War Against the White Knights (16 page)

“That’s remarkable,” said Tremayne, “if it’s true. It’s just a pity those neighboring realities have the exact same force shields as ours. Clever idea, no practical application. What’s the contingency plan?”

Xin laughed. “Patience, Deputy Ambassador. There’s bound to be one nearby without the force shield. It’s just a question of finding it.”

Tremayne watched in astonishment as the invisible beam from Giant’s gun suddenly played across the Hardit swarm, dropping them to the deck, as if they were insects sprayed with a powerful insecticide.

Inside their pressure-sealed armor, the Hardits showed no sign of impact or injury; they just dropped and went still. But the microwave beam would have superheated the water in their internal organs, causing them to burst. The insides of those Hardit suits were going to be seriously messy.

“I don’t like the look of whatever the monkeys were bringing to bear on us,” said Majanita. “I’ve shut down the forward shield. O’Hanlon, spike their guns.”

The marine with the bulky backpack sprayed the area with explosive rounds. The bulkheads looked unscratched, and the pressure integrity of the ship unaffected, but the same couldn’t be said for the Hardits or their machinery, which were chopped to pieces. Where before the dead Hardits looked as if they were sleeping, was now a scene of bloody carnage.

“Cease fire,” ordered Majanita. “Forward shield restored.”

“Hostiles approaching from aft,” said Corporal Bolinny. “I count six.”

Tremayne switch to attention to this new threat. The Hardits approaching their rear were still coming, racing to take up positions. She counted ten now. She could imagine the confusion in their minds. The plan to trap the humans from both sides and wipe them out in the crossfire was not working out as they had planned.

“Get out of my frakking field of fire!” growled Giant who had turned her pulse weapon around on its mount and was now aiming at these new targets.

Tremayne backed up against the exterior bulkhead to keep out of the way.

This time, the Hardits opened fire, concentrating their aim on the shield generator limpets attached to the passageway bulkhead. The shield flared in angry, yet beautiful flashes of cream and violet.

Years ago, in the Antilles insurrection, Tremayne had been part of a squad firing everything they had a portable shield generator, which had barely noticed their fire.

Whatever the monkeys were packing was far more effective.

“Cease fire!” said Majanita.

Sparks flew from one of the shield generators before it popped and died, swiftly followed by all the other generators powering the shield. They were vulnerable!

She tensed, hoping her personal shield would work, but she took no hits.

She looked again and saw that their opponents were already dead.

The Hardits hadn’t stood a chance.

“Show’s over,” shouted Majanita. “Bolinny, Jintu, Morgan, you’re point. O’Hanlan, Giant, cover our rear. General McEwan’s on Deck Three, move it!”

Arun tried once more to wriggle free from the metal clamps securing his forearms to the padded bulkhead. It was hopeless. He lashed out with his feet, which dangled a foot above the deck, but that only made his arms hurt more.

Of course it was hopeless, but his body wouldn’t let him hang there without a fight. His arms were spread wide but weren’t fully outstretched, which meant the pull of his body’s weight was slowly building a burn in his shoulders, but wasn’t wrenching them from their sockets.

The pain that prompted him to attempt an impossible escape was not the throb in his shoulders but an unbearable itch in his neck where it felt as if the blackout hood over his head was secured to his neck with pins soaked in a skin irritant.

And he was naked.

Altogether this was not a nice way for the Hardits to welcome their guest.

How had the commando squad managed to sneak through Legion defenses undetected? He didn’t like to think too hard about that, preferring to trust in the strength and ingenuity of the combined Legion fleet.

The Hardits had done something clever, he’d allow them that, but there was no way they could escape the Legion fleet searching for their commander.

And when the situation was reversed, and the Hardits were his helpless prisoners, he would not dignify them with a shred of mercy. Every humiliation and hurt they visited upon him would be repaid a hundredfold. And if he died before being rescued, he’d depart this life knowing he would have been merciful to the Hardits in comparison with his comrades who would punish his killers endlessly.

