Even so, I hoped against all reason that Lieutenant Silverberg was behind our arrest; that she was trying to keep us locked out of harm’s way until the city had calmed down.
They gagged me – Silky too – and that was disturbingly new. In my experience, captors leave you free to beg for mercy, and later to scream when the torture gets underway.
But they couldn’t gag Silky’s kesah-kihisia, which flailed me with a blend of anger and concern, both directed at me. I would prefer her head lumps to be gagged, if such a thing were possible, but at least if Silky concentrated on being pissed at me, she wouldn’t have space to be terrified for herself.
The station house was busier than the last time I was here, and the officers were carrying bigger guns.
I recognized a few faces staring at me with a mixture of apprehension and contempt, but I hadn’t time to chat about old times because we were pushed through the main holding areas, into a section I’d never seen before, and then led down three flights of steps. I felt tension growing in the officers as we were marched down a long corridor and into what looked like brand-new levels, going by the pristine stone-faced walls and ceilings. Unlike the rest of the station house, the lights set flush into the overhead didn’t flicker. Looked like someone’s budget had expanded recently.
Cells, torture, and interrogation.
I was an old hand at these things – and from both sides of the knife point – but my pulse was racing so fast by the time they locked me in my cell that I was unable to give the officers the benefit of my usual wise-assery.
Silky was the reason.
When they separated us at the level above, I had taken a last, careful look at her being dragged down a corridor of cells with the kind of heavy duty windowless doors where you put someone you wanted to rot away. I saw that she had tied red ribbons to her silly head lumps. Those elegant hands the color and texture of perished rubber – had her black fingernails always gleamed with that glossy sheen? I’d never noticed before.
And then I was stumbling downstairs, shoved along by one of my jailers.
I still had memories of people and incidents from my youth, stored away in my head as high-fidelity recordings of the signal from my eyes and ears. The multi-redundancy memory augmentations we’d all had implanted in the crèche still functioned, but my head had fought a long battle of attrition with the rigors of Marine life, and the only place I could record to now was my short-term memory buffer.
The memory buffer is a useful tool. I can glance at a battlefield, duck down under cover, and then replay the memory of what I saw at leisure. But the more my head filled up with sights and smells and sounds and sensations, the quicker my memories flushed out the other end.
I ignored the cell I had been locked inside and used every ounce of willpower and mental discipline to commit Silky’s image to my biological memory.
I think that only succeeded in filling my head up more quickly with memories of trying to remember her.
I fought for about forty minutes and then her image faded from my head.
I screamed, and banged my fist against the bars of my cage. I had hours of footage of my two human wives and my squadmates that were too painful for me to ever look upon, but it had comforted me to know they were there.
Silky’s image was failing already, and if the mayor followed through with his attack on Revenge Squad, if I ever saw Silky again, the next time would be at her execution.
— CHAPTER 15 —
I banged my head against the bars of my cage for ten minutes before I paused for breath.
“It’s no use,” said a guttural female voice. “No matter how hard you bang your Marine head against those bars, you’ll never knock sense into it. So why don’t you give me a break and shut the fuck up.”
Anger reached inside, grabbed my sanity by the throat and pulled it kicking and screaming back into the pilot seat where it belonged.
I wasn’t alone.
I turned around and took in my surroundings for the first time.
Cells in my experience emphasize one of two themes – isolation and sensory deprivation, or the reverse: exposure. I guessed that Silky in the level above me was experiencing a soundproofed and suffocating little cell in complete darkness, because this level was the opposite. The floors, walls, and ceilings of this level were a uniform black glassy material. It wouldn’t look out of place in a bathroom in the officer’s quarters, but there were no dividing walls here – no privacy at all – just a series of cages. A sink and a toilet set in the wall were the only relieving features, and I bet they were for the benefit of disease control rather than our comfort. There was no bed, nowhere to sit – even the toilet required you to stick your arse into the wall to squat over a hole – and there were no shadows to withdraw into because every surface was ablaze in blue-white light.
There was only one place in shadow, and it was a dark one indeed. In the cage opposite mine, the only other prisoner on this level was wrapped in rags that she’d heaped over her head as a crude hood.
“Let me guess,” I told the hooded prisoner, “you’re a beautiful Earth maiden, a frakking princess no less, and they told you to cover up so I didn’t get all chivalrous on their asses and bust you out to return you to the king and claim my just reward.”
“Astonishing,” she said.
That was it. I expected her to elaborate, but she’d said all she wanted. In fact, she said more than she realized. Her voice was strained in a way I couldn’t place – smoke damage perhaps? – But I recognized the accent. She was from Earth, and every Earther I’d ever met outside of Sol System had been bad news.
The hooded Earther came to the edge of her cage closest to mine and appeared to study me out of the shadow of her hood.
If I’d been left with my biological eyes, she would have seemed sinister, her face impossible to make out within the inky gloom of the crude hood, but I armed my eyes for darkness piercing, and learned she wasn’t just hooded, but her face was heavily bandaged leaving just slits for her eyes.
“Is your face burned?” I asked gently.
