The Cyber Chronicles Book II: Death Zone (16 page)

"We don't have
queens in Oroka, only an emperor, who has many wives, none of whom
could be called queens. Whatever she might have thought she was,
she's just my woman now." The man paused, considering the cyber.
“I’m Rai, by the way.”

"So what do
you intend to do with me?"

"You're going
to be sacrificed, of course. But first I want to ask you some
questions, with a bit of gentle persuasion if necessary."

Sabre shook
his head again, not breaking eye contact with his captor. "I have
nothing to hide."

"Good. Then
you'll be sacrificed even sooner." Rai settled on a metal table
nearby. "So, where are you from?"

Sabre decided
to save them a lot of time on tedious questions, and related the
story of Tassin's flight in terse, clipped sentences.

"Well, you're
certainly a talkative fellow, aren't you?" Rai glanced at the fat
monk, who shook his head, looking apprehensive.

"The emperor
will want to see him. He crossed the Flux Zone."

Sabre studied
the man with renewed interest, wondering how he knew that it was a
flux. Sabre had called it the Death Zone, as Tassin did.

Rai raised a
brow at the monk. "Why? He's just a wanderer."

"No one has
crossed the Flux Zone before. He's dangerous; he knows too
much."

"So? He'll be
sacrificed, and the knowledge will die with him."

"And the
woman?"

Rai frowned.
"She'll be my wife; she won't talk to anyone."

The priest
shrugged. "That's up to Norak. He may demand her death too."

The monk left,
and Rai turned to Sabre. "So, you were manipulated by a woman. A
sad tale indeed, but that's what happens when you give women
choices, and make them queens, they get choosy."

"Every person
should have a choice in what they do with their lives, or whom they
marry. It's a basic human right."

Rai shook his
head with a supercilious smile. "Not women. They don't know what
they want, or what's best for them. They have to be controlled, and
made to do what a man wants; otherwise they make his life
unpleasant with petulant demands and peevish complaints. But I
didn't come here to discuss our society, prisoner. What is that
thing on your head, and what does it do?"

Sabre shifted,
easing a tingling leg. "Originally it enslaved me, but it's broken
now."

"How did it
enslave you?"

"It controlled
my mind, and made me obey the orders of my owner."

"And she was
your owner," Rai said.

"More or
less."

"Why did you
continue to obey her when you were no longer forced to do so?"

"I wanted
to."

Rai folded his
arms. "Then you're a fool to continue to be her slave."

"I chose to
help her. I'm not her slave."

"I don't
believe you. I think that thing does more than you say. It has
lights in it. If it was broken, it would not. What else does it
do?"

"Nothing. The
lights are the only thing that still works."

"You're
lying." Rai signalled to one of the guards, who left the room.
"That thing looks like old technology, and I want to know what it
really does."

Sabre cursed
inwardly; he had hoped that by telling the truth, he could avoid
torture. If it was the kind than involved breaking bones, his
modifications would be discovered, and that would lead to more
questions. "You're wasting your time."

"I think
not."

Rai looked
around as the door opened, and the guard he had sent away returned,
accompanied by the monk, who addressed Rai. "You're to bring him to
Norak. He wishes to speak to him."

"He could be
dangerous,” Rai said. “I don't know what that thing on his head
does yet."

"Norak does
not fear a mortal. He must be obeyed."

"Very well,
but he should be drugged, for safety."

The monk
nodded and dug in his robe, producing a vial and a rag. Uncorking
the vial, he sprinkled a few drops of clear liquid onto the rag and
handed it to Rai. The warrior approached Sabre, who tensed.
Evidently deducing his prisoner's intention to defend himself, Rai
stayed out of range of his feet and pinned Sabre's neck to the
floor with his knee, clamping the rag over his nose and mouth.
Sabre held his breath and waited for a couple of minutes before
going limp, feigning unconsciousness, but Rai continued to hold the
rag in place. A cyber could hold his breath for close to twenty
minutes when not exerting himself, but clearly Rai had noticed that
he was not breathing. Time crept past, and the silence became
pregnant with growing amazement as Rai waited for him to
inhale.

