He had urinated at some point and was sitting in the wet. The cell was so small that his knees were folded up against his chest. His icy toes pressed against metal that was probably the door. The cell was narrower than the kang, and Stef had to sit with his body twisted. There was no way to move, no way to rest. As the hours passed, agonizing pains began to shoot through his back and side. Breathing became difficult. He began suffering waves of panic at the thought that the polizi would leave him here until he slowly suffocated. The panic made things worse; he started to hyperventilate, and every breath stabbed him like a knife. He tried to calm himself, counting slow shallow breaths that didn’t hurt so much.
Then voices approached along a corridor outside the cell. Faint hope was followed by stomach-knotting fear. They might let me go; it was all a mistake; Yama will get me out. No, Yama doesn’t know anything and anyway he doesn’t control the polizi. They’re coming to torture me.
The voices came close. Two techs were discussing a “client,” as they called their victims. Voices neutral, atonal like the voices of two black boxes.
“Maybe twenty cc of gnosine would do it.”
“I dunno. This client is a tough case.”
“Maybe needles in the spinal marrow…”
They were gone. A faint noise in the distance remained unidentifiable until a door in the corridor slid open. Then Stef heard a whimpering, sobbing sound that made all the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
Extreme agony, he thought-beyond screaming.
The door slid shut again and the sound became a low meaningless murmur. Human footsteps approached again. Two voices.
“Just wonderful, Doctor. I never thought she’d break.”
“Sometimes a combination of therapies is essential.”
They too were gone. Doctors. Technicians. Therapies. Clients. The language of the Chamber. We are not sadists, we are scientists performing a distasteful but necessary function in the cause of justice. Try the gnosine, try the needles, try everything in combination. Promise the clients life; after you’ve worked on them for a while, promise them death.
When the polizi came at last, they came in silence. Without the slightest warning the door clanged open.
Somebody yelled, “Get the scum! Get the piece of shit!”
A Darksider grabbed Stef’s legs and dragged him into the hall and the wrench on his cramped limbs made him scream. Then the animal was dragging him down the hall by the heels while boots kicked at Stef’s ribs and head.
The kang knocked against the walls and floor. A human hand grabbed his testicles and twisted and he screamed again, louder than before. Then somebody, a crowd of them, human and inhuman, seized the ends of the kang and dragged him to his feet.
“Walk! Walk, you piece of shit! Walk!”
He couldn’t and fell and somebody kicked him hard in the groin and this time he did no screaming. He was unconscious.
He woke with intense light in his eyes. He was sitting in a hard duroplast chair and the sack was off his head. His eyes burned; agony rose in waves from his groin. Somebody in hard boots stamped on the bare toes of his left foot.
Stef wasn’t thinking any longer, he was living in nothing but the conviction that every second some new pain would strike. What next, what next? Hands seized the kang and pulled it back. Other hands, some human, some inhuman, grabbed his ankles and stretched out his legs. In the blazing light he was halfblind, absolutely helpless. Somebody touched his breastbone and he moaned and his stomach knotted, expecting the blow.
Nothing happened. The light dimmed. Gradually his eyes cleared. A man with a pointed head was standing before him. The man had plastic eyes that went blank when he moved his head. There was no crowd of tormentors, only two thuggi from Earth Central and one Darksider. One of the thuggi gave the other a piece of candy and they stood there, chewing. The Darksider scratched its furry backside against a wall.
“Mr. Steffens.”
“Yes,” whispered Stef.
“I’m sending you home now. For the future, will you remember one thing?”
“Yes.”
“From now on, Yamashita will continue to pay you, but in spite of that you’ll be working for me as well as for him, and I’ll expect to know everything you do and everything you discover about Crux.”
Kathmann leaned forward and once again tapped Stef’s breastbone.
“If you hide anything from me, I’ll know it, and I’ll bring you back here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Next time you’ll get standard treatment,” added Kathmann, straightening up. “Not the grandmotherly kindness you received this time.”
To the thuggi he said, “Give him one more.”
He left the room and a door closed. Behind the light the room flickered and a second Darksider Stef hadn’t seen before approached him, holding a spiked club in its paws. But that’ll kill me, he thought, and his eyes clamped shut on a final vision of the new Darksider raising the club for a smashing blow to his gut.
He sat there blind, waiting. Then he heard them laughing at him. He opened his eyes as one of the thuggi unlocked the kang. The other was grinning. The Darksider with the club flickered, evaporated. A three-dimensional laser image, created, Stef now saw, by projectors mounted high up on the walls.
“The boss likes to have his little joke,” the thug explained with a wink. The real Darksider was still scratching its butt. Insofar as an animal could, it looked absolutely bored.
Outside was deep night or earliest morning. Wrapped in a blanket and shivering uncontrollably, Stef rode home in a polizi hovercar. Before dawn he was in his own bed, wracked by pain from toes to scalp. Yet he slept, and by noon was able to creep to the balcony, dragging one foot behind him. He walked bowlegged, because his scrotum was the size of a grapefruit.
Slowly, very slowly, he prepared kif and lay down. He was starving but wouldn’t have dreamed of getting up to look for food.
He smoked and the drug dulled everything, pain and hunger alike, and let him sleep. In all the world only kif was merciful. No wonder it was his religion.
By nightfall Stef was minimally better. He slept long, despite nightmares that left him drenched with sweat.
By morning he was functional enough to bathe (he smelled worse than a Darksider by then) and dress.
Then he called Yama on his mashina, hoping the polizi would monitor his call-he wanted to remind them that he had powerful friends.
“Stef. What’s up?”
“I just wanted you to know that your pal Kathmann had me in the White Chamber. I’m working for him now, too.”
“That son of a bitch. He hurt you much?”
“It wasn’t a picnic. But I’ve been through worse.”
“Yeah, I know you’re a survivor. Well, I guess we got to share anything we find out with Earth Central.
But I’m going to see Kathmann and tell him if he grabs you again, I’ll send Oleary to see Xian herself.
You got anything broken, like bones?”
“No.”
“Well, at least the miserable bastard went light on you.”
Stef next called a neighborhood babaku shop and ordered food. Then he found his pistol, made sure it was loaded, and returned to his kif pipe.
On the balcony he smoked and thought about ways to kill Kathmann. He had two people on his list now:
Dyeva, because she wanted to destroy his world, Kathmann because he had-well, not tortured Stef; what had happened was too trivial to be called torture. No, Kathmann had simply been getting his attention in the inimitable polizi way.
This wasn’t the first time in his life that Stef had been completely abased and humiliated. But he decided now that it was to be the last. He pointed his pistol at the wall and said,“Phut.”
