From the bridge of the Shadowsea, Ada watched the monitors and gritted her teeth. The camera drone was barely keeping up with Cinquain's flight armor, and on top of that, throttling down its bandwidth to the relay to stay beneath the station's detection threshold as they approached, so the picture was getting steadily worse. She keyed the mic.
"Cinq. How are you holding up?"
"Green across the board, boss. Thermals where they should be. Deflek geometry solid, aerodynamics smooth like butter."
"Not the armor, Cinq. You."
"Green across the board, boss," her pilot repeated. "You nervous? You sound nervous."
No point in hiding it. "Always."
"Don't be. You trained me for this. Tell the mission jitters to fuck off."
"Wish I could. I don't have your triggers."
"Hard life you live, boss." Her pilot paused. "Coming up on the go/no-go line. We doin' this or what?"
She released the mic switch for the duration of one long intake of breath, held it again. "We're doing it."
"Right."
"And here's me," she told her pilot, and flicked a quartet of hardswitches across the width of the console. The Shadowsea's automatics took it from there.
For a quiet minute, nothing happened.
Then, when the moment was right, the firing solution perfect, the ship shuddered as its twin railguns hurled cobalt slugs in perfect over-the-horizon arcs. Elsewhere on the planet's surface, Cinquain had entrenched weapons where Ada commanded; now buried hypersonic missile launchers ripped their way to the surface to launch a a follow-up barrage of smarter, heavier ordnance.
The camera feed lit up white and then went to SIGNAL LOST. On the voice link, Cinquain whooped and then her signal was gone too.
Ada bit her lip. Nothing to do but wait. And oh, how she hated waiting.
The signals came back, eventually.
The camera drone had survived, and in its feed, defense drones fell burning from the sky. Pillars of ash spread from where railguns and missiles had blasted the station's air defenses to dust. The black wings of Cinquain's armor in approach configuration showed briefly against the steel and glass of the station itself, and then, nothing.
She put the drone into signal relay mode and switched to Cinquain's armor's camera just as Cinquain smashed through the station's walls. The video feed was chaotic, patchy, contrast blown by weapon flash. Most, not all, from Cinq's own weapon.
It was over quickly. She watched every second, room by room, unflinching, reminding herself what this all cost in the end, what was gained, what was lost.
"—day— … —ender—"
"Say again, Cinq."
"I said, that's something you don't see every day, boss. Finally got one of the bastards to surrender."
The armor's camera showed a room full of metal shelves, and a young woman, wearing the usual black and gold but cringing, arms crossed in front of her face as if to ward off Cinquain's cannon.
That didn't happen. Their indoctrination ran deeper than she'd ever been able to figure out a way around — at least, in the field. "You're kidding."
"Nah. Somebody's lucky day, I guess."
"Is the station secure?"
"Other'n this chick, yeah. Everything matched up with our blueprints and personnel records."
"Good. Hold for pickup. I'm bringing the ship in."
"Urgh." She could hear the grimace in her pilot's voice. "Be careful, will ya?"
Despite the chain of command being obvious, short, and to push the metaphor, tightly wrapped around a certain pilot's neck, Cinquain still considered the Shadowsea hers.
Pilots.
"Funny of you to tell me that."
"I'm the one who has to fix the paint job. And last time, two layers of armor underneath—"
Ada spoke a phrase into the mic.
In a voice entirely drained of its irritation, as well as its accent, Cinquain replied: "I hear and obey, Miss."
"Good girl," Ada purred. "Continue to hold. I'll be there shortly."
She reached up to pull the flight controls into position.
The prisoner looked miserable, Ada thought, but twenty minutes at gunpoint tended to have that effect on people, especially when the gun was enormous and mounted on a faceless flight armor that didn't even need it to do them damage.
"Right," she said. "Cinq, at ease."
"Yes, Miss," the armor speaker buzzed. Cinq lowered the gauntlet-mounted cannon, but the hulking weight of the armor still dominated the room. Ada trusted that her pilot, once again thinking independently, would keep her covered with the armor's more precise systems while she had a talk with the captive.
"You want to surrender."
"I'd very much like to surrender," the woman said. "I just saw several of the alternatives. Believe me, surrender is very high on my list of things to do today." She chuckled wanly.
"Smart," Ada said. "Unusually smart for a Federal goon. Seems like your standard conditioning doesn't normally leave you the smart option."
The woman flushed, obvious given her pale freckled skin.
"Shit, really?"
