I had experienced something like this before, but not nearly as excruciating. I was being electrocuted, and judging by the screams all around me, I wasn’t the only one.
The pain continued, building and building and building on itself until I was completely overtaken by it. My bleary eyes, locked into position and unable to blink, watched as Mari calmly walked over all of us to the helm.
She said something, I couldn’t hear what, and then the entire world slipped away from me.
5
De Ja Oh No
I wish I could say I woke up peacefully, that birds were chirping or that I came to with Mimi beside me, but that was not the case. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt like it had been stuffed with cotton then filled with blood. I was pretty sure I had bitten my tongue.
I groaned and looked around, my entire body aching. We were in a ship, that was for certain, but it didn’t look like our own.
I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t roll myself over. Pulling at my arms, I realized that they were in cuffs, as were my feet.
That definitely wasn’t good.
I gave myself a couple of minutes for my mind to settle, although my adrenaline was pumping, and I could feel my heartbeat accelerating. I needed to calm down and examine the situation if I wanted to be of any use.
But I couldn’t help it, my mind was flashing back to the time I had already spent imprisoned on Earth. The terror, having to sit back and watch Gonzales be terrorized, the electrocution. Occasionally I still had nightmares about it and to be pushed into the same situation again was making my body go into crisis.
I focused on my breathing. In and out. In and out. As the minutes passed, I became aware of other inhales rasping around me. I wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t tell yet if that was good enough.
Finally, I was in control enough to fully open my eyes and rock myself onto my back. From there, I was able to sit up and look around fully.
Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske were all in the room with me, similarly thrown face-down on the floor and bound by their wrists and ankles. From my position, I could see that the restraints were thick and lit up with nodules in several places. They looked more heavy duty than anything I had ever seen before, which made me wonder how dangerous they thought we were.
But that thought made my stomach churn as I realized exactly what had happened. Not only were we in the custody of Earth again, but we had been betrayed by one of our own.
Crap.
I couldn’t believe it. Mari was but a child, and sweet as pie, if not a little clingy. Why would she do this to us?
I wanted to believe that it was a mistake, that she was somehow tricked, but I couldn’t see how. The self-satisfaction I had seen on her face before she fried us was one hundred percent deliberate. She had been planning this for months and we had walked right into her trap.
There was a whimper beside me and I looked to see Eske waking up. They had taken the goggles that the coin twins had made for her, and I felt my temper flare. Imprisoning us was one thing, but blinding someone for no reason was another.
“Hello?” She sounded terrified, her voice cracking, and I crept closer to her.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Oh, Higgens!” She tried to turn her face to look at me, and I saw her eyes trying to focus on me, but one of them was wandering off in its own direction. “I… I think I see you. Where are we?”
“I think we’re in some kind of brig, but I can’t tell for sure. If you roll onto your back, you can kinda use your momentum to sit up.”
“Ugh, give me a minute. I don’t think I’ve been in this much pain since I lost a MMA match to a state champion back in high school.”
“No problem. Take your time.”
I sat back, waiting, as she went through her own little breathing exercises. Even with her face partially pressed against the ground, I could see the pain written across her features. There was a small trickle of congealed blood down her lower lip, which I could tell was quite swollen. Geez, they had really done a number on us, hadn’t they?
After five minutes or so, she went through pretty much the same process I had to get up, and then we were sitting face to face.
“This isn’t good,” she said hoarsely.
“That’s one way to say it.” I tried to make light of the situation, to find a glimmer of hope. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to scratch my nose so much in my entire life.”
“Oh, I can help with that. Gimme a sec.” Eske started to wiggle, rolling her shoulders several times until, in one smooth motion, she swung them up over her head, popping them out of joint only to end up settling back in and leaving her hands in front of her.
“How did you do that?” I asked, staring at her with wide eyes. You’d think after all the things I had seen, and all of the crazy experiences we had, that something so simple wouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did.
“Do what?”
My eyes flicked to her hands, sitting in front of her like everything was normal, and she just laughed.
“Oh, I’m a little bit hyper-flexible. It’s partially what made me so good at a lot of the martial arts I liked.”
“A little hyper-flexible?” I retorted. “That was borderline terrifying.”
“Was it? Huh. That’s interesting. Anyways, I believe someone had an itchy nose?” She reached out and before I could tell her that I was joking, she was reaching for the general area of my face. After a few fumbling seconds, I realized that she couldn’t really see my face, so I gently moved my head in the direction of her fingers. Once she felt my touch, she scratched gently. “There we are. So, what now?”
“Should we go about waking the others, or wait for them to get up on their own?”
Eske rubbed her chin, her eyes still hazy and unfocused. “Honestly, I think it would be better if they were up. I can’t really see, and you have no hands. I think we can use all the help we can get, considering the situation.”
“Fair enough.” I looked around, trying to see if there was anything that I could use as a handhold, but we were pretty much in an empty containment room. I was surprised that they even put four of us in there.
