His cell was much like the medical area I had found myself in when I woke up: looking like the interior of a walnut shell, only green. The Sudorian soldier, however, did not lie strapped to a comfortable bed but was instead ensconced in a chair. He shivered occasionally, probably because they had removed his helmet and the temperature in there must have been chill to a Sudorian. Something like a melted crab clung to the side of his head, with its leglike protrusions penetrating his skin. Blood had crusted around the wounds.
Slog and Flog squatted against the wall over to one side. I did not think they were there to guard him, since with his insulating suit epoxied to the chair he wasn't going anywhere, but were watching out of curiosity. Slog, who I now identified more easily by a blotch resembling a birthmark on the side of his neck, was sharpening his mandibles with a small hand-held rasp. The Sudorian soldier kept glancing at him, whether out of fear at the implicit threat or just through irritation, I couldn't say. The prisoner otherwise seemed pretty self-possessed.
"I thought it might be a good idea for you to question him," Rhodane suggested.
I hesitated, then abruptly stepped forward. "What's your name?"
He stared at me for a long moment, then winced and jerked his head, replying, "Erache Turner."
"What is that thing on the side of his head, Rhodane?" I asked.
"The broud encourages him to answer quickly and discourages him from lying," she replied. "It uses pain, certain neurochemicals, stimulation and uninhibitors."
Rather unpleasant, I gathered, but I wasn't feeling particularly sympathetic right then since, as well as the nightmares and other weird effects I had been experiencing, I still felt nauseous most of the time, aching from head to foot as if from unaccustomed exercise, and my shoulder still hurt, a lot. In fact, at that very moment my right leg started to develop a case of the shakes. Looking round I noted a shelf-like protrusion beside the door, stepped back and rested my weight on it.
"Why did you try to kill me?" I asked him.
Again that pause then wince. "I didn't try to kill you."
I glanced at Rhodane. "But he can obviously resist it."
"The absence of further discomfort shows that he did not lie."
The prisoner looked rather smug all of a sudden, and I realised my questioning required more precision. "Why did one of your companions try to kill me?"
"I don't know—" His head snapped back and he grimaced. The broud shifted slightly against his temple. "You were in his sights when—" His jaw locked into a line and his eyes squeezed shut. "Fuckit! We were ordered!" Panting, he opened his eyes. A little trickle of blood ran down his cheek.
"Who gave the orders?"
"Admiral…Carnasus—" Gloved fingers clamping onto the chair arms. "Fleet!" He started shivering.
"Did your orders come directly from Admiral Carnasus?"
"No."
"Did your orders come from Harald Strone?"
"…Yes!"
My mouth suddenly arid, I glanced at Rhodane. "Any suggestions?"
She had been standing, arms folded, staring pensively at the prisoner. Her mouth had a slight twist, as if she had tasted something bitter. Of course—Harald was her brother.
"Why were you sent to Brumal?" she asked.
The man stared at her. "Traitor, how can you…? We were sent… we were sent." He yelled and thrashed about as much as his glued-in-place suit would allow. He started gasping again, and despite the room being cold for a Sudorian, sweat beaded his face.
"Answer me," said Rhodane, "and the pain will stop."
"Harald sent us." He managed this through gritted teeth. "He sent us—" His head snapped back and his eyes closed—apparently the broud was as impatient with procrastination as it was with prevarication. "We were sent to scout—" He shrieked. This performance went on for some minutes until eventually it started to all come out. The missile launcher came from a Fleet ground base, and they moved it using antigravity lifts, camouflaged and at night. The bodies had been stored in the same ground base: Brumallians killed during the last stages of the War or during the subsequent occupation, and put on ice for further study. The missile they had fired was guided in by a beacon on Inigis's ship, a beacon in the viewing gallery which someone activated once I was in there alone.
"I don't think there's much else I want to ask," I said, standing up.
"I will obtain further details," Rhodane informed me.
I left that place, clamping down on my need to vomit.
13
The first five hilldiggers were built during the first twenty years of the War and it was this effort that pushed the economy of Sudoria into collapse. The Planetary Council plutocrats had of course gathered to themselves a huge proportion of Sudoria's wealthy and lived sybaritic lifestyles utterly at odds with the famine and want experienced by the majority. The revolt, when it came, was led by workers in the space industry and by Fleet personnel returning groundside. Chaos ensued and many of those sybarites turned up in the Komarl, bolted to rocks with the kind of fixings used in the construction of hilldigger skeletons. Things settled down a little, but there was much argument about what kind of regime should come next, how wealth should be distributed, who should be in charge of what…The list just kept growing. The old planetary parties began scrabbling for power, and some infighting ensued. The people lost focus and indulged in some rather silly squabbling. The fifty-megaton Brumallian warhead that annihilated the city of Cairo-Desit came as a timely reminder. It took just ten days to form Parliament after that.
— Uskaron
Harald
Feet thundered on the deck plates, the racket of machinery was constant. A hot metal smell permeated the air, as did the drifting smoke from welding whose arc flashes lit the interior of the engine galleries. Standing on a high catwalk, his guards deployed around him, Harald was hardly aware of this commotion. He instead stared at the code scrolling down in one segment of his eye-screen, while clenching and unclenching his hand to stretch his fingers inside the control glove. One of the other two screen segments, either side of this main one, held his cracker programs, worms and viral decoders—a toolkit he had built up over many years of breaking into Fleet com. He began working the glove, selecting out lines of code to copy and then apply his programs to, before dropping the results through analytical sieves. It soon became evident to him that Lambrack was using a standard randomising protocol, but obviously running a book code behind that, for the third screen divided itself into blocks displaying parts of images, and from the speaker issued something sounding like an alien tongue. He made the obvious selection—Uskaron's damned book—and felt a cynical contempt when two more screen sections lit up to show Captains Davidson and Lambrack, and their voices became clear.
Lambrack: "… to come over to his side. In a way I admire that. It shows a degree of ruthlessness we need in an Admiral, but I still cannot agree with his obvious intent. The purpose of Fleet is to defend Sudoria, obeying the dictates of Parliament. If we follow Harald, we'll end up with a military dictatorship."
Davidson: "I understand that probability, but wonder if that is really his intent. It could be that he feels, as do many in Fleet, that Parliament is making a mistake in its dealings with this Polity."