Prophets

engineers who had designed and built Facility 235 had no clue what moonlet, or even what star system, Facility 235 was being built in.

It existed so that Yousef could interrogate persons whose imprisonment might prove otherwise problematic. It was a prison that could hold, at most, a half dozen people.

At the moment, it only held one. One whose questioning he didn’t trust to anyone else.

A mess of my own making, he thought, I assumed too much.

If there was anything he hated, it was being manipulated. It had become clear to him in recent months that not only had he been manipulated, but the entirety of the Caliphate had been, through him.

At least I caught her. But the thought was little comfort, with all the Caliphate’s functional Ibrahim carriers nearly a hundred light-years away.

He stood at one end of a long air lock at the end of the corridor. Next to a massive door, indicator lights flashed red, then yellow, then green. Finally, the automated door opened with a pneumatic hiss.

The air lock beyond didn’t lead outside; instead it was a continuation of the corridor, a hundred meters long. It was an additional layer of security, as this section of corridor was only pressurized when someone needed to walk from the operational side of the facility to the actual prison. Normally the corridor lacked atmosphere, and the environment in the prison was completely separate from the guards’.

When he walked through the door on the opposite end of the corridor, the lights cycled again as the corridor depressurized behind him. And, for the first time in six months, he breathed the same air as Ms. Columbia.

He pulled himself through the corridor by the handrail so quickly that his feet barely touched the floor. His path ended in the main interrogation room at the heart of the prison. It was little more than a control console before a number of display units. Three could be seated at the controls, and there was room for about half a dozen spectators in back.

Right now, it was just him. His first task, once he seated himself, was to ensure it remained that way. He sealed the room, made sure that all the recording facilities were off-line, and switched all monitoring equipment onto a closed circuit that ended at the walls of the prison.

For now, at least, it would just be him and the enigmatic Ms. Columbia.

He switched on the monitors for her cell. Several displays came to life before him showing various angles from various spectra, all showing an athletic, dark-skinned woman, naked and restrained on a large table. Tubes attached to her body fed her, while other tubes removed her waste. Wires connected to her nervous system and gave him feedback on other displays showing biometric data, life signs, and cerebral activity.

He opened the comm channel to the cell and spoke. “It is time for you to answer some questions, Ms. Columbia.”

Her head was encased in a helmet, a wire-studded white hemisphere that hid most of her face from view, so she would see and hear only what he wanted her to see and hear. Even so, he saw the hint of an ironic smile cross her lips.

“Yousef? I’ve been waiting for you.”

Yousef frowned. His voice was altered through the system. Anyone who sat in this chair would project exactly the same flat, authoritarian voice into the chamber. The filters were designed not only to remove identifying tonal characteristics, but emotional inflection as well. She couldn’t possibly identify who was speaking to her, so she was guessing.

Reacting to that guess would be providing her information. He wasn’t about to play that game with her.

“You will need to answer our questions fully and accurately, or we can make this experience unpleasant.” Still that damn smile. “You have sold the Caliphate large amounts of intelligence information over the past decade. Who else have you sold this information to?”

His hands hovered over the control console, prepared to encourage a response from her. He had prepared for a long and arduous interrogation session, and expected that he would need to resort to invasive techniques that would leave little of his captive left.

He was quite surprised when he heard her respond. “Of primary interest to you would be my contact in Rome, Cardinal Jacob Anderson who is, more or less, your equivalent in the Vatican. I have been working with him as long as I’ve been working with you. However, the information he’s received over the years has been slightly different. He only received the specifications for the Ibrahim-class carriers after you had a fair complement available.”

Yousef sat stunned for a moment. He had discovered her duplicity through his own agents in Rome, but he had no clue that it had gone on for so long.