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"WAS SHE RIGHT?" PETROS the dealer freed himself from the tangle of unconscious men around him, rubbing the numbness of the stunner graze from his left arm. Tall as a small tree and thin as a sapling, Petros had the shrink-wrapped quality of a Dark Matter addict. Clean now, and beginning to put weight back on even on the prison diet, he hadn't yet recovered any moderation or restraint over the drug-induced paranoia.
On the other side of the room, where the doorway led to showers and bunks, Janika - grave robber - and Hiraku, counterfieter, stalked closer. Ramjet was an unimaginative thug, but these three had brains. They had been important people on their own planets and they retained that aura even behind bars, when their sharp suits were wrinkled with round-the-clock wear, and all other marks of status were gone.
"Of course she wasn't," Bryant insisted. "Mind control? Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing."
They took their time coming closer. He was allowed to back away, to end up pushing his shoulders against the bars of the cage, with his hands sweating and trembling, and a jitter of terror turning his bowels loose. He'd tried so hard to make sure nobody looked at him, nobody saw him except as a bowed head and a smile, and now she'd destroyed that pretence with a few words, damn her.
And he was light headed with hunger. The bots took a great deal of energy to manufacture. He didn't think he could strip another set out of the few remaining fat cells in him. If he tried, it would mean losing some more of what little muscle he had. Nor could they take strongly enough in time to save him from this anyway.
"Ridiculous?" Janika was huge and blond, Hiraku sleeker, still rounded despite months in prison and a week on this bloody ship being transported to the very edges of the Kingdom. Hiraku had a softness about him, but there was something about the way he moved that triggered alarms in Bryant's hind brain. They were a bear and a panther and he didn't want either of them looking at him like that.
"Did I just hear you call me ridiculous?"
"No!" Bryant flung up both hands. He gritted his teeth and screwed his eyes closed and tried to say 'sir' but it wouldn't come. "No! The captain's idea was ridiculous. I'm a surgeon! I correct hare lips. If people are born disfigured I mend them. And yes, perhaps I've done sex change operations and—"
"Messing with the laws of God and nature," Janika growled, as Petros kicked the final unconscious man out of his way and filled in the trio on their left flank, blocking Bryant's escape. If he had thought of running for the urinals - which he wouldn't. He would not take this to a place where the guards were not watching.
Even now another of the Froward's crew, a woman whose uniform read "Metharom", was sitting outside the cage, watching the monitors, her back to him. That turned back said she felt he was getting what was coming to him, not her business. But he felt eighty six percent confident that she wouldn't let it escalate to rape right where she was personally in the room, and that was a better percentage than he had anywhere else.
"Using the brains God gave me to better the lives of my fellow creatures," he insisted, his voice rising as they closed in. The reek of his own fear filled his nostrils and his mouth and made him gag.
"We read what you did to that kid." Petros raised a skeletal hand and landed a fingertip gently on the tip of Bryant's nose. He closed his eyes, fairly sure that was where it was going to come next - a hard poke in one or other eye.
"They took him off the table before he was finished!" Bryant was still angry about this. He thought he'd be angry about it until the day he died.
"How many cuts about the neck was it? And you're still claiming it was some kind of accident?"
Eighteen wasn't really a child, Bryant told himself again, and the boy had wanted it so much. Everyone had heard of the fabled mer-people of Genovefa. Who was he to say his client couldn't run away to become one? They would have been workable gills if he'd been allowed to finish - if he hadn't been torn away from the table with the bloody scalpel still in his hand, while the state-approved butchers had tried to sew the boy up again. He could have told them that would never work.
"I tried to save him! I was in the middle of an operation. If they'd only let me finish, he'd still be—"
The jab came not to his eye but to his nose. Two fingers up his nostrils, jammed in until he feared they'd fracture the nasal cartilage, even the bone, and then press in to pierce his brain. He grabbed Petros' wrist, but his full strength couldn't shift it as he was raised on his tip toes, pain like white noise static, high shrieking out of the speakers of the universe. Needles, needles and where was his vaunted intelligence now?
He clung on tight to Petros arm, hanging from it, as Janika's first punch whammed straight into his sternum and shocked his heart into missing its beat. There was nothing soft or sleek about Hiraku's bony knuckles as they slammed into Bryant's belly. All the little organs! All the trauma, the broken blood vessels, the potential for rupture. He hated it. He hated the ugliness of it as much as the pain. He was not a violent man and he didn't approve of this.
