This Alien Shore (49 page)

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.

“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.

T
HERE WEREN'T enough spores.

Dr. Masada looked at the data five times, ten times, a hundred. Still the numbers weren't right. Still they didn't match what he knew must be out there.

With a sigh he pushed his chair back and shut his eyes, rubbing the ache out of his head with a weary hand. His wellseeker sensed the change in focus and took the opportunity to remind him that his caloric requirement for the day was far from met, and in fact yesterday's had gone at a deficit. He was about to shut it down again—for the fourth time today—but then he stopped and thought, why not? He needed a break from this damned screen, and the even more frustrating data displayed on it.

Mankind wasn't designed to stare at a screen all day, and handling data like this in such a frustrating format hour after hour was almost enough to make him load Lucifer right into his head, just so he could deal with the damned thing directly.

Almost.

Not quite.

With a sigh he visualized the icons that would shut down his programs and save all his data. He had a set of five high-security icons that he was using, dense and complicated visual designs that not only had to be formed in his mind's eye, but rotated properly as well. The likelihood of anyone managing to guess at such patterns was astronomically small, and not one he worried about.

Although someone could do it, theoretically. The security system didn't exist which
someone
couldn't break into. Who knew that better than Kio Masada, who had written the book on data security?

There were half a dozen Guild folk in the nearest commissary, two
nantana,
three natsiq, and
a yuki.
Programmers, all of them, who wore the sign of Gaza's department proudly on their left breast. He might have gone over to the
yuki
if he'd been alone, just to hear another human voice—sometimes even an
iru
needed such things—but the closeness of the group and the energy of its laughter dissuaded him. How he missed the ordered ranks of his students, the comfortable security of the educational ritual: human company without the stress of individual contact. Not for the first time since coming here he felt a wave of vertigo, as if he had suddenly been transported to a mountaintop barely inches wide, miles over the land which others inhabited. His wellseeker flashed a query, and he gave it permission to go ahead and adjust his brain chemicals to compensate for the sensation, but he knew from experience that mechanical adjustment alone couldn't make the feeling go away. It was part and parcel of who he was, and the price he paid for his special talent.

He flashed a request for a sandwich of some local synthetic meat, marinated “Paradise style” ... whatever that meant. That and a cup of tea would satisfy his immediate appetite. His wellseeker processed the order while he ate, and informed him that he had 1237 calories yet to go to make his day's quota. So he ordered another drink, something fattening and frothy that sent the target number down to 829. Good enough for now.

And he thought about Lucifer.