Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "You are deluded, you sausage casing of a man. They are about to destroy your forces in the Asteroid Belt, and once they're done with that, they will return to Earth and root out everyone like you."

  Enspach looked annoyed for the first time. He squared his shoulders, smiling again, although now it looked forced. "You came to Khent to extract Mr. Rohan, as he calls himself. Why? What is your interest in him?"

  "Let me think." MacAdams furrowed his brow. "Oh right. He was interested in finding someone to split your mother's two-for-one deal."

  Not looking insulted in the slightest, Enspach touched the pain-stick to MacAdams' neck. MacAdams writhed and shuddered, the restraints creaking around his wrists.

  Enspach asked more questions. MacAdams replied with more insults. Each time, Enspach gave him the stick. It hurt. Of course it hurt. But he'd been hurt before and he'd learned to detach from it, to let his mind look away from it and think of old memories, and that was what he did until he got so fuzzy that it didn't even hurt the way it should have anymore.

  Enspach left for a while, informing MacAdams that his nerves needed to rest before their next trial. MacAdams meant to work on a way out of the gray room, but the stick had put him into a haze and he'd barely crawled out of it when Enspach came back into the room.

  It was the same as before except the pain-stick hurt even more. MacAdams was starting to have some problems remembering what he'd said to the last question Enspach had asked him, but judging from the man's slowly decaying patience, MacAdams still wasn't giving up anything useful.

  Enspach took another break, then came back for a third round. MacAdams couldn't really say how long it went on for, time had gotten spotty and sometimes he felt like he'd been catching his breath for five minutes between questions. He'd sweated through his clothes a long time ago and he was starting to wonder when he would have his first heart attack.

  "This has not been productive," Enspach said at last. He tapped one end of the pain-stick and inserted it into a slim holster at his waist. He gave MacAdams a look that was almost pitying. "You might think that you've won this. But this wasn't a battle you wanted to win."

  He made to leave the room again. MacAdams lifted his head. "You got a bathroom? Or would you prefer if I take a shit in the chair?"

  Enspach turned, an utterly blank look on his typically expressive face. "Of course. We're not monsters."

  He walked out, returning a minute later with two pairs of cuffs made from pliable plastic or tough rubber. He fastened them around MacAdams' ankles and wrists before letting him loose from the ones binding him to the chair. MacAdams had half a mind to bullrush him and headbutt his face in, but the pain-stick had left him so woozy he could hardly hold himself upright.

  Turned out the other door in the room led to a bathroom. The toilet turned out to be a six-inch wide tube protruding from the wall and bent up in an elbow joint.

  MacAdams glanced between it and Enspach. "What is the matter with you people?"

  "If you don't like it, you can use your chair after all. It makes no difference to me."

  Somehow, MacAdams made it work. There was a combination vacuum/hose for cleanup. Surreptitiously, MacAdams ran his thumbnail along the tubing, searching for anything he could pry loose, but found nothing. There were no objects of any kind on the blank countertop, either. Even if there was, Enspach had been watching him the whole time. He did up his pants, which were some kind of peasant garb with two big buttons for the fly, then yawned and covered his mouth. He shuffled toward the doorway.

  "Show me your hands," Enspach said.

  "What do you think I'm going to do? Flick water at you until you drown?"

  Enspach unsheathed his pain-stick, twirling it smoothly in his fingers. "Show me your hands."

  MacAdams held them out, confirming they were empty. Enspach directed him back to the chair, reaffixed his original restraints, and left.

  MacAdams waited five minutes, then five more. Then he started to tug on his restraints. They were the same stretchy plastic as the cuffs Enspach had put on him to go to the bathroom and they had some give to them. Enough that MacAdams thought he could probably chew through them. But no matter how he stretched, he couldn't get his mouth within six inches of them.

  The gray room was as barren as the strange bathroom. There were some wall compartments which he suspected were empty. Otherwise, the only thing there was the chair itself. Its surface was textured, like whoever had built it had been afraid people would slip off it. There was something out of place about the build, too. It didn't feel like he was supposed to be in it. It was like the chair wanted him off of it.

