by John Scalzi
Two rebel vehicles outside the administration offices opened fire at the building and were turned into glowing piles of slag by the Tubingen, which had targeted them from orbit. The hostages, kept in a basement-level wing filled with conference rooms, were dirty and tired but generally unharmed. The entire event took less than thirty minutes, with no casualties on the CDF side.
Their work done, the CDF soldiers asked for and received shore leave in Zhoushan, where they were welcomed enthusiastically, or so it seemed, by the locals, although that might have also been because the Colonial Union was known to pick up the tab for Colonial Defense Forces on shore leave, encouraging the soldiers to spend foolishly and the local shops and vendors to charge exorbitantly. If there were any rebel sympathizers among the burghers of Zhoushan, they kept their mouths shut and took the CDF’s money.
The last thing Lee remembered prior to waking up in the room she was in now, she, Jefferson and Private Kiana Hughes were having dinner in a hofbräuhaus (Zhong Guo, despite its Chinese naming conventions, had mostly middle and southern Europeans, an irony that Lee, with Chinese ancestry on her father’s side, found somewhat amusing). She recalled the three of them getting more than a little drunk, which in retrospect should have been a warning, since thanks to CDF soldiers’ genetically-engineered physiology, it was almost impossible for them to actually get smashed. At the time, however, it just seemed like a pleasant buzz. She remembered piling out of the hofbräuhaus very late local time, wandering toward the hotel at which they had been booked and then nothing else until now.
Lee ruefully revised her assessment of the state of enthusiasm of the locals for the CDF’s work. Clearly, not everyone was pleased.
Her memory checked out, and Lee turned her attention to where she might be now. Her BrainPal’s internal chronometer told her that she had been out for roughly six hours. Given that expanse of time, it was possible that she, the apparently late Jefferson and (she rather strongly suspected) Hughes were now on the other side of the planet from Zhoushan. She doubted that, however. It would have taken at least some time for Two and Six to have gotten her naked and strapped to a chair and otherwise prepped for what they were planning to do to her. Two also mentioned that he (she? Lee decided to go with “he” in her brain for now) had already had enough time to talk to Jefferson and Hughes and to kill Jefferson when he had not cooperated. For these reasons, Lee suspected she was still somewhere in Zhoushan.
She also suspected, since she was still in fact in the hands of Two and Six and not already rescued by her platoon, that wherever she was had shielding that kept her BrainPal from transmitting her whereabouts. She tested this by trying to make a connection to Hughes and then to several other people in the platoon: nothing. She tried pinging the Tubingen: also nothing. Either this room specifically had a signal blocker or she was somewhere that was designed with (or had among its capabilities) the ability to block signals. If it was the latter, that would bring down the number of possible buildings it could be in Zhoushan.
Lee thought again, more deeply, about her situation and realized she was sitting on a clue. She was in a restraint chair of some sort—moreover, a restraint chair designed for someone to sit in for an extended period of time, given that the seat of the chair had a sliding trapdoor to allow waste through. Lee did not fancy herself a connoisseur of restraint systems, but as she was now in her ninth decade of life, she had seen a thing or two. In her experience, restraint chairs showed up in three places: hospitals, prisons and particularly specialized brothels.
Of the three, Lee dismissed the idea of a brothel first. It was possible, but brothels were a place of business and not particularly secure. People lived in them and worked in them, and there were (if the brothel was at all successful) all sorts of new and different clientele coming in and going out at all times of the day. Brothels would ensure some privacy, but probably not so much that a shotgun blast wouldn’t be noticed, not to mention a corpse or two being dragged out of the premises.
In a hospital a corpse would not be a problem, but the shotgun blasts probably would be. An abandoned hospital might solve that issue, but hospitals also generally were not signal-proof—too much medical information was shuttled about electronically to make it a feasible idea.
So, a prison or jail seemed to be the mostly likely location: chairs, signal-blocking structure and easy disposal of dead bodies, as the prison would likely have its own morgue. It also meant that whoever was holding her and Hughes also had the ability to discreetly bring people in and out of a prison setting: someone in the local police, or at least the local government.
Lee had been given a map of Zhoushan as part of the briefing for the mission; she called it up on her BrainPal and then winced slightly as the computer in her head activated the visual cortex. Not actually seeing for several hours made even the illusion of light slightly painful. She let her brain acclimate to the visuals and then started scanning through.
As far as she could see (an expression that at the moment held some irony), there were two buildings in Zhoushan she was likely to be in: the municipal jail, which was in downtown Zhoushan and less than a kilometer away from the hofbräuhaus from which they were nabbed, and the province prison, which was ten klicks out from the Zhoushan city center. Lee had no detailed maps of either building—they had those only for the administration and broadcast buildings—but either way, she was comforted by at least the idea that she knew where she might be. It could come in handy.
She now turned her attention to her own situation, which she continued to deem not especially positive. The nakedness did not bother her on a personal level, as she’d never been particularly self-conscious about her body, but it did bother her that she was unarmored. Two had been correct that the CDF uniform gave its wearer certain protections and advantages, although its strengths in that regard were more passive than active. The uniform didn’t make Lee stronger; it just made her tougher. Without it she would be more vulnerable to physical assault, which she suspected likely to happen despite assurances. Not to mention being vulnerable to shotgun blasts.
