Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

There were perhaps a dozen others in the room—it was difficult to tell with her limited movement—and all had familiar faces. They were also all females; she wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or an ominous one.

Some were still unconscious; others were awake, but that was about all that could be said. They were all gagged; that was why even her cry of pain had been muffled. Still, the communications system for the Arm was implanted in each of them; she listened for any sign of being hunted or any news of what was going on, but there was nothing, just a slight hissing if you concentrated. Shielded, too. They seemed to have thought of everything.

Within half an hour the miserable pain hadn’t subsided, but just about all the others were at least awake and already through her own process of discovery.

Everything seemed to drag into eternal boredom; there was nothing you could do, nothing you could say, and nothing left to see. There were no frames of reference, nothing. Eventually, most discovered that if you had to relieve yourself you just had to relieve yourself; it grew foul and smelly in no time.

Finally, somebody entered. He was a younger man, dressed like a crindin handler, wearing gray cotton clothing and heavy boots that looked like they’d been taken off one of the male members of the Arm and probably were. He hit the stench and turned up his nose. “Ew! Yuk!” he muttered, then left, returning with a long hose of the sort used to wash the big animals. He turned and shouted down the cavern, “German! Pump!”

The hose was inactive for a few moments, then it gushed water, which he used to wash off each of the women in turn, breaking now and then to use a homemade push broom to get the mess into the center of the room where there was an actual drainhole or some kind, masked until he pulled it up by a slate rock fitted cover.

“Okay!” he yelled at his unseen companion. “It’s bearable!”

He looked around at them and had a leering sort of grin on his face. “Pretty. Different from most of the girls we got ’round here. Maybe I’ll take me one of you if this don’t go good.”

Just try it with me , Eve thought grimly, daggers shooting from her eyes. She, or any of the others, for that matter. Let me get one arm free and you’ll never want a woman again, she thought with absolute confidence in her ability to do the job.

The herder type left, though, taking his equipment with him, and shortly another came in, this time a tall, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard.

“All right, ladies, listen up!” he said in a tone of absolute command. “You are currently in no position to haggle. I think we’ve made that clear. In fact, we’ve tried very hard not to underestimate you. There wasn’t any plan to go this far, or even disrobe you, but after we searched and found the incredible amount of stuff you were hiding, including the guns and power packs, we just had to assume that you were fully trained in combat and control. Disappointing for people who say they’re from God, but after listening to your boss’s messages I can understand it. Now you understand this. We’re desperate. We can’t get off this hole and we sure as hell don’t want to die on it munching grass. We knew we couldn’t make much of a deal after you explored the crash site, so here we are. Be very convinced that we will do exactly what we say and what we feel we have to do. I suspect that we may have to do some unpleasant things to some of you, maybe even kill a few, to demonstrate our resolve. If we loosen up your restraints and you violate any of the rules, and I mean any , you’re number one on the list. Holy people like to talk about martyrs who are tortured and killed for their faith. You may get that chance. We will need a few examples before the others to establish the limits of your faith. Who’s first? Any volunteers?”

He was playing with them, of course, but he seemed very different than the chief of a raider band might be imagined. Cultured, calm, knowledgeable, and apparently born without a soul, and all the scarier for it. This was not a man who would ever enjoy ravishing a captive. This was a man who would enjoy watching it, maybe even recording it and replaying it over and over at parties.

“All right,” he sighed, “now that we understand each other, here’s the first choice in the rest of your life. We have food here. It’ll be served by women, not men, so relax on that score, but don’t take any of them for granted, either. One at a time, your gags will be lifted and you will get drink and food. If you say anything, and I mean anything , all that will stop, and you’ll not get any more. Understand? No more water, even. But don’t worry, it won’t last long. You’ll become an early example. Or, you can relax and wait. This could be over in a day or two, one way or the other. Just also keep in mind that none of you and your people, and we’ve got almost a hundred of you in various locations, will survive unless we get what we want.”

And, with that, he walked out.

If he’d intended to frighten them, it only took a look in the eyes of the others to show that he succeeded. Eve suspected her own eyes looked much the same. It wasn’t just the threats—those they already took for granted—but the coldly pragmatic way he warned them that got them. To him, torture, kidnap, murder, were all just business, and he almost certainly lost no sleep whatsoever over them.

He was certainly as good as his word in delivering what he promised. He hadn’t been out of the cavern a minute when three women entered. They looked hard and tough, but so did just about everybody on the surface, so there was nothing obvious to set them apart from the villagers. That was the insidious part of this. You couldn’t tell one from the other, if, in fact, there was something to tell. The two different populations had been deduced primarily from the size of the crashed spaceship and the subtle differences in genetic makeup of the majority of villagers versus the nonmatching polyglot of the few others. But who really knew?

One thing was for sure: the short, slender, long-haired woman in the patterned cotton dress had a pretty mean-looking pistol that wasn’t of a familiar type to Eve, at least.

A second woman was unarmed but had a medical sensor in her hand and passed it completely over the first captive woman, then checked the readings. “This one’s okay, but she’ll have some problems walking or doing anything complex for a while. They all will, most likely.”

“Not our problem. Okay, Miga. Take off the gag, give her a drink, then feed her. You kneeling, you remember what happens if you say just one word, understand? One word! ”

The frightened woman nodded, and the third member of the trio removed the gag and allowed the captive a number of deep breaths. Then a jar was lifted in front of her, containing a large gravity straw, and the woman drank, first hesitantly, then, after a few coughs and some spitting out of liquid which the experienced woman administering the drink was ready for, eagerly and in gulps.

After that, the drink was removed even though the woman clearly wanted more, and a kind of homemade granola and honey bar was hand fed to her. She was allowed one intermediate and one ending drink, and then the gag was replaced and it was on to the next woman.

“Faith!” the one with the gun sneered at all of them. “Easy to spout about until it’s live or die time or worse, isn’t it?”

The comment stung them all far more than the chains and restraints. It was far easier to assume that you would die for your faith, or suffer any affliction for it, until you were faced with the choice. Most of the apostles had been brutally tortured and murdered in the end, or executed at least, but they all did have the advantage that they had seen the dead and risen Christ. She began to realize that, for all the teaching and training, “evil” was a word long out of fashion and used mostly to cover the scope of a crime. Nobody really believed in evil anymore; they believed in “wrong” and “bad” and “psychotic.”