HWS Quebec-One, pinchspace
The week dragged on interminably, and the pressure of sitting around doing nothing was beginning to tell. The only thing that broke the monotony was an endless round of interrogations, in Michael’s case more than all the others in his cage put together. The Hammer interrogators were very good, and Michael thought they were sounding less and less convinced by his fictitious account of intelligence linking them to the mership attacks. Not that it mattered much anymore, though. The lie had served its purpose. The Hammers had not killed the survivors from the Ishaq, and Michael did not think they would.
The inactivity was hard to take. Despite Michael’s best efforts, Kingpig had rejected his idea of a cage for futbol out of hand. Worse, Michael’s authority was beginning to wear thin as he chivvied his troops to stay active and positive.
Tempers were beginning to fray. Fights, sometimes bad ones, were all too common. The Hammers did not seem to care. Safe behind their stun guns, they watched from a distance as Michael, Ferreira, and anyone else who could be bothered to help broke up the fights.
Michael sighed. In another few hours, they should know their fate.
Michael sat bolt upright as the characteristic hum of the ship’s main broadcast being switched on cut through the desultory buzz of spacers talking among themselves. It had never been switched on before. Michael was sure he knew what it meant. Here we go, he thought. This has to be the drop.
“All stations. Stand by to drop in five minutes. Five minutes. Out.”
For a moment, the cage was silent. Then it erupted in a welter of excited talk, the boredom and ennui that had blanketed the spacers for days gone in a flash. Michael shouted for silence.
“Okay, guys. Get ready for the drop. Let’s hope these Hammer filth are taking us somewhere nice.”
It was a pretty sad joke, Michael thought as laughter, almost hysterical in its intensity, engulfed the cage.
The excitement of the drop out of pinchspace had evaporated long before.
Michael stood by the wire, hands jammed into the pockets of his tattered shipsuit. Behind him, the occupants of his cage lay sprawled across the deck, awake but silent. Michael cursed the Hammers. What in God’s name were they doing? Probably fighting over who would get their hands on the Ishaqs, he thought. Utterly depressed, he slumped to the deck; with nothing better to do, he was asleep in a matter of seconds.
A violent crash jerked him awake and onto his feet. What now?
It was Porky, smashing his club on the wire to get their attention; hooded or not, Michael would recognize the man anywhere.
Porky came to the wire where Michael stood. Behind him, two more spacers stood, well back, stun guns leveled at the cage and its occupants.
“Get your men on their feet, Helfort.”
“What’s happening?”
“Helfort”-Porky sounded utterly uninterested-“if there’s anything I think you should know, I’ll tell you. Now, get your men on their feet.”
Michael shrugged his shoulders. “Okay.” He turned to his men. “On your feet, everyone. Come on,” he said to the laggards, “on your feet.”
Porky waited until all the Ishaqs were standing. He stepped away from the crude gate cut into the wire. “Right,” he ordered with quiet authority. “When I call out your name, leave the cage, turn forward, and go through the air lock door. Leading Spacer Jarvinen, let’s be having you.”
One by one, Porky called out the occupants of Michael’s cage. The numbers thinned quickly, but Michael was not too concerned. Rank had its privileges, after all, and being last to leave was one of them. When the only remaining spacer left the cage, Michael stepped forward and made to follow the rest of his men.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going, Helfort?” Porky hissed venomously.
“Leaving, like the rest,” Michael said, puzzled. “Why?”
“No, you’re not. Get back from the gate, you piece of Fed scum.”
Michael stepped backward, his confusion total.
After locking the gate and without another word, Porky and his backup left the compartment. Michael stood unmoving for a long time. He was alone and very afraid.
The men who appeared at the cage door were something new.
They did not wear hoods, for a start, and a quick search through his Hammer information base told him they were dressed in the black uniforms of the Hammer’s Doctrinal Security Service. Two chevrons woven in silver thread into the black fabric marked one out as a corporal. The other was a trooper. Shit, Michael thought. DocSec; that was all he needed. He had heard a lot about DocSec, none of it good. If half of what he had heard was true, DocSec was a truly nasty organization, the Hammer’s internal security force and secret police rolled into one.
Michael made his way to the wire.
“Yes?” He put as much authority into his voice as he could muster. “What do you want?”
“You, sir,” the corporal replied. “I want you. Junior Lieutenant Helfort, right?”
Michael nodded.
“Good. Come with us, sir,” the corporal ordered, his voice polite but firm. “Stand away from the gate, please.”
The DocSec trooper unlocked the gate and stepped back. “Come through, sir.”
Warily, Michael stepped through. Pleasant though the two men were being, they were still DocSec. The two black-uniformed men plasticuffed his hands behind him before taking him by the arms and hustling him out of the cargo bay, their footsteps echoing through the huge empty space.