He felt a vibration through the arms clamps. Was that a hatch opening? The hood he wore blocked out sounds other than his labored breathing as he fought to extract oxygen from his own exhalations. There must have been an air opening in the hood, though, because he hadn’t suffocated yet. He concentrated on sucking in breaths as deep as he could to maximize his oxygen intake. He wanted his muscles to be ready for whatever he faced next.

He yelped as a ring of pain cut around his neck, and the hood was removed.

Arun blinked away the sudden influx of light, and then set about assessing his situation, planning his escape.

He was inside a hexagonal chamber with padded bulkheads and overhead, and only one obvious exit guarded by four armed Hardits in powered armor, possibly some of the commandoes who had captured him. His hood had been removed by a fifth Hardit who wore what looked like a uniform in a metalized silver fabric with a ludicrously high collar behind its head, but who carried no weapons. This Hardit, who moved with unhurried grace, placed the hood on a small metal trolley on wheels.

Arun frowned, realizing something disheartening. Wheels? The trolley wasn’t bolted to the floor and didn’t run on tracks set in the deck. The way the Hardit moved, and for that matter the way the weight of his body tore at his shoulders, all suggested a constant gravity. Either he’d been a prisoner for a helluva lot longer than he thought and was actually on a planet, or else the Hardit vessel he was aboard was accelerating at a constant rate and bearing. It hadn’t the feel of a ship fearful of pursuit or incoming weapons fire.

The Hardit reached up with her tail – he tended to regard the Hardit as a female, given his previous experience with the species, even though this creature was more likely neutered – and pulled out a tray built into the trolley. She proceeded to make a show of lovingly caressing the contents. Shining scalpels, laser cutters, and saws. An all-metal hammer followed by barbed spikes. He couldn’t identify half the objects in the tray and neither did he want to. Arun could fight back the surge of panic threatening to overwhelm him but he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. The equipment the unarmed Hardit was making a show of inspecting was a torturer’s toolkit.

Hardits were ugly inside and out. Hatred clouded their brains every moment of their waking day. Come to think of it, even their dreams were probably soaked in bile. Different strata of Hardit society loathed each other. Males and females detested each other so much that many would attack each other on sight except during mating season. About the only thing that united Hardits was their utter hatred for anything non-Hardit: even artificial intelligences were detested on principle.

They might be psychotic xenophobes, but Hardits weren’t stupid, especially with respect to their command over the physical universe. Arun’s mind whipped itself to think harder about an escape plan, but in his heart he knew there would be no escape for him. Not from the Hardits.

With escape impossible for the moment, he went for the only weapon he could think of: words. Back when he was a cadet, he’d managed to wind up a Hardit called Tawfiq so badly he was disappointed that she hadn’t died from apoplectic rage.

“Getting a good look, fleabag?” he sneered. “I’m not surprised you have to abduct a male to see what one looks like. It isn’t so much that I can see why no Hardit male would want to come near you – what with the ugly overbite and the unsightly body hair – but I can smell why a male would give you a wide berth. You stink like rotting offal.”

If he could get a rise out of the alien, at least he wouldn’t feel quite so helpless, but the torturer gave no indication she’d even heard him.

Whenever he talked with Hardits in the past they’d had translator systems. Had she switched hers off or maybe she didn’t have one? Either way she would hear his words as nothing more than meaningless grunts.

With surprising grace, the torturer drew a syringe from her tray and drew up a small quantity of fluid from one of the glass bottles at the back of the tray.

She came over to him, standing just far enough away that Arun couldn’t fling his legs out into a kick that would snap her neck. She held the syringe in her prehensile tail-tip, her three yellow-tinted eyes peering up at him along her long snout. The fluid was a roiling mix colored sulfur and rust with a dark sludge settling at the bottom. It looked like something you’d bleed out of a cooling system. Arun had no idea what this was but it was bound to be nothing good.

The Hardit growled at him, her alien voice converted to human speech and spoken out of a collar speaker. “You are naked and male. I had forgotten both facts.” She brandished the needle. “Thank you for reminding me, you have suggested intriguing options for sites on your body to insert this needle.”

