After darkness, hell. Slowly coming to. I could feel the pain through the fugue of painkillers, my IVD red with warnings. Hopelessness accompanied consciousness. Or in other words I knew I was fucked.
Opening my eyes was like tearing off a scab. Light was pain; focusing on my surroundings, making sense of them, wasn’t much better. Calum Laird may have been a cunt but I should have taken the job with him. He was an amateur compared to the other inhabitants of the cell I was in.
I was strapped into some sort of contoured vinyl couch, properly secured despite not having the use of my arms. I could feel a single jack in one of my plugs connecting me to some kind of medical suite. I was covered in medpak-driven medgels.
‘He seems to be healing quickly,’ Josephine said quietly. She was looking at the suite’s monitor.
It looked like your standard cell – stone walls, no windows, thick metal door. I reckoned it would have been quite roomy without the hulking, patchwork presence of Martin Kring. Even through the agony I still managed to find disgust for this murderous, so-called anti-insurgency specialist.
Kring was standing impassively next to an unhappy-looking Vincent Cronin, whose salon looks, smart suit that probably cost more than most made in a year and carefully cultivated corporate duelling scars all looked out of place in this dungeon.
And of course Rolleston. Still in uniform – crisp clean fatigues. Well built, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, every inch the suave officer. He had a patient, almost indulgent smile on his face beneath his pale-blue eyes. I’d seen matt-black plastic lenses with more feeling in them than those eyes. This was a moment of clarity. I wasn’t frightened; all I felt was an overwhelming hatred. It was all I could do not to scream my hatred and anger at him.
‘I don’t really feel that I need to be here for this,’ Cronin said to Rolleston, his annoyance obvious. ‘This is your department.’
‘I thought you might want to meet the man who caused us so much trouble. Besides, he will have information that will be of use to both of us. Don’t you, Jakob? Anyway, Jakob has an important lesson to learn.’
‘I’m not being funny, right, but either torture me or kill me because we’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ I said.
‘I find myself in agreement with him,’ Cronin said with a look of disgust in my direction.
Fuck you, suit. Things would be different if I wasn’t strapped down to this couch. With two broken arms. Surrounded by hard bastards.
‘I want to know why,’ Rolleston said.
Cronin turned to look at the Major. ‘This is a waste of our time.’
‘Leave if you want.’ Rolleston just kept staring at me.
‘Why what?’ I asked.
‘Why are you here? Why do you fight? Why did you try to pull down everything we tried to make?’ I stared at him like he was mad. I hoped he picked that up. ‘When you’re suffering I want you to remember that all you had to do was kill an alien and some whores and then go back to your miserable life a bit richer.’
‘Where do I start?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I mean, you get that you shouldn’t do the things you do, yeah?’
‘Get what you can out of him; we can break him now and get after the others,’ Cronin said. He sounded impatient but there was something else there. Nervousness? Fear?
Others? That meant some of them had got away. Rolleston glared at Cronin, obviously irritated by his indiscretion. Though I couldn’t see how it mattered.
‘You understand that you’re in no position to judge me?’ Rolleston asked.
I looked down at my broken, blackened and bloody body.
‘Well not at the moment, but give me a few days to get back on my feet and I’ll give you a square go.’ It was bravado I didn’t really feel.
Rolleston laughed as if we were two old army buddies sharing a joke. Then he reached down and placed his hand on my stomach wound. I gritted my teeth, rode out the pain, wished I had more drugs. His fingers elongated and burrowed through my flesh like razor-covered worms. I screamed and writhed on the couch. Rolleston tore his bloody fingers out of me. I saw them sway and writhe as they slowly returned to looking like fingers. The medical monitor was begging for attention, bleeping with urgency. I was gasping for breath. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers writhing through my guts. Control yourself.
‘Aaaah!’ Turn it into a laugh. ‘Yes! That’s the spirit! A little more torture, a little less fucking talk!’ Because false bravado was bound to see me through, though there was still no fear, only hatred and resignation.
‘Why?’ he asked again.
‘We’ve talked this to death!’ I shouted at him through a spray of blood and spittle. ‘Just fucking get on with it!’
‘Don’t give me orders, Jakob.’ Danger in his voice. He hadn’t liked that.
‘When did you get to like the sound of your own voice so much? You were always a cunt, but I just thought you were trying to get the job done no matter what. Now you’re a fucking psycho. The Cabal have gone. They’re over, dead. You’re just a broken machine following the programming of people who either don’t exist or have switched sides.’
The twitch on his face was instantly replaced by a calm smile. There was something there he hadn’t liked.
‘Humans are all biological machines. Everyone’s programmed. We call it growing up. All you are is malfunctioning pinkware,’ he said.
‘Fine, justify it how you want. It’s not difficult to work out why I’m here. This is just what people do when people like you try to make us live a certain way.’
It was a lie. I was here because of Morag and to a degree because I hated this guy. Want to rule humanity? Fine. But why did it seem that he was on a mission to make my life such a long bleeding streak of misery?
‘You’re angry you can finally see the strings?’ Josephine surprised me by asking. I don’t think I was the only one who was surprised.
‘As for what happened on Earth, you boxed us in. We were making it up as we went along. Just trying to survive. Can we get on with the torture now?’
Rolleston seemed to be giving what I’d said some consideration. ‘That’s what I thought – the spastic reaction of the frightened animal.’ So he hadn’t been giving what I’d said some thought. He just wanted to spin whatever I said until it suited what he wanted to hear.
‘While we’re having a nice little chat. What. The fuck. Are you doing?! You’re potentially going to kill millions of people. For what? Some abstract sense of accomplishment in the power game?’
I was finding impending death and torture quite liberating.
‘You know what you remind me of?’ Rolleston asked.
‘Someone tired of rhetorical questions?’
‘A Neanderthal. I don’t mean that as an epithet…’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘An insult,’ he supplied. ‘But this is an insight into what the Neanderthal must have felt in the face of Homo sapiens.’
I was speechless. I had no idea what he was going on about. Or why Cronin was looking so uncomfortable.
‘We have the opportunity to be strong as a species, to move forward as one, to make progress as one, to deal with the threats and opportunities that expansion provides from a position of strength, to actually build something instead of tearing things down and constant petty squabbling. This is an evolutionary point in human history. Do you understand that? Do you see what you’re opposing? What you’re trying to drag down, destroy?’
I tried to think through what he’d said.
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him. ‘You fucking psycho,’ I added. Liberating.
‘George, that’s enough.’ Cronin did not sound happy at all.