Fucking Campos. He'd been so careful to prevent any of this from being traced to him, and she had seen through the whole thing in milliseconds, pulled the rug out from under him and left him to what was, he supposed, the punishment he deserved for betraying his own principles so thoroughly. Never again, then. Violence was never a solution. Especially when it lead straight to him being hurt.
Pulling himself up fractionally while the beating continued, he managed to get the fingers out of his nose, keep his precious brain intact. That was the important thing. Everything else would...
His lips brushed the side of Petros' hand. Probably expecting to be bitten, Petros snatched his hand away, threw Bryant to the floor against the bars, and then there was kicking. Endless kicking of rubber soled shoes against the undefended bones of his shins and forearms. He crammed his back into the protection of the bars and curled, curled tight, trying to protect his face and ribs and belly, defended only by the fact that the three men were in each other's way.
Bryant snivelled in the circle of his arms, crying out when the blows fell, trying to swallow down bile, not to throw up and choke on it. Bile in his brutalised nose would be like vitreol in the face, and it hurt enough as it was. Even breathing made him want to hurl. When the clang on the bars came again and the blows stopped he did weep in thankfulness for a long, humiliating moment before he could pull himself together and look up.
The Captain wore faint traces of annoyance around her mouth. He supposed that meant she hadn't intended for this to happen, but if that was the case then she was too fucking stupid for sympathy.
"Twice in one day?" she stepped back to sweep a cold discouraging eye over Janika, Petros and Hiraku. "You three? Fasting for the rest of the week and three hours of compulsory prayer morning and evening. As for you, Mr Jones. Bring him out."
No nonsense this time. Lieutenants Funar and Roimata simply sprayed the whole room with their stun rays. Bryant too. He was conscious of a kind of a hilarious disorientation like the wooziness one could feel, coming out of anaesthetic, and then he woke up and he was covered in bandages and poultices, sprawled on a narrow bench with a bare milimetre of padding, locked in solitary confinement.
This cell contained only a bench bed and a bucket, and it too was closed off by an old fashioned lattice of iron bars, locked with an old fashioned mechanical lock.
"Accurate to the minute.” Outside those bars, Captain Campos checked her watch and gave Dr Atallah the minute lift of the lips that served her for a smile. Miserable bitch. "Nicely done."
Oh yes, nicely done. Bryant didn't roll his eyes, but only because they were red and puffy and they hurt. The doctor had probably treated him with gloves on. Campos had undoubtedly not touched him at all. He found himself studying her hands as if he could see his bots on there. Strong hands, but nicely shaped. He saw with surprise that she'd painted her nails with clear gloss, and that was one step away from the full Jezabel. It was kind of pathetic seeing a woman so butch make any gestures at all in the direction of femininity, especially if it had served her so badly in the past.
Still, it didn't hurt to be polite. "Thank you," he croaked, his throat sore and his mouth dry.
"Let me get this clear," she said, "I don't care what they do to you when you get there, but while you're on my ship you're under my protection, child killer or not."
The nail varnish had been lying - there wasn't anything feminine about her at all. Cold hearted bitch.
"Was she right?" Petros the dealer freed himself from the tangle of unconscious men around him, rubbing the numbness of the stunner graze from his left arm. Tall as a small tree and thin as a sapling, Petros had the shrink-wrapped quality of a Dark Matter addict. Clean now, and beginning to put weight back on even on the prison diet, he hadn't yet recovered any moderation or restraint over the drug-induced paranoia.
On the other side of the room, where the doorway led to showers and bunks, Janika - grave robber - and Hiraku, counterfieter, stalked closer. Ramjet was an unimaginative thug, but these three had brains. They had been important people on their own planets and they retained that aura even behind bars, when their sharp suits were wrinkled with round-the-clock wear, and all other marks of status were gone.
"Of course she wasn't," Bryant insisted. "Mind control? Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing."
They took their time coming closer. He was allowed to back away, to end up pushing his shoulders against the bars of the cage, with his hands sweating and trembling, and a jitter of terror turning his bowels loose. He'd tried so hard to make sure nobody looked at him, nobody saw him except as a bowed head and a smile, and now she'd destroyed that pretence with a few words, damn her.
And he was light headed with hunger. The bots took a great deal of energy to manufacture. He didn't think he could strip another set out of the few remaining fat cells in him. If he tried, it would mean losing some more of what little muscle he had. Nor could they take strongly enough in time to save him from this anyway.
