The monk left, and Rai turned to Sabre. "So, you were manipulated by a woman. A sad tale indeed, but that's what happens when you give women choices, and make them queens, they get choosy."
"Every person should have a choice in what they do with their lives, or whom they marry. It's a basic human right."
Rai shook his head with a supercilious smile. "Not women. They don't know what they want, or what's best for them. They have to be controlled, and made to do what a man wants; otherwise they make his life unpleasant with petulant demands and peevish complaints. But I didn't come here to discuss our society, prisoner. What is that thing on your head, and what does it do?"
Sabre shifted, easing a tingling leg. "Originally it enslaved me, but it's broken now."
"How did it enslave you?"
"It controlled my mind, and made me obey the orders of my owner."
"And she was your owner," Rai said.
"More or less."
"Why did you continue to obey her when you were no longer forced to do so?"
"I wanted to."
Rai folded his arms. "Then you're a fool to continue to be her slave."
"I chose to help her. I'm not her slave."
"I don't believe you. I think that thing does more than you say. It has lights in it. If it was broken, it would not. What else does it do?"
"Nothing. The lights are the only thing that still works."
"You're lying." Rai signalled to one of the guards, who left the room. "That thing looks like old technology, and I want to know what it really does."
Sabre cursed inwardly; he had hoped that by telling the truth, he could avoid torture. If it was the kind than involved breaking bones, his modifications would be discovered, and that would lead to more questions. "You're wasting your time."
"I think not."
Rai looked around as the door opened, and the guard he had sent away returned, accompanied by the monk, who addressed Rai. "You're to bring him to Norak. He wishes to speak to him."
"He could be dangerous,” Rai said. “I don't know what that thing on his head does yet."
"Norak does not fear a mortal. He must be obeyed."
"Very well, but he should be drugged, for safety."
The monk nodded and dug in his robe, producing a vial and a rag. Uncorking the vial, he sprinkled a few drops of clear liquid onto the rag and handed it to Rai. The warrior approached Sabre, who tensed. Evidently deducing his prisoner's intention to defend himself, Rai stayed out of range of his feet and pinned Sabre's neck to the floor with his knee, clamping the rag over his nose and mouth. Sabre held his breath and waited for a couple of minutes before going limp, feigning unconsciousness, but Rai continued to hold the rag in place. A cyber could hold his breath for close to twenty minutes when not exerting himself, but clearly Rai had noticed that he was not breathing. Time crept past, and the silence became pregnant with growing amazement as Rai waited for him to inhale.
The cyber's host status warning light flashed as Sabre ran out of oxygen, and he strived to slow his metabolism to a crawl, but the light turned red. Had the cyber had more warning, it might have been able to slow his metabolic rate sufficiently to extend his oxygen supply. In a few more seconds, he would pass out and inhale anyway, so he had no choice but to breathe.
A chance remained that he might be immune to the drug, but the last one had worked, so he doubted it. Whatever alien plant this chemical was derived from, its antidote was not, apparently, in a cyber's defensive arsenal. A pungent odour stung his nose, making him dizzy, and reality receded into a haze. Rai removed the rag, and someone unshackled Sabre’s hands, then twisted his arms behind his back and chained them at the elbows and wrists.
The guards raised him onto rubbery legs and half carried him out of the torture chamber, his feet dragging. He was vaguely aware of passing spluttering torches in a dark corridor, and sombrely clad men stepping out of his path. A pair of doors opened ahead of them, and they entered a well-lighted hall with a high roof supported by carved pillars as thick as tree trunks. Dozens of torches burnt against soot-streaked walls, and the guards' footsteps echoed as if they were in a massive cave.
The guards forced him to his knees, and he looked up at a red-robed man seated on an ornate gilt throne; Emperor Norak, presumably. A dozen brown-robed priests stood in a row behind Norak, their heads bowed and hands clasped. Several naked blonde girls wearing gold collars knelt beside the throne, the torchlight gilding their slim bodies. Sabre averted his eyes from their unwilling exposure and turned his attention to the man on the throne. His vision sharpened and the dizziness abated as his enhanced immune system flushed the drug from his blood with a cyber's peerless efficiency.
