by Jamie Sawyer
Now, that got the better of me, and I answered despite myself.
“I’m not that person anymore,” I said, strength rising in my voice. “I’m not anyone anymore.”
Kwan smiled. It was a cruel, but somehow tired, expression. “You are an asset of the Asiatic Directorate, and as such you will answer my questions. Why was your ship carrying a Krell bio-form?”
Pariah’s history was special. The Directorate already had the alien’s body. They were probably torturing it just as they were torturing me.
“What do you know about the virus spreading through the Maelstrom?” Kwan followed up. “Tell us why the Krell are evacuating their homeworlds.”
This was new information, but I knew that it was all part of their interrogation technique. I was probably being drip-fed the intelligence because I wasn’t leaving this room alive. A second passed as Tang and Kwan waited for my response.
And, eventually, I did reply.
“My name is Keira Jenkins. My rank is lieutenant …”
Commander Kwan’s hackles rose. He seemed to increase in size, his jaw set. He spoke over me, in his quiet, commanding way.
“They say that simulant operators are selected because of their insensitivity to pain,” he muttered. “Is that right?”
“I am serving with the Alliance Army Simulant Operations Programme …”
Kwan nodded his head, just once, and Tang turned her back to me. There was a trolley behind her. It held a selection of implements that would make a torturer proud: metallics glinting as they reflected the chamber lights. Tang selected a laser scalpel and activated the blade. The brilliant flash brought with it an involuntary gush of memories, made every muscle in my body seize up. Tang saw my reaction, and her brow creased with interest.
“The body remembers what the mind tries to forget,” she remarked. “That is most interesting.”
“We have methods of retrieving your memories,” Kwan said. “A full neural download, for example, will allow us uninhibited access to the contents of your head. The process is painful.”
“Excruciatingly painful,” Tang echoed.
I knew that choice of words—“ the contents of your head”—wasn’t accidental. The sentence was spoken with real threat. From any other organisation in human space, I would’ve thought it was just bluster. But the Directorate were—or at least had been—masters of this technology. They’d been stripping prisoners of their memories and their skins for longer than I’d been in the Army, and the stories of what they were capable of made even the most grizzled veteran’s blood run cold …
“The procedure is universally fatal,” Kwan said, reining in Tang’s enthusiasm, “but the results are not always reliable. So, it would be better for all concerned if you gave us answers now.”
The drone overhead watched and watched. Its red eye glimmered maliciously.
“My name is Keira Jenkins …”
“Fine,” Kwan said. He didn’t even look in my direction as he gave the order. “Take her apart.”
“Of course, Honoured Commander.”
She flipped the ocular display over her face, protecting her eyes from the scalpel’s intense, burning light.
Tang had been wrong. The mind well remembered this pain. I started to scream, the noise echoing around the chamber, echoing around my own head.
Like I said, I was screwed. Totally and utterly screwed.
None of it was real, of course.
I was in a simulant. My real body was in a simulator-tank, held somewhere else in the prison. It hadn’t taken our captors long to figure out how to use the technology once they had recovered it from the Santa Fe. They had seized the stock of sims in the ship’s hold, and now they were putting them to a use for which they had never been intended.
The Surgeon-Major did her thing, and for all its engineered perfection, the simulant didn’t last long. The Directorate knew torture, and Tang had honed her technique: knew just the right flesh to peel, muscles to cut, bones to break. In a real skin, you have a pain threshold. Once that’s crossed, you go into shock. There’s only so much damage a real body can take. But simulants don’t have that safety mechanism. Tang just kept going and going on the simulant until there was nothing left of it, and even if I had wanted to speak I doubt that I would’ve been able.
Eventually I extracted, but it didn’t stop there. When Tang had finished with the first body, we went again.
And again.
And again.
I lost track of how many transitions and extractions I made. Still, I didn’t talk.
Kwan finally made the call.
