“You are a fool, Rabat,” Reza warned. “You do not comprehend what you are about to trifle with. My brain, as my body, is alien. You shall not find there what you expect.”
She smiled condescendingly. “Don’t flatter yourself so much, Reza,” she told him as she made some final adjustments on the small console in front of her. “I am the one who will be in control, not you. And I will also be the only one of us who will walk out of this room when we are finished.” She ran a hand over his forehead as she looked down at him, an expression of consideration on her face. “It’s a shame, really, to use you up like this. When we’re done here, you’ll be nothing but a drooling vegetable for Thorella to dispose of.” She shrugged. “But they were going to kill you anyway. At least I convinced the senator – the president – that we could still get very valuable information from you.”
“How generous of you,” Reza hissed.
“We’re going to start now. Just close your eyes and try to relax.” Suddenly he felt a dizzying sensation, as if a thousand tiny jolts of electricity were coursing through his body. “What I’m doing right now,” she said in a very clinical voice, as if she were speaking to a patient rather than a victim, “is scrambling your voluntary nervous system. You won’t be able to twitch a muscle unless the computer commands it. A security precaution on my part, obviously. You see,” he saw her smiling above him again, “you’ve been carrying a tiny implant around inside your head since just after you came back from Erlang. I took the liberty of implanting it while you were in your coma. A rather ingenious device, if I do say so myself.” Reza felt a curious tingling behind his right ear, a scraping sound that seemed to come from inside his skull. She held up a tiny white capsule that was stained with blood. “This is what’s been keeping you under control. Any time your brain waves reached a certain threshold, this acted like a jammer, influencing the key areas of your brain to reduce your adrenaline levels and critical neural signals. It has also been busy transmitting data on your brain activity all this time, allowing me to make much better calibrations for this experiment than otherwise would have been possible.” She paused as she ran a skin sealer across the small wound, dropping the tiny device into a waiting bowl. “This is also why you were in a coma for so long. I wasn’t ready for you until now, and it gave Borge the time he needed for his own plans.”
Completely paralyzed and unable to speak, Reza silently wondered if she really believed that Borge would let her live; long enough to boil the essence of Reza’s thoughts down to data understandable by her computers – and in turn by Borge’s people – but no longer. If she did not know everything, she knew enough. She was a liability. And Borge did not tolerate liabilities.
“But when Thorella comes for you,” she went on casually, ignorant of his silent monologue, “the capsule might make things look a little odd when you’re… discovered. Not to mention that it interferes with the cerebral interaction we’re about to induce.”
Reza had no difficulty imagining a scenario. It would be much the same as when they brought him here. He suddenly had collapsed, unconscious, in his hospital room, and the next thing he knew he was here. In the near-vegetable state he would be in after Rabat finished with him, Thorella could hand him a weapon – Reza might have enough gray matter left to understand how to hold one – and put him in any setting he thought fitting. And then he could simply gun Reza down at the end of some concocted hunt, walking away with the laurels of a hero. Easy. Clean. Simple.
“There!” she said. “That’s all done. Now we can get to work.” She looked deeply into his eyes. “I’ve waited for this for a long, long time.” On impulse, she leaned down and kissed him full on the mouth. Then her hand touched a control on one of the computers surrounding him, and suddenly the cold metal and machine world around him disappeared.
Deliha Rabat stood at the edge of a great plain, upon which stood a city that only one human had ever visited.
“Where are we, Reza?” she asked in wonder.
“This is the Homeworld of the Kreela,” he answered from behind her. “That is the city where the First Empress was born, and where I first fought for the woman who would become my love.”
She noted with pleasure that he was not speaking Standard; he was speaking Kreelan – the Old Tongue she knew now – and she understood it. She suddenly forgot about the city as her mind began to receive the first trickle of Reza’s thoughts, his knowledge. She looked around her, at the mountains, the magenta sky, at the Empress moon above. The trickle soon turned into a torrent, filling her with all the images and memories of an alien lifetime. She felt the knowledge pouring into her, a fountain that seemed endless. She drank all that he had to offer her, and still demanded more. All that he knew was hers. Everything.
“No,” she heard his voice say. “Not everything.”
“What do you mean?” she demanded in a tongue she had never before spoken. “Give it to me! I want it all!”
“I warned you, doctor, but you would not listen. And now you shall pay the price for your vanity. Behold!”
She whirled around. Behind her should have been the mountains surrounding the valley that was the birthplace of the Empire so many eons ago. But as she watched, the great peaks disappeared behind a veil of fire, a wall of boiling scarlet flame that looked like bloody lava. “What is it? Tell me!”
“It is the Bloodsong of my people, human,” Reza answered contemptuously, “the song of Her will. You and your machines can only comprehend the barest essence of the Way, of our lives. You can catalog the sights, sounds, smells, even the language of Her Children. But you do not understand our soul, or the power of the Empress, the power of Her spirit that dwells within us all. The Bloodsong is what unites us, all who have ever lived since the death of the First Empress. You wish to understand us? Then you must face the fire!”
“No!” she screamed as the wall of flame roared closer, devouring all that lay before it in a symphony of exploding trees and scorching rock. “I’m turning this off!” she screamed as she tried to flee back to her reality.
“Too late,” Reza bellowed, and she felt his hands pinning her arms. She saw the silvery talons of his armored gauntlets pierce her flesh, felt the warm trickle of blood running down her arms. She struggled in vain. His breath was hot on her neck. “I warned you, you fool!” he shouted in her ear. “And now shall you know the truth! You wanted everything, and now you shall have it!”
As the wall of flame grew nearer, towering in the sky to blot out the glimmering Empress moon, Rabat could hear another sound above the din of the advancing apparition: voices. Thousands of them. Millions. All calling to her. They were angry, enraged. She looked into the flames and saw their terrible claws reaching for her, their mouths opened wide to reveal the fangs waiting to tear out her throat. Her skin began to blister in the heat, and she could smell the stench of her hair as it smoldered and then suddenly burst into flame.
She screamed, and kept on screaming as her skin and flesh began to boil away. Her eyes bulged and then exploded from her skull as the flames roared over her, the ethereal claws of the ancient warriors tearing at her flesh, at her soul, devouring her spirit as the world around her turned the color of blood.
“Reza! Jesus, are you all right?”
He felt hands moving along his body, tearing away the monitors and probes.
“Where is she?” he rasped. “Rabat.”
“Looks like the good doctor’s had it,” Jodi said quietly. She had to look away from the body. The woman’s face was frozen in a nightmarish grimace of agony, her hands clutching her breast as if her heart had exploded in her chest. In fact, as a coroner would ascertain some time later, it had.