Shifting, I managed to get to my knees and sort of shuffle forward until I was by Ciangi. I went to sit, wobbling and almost falling on my face, but thankfully Eske caught me and helped me onto my butt without hurting myself further.
“Hey, guys,” I murmured quietly, trying to wake them up as gently as possible. “Are you okay?”
Eske, with her hands in front of her, reached forward to stroke Ciangi’s curly hair. I noticed that her normally well-taken care of mane was slick with both oil and sweat. I knew it took a while to get that way, so how long had we been unconscious?
I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think there was any way to find out at the moment, so I just settled for concentrating on waking up the engineer.
It took a while, with both Eske and I comforting her and talking softly, but eventually, her eyes flittered open.
Well, one did. The other was swollen shut with a black and blue bruise around it. She must have hit her face on something during her convulsions. Judging by the coloring and spread of it, it was definitely several hours old, but not multiple days. Well, that was the mildest of reliefs.
“Ow…” was all she groaned at first before her eyes closed again. For a moment, I felt panicked, but I heard her breathing steadily through her chapped lips. She was conscious, just recovering like we had. With a nod to Eske, we moved on to Bahn.
He was in slightly better shape than his other half, but there was blood around his mouth as well. Apparently, we had all taken enough of a shock to clamp down that hard on our tender mouth bits.
“Hey, Bahn, time to wake up.”
No response at first of course. But we were patient and kept at it until finally both of the twins were beginning to stir.
“What happened?” Ciangi groaned, managing to roll partially onto her side.
“We got shocked,” E
ske answered quickly.
“Yeah, I put that together. What I meant was, why the heck were we shocked?”
“I don’t know,” Eske said as she helped Bahn to sit up.
“I do.” I looked at my friends uncertainly, as if I wasn’t sure whether I should deliver another blow to their morale. But I wasn’t much for keeping secrets and they deserved to know. “Mari betrayed us.”
“What? Little Mari who follows you and Mimi around like you’re gods?”
“Yeah, that little Mari. She said she had been planning this for four months and then threw some sort of electrical bomb onto the ground.”
“How did she not get shocked by it?” Bahn asked. “I seem to recall that she was fine, but I can’t tell. My memory is quite…hazy.”
“She had made her outfit from rubber insulation in the rec hall.”
“Wow,” Ciangi muttered. “So, she really did plan this. I… I honestly don’t know what to say about that.”
“I do,” I said, lips forming a frown. “Where’s Mimi?”
The others looked around like they hadn’t noticed, all with varying expressions of worry on their faces.
“That’s not good,” Ciangi said, eyebrows knitted together.
“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “And I’d like to know how to find her.”
“I have the feeling that she’s most likely in some sort of container similar to what Giomatti once tried to hold her in, expect perhaps modified to fit her current power levels,” Bahn thought aloud, rubbing at his temples as he did.
“Do you think that the humans have technology capable of that?” I asked, turning the idea over in my head. “Mimi has gotten a lot stronger than our Giomatti days.”
“Yes,” Bahn said, “but if Mari was in touch with them then they probably have more recent reports of her actual power level.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s discouraging.”
There was a murmur of agreement amongst us and the conversation stilled. We sat there, in silence, before the door slid open.
I was unsurprised to see the commander, still flanked by soldiers. “You are the one they call Higgens?” he said, addressing me.
“You tricked us,” I said, lips pulled back with a snarl. It wasn’t like me to be so aggressive, but they had managed to push just about all of my buttons.
“We needed to contain you and bring you in. You and your fold are a looming threat about humanity that would have been dealt with eventually. We just lucked out that one of your own recognized the danger that you were and turned you in.”
“You’re not actually Earth Gov,” I said as realization dawned on me. “You’re part of the coup. Geez, how many of you guys are corrupt?”
“Is it corrupt to want to throw off the shackles of a power system that is failing so many of its citizens?”
“When you’re doing it by breaking treaties, stealing technology, and locking up innocent people, I’d give a resounding yeah.”
“None of you are innocent. You’re all traitors to your kind that have abandoned the world that needed you so much.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ciangi cut in. “Bloviate all you want, buddy, you’re a pawn just as much as we are. What we wanna know is where Mimi is and what you’re planning to do with us.”
“She is contained. As for the purpose of your presence here, that is not for you to know. Be satisfied that your value has temporarily suspended your punishment for betraying Earth Gov. But press us, and you may outlive your usefulness sooner than calculated.”
And with that, he turned on his boot and headed out, leaving me to wonder what this whole show was about anyways. It was only after he was gone that the soldiers dropped four ration packets in front of us and a single canteen of what I assumed was water.
Well, at least they weren’t trying to starve us.
Without a word and with their packages set down, the soldiers headed out and closed the door behind them, leaving us alone.
