It was the kind of trick you couldn’t use too often, but when it worked right, it could net a treasurehouse of data before anyone caught on. If they were lucky, no one ever would. Sometimes you were that lucky.
“Allo, I’ve got a signal coming in.” It was Sumi. “Customs, it looks like.”
It was a cold word in the otherwise jubilant atmosphere. Allo felt his mood deflate quickly. “What do they want?”
Sumi closed his eyes to better envision the message. His tentacles twitched slowly as he read.
“Permission for search,” he said at last.
The words hung there in the air for a moment, heavy with connotations of trouble. It wasn’t unheard of for a Customs team to go out and aggressively search independent vessels in the vicinity. Most smugglers knew enough to dump their loads at private docks before showing up at the waystation, so it was pretty much the only way they were going to nail anyone. But still. It wasn’t that common. And now? Bad timing.
Allo bit his lower lip, considering. At last he said, “Your take?”
It was a long second before Sumi answered. “If we say no, it’s trouble. You know that.”
Yes, he did. It shouldn’t be that way, but it was. In the spacelanes you were considered guilty until proven innocent, no matter what the laws said to the contrary. On a station he might argue. Out here in safespace, there was no one to argue with.
Never forget they carry guns, he thought.
Never let them find out that you do, too.
“Calia?”
“We’ve got nothing to worry about on board,” she said coolly. “You did a scrub after that last drug shipment. We haven’t carried anything else that would leave signs.”
“We’ve got logs of legitimate business,” Sumi added. “As always.”
God, he hated this. You wanted to turn them away, to tell them to go off and mind their own business ... and they might even do that, if they didn’t have a proper warrant. You’d be within your rights to refuse them. But you could bet your ass that they’d be waiting at the next station you visited, and the next one, and the next one after that. If Allo and his crew were really legitimate, then it would just be a nuisance. But they weren’t. And God knows, like Calia said, the ship wasn’t ever going to be cleaner than it was right now.
“Tam, I want all our programs—”
“Erased from the main banks,” the Belial said. “Already done.”
His crew was good. They knew how to think, and they knew how to move fast, and most of all they knew how to lie. Sumi best of all. He’d let the Medusan play guide to the customs crew. That would give this little invasion the attention it deserved, not too little and not too much. It was important to get those gestures right.
“Check their ID,” he said at last.
Sumi shut his eyes and started trading codes with the distant ship. After a moment he nodded. “Checks out,” he pronounced. “Looks like they’re the real thing.”
He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. An enemy might have been easier to deal with. “All right,” he said. He could hear the frustration in his own voice. “Tell them to come on in.”
Sumi looked up at him; he nodded. They knew each other well enough for no words or flashed messages to be necessary. After all, they’d been through such searches before. Allo hated it every time, but it was hardly unfamiliar ground.
It took the customs ship half an hour to reach them, and almost that long again to dock. Inwardly Allo was seething, but he knew the game for what it was. Node law forbade any truly invasive search without just cause and a warrant. But the minute he made any move against these people that could be read as defiance, a warrant was no longer needed. If they could frustrate him to the point of losing his temper, he’d be playing right into their hands.
He hated this game. But he usually won it.
The officials who entered his ship were crisply dressed, fresh from easy duty on some pleasure station, he’d bet. Their uniforms were emblazoned with signs of local rank that Allo didn’t recognize, but the sheer number indicated considerable authority. He wasn’t sure yet if that was good or bad.
“Allonzo Porsha?”
“Yes.”
“This is your ship?”
He stifled a nasty retort and said simply, “Yes.” Like they didn’t have the ownership records already loaded into their heads.
They introduced themselves. He introduced his people. They stared at nothing while checking off the names against some list inside their heads. Then their leader asked to see the ship, and Sumi moved forward to lead them—
And there were weapons in their hands, appearing so suddenly that Allo barely had time to react. Even as he pulled out his own, a spray of some chemical enveloped him, an acid fog that burned his eyes and his throat and set off a spasm of coughing so violent that he couldn’t even see straight. Damn! Blinded, doubled over as his body fought to heave up the poison it had breathed in, he didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting his own people. Jesus Christ! He sure hoped Sumi and the others were on top of this situation, ’cause he’d been blinded but good. He tried to get the innemet to feed him something visual from a cam so that at least in his mind’s eye he could see what was going on, but the poison spray had kicked off spasms so terrible he couldn’t visualize the icons clearly. With a grunt of pain, he dropped to the floor and felt something sharp and nasty bite into his arm as he hit it, hard. His wellseeker flashed him a warning that was all blurred, probably about some new poison the shot had injected into him. Damn. Damn. Gotta fight this.... The sharpness became a burning that began to spread through his torso, and his whole body started shaking. All around him he could hear the sounds of battle, the hot buzz of electrical contact, the soft whir of darts ... but even the sounds were blurred, as if his brain would no longer accept clean input. Was that poison in his veins? Something worse? He heard cries and crashing and the garbled curses of his crew. Jesus Christ, where had these bastards come from?