Only the torches that hissed in their sconces broke the chamber's oppressive silence. The guards knelt, and Norak rose to loom over Sabre. A skull-like visage gazed down at him, gleaming black eyes sunk deep into the dark caverns of their sockets. Pallid skin covered his jutting bones, and a shrivelled nose protruded over his almost lipless mouth. Oiled, wispy white hair was braided behind his head, and a waxed goatee covered his chin. Norak walked around Sabre, studying him, then returned to the throne and sat down again.
"How did you cross the Flux Zone?"
"We walked."
One of the guards thumped Sabre in the kidneys. "My Lord."
"I'm not your lord."
"Not you, I meant -"
"Leave it," the emperor boomed. "He thinks he's clever." He took a gold goblet from a cowering servant and sipped from it. "How did you avoid the perils of crossing the Flux-reality?"
Sabre shrugged. "We ran, we hid, sometimes we fought."
"You don't strike me as a man who's capable of crossing the Flux-reality. My captain tells me you're a cowardly sort."
"We were lucky I guess. How would you know what it's like in the Death Zone?"
The emperor gave a glottal laugh, then coughed and sipped from his cup again. "The Flux Zone is my birthplace. I was a guardian, created by the Core, but you don't know what that is, do you?" His eyes glowed red in their dark holes. "I have powers you could only dream of, which is why these people respect me. Now, how did you cross the Flux Zone, and what is that thing on your head?"
"I already told you."
Norak gestured with a skeletal hand. "Rai, show him how we run things around here, perhaps that will refresh his memory."
Rai, who knelt next to one of the guards, nodded and rose. The soldiers steered Sabre out, his legs still wobbly. The fresh air cleared his head further, a welcome relief after the smoky confines of the palace. Two more guards fell in behind him, and Rai led them through the city, affording Sabre his first glimpse of it. The paved streets' cleanliness gave it a cold, unlived in air, and the idle prosperity of the men who wandered along them did little to relieve that impression.
Only the low mutter of male pedestrians broke the city's brooding quiet. The absence of women made it a drab, melancholy place. Instead of gaily-clad housewives swapping gossip on street corners, or haggling with merchants, a few sombre boys carried bags of groceries home from the equally dismal shops. Sabre wondered how the Orokans could bear to live in such an oppressive, unhappy society.
Rai led the little group out of the city and back along the road through the swamp to the forest. When they reached the trees, he turned onto a narrow, upward-sloping track that ended where the land fell away into a large, sheer-sided box canyon. Clearly it had once been a quarry, and solved the mysterious origin of the stone from which the city was built. Soldiers guarded a pair of stout gates that blocked the narrow gap at one end, and animal and human bones littered the floor. A dozen Death Zone monsters of various shapes, sizes and ferocious aspects paced around it or lay in the shade. Sabre noticed that the scanners did not detect them, even here, and wondered afresh at this strange phenomenon.
Rai turned to him. "Norak's pets. They have to be fed, and that's where you come in. If you don't co-operate you'll end up down there."
"Why doe
s he keep them?"
"He controls them, and we use them to raid villages. Then they feast, and at other times they eat our criminals, vagrants and the occasional traveller foolish enough to wander into our city and cause trouble, but we don't have enough of those. They'll only eat live prey, so dead bodies are no use. No one dares to stand against us or attack us. Half of those girls we captured will be used to feed Norak, who drains them of life. A waste, if you ask me, but no one will gainsay him. If anything happened to him, those creatures would tear us apart."
"A vampire," Sabre said.
"No, he doesn't drink their blood. I don't know what he is, but he's powerful."
"He's a Death Zone monster."
Rai shrugged. "Maybe, but we're rich because of him."
"How does he control the beasts?"
"I have no idea. They just seem to do as he wishes."
"Some sort of mind control, perhaps," Sabre mused.
"Have you seen enough?"
"Too much."
"Good, now you can tell me what I want to know."
