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During the interrogation, a caustic cleaning agent’s odor made it hard to breathe. Somebody had taken the tampon pieces out of the wall, too, exposing all the cameras. The dream on the floor by the door exuded insistent docility, but Elys fought it, hard.
She whirled around as the door clicked shut behind her. “What did you do?” she shouted at it. Nobody answered.
What they’d done was obvious. They probably hadn’t even heard her yelling. But she was so furious about the soldiers erasing what small customizations she’d made to this room that she didn’t care how irrational her reaction was.
She filled in the holes for the camera lenses again. That might make the soldiers remove the sanitary products from the cell eventually. For now, they gave her some privacy.
Rearranging things had given her time to calm down. At least they’d left her spirals scratched into the back wall. She could stare at that while she forced herself to focus on the problems she came here to solve.
She sat on the padded part of the floor to review everything Krebs said. The most important thing she’d learned was that Krebs was planning to bribe different types of Alyansans than the ones City Support was now watching.
If she were lucky, that mic and transmitter in her chest had picked that up and sent it to the city, which could clarify the message and get it to Jules. City Support was teaching the city to identify the beginnings of a disruptive trend stemming from the entertainment programs. Now they’d have to do everything possible to speed up the training schedule.
Whatever Krebs did, City Support would have to guide the city to develop a detailed record of this bribe-influence-mass-run-on-city-resources pattern from its perspective. Now that the city had made the technique publicly available, terrorists, religious zealots, and other government organizations would use Krebs’s example to disrupt any community that relied on an MCAI. The independent stations could protect themselves with that same information.
And Elys might’ve been giving Krebs too much credit. Although he talked like he understood the situation, that didn’t mean he thought up the idea himself. The RIS might have a whole manual on how to sabotage station MCAIs, and he just followed instructions.
Three weeks. She’d been free on the world Krebs had been attacking for three wonderful weeks, and now she was back in a cell.
She shook her head. She’d come here to gather information and get it to Alyansa, and to give City Support a few peaceful hours to strengthen the city’s defenses. This time, she’d chosen to let soldiers lock her in a cell. That mattered.
What if the shock she’d gotten had overloaded the mic, or she’d broken it when she fell? The bone on top of it felt fine, so that last possibility was unlikely, at least.
But she’d seen the tiny thing before the doctor put it in her. They hadn’t told her anything about its durability. What if she’d gotten herself locked in this cell for nothing?
Elys wouldn’t let that happen. The grating noise interrupted her thoughts and she covered her ears until it ended. If the implants weren’t transmitting, she’d need another way to send any information she found to the city. To do that, she’d need to talk to the shipboard AI, which the city might or might not have convinced to talk to her.
And to do that, she’d need a pickup. Between getting dragged around the ship and the layout diagrams of this type of vessel that she’d studied in Alyansa, she had a pretty good idea of where the crew berths were in relation to her cell. She’d just have to find a way to get there without an escort.
She couldn’t rely on distraction and apathy among her current captors, the way she had in Amberson. City Support was needed anything she could find that would help them teach the city to defend itself. Every Alyansan who got injured or turned out of their home because of the city’s mistakes hurt Taia’s heart, too. Taia deserved to live in the place she loved without fear, for herself or her neighbors. Even if Elys never saw Alyansa again.
––––––––
After that first talk with Krebs, the Republic soldiers brought food to Elys’s cell more often, alternating protein bars with packaged meals designed to be frozen and reheated in bulk. They dropped dreams on the floor that elevated her heart rate a little, but she couldn’t tell what else they did.
She folded the wrappers into origami boxes lined up behind her sleeping pad, where the soldiers would pass them but not step on them in the course of forcing her to face the back wall. The packaged meals’ oven paper was a lot easier to fold than the foil wrappings on the protein bars.
The soldiers, new ones each time and always in cloth uniforms, left the folded boxes alone. The door clunk-hiss-clicked behind them at least twice per day.
