Rolleston turned to him. ‘We have an opportunity here for an insight. Do you not see that? He is effectively an uplifted animal.’
‘What are you talking about?!’ I screamed at him.
Rolleston turned back to me. Again he looked angry.
‘I told you, we’re asking the questions,’ he said.
‘Or fucking what? Threats of pain are a little fucking redundant, don’t you think?’
‘I’m angry, Jakob.’
‘Good!’
‘Do you know why I’m angry, Jakob?’
‘Were you recently strapped into a chair and asked stupid fucking questions?!’
‘Because we’re more alike than not.’
‘Brilliant. Unstrap me and we’ll go for a beer!’
‘Because we’ve both been given a great gift.’
‘What?’ I asked, though I think I knew the answer.
‘Why are you healing so quickly?’ Rolleston asked.
‘Themtech,’ I said quietly.
He nodded. ‘Imagine my disappointment that it has been given to one so undeserving. You were a good if disobedient servant, Jakob, but let’s face facts. You’re little more than a brute beast whose only thought is its own selfish gratification.’
And the thing was, he wasn’t trying to anger me. He probably didn’t even think he was insulting me. He was just describing things as he saw them. He wouldn’t even have understood that I didn’t see myself the same way.
‘Not only so undeserving, but someone who’d never be able to understand what he was, let alone understand what we’re trying to do,’ he explained.
I met his eyes and tried not to flinch away from the cold analytical expression on his face. It was like he was studying an insect.
‘I’m an animal who’s caused you a lot of trouble. You know I’d never join you, right?’ I told him.
Cronin actually laughed. ‘We couldn’t use you.’ I heard Josephine sigh. Rolleston’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘You lack the vision. Though I think you know you’ll serve in the end.’
‘Nobody wants what you want except you,’ I said. Very fucking eloquent, I thought.
‘That’s because people only see the small picture. They fear what they don’t understand and like you think only of gratification. And the people whose power relies on them think only of the illusion of providing that gratification. Everyone’s miserable. Imagine if that could be changed.’
‘This is a waste of time. You’re crazy. Seriously. Move on. Brainwashing, torture, getting killed, whatever.’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘George, let’s just get what we need from him,’ Cronin said. He was looking more and more nervous.
‘As Mr Douglas has pointed out, he is an animal that has caused us a lot of trouble. He needs to be taught an object lesson in power. He needs to understand his place in the scheme of things.’
Suicide implants had always struck me as tools of the religious fanatic but right now I was thinking what a good idea they were. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this shit.
‘We want to know where the deserters are. We also want to know what you know about Earth’s defence plans.’ Rolleston was talking to me now.
I didn’t say anything but I went very cold. Mother and her people would move – it was standard operating procedure for them when people got captured – but I thought back to what the prime minister had told me about fortress Earth’s vulnerability. God was their only real hope against Demiurge, and fear and paranoia were diminishing that hope.
‘You’re going to have to get that the hard way,’ I told him.
‘It may interest you to know that you were betrayed by two of your own people,’ he said.
It made sense, but I tried not to react. I still felt angry. I hoped that whoever had got away would realise that we’d been betrayed and hunt down the traitors. It must have been two of Mother’s people. It was understandable. They had roots here. A lot of pressure could be brought to bear. Then something occurred to me.
‘Hold on a second. If we were betrayed, then why do you want to know where the resistance are?’ I asked.
Rolleston was too experienced an officer to give much away, but there was something there. Something he didn’t understand.
‘You know everyone breaks. You know that people can be broken in a very short amount of time using the variable time effects of a sense booth, and you have enough base cunning to understand that we can now break and slave people almost immediately.’
I thought back to Skirov tearing off gobbets of flesh on his pile of corpses, but he had known there was something wrong with him and wanted to die. It was pretty much the closest I had to hope. I wasn’t sure I was as strong as Skirov had been, however.
‘Then just fucking do it. Maybe you can make me like the sound of your voice as much as you seem to.’
‘Jakob, I can break you just as quickly without torture or other little tricks.’
I didn’t like this at all. Rolleston turned to Kring and nodded. Kring looked to Cronin. Cronin looked uncomfortable but finally nodded as well. Kring turned and left the room.
Moments later I could hear the sounds of a struggle. I watched Kring carry a gagged, bound, badly wounded but very angry Morag into the cell. He put her down and forced her to kneel. She stopped struggling when she saw me. Fear was written all over her face. I turned back to Rolleston.
‘Come on, not like this. Fucking brainwash me, torture me, but leave her out of this. We don’t deserve this. At the very least we’ve been worthy opponents.’ I was babbling nonsense – anything to delay the inevitable.
‘You are less than an insect to me. This is about understanding your place. This is about the fortune of your presence here before me. This is so you can understand something better. This is so you can admit your hypocrisy. You fight and struggle so hard to pull down what those above you have sought so hard to build, but you will betray it all for your own selfish wants and desires. Do you understand how pointless everything you have ever tried to do is?’ He turned to Kring. ‘Take her gag off.’
‘Go and fuck yourself, you cunts!’ Her anger made her Dundonian accent so broad it was almost impossible to understand. Fuck knows what the English and the Americans in the room thought she’d said.
‘I will have her gang-raped in front of your eyes. My understanding is that she is used to it.’
‘Don’t fucking listen to him, Jakob.’ I heard the resolve in her voice. I knew that she would be harder to break than me.
‘Please…’ I was begging now.
‘I will put you both into a sense machine and you will watch her being tortured for decades – do you understand me? You know me; you know I’ll do this.’
‘Fuck him! Jakob, listen to me. He can’t touch me. Don’t tell him anything.’
I couldn’t look at her. I was weeping. I knew Rolleston would do these things.
‘Not immediate enough for you?’ Rolleston asked. He drew his sidearm and held it at her head.
‘Fuck you!’ Morag screamed at him. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone so angry before. ‘Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it, Jakob!’
‘No… please… stop…’ I was sobbing as I begged. I wasn’t sure who I was begging to stop. Rolleston was starting to pull the trigger.
‘Jakob! Look at me! At least fucking look at me, you bastard!’ Morag screamed. I had to force my head round. She was scared now, but resigned, stronger than I could ever be as I tried to meet her fierce and earnest look. ‘Listen to me. It’s okay. If it was the other way around I would watch you die.’ I believed her. I broke.
If they were still alive, then I betrayed Mudge, Pagan, Cat, Merle, the whanau, all of the resistance and my entire fucking planet and everyone I’d ever known alive or dead. All the while Morag was crying, begging me to stop, not to say any more. It took me hours to sell out everything I knew. Rolleston listened to it all. I was numb with disgust at myself by the time I’d finished. I thought I was just a shell, that I couldn’t feel any more. Rolleston
