Scouts (32 page)

“I love you, too. No matter what happens to us, remember that.”

“I will. I promise.”

We had said the same thing to each other, back before we even started looking into becoming Scouts. That promise had been broken as soon as the slightest strain was put on it, but that promise was built on a lie. Now, with a new relationship built from the shards of the old, I knew it meant something. I would remember her as long as I lived.

We turned our heads and kissed, but it was hard to maintain through the tears.

“Time’s up,” said one of the guards and we were shoved apart.

As they carried Valka away, I could hear her shrieks of grief echoing from the walls.

We walked along for a bit and then a section of wall suddenly slid up, revealing a tiny cell. Shirley removed my restraints, stripped off my clothes, and gently pushed me inside. I didn’t resist. She stood in the doorway, her face unreadable.

“Oxygen,” I said and she looked away. I didn’t really think using my safe word that way would get me out of this prison cell, but it did hurt more than I could stand to see my life crumbling around me.

As the door closed, she mouthed a word, almost imperceptibly. It could have been
sorry
, but I couldn’t see how she could be sorry for any of this.

The room was two meters wide, two meters long, and two meters high. Too small to walk in and barely big enough to lay down. The floor, walls, and ceiling were made of the same soft-but-resilient material as a Scout bed and glowed faintly. A covered hole in the corner with a water sprayer above it was clearly for sanitary purposes.

I wailed until my voice was raw, all pretense of dignity gone now that I was alone. I beat my fists on the walls. In between, I sat and sulked, imagining a thousand ways to get my revenge on Shirley. When that was done, I lay down and tried to sleep.

As soon as I closed my eyes, the lights flashed and a loud crash rattled my teeth.

I started, my sleep spoiled, heart pounding. “What?”

“Cadet Challers Dizen, who are you working for?” The voice was synthetic. Impersonal. Pitiless.

I squinted against the bright light. “I was just trying to help Masters and Valka.”

“Someone contacted you. Who was it?”

“I don’t know what you’re t . . .”

Another klaxon split the air. I clamped my hands over my ears. Then it was gone and the lights went out completely.

Did they want Trace? Was that it? Trace didn’t have anything to do with this. They couldn’t want her.

“Who is your contact with the Pirates?”

“I don’t have con . . .”

My denial was obliterated by the noise.

“We know everything. Your entire life has been recorded. All that remains is whether you will redeem yourself and cooperate, or if you will refuse and prove yourself completely useless.”

“Trace. Her name was Trace.”

“Good. So Cadet Trace Hom was part of the conspiracy?”

“There was no conspira . . .”

Another blast of sound interrupted me. “Do not lie to us, Cadet Challers Dizen. You were in a conspiracy with Cadet Trace Hom.”

“To maintain the hideout in the robot. That’s all.”

The blackness stretched in silence. I waited for a response. There was nothing. I groped, found the corner, and curled up in a ball.

Everything seemed to be going so well. The Scouts didn’t seem to have taken any notice of our activities. Shirley’s betrayal bit into my stomach. I vowed to make her pay for it if the opportunity ever came.

Might as well have vowed to visit the Norma Arm.

When I woke up, I smelled food. Groping in the darkness, I found warm bread, some tea bulbs, and cut raw vegetables. I ate them all as fast as they would go down.

Sleep came at irregular times, often interrupted by the disembodied, angry voice. Always, they wanted to know who I was working with, who I had spoken to, and what I had said.

Before long, with the constant assaults on my sleep, the irregular food, and the light and dark, everything outside the room started to seem unreal. I started having nightmares. The world took on a dreamlike quality and the dreams became more vivid. The difference between sleep and wakefulness blurred. I fought hard to hold on to what was real, but in the isolation of that little cell, the fight was a hard one.

In the meantime, I told them everything. I told them about Trace, and the hideout, and Suna, and Zun. I gladly told them all about Shirley and everything she had done to make my activities possible.

And when that wasn’t enough, I made stuff up. It didn’t seem to matter. Talking resulted in food and sleep. Refusal, or even hesitation, was punished. Before long, I had constructed an elaborate fantasy in my head full of lies and betrayal, doublecrosses and triplecrosses, with plenty of names to give up to my captors.

Time passed. I don’t know how long. Ten days? Thirty? A thousand? I had no way to tell.

The door of my cell opened. The walls outside were green instead of white.

“Good news,” said a man. “We’re going to reward you for all you’ve done. You’re getting your old body back.”

“Thank you,” I said. “My old body?”

He didn’t explain further. He led me out and down a short corridor to a gentank where a couple of technicians were waiting.

I wasn’t sure, right then, whether I was dreaming or not. They opened the gentank and helped me down into the blue gel. Something inside me tried to protest, tried to tell me not to do it, that they would be able to make me into whatever they wanted, whatever was useful to them.

That voice was small. The greater part of my mind wanted to just go along to make sure they didn’t start with the klaxon, with the lights, and let me sleep. Inside the gentank, I knew I would sleep. I had the strangest sensation of deja vu, that this had happened to me before, but I couldn’t tell whether it was in a dream or real life.

I could swear I knew that technician, that I’d seen him before, but all my thoughts were lies—things I had made up and things I had dreamed.

