice from somewhere above her head. She craned around to see his battered face looking at her from his own bunk. “She’s only got a few more minutes before the guard comes by.”
Janlin looked back at the girl. She held her hands up, palms out, and Janlin grimaced at how filthy they were.
“How many fingers?” she asked. She is so terribly young, Janlin thought. Her blue eyes were ringed with exhaustion, and she bore a scar on her cheek that had puckered the skin into a teardrop shape. It made her appear to be weeping.
“Two,” Janlin said.
She bent and looked close at Janlin’s eyes. “Does your head hurt when you turn it side to side, like this?”
Janlin tried, winced. “A bit, yeah.”
The girl glanced at Stepper. “A mild concussion. She shouldn’t sleep for more than a couple hours at a time. Not much else we can do, but she’d be better off with some rest.”
Stepper nodded his thanks. “You’d best get back. Time’s nearly up.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line as she nodded back. “Right.”
Janlin rolled over slowly. It still hurt. “Who is that?”
Stepper hissed at her. “Shush. We have news, but we have to wait until the next round.”
“Aren’t the vids watching anymore?”
Stepper gave his click-clock sound with his tongue that he used to warn everyo
ne the guards were coming. Someone was moaning in their bunk, and continued to do so. Janlin wondered who it was, and what the Imag would do about it.
She lay still, fighting to keep her eyes open. She needed to hear what everyone else had found while she was gone. Something had changed, or the girl wouldn’t be out of her bunk tending the injured without being whipped and hauled away.
“No! No! Don’t take him! He’ll be okay, it’s just a painful burn. Please, don’t take him!”
The voice, close by, keened on the edge of hysterical, and Janlin risked the flash of pain behind her eyes to twist around and look. The man who was moaning, who now cried out as they pulled him off his slab, had a woman wrapped around him. She refused to let go. The familiar whine cut the air, and the woman jerked into spasms as the other guard hauled the man away.
Janlin rolled onto the floor, landing on her hands and knees, but Stepper was faster, pushing past her to face the towering alien. Janlin mouthed a denial, a plea, but to no avail. Stepper took the whip, too, and slumped to the floor, twitching.
The alien looked at her. Janlin stayed down, unable to do more as her head spun. Her fingers curled, scraping against the hard floor as she stared up at her tormenter. He bared his teeth in a grisly grin and followed his mate.
Janlin collapsed onto the floor. Strong hands lifted her, and she looked to see that others were lifting the woman and Stepper gently back to their bunks. She reached up to catch the single tear that slid down Gordon’s nose as he bent to lay her on her slab of steel.
Hours later, once the woman regained the use of her limbs, she ran screaming down the hall and attacked the nearest guard. He hauled her to her bunk, unable to reach for his whip as he held off her frenzied violence, but every time he let go, she fought harder, still screaming like a banshee. Just as Janlin, Gordon, and others began to rise to join the fray, more aliens arrived and the nerve whip rendered her silent. Janlin wanted to scream with her.
After the third time, they took the woman away.
In the grieving silence that followed, Stepper watched the door until two guards walked by, and then nodded to Gordon.
Gordon faced Janlin. “Seems we can talk here as long as we don’t leave our bunks,” he said.
“But the vidlens . . .”
“Renegade people told us. For the first few weeks, any movement brought instant reprisal,” Gordon said, his eyes dull. “Now that we’re beaten into submission, and know how hopeless the situation really is, they won’t bother to run in at every little thing.”
Janlin stared. Beaten, broken, and hopeless . . . that’s what they’d come to. Of course, this news gave them the opportunity to talk, but just then no one was in the mood to do so.
Chapter Fourteen
JANLIN SAW FRAN occasionally, but always from a distance. The woman’s limp was more pronounced, and she stared right through Janlin as if she didn’t even know her. That suited Janlin just fine.
Today, however, Fran accompanied her and Stepper on their work assignment.
“We have to take the catwalks,” Fran said, her voice as gruff as ever, but Janlin noticed the linguist swallowed hard. “They’ve given me a communications unit, and I have to translate to you what needs done. Apparently Imag don’t like heights much.”
Janlin could see why as she stood at the top of a rusty ladder and stared at the narrow walkway high above the factory floor.
“No safety straps, eh?” she said, but both Stepper and Fran ignored her. Far below, aliens moved about their business, making Janlin wonder yet again just how big this station-like ship must be.
They climbed, and worked out what needed done through Fran’s translation. After the first dizzying glance, Janlin did her best not to look down.
Fran’s limp might’ve been the cause of her fall, or maybe she decided to try the suicide way out of this nightmare like so many others had. Imag always tried to stop any death, which was one of the arguments for the possible survival of those that disappeared. “We’re valuable, maybe we’re being sold for something,” one Renegade scientist had argued.
“Valuable for what, meat?” No one had any better ideas. At first, they were happy to have food . . . now they wondered what it was made of, let alone how any alien bacteria might affect them.
