He was cut off, not by static, but by the sudden dead silence of an electromagnetic barrier effect.
“No, no, Rawl,” Thaddeus's voice said, startling the other captives. “I can't have you spreading wild rumors."
“Rawl?” Lady Sunlight said, puzzled. The other two looked at him, surprised but silent.
“Rumors?” Rawl asked.
“Certainly. Just rumors. What else could it be?” Thaddeus laughed unpleasantly.
Rawl wished, briefly, that Thaddeus had come out in person to oversee their capture. That would have given them a better shot at escape or at doing some serious damage, since Thaddeus's forces would have had to put some effort into defending their master.
Of course, Thaddeus would never have been that stupid.
A moment later the yellow plastic walls opened suddenly, shrinking down into themselves. The transport dissolved until nothing remained but the two simple benches, facing each other in the center of a moderately-large chamber.
The walls were drab gray; no music played, and the place smelled of oil and metal.
Sheila and Rawl quickly took in their new surroundings; Brenner looked around slowly but without real interest, and Lady Sunlight glanced back and forth wildly.
“Where are our things?” she demanded.
Thaddeus appeared suddenly, standing before them a centimeter or two off the floor. Rawl looked at the brown-garbed figure and realized it was not tall enough; he would have assumed it to be a transmitted image in any case, and Thaddeus gave that away by reducing his size to one more normal for a human being than his actual 2.9 meters.
“What things?” the image said, smiling.
“You know what things!” Lady Sunlight spat.
“You mean this?” The image held up Lady Sunlight's golden-furred pet, its neck clutched in one huge hand. The little animal was kicking and scratching desperately, unable to breathe. As it had been bred without claws, its struggles did no good at all.
“Let him go!” Lady Sunlight shrieked.
Thaddeus smiled and squeezed harder.
The animal gasped once and went limp. Thaddeus squeezed harder, then released the creature. It fell and lay still. Rawl noticed that Thaddeus had carefully dropped it inside the transmission area, so that his captives would be able to see for themselves that it was really dead.
“Vicious bastard,” Brenner muttered.
“Really, Thaddeus,” Sheila said, “is this necessary?"
“Maybe not,” the image replied, “but I'm enjoying it. I'm really enjoying seeing you smug little fools realize who is actually in charge here."
Rawl watched intently, suddenly aware that something was wrong here. Would the real Thaddeus have casually handled Sunlight's pet so directly? He had no way of knowing what the little animal was capable of, and for as long as Rawl had known him, Thaddeus had never taken an unnecessary risk.
This, then, was not the real Thaddeus, or perhaps it was not the real pet.
An android, perhaps? A clone?
It didn't really matter, though.
“Stinking son of a bitch,” Brenner said. “Where's the joy in strangling little animals?"
“Oh, there's joy enough,” Thaddeus replied. “There's a feeling of power to it, feeling that little bit of life squirming in your hand, and then feeling it break and die. The best part, though, is watching you people while I do it. You all thought you were as good as me-as good as me, hell, you thought you were better. You think I didn't know what you felt? You were all basking in that glow of power over me, knowing that you could turn me over to the rebels on Alpha Imperium at any time, knowing you could put an end to a life that's lasted longer than any of you. You all thought you were better than me because you'd never been defeated the way I was-but none of you ever tried. None of you could do any better. I'm the conqueror here, and now you have been defeated. Like it? Like the feeling? Do you?"
“No,” Sheila said. “We don't. We never gloated over your defeat, Thaddeus."
“No? Then why didn't you turn me in?"
No one answered.
“Why?” he screamed.
“I don't know,” Sheila shouted back.
“We felt sorry for you,” Lady Sunlight said before Rawl and Sheila could stop her.
“You pitied me? Well, pity yourselves, now, you sanctimonious little idiots!"
Something flashed in the chamber that held them, and Rawl felt his skin crawling and drying. His internal systems began reporting damage. They had been bombarded with a short burst of high-intensity radiations of various kinds-ultraviolet, narrow-band gamma rays, and others, all designed to kill off tailored microbes, but which incidentally damaged human tissue, several kinds of symbiote, and electromagnetic data storage.
He looked down at his hands; the skin was reddening already. He would have a ferocious sunburn in minutes, and his symbiotes were too badly hurt to repair it quickly. His skull-liner had lost large chunks of memory. Some of the independent intelligences that roamed in his body had died, he was sure.
So much for any attempts to fight their way out. They were at Thaddeus's mercy.
“Take off your clothes,” Thaddeus ordered.
“Why?” Lady Sunlight asked. “Why should we?” She was once again on the verge of tears.
“Because I'll kill you if you don't,” Thaddeus began. “I'll kill you slowly…” Then he stopped and reconsidered. “No,” he said. “No, I won't kill you. I don't want to make threats I won't keep, and I have no intention of killing you yet. No, if you don't take your clothes off, I'll take them off for you, and my machines won't be gentle about it."
Rawl was already peeling off his own garments, and the others reluctantly followed his example.
By the time they were all naked a gleaming silver machine had rolled into the room and stood before them. Rawl studied it in wry amusement. Thaddeus was not only one of the oldest people alive, but one of the most old-fashioned. Nobody else still used wheeled machines; they were too limited in what terrain they could travel on. Thaddeus did not entirely trust antigravity. It had been around for more than four thousand years, but to Thaddeus it was still too new to be used extensively.
“Hello,” he said to the machine, testing out its capabilities.
It did not reply. Thaddeus's image turned away from his intent inspection of Lady Sunlight and said, “It can't hear you. None of my mobile machines can. I programmed them all to block out your voices, to treat them as unprocessable background noise. You aren't going to get out of here with their help, any of you."
Rawl shrugged. “I didn't expect to,” he said truthfully. He had known that Thaddeus would have taken precautions against anything of the sort. He had not guessed what form the precautions would take, though; coding their voiceprints to be inaudible was, like many of Thaddeus's methods, unusually simple and clever, taking an indirect route to the desired result. Most people would have simply ordered the machines not to take orders from anyone else, but Thaddeus realized that there were ways around that sort of blanket command.
And there was an added psychological dimension, as well; these machines would not only not obey the captives, but would refuse to even acknowledge their existence except as objects. Thaddeus was doing his best to depersonalize his prisoners. He had stripped away their defenses, their machines, their creatures, their clothes, even the voices they used to give orders. Even their health, something they had all taken for granted for centuries, had been disrupted by the radiation burst; they would all be in mild pain for hours, maybe days, before their skin healed and their symbiotes regenerated.
Rawl almost admired the paranoid completeness of it all.
“Come along,” Thaddeus said. “The machine will lead you to your cell. The others are waiting."