Graham Paul: The Final Battle

“No, not yet,” Polk said with an emphatic shake of the head. “I’ll share a bottle of champagne with you, a good bottle from Old Earth, but only when that man is dead and not before. Now go and find out where Councillor Kando and Colonel Hartspring are. I want to see them.”

“Sir.”

Polk waited in silence until Nagaro returned.

“Kando and Hartspring will be back in McNair tomorrow,” Nagaro said.

“Good. I want Kando to make sure that the Feds carry through with this, and I don’t care how much we have to spend or who we have to suborn. Helfort must be executed.”

“I think Kando can make sure of it.”

“He’d better.”

“But what about Hartspring? What can a DocSec colonel do?”

“A lot, Lou, a lot. Michael Helfort might be on his way to the gallows, and none too soon, but death’s not enough for him. I want him to suffer every minute of every day he has left alive. I want him in so much pain that he’ll be begging the Feds to kill him when they strap him into the chair.”

Skepticism flitted across Nagaro’s face. “Forgive me, Chief Councillor, but how can we do that? The Feds will have Helfort locked away where nobody can reach him. No matter how much we spend, we’ll never lay a hand on him.”

Polk smiled indulgently at Nagaro. “You never were much of a creative thinker, were you?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Watch and learn, Lou; watch and learn.”

Saturday, September 16, 2403, UD

Federal Supermax Prison, Foundation City, Terranova planet

Day followed day, each one the same as the last, the routine mind-numbing in its relentless predictability.

It was almost nine in the morning: exercise time. Precisely on the hour, the door would open. He would be called out into the corridor. A pair of guards would escort him out into the yard. He would exercise for an hour and then return to his cell.

The routine never varied.

Except today it did. When the door opened, one of the guards was standing not back as usual but right by the door, a break from routine that struck Michael as odd. It was his least favorite guard, a hard-faced bitch called Loewenthal, always sullen, always as unhelpful as she could be. The woman would have made a perfect DocSec recruit, Michael had decided.

Loewenthal took a half step forward. Her hand brushed Michael’s long enough to press a tiny object into his palm.

The guard stepped back as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “Just checking,” she said. “Let’s go.”

• • •

The lights in Michael’s cell burned twenty-four hours a day, but they were dimmed at night. Taking advantage of the gloom, Michael lay on his bunk, his back to the security cameras that watched his every movement. He moistened the inside of his wrist with saliva, then pressed the object-a datastick-hard into his skin. His neuronics took only a second to establish an online connection.

“Upload file?” Michael was asked.

“Go,” he responded.

The file took a lifetime to upload. Michael prayed throughout that the prison guards would not break the door down to stop the process and then prayed even harder that somehow Anna had found a way to get a message to him.

“Upload finished,” his neuronics said. “Open file?”

“Go.”

There was a pause. Michael’s anticipation grew, and his elation built. He was convinced the holovid was from Anna. Finally, his neuronics popped a screen into his mind’s eye, and he settled down to watch.

“Hello, my love,” Michael whispered when Anna appeared. That’s very odd , he thought. Why is she in Fleet coveralls? She should be in NRA combat fatigues, surely.

A few seconds later, the screen faded to black. Disappointment and frustration swamped Michael. “What is going-oh, no,” he hissed.

A man had appeared. He had a face no Fed would ever forget. It was more skull than face, with the skin drawn tight over sharp-edged cheekbones. They eyes were deep-set and hooded below steel-gray hair that was cropped short. “You murdering dirtbag,” Michael whispered as the image steadied.

The man’s eyes bored into him as he spoke.

“Hello, Lieutenant Helfort,” the man said, his death-skull face stretching into a ghastly smile. “I’m Jeremiah Polk, Chief Councillor of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. I wanted to tell you how delighted I am that you are to be held to account for your crimes. I am, of course, disappointed that you’ll be executed by your Fed countrymen rather than by a DocSec firing squad, but it is a disappointment I can live with.

“And do not think for a second that you will escape. You won’t, not this time. To make sure of that, I have authorized my people to spend as much money as they need to ensure that your sentence is not reduced, and you might be surprised just how many Feds are more than happy to help us.

“Even President Diouf will not help you, and spare me all that crap about what a good woman she is. Even she has her price-which we will pay-and …”

“Bullshit,” Michael snarled. “Absolute bullshit.”

“… as you’ve noticed we’ve had no trouble persuading your trashpress to lobby hard for your death sentence to be carried out. But it does strike me that you’re getting off too lightly. Because you Feds believe all that human rights garbage, your death will be painless, and you won’t suffer as much as you deserve to. I think that is just plain wrong. You should suffer, and I intend to make sure you do.

“‘But how?’ I hear you say. I’m speaking to you from McNair, hundreds of light-years away, and you’re tucked away behind the walls of a Fed maximum-security prison. So what can I do to you? Well, the answer to that …”

Michael’s heart lurched. “Oh, no,” he whispered. All of a sudden he knew where Polk was going.

“… is to hurt the woman you love, and when I say hurt, I mean in a way no human should ever be made to suffer. And in case you’re wondering what those words mean, I am talking about weeks and weeks and weeks of drawn-out agony, torture so exquisite, so relentless that death will be a blessing.”

Polk smiled.

“Oh, yes, I’m really looking forward to it, I can tell you,” he went on. “Now, let me see.” Polk made a show of consulting a piece of paper. “Ah, yes; your Anna has done well. Very well, in fact. I’m told she’s a captain in the NRA’s 120th Regiment, which is not bad for a woman. We thought you might like to see a picture of her.”

Anna reappeared. Michael’s breath caught in his throat at the sight. The image was so real, he felt as if he could reach out and touch the woman he loved. Assault rifle in one hand, she was dressed in well-worn NRA combat fatigues. Wayward wisps of fine black hair peeked out from beneath her helmet to hang down over honey-dark skin smeared with dirt. She stood in front of a group of NRA troopers- She’s doing a briefing , Michael realized-and her deep green eyes blazed as her right hand stabbed out to make a point. It broke Michael’s heart to see her, to know how badly he had betrayed her, to know he would never hold her close again, to know she would live while he died.

The picture faded.

“I have to say,” Polk went on when he returned, “your Anna is a very beautiful woman. And in case you were interested, one of our agents took that picture last week at a briefing before the 120th attacked one of our planetary defense firebases. One of their more successful operations, I’m sorry to say, and before you ask, she came through without a scratch. As you’ve worked out by now, my agent in H Company keeps me very well informed. Now it’s time for you to meet an old friend. Colonel?”

Michael flinched when Erwin Hartspring appeared. The man terrified him still. The DocSec colonel had been pressed from the same mold as Polk. His face was long and gaunt, his skin wrinkle-cut, stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and windburned to a reddish brown. A long, straight nose dropped to a fine pencil mustache above thin bloodless lips. His hair was cropped to jet-black stubble.