“We are finished for today,” he said. Pressed down his uniform. Picked a little lint off the chest. “Perhaps some reflection will assist the prisoner in making the right decision.”
I knew that it wasn’t over, but for today it was done.
In the circumstances, that surely had to be some sort of victory.
CHAPTER THREE
ENGINEERED PERFECTION
Fire and Ice appeared in front of my simulator-tank, and hauled me from inside. The conducting gel necessary to operate the tank had turned a filthy green, filled with floating debris, and it flushed out across the floor, poured over the boots of the waiting troopers.
I wasn’t in the torture room anymore, but this chamber wasn’t any better than the last, like everything else on Jiog, dirty, empty, hopeless. Tang stood a safe distance from my tank, at the edge of the room.
“Hold her there,” she said, logging data on a slate. “I need readings.”
Fire grabbed one arm, Ice the other.
“Stand,” grunted Fire. “Now.”
I made a perfunctory attempt to resist them, but I knew that it wasn’t worth the calories. Both were fully armoured in black hard-suits, and my fists bounced off their hides. The Directorate clones never seemed to remove their armour, but they were always bareheaded. I suspected that was deliberate—a destabilisation tactic—because they looked so much like Feng. Had they been born from the same cloning crèche? Dark hair shaved close to scarred scalps, faces covered with proto-Taoist tattoos. Fire on the right of his face, Ice on the left. Their faces were otherwise identical: blunt-featured, broad-nosed, slabs of men. They even appeared to have scars in the same place.
Ice shook my shoulder. “Hold still.”
They both spoke perfect Standard. Probably part of their birthing download.
“You’re bastards,” I spat.
“Do we have to go through this again?” Tang asked. “Your comrades are far less obstructive.”
She spread her arms. Through aching eyes, I saw the other simulators positioned around the room. The tanks were currently empty, but I could tell that they had recently been used from the pools of conducting fluid on the ground. Every Jackal except Zero was operational. I had no doubt that they had undergone torture and interrogation in their own private hells.
Ice flipped a shock-baton from his belt. The two-foot truncheon crackled with blue light, filled the air with the smell of ozone. The scent was much better than the cloying smell of faeces that lingered in the chamber.
A Directorate medtech checked me over with some sort of handheld device. This body—my real body—was still in one piece, but only just. I was naked, dripping wet with conducting fluid, and covered in bruises, cuts, and burns. I glanced down at my limbs and noticed how much weight I’d lost. We’d only been here six days, by my reckoning, but six days was a long time in Directorate custody. Malnutrition had hit me hard. I was losing muscle mass, and fast. The tattoos of my present and former military service had faded, become barely visible against my filthy skin.
The medtech appeared again, a folded prison uniform placed across her open hands. Ice took it, and under duress I dressed. The uniform was coarse-fibred, uncomfortable, and it had no insignia, no identifiers. Shackles at the wrists and ankles completed the ensemble.
Tang started, “I want to see if …” but her words trailed off.
Somethin
g rumbled all around us, and the walls of the prison shook. Tang’s eyes panned the ceiling, expectantly. Fire and Ice froze in position. The vibration came up through the soles of my feet, was strong enough to loosen a layer of dust from the ceiling, fat motes drifting past the bare-bulb lamps.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Fire. “It’ll pass.”
“Get her out of here,” Tang said abruptly. “Take her to the hole.”
“Yes, Honoured Surgeon.”
Before I could ask any more questions—not that I would get answers—I was dragged out of the room.
Jiog prison complex was a sprawling mess of gantries, walkways and chambers. Hundreds of individual cells lined the walls of this cell block: each holding a prisoner behind old-fashioned bars. The main block extended for as far as I could see—reaching into shadow in the distance. There was no telling how many prisoners were being held here, but at a guess it was in the thousands. The sound of so many detainees in one place was overwhelming, the clattering of metal against cell doors, of whoops and yells and screams. Filthy hands reduced to claws by starvation reached from between cell bars as we went. Most of the prisoners here were Alliance servicemen and -women. Some wore military uniforms, others prison outfits, others yet just rags. It made me feel sick.