"There's nothing more to tell."
"You want to be thrown in there?" Rai asked.
"You want me to make up stories? Besides, I don't doubt that I'll end up down there whether I talk or not."
Rai scowled and headed back along the path. Sabre considered kicking his way free, but his arms were shackled in such a way that it would be impossible even for him to break the chains.
Back in the torture chamber, they waited for the monk to arrive with his bottles. Rai sprinkled the drug on a cloth again and clamped it over Sabre's nose while the guards held him. Sabre quelled a strong urge to kill the obnoxious captain, which he could have done with one kick. Such an attack would, he suspected, only result in his being thrown to the monsters, a prospect he did not relish.
When his knees buckled, they removed the manacles and lifted him onto a table. Blurred figures moved around him, pulled his arms straight and shackled his wrists and ankles to the table. By the time they had finished the haze receded, and when the room came back into focus Rai stood over him, holding a slender knife. Sabre smiled, recalling the torture he had suffered at the hands of the surgeons on Myon Two.
Under the cyber's control, he had endured the exquisite agony of being sliced open with lasers, unable even to vent the screams that had hammered in his trapped mind. Only one host had ever broken cyber control, and had leapt from the operating table to cavort around the theatre in a gruesome, screaming dance of agony, killing two surgeons before he died of blood loss and shock. Sabre had blacked out after a time, and had been spared the full horror of the procedure. Compared to that, the threat of a knife was laughable.
Rai returned his smile. "Our methods are not so crude, you'll soon see." He studied the scars that ran down Sabre's chest and limbs. "I see you've been tortured before, in a strange fashion. Still, you'll find our technique a lot more persuasive."
Sabre glanced at the weapon poised over his belly. "I've already told you the truth."
"We'll see."
Sabre gritted his teeth as Rai sliced into his skin. Just under it, the knife would encounter the silk-fine barrinium mesh and go no deeper, then there would be more questions. Rai seemed satisfied as soon as blood welled from the incision, however, and put the knife aside. The monk handed him a bottle, which he uncorked and tilted over the cut. A small, greyish creature fell out, writhing on Sabre's skin. He stared at it in horror as it paddled in his blood with countless legs, its worm-like body pulsing.
Rai drawled, "You see, this is a true instrument of torture, far more effective than knives or whips. This is a meeder, a parasite from the swamp. It likes to eat people alive. It will ingest your flesh slowly, and very painfully, I am told, gnawing its way into your guts. Once it gets there, you'll die, but the temple will consider it a sacrifice. Few men last that long, however, most are babbling when the meeder takes its first few bites."
Sabre flinched as a lance of fiery pain shot through him. The meeder had wasted no time in settling down to its meal.
"So, what have you to tell me?" Rai asked.
"Go to hell."
"The pain will only get worse, my friend. You see, the meeder digests its food before it consumes it, by injecting a particularly virulent acid."
"I've told you the truth."
Rai shook his head in mild reproof. "Your stubbornness is foolish. I can end your suffering as soon as you tell me everything."
Sabre sensed a tugging deep in his mind as the control unit urged action, but suppressed it, ignoring the scrolling readouts that demanded his attention. "I've told you everything."
Rai sighed and turned to the monk with a shrug. "It seems our friend enjoys pain."
The monk's round eyes darted to the tiny monster that chewed Sabre's flesh, his fat cheeks dimpling. "Perhaps we should employ another?"
Rai gazed at Sabre, lips pursed. "No, I think one's enough. Two would kill him too quickly."
Sabre forced himself to lie still, disregarding the cyber's urging to control the animal. Since the meeder would not be able to chew its way into his guts, it was not necessary to reveal the cyber's ability, which was something he might need soon. The creature's legs scratched his skin as it burrowed into his flesh, sending shafts of agony through him. For an ordinary man it would have been unbearable, but it did not compare to the torture of the surgeons' lasers.
Rai turned to the monk again. "We should leave him to think on his decision for a while, Brother. Let's return later, when he's feeling more talkative."