When footsteps approached her cell, Elys sat on a different part of the floor every time they came, moving her position gradually closer to the door. After the first few times, they stopped telling her to get up and face the wall. The lights never turned off, even for an hour.
After several deliveries, the soldiers had gotten used to Elys sitting on the padded section of floor about half a meter from the cell door. Most of them still pointed weapons at her, but they no longer tensed up like they were facing some kind of martial arts expert. Sitting near the door had given her the opportunity to study it, and the doorway it fit so tightly into.
Whoever locked down this pickup had left the magnifier available. While she’d been acclimating the soldiers to her presence at the door, she’d also examined the door with it. She’d never been so familiar with the contours of a single room as she was with this one. The soldiers let her sit close enough to reach for the door when it opened, if she’d wanted to get shot or kicked for her trouble.
The soldier who brought her food and bagged water today awkwardly handed the meal to her. She might’ve smiled at that, if she’d had the energy to be amused. The soldiers always glanced at, but never commented on, the origami boxes lined up by the padded floor section.
She’d been making between one and three boxes per food wrapper. That made it more difficult for anybody watching to count how many she’d made, and how much oven paper from the reheated meals she’d soaked in water and wound together into a pellet that would hold a lot of pressure when it dried.
This time, when the door was almost shut, Elys tossed the compressed paper pellet between the door and the frame. It should work, if the guards didn’t notice...
All Elys saw of the soldiers were their backs. Her throw had been a small, quick motion. The rest of her stayed still. The soldiers’ footsteps faded.
The door clunked against its frame and hissed a little, but the lock did not click shut.
A few millimeters of shadow remained between the door’s edge and the wall, stopping the lock from engaging. Elys held her breath. The soldiers kept walking.
They seemed to take turns making her delivery, and she’d seen thirty or so lower ranked people so far. More than that had fought the CRU who’d come here with her. There’d be a shift of people sleeping no matter when she got the door open. Now, for example.
Heavy footsteps, much faster than usual, approached her cell. Elys scrambled away from the door. The “Stand facing the wall” order was a lot louder than usual, too.
Despite a search of the cell, the soldiers didn’t find the paper pellet she’d jammed the door with. One of them must’ve stepped on it. By the time they’d left, though, Elys was sure an alarm had called them back. One she hadn’t heard. The lock clicked when they left, this time.
The soldiers who took her out of her cell next were a different pair of young killers than the ones who’d come before them. The hallway outside had three other doors on the same side as hers and none on the other. The doors must’ve been labeled with visualizations. Elys would need a pickup to read them.
“Did Krebs think he’d need all you troops to capture me?” Elys asked.
One of the soldiers snorted. “We almost did need—”
“Shut up,” snapped the other. “Both of you shut up.”
“How long have you worked for Krebs?” After a few seconds of nothing but three pairs of feet on the hard floor, Elys asked, “Do you like how he runs things?”
The soldiers’ expressions suggested they didn’t, and they didn’t know why Elys was asking. If there’d been time before the potential Republic invasion that the attack on the city represented, Off-world Affairs should have sent somebody more experienced at extracting information from people.
As the soldiers were attaching her to the chair in the same interrogation room as her previous conversation with Krebs had been in, she realized she was sick of the Republic’s self-satisfaction. They were so sure they were right about everything.
The soldier who didn’t like talking left the room. The other one stood somewhere behind Elys. “Do you know what Krebs is doing to Alyansa?” Elys stayed quiet for two long breaths, giving the soldiers a chance to respond. “He’s organizing unprovoked attacks on the station’s civilian population, using their MCAI. Do you think those people did anything to deserve that?”
“Who deserves what is somebody else’s load to shift,” the kid said. If the soldier were older than twenty, Elys would’ve been surprised.
“If you never decide to do anything, you’d just lie in bed staring at the ceiling,” Elys said. “You’re deciding to let Krebs think for you every day.”
The door opened behind her. She twisted in her chair until her spine clicked, but she still couldn’t see the new arrival or the kid she’d been talking to. Someone in medical scrubs stepped up beside her.