Whatever the case, Janlin watched with an air of detachment as Fran slipped off a canted part of the catwalk and broke through the railing. On the way down, her grasping arm caught in some chain, breaking her fall with a snap. Stepper dove forward to grab the chain before it broke, but he wasn’t strong enough to pull her up on his own. She dangled over a five-storey fall, easily high enough to kill her.
Imag down below pointed and shouted at each other, some beginning to run, but they were a long way off.
Fran’s grip slipped a bit further, and the whites of her eyes flashed in the gloom.
“Janlin, help me,” Stepper said, his breath coming in gasps. Janlin stepped closer, realizing only then that Stepper’s wrist was twisted at a very odd angle.
“Janlin!”
If Janlin let Fran die, the torture would stop. They’d have no translator anymore. Wouldn’t that be a kindness?
“Janlin, you have to help . . . she is trying to get us on work shifts closer to the hub. We might never succeed if you let her die.”
Who cared about some slight chance like that? It would be better to simply end the torture. Janlin knew Fran wanted it, knew it in the way Fran looked at her right now.
Worker Imag climbed the ladders, prodded along by uniformed guards with nerve whips out.
“The only way we are going to have any chance of getting pilots like you on the specialist teams is with Fran’s help. Come on, Janlin!”
She could hear his pain, knew he wouldn’t let go. Maybe she could pretend to help and send them all to a mercy death below?
She knelt by Stepper, then laid on her stomach alongside him. The steel groaned under their combined weight.
“Grab on and pull!”
Still she hesitated. She stared down at Fran and saw her own bitter hatred mirrored at her.
“She doesn’t want saved, Stepper.”
“I don’t care.” His face twisted with agony. The catwalk groaned and sagged further. Stepper slid, and Janlin reached to grab him before she could think about it.
“It’s either we both go, or none,” Stepper said then, challenging her to either let him go or help him.
With a cry of anger and frustration, she braced her ankle on the opposite railing and grabbed the chain. Together they pulled Fran onto the catwalk.
“You should’ve let me die,” Fran said with a snarl.
“I wanted to, but Stepper would’ve gone down with you.” Janlin shook, red fury blinding her. “You would’ve stolen him again.”
“Stolen him? Space me, Janlin, after you walked in on us, he never looked sideways at me again. Don’t you get it?”
Janlin walked away, chest heaving, unable to bear the weight of what Fran was telling her. Stepper had left her after they argued about SpaceOp’s Mars offer. She hated that he always ran at his family’s every beck and call. He had wanted her to go with him, but she’d felt he abandoned the near-Earth colonies and her family. They’d bickered over it endlessly, then not spoken for months while he completed his training for his promotion.
Then, unable to bear the thought of him leaving and wanting to reconcile before he left, she’d walked in on Stepper and Fran in his bed. In the bed they’d shared so many times, for so many years.
That image still burned in her memory, and she could never wipe it away.
Didn’t matter what Fran told her now, there was no going back. Stepper didn’t love her. Bollocks on that, as Gordon would say. Stepper still left for Mars, still abandoned her even though she’d wanted to apologize.
After the work shift ended, Janlin lay on her bunk facing the wall, arms curled over her head, and refused any attempt by anyone to engage her in conversation.
Chapter
Fifteen
THE NOISE OF shift change swelled, and Janlin swung her legs off her bunk. She sat there a long while, knowing she would miss her chance to use the head, but she couldn’t bring herself to stand. Finally, when there was no time left to linger, she rose.
The Imag didn’t come in for them anymore. They were expected to arrive at the assignment room on their own initiative. They all knew there was nowhere to run.
Janlin paced along the rows of slave bunks, her boots slapping the metal deck. Her body throbbed, especially her legs, but she might get a touch of the whip if she arrived late . . . which would only add to the ache.
An arm snaked out and caught at the sleeve of her grey coveralls. Janlin shook her head and tried to pull away.
“Help me die,” said a girl’s voice from the bunk at waist level. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Janlin used her other hand to break the grip on her sleeve. She knelt down, realizing it was the girl with the teardrop scar. She wasn’t really a girl, more a young woman, but the dirt and exhaustion made her seem much younger. She trembled with pain and despair. Her scar emphasized the dark circles under her blue eyes.
Janlin slipped her hand over the woman’s, and their fingers tangled together, gripping hard in a rough gesture of reassurance. “You’ve made it this far, and you know we won’t give up.” She pushed aside her fear of being late. If the Imag in the assignment room felt impatient today, she would pay for it, but some things were worth caring about, some weren’t.
The woman’s breath hitched. “Brendan threw himself into the blast furnace last shift. They’ve been more careful with us since, or I’d be dead too.”
Janlin recoiled inside. Brendan, the handsome young engineer from Mars. “Hang in there,” she said, knowing how pitiful the words sounded.
The woman turned an accusing stare on her. “For what?”
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