Arun gasped. He couldn’t help it. The fragility of his resolve shamed him into presenting the torturer with a robust look of contempt.

In response, the torturer lifted her lips high to reveal a long jaw of serrated fangs.

“I have decades of experience torturing humans,” she said after a stretched moment of mutual glaring. “I know exactly how to drag you through near-endless landscapes of pain to the edge of consciousness, eyes open and shredded nerves alert to every agony. However, I will never allow you the escape of unconsciousness.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll never talk, monkey brain.”

The Hardit regarded him coolly without speaking. Was the torturer dismayed by this human resilience? If so, then she had never encountered a Marine before. Arun leered back. Didn’t look like he was going to escape from this, but he wasn’t planning on going easily. His body had understood his situation and activated his pain shunts. The burn in his shoulders had already numbed, and the more this veck hurt him, the less Arun would feel it.

Arun began to feel unnerved with the syringe. He tried to look away, but trying to look away only made him think of that needle and its tip that looked unnecessarily broad.

He shut his eyes, but the needle was still there in his thoughts. Only now it was larger, and its content bubbling and fuming like an evil wizard’s potion.

His eyes flicked open and his gaze locked onto the needle’s tip.

“What’s that?” he heard himself ask, and then cursed himself for betraying his fears to the torturer. How could he be so frakking weak?

The Hardit stood on a step in front of Arun.
Close enough to kick.

She was larger than the Hardits he had known on Tranquility – as he was larger than the humans of Earth – but that still left her no higher than his shoulders. A motor sounded and the step the torturer stood upon rose out of the floor, presumably because she wanted to look her captive in the eye.

Even better.

Arun tried to give the impression of shying away from the torturer while really gathering his strength. Just before she reached his height, he snapped into action, channeling all his loathing for Hardits into a kick aimed at the hairy veck’s throat.

His hips twisted and his thigh moved up to snap out the strike, but after that his attack collapsed and his sight popped with explosions of pain that burst in his head. His body shuddered with such hurt that it seemed he had imploded, shrinking around a ball of burning agony that seared every fiber of his being.

As he hung there, the brightness of the overloaded sensations dulled, forming a single, aching word that resonated in his head.
Pain. Pain. Pain?

What happened to my pain shunts?

He heard a growl from the Hardit, and remembered the torturer standing before him, examining her latest project. The skangat was laughing at him. “Yes, you feel pain, human Marine. Pain and paranoia. As I said, I know how to drag dogs like you through worlds of agony of my own creation, begging me for the release of death almost from the very first step.”

The torturer blew over Arun’s face, forcing him to breathe in her stink of rotting meat and loamy mud. “I have broken stronger humans than you, Number 106.”

That number…
Arun’s thighs trembled. Number 106 had been his designation in that mercifully brief time when he’d been a Hardit slave.

The torturer brought the syringe in front of Arun’s face and depressed the plunger with the endmost tip of its tail until the sludgy liquid dribbled out of the needle’s tip.

Arun’s mind shot hatred at his tormentor, but his body betrayed him. His gasps were accompanied by a pitiful mewling at the back of his throat.

As the pain in his shoulders returned and began growing into agony, he watched, mesmerized by the needle as the Hardit pushed more fluid out of its tip… until the syringe barrel had emptied its contents onto the deck.

“I have no need to inject you,” she said. “The hood has already delivered its payload into your bloodstream. Did you feel a prick in your neck a little earlier? Yes, I see from your eyes that you did. Soon the merest touch will be agonizing, and yet, sadly for you, the stimulant will prevent the pain shock from driving you into the refuge of unconsciousness. You will feel every agony I will upon you. And I shall never grant you release.”

The torturer then stepped forward and stabbed at Arun with the syringe.

He was screaming even before the needle hit home. Then it speared his groin, sinking through his flesh until it scraped the bone of his pelvis and drew out howls of agony. The needle broke off inside him, leaving a thumb’s-width on the outside. Arun went beyond screams into streams of tears and moans.

“I didn’t need to do that,” said the Hardit, the artificial voice making her explanation sound perfectly reasonable, “but I wanted to.”