Personifying oneself was supposed to make it harder for other people to treat you like an insect. She’d read that somewhere. “Hey my name’s Elys what are you doing?” she said in the space of two seconds as she leaned as far away from the new person as she could. The restraints dug into her wrist.
The person in scrubs pushed Elys’s overlong jumpsuit sleeve up and ignored Elys’s attempt to shake the stranger’s gloved hands off her. “Immunizations.” The injector scratched Elys’s arm.
Given how rarely most individuals traveled between the nearest Republic station and Alyansa, she should’ve gotten immunizations when the soldiers first threw her in her cell. The person sounded like they were not happy to be doing it now, either.
“Yeah, thanks,” Elys said anyway. “Anything else in there?”
This time the person in scrubs ignored her. They left and both soldiers stayed, until the door behind her opened again. “If you two will wait outside, please? I’ll call if I need assistance.” Krebs had arrived.
Whatever he’d brought with him smelled like the dark tea Taia brewed in the mornings. While Elys wished herself back to Taia’s kitchen, Krebs sat in the more comfortable chair Elys’s own forced her to look at. He was, in fact, carrying a mug.
“Tea drinker, are you?” Krebs’s smile wasn’t quite that tooth-covering grin today, but it wasn’t far off. After days of getting what she guessed was one liter bag of water every twenty-four hours, she must’ve been staring at the mug. “I’m hopeful that sometime in the future we’ll be on good enough terms that you can enjoy a more civilized breakfast than you’ve had onboard to date,” Krebs said. “I’ve found that the tea plants Alyansa cultivates are a bit tart, and yet they still make for a pleasant drinking experience.”
Elys was beginning to doubt that she’d ever drink tea again. While she searched for a way to get the conversation around to the Republic’s invasion plans, Krebs continued, “I’ve arranged to have custody of you until I’m satisfied I understand some particulars of Alyansa’s city and City Support. If we’re able to straighten that all out today, you can look forward to a relatively pleasant journey home.”
“To the Republic, you mean.”
“Of course. You know what Alyansans are like.” Krebs was echoing Elys earlier words. Even after weeks in Alyansa’s public spaces, her mind wasn’t used to speaking to a larger audience than the people in her line of sight.
“Why are you taking advantage of their nature?” Elys asked.
“Someone’s bound to, eventually.” Krebs’s frown looked genuinely sad, but he didn’t stop talking there. “It should be the Republic. Better us than Shine Forth, say, or Acosta. They keep slaves on Acosta, you know.”
The city’s in-depth identification assessment in the marina would’ve caught terrorists and slavers, when it was working the way the designers intended. Elys was too tired to put up with semi-philosophical nonsense. “So go beat on those people and leave Alyansa alone.”
Her head felt cloudier and more cluttered than it had when the horrid noise in her cell had last woken her up. She kept losing track of what she’d come here to do. It was talking to Krebs, unpleasant as that was.
“Attacking Acosta would be prohibitively expensive. What even one station-scale kinetic bombardment costs these days, on top of fuel to get there and manpower to occupy the place, and for what? It doesn’t bear thinking about.” Krebs sipped his tea. No matter where else Elys tried to focus, her gaze kept sliding back to the mug. “My operation is effective while minimizing casualties and it costs less than a new state school on Mars.”
Maybe Krebs thought he was being friendly, referencing Elys’s adopted home planet so often. The Republic had stripped her real one, Reznikov, of everything that made it home. The Republic would look so silly if... When a peaceful vacation destination like Alyansa repelled their invasion.
Krebs leaned forward in his doubtless more comfortable chair. “How did the Alyansans dissuade so many of the show hosts from taking the money, once you found out who was accepting it?”
That should’ve been publicly available information. Was he too lazy to review the public archive, or was this some kind of test? She’d better stop underestimating him. “Would you answer a question of mine, if I answered that?”
“It depends on the question.” If Krebs was planning to have Elys killed within the next few days, he had nothing to lose by telling her anything. Still, he had no reason to tell her the truth. Why was Elys doing this? It was something for Taia, wasn’t it?