  He spent a long time worrying at the restraints. He might or might not have loosened them by a millimeter by the time he fell asleep.

  He got up what felt like two or three hours later and went back to work on the chair. The door slid open some time later. Enspach strode into the room, pushing a metal tray table with a shiny black bag on its surface.

  "I hope your rest has given you time to think," Enspach said. "Now. Will you tell me who you are working for?"

  MacAdams sighed. "You're wasting your time. Get out your little stick and let's get on with it."

  "Yes, I anticipated that would be your attitude. That is why I brought a different set of tools. They are less sophisticated, but it is quite possible that will make them more effective." He popped open the back and rummaged through the metallic contents. "I am very upset about this, you know. At the risk of immodesty, what I do is a form of art—even, in its way, a form of spiritual practice. It shouldn't be rushed any more than one should rush a prayer. Unfortunately, events have left me without the time such a process reserves."

  He withdrew a snub-nosed syringe and stuck it into MacAdams' left arm. Within moments, MacAdams couldn't control his hand—could barely make his fingers twitch (which Enspach seemed to hesitate at seeing). But he could still feel everything.

  "Physical pain is usually more than enough," Enspach said. "But it is in fact a relatively merciful method. For pain fades, doesn't it? In the moment it is happening, it can be agonizing, but if enough pain-free moments pass afterward, it is soon forgotten."

  He set aside the syringe and withdrew a black plastic square four inches on a side with a round, two-inch hole through its center. He placed the tip of MacAdams' left index finger inside the hole.

  "If physical pain is merciful," Enspach mused, "what, then, is merciless? Physical loss. For when something is lost, it cannot be replaced, and thus is permanent and horrible in a way that transient pain can never be. When you are injured deeply, you know you'll never be quite the same. That you will always be a lesser person than you once were."

  He pushed a hidden button on the side of the square. Blades irised in from the edges of the hole. The tip of MacAdams' finger dropped to the floor and rolled away, leaving a semicircle of blood behind it.

  The part of his finger that was still attached pumped out blood in tune to his heartbeat. Cold sweat broke out across his body. It hurt, but not as much as the pain-stick had hurt. What hurt worse much was just as Enspach had said: the loss. The loss that made his stomach twist and his head roar.

  Enspach stepped back and used a cloth to wipe the surface of the cutting box. "Why did you come to retrieve Rohan?"

  "Had to," MacAdams said. "He picked me up at the spaceport last month and I owed him a favor."

  "Who are you working for?"

  "Like I told you, Frankie's Pizza. Got a sausage pie for you. But it looks like one of the toppings fell on the ground over there."

  "This is amusing, but only in the sense that it's going to make things even worse for you." Enspach set the cutting box on MacAdams' clipped finger, settling it over the next knuckle. He activated it, the blades swashing together and dropping another third of a finger to the gray floor.

  MacAdams fought not to pass out. "Oops, there goes another piece of the topping."

  "If you haven't already seen where there is going, it t
urns out that you have a number of small appendages that can be amputated without risking your death before my questions are answered. Next will come a toe. Then another finger. And then another toe. At some point, we will move to the genitals. I think I will remove one testicle first, followed by your penis. Once the remainder of your fingers and toes have been pruned, I will sever your second testicle. From there, we will move to the features of your face."

  "I'm dead anyway. Don't matter what you do to my body between now and then. The only thing I have left is to die well. To hope my ancestors see it. And that I made them proud."

  "To my great dismay, I find that I believe you." Enspach placed the cutting box on the metal table with a clack. "That is the problem with sentience: a being's delusions are more powerful than the reality they exist within. And so, at the end of the day, the only way to defeat those delusions is to subvert them."

  He got out an unmarked gray tube and squeezed gel over MacAdams' mutilated index finger. The bleeding stopped. The pain got a little better, too.