"Really. You must have noticed."
"I'm new. Literally my first week out of boot camp and I never noticed any conditioning. Nobody said anything about any conditioning. Yelling, yeah, there was plenty of that. But they mostly yelled about when to salute and how to load an EP-33."
Ada frowned. "That doesn't sound like the Federal Empire. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, but they sure use it a lot."
"God's honest truth." The woman looked at her, then the armor, then her again, and then down at her own boots. "So, uh, are you gonna ask me my name, rank, serial number…"
"Oh, of course. But we only need those as a baseline. We'll see how those answers change as things progress." Ada paused. "If you want to admit that you're a Federal Intelligence plant now, it'd save me a little time and I'll count it as a point in your favor, but in the end it won't matter all that much."
"Uh, ma'am, I'm not sure I follow." The prisoner looked even shakier than before.
"Aw, no problem. Don't worry. You will," the armor speaker buzzed.
"About time to leave, I think," she said to the armor. "Cover until I get our new friend situated."
"Sounds good, boss."
To the prisoner, she said, "Don't move." To Cinq, she pointed and said, "A demonstration, please."
A searing line of light tracked over the shelf of supplies to her left, and what didn't shatter or burst came apart, smoking, sliced in half. The prisoner turned and winced at the last flare of light before the beam switched off.
"Cinq has an array of point defense lasers in that thing's head; she's quite a fast shot, and that was a very low power setting. If you're thinking of a brave last stand, taking me with you if you can, don't, unless you actually want to join your compatriots on the floor. I'm going to put you in stun cuffs and a stun collar, just for now. Remain still unless I move you."
This was met with silence.
"I need you to acknowledge that order."
"Uh. Sure. Yes, ma'am."
"Good girl," she said, and approached, pulling the cuffs from a pocket on her jumpsuit.
She wrapped them around the prisoner's wrists, which were surprisingly soft, and then knelt to attach more to her ankles, pushing down thick uniform socks.
"Not too tight?"
"Uh, no, ma'am."
Ada checked with a finger anyway, feeling under the slick black polymer surface for the electrodes. Enough gap not to cause damage, not enough gap to slip out or fail to make contact somewhere. Good.
Ads repeated the process with the collar, tilting the prisoner's chin up with a finger before she snapped the catch in the back. She thought she saw a little familiarity in the prisoner's eyes, like she'd spent some time in restraints like these recently.
Finally, she said, "Cinq, we're done here. Load up."
As the armor trod up the Shadowsea's loading ramp, Ada told the prisoner, "It'll take a few minutes before she gets that thing locked down for takeoff. Might as well get the name, rank, serial number stuff out of the way."
"Olivia Persephone Mersey. Pronouns she/her. Private. Federal Service number," she rattled off a string of hex digits.
"Here are mine: Ada. Just Ada. She/her. No military rank. No serial number."
"No military rank? No military rank. But military gear… Oh, fuck, you're pirates," Olivia breathed.
"More like concerned citizens." Ada smiled a predatory smile. Pirates. Let her think that; it's amusing. "But yes… if you had any hope of a prisoner exchange some time down the line, you can put them out of your mind. You're not going home, Private Olivia Mersey. You're mine now."
Private Olivia Mersey put both fists together and swung at her. Ada twisted to the side, letting her miss, and almost as an afterthought, clicked the remote for the stun restraints.
Stun restraints were progressive, and the first step aimed to deliver maximum muscle disruption with minimal injury and few nervous system effects. (She'd tried a few steps past that herself, just out of curiosity, and was in no hurry to repeat it as a recreational experience.)
So there was a short stuttered buzz, and her captive crumpled groaning to the floor.
"I'm almost beginning to buy the green recruit story, Olivia," she said. "That would have been a pretty sorry escape attempt by a Federal Intelligence agent."
"Fuck, I can't move…"
"It'll wear off. Try that again and I'll leave them on a low-level trickle until Cinq's ready to take off."
"Bastard." The captive was breathing heavily, her chest heaving. "You gonna keep me cuffed forever? Don't see that I'll be much use. Sell me to someone? Break me up for transplants?"
"Please. Nothing so tawdry. I'm going to brainwash you. I'm going to condition you so thoroughly that you're going to decide to be useful because it will please me," Ada said, matter-of-factly. "I'm going to thread your psyche through with my own customizations so deeply that you'll respond to my voice before you can think, and you're going to thank me at the end of it."
