The Human Division (33 page)

Hello,
her brain said again.

As it did so, the door opened. Lee opened up a visual window of the room and started tracking the new sounds and their reflections on them. In a few seconds, Six came into view, positioning herself between the chair Lee was restrained in and the table holding the shotgun and surgical implements. Lee “watched” Six almost disappear as she stopped moving and her sounds ceased except for her breathing and then became silhouetted again when Two spoke from the PDA.

“I’m afraid I have some very bad news, Lieutenant Lee,” Two said. “I took the information you gave me back to my colleagues, and as impressed as they were with your willingness to share, that same willingness has made them suspicious. They believe a CDF soldier would never willingly volunteer the information you have, or as much information as you have. They suspect that while you are telling some of the truth, you may not be telling all of the truth.”

“I told you everything I know,” Lee said, putting an edge of panic in her voice.

“I know you have,” Two said. “And I for one believe you. It’s why you’re still alive, Lieutenant. But my colleagues are skeptical. I asked them what it would take to relieve them of their skepticism. They suggested we go through the questions again, but this time with a certain added … urgency.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lee said.

“I do apologize,” Two said. “I told you that we would not torture you. At the time, I thought it was the truth. I regret it is no longer the case.”

Lee said nothing to this. She knew by all outward indications it would look as if she were trying to keep from crying.

“Six is a medical practitioner of some note,” Two said. “I can promise you that you will be inflicted with only as much pain as is necessary and not a single bit more. Six, you may begin.”

Lee opened her mouth just slightly to offer what she hoped would sound like a frightened, keening wail.

Six reached over to the table, picked up a scalpel and moved it toward Lee’s right ring finger, slipping the very edge of it underneath the fingernail.

Lee, who had bit her tongue quite severely for several seconds, spat a gout of SmartBlood at Six, covering her arm and the hand wielding the scalpel. In the reflection of the spitting noise she saw Six’s chin move sharply, as if she had moved her head to look at Lee quizzically.

“You’re going to make some noise now, Six,” Lee said, and ordered all the SmartBlood she’d spit out to ignite as furiously as it could.

Six became a bright spot of noise as she jerked back, wailing, arm and hand incinerating. She wheeled in reverse, colliding with the desk that held Two’s PDA. It dislodged from its position and fell forward, leaving Two in the dark about what came next.

Lee wailed as well as the bit of SmartBlood that had landed on her wrist burned like hell against her skin. Then she gritted her teeth and as hard as she could started yanking against her right wrist restraint, currently being weakened by the SmartBlood burning into its fibers.

One yank, two yanks, three yanks … four. There was a ripping sound, and Lee’s right arm was free. Without bothering to put out her wrist or uncover her eyes, she reached over to the table and grabbed the shears and as quickly as possible started cutting her other restraints: left wrist, neck, waist and ankles.

It was when she got to her ankles that Six exclaimed through her pain; Lee guessed that Six had finally figured out what Lee was up to and scrambled toward the table with the shotgun on it. Lee cut through the final restraint and leaped for the table, too late; Six had the shotgun.

Lee yelled, grabbed the scalpel Six had dropped and pushed up, getting inside the radius of the shotgun and driving the scalpel up Six’s abdomen. Six made a surprised gasping sound at the sharp, slicing pain, dropped the shotgun and slid to the ground.

Lee finally removed her blindfold, turned off the audio map and blinked down at Six, who was looking at her with something akin to wonder. She was, Lee noted, a bloody mess.

“How did you do that?” Six whispered between panting breaths of agony.

“I have good ears,” Lee said.

Six had nothing to say to that or anything else.

Lee grabbed the shotgun, checked the load and then moved quickly to position herself by the door. Less than twenty seconds later, the door burst open and a man came through, sidearm at the ready. Lee dropped him with a shot in the abdomen and then pivoted to get a second man in the doorway square in the chest. She dropped the spent shotgun, picked up the sidearm, checked the clip and went through the door.

There was a hallway with another doorway five meters down. Lee grabbed the second dead man, dragged him down the hallway with her, kicked open the door and hurled the corpse through. She waited until the second shotgun report and then shot the man still holding the shotgun. He went down. Lee resighted and aimed at the PDA sitting on a table, blowing it to pieces. She went into the room and looked at the chair to find Hughes, naked, restrained and understandably anxious.