  Enspach capped the tube with angry haste, glanced with greater irritation at the two pieces of finger lying on the floor, and packed up his bag. "Don't be too pleased with yourself. Later, I might separate you into your smaller components anyway."

  He exited the room. MacAdams gave himself thirty seconds to recover, then went back at the chair. There weren't any windows in the room and there weren't any devices in sight he could use to keep track of time with, but Enspach was gone for a good while, at least two hours. After that there was nothing more for MacAdams to do but sit there and listen to the faint hissing that might have been circulating air.

  The door opened, bringing Enspach with it. He carried another snub-nose syringe and a sleek device. He gave MacAdams' finger a once-over—the gel had hardened on it some time ago and the pain was down to a distant throb—then pricked the syringe into MacAdams' right arm.

  "And how are you doing?" Enspach said.

  "Tired of waiting for you to get on with it."

  "Well, the responsibility for the delay falls entirely on you, I'm afraid. And as you will soon find out, your resistance accomplished nothing."

  "There's something wrong about you," MacAdams said. "Like you weren't born of a mother."

  Enspach's mouth tilted up at the edges. "Isn't that something." He leaned closer, examining MacAdams' eyes, then smiled again, clearly pleased, and straightened. "Very good. What is your name?"

  "MacAdams," MacAdams said. He rammed his brows together. "What the hell?"

  "And your first name?"

  "Gene. Gene MacAdams."

  "Yes, Mr. MacAdams. Now, who do you work for?"

  MacAdams tried to clench his jaw, then to bite his tongue, but his mouth seemed to be under the control of someone else. "Tough to say."

  "Why?"

  "Because I might be working for two people. Or none. Until a couple weeks ago, I was with the Hive. Suppose I still am, assuming they're still alive. But since then, I've been working for Dark Solutions." MacAdams found himself snorting, then grimaced. "Or more like working with them. Ain't like they're paying me. Then again, money doesn't matter too much anymore, does it?"

  With great effort, feeling each cord in his neck going tight, he shut off the flow and glared at Enspach. "You drugged me."

  "Obviously.

  "Why didn't you just do this in the first place?"

  "It's extremely unsporting, isn't it? It's just…unsatisfying. Anyone can administer a man a drug and get them to speak. If anyone can do a thing, that means there's no art nor craft to it. It's purely amateur."

  "What kind of art is there in cutting somebody up until he squeals?"

  "Well you see, Gene, it represents the taking of the most difficult thing a person can acquire. Consider this. If you have valuables, I can rob them from you; if you own land, I can force you off it through violence or by law; if you have money, I can steal or swindle or seize it from you. If I have even a modicum of power, there is very little that you can do to stop me. So your ownership of these things is very conditional, very tenuous.

  "When you think about it, the only objects you can be said to have genuine ownership of are your body and your brain. Now obviously I can kill you, and remove your ownership of these things, but that doesn't mean they then come under my possession. They are simply lost to everyone. Further, since the body has no will of its own, and is in fact the slave of the brain, it is clear that ownership of the brain is the only truly sovereign ownership a person can have.

  "So if I can use my skills to take control of that brain—to force you to give up its secrets or to take my beliefs as its own—then I have accomplished a genuine feat. This is best done through a mixture of pain and persuasion, for that is the way things are done. But as I said, I don't have the luxury of time."

  "I feel like you don't have many friends," MacAdams said.

  The man laughed happily. "You said that you work for the Hive. Do you know where they have been hiding themselves?"

  "Titan. They dug out some tunnels and stashed the ships there."

  "Yes, we suspected it would be something like that. What about the pirate fleet?"

  "Don't know."

  Enspach looked up from his device, which he'd been taking notes on. "You don't know? Are you sure of that?"

  "After the blowup at Earth, Kansas took off with her part of the fleet. Nobody's heard from her since."

  "I see. Do you have any guesses as to where she might have gone?"