“In a sense. They call me the Grotesque but that is only partially because of my features. I perceive you have talents beyond a hardened skull, as well as a smear of knowledge. So far, Marine, your knowledge only emphasizes the depth of your ignorance, but knowledge it is nonetheless.”
I bit my tongue. I was low on patience, but I decided I felt sorry for Bandage Woman.
“Tell me, how come you have a rudimentary familiarity with European fairytales? Don’t tell me you were part of the Legion horde that invaded Earth.”
“I did go to Europe once. Spent the day in Athens, but I didn’t think much of it. All bleached old stone work, lethal rad-levels if you didn’t wear protection, and overpriced beer. So, are you a native European?”
“Why are you here?” she said in a haughty reply.
The way the Earth-born woman snubbed my question as inconsequential noise reminded me of Mrs. Gregory, a gang boss I’d encountered with an alien parasite inside, which gave her power in return for feeding its dark appetite. But this Grotesque was too tall, and her voice completely different.
I shrugged. Most Earthers I’d met were arrogant drellocks twisted with paranoia, so I overlooked her rudeness and answered her question. “I’m here because I annoyed the mayor.”
She laughed. “Now there is an oaf who deserves to be annoyed. Please tell me you used that thick Marine skull of yours to head-butt him.”
“Not yet. I blew up his ship. It was only a small cargo freighter, but he didn’t seem happy about it.”
“Perhaps there is hope for you yet,” she said mysteriously. And that was that. Audience over, she turned her back on me and sat cross-legged on the floor of her cage.
Fine. If she wouldn’t make a useful distraction, then she was no use to me either.
I missed Silky terribly, but I had former comrades and late wives to comfort and distract me, it was high time to scout out the memori
es I’d avoided for so many years that should be waiting patiently in my long-term memory. I might not get another chance to re-experience them.
I curled into a ball on the floor and withdrew inside my head where my ghosts awaited me.
——
The jailers interrupted my inner festival of nostalgia about three hours later, when two uniformed police officers unlocked the Grotesque’s cell, backed up by two more officers armed with short-barreled assault carbines.
I feigned sleep, watching through slitted eyelids as one hefty officer held down the Grotesque while another injected her in the neck.
The prisoner didn’t fight her treatment, which made me think the injection was routinely administered.
Nonetheless, the police team were prepared for the possibility of a struggle. Their carbines were aimed and ready, and the woman holding the Grotesque down had the build of a Marine and was not hesitant about throwing her bulk around.
Perhaps this strange woman was worth my attention after all.
— CHAPTER 16 —
The Grotesque’s injections continued every three hours, day and night. I’d been left here over a day so far. No food. No acknowledgement of my existence. My only sustenance was the water from the sink.
All the time, the lights had been on full blast, but at what I estimated to be 05:00 hours on the second day, they suddenly extinguished, plunging the cells into a darkness that would be impenetrable to a baseline human.
I switched my eyes to infrared and watched as a party approached from the stairwell. Warmth flared in my muscles. My body wanted to fight my way out. Surely they were coming for me.
But it was the Grotesque they were after.
At first I thought the party of five was the same group who administered the Grotesque’s injections, different only in the heavy IR goggles they wore. But one member was hooded, and with well-tailored clothing. He had a military bearing, and his air of authority was in sharp contrast to the most pitiful member of the group. Bound and sullen, the humans were followed by a furry creature with a long prehensile tail, a snout filled with fangs, and three baleful eyes that could see no good in any race but its own. This sorry creature was a Hardit.
As the police officers retrieved the Grotesque, the hooded man flicked one wrist with relish and a short-barreled object emerged into his hand. A shock stick. It was rated non-lethal, but that depended how you used it, and in any case if that was shoved against a sensitive part of your body, you would wish it was lethal.
The unlikely group disappeared into a sliding door at the end of the corridor. That was news. I had never even guessed the door was there.
Three human police officers waited outside in an awkward silence for the screams to start inside the secret room. They didn’t have long to wait.
I heard the haughty woman who called herself the Grotesque begging from the outset not to make her “do it again”.
My gut burned with acid at the prospect of what was about to transpire behind that hidden door.
The strong take from the weak. I’ve seen far too much to deny this universal truth. For some, their motivation is in acquiring the treasure, land, service or whatever the weak cannot defend. For others it’s the very act of seizing from the weak, the intoxicating sense of wielding power over another sentient being. My money was on the hooded man being in the second category.
The Grotesque’s pleadings never stopped but they were soon joined by cries of pain and then with screams of sexual abandon.
Hideous though it was, part of this foul scene didn’t fit my expectations. The loudest and longest screams of ecstasy came from the Grotesque, the bellows of pain from the Hardit.
When the screams finally faded away, the Grotesque padded back to her cell, escorted by the guards and the hooded man.
She was naked other than her bandages. Seeing in infrared can be confusing but I’m sure her body was distorted in ways I had never seen before.
The man threw the Grotesque’s rags to the cell floor. She ignored them, and stood there with her back to me clenching her fists, her whole body clamping. She was overloaded with rage, a condition I recognized because I’d felt the same when they’d dumped me in my cage.