“Private Hughes,” she said. “How are you?”

“Ready to get the
fuck
out of this chair, Lieutenant,” Hughes said.

Lee reached over to the table that held surgical instruments and then cut through Hughes’s bonds. Hughes pulled the blindfold over her head and looked at her naked lieutenant, blinking.

“This was not what I was expecting the first thing I would see to be,” Hughes said, to Lee.

“Knock it off,” Lee said, and pointed toward the corpse of the man she’d flung through the door. “Check him for a sidearm and let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hughes said, and moved to the corpse.

“What did this one call himself?” Lee said, pointing to the man who held the shotgun.

“One,” Hughes said. “But he never called himself it. I didn’t even know he was a he until right now. Someone calling himself Two called him that.” She found the sidearm, checked its load.

“Right,” Lee said. “I killed three more, including that one and one called Six. So that’s four dead and at least two still alive.”

“Are we going to wait around to meet them?” Hughes asked. “Because I’d prefer not.”

“We agree,” Lee said. “Come on.” They went to the door; Hughes took point. The two of them made their way back down the hall, toward the direction Lee had come from. Another door lay five meters past the door of her room; they opened it and found it empty except for a chair and a spray of gray matter and fluid on the bar floor.

“Jefferson,” Lee said. Hughes nodded, unhappy, and they continued onward.

A final door stood near a stairwell. The two banged through and found a small office with a PDA on a desk and very little else.

“This was Two’s room,” Lee said.

“Where did the son of a bitch get to?” Hughes asked

“I think I scared him off when I set a friend of his on fire,” Lee said. She picked up the PDA. “Watch the door,” she said to Hughes.

On the PDA were a series of video files of Lee, Hughes and Jefferson as well as other documents Lee didn’t bother with. She swiped past all of them to look for the PDA’s file system for a specific program. “Here it is,” she said, and pressed the button that appeared on the screen.

Lee’s BrainPal suddenly came alive with a long queue of increasingly urgent messages from her sergeant, her captain and the
Tubingen
itself.

Hughes, who apparently received a similar queue of urgent messages, smiled. “Nice to know we were missed.”

“Make sure they know where we are,” Lee said. “And make sure that if I tell them to, they’ll flatten this place into the ground.”

“You got it, ma’am,” Hughes said.

The two of them moved out of the office and went up the stairs, Lee taking the PDA with her and tucking it under an arm. The stairs emptied out into another short corridor that looked like a wing of a hotel. The two soldiers stalked through it carefully, turned a dogleg and were confronted by a closed door. Lee nodded to Hughes, who opened it and pushed through.

They came through the side of a lobby filled with lumpy-looking older people in ordinary clothing and very attractive younger people wearing almost nothing at all.

“Where the hell are we?” Hughes said.

Lee laughed. “Holy shit,” she said. “It
was
a brothel!”

The lobby quieted as the brothel workers and their potential clients got a look at Lee and Hughes.

“What?”
Hughes said, finally, not dropping her weapon. “You all act like you’ve never seen a naked woman before.”

*   *   *

“I don’t think I can tell this story again any differently than I’ve already told it the last three times, ma’am,” Lee said, to Colonel Liz Egan. Egan, as she understood it, was some sort of liaison for the State Department, which had taken considerable interest in her abduction and escape.

“I just need to know if there’s any additional detail you can give me regarding this Two person,” Egan said.

“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “I never saw him or heard him except as a heavily treated voice over that PDA. You have all the files I made, and you have all the files on the PDA I took. There really is nothing else I can tell you about him.”

“Her,” Egan said.

“Beg pardon, ma’am?” Lee said.

“Her,” Egan said. “We’re pretty sure Two was Elyssia Gorham, the manager of the Lotus Flower, that brothel you found yourselves in. The office you found the PDA in was hers, and she would be able to keep anyone out of the basement level you were in. The rooms the three of you were held in were private function rooms for clients who either liked rougher pleasures or wanted special event rooms which would be built up and torn down quickly. That also explains the signal blockers. The sort of people who would rent those rooms would want to be assured of their privacy. In all it made it a perfect place to stash the three of you.”