Speaking of which, she was also unarmed as well as unarmored. This was a problem, but one she spent little time concerning herself with. There was no point wishing for her weapons when she didn’t have them.
The part where she was bound was also of concern to her. As discreetly as she could, she flexed against the binds. They felt soft, slick and supple rather than hard and unyielding, which told her that they were of some sort of woven substance rather than straight-up metal cuffs. She strained against the left arm restraint to see if there was any give to it, but there was none. The other restraints were the same. She had all the genetically-engineered superstrength of a CDF soldier, but no leverage to apply it with. If the binds had even the slightest tear in them, she could work against that, but as far as she could tell, the binds were in excellent condition.
Finally, Lee took stock of her assets, which at the moment consisted of her brain and not much else: She had no eyes, no physical strength and no way to communicate to anyone except possibly to Two, which did her no good, and Six, which likewise did not give her much to go on. And as much as Lee thought she had a reasonably good brain, all things concerned, there was only so much it could do, trapped as it was in her head.
“Well, shit,” she said aloud, listening to the sound of her voice travel around the room. The room was large enough and had walls made of a substance that made it acoustically bouncy, probably bare rock or concrete.
Hello, her brain said.
She spent the next half hour alone in her head, occasionally humming to herself. If Two was watching, it might confuse him a bit.
Eventually, the door to the room opened and Six (Lee presumed) came back in.
“Lieutenant Lee,” said the voice of Two, “are you ready to begin?”
“I am ready to talk your ears off,” Lee said.
* * *
For the next two hours, Lee spoke at length about any subje
ct that Two wished to know about, which included current CDF troop strength and disposition, CDF and Colonial Union messaging about the break from Earth, what the two organizations were doing to compensate for the loss of human resources from Earth, the state of rebellions of various colonies, both in Lee’s direct experience and from hearsay from other soldiers and Colonial Union staff and the details of Lee’s particular mission on Zhong Guo.
Lee answered with facts when she could, informed guesses and estimates when she couldn’t and wild supposition when she had to, making sure Two understood which was which and why, so there would be no margin for misunderstanding between the two of them.
“You are certainly being forthcoming,” Two said at one point.
“I don’t want a shotgun to the face,” Lee said.
“I mean that you are offering rather more than your surviving compatriot,” Two said.
“I’m the lieutenant,” Lee said. “It’s my job to know more than the soldiers under me. If I’m offering you more than Private Hughes, it’s because I know more, not because she’s holding out on you.”
“Indeed,” Two said. “That’s good news for Private Hughes, then.”
Lee smiled, knowing now that Hughes was the other soldier held and that for now, at least, she was still alive. “What else do you need to know?” she asked.
“At the moment, nothing,” Two said. “But I will be back with more questions later. In the meantime, Six will tend to your needs. Thank you, Lieutenant Lee, for your cooperation.”
“Delighted,” Lee said. And with that, she assumed, Two had wandered away from his microphone to do whatever it is that he did, presumably talk to fellow conspirators (of which Lee assumed there were at least five).
She heard Six moving about in the room. “Do you mind if I talk?” Lee asked. “I know you can’t answer. But I have to admit this entire incident is making me nervous.” She began talking, primarily about her childhood, while Six fed her and gave her water and then tended to her bodily needs. After twenty minutes, Six went away and Lee shut up.
It was the room’s acoustics that had given her the idea. Lee had spent years as a performing and recording musician, and part of her job was to make sure the room, whatever room she was in, wouldn’t defeat her instrument or her band. She’d played enough basements with stone and concrete walls to know just how much the sound bouncing off the walls would mess with the performance and also what sorts of materials made what sort of sonic response. She could close her eyes, strike a note in a room and tell you, roughly, how large the room was, what materials the room was made of and whether there were objects in the room bouncing sound off of them. She wasn’t, alas, good enough at it to be able to make an entire map of a room that way.
But her BrainPal was.
For two and a half hours Lee had talked, almost constantly, moving her head as much as she could, risking a neck chafe from her restraining strap. As she talked, her BrainPal took the data from her voice (and from Two’s) and used it to paint a picture of the room, marking every surface that sound reflected off of, polling the delay between the ears to locate the surface in the room and adding each additional piece of data to give a complete audio portrait of the room, of Six and of everything within earshot.
What Lee had learned:
One, that Two was (or, more accurately, was speaking to her through) a PDA set up on a table a meter and a half away, directly in front of her. This was the same table on which Six kept the bottles from which she fed Lee soup and water.
Two, Six was a woman, about 165 centimeters tall and weighing about fifty-five kilos. When Lee was talking directly into her face, she got a reasonably good “look” at Six; she guessed Six was roughly forty to fifty years of age, presuming she was not ever in the CDF.
Three, to the side of the chair was another table, less than a meter away, on which sat a shotgun and various surgical, cutting and shearing implements. Which confirmed for Lee that Two was full of shit about the torture assurances, and that she wasn’t likely to get out of the room alive—nor was Hughes going to get out of hers.
