The drills marched me into a tiny room and thrust me into a metal chair bolted to the floor. The debriefing room sat on top of one of the main reactor conduits. The air was uncomfortably warm and probably irradiated. Nordall wrenched my arms behind my back and handcuffed me to the chair. This was it.
I pretended to be exhausted, but inside, I was a pulsar. I vacillated between neurotic dread and lurid excitement. I was about to be executed, but they must have decided to torture me first.
The drills cut the lights and left me alone in absolute darkness for what felt like hours. I became intimately familiar with the heartbeat of the reactor underfoot. Four cycles ran each minute, each lower than the last. The fourth note was too deep to hear, but I could feel it in the soles of my feet.
How would they do it?
Would they beat me to a pulp? Starve me for days? Brand me with a soldering iron? The scenarios in my head grew more elaborate by the minute. I was so aroused, I expected to hear the button of my fly pop off and zing across the cell. What can I say? That’s how I’m wired. I didn’t choose to be this way.
The door flung wide, and I was blinded by the light. It terrified me. I thrashed against the shackles until I heard boots in the corridor. The gait was as regular as a watch. I recognized it instantly. I froze up, it felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs.
TSUROS.
“What is your name?” Sergeant Tsuros demanded. I squinted into the corridor. Everything was a glaring blur.
“Traitor! Reporting as ordered, sir!”
“Where were you last night at 0200 hours?”
“Asleep in my bunk, sir!”
His voice grew closer, but my eyes refused to clear. I couldn’t rub them, I was shackled to the chair.
“Did you hear anything in the night? Anyone moving around in the barracks or in the hallway?”
“No, sir!”
“Why is that?”
“Sir?” I asked, stupidly.
Tsuros hit me in my right temple with a closed fist. The blow rang in my skull like a slamming door. Glorious!
Suddenly, I could see again. My veins were hot with adulation, my lungs full of air. I was alive.
In that moment, I had the audacity to stare right into Tsuros’ eyes without servility or guile. I wanted him to hit me again.
Harder, I wished.
Instead, his clenched jaw melted into a grimace of disgust. A sigh hissed out of his flared nostrils. Tsuros had forgotten I was like that. I wondered how he’d ever gotten to be a drill with such an expressive face. Maybe it was only because I’d known him so long. Maybe I was only imagining it. He didn’t hit me again and pretended not to notice my erection.
“I asked you why you didn’t hear anything, inmate.”
“Sir! I was asleep, sir!” I repeated.
“The other inmates were more forthcoming with me. They all heard something.” Tsuros dropped his voice, leading me down a path. He wanted me to wonder if one of them had said something about me. That was why they left me in the dark for so long. I was supposed to be wondering if anyone had talked instead of edging.
“Sir! I didn’t hear shit, sir!”
I was trying to goad him by cursing. Tsuros would have laid out any other inmate, but he ignored the bait.
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“You heard nothing unusual?”
“Nothing, sir! I sleep like the dead, sir!”
“Take some time and think about it. I’m sure you’ll remember something.”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
I spent the next twenty-four hours shackled to that chair, stewing in a pool of urine. Every few hours, a pair of drills would barge in, screaming at me in a flare of blinding light. Rehnquist and Nordall, the dumbest of the drills.
Both men had the same type of face, lumpy and potato-like. Rehnquist’s black eye had faded, but I could still tell. I actually felt a little degraded dealing with them, but I liked that, too. I didn’t even rate a first-class torturer like Tsuros. I’d been left to the dregs.
Rehnquist said the other inmates had all informed on me. He warned I would be executed if I didn’t spill everything. He made some threatening gestures but never followed through. Tsuros must have warned them not to beat me.
Nordall was the carrot. He promised me a drink of water if I would only recite what had happened that night, telling him every detail. I must have repeated myself twenty times.
The showers had run out of hot water after flight training. Chow was a bland gruel of too-green ersatz peas and stringy clots of fab-protein. Before lights-out, Pirate told us for the hundredth time how he’d outwitted a Hezo ambush at Altair. For the hundredth time, the rest of the squadron scoffed and told him it was bullshit. I crawled into my bunk, laid my head on the thin and unsatisfactory pillow, and that was it.
“Not good enough,” Nordall said. He grinned those wide, idiot lips and quaffed the whole glass. I wanted that water so badly. But I knew. Even if I told him everything, he would just throw it in my face. I’d only get a few drops licked off the tip of my nose.
As the torture wore on, those few drops seemed more and more worth it. But that was just a small part of me. The larger part was disconnected, exulting in the scene as if I was standing right next to the drills, torturing myself. I was beginning to hallucinate, and I welcomed it. I’d been having terrible cramps for hours. My eyes felt abraded.
“Let’s go over it again,” Rehnquist suggested.
“Sure thing, sir,” I croaked. My voice sounded like I’d been snorting sand.
“He’s too weak. Better let him stew here,” Nordall butted in. “Do you want that, inmate? How about another twenty-four hours in the dark?”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
They turned to leave me there, but I could sense they weren’t finished. I counted the steps towards the door: one, two, three. On the third, Nordall swiveled on his heel. His brow was furrowed with what passed for a thought.
“Hey, inmate?”
“Yes, sir?”
“How come you never asked us what we’re grilling you for?”
“Sir! You’d tell me if I needed to know, sir.”
“You know exactly what happened.”
“Sir! I was asleep, sir!”
“Idiot,” Nordall hissed. The door slammed, and there was darkness. For a while, I wondered if they had left Rehnquist behind to fuck with me in the dark. I strained my ears against the darkness, though I couldn’t hear anything but the thrum of the reactor. I think I just hadn’t noticed him slip out. For hours, every inch of my skin crawled, anticipating his touch.
I had lost all sense of time. I wondered if the others were doing the same, trying to guess at which point each had broken. I was certain I could hold out the longest. As the hours bled out in total darkness, my thoughts flew far afield. I hallucinated that I was Tong Lang Chinci, bloody-eyed on the bridge of Bulldog, preparing for my final tilt at Titan Forge.
Then I became convinced I was Murderess. I raved at the empty interrogation room, begging the drills not to kill my unborn child. After that, I started to think I had already been executed, and I’d been in Diyu all along.
At last, the clarion of judgment sounded. An angel burst before me in a wreath of transcendent flame.
“Lydia…” I whispered. She’d come back for me at last.
It was just Tsuros, backlit by the corridor. The horns of revelation were only Reveille. The interrogation had gone on for forty-eight hours straight. Tsuros turned on the room lights. I tried to scream, but I could only produce a rasping croak.
Tsuros was clean-shaven. His uniform was perfect, boots shined, and buttons gleamed. But there was a shadow behind his eyes. He wasn’t happy.
“Enough games. Last chance before I lock the door and give you another twenty-four without water. I don’t care if you die. Do you understand?”
It took all my strength to nod. I wouldn’t make it another twenty-four hours.
“Good. Now, tell me, where is it?” Tsuros demanded.
“Whhh…” I strained. The word was like a hot stone in my throat. I hadn’t had a drink in so long. I would have lapped the piss off my chair like a dog if there was any way to reach it.
Tsuros brought his ear to my mouth, like he wanted to hear my last words. At this point, they might be.
“Where’s what?” I managed.
I got my wish. Tsuros hit me so hard I didn’t wake up for three days.