A voice came down the loading ramp: "Oh, I remember this speech! And y'know? I did thank her for it."
Outside of her flight armor, wearing a T-shirt and coveralls instead of several tons of malevolent machinery, Cinquain was shorter than either of them, with black hair in a shaggy undercut, and an easy grin. She looked down at the prisoner.
"Had to use the stun cuffs, huh?"
Ada shrugged. "She insisted on being foolish."
"Foolish got a name?"
"It's Olivia, you pirate fuck!"
"Aw, cute." Cinquain smiled broadly. "Maybe she'll let you keep it. She didn't like mine. Hey, Olivia, I promise it's nicer in the ship than on the floor. Even in the brig. You get one end, I'll get the other, boss?"
Ada watched her new acquisition through the transparent door of the ship's brig.
Olivia sat on the floor, tethered to the brig's wall by an ankle cuff and a thick short cable, but otherwise free. She held up a half of a perfectly ordinary ham sandwich on marbled rye by thumb and forefinger.
"So, what, is this drugged? This how it starts?"
"No. It's just a sandwich. Cultured ham. Soy cheese. Mustard. It's spicy mustard, if that has you worried. Touch of horseradish and some xeno herb I can't pronounce. Cinq found it two systems ago and insisted on getting a case."
Ada sighed. She very much wanted to get to the bottom of what was really in this girl's head, and then keep digging. This defiance was slapdash at best, but if Olivia hardened, she'd be forced to respond in kind, and then claiming the girl would take weeks. Maybe months. And she wouldn't enjoy most of it. Better to start to build a rapport.
"Look, if you don't want that sandwich, I'll trade you," she said. "We still have some sweet barbecue tofu and pickled carrot on wheat that can be yours, and I like spicy mustard. Neither sandwich is drugged. Believe me when I say this, Olivia: when I drug you, you'll know it, because I'll tell you."
Ada stood over Olivia, with the ceiling light at her back, casting a shadow over the woman.
"I'll tell you exactly how the drugs we use infiltrate your nervous system and stimulate neurogenesis and focus while sapping aggression, so that you'll listen deeply and be a good girl for me while your synapses twine densely around my words. I'll let you know when we're going to do the injections and what the side effects are, so that when you feel that cheek flush, you'll know it's the reganaline, and when your vision tunnels a bit, you'll know it's the neuroptin, and you can relax because everything's planned out and predictable and all you have to do is note each side effect and let that thought drift off. It's remarkably easy to follow along. So much better than when the subject is surprised and uninformed."
She held the captive's gaze. The girl opened her mouth to say something, so she continued before Olivia could get a word out:
"But if you're hungry when we do all of those things, it won't work as well, because neuroptin can cause gastrointestinal irritation, and in any case, hungry people don't listen. And if I have to, I'll restrain and IV feed you, but I don't enjoy it, and you won't either."
Ada dropped to a crouch, almost level with her prey but still above her. She brushed hair out of her face. "So make a choice, Olivia. Choose this sandwich, or the other, or choose defiance and the consequences of defiance. But when you choose wrongly, I will start taking your choices away."
Olivia made a face, but took a bite anyway.
"Good girl."
"Fuck you," Olivia said around the mouthful of sandwich.
"That's much later. We'll be at our jump point soon, a few hours at most, and once Cinq gets us safely in transit, we'll begin with you. Until then, Olivia."
Ada rose, and started for the lab without looking back. There was prep work to do besides what she'd started in her subject's head.
Ada felt the jump drive beginning to charge as much as she heard it. She'd lived on board the Shadowsea for long enough to know its rhythms and its quirks, including the subsonic thumping of a "mild" vibrational instability in the jump accumulators that Cinquain had explained once and that she'd forgotten the details of almost immediately. Within tolerance, that was the takeaway, and never mind the way it shook her bones.
And then it stopped. They were away. There was no catching a ship in jump, no known way to disrupt the packet of field-knotted space around the ship before it arrived at its destination, from inside or outside. They'd be in transit for two weeks, and she intended to use them well.
Ada roused herself from her bunk, went to check over the lab one last time. A glass-fronted cabinet displayed several transparent bags of the IV drugs she'd use on Olivia, striped with pastel color codes in purple, pink, pale green.
The chrome swivel arms around the padded table gleamed, arrayed like the mouthparts of some robotic arachnid ready to receive prey. She'd left some of the attachments in drawers until they were needed; Ada had been honest when she told Olivia that she'd explain the process even as she inflicted it on her subject, but some things were best reserved, to be revealed for maximum impact at the appropriate time.
