Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

LEDs winked red in Angel’s eyes.

  Steward took a breath. M44, he thought. In Cancer.

  Interrogation technique, he thought. The primary rule was always to isolate the individual: That was the first thing. Make him feel alone in the world. Put him naked in a metal box. Shine spotlights on him all the time so he doesn’t know if it’s night or day, so that one of the first things to go is his sense of time. March him through the security station so that he will feel even more alone, an individual caught in a vast machine. Then put him in a small room, tell him the only way he’ll ever get out of the machine is to do as he’s told, and provide just that extra burst of fear by putting him in with a very large man who, very recently, has just caused him vast pain….

  By contrast with the other, Angel would become the good guy. Steward would become dependent on him to keep the other away. Would wish to please him, confide in him. Give him everything he wanted.

  Steward knew all the moves, exactly what Angel was doing. But that didn’t mean Angel’s techniques wouldn’t work. The only way not to crack was to keep himself intact, integral, away from this. Inside the universe of stars that he was building in his head.

  There was more than one interrogation here, Steward thought, and he was the only one who was aware of it. Angel and his partner knew what had happened here on Vesta, and were trying to find the answers to what they didn’t know. Steward knew less than they, couldn’t give them anything new. But the very questions they asked might tell Steward something, and he had to keep them asking. He had protested his innocence because it would have seemed odd if he hadn’t. But really he wanted the interrogation to continue, wanted Angel and the other to talk about what they thought Steward already knew. And in order to do that, he had to interest them, had to convince them somehow that he had the answers they wanted. He had to act as if he knew things they didn’t.

  Angel crushed his foam coffee cup, dropped it onto the desk. He held up the file folder, opened it, glanced through it. Steward saw the name on it: filesecur:steward.1 “What were you going to do, Steward?” he asked. “Were you going to a meet? Visit someone you knew? Or were you just going to check the extent of what you did last time?”

  “I was going,” Steward said, “to a place called Time Zero.”

  “To meet somebody?”

  “To meet Fischer. He’s communications officer on the Born. He called me and told me there was a good party.” He looked up at Angel and grinned. “I’m sure you were recording communications on and off the ship. Listen to it. Maybe it’ll satisfy the Procureur that you know what you’re doing.”

  Angel’s partner took his hand out of his pocket. He was wearing a zap glove. He held an inhaler in his gloved hand. He put the inhaler to his mouth and pressed the trigger.

  Great, Steward thought. An asthmatic goon.

  Angel’s voice filled the silence. “Who do you know on Vesta, Steward?”

  Steward turned his eyes to Angel and tried to put as much venom into the look as possible. “You tell me. You’re the fucking expert.”

  “Who did you see in February?”

  Steward only looked at him.

  “On whose orders were you here?”

  Mira. In Cetus. Angel’s partner was taking off his jacket.

  “Did the order come from high up? Or was it Curzon?” Steward felt something inside him leap at the mention of the name. Seen on Angel’s readouts, no doubt, which might make him think he had something.

  Angel’s partner, carrying his jacket, was slowly moving around the desk, toward Steward.

  Procyon, Steward thought. In the Little Dog.

  “Was Curzon working on his own? Did the Board know? The Chairman?”

  Angel’s partner was standing behind Steward now. The hair on the back of Steward’s neck prickled at his closeness. Suddenly the man threw his jacket over Steward’s head, held it close around him. Steward smelled sweat, plastic, his own sour breath. He felt panic rising, tried to bite it down. Angel’s voice went on, toneless.

  “Did the Prime know? Was it the Prime’s idea?”

  Steward’s pulse crashed in his ears. He felt the touch of the zap glove against his shoulder, two hard electrodes pressing through his flimsy robe. He fought against the fabric that was trying to smother him and tried to remember what constellation Fomalhaut was in.

  Spit into the void, he thought.

  “Fuck off, Angel.”

  The lights went out for a while.