The cyber's
host status warning light flashed as Sabre ran out of oxygen, and
he strived to slow his metabolism to a crawl, but the light turned
red. Had the cyber had more warning, it might have been able to
slow his metabolic rate sufficiently to extend his oxygen supply.
In a few more seconds, he would pass out and inhale anyway, so he
had no choice but to breathe.

A chance
remained that he might be immune to the drug, but the last one had
worked, so he doubted it. Whatever alien plant this chemical was
derived from, its antidote was not, apparently, in a cyber's
defensive arsenal. A pungent odour stung his nose, making him
dizzy, and reality receded into a haze. Rai removed the rag, and
someone unshackled Sabre’s hands, then twisted his arms behind his
back and chained them at the elbows and wrists.

The guards
raised him onto rubbery legs and half carried him out of the
torture chamber, his feet dragging. He was vaguely aware of passing
spluttering torches in a dark corridor, and sombrely clad men
stepping out of his path. A pair of doors opened ahead of them, and
they entered a well-lighted hall with a high roof supported by
carved pillars as thick as tree trunks. Dozens of torches burnt
against soot-streaked walls, and the guards' footsteps echoed as if
they were in a massive cave.

The guards
forced him to his knees, and he looked up at a red-robed man seated
on an ornate gilt throne; Emperor Norak, presumably. A dozen
brown-robed priests stood in a row behind Norak, their heads bowed
and hands clasped. Several naked blonde girls wearing gold collars
knelt beside the throne, the torchlight gilding their slim bodies.
Sabre averted his eyes from their unwilling exposure and turned his
attention to the man on the throne. His vision sharpened and the
dizziness abated as his enhanced immune system flushed the drug
from his blood with a cyber's peerless efficiency.

Only the
torches that hissed in their sconces broke the chamber's oppressive
silence. The guards knelt, and Norak rose to loom over Sabre. A
skull-like visage gazed down at him, gleaming black eyes sunk deep
into the dark caverns of their sockets. Pallid skin covered his
jutting bones, and a shrivelled nose protruded over his almost
lipless mouth. Oiled, wispy white hair was braided behind his head,
and a waxed goatee covered his chin. Norak walked around Sabre,
studying him, then returned to the throne and sat down again.

"How did you
cross the Flux Zone?"

"We
walked."

One of the
guards thumped Sabre in the kidneys. "My Lord."

"I'm not your
lord."

"Not you, I
meant -"

"Leave it,"
the emperor boomed. "He thinks he's clever." He took a gold goblet
from a cowering servant and sipped from it. "How did you avoid the
perils of crossing the Flux-reality?"

Sabre
shrugged. "We ran, we hid, sometimes we fought."

"You don't
strike me as a man who's capable of crossing the Flux-reality. My
captain tells me you're a cowardly sort."

"We were lucky
I guess. How would you know what it's like in the Death Zone?"

The emperor
gave a glottal laugh, then coughed and sipped from his cup again.
"The Flux Zone is my birthplace. I was a guardian, created by the
Core, but you don't know what that is, do you?" His eyes glowed red
in their dark holes. "I have powers you could only dream of, which
is why these people respect me. Now, how did you cross the Flux
Zone, and what is that thing on your head?"

"I already
told you."

Norak gestured
with a skeletal hand. "Rai, show him how we run things around here,
perhaps that will refresh his memory."

Rai, who knelt
next to one of the guards, nodded and rose. The soldiers steered
Sabre out, his legs still wobbly. The fresh air cleared his head
further, a welcome relief after the smoky confines of the palace.
Two more guards fell in behind him, and Rai led them through the
city, affording Sabre his first glimpse of it. The paved streets'
cleanliness gave it a cold, unlived in air, and the idle prosperity
of the men who wandered along them did little to relieve that
impression.

Only the low
mutter of male pedestrians broke the city's brooding quiet. The
absence of women made it a drab, melancholy place. Instead of
gaily-clad housewives swapping gossip on street corners, or
haggling with merchants, a few sombre boys carried bags of
groceries home from the equally dismal shops. Sabre wondered how
the Orokans could bear to live in such an oppressive, unhappy
society.

