When Gregor came to, his first sensation was the feeling that someone had filled his mouth with scalding water while he was out cold. His half-numbed tongue felt too big for his mouth, and his teeth ached with a dull throb. He couldn’t remember ever having felt his heartbeat in his teeth before. It was decidedly unpleasant.
Seeing that he was awake, the right side of his face joined the pain party with the gift of a blowtorch impression, along his upper cheekbone below the eye socket. He went to touch it, but his arms didn’t work. It took him a moment to realize he was strapped down.
“Mornin’,” a man’s voice said.
The sound drew Gregor’s attention to the larger surroundings, outside the borders of his personal world of hurt. He opened his eyes to find himself quick-cuffed, hands and feet, to a chair, in the middle of a small, otherwise empty room. It was damp, with a sharp odor of fuel. A man leaned against the wall in one corner; tall, long limbed. He was smiling, but he didn’t look happy, or friendly.
“Let me put it to you like this, buddy,” the man said. “The only reason you woke up with eyes is because I wouldn’t let her carve ‘em out while you were out cold.” He pointed to a woman seated on the floor.
Dark skinned, her face vaguely familiar. Gregor knew her, from somewhere. Cooper. Allison Cooper, though he knew now that most likely wasn’t her real name. The other NID agent. Gregor looked back at the man, tried to bring up anything he might know, but came up blank. Apparently Elliot hadn’t given him all the information. Gregor regretted not having shot him more.
“And why is that?” Gregor managed to ask.
“Figured it’d be better if she waited till you were awake,” the man said.
“You seem angry,” Gregor said. He sat up as straight as he could in his chair and made a show of stretching his back and neck, to draw attention away from the fact that he was testing the strength of his bonds.
“They’re strong enough,” said the man. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I work for Internal Security. I hope you realize you’ve assaulted and imprisoned an officer of the law.”
“You’ll have to pardon me if I don’t think you’re much of a lawman.”
“Well, I’m sorry, I’m at a bit of a loss,” Gregor said. “You’ll have to remind me what it is in particular I’ve done to upset you.”
“You killed a friend of ours,” the woman said. “And kidnapped another.”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “Ah yes, I could see how that might be upsetting. But if you’re referring to Elliot Goodkind, let me assure you that he was no friend of yours. I probably did you a favor.” Good to know the man was dead. Gregor still wished he had shot him more.
“Then maybe you’d be kind enough to do us one more,” said the man. “What are you doing with SUNGRAZER?”
Gregor kept his face neutral. For what was supposedly an above-top-secret asset, an awful lot of people seemed to know about that ship.
“I’m afraid I don’t know the reference,” Gregor said. “But I do understand that you’re hostile spies operating in the colony I’m sworn to protect. I’m sorry about your friends, but I’m not sure what else you would expect me to do, exactly.”
“Think harder,” the woman said. “Do your best to remember. It’s important.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said. “SUNGRAZER you say. OK, let me think about it. Nope, no idea.”
Cooper, or whatever her name was, got up off the floor then and walked slowly towards him, with a predatory look. She stopped in front of him, her legs touching the front of his knees, and started to unbutton her shirt. Underneath she was wearing an athletic compression top, sleeveless. Her arms were well-muscled, covered from shoulders to wrists in intricate tattoos. She tossed her shirt to her companion in the corner.
“Don’t get excited,” she said. “I just don’t feel like trying to get the blood out of my shirt.” Her hand disappeared behind her back for a moment, and when it returned it brought with it a claw-shaped blade. She straddled him and sat on his lap; Gregor reflexively leaned back in the chair. When he did, the woman grabbed the top of his head with one hand and forced it back further, to the point of pain. The next instant, he felt cold steel press into his cheekbone, the blade flat against his skin, but the point of that claw-tip uncomfortably touching the lower eyelid, just under the eyeball.
“I hope it doesn’t pop like a grape,” the man said.
“You sure you don’t have anything you want to say to me?” the woman asked.
“I have many things I’d like to say to you,” Gregor answered. “But I fear they would only anger you further.”
The woman pressed her body into him, her weight and strength constricting his abdomen; with his head tilted so far back, he found it difficult to breathe. Even without the knife blade threatening to pluck his eye out, Gregor had to fight against the natural panic rising. It was almost like drowning on dry land. But Gregor held on. He was strong. He could beat her. He held still, silent, did his best not to give them the pleasure of seeing his discomfort.
“Don’t break that neck,” the man said. “Gonna be hard for him to talk if he chokes on his own tongue.”
In response, the woman lightly dragged the curved inner blade of her knife along the hard edge of Gregor’s eye socket, not enough to cut, but uncomfortable, like she’d dragged the back of her fingernail roughly across the soft flesh.
“Torture me all you want,” Gregor said. “I assure you I have nothing to tell you.”
“That’s OK,” the woman said, suddenly casual. She stood and backed away from him, and held up a small device for him to see. His badge. His credentials. Access to Internal Security Systems. “I only needed a little bit of your DNA and a couple of minutes of voice sample anyway. I was just hoping you’d save us the trouble.”