There was a final crashing sound, and then a hand grabbed him by the sleeve, forcing him upward a few feet. The motion proved too much, and he started vomiting; the bile was like acid on his tongue, as if whatever they’d shot into him had corrupted his own body fluids. They knocked his weapon out of his hand and then dragged him across the bridge, to the place where their own ship waited. He banged into something on the way; a body? Moist tentacles were ground underfoot as his captors forced him into the air lock, and a trail of sticky blood marked his progress like the slime trail of a slug. Was anyone from his crew left alive? He tried to call to them but gagged on the words, his throat clogged with bile and worse. Desperately he tried to cough some of it up so that he could breathe.
And then someone hit him on the back of the head, hard.
And then there was darkness.
Sounds. Distorted colors, slowly coalescing into shapes. Bright lights, too bright. He tried to turn away. Couldn’t. Motor control offline. Or was he paralyzed?
He blinked hard, trying to focus. Something stirred in front of him, other shapes following. People?
“He’s awake.”
The voice was gruff, and it was followed by a stinging in his arm and the hiss of a medspray. Something gripped his heart and squeezed it, hard. His wellseeker, which should have protested the move, was silent. He tried to call it up. No good. The fist around his heart loosened up a bit, but each beat that followed banged against his rib cage with unnatural force. He could feel a spark of life coming back into his brain, as the drug they’d given him forced his body into a more active state. He suspected that he’d have been better off staying asleep.
“Time to wake up now.” It was a male voice, harsh and cold. Something chilly wafted across his nostrils and a sharp, stinging odor brought him suddenly into the here-and-now.
Big room. Mostly empty. Two men standing. Him sitting. Bound. Or maybe just shut down below the neck, like a program that wasn’t needed.
The light was turned into his face, blindin
g him. Something buzzed inside his skull; brainware response to alien instructions? He tried to shake his head hard enough to throw off the headset, but of course it was locked into place.
—And pain, blinding pain, seared through every nerve in his body. Not as if he’d been hurt, nothing so centralized as an injury. It was as if all his blood had suddenly started to boil, and the flesh around it melted, and the skin over that dissolved in acid. It was hot and it was sharp and it was crushing and it was tearing, and every other word that had ever been associated with pain, or ever might be. All at once.
He didn’t scream, but that was only because it was so fast he didn’t have time to. It just lasted for a second—less than a second—and then it was gone.
He was left gasping for breath, his whole body shaking. The room spun about him dizzily, his brain too stunned to make sense of what it was seeing.
“Very good, Mr. Dietrich,” the harsh voice approved. The lights moved closer. He could make out details now, in the room and of the men, but his brain could still make no sense of them.
Aware that he was fighting for his life, he struggled to find his voice. “Look, whatever you want—”
Pain again. Agonizing nanoseconds of it. He couldn’t breathe when it ended, and there were bands of hot metal wrapped around his heart.
“You want the wellseeker on?” The voice from the back of the room was male.
“No. Not yet.”
Oh, Jesus. Let this be a nightmare. A real sleeping-type nightmare, the kind you could wake up from.
“Now, Mr. Porsha. We have a few questions to ask you. And as you may have guessed by now, cooperation would be far more ... comfortable for you.”
He tried to feel strong, but the mere memory of that pain was enough to set his whole body to shaking violently. Any façade of courage he might have tried to erect could not stand up to that memory.
“I see you understand.”
There was a pause then, enough time for images to flicker through his brain, hot and painful. Sumi’s body on the floor. Someone’s blood underfoot. Poisonous smoke drifting in the air.
A face appeared before him. Pale-skinned, aquiline, with piercing gray eyes. He was Terran, Allo noted, in that part of his brain that was still capable of rational thought.
“Let’s talk about Reijik Node.”
Reijik? What mattered about Reijik? That was—
Shit.
The drugs.
Shit.
“What?” he whispered. Stalling.
Jesus. He was going to die.
He tried to struggle against his bonds. His body didn’t respond to him. Whatever program they’d launched into his brainware, it had shut down everything below the neck.
“Casalz’ place. Do you remember that?”
The words confirmed his worst fears. Frederico Casalz was the man whose station they had used to transfer the drugs. Damn it to hell, that careless fucking idiot of a servant had gotten himself caught and spilled the whole story—
A bolt of pain, quicker than a heartbeat, cut short his reverie.
“Casalz.”
“Yes.” He gasped it, hating himself for his weakness, his fear. How could you fight a pain that was injected directly into your neural circuits? “Yes. I remember.”
“You transferred some goods there. What?”
For a minute he didn’t answer, clinging to an illusion of free will. Then he saw the man’s hand flicker up in a subtle gesture, and pain filled his universe again.
Longer, this time. Almost a second. Longer than eternity, when you were trapped inside it.
“What goods?” the voice demanded.
Had he stumbled into some drug lord’s territory? Handled goods that belonged to someone else? Or just really, genuinely upset customs officials that much? He doubted it was the latter. Customs didn’t generally use torture to find out what they needed to know.
