Wreck of the Nebula Dream (24 page)

Did she pull the regulation out of my memory?
No sooner had the suspicion flickered across Nick’s mind than she added a postscript. “That’s what my son did, when he was trapped here in Sector Seventeen long ago.”

 
Gianna reached up and tugged at her sleeve. Damais bent over the girl, murmuring reassurance, gently stroking her soft black hair.

“Suicide? What’s she talking about?” Brow furrowed, Twilka obviously didn’t get it.

Mara most emphatically did. Apparently she’d heard rumors about Standing Order Number One in the past. Eyes widening in disbelief, hand to her throat, she stared at Nick. “What kind of a heartless order is that?”

“We can’t afford to let any intelligence about our systems, our codes, our operations, fall into enemy possession.” Nick leaned his head against the bulkhead, flexing his muscles to test the cords, knowing it was useless.
But I have to try.
“We have no choice. The Mawreg and their client races have only one goal we can determine, which is the total annihilation of humans, of any sentients not under their dominion.”
 

Anguished sorrow on her beautiful face, Mara stroked his cheek. Tears were beginning to pool in her eyes. She shook her head slightly, in denial, but said nothing.

“But you can’t kill yourself.” Twilka laughed, an eerie sound verging on pure hysteria. “They’ve got you tied up too well. And we’re certainly not going to murder you with our bare hands.” She held her soft white hands in front of her face, made a small fist, and laughed again. “So just you rethink those orders.”

“A guy like me, Special Forces, the suicide mechanism is internal,” Nick said. “She understands.” He nodded at Damais, who inclined her head slightly. “It’s a Mellurean mind implant, instant, painless.”

“But then why would the pirates waste time torturing you, if they know you’ll kill yourself with some mental magic trick?” Not yet ready to accept what Nick was telling them so calmly, Twilka was still searching for some loophole.

 
There were always loopholes in her well-cushioned world, ways to flout the rules.
Nick eyed her for a moment.
Not this time, girl.

“They don’t realize he’s an operator,” Khevan answered before Nick could say a word. “I am D’nvannae – no one ever mistakes me for other than what I am. He wears nothing to mark him for what he is. The instant they find out –”

“We have reports the Mawreg have ways to keep even one of my kind alive, for some length of time,” Nick said as Khevan took a breath. “And these pirates are a loyal Mawreg client race. They’ll send for Mawreg military presence the second they discover I’m an operator.”

“But you can’t abandon us so easily, can you?” Lady Damais wasn’t truly asking, but declaring a truth held in Nick’s soul. “Despite these orders?”

He shook his head. Gazing at Mara and then at Paolo, who was rubbing his reddened eyes, but gamely trying to comfort his sister, one chubby arm resting on her shoulder, Nick admitted his dilemma. “I can’t bring myself to take the easy way out, leave you – all of you – not while there’s any hope, however slight. But, hope’s in short supply right now.”

Walking slowly, leaning heavily on Paolo’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her slender waist, Damais came to him. “I promise you, my son, I will stand between you and those who wish to break and then enslave your soul with their torture device. Do you trust me?”

Nick’s gaze locked onto her deep, dark, tired, blue eyes. He then found he couldn’t break their link, not even to blink. “I trust you, my lady, but to what end? What good is delaying the inevitable? I can’t allow myself to be taken alive by the Mawreg. I know too much that would be of value to them, believe me.” A quick vision of his last mission into Sector Seventeen flashed across Nick’s thoughts. He remembered the peculiarity of the Mawreg defenses, a weakness his team had used to sneak into the targeted compound, obtaining the high-value information they’d been sent for.
That data alone, the one chink in the Mawreg defensive cordon, which could be used again, is worth dying for. I can’t betray it, much less any of the other accumulated knowledge I hold.
The bleak but undeniable truth served to break the tie binding him to Damais’ will. Nick looked at his tightly bound hands. When he glanced over at the elderly woman, he realized she knew what he’d decided.