  *

  After several interrogations Steward couldn’t sleep on his back because of the scorch marks from the zap glove. His right hand was going numb and he wondered about neurological damage from the repeated jolts of electricity.

  Angel kept coming back to the same questions. Who on Vesta had he worked with? Who had sent him to Vesta, and with whose knowledge? Was the Prime involved? Angel never tried any tricks, never used rhetoric, just came back to the same questions. Monotonously. With his partner there to administer the zap when Angel got bored with the questions he was asking.

  Steward couldn’t answer the questions if he wanted to. And he wasn’t getting asked anything new.

  Steward wondered why they weren’t using drugs. He had gone under drugs and deep hypnosis as an Icehawk, part of techniques designed to help him resist interrogation. But that kind of conditioning could be broken, given enough patience. And though interrogation under drugs was suspect—the subject might not only babble what he knew, he might cheerfully invent information or tell the interrogator what he thought he wanted to hear—the drugs would certainly work better than anything Angel had tried so far, and careful interrogation could winnow out truth from hallucination.

  Maybe Angel was just addicted to classical methods. Maybe he thought the use of drugs would be like cheating.

  Maybe he just liked the smell of scorched flesh.

  And then it occurred to Steward: Maybe they tried drugs, when he first arrived, while he was still out. And they hadn’t worked.

  The Prime, Steward thought. That was all he’d got out of this, the only thing that was new. He wondered if the Prime was someone in Consolidated Systems’ security apparatus.

  He looked around his cell, flexed his shoulders, and winced at the protest of scorched flesh. This was one of the few times when he hadn’t awakened to the voice of guards ordering him to kneel facing away from the door, hands behind his back.

  A small gesture of defiance might be in order. He rolled off his mattress and started to do push-ups. On his fists. Yelling on each upthrust. At the end, gasping for breath, he tossed a finger in the direction of the monitors concealed behind the screens on the front wall and muttered, “Take that, Angel.”

  He drank water from the sink and started shadowboxing. The two bright floodlights gave him two shadows to dance with. They both reeled drunkenly. Something had happened to his balance.

  The electric bolt on the door slammed back. It opened. Steward spun, felt a wave of vertigo at the too-sudden move. He stood, his fists still up, and saw one of his guards, the woman he saw the first day, standing in the doorway. Her helmet was off, her armored jacket was open to reveal the uniform blouse underneath. She was blond and square-faced, her eyes distant beneath the butterfly-wing makeup. She was holding his clothes folded neatly in one hand.

  She tossed them onto the mattress. “Put them on,” she said. “You’re being released.”

  He lowered his guard slightly, not believing this. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know why they were holding you in the first place. Not my job.” She stepped back behind the door. “Check your pockets, make sure everything’s there. You’ll have to sign for it. Knock when you’re ready.” The door closed again.

  Steward stood breathing hard, his mind swimming, his eyes dazzled by the floods. He thought for a moment, then slowly put on his underwear and socks, drew on his cords, then his boots. He checked his pockets, looked at the shirt and jacket and thought, If I get my chance. He put the T-sh
irt and jacket over one arm and knocked.

  The door opened again, and Steward realized that it hadn’t been bolted. The woman looked him up and down. “You going to put your shirt on?”

  “I like the way I look, with zap marks all over my back.”

  The guard frowned at him. “Up to you, I guess.”

  He followed her to the desk down the hall, then signed for his belongings. She took him into the elevator, then down the long beige corridor, past Room Twelve to the big room where people were tapping their console keys and talking into their telephones.

  Steward stopped and looked at them and wondered how many of them knew the sorts of things that happened in Room Twelve. Maybe they all did. Maybe that was just part of the working day to these people, taking in a torture session before the afternoon coffee break.

  “This way.” His escort had stopped and turned to face him. Steward looked slowly over the room. Angel and his partner were not to be seen. Maybe it wasn’t their shift.

  “I want some coffee,” he said, and turned.

  “Hey,” the guard said.