Rai led the
little group out of the city and back along the road through the
swamp to the forest. When they reached the trees, he turned onto a
narrow, upward-sloping track that ended where the land fell away
into a large, sheer-sided box canyon. Clearly it had once been a
quarry, and solved the mysterious origin of the stone from which
the city was built. Soldiers guarded a pair of stout gates that
blocked the narrow gap at one end, and animal and human bones
littered the floor. A dozen Death Zone monsters of various shapes,
sizes and ferocious aspects paced around it or lay in the shade.
Sabre noticed that the scanners did not detect them, even here, and
wondered afresh at this strange phenomenon.

Rai turned to
him. "Norak's pets. They have to be fed, and that's where you come
in. If you don't co-operate you'll end up down there."

"Why does he
keep them?"

"He controls
them, and we use them to raid villages. Then they feast, and at
other times they eat our criminals, vagrants and the occasional
traveller foolish enough to wander into our city and cause trouble,
but we don't have enough of those. They'll only eat live prey, so
dead bodies are no use. No one dares to stand against us or attack
us. Half of those girls we captured will be used to feed Norak, who
drains them of life. A waste, if you ask me, but no one will
gainsay him. If anything happened to him, those creatures would
tear us apart."

"A vampire,"
Sabre said.

"No, he
doesn't drink their blood. I don't know what he is, but he's
powerful."

"He's a Death
Zone monster."

Rai shrugged.
"Maybe, but we're rich because of him."

"How does he
control the beasts?"

"I have no
idea. They just seem to do as he wishes."

"Some sort of
mind control, perhaps," Sabre mused.

"Have you seen
enough?"

"Too
much."

"Good, now you
can tell me what I want to know."

"There's
nothing more to tell."

"You want to
be thrown in there?" Rai asked.

"You want me
to make up stories? Besides, I don't doubt that I'll end up down
there whether I talk or not."

Rai scowled
and headed back along the path. Sabre considered kicking his way
free, but his arms were shackled in such a way that it would be
impossible even for him to break the chains.

Back in the
torture chamber, they waited for the monk to arrive with his
bottles. Rai sprinkled the drug on a cloth again and clamped it
over Sabre's nose while the guards held him. Sabre quelled a strong
urge to kill the obnoxious captain, which he could have done with
one kick. Such an attack would, he suspected, only result in his
being thrown to the monsters, a prospect he did not relish.

When his knees
buckled, they removed the manacles and lifted him onto a table.
Blurred figures moved around him, pulled his arms straight and
shackled his wrists and ankles to the table. By the time they had
finished the haze receded, and when the room came back into focus
Rai stood over him, holding a slender knife. Sabre smiled,
recalling the torture he had suffered at the hands of the surgeons
on Myon Two.

Under the
cyber's control, he had endured the exquisite agony of being sliced
open with lasers, unable even to vent the screams that had hammered
in his trapped mind. Only one host had ever broken cyber control,
and had leapt from the operating table to cavort around the theatre
in a gruesome, screaming dance of agony, killing two surgeons
before he died of blood loss and shock. Sabre had blacked out after
a time, and had been spared the full horror of the procedure.
Compared to that, the threat of a knife was laughable.

Rai returned
his smile. "Our methods are not so crude, you'll soon see." He
studied the scars that ran down Sabre's chest and limbs. "I see
you've been tortured before, in a strange fashion. Still, you'll
find our technique a lot more persuasive."

Sabre glanced
at the weapon poised over his belly. "I've already told you the
truth."

"We'll
see."

Sabre gritted
his teeth as Rai sliced into his skin. Just under it, the knife
would encounter the silk-fine barrinium mesh and go no deeper, then
there would be more questions. Rai seemed satisfied as soon as
blood welled from the incision, however, and put the knife aside.
The monk handed him a bottle, which he uncorked and tilted over the
cut. A small, greyish creature fell out, writhing on Sabre's skin.
He stared at it in horror as it paddled in his blood with countless
legs, its worm-like body pulsing.

Rai drawled,
"You see, this is a true instrument of torture, far more effective
than knives or whips. This is a meeder, a parasite from the swamp.
It likes to eat people alive. It will ingest your flesh slowly, and
very painfully, I am told, gnawing its way into your guts. Once it
gets there, you'll die, but the temple will consider it a
sacrifice. Few men last that long, however, most are babbling when
the meeder takes its first few bites."