M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

Men stood around them, glaring. The Dejae ignored them, his spider marching at his side. At least the Dejae was not going to let them rape her.

Yet.

Kyle wondered if the Dejae would keep her for himself. Kyle began to hope he would. It would be better for her.

The ship moved underneath them.

“Target is cleared for attack,” the Dejae said from the bridge. A wall-sized screen showed the Ulysses drifting in space as they accelerated away from it. The freighter did not look as ungainly as Kyle had feared. With the cargo hold shorn off, it looked like a dragonfly, lumpy and angular but rendered delicate.

Lights sparkled around the Ulysses, and then steam as its air was vented from a thousand holes. At the same time a dark, tubular shape streaked through the screen’s vision. A fighter, making a close pass.

In its wake the Ulysses came apart in pieces, like shredded lettuce. The main generator exploded, a ball of flaming gas welling up from the remains. When it cleared, there was nothing left. The corpse of the Ulysses had been dismembered and cast upon the void.

With Jorgun’s body. And Kyle’s dreams of home and family. And maybe Prudence’s soul.

She still had not spoken, not a gasp, not a whisper.

Ridiculously, he feared for her state of mind.

She took comfort in the feel of his body against hers. Insanity, yes, but it was the only comfort left. She could not speak to him. Even if she trusted her voice, even if she could talk without revealing the medallion hidden in her mouth, there was nothing to say.

Like a rabbit caught in headlights, she remained perfectly still, staring at nothing. The men leered and whispered terrible things, but acknowledging them would only make it worse.

It would be bad enough as it was. They had already taken almost everything from her. Her ship. Her crew. Her family, past and present. Soon they would take her dignity, and then they would take Kyle away and kill him.

Of all of these losses, Kyle seemed the greatest. She had not had time to be with him. Their life, the hopes and dreams it promised, was not just cut short. It had never begun.

She had never even kissed him.

All the sacrifices she had made had been in vain. All the time she had spent dismantling her defenses to let Kyle in had been wasted. All her efforts had been futile. Jandi had been right. But to think on that was to surrender to self-recrimination. And there was no room for that. Grief squeezed out all other emotion, and spilled over her body, coating every sensation with a glaze of unreality.

With nothing else to do, she watched the main vid screen. They were approaching another ship. She could judge its immense scale by the tiny fighters buzzing around it. An opening appeared in the squat, tubular behemoth. A carrier, then: a ship that bore other ships as cargo, like a chinchilla fish carries its babies in its mouth. The fusion boat that had captured them did not seem equipped for node travel, nor could those little fighters manage a node on their own. They lacked the mass necessary to create a stable bubble in the node.

Before they had captured her ship, the gravitics display had told her of the existence of this one massive vessel, and of dozens of other smaller ships, probably a screen of destroyers. In a fair fight, Altair might stand a chance.

But of course they had their secret weapon. The carrier would paralyze her prey and release the swarm to feed. Altair Fleet would be rendered helpless for hours, while the spiders bled them with sprays of steel needles at near-relativistic speeds. Even the idiotic robotic fighter pilots would be capable of total victory in such a one-sided battle.

A warning from Prudence, and Altair could crush this monster under its heel. But in silence, its poison would destroy a foe ten times its size. The remnant of Altair Fleet would be loyal to Dejae and afraid to move. While it did nothing the clones would build more ships, extending their web across the sector until they could defeat planetary fleets without cheating. In a hundred years Altair would be a sea of Dejaes, and the sky would be blotted out with their ships. Then they would be unstoppable. The entire galaxy would be wiped clean of humanity and replaced with Dejae.

It might be an improvement. Presumably the Dejaes treated each other better than ordinary people did. Under the rule of clones, there might not be any more Strattenburgs.

Remembering the frightened young monk on Monterey, she knew it was a false hope. The clones were not better people than people.

The boat shuddered as clamps seized it. Its gravitics whined and died, and she could feel the lock cycling as the air pressure subtly changed.

“Take them to holding. In one piece.” The Dejae spoke the order to his men, and swept out.

The spider remained, watching them impassively.

Glaring, the men pulled her and Kyle to their feet. They were not gentle or modest.

One leered at her, his hand slapping her buttock. “Don’t worry, pretty little thing. The monks won’t touch you. But they’ll let us show you a good time, before they space you as a waste of mass.”

“Fuck you,” Kyle said, earning a beating. The soldier punched him in the face several times while others held his arms.

“Knock it off,” their leader said. “He has to be able to talk.”

Dragged through the corridors, they came to an elevator. The ship was built on the vertical, instead of the normal horizontal. Like an old rocket ship instead of a surface vessel. Prudence wondered why. Passive grav-plating didn’t care which way you laid it. Maybe the monks had not trusted their opaque sky, and had built their ships in deep holes in the ground, like missile silos, easier to conceal than shallow pits. Or maybe they were just crazy. Not every action had a reason. Not everything made sense.

The brig was small, with only two guards. The clones obviously didn’t intend to take a lot of prisoners. Kyle and Prudence were forced into a bare room, with solid steel walls. Chains hung from the ceiling, and there were bloodstains on the floor. Their bound hands were held high above their heads while a chain was looped between them and locked. Now they stood, naked and helpless, but after enough hours their legs would give out. Then they would dangle. After enough hours of that, their lungs would collapse, and they would die.

The leader of the guards explained the bloodstains with a grisly smile. “The monks believe in corporal punishment. They say it improves discipline, but I think they just like flogging. The chain is so you have to choose to stand and take it. If you do something stupid like turn around, they’ll flog your front side, including the naughty bits.” He leered at Prudence’s nakedness. “Not so much a problem for you, missy. But that’s good news. Maybe there’ll be something left for us to play with when they’re done.”

“Fuck you,” Kyle said, through his bloody mouth.

They didn’t even bother to beat him this time. Laughing, they walked outside, and sealed the door.

“Prudence.” Kyle sounded so lost and alone.

She shook her head. They still had to wait.

But not for long. Five minutes and one of the guards from the brig came in, the huge steel door whining as it opened and closed.

He walked around them, leering. Trying to intimidate her. Futilely, given the circumstances.

“Jobson and I talked about it, and we decided not to wait on the tender mercies of our employers. I won the throw, so I get to go first.”

He took his jacket off and hung it over a camera on the back wall.

“No point in letting that pervert Jobson watch.” Prudence marveled at the sensibilities of rapists. “You think about how you want to play this. It’ll likely be the most fun you’ll have for the rest of your life.” He advanced on her warily, his hands open and in front of him.