Cormac wondered who would come here to clear up the mess. Certainly someone would come, for there might be information in there useful to ECS. He wondered momentarily if the cave would then be sealed. Probably not; they'd just take what might be of use and burn the bodies.
As they headed down into the trees Cormac heard yelling, and the mosquito opening fire. He didn't look back.
It being imperative the prisoner stayed alive, no lethal weapons were to be put within her reach, so Cormac and Gorman armed themselves with stun batons only. Cormac thought it all a bit over the top, but then he had been a captive too, and look what he had managed to do. Gorman was smoking one of his big cigars, the contented look upon his face as he digested the huge chicken madras he had eaten, tempered only by the fact that he had been unable to wash it down with numerous beers. But later, he said, they'd drink some beer later.
'We normally don't get to see this side of things,' he announced.
'Then why are we seeing it now?'
'This is for you,' Gorman replied. 'I've seen it before and know what's involved, but you haven't and ECS likes its Sparkind to be thoroughly aware of the consequences of what they do. None of this 'I didn't know' or 'I was only following orders. You can choose to leave the military at any time, you know.'
The cell block corridor appeared little different to how such corridors had looked for hundreds of years, though someone from a past age might have mistaken the pendent ceiling drones for light fittings. They halted at an armoured door with a screen display fixed centrally. Gorman tapped the screen and it came on, showing the interior of the cell and reassuring them that the prisoner wasn't crouched beside the door ready to jump them. Though it seemed unlikely she would be in any condition to do so, since she would still be suffering the aftereffects of stun toxin and a robust scanning routine. Gorman pressed his hand against the side palm-lock and the door swished open silently, and they stepped inside.
A bed, wash basin and toilet were provided. The bed was fixed to the floor and the wash basin was a flimsy thing that folded down from the wall. Neither provided an opportunity for the prisoner to hang herself, just as the bed possessed no sheets that could be turned into ropes and the paperwear she wore consisted of a tissue that turned powdery when torn. Also, there were no sharp edges to be found in here, nor anything that could be turned into a sharp edge. Via pin-cameras positioned in every upper corner of the room the prison submind kept perpetual watch, and other hardware in the walls monitored the prisoner's vital signs. ECS did not want its captives to die here, though it had been known to happen. Gorman had already related to Cormac a story of the man who managed to drown himself with his own urine, though he was revived shortly afterwards, and a story about a woman who tore out her own jugular artery.
'Hello, soldier Cormac,' said Sheen, easing herself upright and swinging her legs off the bed. He noted that she looked bruised, with a couple of raw spots on her bare arms. However, no one had beaten her, for the marks were a result of the full-spectrum scan she had undergone, just to be sure she had no pieces of syntheskin attached about her body. They had learned their lesson with Carl.
'Stand up,' said Gorman, then removing his cigar butt from his mouth, dropping it to the floor and crushing it out.
'No civilities then?' Sheen enquired.
She still looked like a teenager, but the information they had available about her put her age at fifty-two. Her present appearance was the result of cosmetic work, perpetually maintained by whatever suite of nanomachines she was running.
'You heard the man,' Cormac said. 'You can walk out of here or we can carry you out—makes no difference to me.'
'Ooh, tough talk.'
'Zap her on the tit—that usually gets their attention,' said Gorman.
Cormac began to step forwards, but Sheen abruptly lurched to her feet. He and Gorman moved in on either side of her, Gorman closing a hand just above her elbow, his stun baton held in his other hand casually down at his side.
'Let's go.' He marched her towards the door, Cormac, as instructed earlier, falling in two paces behind Sheen.
'You have to keep them off balance,' Gorman had also told him earlier. 'If they're untrained you usually have no problem because they continue to maintain the hope that somehow they're going to survive, to get away with what they've done or that ECS might be forgiving if they cooperate.' He had paused for a moment to lave a piece of poppadom with lime chutney and chomp it, washing it down with a swallow of fresh mango juice. 'This one isn't going to be like that. She's trained and she's wily, and she knows that no one is given amnesty by ECS. Ever. She'll go for one of us once we leave the cell corridor and step outside the range of the security drones, and she'll fight for her life knowing that if she loses, her life is certainly forfeit.'
At the end of the cell corridor the door stood open. Gorman turned her into the corridor beyond. Sheen lurched sideways as if losing balance, then turned, her foot coming up in an arc towards Cormac's head. It was smoothly done. Perhaps she hoped Gorman would lose his grip and that she would have time to relieve Cormac, obviously the least experienced of the two, of his baton. Gorman's grip was iron. He turned slightly, dragging her truly off-balance whist planting a foot against the back of the foot she kept on the ground. As she started to go over backwards, her kicking foot coming well short of its target, Gorman casually touched the baton to her chest.
Sheen gasped, then hit the floor on her back convulsing, her spine arched. Gorman and Cormac stepped forwards to grab a wrist each, and they dragged her the rest of the way, leaving shreds of her paperwear clothing in the corridor behind.
Sheen never truly lost consciousness, though she did lose some awareness of what was happening to her and where she was. That awareness only returned once she was strapped on the surgical table. She focused first on Agent Spencer, who stood at her head fiddling with a pedestal-mounted autodoc, then on Gorman and Cormac who stood beside the door.
'I'll tell you nothing,' she said.
Gorman grinned, then groped about in his top pocket for a cigar, which he lit with an old petrol lighter.
'As you have recently experienced, Cormac, when an aug is installed,' Agent Spencer continued the explanation she had been making before Sheen's interruption, 'the patient cooperates in the interfacing process, enabling the aug software to recognise its targets and thus guide in the nanofibres to synaptic connection.'
'Which takes me back to my previous point,' said Cormac. 'It's a difficult process to first install an aug, even with the recipient's cooperation, then a lengthy learning process afterwards to get it to work properly—the recipient's mind learns how to use the aug and the aug itself learns how to interpret the recipient's mind.'
'So I'm just meat now,' said Sheen. 'You're just going to ignore me?'
Agent Spencer picked up an item from a glass tray mounted on the side of the autodoc. It was a large, translucent plastic plug with a hole bored through the centre, attached to a skin-stick strap. Spencer kept it from Sheen's sight, which was easy enough with the Separatist's head secured in a clamp.
'On the contrary, Sheen,' she said. 'You are a very valuable piece of meat and you are going to receive my utter attention over the next few hours.'
'You can't—' was all Sheen managed before Spencer leant across, clamped a hand on her chin, pushing her jaw down, and shoved the plug deep into her mouth, pressing the skin-stick strap down on her cheeks. Now all Sheen could do was make sounds from deep in her throat.
'It's to stop her swallowing her tongue,' Spencer explained. 'Or biting it off.' She now moved the autodoc into place beside Sheen's skull.
'You were saying?' Cormac enquired.
As he understood it, the process was easier to conduct if the subject remained conscious. He understood that some would find all this rather distasteful, cruel even, and feel it something those of a civilized society should not do. Trying to feel some sympathy for Sheen, since they had fought together, he only felt cold. Criminals like Sheen tortured and killed with utter abandon, they ruined people's lives and, when they wanted information, they got out the blow torch and disc grinder.
'Yes,' Spencer continued, 'interfacing with an aug is an act of cooperation. Limited synaptic contacts are made and both mind and aug learn to use the communication channels they provide. Increasing the amount of contacts can lead to problems: destructive feedback, destructive synergy of the kind that killed Iversus Skaidon
