“Easy, dude! I’m complying! Just don’t pull that damned trigger!” He eased the rifle down to the ground and then held his hands up as commanded. Dee did the same, thankful the barrel was singing someone else’s skull.
“They don’t court-martial non-humans in the Authority,” Ruff replied calmly. “They just put us down, as if we had rabies. Any trooper would know that.” He felt Ruff’s mouth at his ear, “But then … you’re not a trooper, are you, Tanner Thomas?
Tiger squeezed his eyes shut in frustration.
Fuck me!
Chapter 12
Something inside Stella told her she should feel something … anything. A small, tiny voice, familiar, but distant, as if it came from miles away, across space and time. She should feel something for this man she was about to damage permanently. Sympathy. Pity. Compassion. But she couldn’t.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. She was just incapable of it. Something wouldn’t allow it. Like blinders on a horse, it prevented anything from distracting her from the task at hand.
Below her, Jocko DeWitt lay fully submerged in the vat of gooey virtual amniotic fluid that kept him nourished and breathing. Underneath the skin of his abdomen, she could see the nanobots moving to and fro, repairing tissue, cleaning out infection and scrubbing away burnt flesh. The wound looked markedly improved since the last time she’d seen it. He might’ve had a decent shot at recovery.
Might’ve.
She opened a pouch on her gun belt and pulled out what looked like two earbuds. It was amazing how far the technology had come in the last few years. Of course, anything the Space Authority put a priority on seemed to get put on the fast track as far as R & D. After the Lunar Rebellion, the need for more thorough and “cleaner” interrogation techniques became obvious. Torture, both physically and psychologically, had proved time-consuming, messy and, at times, unreliable. There was a need to glean information from prisoners with or without their cooperation. Even torture operated on the concept of eventual cooperation of the subject, albeit coerced.
With one rebellious lunar colony vaporized, the Space Authority still had the momentous task of occupying and pacifying the surviving citizenry of another. In their quest to root out those they would hold accountable, the Authority quickly discovered many of the rebel leaders had simply blended back into the general population. Records, if kept at all, were destroyed. They simply became doctors, engineers and scientists again. The Authority couldn’t have the remains of an agitating intelligentsia remaining at large. They had to be weeded out and removed, like a cancer cut from the body.
What they found was a bitter and vanquished population inclined not to cooperate, and the high number of “subversive” detainees called for desperate measures. Devices that could scan a subject’s brain functions and process data from electrical impulses and chemical releases were desperately needed to vet these political prisoners and determine who could be returned to civilian life and who would suffer the fate of a traitor.
Civil libertarians on Earth would cry “foul” and file lawsuits and protests with the U.N. and planetary governments in hopes they might exert some influence on the space-based Frankenstein they’d created. Little did they realize, these entities had a vested interest in what was being tested on human guinea pigs 240,000 miles away. They wanted to see how these devices, employed by the Authority, under the guise of martial law, worked. After all, they wanted their little toys too.
That was three years ago. By now, the “brain drain” was a common practice, having survived all legal, medical and ethical challenges. No longer just an instrument for interrogation by Authority goons, it had become a valuable crime-fighting tool for law enforcement … with certain restrictions and considerations, of course. It had to be administered by a medical doctor while observed in its entirety by another. The observing doctor had the authority to halt the procedure at any time if he felt the subject’s mental or physical health was, at any point, in jeopardy. Drains conducted without consent were not admissible in most courts of law. It was a moot point, however, as the Trans-American Supreme Court had recently ruled in the case of Tobias vs. Rocky Mountain Regional Government Cooperative that, while the drain itself wasn’t admissible, evidence collected as a result of it was allowable.
None of that legal mumbo jumbo had ever mattered to Stella. That was something for lawyers to argue over. She was a cop. She did what she could to fight the bad guys on the street. Once it got above her, it was out of her hands. She didn’t lose sleep over the fact that the good guys didn’t always win.
It mattered not an ounce now. Stella wasn’t a good guy anymore. Was she a bad guy? She didn’t know. She would’ve liked to have contemplated the question, but there was that wall again. She was only allowed to think about certain things, things that she needed to accomplish … matters pertaining to the mission. If she tried to divert to anything else, to a different subject, another line of thinking, whatever it was simply pushed her back in line.
Eventually, she got tired of trying to skirt a wall that never ended.
She reached into Jocko’s vat. The fluid felt gooey and thick, reminding her of the personal lubricant she used … no, had used … with Matt, during some of their more adventurous exploi— There it was again, pushing her away from the memory. Back in line, you cunt!
She wanted to remember Matt so desperately, but the wall wasn’t going to let her. With a sigh of resignation, she placed the buds in Jocko’s ears.
She wiped her hands
