Part Three: Solution
Cass III (The Third Planet of the Eta Cassiopeiae System, 20LY from Sol and held in fealty for the Terran Star Empire by the Imperial House of Lein Rocha)
The Prisoner
Dull throbbing pain returning to my legs, thoughts groggy and slow. I'm returning to consciousness, lying on a bed. Pain stronger now. I reach for the pump to top up my painkiller but it’s no longer there. I pat the bed covers for the call button. Eyes focusing now, there are others in my room. I tell them that I am in pain. I ask for a nurse. A face comes closer, smiling. Pain forgotten, my chest and stomach drop away from inside as I hyperventilate.
“No! No! No! Nurse! Nurse! Help! Help me!”
It is him!
Three hours earlier
“What do you think?” Jorich asked as they were driven back to the city. Sam pulled a pained face before committing to an answer.
"I guess he believes in what he is saying, maybe it’s the truth, maybe he's just trying to protect his daughter. Still, any insurrection, however small, if it remains unchecked, will eventually effect production, and that, as you know, is all our masters will worry about." Jorich grunted, uninterested.
"Bah! Politics!"
"Quite."
The plan now was to locate and interview Mellissa Guzman's school friends, to see if they were involved in the kidnapping. Addresses were being patched to the patrol car's nav-comp and the driver had been instructed to go straight to the nearest one.
"What'll happen to them?" Jorich asked.
"Depends," Sam replied, "If it is as Guzman explained, then it'll probably be standard psychological reprogramming and a slap on the wrists for the kids."
"And Guzman?" Sam gave Jorich a second look.
"My, you are gregarious today." Jorich shrugged.
"I liked him, good food," he said.
"Fair enough," Sam laughed, "Guzman's future will depend on how useful he's been to the Governor, I suspect he'll retire early, you know, to spend more time with his family." Sam looked at the daughter’s ID photograph, she was young, attractive, olive Cassian completion, wavy auburn hair and a cocky confident expression in her eyes. Everything about her said privilege.
"And what if Guzman's wrong?" Sam was not sure about this new inquisitive Jorich.
"What, if the kids are terrorists you mean?" Sam clarified, "Well then, that's when you come in isn't it."
The Prisoner
Agony, searing and intense, my legs are on fire. His face comes close to mine as he leans across my chest, supporting his weight on my broken knees.
"And Mellissa Guzman?"
"Yes! Yes! Her too," I pant, broken by the pain and the man's cold sneering face. I just want it to end.
"And who recruited you?"
I try to answer but my brain explodes in pain, the psychological conditioning, a requirement on recruitment to the cell, it distracts me from the pain in my legs. The interrogator reminds me of it however, as he squeezes my knees in his vicelike grip. He has no mercy, this torturer, he will give no quarter. We killed his friend after all. Fear rises as this fact sinks in. I am falling now, dizzy and numb, my screams now distant sounds as the pain fades and I lose consciousness.
Two hours earlier
It was confirmed, Mellissa Guzman, onetime sorority girl, was the same dedicated killer Sam had shot in the head earlier that day. He hadn't recognised her until now, the shocked bewildered look on her face as her consciousness left her before her body quite realised. The crew cut had also made her look ten years older. Sam felt sick, she had barely been nineteen. He reminded himself that it was she who had tried to kill him. She had certainly did for poor Jorich, but nineteen? This must be his youngest kill yet and Sam wasn't sure what to feel. He hated killing as a rule and didn't particularly think of himself a cruel or violent person. His job and his loyalty to his House had often meant he had to do cruel and violent things, but that was duty and not the real Sam Dapes. The real Sam Dapes loved ancient classical Earth music; Brahmns, Morricone, Mozart, Williams, he liked old movies and loved curling up in bed with his occasional lover; when they were back on of course, and who was no doubt waiting for him back on Lien Rocha with ‘the latest find’, an antique vidisc or some new music to add to their shared datafile collection. Damn that Mellissa sodding Guzman, nineteen for Kristo's sake. Sam doubted he would sleep well now, not for the next few months at least.
What would turn a privileged, wealthy debutant into the dedicated and committed killer he had been forced to end?
"Is that really her?" Sam's travelling companion, the Esper, sat next to him in the patrol car. He was still staring in disbelief at his comp-pad.
"Your point?" Sam asked, maintaining his cold and bored tone.
"The secretary's daughter?"
"Not anymore," he corrected, "she's just a dead terrorist now."
Sam had no illusions about Police Lieutenant Higani, he knew that as a guild trained telepath, the Lieutenant was probably his greatest threat on this Kristos cursed planet. Sam's main ploy had been to keep his mind shielded and wrong foot the Esper whenever he could. The way this case was going though, Sam was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the charade and it was only a matter of time before the Esper discovered his secret. Sam was however mildly reassessed at discovering that Higani was also keeping secrets and he hoped this knowledge would provide enough leverage to protect him if the worst came to the worst. If only he could discover what the Esper's secret is. Whatever it was, he hoped it was going to be big enough to outweigh his.
"So what are you going to do?" Higani was goading again, Sam didn't miss the emphasising of the 'you'.