Hope was as alien to these prisoners as the Krell. Kwan and his men had this place properly sealed up: failsafe upon failsafe. There were armed guards everywhere, both above and below me. Wearing tactical vests and carrying shock-batons, shotguns across chests. Propaganda posters lined the walls, repeating the mantra HONOUR, OBEY, SERVE in Standard. Walking guard stations, called Prowlers, patrolled the edges of the prison complex. The bipedal machines swept every gantry and deck with mobile spotlights, their riders panning heavier automatic weapons across the banks of cells.
Fire and Ice dragged me along the main corridor, and we passed work-gangs in filthy orange survival-suits. I had no idea what the workers actually did on Jiog’s surface, but they seemed selected from the larger, healthier prisoners. The workers were manacled together in a ragged column, their chains clank-clanking as they marched to another sector of the prison.
“Novak …?” I called, as I recognised a familiar face. “Is that you?”
The Directorate had probably realised that Leon Novak had no information to give—that, as a lifer, he wasn’t worth interrogating. His enormous muscled frame, face covered in gang-tattoos and nerve-studs in his brow, was unmistakable.
Novak grinned an unhealthy smile, but we were ships passing in the night, nothing more than that. His work-gang was gone before I had a chance to speak with him. He looks okay, I thought, reassuring myself. Of all the Jackals, I knew that Novak was the trooper most likely to adjust to life in the prison. Many of his group looked like they carried similar gang markings, familiar script tattooed over faces and scalps. Perhaps Novak even had some friends in here.
“Keep moving,” said Ice.
“We’re almost home,” added Fire.
We reached the junction of a prison block. Korean characters were printed overhead, words that I didn’t understand, but I had come to recognise. Solitary confinement. The door slipped open.
They pulled me farther down the corridor. Through a security gate, and a chamber that scanned me with blue light. More guards armed with pistols worn on the hip …
“Don’t even think about it,” said Fire.
A shock-baton slammed into the back of my legs. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of going down; instead, whirled about to face them. Fire and Ice paused, waiting, watching. Challenging. Fire had his baton fully racked. It crackled with energy.
“Just give me any excuse,” he said.
I relaxed my posture. “Not today, boys.”
They looked almost disappointed. Another guard opened the hatch set into the floor. It settled with a loud clunk.
“Inside,” said Ice. “Now.”
Fire grabbed one arm, Ice the other. They tossed me down the hatch. I hit the floor hard.
“Fuck you both,” I yelled to the dark.
The hatch slammed shut above me.
In the distance, I could hear a scream. It sounded a lot like Feng.
Had it really been six days since we’d arrived on Jiog? It was, I realised, impossible to say with any certainty. Without a day–night cycle by which to measure the passing of time, my circadian rhythm was a distant memory. We could’ve been here for weeks, for all I knew. The disorientation was all part of the scheme, a classic interrogation technique.
The screaming stopped, eventually. I sat on the dank, mouldy floor. The wall at my back was as wet as the ground. I was hungry, cold and angry. Not a good combination.
The stigmata left from the torture session were all over my body. A neat welt across my shoulder. An incision that stretched from gullet to gut. Dissection marks at the limbs, at every major joint. The red, psychosomatic line that marked where Tang had just opened my sternum was particularly bright and painful. None of the injuries was real, but all of them were remembered. I pulled my prison uniform a little tighter at the neck and tried to forget.
The Asiatic Directorate had been a feature in my life since before I could remember. My father had fought them during the Deimos Campaign. He was filled with old war stories of what a treacherous and dangerous opponent they could be, and he was keen to tell anyone who would listen. Still, in those early days—when I’d been a teenager, and we’d been living in San Angeles territory—he showed a certain kind of grudging respect for the Directorate. While he didn’t approve of their behaviour, as a military man he could appreciate their training, discipline and determination.