Eske was kind enough to open each of the packets for us and hold them up to our mouths. How we would have eaten without her, I didn’t know, but maybe it was another method of torture to put food in front of us that we couldn’t reach.
The joke was on them, though. Just like Eske working around the cuffs, we would find away around our imprisonment. We’d never been beaten before, so we certainly weren’t going to start now.
…I hoped.
6
Zero Star Accommodations
Time moved painfully slowly within the ship. There was no way to tell when it was night or when it was day, or even if any hours were passing at all. We had each other, and that helped, but the thought of what was coming and what could be happening with Mimi made every second painful in its passing.
It took two weeks to get back to Earth at the highest of speeds without a break, and I wasn’t sure we could last that long. Sure, while they brought us food and water occasionally, they made us wait a painfully long time before letting any of us relieve ourselves. And even then, they took us out of the room one at a time, taking us to the lavatory but never allowing us to shut the door or uncuffing our feet.
At least none of them were being directly violent with us like the guard that had tortured Gonzales, but they weren’t exactly nice either. If any of us took too long, they’d often shove us forward, and if we rationed our water too efficiently, they would take the still partially-full container and dump it out in front of us.
It was awful, more mentally than physically. All of us were growing more and more irritable, and the term ‘short fuse’ came to mind. The same day in and day out was definitely getting to all of us.
The door opened, much sooner than it normally would, and we all sat up to see several soldiers at the door, all of them armed again.
“Come with us,” one of them said. They were pretty much impossible to tell apart, all being male with the same military-grade haircut and square jaws. Or maybe I had just spent too much time around the mimics and had forgotten how to distinguish human features as well as I might once have.
“Which one of us?” I asked, since the rest of us were all just blinking at him with wide eyes. Apparently, our time in captivity had not exactly been kind to any of our social skills.
“All of you. And if you try anything, we will open fire.”
“Why? Where are you taking us? Are we at Earth?”
Before I could even blink, one of them slammed the butt of their gun into my side and I went toppling over. The rest of our little quartet surged onto their knees, ready to defend me, but the soldiers swarmed us and got us to our feet. They unlocked the shackles around our ankles, but left our hands bound, making me wonder what we could possibly be doing.
By the time I caught my breath, we were marching through the door. We passed the bathroom without a second’s hesitation, and suddenly, we were in a part of the spaceship we had never been before.
None of us said anything, but I got the feeling it was because we were all frantically taking in everything we could, hoping that there would be some sign of how we could escape or even finding Mimi.
The halls were much less winding than a lot of other ships I had been in, and even our warship, which made me wonder if Earth Gov had improved it designs or we were just in a particularly efficient model.
Not too much later, we were shoved into a large, empty room. I couldn’t quite place what the purpose of it was. There were drains in the floor and handles against the wall, with strong lights all above. There was a spout at one end of the room, a considerable distance away from us, and the one door, but that was it.
“What’s the point of all this?” Ciangi asked, holding Eske’s hand since the athlete was still without her goggles. “Wanted to take us on the least scenic tour known to man?”
The soldiers didn’t say anything, but rather stepped out of the doorway so that the commander could take their place.
“You’ll all filthy. No soldier should have to be stuck on a transport with any of you, cons
idering how foul you smell.”
“Gee, its almost like when you make people wear the same clothes for days on end without cleaning themselves, they start to get a little rank.” Ciangi’s already short patience had grown even smaller during our captivity, but I couldn’t help but agree with her assessment.
“Noted. Prepare for decontamination.”
“Decon—”
The door closed before I could finish my word and then we were alone. For a moment, everything was quiet. But then the spout at the end of the room opened and pushed forward, increasing in width until it was about as wide as a hand.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Bahn managed to get out before we were all blasted with a large, freezing cold jet of water.
Once more, I couldn’t breathe. My whole body locked up from the cold. The water hurt, like someone spraying sandpaper all over us and rubbing our skin raw.
The spray moved down my body, knocking me to my knees. The others weren’t doing much better, and we ended up huddled together on the floor to try to protect each other from the blast.
I had no idea how long it went on, my mind a haze of pain, but eventually, the water cut off and we were left panting and shivering on the floor.
“Apply the cleanser.”
I didn’t need to ask to know that I wouldn’t like that, so I pressed my face to my shoulder as several panels in the ceilings opened to reveal sprinklers that sprayed down something both foamy and floral-smelling.
At least that part didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t that great either. I was never much one for the scent of lavender or any strong smells really, and I knew that the layer of suds would eventually have to be washed off.
“I’m going to need all of you to stand up and make sure the cleanser is worked into all of your clothing and body.”
“Why on Earth would be cooperate with you?”
“Because if you don’t,” the commander’s voice said over the com, “we can’t be assured that you were properly decontaminated. Which means we’ll just have to cycle this process again and again and again until we are satisfied that you are thoroughly cleansed.”
Mimic Betrayed Page 4