"Ridiculous?" Janika was huge and blond, Hiraku sleeker, still rounded despite months in prison and a week on this bloody ship being transported to the very edges of the Kingdom. Hiraku had a softness about him, but there was something about the way he moved that triggered alarms in Bryant's hind brain. They were a bear and a panther and he didn't want either of them looking at him like that.
"Did I just hear you call me ridiculous?"
"No!" Bryant flung up both hands. He gritted his teeth and screwed his eyes closed and tried to say 'sir' but it wouldn't come. "No! The captain's idea was ridiculous. I'm a surgeon! I correct hare lips. If people are born disfigured I mend them. And yes, perhaps I've done sex change operations and—"
"Messing with the laws of God and nature," Janika growled, as Petros kicked the final unconscious man out of his way and filled in the trio on their left flank, blocking Bryant's escape. If he had thought of running for the urinals - which he wouldn't. He would not take this to a place where the guards were not watching.
Even now another of the Froward's crew, a woman whose uniform read "Metharom", was sitting outside the cage, watching the monitors, her back to him. That turned back said she felt he was getting what was coming to him, not her business. But he felt eighty six percent confident that she wouldn't let it escalate to rape right where she was personally in the room, and that was a better percentage than he had anywhere else.
"Using the brains God gave me to better the lives of my fellow creatures," he insisted, his voice rising as they closed in. The reek of his own fear filled his nostrils and his mouth and made him gag.
"We read what you did to that kid." Petros raised a skeletal hand and landed a fingertip gently on the tip of Bryant's nose. He closed his eyes, fairly sure that was where it was going to come next - a hard poke in one or other eye.
"They took him off the table before he was finished!" Bryant was still angry about this. He thought he'd be angry about it until the day he died.
"How many cuts about the neck was it? And you're still claiming it was some kind of accident?"
Eighteen wasn't really a child, Bryant told himself again, and the boy had wanted it so much. Everyone had heard of the fabled mer-people of Genovefa. Who was he to say his client couldn't run away to become one? They would have been workable gills if he'd been allowed to finish - if he hadn't been torn away from the table with the bloody scalpel still in his hand, while the state-approved butchers had tried to sew the boy up again. He could have told them that would never work.
"I tried to save him! I was in the middle of an operation. If they'd only let me finish, he'd still be—"
The jab came not to his eye but to his nose. Two fingers up his nostrils, jammed in until he feared they'd fracture the nasal cartilage, even the bone, and then press in to pierce his brain. He grabbed Petros' wrist, but his full strength couldn't shift it as he was raised on his tip toes, pain like white noise static, high shrieking out of the speakers of the universe. Needles, needles and where was his vaunted intelligence now?
He clung on tight to Petros arm, hanging from it, as Janika's first punch whammed straight into his sternum and shocked his heart into missing its beat. There was nothing soft or sleek about Hiraku's bony knuckles as they slammed into Bryant's belly. All the little organs! All the trauma, the broken blood vessels, the potential for rupture. He hated it. He hated the ugliness of it as much as the pain. He was not a violent man and he didn't approve of this.
Fucking Campos. He'd been so careful to prevent any of this from being traced to him, and she had seen through the whole thing in milliseconds, pulled the rug out from under him and left him to what was, he supposed, the punishment he deserved for betraying his own principles so thoroughly. Never again, then. Violence was never a solution. Especially when it lead straight to him being hurt.
Pulling himself up fractionally while the beating continued, he managed to get the fingers out of his nose, keep his precious brain intact. That was the important thing. Everything else would...
His lips brushed the side of Petros' hand. Probably expecting to be bitten, Petros snatched his hand away, threw Bryant to the floor against the bars, and then there was kicking. Endless kicking of rubber soled shoes against the undefended bones of his shins and forearms. He crammed his back into the protection of the bars and curled, curled tight, trying to protect his face and ribs and belly, defended only by the fact that the three men were in each other's way.
Bryant snivelled in the circle of his arms, crying out when the blows fell, trying to swallow down bile, not to throw up and choke on it. Bile in his brutalised nose would be like vitriol in the face, and his face hurt enough as it was. Even breathing made him want to hurl. When the clang on the bars came again and the blows stopped he did weep in thankfulness for a long, humiliating moment before he could pull himself together and look up.
The Captain wore faint traces of annoyance around her mouth. He supposed that meant she hadn't intended for this to happen, but if that was the case then she was too fucking stupid for sympathy.