All that changed when my younger brother had been killed in a bomb-blast outside of a shopping mall in Diego District. There was no rhyme or reason for the atrocity—when tensions between the Alliance and the Directorate were at their peak, there rarely was—and that somehow made it worse. His name had been Robin, and he had been thirteen years old. Theodore Jenkins’ only son had been swept up in a conflict that had been going on for generations. The Directorate claimed immediate responsibility for the dirty little nuclear device that decimated a good portion of Diego District, and that was it: Robin was gone, and Teddy was left with his disappointment of a daughter for consolation.
After the incident—Mom never called it “murder,” and as a family we’d settled on the neutral terminology that seemed to imply there was no real fault on anyone’s behalf—Dad’s attitude to the Directorate changed. Hell, his attitude to life changed. He was withdrawn, inward-looking and damned well critical of everything I did.
“Sorry, Dad,” I said, just to hear the sound of my own voice. “I let you down again. Let you down real good.”
My father had never wanted me to join up with Simulant Operations. He’d wanted Army kids, had wanted us to enlist in a proper military service. I’d tried doing that, just to please him, but when the opportunity to join Simulant Operations had come up, who was I to say no? Sim Ops—riding the galaxy in a body that wasn’t really yours—wasn’t his thing. He couldn’t understand why I had decided to transfer out of regular Army, and enrol in the Programme. Of course, he’d never made a transition, never known the way a true operator feels when they get to inhabit another version of themselves.
But maybe he was right, I thought. Where has Sim Ops got me? Trapped on a Directorate rock.
Not that it particularly mattered where I was, but I took in the detail of the cell. It was a few metres cubed, walls covered with dirty ceramic tiles. I’d already tried peeling those away, but after long hours of effort I’d given up. There was a light above me, distant: as though I was at the bottom of a deep well, looking up a shaft.
“It’s real cold in here, huh?” came a voice, in the dark beside me. “Not what I’m used to, that’s for sure.”
I swallowed, sat up.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Tau Ceti is a long way from Jiog, and Ce
ti V is warm like you wouldn’t believe. Peaceful, too. We never had to worry about the Directorate when I was growing up.”
But I recognised the voice. This isn’t possible. You know that it isn’t. A shape disentangled from the dark in one corner of the cell. Face caught by the single shaft of light from above.
“Don’t be like that, Jenk,” he said. “You and I used to get on just fine.”
Daneb Riggs stood over me. He wore his Alliance Army uniform, slightly dishevelled, open at the neck to reveal his muscular torso. His dark hair was tousled just so, broad arms crossed over his chest. He looked as young as I remembered him: a perfect replica of the man who had betrayed us—had betrayed me—during our flight from the Maelstrom.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said, rolling his head disapprovingly. “You should watch that. Your strength will suffer.”
A tide of hate and anger and disgust crashed over me. It was only quelled by the fact that I knew Riggs wasn’t really here: that he was a figment of my imagination. Too little sleep, too little food, and too much torture can do strange things to a girl’s mind.
“They’ve done a job on you,” he said, shaking his head again. “The Directorate sure are bastards.”
“You can hardly talk. You’re worse than them.”
Riggs’ face creased as though he was disappointed at my reaction. “I was a member of your squad, once. I was your second in command. I was your golden boy. I was a Jackal.”
“And now you’re a traitor.”
Riggs gave a half-hearted smile, his broad features open and honest and completely devoid of malice. “Come on. Don’t be like that. I did what I had to do.”
“Fuck you.”
“Watch your language.”
“Why’d you do it, Riggs?”
He sighed wistfully. “It wasn’t an easy call, Jenk. Believe me when I say that.”
“I don’t believe anything you say.”
Not least because you aren’t really here …
“It’s complicated,” Riggs said. But as he drew nearer to me, I saw that he had something in his hand. He was holding a crudely machined infinity spiral, on a chain, looped between his fingers. The Black Spiral’s icon.