Nick intended to give voice to his denial of what she wanted him to do. “Lady Damais –”

“Delay will win us all. Your order allows for that.” The old woman cut his words off flatly, imperious as always. She beckoned to the girl, who had curled up on the bins furthest away from the door and the potential return of the nightmarish Shemdylann. “Gianna, come to me for a moment.”

Nick expected the child to protest or resist the command, but Gianna slid easily from her perch and came across to stand next to her brother, reaching uncertainly for his free hand, carrying her stuffed bear by the remaining ear, dragging and bumping on the deck. The once-glossy brown synthfur was now matted and grimy from all their adventuring.

“Show the captain again what game Mara and your sister have played, Paolo. But only a glimpse,” Damais warned as the boy took his sister’s toy. Sniffling, Gianna popped one thumb in her mouth and watched without fuss.

Opening the well-concealed slit in the bear’s seam, Paolo tugged and tugged, finally bringing the handgrip of the missing Mark 27 blaster into view.

“She likes to hide her treasures in the bear,” Paolo said. “I told you when we were in the hold, remember?”

“When the pirates were busy tying you up, I slipped the blaster into the bear,” Mara whispered to Nick. “Khevan surrendered his, and they were satisfied.”

“Shemdylann don’t regard females as warriors,” Khevan said in a low voice. “They had no suspicion she’d been firing at them.”

Nick laughed without humor. “Brave and smart. I’ve come to expect nothing less from you. But too little, too late for our current predicament, I’m afraid.”

“What are you talking about? It’s a blaster, for space sake! Oh my god, Mara, get him, and get Khevan, get them loose then, and let’s get out of here.” Twilka’s words tumbled over each other in her eagerness. “What are you waiting for?”

But Damais and Nick were shaking their heads in unison. Mara leaned over to help Paolo shove the weapon more securely, deep inside the bear’s stuffing, and reseal the seam so it was invisible.

“The pirates come at this minute.” Damais was matter of fact, as if she could see through the walls. “We’re not ready to attempt an escape.”

“To try too soon is to lose all.” Khevan directed his words at the rebellious, unhappy Twilka. “We have no choice but to wait.”

Hard on the heels of his statement, Nick heard the pirates fumbling with the recently installed locking mechanism of the storage room now converted to a prison.

“Easy for you to say,” Twilka said. “They’re going to take him first.”

Damais placed one wrinkled hand gently on Nick’s cheek. A faint hint of her perfume wafted around him. “I will be there. You’ll come to no permanent harm, I swear. No secrets will be revealed, no information compromised. But you must let them know what you are when I ask you to do so.”

Struggling with the dilemma of his oath as an SF officer, versus his faith in her Mellurean powers, Nick stared at her. He had an intense aversion to taking the simple, painless way out for himself and leaving all of them – leaving
Mara
– defenseless.

 
The hidden blaster had the potential to change the situation, if he survived the first round of interrogation.
But how much can I rely on Damais? And how much can I endure, before the suicide would have to occur to preserve my sworn oath, to carry out my overriding orders?

Leaning over, Mara kissed him on the cheek. She seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the argument he was waging with himself. “Do whatever you must,” she said, in a low voice meant for him alone. Intense, shining with unshed tears, her turquoise eyes locked with his, her gaze every bit as unbreakable as the Lady Damais’s had been, but for a different reason. “Do your duty if that’s the path you have to take. Don’t worry about us.”

Miserably, he stared at her. “How exactly am I supposed to abandon you, Mara? I’d give anything to get you out of this mess. I’d gladly die to save you.” He glanced at the oddly assorted band, as important to him now as any team of Special Forces operators had been in the past. “All of you.” Closing his eyes, Nick swallowed hard. “What a voyage to hell this trip has been.”

A loud metallic sound signaled the lock releasing. Three pirates marched into the room, one backing the small group of women and children away from Nick, holding them at blaster point, while the other two released him from the webbing, yanking him to his feet, dragging him into the corridor.

“Courage, brother,” Khevan shouted, his words abruptly cut off as the door clanged shut behind them.