The instant the air lock from the cargo bay shut behind them, the two DocSec troopers stopped being polite. The trooper took Michael by the hair on the back of his head. The corporal stepped in front of him; with vicious deliberation, he hit Michael heavily three times across the face. With his hands secured behind him, Michael could do nothing to protect himself except twist his head to one side in a frantic bid to escape the attack. It was futile. He grunted in pain as the first blow smashed into his face, a ring on the corporal’s right hand opening up a deep cut across his forehead to drop a curtain of blood down his face and onto his wrecked shipsuit. The second was worse, his newly repaired cheekbone absorbing the full impact of the backhander. Michael screamed in agony. He did not even feel the third as it turned his mouth into a bloody wreck.
The corporal put his mouth to Michael’s ear. “Now, Helfort, let me explain something,” he hissed. “We don’t give a fuck whether you live or die. So do as you are told and don’t talk until you’re ordered to. Got it?”
Michael could barely speak, the pain was so intense. “Yes,” he mumbled, fresh blood frothing up into small bubbles across his battered mouth. “Understood.”
“Good. Right, Helfort. I’ve got good news. You’re going dirtside. There are some people who really, really want to talk to you.”
Michael did not much care anymore. They could put him in lead boots and drop him into thirty meters of liquid pig shit for all he cared right now. Dripping blood, he was half dragged, half pushed along yet more corridors, down two levels in a drop tube, and along another set of corridors until finally they got to a lander for transfer dirtside. He had screamed with pain most of the way as his tortured body was driven into every hard projection they passed. The troopers’ only response had been to backhand him again and tell him to shut the fuck up before smashing him into the next door frame they came to.
Dragged through what looked like a lander’s air lock, Michael was pulled down a short corridor and into a small compartment. He was thrown bodily onto a metal rack, his plasticuffs quickly and efficiently replaced by a single plasfiber wrist strap secured to the lander’s hull. Then, with a parting slap to the head, the DocSec troopers left him alone.
Michael lay barely able to move, searching desperately for the last of the painkillers he had been given by the Hammer doctor. Digging them out, he swallowed them gratefully. When the pain finally started to subside, Michael had a look around through blood-gummed eyes. What he saw did nothing to improve his morale. The lander had been stripped down to absolute basics. There were no seats, only openmeshed metal racks layered deck to deckhead, one of which he now occupied. Frankly, he did not much care. Being left alone was more than enough for him.
Bit by bit the pain receded. Encouraged, Michael experimented. He could move, but not without protest from his badly battered body. He resigned himself to an uncomfortable trip dirtside.
He made a promise to himself: He was going to get out of this one way or another. He had no idea how, but he was not going to give up. Buoyed by his new resolve, he waited until shock and tiredness started to push him under. He made himself as comfortable as the metal rack and limited headroom allowed and did his best to sleep.
He had almost succeeded when, with no warning, the lander unberthed to start its long drop down the gravity well to the planet below. Which planet, he had absolutely no idea. The DocSec pilot clearly did not care too much for his passengers, and the entire journey down seemed designed to make life as miserable as possible, every maneuver so violent that Michael began to wonder how the lander’s airframe could take such abuse. To Michael’s relief, the lander finally thumped down, but with such casual violence that his aching head was whipped from side to side. He could not wait to get off. The brutal trip had made him lose his breakfast, but at least he now understood why the inside of the lander was bare metal. It was obvious, really; it made hosing it out that much easier. God knew what it must be like with a full complement of prisoners. He could only hope that he would never have to find out.
The moment the lander came to a halt, bobbing on its landing gear, the two troopers were back, seemingly unaffected by the state of the compartment Michael had been held in and apparently untroubled by the rough trip dirtside. Unstrapped, pulled unceremoniously down from his rack, he was half carried, half dragged off the lander and down the ramp into the hot, humid air of what looked like early evening. Michael had only a few seconds to look around before he was bundled carelessly into the back of a small van with blacked-out windows and plasticuffed to the seat frame. The whole routine was as cruelly rough as before, to the point where Michael began to think-when he could think between bouts of agonizing pain-that inflicting pain had to be a trade skill taught wherever DocSec troopers were trained to be the vicious thugs they all obviously were.
Two hours and two more rounds of gratuitous brutality later, Michael was thrown bodily into a small cell. A single small window set high in one wall lighted the bleak plascrete box; the light recessed into the ceiling was off. Michael sat looking up at plasglass-filtered sunlight dappling one wall of the cell an orange-red. Suddenly, it was all too much, and he began to cry. He could not stop, his tears washing tracks down through the dried blood caking his face.
He had never felt so alone in all his life.