"Twice in one day?" she stepped back to sweep a cold discouraging eye over Janika, Petros and Hiraku. "You three? Fasting for the rest of the week and three hours of compulsory prayer morning and evening. As for you, Mr Jones. Bring him out."
No nonsense this time. Lieutenants Funar and Roimata simply sprayed the whole room with their stun rays. Bryant too. He was conscious of a kind of a hilarious disorientation like the wooziness one could feel, coming out of anaesthetic, and then he woke up and he was covered in bandages and poultices, sprawled on a narrow bench with a bare millimetre of padding, locked in solitary confinement.
This cell contained only a bench bed and a bucket, and it too was closed off by an old fashioned lattice of iron bars, locked with an old fashioned mechanical lock.
"Accurate to the minute.” Outside those bars, Captain Campos checked her watch and gave Dr Atallah the minute lift of the lips that served her for a smile. Miserable bitch. "Nicely done."
Oh yes, nicely done. Bryant didn't roll his eyes, but only because they were red and puffy and they hurt. The doctor had probably treated him with gloves on. Campos had undoubtedly not touched him at all. He found himself studying her hands as if he could see his bots on there. Strong hands, but nicely shaped. He saw with surprise that she'd painted her nails with clear gloss, and that was one step away from the full Jezabel. It was kind of pathetic seeing a woman so butch make any gestures at all in the direction of femininity, especially if it had served her so badly in the past.
Still, it didn't hurt to be polite. "Thank you," he croaked, his throat sore and his mouth dry.
"Let me get this clear," she said, "I don't care what they do to you when you get there, but while you're on my ship you're under my protection, child killer or not."
The nail varnish had been lying - there wasn't anything feminine about her at all. Cold hearted bitch.
"You're taunting me about children?" he mocked, forgetting about politeness again, and prudence, hit on the raw. The boy wasn't a child, and Bryant wasn't the one who killed him. "They tried to cover it up but word still gets around, you know. How dare you judge me, you fallen woman."
The captain's face barely changed. Nothing about her posture - a kind of casual battle-readiness - altered in the slightest, but he got a blast of chill from her as if hell had just frozen over. He laughed. "'Fallen' is the right word, isn't it? I've seen the pictures in the gossip rags of that 'holiday' you spent on Rigel Gamma 15 with a belly like a barrage balloon. Where's your child now, then? Where's your wedding ring? 'Holy warrior of God' my ass. You're no better than the rest of us. You ought to be on the other side of these bars."
Her eyes blazed, and a muscle clenched in the corner of her jaw. He really thought for a moment she would reach through the bars and punch him out and, even though his hind brain wailed in protest at the thought of being hurt again, the part of himself that was really him said 'Yes!' He'd strip a bit of strength for that, if he could get her skin on his skin long enough for his little bots to hop across.
But "Ma'am," Atallah put a long, narrow hand on the captain's arm, the pair of them an offence to Bryant's sensibilities even in their dress. Atallah's hair was covered with the military hijab, Campos's with its Christian equivalent, which they preferred to call a 'veil'. Black, over their crimson jackets like shadow over blood. "He's got no decency, but that's hardly a surprise."
They were the ones with no decency, ashamed of their own hair. Probably scared of provoking lust – not that there was much chance of that.
Campos's attention remained locked on him like a pointer dog for a moment more, and then - again, without moving at all - she seemed to droop. The corners of her mouth turned down fractionally; she shook the words off like a bird ruffling its feathers and sighed.
"Thank you, Lina." She considered Bryant for a moment longer. Bryant got the impression of someone who was thinking through how to do a distasteful job to the best of their ability. Not because they wanted to, but because it was their duty.
"I'm sorry," she said at length, fixing him with a resolute gaze. “Both for the insult and for inadvertently causing you harm. Believe it or not, I would have put you in solitary earlier if I knew you were in danger.”
He didn't want her apology. That had been the whole point of his rudeness - to get her to go away, to get her to behave like an enemy, so he could think of her as one. "Whatever we have both done, you are a child of God, Mr. Jones, and in so far as you are in my keeping, you will be treated well."
Then she tapped her cudgel on the bars, once twice, three times, a light little pinging reminder. "But whatever you have heard of me, don't mistake it for lack of resolution. Don't push me to do anything you will regret."
He didn't think it was possible for her to get colder but she did, so frigid it was a wonder the steel bars didn't shatter at her sub-zero disdain. "You are perilously close to getting on the wrong side of me, Mr. Jones. I don't think you'd like that. I don't have a lot left to lose."