Nick was hustled into the captain’s dining room. Most of the tables and chairs had been shoved against the bulkhead, leaving a large clear area, in the middle of which stood a complicated, ominous apparatus. Two Shemdylann techs were in the final moments of assembling the device. The struts and straps were pitted and stained in spots with the blood, and other fluids, of previous victims.

First, the pirates laid him on a large table, holding him pinned with their huge, clawed hands. One of the Shemdylann techs came over and shot him full of some medication from a crude inject. Burning through his veins like acid, the stuff spread inexorably through his body with each beat of his heart. As they dragged him off the table to tie him down and begin the torture, Nick considered the suicide code, buried in the far reaches of his subconscious. He could trigger his own death in the blink of an eye.
 

He was as brave as any man, trained to resist physical and psychological torture, but was he prepared to risk betraying the Sectors because an old woman had said she could protect him?
What if she was wrong? How can I let my feelings
–
for Mara, for the children
–
overrule the most stringent and unbreakable order of the Sectors Special Forces?

 
The acid burning through his body threatened to tip the balance.
I can’t let personal considerations jeopardize operation security. There’s no rescue coming. I can’t rely on Damais. What was I thinking?
Shaking his head slightly, Nick visualized the first in the necessary sequence of oddly assorted symbols making up his personal suicide code, planted there by the Mellureans against exactly this kind of contingency.

“No, my son, do not.” The voice of Damais was so clear, so close, that he tried to turn his head, pushing against the padded clamps, fearing they’d brought the aged woman into the dining room to watch his suffering for some sadistic purpose. Distracted, Nick lost track of the symbols, which had to be visualized in a certain order. Fighting to concentrate, he began again.

The pirates were tilting the apparatus, to make it easier to work their well-honed torture techniques on him. Shemdylann were renowned for their interrogation expertise.

Convulsing violently, Nick contorted as a cold chill spiked through his body. The wave of crystalline cold drove out the acid pain, moving upward from his toes, leaving him clear-headed, calm. It was as if he had invisible armor covering his body. All at once his left hand, restrained though it was, felt as if Damais had taken his fingers firmly in her warm, dry clasp, to offer comfort, as she had the first night in the observatory. He caught the faint whiff of her perfume, distilled from flowers growing only on Mellure.

In the next breath, Nick realized his body and his mind were no longer under his control, but rather moved, spoke, and yelled in agony as Damais willed it, while he – the essence of what and who was Nick Jameson – was held safely out of harm’s way. Crouching in a corner of his mind, watching, ready to act if she asked, but not touched by the combat she was waging, unbeknownst to the pirates torturing him. She shielded him from detailed awareness of what they were doing to him, to his body, stretched out on their rack.

The torture continued for hours, that he did know.

Trapped in his own mind, Nick was galled to have the elderly woman fighting
his
battle, all the while keeping him neutralized.
Who’s the warrior here, her or me?
But on the other hand, he had to admit, the interrogation techniques the pirates were using were so macabre and excruciating, the torture would most likely have forced him to admit defeat and use the checkout code, as it was known in the teams.

At times, he was sure the other prisoners must have heard his agonized cries, as the pirates brought more of their highly developed information extraction skills to bear. The Shemdylann were puzzled, excited, frustrated by their inability to break through Nick’s self-control with their infliction of pain. The torture was real, was happening to him, but Damais met it at each nerve ending, each muscle fiber, before the damage could be done, or actual pain created. Remaining firmly in control, Damais healed destroyed tissue, not allowing the agony to reach Nick where he waited in his own mind, behind the barrier she’d established to defend him. From time to time he heard himself gasping out small bits of information, true and false, when and as she willed it, but only after the enemy had labored to break him far longer than any other prisoner had ever resisted.

 
Tell them who you are, Nick.
The command floated through his head in Damais’s voice. Nick found he couldn’t disobey her. “Special Forces, I’m Special Forces,” he heard himself revealing in a voice barely recognizable as his own. “Captain Nicholas Jameson, ID number 12171931427, Terran descent twice removed.”