Elys had spent time in the cell thinking of questions to ask Krebs. She did not remember what the questions were. And she’d recently been injected with an unknown substance. Interrogation drugs that made the subject forget things, while creating enough stress to make her forget even more, was exactly what she’d expect from Krebs.
“That’s rather rude,” Krebs said.
Elys hadn’t said any of that, had she? But her throat buzzed slightly, like she’d been speaking for a while.
Krebs’s small smile was not reassuring. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Saying everything that came to her mind wasn’t what Elys was supposed to be doing here. And she’d better not think about what she was supposed to be doing. Fortunately, the “oh” and “hey” song was still stuck in her head.
“You’d mentioned trading an answer for an answer,” Krebs said more loudly than seemed necessary for the small and quiet room. “So why don’t you tell me about the show hosts’ change of heart. I believe the mediators went to talk to them?”
“If mediators talked to the show hosts,” Elys said aloud on purpose this time, “that should be in the public record.”
“It should, shouldn’t it? Goodness, nobody ever taught you to sing, did they,” Krebs said. “Mediators’ recordings are not always added to the public record immediately. These have been delayed.” So, some Alyansan learned how beneficial secrets could be.
“It’s funny just how unpopular Alyansan entertainment is among non-Alyansans.” Krebs always did enjoy the sound of his own voice. “If nobody else is going to make the important points, I will. Now, there are off-worlders who appreciate certain segments of Alyansan media, myself included. But for the most part, Alyansan show hosts only entertain Alyansans. And Alyansans are just the tiniest subset of viewers of Republic entertainment, perhaps because of its sophisticated themes.”
“If you’re looking for what mediators told the hosts, I don’t know.” Maybe they appealed to the hosts’ civic pride. That’s what Elys would’ve done.
“Then this deal is off, isn’t it.” Krebs stilled, mug several centimeters off the table he’d been about to put it on. He set it down almost at once, but that pause was strange. “If you can’t answer that one for me, let’s try another. How is the Mayari MCAI identifying each new behavioral shift earlier than the one before?”
He said “Mayari,” not “Alyansan.” Elys had to answer the question instead of thinking about what that meant. “Isn’t that public record?”
Krebs took another sip of tea. “It’s described in the archive. Some compromise on the definition of ‘public’ made well before our time resulted in a summary. That’s not what I’m interested in. Tell me the identification process from an expert’s perspective.”
“I didn’t develop the city.”
The city’s various outlier evaluations involved a lot of math. With a given dataset, she could work out an example in a visualization, but a person was bound to make mistakes doing that. Besides which, she’d need a pickup to create the visualization.
Krebs, or whoever he was talking to, damn it, she shouldn’t think of whoever he might be talking to... Someone found a way to make the city’s predictions less effective, and she hadn’t studied the rebalance corrections long enough to visualize them from memory.
“Can’t show you.” Elys shrugged as well as she could with her arms bound. “No pickup.”
“I’m certain we can scrounge one up. Give me a moment to request it.”
If she had a pickup, any pickup at all... No, shouldn’t think of that, back to the “oh” song. Elys was so tired of it. Why couldn’t she have gotten one of the old Reznikov protest songs stuck in her head? But it’d been at least a decade since she’d last listened to them.
The door behind Elys opened. A soldier stepped around Elys’s chair to show Krebs a pickup. It looked like a basic model she’d pick from a convenience store assembler catalog if she damaged hers while she was out.
“Yes, fine.” Krebs flicked his fingers toward Elys. “Put it on her, would you?”
The way Elys’s arms were fastened didn’t give her much room to lean forward. When she did, her hands tingled and shook as the pressure on them changed. The soldier gingerly reached behind Elys’s neck to clip the pickup on. He adjusted its position several times, until its sensors lined up with Elys’s photophores.
That difference meant something, between the mediators who’d given her a pickup in Alyansa and the Republic military giving her one now. The mediators let her put on her own gear.