  "Not the Locker," MacAdams said. "Other than that, any guess I gave you would be a bad one. Kansas is too unpredictable for me to keep up with."

  "What about the most recent fleet, the one that has gathered in the Asteroid Belt? What are its plans there?"

  "Don't know that either. Didn't even know there was a fleet in the Belt. But knowing the Belters, they're going to come up with some shit you won't even believe."

  Enspach got one of those blank looks again. He tapped some stuff into his device and sent a transmission. "Regarding yourself? What are you doing on Earth and what brought you to Mr. Rohan?"

  "Originally, I was just supposed to come down here and put three bullets in President Cannel. When somebody else took care of that for me, I got sent over to the president's office to take whatever there was to take. Only another crew was already there. We tracked them down to an island in the middle of the Pacific called Tandana. Just a disease-ridden jungle."

  "And what did you find there?"

  "A whole lot of not much—until we found the jet fighters. Same ones Sveylan is currently bombing the hell out of New Mongolia with."

  "How did a small army of aircraft wind up on a disease-ridden jungle island?"

  "Wild guess here, but I'm thinking that they flew there. Same reason Toman went to Titan: to hide away until he could do the most damage. Tracking the planes was what brought us to Khent."

  "Where you were to pick up Rohan. Why?"

  "He was supposed to provide us with answers."

  Enspach made another note. "Has he?"

  "Just that the Lurkers are already down here working with people. If he had anything more, he wasn't going to tell us until we'd gotten him out of town to safety."

  Enspach went through another host of questions about who else was working in Dark Solutions, what assets they had at their disposal, and so forth. MacAdams was powerless to stop himself from answering, so he supposed it was a good thing that DS had told him so little about their organization. Thirty minutes in, Enspach took a break from questions to go over his notes.

  MacAdams stared at him. "You really think your pipe-shaped pals can take over everything?"

  "I am quite sure of it. You have already lost nearly half of your fighting ships. The remainder are splintered and will easily be defeated within another two or three battles."

  "Then what? The Lurkers don't have the troops to occupy Mars, let alone the whole System."

  "Yes, but the more of you who resist, and ar
e killed for it, the less occupying the Lurkers will have to do. From there, it is a simple matter of consolidation. Human manufacturing will be reduced to zero while the invaders produce new weapons. It will take years to complete the process in full, but that does not bother them. After all, it took them years just to get here."

  "You better pray you're right. If the Lurkers lose and we take you alive, we'll make cutting off fingers feel like a warm bath."

  "I'm almost sad that I'll never get to see that." Enspach didn't move, but he seemed to loom closer, something stirring in the depths of his eyes. "What you don't understand is how close to over it already is. They won't even have to do most of the work themselves. All they have to do is sow chaos between the right groups of you and let your own worst instincts bring you to tear each other apart."

  "What do they even want? Don't they have their own planets? Are they running out of room? Are they too god damn dumb to rig up a new station when the old one starts getting full?"

  "They don't often speak of such things. Even when they do, I suspect that they are in some way mocking me, as if it's funny to them to take this world from us and never let us know their true reasons why.

  "But I have spoken to them often enough to glean my own insights. For them, I don't believe that the taking of Earth is about the acquisition of resources or living space. I believe it is about the taking itself."

  "And you want to help them take it."

  Enspach waved his hand. "As I've said, it's not about what I want, it is about what is going to happen regardless. If our defeat is inevitable, then our only hope lies in working with them, and hoping that this will convince them to leave some few of us alive."

  "If there were any justice, people like you would bear marks on your forehead so we'd know who to stake."

  "The only order within the universe is the physical laws and what we impose on the universe ourselves. Therefore, if you weren't out 'staking' people like me before now, it is your own fault that I'm still here, and you should condemn yourself for it." The tall man allowed himself a moment of smugness, then nodded to himself. "But we've gotten off course. You say you haven't been working with this so-called Dark Solutions for long. How much sway do you have with them? If you requested them to come meet you, would they do so?"