Sabre knew that the prospect of being left at the mercy of this tiny monster was supposed to panic him into talking, but it was just what he wanted. Rai gazed at him, disappointed, then walked to the door with the monk, the guards preceding them. At the door, he glanced back.
"Enjoy yourself. I hope I remember to return in time."
Rai followed the monk and the guards out, closing the door. The brow band flared electric blue, and Sabre raised his head to aim it at the meeder. The deep, almost inaudible drone filled the room, and within seconds the beast ceased to feed, then withdrew from the wound before curling into a ball and rolling off. As it hit the floor, he sagged back, the cyber band dulling. A residual burning sensation filled the wound, fading slowly. Sabre strained at the steel cuffs, but, unlike the chains in Olgara, they were made from good quality steel, and without any leverage, he could not break them.
Rai returned within twenty minutes, and his brows rose when he found Sabre relaxed on the table. He inspected the wound, then his eyes flicked to Sabre's face.
"What happened to it?"
"I think it found me unpalatable."
Rai scowled. "It didn't appear to find you unpalatable earlier."
"Perhaps it took a while to make up its mind."
The warrior's eyes narrowed. "You did something to it."
"How could I?"
Rai searched the floor and found the meeder, which he set on the wound again. The animal remained curled up, and Rai returned it to its bottle.
"So, we'll have to use more conventional methods on you, it seems."
"You're wasting your time."
Rai smiled. "Maybe I am. You do appear to be impervious to pain, and clearly you have experience with torture. Perhaps it's not you I should be torturing. I fancy the girl will be more susceptible."
"No. This is stupid and pointless. If you intend to kill me, what difference does it make what the brow band can do? Once I'm dead it can do nothing."
"Indeed, but I don't want anything to go wrong at the sacrificial ceremony; the priests would take it as a very bad omen. I don't want portents of doom bandied about simply because you have some unusual ability I'm unaware of."
"Do you really think I stand a chance against those monsters?" Sabre asked.
"You survived the Death Zone, and there are lots in there. According to Norak, you shouldn't have been able to get through, and he should know."
"Maybe there aren't
so many anymore."
Rai shook his head. "There are more coming out all the time. Before, we used to see one only rarely, now we see them regularly. Don't tell me there are less in the Zone, when more are coming out of it."
Sabre frowned at the soot-blackened ceiling. Rai was no fool. These people knew something about the old technology that had once existed on this world, and he was rightly suspicious of the control unit. If he tortured Tassin, Sabre would be forced to tell him something, although he could try lying. Rai seemed shrewd, however, and Sabre was no expert in the art of deception, having never attempted it before. If it did not work, Tassin's suffering would provoke a reaction from the cyber. What kind he was not sure, but it might disable him again in an attempt to take over.
Cybers were programmed to sacrifice themselves to save their owners and people with command privilege, when all else failed. Even though it knew it could not take over, it could still inflict a great deal of pain in a bid to force Sabre to tell the truth and save Tassin. A threat to the cyber's charge would turn it against Sabre, and he did not relish the prospect of another mental battle. He needed to get free in order to save the Queen, but, with the drugs Rai employed, that would not be easy. He had hoped that at some point he would be put into a cell from which he could escape, but that seemed unlikely now.
Rai smiled, turning away. "I'll fetch the girl, then I'll find out what I want to know, I suspect."
Sabre watched him leave, helpless rage coursing through him. The thought of a fiendish meeder torturing Tassin made his skin crawl and his gut clench. He did not think he would be able to keep silent if he was forced to listen to her screams and pleas, even if the control unit did not torture him too. He strained at the cuffs again, making the metal creak and the bands dig into his wrists, but they held.
Relaxing, he considered his situation. Rai would only be convinced that he was harmless when he was dead, even though, as far as Rai knew, he could have killed him with the dart, had it been poisoned instead of drugged. Initially Rai had wanted to question him, but had probably intended to sacrifice him all along, and for that he needed Sabre alive. Now he had discovered that Sabre might have other weapons at his disposal, and could not risk him escaping.
The Cyber Chronicles 02: Death Zone Page 12