What Lee suspected: Six would return at some point, Two would declare regretfully that they would have to go over answers again, this time with some added incentive in the form of pain, and then at the end of it she would be fed the shotgun while Two and his friends reviewed any discrepancies in her stories and the stories they got from Hughes. Which meant Lee had an indeterminate but short amount of time to escape the chair, rescue Hughes and escape from wherever they were.
She had no idea how she was going to do that.
“Come on,” she said to herself, and thumped the back of her head against the headrest as much as she could with the restraint on her neck. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was enough to clack her jaw, driving her left incisors into the edge of her tongue. There was a small nip of pain and then the odd, not-at-all-coppery taste of SmartBlood, oozing out from the wound.
Lee grimaced. She could never get used to the taste of SmartBlood. It was the stuff the CDF used to replace human blood in its soldiers for its superior oxygen-handling capabilities; the nanobiotic machines could hold several times more oxygen than red blood cells could. It meant that a CDF soldier could survive without taking a breath far longer than a normal human could. It also meant that SmartBlood could become so superoxygenated that a favorite party trick of CDF soldiers was forcing the nanobots in the SmartBlood, which could be programmed via BrainPal, to incinerate themselves in a flash. It was a surprisingly excellent way to get rid of bloodsucking insects: Let them feed off your flesh and then, as they fly away, ignite the SmartBlood in their bodies.
If only Six were a vampire, Lee thought. I’d show her. She spat the SmartBlood that had accumulated in her mouth and did a poor job of it, spattering it onto her right wrist and the restraint over it.
Hello, her brain said again.
As it did so, the door opened. Lee opened up a visual window of the room and started tracking the new sounds and their reflections on them. In a few seconds, Six came into view, positioning herself between the chair Lee was restrained in and the table holding the shotgun and surgical implements. Lee “watched” Six almost disappear as she stopped moving and her sounds ceased except for her breathing and then became silhouetted again when Two spoke from the PDA.
“I’m afraid I have some very bad news, Lieutenant Lee,” Two said. “I took the information you gave me back to my colleagues, and as impressed as they were with your willingness to share, that same willingness has made them suspicious. They believe a CDF soldier would never willingly volunteer the information you have, or as much information as you have. They suspect that while you are telling some of the truth, you may not be telling all of the truth.”
“I told you everything I know,” Lee said, putting an edge of panic in her voice.
“I know you have,” Two said. “And I for one believe you. It’s why you’re still alive, Lieutenant. But my colleagues are skeptical. I asked them what it would take to relieve them of their skepticism. They suggested we go through the questions again, but this time with a certain added … urgency.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lee said.
“I do apologize,” Two said. “I told you that we would not torture you. At the time, I thought it was the truth. I regret it is no longer the case.”
Lee said nothing to this. She knew by all outward indications it would look as if she were trying to keep from crying.
“Six is a medical practitioner of some note,” Two said. “I can promise you that you will be inflicted with only as much pain as is necessary and not a single bit more. Six, you may begin.”
Lee opened her mouth just slightly to offer what she hoped would sound like a frightened, keening wail.
Six reached over to the table, picked up a scalpel and moved it toward Lee’s right ring finger, slipping the very edge of it underneath the fingernail.
Lee, who had bit her tongue quite severely for several seconds,
spat a gout of SmartBlood at Six, covering her arm and the hand wielding the scalpel. In the reflection of the spitting noise she saw Six’s chin move sharply, as if she had moved her head to look at Lee quizzically.
“You’re going to make some noise now, Six,” Lee said, and ordered all the SmartBlood she’d spit out to ignite as furiously as it could.
Six became a bright spot of noise as she jerked back, wailing, arm and hand incinerating. She wheeled in reverse, colliding with the desk that held Two’s PDA. It dislodged from its position and fell forward, leaving Two in the dark about what came next.
Lee wailed as well as the bit of SmartBlood that had landed on her wrist burned like hell against her skin. Then she gritted her teeth and as hard as she could started yanking against her right wrist restraint, currently being weakened by the SmartBlood burning into its fibers.
One yank, two yanks, three yanks … four. There was a ripping sound, and Lee’s right arm was free. Without bothering to put out her wrist or uncover her eyes, she reached over to the table and grabbed the shears and as quickly as possible started cutting her other restraints: left wrist, neck, waist and ankles.
It was when she got to her ankles that Six exclaimed through her pain; Lee guessed that Six had finally figured out what Lee was up to and scrambled toward the table with the shotgun on it. Lee cut through the final restraint and leaped for the table, too late; Six had the shotgun.
Lee yelled, grabbed the scalpel Six had dropped and pushed up, getting inside the radius of the shotgun and driving the scalpel up Six’s abdomen. Six made a surprised gasping sound at the sharp, slicing pain, dropped the shotgun and slid to the ground.
Lee finally removed her blindfold, turned off the audio map and blinked down at Six, who was looking at her with something akin to wonder. She was, Lee noted, a bloody mess.