  “Brighter Suns owes me coffee, for shit’s sake!” Steward snapped, his voice very loud. People looked up at him; saw the burn marks; looked down. No one seemed particularly troubled. He passed by Angel’s desk and looked down at it as he passed. What he wanted was there, just where he remembered it had been on the first day, that first interrogation. Sitting on a pile of papers, on a bunch of file folders with classified stamps.

  Steward was swaying slightly as he walked. His balance was still wrong. He exaggerated the motion slightly, found himself overdoing and almost fell, caught himself in time. Okay, he thought. Slow and easy.

  He punched coffee with extra cream and turned to glare at the room. People were looking down, suddenly fascinated with their display terminals. Steward laughed. He took his coffee and affected a swagger as he moved back up the aisle. Only his escort was watching; he would have to be careful to conceal the movement from her.

  He raised the coffee to his lips and walked into Angel’s desk, bumping his knee and falling forward, the coffee spilling over the file folders. “Shit,” he said, and tossed his jacket and shirt down on the spill, as if to mop it up. He swabbed the desk until he felt what he wanted under his hand, clutched it, then pulled his arm violently back, as if he’d realized what he was doing.

  “Fuck it,” he said, loudly. “A wet desk is the least thing I can give him.”

  His escort was hurrying toward him. She looked from Steward to the desk and back. “Finished now?” she asked.

  “Spilled my coffee.”

  “You want to go or what?”

  He crumpled the foam cup and tossed it in a waste container. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  And, as he followed his escort out, he tried very hard to keep from smiling.

  *

  In the waiting room just inside the detention station Steward saw the crew of the Born waiting for him. They were all in uniform, Reese in the light blue of Starbright, the others in dark gray Taler jackets. There was another man in Starbright uniform that Steward didn’t recognize, with violet collar tabs of a kind that Steward hadn’t ever seen. They rose as he entered.

  Reese came forward, reached out to touch Steward, brushing his shoulder with the backs of her knuckles. There was shock in her eyes, followed rapidly by anger. “You have a bad time?”

  He tried to be offhand. “Depends on your feelings about torture, I guess.” He looked at them each in turn. “How long was I in there?”

  “Six days.”

  “It seemed longer.”

  She cut her eyes to the stranger in the Starbright uniform. “This is Mr. Lal,” she said. “He’s the Starbright consul.”

  Lal’s handshake was brisk. His uniform fit him well. “Glad I was able to get you out,” he said.

  “I don’t think you had much to do with it,” Steward said. “I think they just finally decided to believe my records.”

  There was hesitation in Lal’s eyes.

  “I want you to get pictures of my back,” Steward said. “They tortured me in there.”

  “We can’t get involved with matters of internal Brighter Suns procedure,” Lal said.

  “So that they can’t object next time Starbright decides to torture some Brighter Suns citizen, right?” Steward said. “Fuck this. I’ll file the complaint myself. And I’ll publicize it.” He looked at the others. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Steward brushed past Lal and moved out the door. He could see Reese’s grin out of the corner of his eye. The others followed.

  The door was blastproof, covered with monitors, and had some kind of exploding star on it, burning in the middle of a spiral galaxy. The Pulsar Division. Outside, the street was cold dark alloy with a bright ceiling that reflected the people below.

  A few people were drifting up and down the street. Vesta was between shifts.

  “Lal was worthless, you know,” Reese said. “I had to stand over him the whole time. Once he found out it had gone to the Pulsar Division he said it was hopeless.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Steward said.

  “You should have seen the Captain, though.” Reese looked at SuTopo. “I’ve never seen him madder. Beating his fist on the cops’ desk and roaring about them wrecking his schedule.”

  Steward turned to him. “Thanks.”

  SuTopo only smiled. “My job,” he said.

  “Not yours. Lal’s.”

  “What was it your Alpha did that made them all so mad?” Reese asked.

  “Killed some people. They said.”

  “I suppose that might make them cross.”