Her body was surging with power but had no outlet other than to give the hooded man the satisfaction of seeing her frustration, the loss of control that he had brought about.
His back was to me as well, but I’m certain he was enjoying the sight. He watched her until two of the police officers brought out the Hardit corpse. I had little love for the bastards, but I’d never seen anyone die like that. Perhaps the poor resolution of infrared made my mind fill in the gory blanks, but it looked as if a miniature grenade had exploded in the alien’s head, vomiting blood and brain tissue out of its nose and wolf-like ears.
I said nothing to the party as they left but threw them looks of sheer hatred. I had no doubt that whatever horror had been inflicted on the Hardit had been carried out by the Earther woman who was now throbbing with power in the other cell.
“You are not culpable,” I told her when we were alone, and turned my back on her, looking at my own fists that were clenching with impotent fury.
A few moments later, the lights returned full blast, but in my mind were images of abject darkness.
— CHAPTER 17 —
There’s a saying in the Marine Corps that’s drilled into us since the crèche: when Marines see an opportunity, they seize it with all six limbs.
Admittedly, it wasn’t originally a human saying, but it made sense all the same. So, when Lieutenant Bravic was dragged away from my interrogation before it had properly begun – growling about some crisis or other to do with Littorane radicals – I saw my chance and seized it.
The opportunity in my case, stared right back at me through cold, gray eyes, that gave the impression that he wasn’t about to be seized by anyone, least of all me.
Meet Police Sergeant Michael Lee Frennan. Tall, weary and worn, I knew from our previous encounters that he hated vigilantes with a vengeance, but he was as honest as his boss, Silverberg. Even through the cloud of anger at what I’d witnessed in the early hours of that morning, I could see that Frennan would never be a party to torture and murder.
“Help me to help you,” I begged him. “There’s a darkness stretching its hand over the city and it’s reached your station house. Please. Help me out.” I glanced up at the recorder slotted into the ceiling, its two black orbs staring at me like a remorseless nightmare. “Is that thing on?”
“Of course,” replied Frennan in a tone that told me he was tolerating the imposition of this interrogation but I’d better not push him. “Regulations demand it. So I would think very carefully if I were you, McCall, before accusing anyone in the station of anything, no matter how poetic you think your phrasing.”
I tugged on my short chains, seething in frustration, but they were securely fitted to the heavy-duty desk, and with thousands of ex-Marines like me in the port, I knew it would have been designed to stop someone with even my strength.
“We’ve never exactly gotten along,” I told him. “But you’re a good cop. You have to know something is not right here. I’m appealing to your honor.”
He took a deep breath. I think he was trying to secure the hatch that was bottling up his anger, but when he leant over the table and practically rammed his nose into mine, I didn’t think the hatch would hold. “Let me explain, in words simple enough to penetrate that thick Assault Marine skull, why you’re going to shut up, and do your time like a good boy. Lieutenant Bravic was called away because he is monitoring the trouble that keeps flaring along Langbian Avenue. Right now, there’s a race riot in progress after Littorane extremists sent a message to their human neighbors in the form of seventeen human heads tied with seaweed fronds into a neat package. And the Littoranes say they did this in retaliation. We are stretched so thinly that I feel transparent. I’d bet a year’s pay that Bravic isn’t coming back and this interview will be termin
ated. I repeat for the hard of understanding – I don’t have time for your dumb small-time shit, McCall. Let it be!”
“It’s not small-time.”
“Revenge Squad is small-time.” He glared up at the recorder. “It’s the mayor’s fault for getting so pissed off at Revenge Squad that we’re wasting our time on you morons while the city burns.”
Had it really gone to drent so quickly? “The city’s on fire? Then if you admit it’s the mayor’s fault, let me go!”
“Go? The city’s burning only in metaphor – for the moment – and though I blame the mayor for me being here, I blame you even more. Idiots! If you hadn’t blown up the mayor’s precious boat, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
“Ship.”
“Eh?”
“The mayor’s ship. It wasn’t a boat.”
Frennan raised his fist, ready to slam it onto the table, but the movement degraded into a shrug and he settled back down onto his seat. “I can see I’m wasting my breath,” he said, his words sticky with contempt. “I don’t have time for your stupidity. And that goes triple for Lieutenant Silverberg. She’s fighting for her career, so don’t even think of dragging her into your drent.”
“Silverberg? Is she here? I need to speak with her.”
“Oh, for frakk’s sake. Have you not heard a word? Look, McCall. You fought for the Legion. You signed up to the Civilian Defense Force. Remember your duty. Remember your brothers and sisters you left behind and what they fought for. Don’t dishonor them. Port Zahir is going through a crisis, and as the commercial hub of the entire planet, that matters. Fast forward fifty years and we might look back on this is a minor bump on the road to a better future, or we might regard this crisis as the threshold that led to civil war and the collapse of our unlikely civilization. If you want this planet to function, if you want the war to have meant anything, you will cooperate, and you will not drag Rachel Silverberg into places she doesn’t need to go. Maybe then the Port Zahir Police Department will have enough time to go after the real bad guys.”
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