"Interview our prisoner," He replied, emphasising the 'our', Sam could play these games as well, and better than most.
"I mean about Guzman's daughter, you killed the colonial secretary's nineteen year old daughter."
Sam managed to supress a regretful wince and told the Esper it was a clean kill, in self defence against a proven dissident, witnessed by both street surveillance and his own ocular implant.
“So what exactly do I have to worry about?” he asked.
The Prisoner
…. Huh? Awake. Fear. Has my tormentor gone? Did I break? I think… I don’t know, I can’t remember, I can't concentrate. Headache, sedatives, shock. Wait, my bed is moving. I am on a trolley, strapped down. Bright lights. A guard to one side. I am in an ambulance again. What did I tell them? Did I name anyone? Mellissa and Paccoro for certain, but they’re both dead now, so Qué diablos. The question is, did I name ‘Him’. Did the conditioning hold? I can’t remember. My head's too hazy, starting to sting again. I can’t…
... Wha..? Drifted off back then. I am being wheeled down a corridor. I am so numb, what have they given me. Faint ache in my missing foot. Plain grey walls passing, locked doors and gates, the smell of disinfectant and body odour. Is this a prison? We seem to be following a sign for the hospital wing.
An hour earlier
Sam turned from his interviewee and studied the Esper’s troubled face as he stood shaken at the end of the hospital bed. He allowed a thin smile before speaking.
“He’s conditioned, unable to name his superiors. Did you get anything?” The Esper nodded, distant and distracted.
“Higani!” Sam barked, “We don’t have a lot of time, our objective will flee.”
“I’m sorry Dapes, the emotional impact of the interrogation, you wouldn’t understand, being a mundane, sorry, I mean a non-Esper, you wouldn’t understand. I felt everything you did to him.”
‘You’d be quite surprised at what I understand,’ Sam thought, both annoyed and relived by the Esper’s misjudgement of him. There was a reason Sam was good at his job, why he was specifically given the more complex or delicate assignments. Sam was an 'empath', a non-trained telepath who would have been guild conditioned by puberty if he hadn't kept his talent a secret well into his teens. By the time his parents found out, they had no choice but c
ollude. In House Lien Rocha, ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law and harbouring an unregistered Esper was an imperial crime. Of course, his ability to read and influence emotion was discovered early on in Sam's House Guard training but being an Empath is a useful talent for an investigating agent and the secret police are as good at keeping secrets as they are at finding them out.
“Never mind that Higani, what did you get?” Sam asked impatiently, “A name?”
“No, not exactly,” The Esper replied shaking his head to clear his thoughts, “Not a name, a face, one I know, one I know very well.” Higani looked at the secret policeman, studying his face, trying to decide how much to trust him. The policeman reminded him it was too late for that, if he had information he needed to share it. The Esper nodded and gave him the name.
“It was the Chief’s face I saw, It was Captain Beydo.”
The Prisoner
I’m in prison. That’s not so bad, at least I’m alive. For the first time today I feel calm. I feel safe in a Kristos cursed prison. That’s funny somehow. Am I laughing? I am! I’m laughing out loud. I’ll try to stop it, the guards are looking at me as if I’m jodido mad. I must look it though, giggling like a maniac strapped to a hospital gurney. Oh Kristo that is funny. joder ellos, follar a todos, I’m letting loose, I’m going to laugh out loud. I’m going to laugh and laugh and laugh. I'm staring at one guard, straight in the eye. He’s angry and confused but most importantly, he’s powerless. Powerless to stop my laughter, he can’t take that away from me, no one can.
Ouch! The bastard hit me, he hit me right in the face. I can feel the blood flowing from my nose. I carry on laughing despite his scowl, right in his red pudgy face. I call him an amateur. I’ve had a professional work on me today, what can a pig faced prison guard like him do to me now. The thought of that sharp faced whiney voiced sadist has sobered me up. That bastard knew what he was doing but I didn’t squeal. That means I’ve still got information they want. That means they’ve got to keep me alive.
“You won’t be laughing soon you sick traitorous bastard!” What does he know, prison’s going to be a breeze after what I’ve been through. Especially in the hospital wing.
“Wait!” I tell them urgently, “The sign said left! The hospital wing's left.” We’re going the wrong way. The guards are laughing now, the one that hit me, the pig-faced man, he’s looking right at me and he’s laughing the loudest.
“Hospital wing?” he says, still laughing, as if at a joke, “You stupid idiot!” I ask what the Joke is and he tells me I am.
We go through more gates and I find myself outside again. It’s cold and I’m still strapped to the gurney. A man in a suit approaches me with a priest. He says he’s the prison warden and that I am guilty of treason. They want me to speak to the priest. I tell them to Vete a la mierda. They step back and Pig-face is back, leaning over me smirking. Something in his hand, grey-silver metal. Oh shit! Pig Face's smug expression tells me everything. This can’t be happening, I tell them I have information. I promise to give them what they want. Pig Face leans in and whispers in my ear.
“They don’t care,” he tells me.