All except that little voice in the back of my head.

It got louder.

They still need you for something or they would have killed you like they killed Joco. They don’t need your mind anymore; it’s broken. So they need your body. They’re trying out a template that Cassandra made, trying it out on someone they don’t care about. They’re lying to you.

My imagination fixed on the dozens of newgen templates they could use. Would they make me into a limbless Astrolo, put me completely at their mercy. They could combine Astrolo and Ovor, and just turn me into an endless egg factory. They could take what they had done to Trace to its logical conclusion and turn me into just another component of their drive system, orgasming on command, a living orgone factory.

Or they could be using this as a convenient way to finally dispose of me. The gentank would simply unmake me, take me apart into my constituent molecules and store them away to use on others.

I tried to fight the horrific possibilities flooding my mind, to somehow escape from what I knew would be a fate worse than death, but the conditioned, compliant, dreaming part of my mind had become too strong. That little voice still screamed in my head as the lid of the gentank came down. The chemical smell came and I slid into sweet unconsciousness.

Masters’s face swam into view, a vision in the mist, blurry and indistinct, but I knew it was him. Only it wasn’t Masters. It was Robert.

“Challers?”

“Unh.” I recognized the voice. Blinking, I wiped the gel from my face.

“Challers, we need to hurry. Can you walk?”

I wasn’t in the gentank anymore; I was propped up on the edge of it. I guessed that I had been yanked out still unconscious.

“I . . . I guess.”

I looked down. I really was back in my old body. I swallowed and stretched. The fog that had clogged my mind cleared a little. This was
real
.

“Wait,” I said. “Where’s Valka? Where’s Shirley? What’s going on?”

“There’s no time to explain, just come with me. We can get you cleaned up when we’re aboard my ship.” He shoved me, still covered in goop, into a Scout uniform and handed me a pistol. “Do you know how to use this?”

Another shock of reality. I remembered that day in the target range when I realized I could kill, in quick flashes of memory, each like a bucket of cold water in my face. I definitely wasn’t dreaming. I thumbed the safety and selected three-round bursts.

“Yes.” My stomach protested with a painful somersault, but I swallowed the bile back down.

“Good. If we’re lucky, you won’t have to use it. Ready?”

I was still sore and dizzy from the aftereffects of the gentank, but I nodded. “Let’s go.”

We hurried away from the lab, through the twisting corridors. I was lost, but Robert knew the way. He peeked around corners as we went, kept an eye behind us, alert every moment for an assault or ambush. I kept quiet.

“Where are all the guards?” I couldn’t see how we would be allowed to just walk out.

“We know how to plan a mission, unlike some cadets I know.”

“That wasn’t our fault!”

“Wasn’t it?” He turned to look me in the eye momentarily. “Do you think Command doesn’t have people watching for just the kind of thing you were doing? When you killed that Ovor in the maternity school, they knew the next car leaving the station would have the perpetrator.”

“Killed? We didn’t kill anyone!”

“Didn’t kill anyone? His head was smashed like a melon!”

Valka. That was Valka. She had stayed behind to “take care of” the Ovor man who had almost raped me. That was indeed the most expeditious way to take care of him.

I shuddered. “I didn’t know anything about that.”

“That may be, but it was what got this whole mess started. They scanned the car as you were travelling back, figured out who you were, and came and got Shirley. She could either arrest you, or she could get arrested herself. It’s a fine position you put her in.” He rounded a corner, raised his weapon, and fired two short bursts.

Two Scouts lay on the deck, neat holes in the centers of their chests. The wall behind them was splattered with gore. Robert was channeling some serious crisis orgone into that weapon. As we ran by, I swallowed hard to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged.

“Stay sharp,” he said.”The gunfire is going to attract attention.”

“Then why did you shoot them? Couldn’t we have talked our way past or something?”

He opened a side door to a ramp circling up the sides of a wide shaft. “Too risky. By now, they know you’re not in your cell; they’re going to have people converging on us.”

“What about Valka?”

“They’re listening, Challers. Just follow me and stop asking questions.”

“I’m not going anywhere without Valka.”

“Vacuum take it, Challers!” He slapped me across the face. “Shut up and run!”

I ran. Every stride could have been taking me farther from Valka. I stumbled, wanting to turn around right there and make sure we were getting her too, but for once in a very long time, the rational part of my brain took hold. If Robert could rescue me now, I could rescue Valka later. With my own freedom, we would still have hope. I pushed on, past the numbered maintenance hatches set every few meters along the ramp.

Shouts echoed from below. “Stop!”

Robert swung his pistol downwards and fired a burst. Ricochets sang through the shaft. I felt the ramp vibrate as more rounds struck the floor beneath us.

He pushed me towards the wall. “Run. If you see them, shoot!”

We hustled together, using the ramp floor as cover, trying to keep the angle between ourselves and our pursuers close enough that they couldn’t see us. For a few seconds, we were safe, but another burst cut across our path. We dropped to the floor and I crept up to the edge of the ramp. One of them on the ramp below was going down. He was angling to get a good line of sight on us while his partner climbed the ramp. Another burst slammed into the ramp.