She'd also "carelessly" left a set of rolling storage drawers close enough to the table that a very big stretch by that subject might let her reach it, and find that the middle drawer was unlocked. Ada had debriefed Cinquain after her initial procedure, and watched the recordings, and learned of her hope at reaching the very same set of drawers and her crushed frustration when she realized all of them were locked. She'd do one better this time, if the subject was half as clever as Cinq.
She pulled open the middle drawer, smiled as she checked the contents, closed it again. Hope was such a precious thing.
the next bits
- Olivia gets strapped down
- "Clothes off. On the table. Cinq, strap her down."
- "Clothes off?!"
- "Part of the process. We're going to start with a medical exam anyway. Nothing you haven't done before, nothing I haven't see. before. Ankles first, Cinq, I need her to be able to sit up."
- …
- "Any medical issues I should know about?"
- "Any medical issues would have kept me out of the Service. Or washed me out."
- "Fine. Sexual orientation?"
- "What?"
- "What is your sexual orientation?"
- "No, I heard you, but you're not my fucking gynecologist."
- "Just answer the question, Private."
- "Fine. Pansexual."
- "Good. Easy to work with. Don't need to work around anything."
- "Fuck do you mean? What would you have said if I said I was straight?"
- "I'd tell you that you would still be straight when I'm done with you… with one or two exceptions."
- Ada let that one sink in for a moment.
- "Breathing normal, no serious bruises, some chafing from the stun restraints. You won't need to wear those for much longer. Next step is to disable your implant."
- "You mean my service ID chip?"
- "No. Well, we're going to disable that too, but I mean the implant that keeps squawking on a Fed distress frequency."
- "I don't have an implant."
- "It's usually in your abdomen."
- "I think I'd remember."
- Ada pressed the ultrasound wand into the prisoner's side, not particularly gently. "That shape there is not standard issue, Private. Are you ready to drop the act?"
- "I have no idea what that is, I swear."
- "Doesn't matter. I'm about to scramble its brains even more throughly than I'm going to scramble yours. We'll need to sedate you; the high-field pulse device can cause seizures and muscle spasms."
- Olivia gets drugged
- "Apometazepam, 7.5 mg. At this dose, a mild sedative, and a moderate muscle relaxant."
- Olivia can fight it. Of course she'll try to fight it. But that's not the point.
- "Do yourself a favor and don't wriggle…"
- The plunger slid home. Ada watched the prisoner's face briefly go slack. She bit her lip, had to restrain herself from doing anything more. You'll be going blank like that on command for me within the week, without the drugs.
- "Whew. Feels nice…"
- "It does, doesn't it? Just let yourself relax."
- "Hard to not…"
- "Just be a good girl and float in that feeling for me for a minute."
- The reinforcer was a cliche. Ada didn't care. She liked it. And if the subject thought it was humiliating, well, that was one thing she could work with. If the subject already had some pre-conceived notions about that phrase, so much the better.
- "We'll be done with this part soon. I'm going to slip a bite guard into your mouth, just in case… Cinq, Faraday curtain."
- BZZT
- She saw the prisoner jerk and spasm through the metal mesh curtain as the pulse coil discharged. Another thing she'll be doing on command soon.
- "Good girl. All done. That was the medical part. No more stun cuffs, your implant is disabled, and that means we can swap out the headrest on this table for the neural imager. Sensitive electronics in that thing. Now it's time to map your responses to some stimuli."
- "What… stimuli?", the prisoner said, with audible trepidation.
- Ada slipped her other glove on, letting the polymer snap audibly.
- "Pleasant ones."
- She leant over the helpless prisoner, glid gloved fingers up her inner thigh. The apometazepam had taken most of the fight out of her, but it wasn't particularly long-lived.
- "Just pleasant ones."
- Olivia realizes that one of the straps is loose and makes a grab for the drawer
- She grabs a scalpel and tries to stab Ada. No prelude, no threat, she just goes for it as fast as she can.
- Ada gives her the most pitying look as she realizes the scalpel is 3D printed silicone rubber.
- "Have it out of your system? I promised you that you're not going home, Private. I will keep that promise."
- so now she can really start on Olivia
- Olivia gets fucked…
it literally never bothered naming this file. should have been a sign. there was something here it liked, but the outlines past this point never worked.
yes, most of this did get posted to Tumblr at some point. but it is unquestionably unfinished.