  Reese had fallen in step with him, to one side and slightly behind. Steward looked to the other side and saw Fischer, grinning under a new blond mustache, unbuttoning his uniform coat to reveal a green and red tropical shirt. SuTopo was striding behind him and to one side, his face solemn under his pitji hat. Cairo was on the other side of Reese.

  A wedge, Steward thought, marching in lockstep along the third level of the Vesta mainline centrifuge, Steward at the ardis, cleaving apart the Brighter Suns citizens. There was a feeling of belonging here, a glow of comradeship, one that Steward knew wouldn’t last—his purposes weren’t theirs, nor theirs his—but still it was good to know that there were people here who would go to trouble on his behalf, who would fight for him, at least in some things.

  And there was another reason for Steward’s glow. His hand was still clutching Colonel Angel’s spike, the key he used to get access to secured places, to Room Twelve, to his sealed computer files. Security, Steward had been told, was only as good as the people who enforced it. Angel had been careless with his key, and Steward was going to open as many doors with it as he could.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Give myself some painkiller first,” Steward said. “Then sleep.” Cairo pressed the silent button of a camera behind him, coding the burn marks on his back into the molecular structure of its variable-geometry threads. She shifted to another position and took another picture.

  “Yeah,” Reese said. “Take care of yourself first.”

  “I’ll file the complaint when I get up,” Steward said. “Then maybe broadcast the pictures to some news agencies on Earth. Some of them might be able to evade Brighter Suns’ pressure.”

  “You want a doctor to look at you?” Cairo asked.

  Steward flexed his right hand, still feeling the numbness there. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll see how I feel when I wake up.”

  Cairo straightened, then looked into the viewer of her camera, clicking backward through the recorded photographs. “I’ve taken six,” she said. “That should be enough, don’t you think?”

  Steward nodded. “I suppose.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and yawned. “Sick bay,” he said. “Then bed.”

  “Let me dress those burns,” Reese said, standing up.

  “That many dressings would just get in my way,” Steward said. “I
’ll just wash them in the shower before I go to bed.”

  “Ouch,” said Cairo.

  Reese looked at him. “You sure?”

  He nodded and yawned again. “Just some sleep,” he said. “That’s all I want.”

  She nodded slowly. “Okay. But if you need anything…”

  “I won’t. Go out onstation and give yourself a party. Celebrate. Drink a few for me.”

  Steward walked down the corridor to the sick bay. He collected some disinfectant and bandages for later, then put some painkiller in a pneumatic hypo, pressed it to his arm, and pulled the trigger. Then he went to another cabinet and shook some speed into his hand.

  He’d have to stay awake for a while.

  He dry-swallowed the pills and headed for his quarters. Once there, he showered, shaved off his six days’ growth of beard while leaving himself a dark mustache, and collected a dozen empty data spikes. He put on a pair of dark trousers that gathered at the ankle with a drawstring. He drew on a high-collared shirt, winced at the pain, then put on slippers and a dark collarless jacket that looked vaguely like someone’s uniform, without the insignia. Looking at himself in the mirror, he concluded that he could pass for a young Brighter Suns exec. He turned on his terminal and printer and punched up the map of Vesta that was in the ship’s computer. He made copies of some of the maps that interested him, then turned off his terminal. The data spikes went into an anonymous leather pouch, along with Angel’s spike, then Steward stepped to his door, opened it slightly, and listened.

  The old ship whispered from its vents. He heard no other sound.

  Steward slipped out of his door and closed it carefully behind him. Speed was beginning to hum in his nerves, his spine. He grinned and moved to the downship access, opened it, stepped into the gravity-free machine space. He pushed off from the access, floated up to the main outside airlock, and looked through the rack for his vac suit. Once Steward found it, he took it and drifted aft to a smaller personnel airlock. Sometimes Cairo had occasion to use the main airlock to perform routine maintenance outside, and he didn’t want to run into her there. In the aft lock he put his air bottles into the ready compressor and put the levers on charge just to assure himself the old bottles would have plenty of air.