“Yes,” Bharat said. “I’m here.”
“Wait.” The voice paused. “Chief Dhillon?”
Every hair on Bharat’s arms stood on end. He hadn’t given his captors his name. He hadn’t given them anything, but if the man in the next cell was Advanced, like he suspected, and had been here as long as he suspected ...
“Jax?” he whispered back.
Almost hysterical laughter flooded the grate. “I can’t believe it. That’s fucking perfect. You came down here to rescue me, and they got you too?”
Jaxon Cole going missing was the reason Senator Tarack had lost her data disc. Cole had been the man Bharat entrusted to deliver Senator Tarack’s information disc to the courier chosen by Elena Ryke. That courier, they all now knew after the disc’s theft, was actually the Golden Widow. As to how she’d pulled that little sleight of identity off, fooling both a secure Supremacy database and its companion database on Ceto, that was what Bharat had hoped Jan Sabato would figure out.
As frustrating and embarrassing as losing the disc was, Bharat could not help but appreciate the beauty of the Widow’s plan. Senator Tarack had kept her quantum crux drive locked in the most secure vault in the most secure mansion on the most remote area of Phorcys, sheltered by anti-aircraft guns and a full spectrum defense system. No thief could have stolen it, yet somehow the Widow had arranged for them to just ... hand it to her. One day later, Senator Tarack had purchased Jan Sabato from prison ... on Bharat’s recommendation.
“How long have you been here?” Bharat asked, even though he already knew the answer. Three days.
“About three—” Cole caught himself. “Ah, good one.”
Bharat nodded in approval. “You can’t know it’s really me in here, can you?”
“Right,” Cole said. “They might be simming your voice to get me to talk, even though I never mentioned who I worked with. They could have found out about you some other way, captured someone else who mentioned your name.”
Bharat waited.
“And they’re probably listening to us talk right now,” Cole continued, “since neither of us has been talking to them. They put us next to each other, hoping we’ll reveal what we weren’t saying when they interrogated us earlier, like I just did when I admitted I know Chief Dhillon. Dammit.”
“You’ve been in here three days,” Bharat said. “One small slipup is acceptable.” This really was Jaxon Cole, a good man he considered a true friend. Sadly, he couldn’t ask any of the questions he desperately needed to ask Cole right now.
Had Cole seen the Widow’s face? Had the Widow captured Cole when she took the disc? Were these people working for her? Those questions could wait. What he could ask now were the questions his captors already knew the answers to, but he didn’t.
“Have they beaten you?”
“Yes,” Cole said. “Cut my toes off too, all of ’em, one by one. That fucking hurt, Chief. Everything fucking hurts.”
Cole was lying, of course. Not about his toes — these people likely had amputated them, which made Bharat furious — but about the pain. Bharat didn’t send any operative into the field without pain-deadening, especially to a theater as dangerous as Ceto. It seemed their captors hadn’t caught on to that yet.
Before they left Senator Tarack’s mansion, Bharat had ordered Tarack’s PBA technicians to implement a full-body pain-nullification protocol for both him and Cole. Such actions ensured that, if captured, they could not be tortured for information, since they couldn’t actually feel pain. Cole had apparently done a good enough job of faking it — as he’d been taught — that his captors assumed they were getting somewhere. Most importantly, they hadn’t killed him yet.
“Where did they pick you up?” Bharat asked, though he was fairly certain he knew already.
“Just outside the starport, about an hour after I handed off the disc,” Cole confirmed. “They must have shadowed me after the exchange, or during.” He meant delivering Senator Tarack’s data disc to Elena Ryke’s courier, who wasn’t, actually.
“How many?” Bharat asked.
“Six ambushed me. I’ve seen at least eight more since.”
That was more armed bodies than he and Cole could handle. “Anyone besides the Commander interrogate you?”
“Nope, just that gray-haired asshole.”
So the Commander was working alone. Truthers usually worked in cells, so while this cell was larger than average, it still implied the conspirators were limited to those Cole had seen. That suggested these Truthers had no backup.
Bharat had had a bag on his head when he arrived. “Any idea where we are?”
“Abandoned warehouse,” Cole said, “probably in the Old Prospector district. In three days I’ve heard no flyovers and only occasional traffic, and it’s a reasonable distance from the Star’s Landing starport.” Where they’d picked Cole up.
That made sense. The Prospector District was one of the oldest portions of Star’s Landing. Empty warehouses were as common as stones down here, with their original owners bankrupt or dead, and Ceto Security Division didn’t actively patrol in this area. The status of these warehouses made them prime real estate for criminals of all stripes.
It also made them the perfect places to beat uncooperative captives to death, which was the way Bharat would likely go out unless he figured something out soon. He clenched the canine in his fist hard enough to prick his skin. He’d had all his teeth replaced years ago, after losing a vicious fistfight with a particularly tenacious Supremacy assassin. The manufactured canine in his hand was almost as hard as a steel shiv.
“Chief?”