She tucked his badge into her pocket, and held the blade of her knife up to the light, looking undoubtedly at the skin cells she’d scraped off. The man moved closer to her and returned her shirt.
“You want to say SUNGRAZER for me again, nice and clear?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you think you’ll do with that,” Gregor said. He couldn’t stand the smug look on her face, as if she’d beaten him somehow. She had no idea what she was up against.
“I do,” she said.
“It’s too late,” Gregor said. “You can’t stop it now. Not even I can.” He wouldn’t make the mistake of revealing anything they didn’t already know, but he couldn’t let them leave that room with any sense of hope. Maybe they’d kill him. But not without knowing it was for nothing.
The woman hesitated by the door. “Things starting to come back to you a little clearer now?”
She gave Gregor a few seconds to answer. When he didn’t, she left the room.
“‘It takes the knowledge of but one shark to fear the entire ocean’,” Gregor said, as the man was about to leave.
“Say what now?” the man asked.
“A wise woman once told me that.”
“Sounds fancy,” the man said. “What’s it supposed to mean?” He didn’t strike Gregor as being particularly bright.
“You’ll see,” Gregor said, smiling.
“Maybe,” said the man. “Too bad you won’t.”
Gregor stopped smiling. The man flicked the light off and left Gregor sitting in total darkness, the scent of combustible fuel suddenly heavy in his nostrils, and on his mind.
“You’re not really going to burn him alive down there,” Elliot said, lying on the sagging couch. His voice was rough-edged and thin, but it’d lost the concerning wet wheeze from an hour or so before.
“Nah,” Wright said, shaking her head. “Probably not. But he doesn’t need to know that. We’ll give him a little while to think about it, see if maybe he decides he’s got something to tell us after all.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Elliot said.
“I’m not,” Thumper answered. She sat down at the makeshift workstation they’d set up for her in the dingy space, and ran what looked like a needle along the blade of her knife. This she inserted into a receptacle attached to Veronica. “He thinks you’re dead.”
“He might be right,” Elliot replied.
“Don’t be a baby,” Wright said.
“What’s with the knife?” Elliot asked.
“Took a little bit of Gregor’s DNA,” Thumper said. “We’ll sequence it real quick, and then with that and a vocal imprint, I can spoof his credentials to give us access to Internal Security’s systems. See what he knows, and what they know.”
“Stay on target, Thump,” Wright said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Thumper said. “I won’t waste time. It’s just… while we’re in there, we might as well grab what we can, right?”
Thumper held her hands up in front of her like she was climbing the face of an imaginary cliff, looked up at the ceiling, and then started moving her hands around like she was manipulating oversized pieces on an invisible chess board.
“OK, so, Veronica’s still crunching C&C encryption data,” she said. “We have the device from the Ava Leyla – that’s busted but has some pieces we might be able to use – and a bunch of design schematics from Guo Components. With our friend Gregor’s creds, we can get into the Republic’s Internal Security Service and see where the ridealong I injected back at the research facility ended up. There’s got to be something in there, with all those pieces… We’ve got everything we need except a way to connect with…”
She trailed off, her hands still hovering in the air in front of her. Then her gaze dropped from the ceiling and fell like a hawk on Elliot.
“Wait a minute…” Thumper said. “Elliot.”
“Yeah?”
“How were you getting intel off SUNGRAZER?”
“Through a bounce, with my rig,” he said. “Secure comm set up. But it doesn’t work anymore. My creds aren’t valid.”
“But you can still submit requests for access?”
“Yes…” Elliot said.
Wright could see Thumper’s mind working; she was putting pieces together faster than anyone else and, Wright guessed, had pieces the rest of them were missing.
“How does that help us, Thump?” she asked.
“Because with his credentials,” Thumper said, pointing vaguely towards the downstairs room where they were storing Gregor, “and his rig,” she said, pointing now to Elliot, “we just might be able to locate SUNGRAZER.”
“How?”
“Ehh neh neh neh,” Thumper said, waving her hands and leaning forward so far that her face was almost touching Veronica’s interface. That wasn’t the first time Wright had seen that reaction; it meant Thumper had an idea and no time to explain. Thumper not having time to explain was a rare thing indeed.
“I don’t know what’s going on right now but–” Elliot said.
“Shut up,” Wright interrupted. “She’s thinking. And she’s probably about to crack this whole thing wide open.”
For nearly half an hour, they all waited around trying not to break Thumper’s concentration while she worked furiously with Veronica. Wright wasn’t actually sure she could have broken Thumper’s concentration; Thumper seemed to have lost all contact with the physical world. But there was no reason to risk it.
Finally, without warning, Thumper let out a little cry and said, “We gotta go! Guys, we gotta go, we gotta go!”
Everyone immediately went into action prepping to bug out, except Elliot, who just laid there on the couch, looking confused.
“What does that mean?” Elliot asked.
“It means,” Wright answered, “we better get a call into Papa Charlie Bravo and see about getting ourselves off this planet.”