The pickup activated without any indication that it had checked Elys’s authorization to use it. Either they’d keyed it to her using the settings from the one she’d come aboard with, or it’d activate for anyone it fit.
She wanted to summon Nisse, but it’d be the pitifully simple version she’d tolerated in the Republic. The assistant’s shadow and thread form flickered in and out of view.
“I know,” Krebs said while she configured the pickup. “But think, when Alyansa’s part of the Republic, everyone can take advantage of the city’s enhanced assistants.”
Nothing benefited “everyone” in the Republic. Rebalancing the city for every populated world would take lifetimes. Even then, the Republic would find a way to ruin it the way they ruined everything else.
Recent studies on accessible healthcare that wasn’t and crime prevention measures that flickered in front of Elys at a comfortable reading distance, even though she hadn’t asked for them. She cleared them away as soon as they appeared. At least she saw what visualizations she was calling up, and presumably sharing.
Every time Krebs sipped his tea, its scent wafted toward Elys and made her mouth feel even drier. “Tell me about those outlier evaluations for identifying changes in Alyansan behavior,” Krebs said.
“They’re public record.” Almost everything was.
“But not at the level of detail we’d like. Perhaps you could ask the city to send the relevant records to you. I’m certain it would be more willing to send them to you than to me.”
Perhaps Krebs could take a walk out an airlock. But his suggestion had been enough. While he was still making huffy Republic official noises about what she’d probably just said, Elys reached out to the city, asking it to send the records.
The ship had flown beyond the city’s real-time communication range. That should let her cancel the request before the city had a chance to complete it. Just in case the city started sending records before it processed her cancellation request, she added a text warning it might understand. This is a public conversation. Once it interpreted that, it shouldn’t send anything too sensitive for the public archive.
“We’ll see what arrives, won’t we,” Krebs said. “And when it gets here, you’ll have your answer too. That was the deal we made.”
Elys didn’t recall making a deal. “So you’ll tell me how you knew I was in Alyansa?”
“Oh, honestly. You began appearing in the Alyansan public record as soon as you arrived in the marina.” If Krebs had been following her progress on Mars and then seen her walk onto the marina escorted by mediators, he might’ve concluded... Best not to think that through. “Also,” Krebs continued, “Republic citizens had some rather specific legal difficulties searching for you there. That confirmed the situation nicely.”
Jules didn’t have to tell the Republic about her presence in Alyansa. Krebs already knew. That was something she’d... known? Suspected.
She couldn’t think. It wasn’t just because she hadn’t slept for longer than an hour at a stretch since she left Alyansa. “Why didn’t you ask me questions and then inject me with garbage?”
“You were not motivated to answer questions. I don’t waste time.”
“When does the tearing my fingernails out part start?” Elys’s gaze caught on the electronic control weapon Krebs still wore on his hip, a much more likely source of pain. It wouldn’t require any effort to use, or overuse.
Krebs snorted. “The Republic doesn’t torture, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Multiple accounts from prisoners Elys had met over the past two years disagreed with that, not to mention Elys’s lack of uninterrupted sleep. But if that was what Krebs wanted to believe, nothing Elys said would change his mind.
She felt like she’d been talking for hours. Had she been? She was so thirsty.
“Oh, excuse me, I should’ve offered.” Krebs went quiet for a moment.
The door behind her opened. Somebody dropped a bag of water in Elys’s lap. One of the soldiers who’d brought her in here picked up the attached hose and nozzle and held it in front of her face until she opened her mouth. The water had the same plastic taste as the stuff that came with her meals in her cell, but it was water.
“Hmm.” Krebs frowned. “Take that with you. And the pickup. We’ll do this again tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as it takes.”
And that whole time, the city would unintentionally destabilize Alyansa with its inability to catch up with the changes Krebs was inflicting on it. At least the soldiers carried her water bag for her and left it with her in the cell, beside a docility dream she allowed to drag her down to sit on the floor. More importantly, they left the pickup on her neck.