“Do we know who drugged us in the first place?” Lee asked.

“We tracked it down to the bartender at the
hofbräuhaus,
” Egan said. “He said he was offered a month’s salary to drop the drugs in your drink. He needed the money, apparently. It’s a good thing he has it, since now he’s been fired.”

“I didn’t think we could be drugged,” Lee said. “That’s supposed to be one of the benefits of SmartBlood.”

“You can’t be drugged with anything biological,” Egan said. “Whatever you were drugged with was designed with SmartBlood in mind. It’s something we’ll be needing to look out for in the future. It’s already been noted to CDF Research and Development.”

“Good,” Lee said.

“On the subject of SmartBlood, that was some good thinking on your part to incapacitate your captor,” Egan said. “The idea to map your surroundings with sound is also clear thinking. You’ve been recommended for commendation for both actions. No promotion, sorry.”

“Thank you, but I’m not really concerned about a commendation or a promotion,” Lee said. “I want to know more about the people who killed Jefferson. When they were interrogating me, they were asking me a lot of questions about what I knew about separatist movements and groups wanting to align their colonies with the Earth instead of the Colonial Union. I don’t know anything about that, but it got one of my people killed. I want to know more.”

“There’s nothing really to say,” Egan said. “These are strange times for the Colonial Union. We’re busy trying to bring the Earth back into the fold, and in the meantime our colonies are trying to deal with events as best as they can. There’s no organized separatist movement, and the Earth isn’t actively trying to recruit any colonies. As far as we can tell, these all are the works of isolated groups. The one here on Zhong Guo was just a bit more organized.”

“Ah,” Lee said. She knew when she was being lied to, but she also knew when not to say anything about it.

Egan stood, Lee rising to follow her. “In any event, Lieutenant, it’s nothing I want you to worry about right now. Your commendation comes with two weeks of shore leave at your leisure. May I suggest you take it someplace other than Zhong Guo. And that you stay out of
hofbräuhauses
for the time being.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lee said. “Good advice.” She saluted and watched Egan walk away. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the ship around her.

EPISODE NINE

The Observers

“Lieutenant Wilson,” Ambassador Ode Abumwe said. “Come in. Sit down, please.”

Harry Wilson entered Abumwe’s stateroom on the new
Clarke,
which was even smaller and less comfortable than it had been on their previous spaceship. “This is cozy,” he said, as he sat.

“If by ‘cozy’ you mean ‘almost insultingly cramped,’ then yes, that’s exactly what it is,” Abumwe said. “If you actually meant ‘cozy,’ then you should have better standards of personal comfort.”

“I did in fact mean the first of those,” Wilson assured her.

“Yes, well,” Abumwe said. “When you have your spaceship shot out from under you and your replacement starship is half a century old and put together with baling wire and gum, you make do with what you have.” She motioned to her walls. “Captain Coloma tells me that this is actually one of the more spacious personal quarters on the ship. Larger than hers, even. I don’t know if that’s true.”

“I have an officer’s berth,” Wilson said. “I think it’s about a third of the size of this stateroom. I can turn around in it, but I can’t extend both of my arms out in opposite directions. Hart’s is even smaller and he’s got a roommate. They’re either going to kill each other or start sleeping together simply as a defensive maneuver.”

“It’s a good thing Mr. Schmidt is using his vacation time, then,” Abumwe said.

“It is,” Wilson agreed. “He told me he planned to spend it in a hotel room, by himself for a change.”

“The romance of the diplomatic life, Lieutenant Wilson,” Abumwe said.

“We are living the dream, ma’am,” Wilson said.

Abumwe stared at Wilson for a moment, as if she were slightly disbelieving the two of them had actually just made a commiserating joke together. Wilson wouldn’t have blamed her if she was. The two of them had not really gotten along for nearly all the time he had been assigned to her mission group. She was acerbic and forbidding; he was sarcastic and aggravating; and both of them were aware that in the larger scheme of things they were hanging on to the bottom rung of the diplomatic ladder. But the last several weeks had been odd times for everyone. If the two of them still weren’t what you could call friendly, at the very least they realized that circumstances had put them both on the same side, against most of the rest of the universe.