Lourdes and Ruqaya, on the other hand, might have been sisters, or at least close cousins. Both were tall and slender. Both had amazingly large and melting brown eyes. Skin color? About the same. Faces? Different, of course, yet each was in the range of symmetrical attractiveness that tended to resemble. However, whereas Mac and Jimenez had shared the same thought, the woman's thoughts were only somewhat related. For Lourdes:
'Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.'
Carrera gripped one of his disgustingly small, distressing soft, and nauseatingly dainty hands around a tall tumbler of scotch and drank deeply.
33/10/462 AC, Hildegard von Mises, Sea of Sind
The conex inside the ship rang with the helpless shrieks. It practically reverberated with them. The conex, soundproofed, also kept in the stench of voided bowels and bladders, and the iron-coppery stink of blood.
He put the olive down and wrinkled his nose as the victim, Fadeel al Nizal, lost sphincter control. The assistant applying electricity to Fadeel's genitalia looked over at Mahamda.
Genial seeming, a little fat, and—appearances notwithstanding—utterly ruthless,
Mahamda had been an interrogator for the secret police, or
Mahamda shook his head at the assistant's unvoiced question. His look said,
Shrugging
Once stocky, and even with a bit of midriff fat, Fadeel was already beginning to waste away under the torture. Though near enough in appearance to the captive that they could have been cousins, Mahamda felt no pity. Fadeel was one of those who had begun and advanced the kind of terrorist war being waged in Mahamda's homeland of Sumer. His list of atrocities was long, the coating of blood on his hands deep, the stain indelible. Mahamda felt nothing but loathing for the Bomber of Ninewa, the Butcher of Pumbadeta.
While Mahamda sat in a comfortable swivel chair bolted to the floor of the ship-borne conex, Nizal was strapped firmly to a dental chair, with an electrode stuffed up his anus through a hole in the chair and his penis firmly affixed into something that still looked much like the droplight socket from which it had originated. Nizal's body quaked with the electric jolts surging through it, wrists and ankles straining at the thick leather straps that held him in place. Helpless tears coursed down his face while an inarticulate 'gahhhhhh' poured from his mouth.
Mahamda raised a palm, signaling his assistant to stop for the nonce.
'I warned you, Fadeel,' Mahamda said, not unkindly. '
In answer al Nizal only sobbed the more heartbrokenly.
Again Mahamda
Since Fadeel hadn't offered more full cooperation, Mahamda said nothing to stop the assistant who then left, returning in a few minutes with a stoop- shoulder woman. He pushed her to a wall and began chaining her upright. She, too, sobbed.
'That won't do any good, madam,' Mahamda said to the woman. 'You raised the boy to be a terrorist. You are responsible. It's only right that you help him see the error of his ways.'
Finished with restraining the woman, the assistant went to a table from which he retrieved a blow torch and friction igniter. She began to scream and plead with her son as soon as the blowtorch was lit. In a cage on the table, a brace of antaniae, or moonbats, the septic mouthed, carnivorous, winged lizards of Terra Nova, likewise hissed in fear as the torch was lit. It was sometimes used to drive them toward the faces of victims.
'It's up to you, Fadeel,' Mahamda said. There was no answer.
'Start with the toes,' the interrogator ordered.
'Bwait!' al Nizal begged, between sobs. ''eave 'er . . . go; don' . . . 'urt her. I make . . . your fi'm.' The assistant with the blowtorch knelt to bare the woman's feet but stopped, looking at Mahamda.
'I don't know,' said Mahamda, doubtfully. Even so, he took a moment to ungag the terrorist. 'We
Al Nizal looked at his electricity scorched penis and answered, 'I think you've'—he sniffed—'punished me enough. I'll
Mahamda rocked his head from side to side, as if weighing the time that might be wasted against the advantage of more willing cooperation. He pointed towards the
The terrorist's voice was full of an inexpressible hopelessness. 'I won't. Just
* * *
The ship rocked more or less continuously. Nonetheless, there was one room on the ship, a conex, actually, that did not rock. This was set up on gimbals and so kept its perpendicularity. This was the camera room.
Inside the room, on a comfortable looking chair under a picture of Adnan Sada, Fadeel al Nizal sat, still chained, and answered questions from an interviewer. Mahamda did not play the part of the interviewer; it just wasn't his thing. Besides, he didn't want Coalition authorities to have any clue as to his whereabouts.
Beside the picture of Sada was a calendar, with the month opened up to show a date not too long after al Nizal's capture in Pumbadeta. The coffee table between him and the interviewer held a newpaper, the headlines of which screamed of the fall of Pumbadeta, an event which had taken place months prior. For all anyone who might watch it could tell, the interview was taking place in the recent past, a few days before the announcement of al Nizal's execution and cremation. It was only for purposes of this interview that Mahamda had kept the dentist away from al Nizal's front teeth.
'What can you tell the audience about the suicide bombers you recruited?' asked the interviewer.
Fadeel had been well rehearsed. He answered, from the script he'd been given, 'The first thing you have to understand is that