“Get on with it for Kristo’s sake,” the Warden calls out, “its cold out here,” followed by, “Sorry for my language Father.”
I feel something small, hard and cold pressed against my temple.
To be continued.
© 2015 Chris Raven
First Person
By Peter John
Cold wet and muddy, it was more of a ditch than a trench. He lay on his stomach in the dirt; the coarse woollen fabric of his uniform soaked up the moisture like a sponge. The front of his trousers and tunic stuck to his flesh like wet paper; what was once khaki was now a deep glistening brown. Eyes forward scanning the tree line ahead, he felt the movement of the others alongside him. The long Muzzle of his Bren light machine gun was perched on the edge of the trench, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
Charlie Cotton’s life had been no more than a jumble of bad decisions and poorly laid out plans. His past was just the flickering pages of a photo album. His memories were numb and blurred. Until this moment his life had seemed fantasied, but now, with the smell of smoke, dirt and blood filling his nostrils, Charlie had never felt more real. It was as if he had been created for this very instance. He could feel the slimy touch of wet mud beneath him and through it, the steady heartbeats of his similarly prone comrades. Something was about to begin, this was what he was made for, and everything else didn’t matter anymore. His Grandmother bringing him up from the age of five after the death of his parents wasn’t important. His string of failures and his few rare successes as he first struck out into the world were of little consequence. His entire past had just been a back story leading to this moment, lying in a ditch on the edge of the Ardennes forest waiting for the battle to begin.
It was 1940 on the Franco-Belgium border. A mixture of the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force laid in wait for the invading German army, or at least this was what Charlie had been led to believe. There had been more information available but he had been far too eager for the fight to read it all. The crackling sound of splintering wood issued from the forest directly in front of him. Low metallic clicking slowly swept along the edge of the trench as weapons were readied. It wasn’t as if I can't read through it later. More crackling followed by a low growling hum. Do I need to know all the ins and outs? Would it make much difference? Voices shouting in the distance, the words clear but unfamiliar. I'm was here to shoot people, would knowing exactly why make a whole heap of difference? The humming grew louder; the closest trees began to shiver. Would that make me such a bad person?
Suddenly the trees ahead of him bent over, cracked and fell under the weight of an armoured half-track. Six men, dressed in starched grey uniforms, scurried around the lumbering truck. Its two front wheels span in the damp grass but its rear caterpillar tracks tore into the wet earth. Churning both mud and grass high into the air, it cleared the tree line and moved steadily and purposefully towards Charlie and the rest of the allied force.
The first lonely crack of rifle fire tore Charlie out of his daydream. He pulled his Bren gun tight into his shoulder and levelled the barrel towards the approaching Germans. A few yards down the line a screeching yet brief cry of pain cut through the air closely followed by an eruption of sound that made Charlie's ear drums throb. Excited and, to his surprise, a little scared, Charlie gently squeezed the trigger and sharp pains coursed through his shoulder as his Bren Gun shuddered and bucked with every shot. He emptied the magazine and his gun fell silent again, though he could barely tell above the noise of the battle. Disappointed, he tugged at the spent magazine; he couldn’t tell if he'd actually hit anything. The magazine resisted, wasting precious time as the half-track lumbered ever closer. The magazine suddenly broke free from the top of his gun, flew out of his hand and landed in the mud behind him. As he fumbled blindly for another from the pouch strapped to his belt, Charlie scanned the battlefield.
A dozen half-tracks and several tanks had now broken through the trees and onto the soft earth of the meadow. A hundred German soldiers scurried among them. Some began to fall in the flurry of Allied fire while others used the vehicles for cover, only exposing themselves to return fire before ducking back behind the slow moving armour.
Charlie pulled a fresh magazine from his pouch and tried to load it into his Bren gun. His heart was pounding, sweat began to trickle down his forehead and sting his eyes. He began to panic as the magazine refused to lock into place. It doesn’t fit! They’ve given me the wrong one. Suddenly bullets tore at the ground in front of him, he ducked his head as puffs of dirt and dust flew towards his face and rained over his back like hailstones. He struggled again with the magazine and it finally slotted into place with a loud click. He lifted his head and his face became splattered with dirt. The half-track was only fifty metres away and the 30mm machine-gun mounted on its roof was peppering the g
round inches from his face. With dirt in his eyes and grit in his teeth, Charlie opened fire. His Bren gun kicked into his shoulder and, through blurred vision, Charlie saw the bullets harmlessly spark against the thick armour of the half-track. He swept his gun around in a great arc across the field, a random spray of machine-gun fire. His trigger finger had turned white at the knuckle as he kept its grip tight. A bright red mist puffed out of the chest of a German soldier directly in front of the Bren Gun's spitting barrel. He dropped to the ground like a string-less puppet and Charlie let out a small cheer.
"I got one!" He cried, his voice drowned out by the roar of the battle, and his gun fell silent again.
Charlie quickly reached up to grab the spent magazine and saw his hand disappear in a puff of red. He felt a second bullet rip into his shoulder and splinter his collar bone until it was little more than toothpicks. He didn't feel the third bullet but he saw the darkness in its wake.