He saw the man’s hand stir again and knew there was no way out. They could have the answer now or they could squeeze it out of him with neurally induced pain; either way, he was keeping no secrets. “Sana,” he said hoarsely. “It was sana.” A nasty, nasty drug. If they really were customs people, they weren’t going to be happy about this.
“Your crew knew?”
Were they still alive? Sumi and Calia and the Tarns ... were they being interrogated like this, their mental guts squeezed out for all to see? At least he could try to save them.
“No. No. They knew we had cargo ... not what it was.” He struggled to make himself sound more confident than he felt. “I don’t tell them everything. Safer that way.”
He saw the man’s hand move upward, and braced himself for the pain. But the motion went uncompleted. The steel bands around his chest loosened an infinitesmal amount in relief.
“You’d better not be lying to me, Porsha.”
“I’m not. I swear it.”
“Who was on your ship, that run?
He hesitated. A moment too long. When the flood of pain had washed over him and was gone, he could barely breathe.
“Minor fibrillation,” the voice in the back of the room warned. “Correct it?”
The gray eyes met his, and Allo knew what was in them. Death. That was the merciful option, the one that would happen if he cooperated. If not ... what would a full minute of neural-induced agony feel like? Ten minutes? An hour?
No wonder the technique was outlawed on all civilized stations.
Small consolation for him.
“Porsha?”
What did it matter? His crew, his friends, were all on that ship. Dead at the worst, or captive at the best. Or maybe it was the other way around. What did their names matter?
“Sumi Ireta,” he said slowly. “Calia Donelly. Tam-Tam.”
“Is that all?”
He stared at the man.
“Is that all?”
“My crew,” he began. “I—”
Pain. Pools of it, oceans of it, blazing, searing galaxies of it.
“Let’s try that again,” the man said calmly. “Who else was on the ship at that time?”
It was as if the pain had cleared his mind suddenly. He understood.
The girl ...
“Let my crew go,” he whispered. “They don’t know anything.”
His interrogator glanced back behind him. With the lights in his eyes, Allo couldn’t see what he was looking at.
Finally he turned back. “All right. You tell us what we want to know, and we won’t ... question the others.”
Were they lying? Could he tell if they were? Were his friends already dead, or locked up in rooms like this one, with strange programs rummaging through the cells of their brain, awakening primal fears of pain and dissolution?
“Life for them and death for you,” the man said quietly. “Or far, far worse for you all.” He glanced back to the unseen figure behind him, who was undoubtedly in control of whatever was triggering the pain. Porsha flinched. But no pain was forthcoming, not this time. The man turned back to him; his gaze was like ice. “Your choice.”
“There was a girl,” he whispered.
He could feel the change in the room with those words. This, this was what they wanted. Lives were worth nothing to these men, compared to this information.
“Tell us about her.”
He tried for a moment to think of how best to answer them, to gain something from this tenuous moment. A quick burst of pain reminded him that he wasn’t in control of this interview, and never would be.
“Tell us about her. ”
“Her name was Jamisia Capra. She called herself Raven. She was running from something—I don’t know what!” he said hurriedly. The man was scowling: clearly he was reading evasion into Porsha’s tone. Jesus Christ, Porsha thought, he couldn’t take the pain again. Each breath was a struggle now, against a weight on his chest that grew and grew and grew. He couldn’t handle it again.
The voice in the back of the room warned quietly: “Blood pressure redzoned.?
??
The gray-eyed man stared at him.
“She came running down the docking ring and we took her in. That’s all I know, I swear it! We got her name off her finance chip and were going to trace her at the next station.”
“Why?”
“Why?” It was hard to think. He felt strangely light-headed, and his thoughts wouldn’t arrange themselves properly. “Someone was looking for her. Someone ... she was worth ... money....”
The gray eyes glanced to the back of the room.
“He doesn’t know,” the other voice assessed.
Hard to breathe. Chest wouldn’t expand. Whatever they’d wrapped around him was too tight.
“Where is she?” his inquisitor demanded.
Where ... ? He tried to think ... had to think, or the pain would come back....
“Don’t know.” Shallow, shallow breaths barely gave him enough air to speak. “Lost her ... on Paradise.”
He was dimly aware he had told the man something he wanted to hear. Good. Good. Maybe he would make the pain go away. It was like fire in his chest now, and every new breath hurt worse than the last. There was a roaring in his ears as well, and a strange sense of being distanced from everyone and everything in the room ... even his own body.
The unseen man said something—he couldn’t make out what—and stepped forward. His face was unfamiliar, but Allo recognized the insignia on his jacket. All too familiar. Every pilot knew it.
Guildsign.
Then the roaring darkness swept him away at last, to places where not even the pain could reach him.
OUTERNET FORECAST
Processing will be slow today in the Five Nodes, in response to a pressure system triggered by yesterday’s stock market crash on Hellsgate. Consumers should expect delays in product services, debit routing, and investment analysis. Data redundancy is advised.