At one point he stirred to the piping of a com signal and he half-woke with the memory of the frenetic dreams fading like a half-forged, coded message. But he didn’t quite make it to wakefulness before he drifted back under and this time was swept up by a wave of images and sounds like a breaker crashing in from the sea.
Memories of Golen Space. The Fortress of DeNoble. Barracks of the captives, more a warren than a human habitation. The bunk on which he rotated shifts with three other men, the mattress that smelled of things he tried not to think about. The raider flights. And between missions, days spent working on weapons arrays and flux-modulation reactors. Days spent dreaming of work stoppage, of suicide. And each day, walking past the window of the punishment center…
Stop… please… he whispered, struggling to wake; but the memories were like a surround-holo, relentless. He couldn’t move, couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears. Prisoners who tried a work stoppage? They were only tortured for a few days with electrosynaptic shock. But those who tried suicide or sabotage? They were strapped into chairs, gnawed by alien parasites, condemned to a lifetime of screaming agony, dying slowly… only to be resuscitated by robot life-support systems. They were the examples: suffering the boss’s eternal wrath for defying the law of the fortress. According to rumor, the boss had once led a bizarre religious splinter sect, inspired to ever-higher standards of torture by ancient legends of purgatory.
Why do I keep remembering…?
And one other memory: he never knew her real name, but among the prisoners she was known as Greta the Enforcer. A woman of exquisite beauty and deadly malice. What her actual position was in the DeNoble hierarchy, Legroeder never knew, either; but in his one encounter, begun as a seeming invitation to special “favors,” he’d been left shaken, dizzy, heart pounding with fear and humiliation. It was rumored that she used pheromones and charm equally as weapons, and just as no man could resist her appeal, neither did any escape the pain that she enjoyed inflicting.
Legroeder, in the depths of sleep, groaned, wondering how he had survived as long as he had at DeNoble, wondering how he’d ever found the courage—or madness—to escape.
And now, to return voluntarily to it all, to new punishments… torture and incentive, reward and punishment… all in a blur that he could only imagine, shivering… struggling to awaken… visions of Tracy-Ace/Alfa and the pirates of Ivan strapping him into a chair alongside his Narseil comrades…
Bzzzz… bzzzzz… bzzzz…
What was that noise, like killer bees swarming—?
Bzzzzzzzz…
He sat upright in bed, shaking. “What—what—?” he stammered.
The door paled and Tracy-Ace strode in.
He shuddered, the aftershocks of the final dream-quakes still rocking back and forth in his mind.
“You’re alive,” she said, looking as if she were surprised to find him still breathing. “Rings—you look awful! I’ve been trying to call you for hours. Why didn’t you answer? Are you sick?”
He rubbed his forehead, struggling to fight his way out of the dream fog. “Uh—I guess I was really asleep,” he said thickly, sounding as if he had marbles in his mouth. “How’d you get in?”
“I overrode the lock.” Tracy-Ace squinted at him. “You don’t look like you slept very well.” She got him a glass of water. “Should I come back later?”
He took a few sips, choking, as he tried to process her question. He thought of his dream and wondered: Are you the one who orders the tortures here?
// Hold, please. We’re working to compile relevant information for you… //
His head reeled. But indeed, some of the information he’d gained was starting to swarm into focus. This outpost was different; they used different methods of persuasion here. He knew more about Outpost Ivan than he’d have guessed possible in such a short time. In the midst of all that dreaming chaos, his implants had been processing the info-dumps that the flicker-tube and the study programs had given him, half a lifetime ago.
// We’ve been comparing past and present… //
(Wait a minute,) he thought with sudden bitterness, (are you saying that I dreamed all that stuff just so you could analyze it?)
// It helped us to establish a perspective, yes. //
Perspective, he thought, shaking his head. Christ.
Tracy-Ace was frowning. “Does that mean yes or no?”
He blinked. “Huh? What did you ask? Give me a minute here, I, uh—”
Tracy-Ace cocked her head. “Are you having a flicker-tube hangover, or do you always wake up this way?”
“Flicker-tube… hangover,” he mumbled. “That must be it.” He squinted, looking around for the time. “How long was I asleep?”
“About fourteen hours. Look, I’ll give you a few minutes to get showered. Then I think we’d better go get some breakfast into you.”
He nodded, rubbing his eyes. He suddenly realized that she’d changed clothes since he’d last seen her. She looked more than a little sexy, dressed in a short gold skirt over black tights, and a patchwork black-and-gold blouse. Her temple implants were flickering, drawing his eye. Now why did he think that made her look good? He drew a sharp breath, thinking of… Greta. This is the face of the enemy. Remember that.
“Great,” he said huskily. “Thanks.”
After she was gone, he tossed off the thin blanket and stepped into the mist-shower, aware of his nakedness as he wondered vaguely: what was one supposed to wear while touring a raider compound with a lady pirate, anyway?
Walking with Tracy-Ace, later, he discovered that the implants had done a pretty thorough job of organizing his headful of new information. He found himself with a silent guide in his head, producing tiny captions for him as they passed through the station.
// …To your nine o’clock, note the flicker-tubes leading to the new docking port construction site. Just under a thousand workers there… //
He glanced left. (New docking port? You mean they’re expanding this place?)
// And further to your left, a departure portal to the location of Outpost Ivan’s contribution to the Free Kyber colonizing fleet… //
Legroeder staggered a little, his heart pounding. He turned to peer back at the flicker-tube portal they had just passed. The colonizing fleet. He had managed to put that out of his mind.
“Something wrong?” Tracy-Ace asked, pausing. She’d been talking all this time, he had no idea about what.
He drew a slow breath. “No,” he said, forcing himself to rejoin her. “Nothing wrong.”
They continued walking.
Colonizing fleet. He was dying to ask her about it. Terrified of what she might say.
He hardly noticed as Tracy-Ace tugged him faster along the promenade, while he contemplated the thought of the Kyber worlds moving out of Golen Space, colonizing… the Centrist Worlds? No, that didn’t make sense.
It must be something else…
He only gradually became aware of the tingling in his arm, mostly after Tracy-Ace took her hand away to gesture toward a food-plaza. “Breakfast,” she said.
Breakfast. Legroeder tried to think what he had been feeling a moment ago. She’d been touching his arm—but as a polite gesture, or a personal touch—or was she making a data connection? He cocked his head at her. “Were you reading my mind a moment ago?”
Was that a twinkle in her eye? “And if I was?”