Frankie’s friends began peeling off into courtyards or up stairways to their flats. At last she was alone, her rolling gait taking her several doorways past the hacker teahouse. Paladin pulled ahead of Eliasz, her body in full stealth mode, light bending around her carapace and her feet soundless on the stone street. As Frankie turned up a short flight of stairs, Paladin jumped on her, clearing several steps and grabbing the woman’s arms in one fluid motion. Before Frankie could cry out, the bot had covered her mouth with one hand.
For a few seconds they engaged in quiet combat on the stairs, Frankie kicking and trying to pull away from Paladin’s grip.
But then Eliasz arrived, a tiny injector gripped between his fingers, which he wrapped around Frankie’s throat, as if he meant to strangle her. Instead, he administered the drug, then moved his hand up slightly to grip her chin as it hit her. Her muscles had gone so slack that she was unable to hold her head up on her own.
Paladin kept a tight grip on the woman to keep her from sliding down the stairs as Eliasz whispered to her. “I think we’re going to have a nice talk now. Let’s start by going inside your flat. What is your key?”
Frankie looked at a point beyond Eliasz’ head, her eyes unfocused. “You bastard,” she replied, her mouth working slowly through each syllable. As the drug’s effect intensified, Frankie lost her footing, leaning heavily on Paladin as she tried to stand again.
“Frankie,” Eliasz said softly. “I want you to look at something very interesting.” He aimed her unsteady gaze in the direction of a tiny projector in the palm of his hand, which emitted what looked to Paladin like a simple light that pulsed more brightly every few seconds. Something about the drug Eliasz had given Frankie caused the pulses to occupy her full attention. It was some kind of multihypnotic, Paladin guessed, that would lower her inhibitions, magnify her desire to trust, and relax her muscles. Any sensory input would feel overwhelming. Distracting her already-saturated attention with something simple, like a light, would intensify the drug’s trust-blooming effect.
They stood for almost a minute with Frankie absorbed by the projection and Eliasz watching her pupils dilate. Then he returned to his question, which he asked even more gently. “What is the key?”
She held up an unsteady hand. “Biometric,” Frankie sighed, speaking to the light.
Frankie’s flat was sparsely furnished, with a bedroom in back and a front room occupied by a few chairs pulled up to a tabletop projector. She had a fabber and sequencer in the kitchen, which also contained the flat’s biggest window. Eliasz pulled the blinds down in each room before turning on a single light, while Paladin settled the loose-limbed Frankie into a chair.
Frankie seemed to lapse into a state of near-unconsciousness. Then she straightened up, her muscles bunching and relaxing in an uncoordinated fashion. Paladin stood quietly behind her, hands on her shoulders. The bot was prepared to restrain her at any moment.
Eliasz pulled up a chair so that he sat knee-to-knee with Frankie. He looked into her eyes, black with pupil, and covered her knees with his warm hands. “Frankie, I’m your friend,” he said softly, leaning closer. He was working with the drug to establish an intense emotional bond. A bead of saliva formed at the corner of Frankie’s mouth. She couldn’t look away from Eliasz’ face.
“Fuck you,” she mumbled.
He ignored her. “We have proof you’re working with Judith Chen, the pirate and terrorist you know as Jack. You’re either going to be in prison for a short time, or the rest of your life. Tonight you make that choice. I can make things easier for you if you tell me where Jack is hiding.”
Frankie seemed to nod out for a second, the drug no doubt making it more difficult for her to process this information. Neurochemically, she would be yearning to trust everything Eliasz said. It would be hard for her to stop herself from talking. But Frankie also knew exactly what was happening to her brain, how she was being manipulated, and would fight it.
“You don’t have anything on me,” she said finally.
Eliasz projected a file in front of Frankie’s vague eyes, showing her the thread between herself and Jack that Paladin had discovered via the projector. Frankie was obviously caught off guard. “Jack…” she murmured uncertainly.
“Where is Jack?” Eliasz asked. “She’s in trouble, but you don’t have to be.”
Paladin put her hands on Frankie’s head, reading the flickering electrical signals from her drug-altered brain. Her visual centers were extremely active: She must be using visualization to resist Eliasz’ questions. They needed to distract her, break her concentration, focus her brain activity elsewhere.
“Hit her,” Paladin said. It was the fastest way to get the job done.
Eliasz punched Frankie in the face, breaking her nose. Her head rocked back, and she began to gurgle and choke on the blood gushing down her face.
Paladin reached a finger into Frankie’s mouth to scoop out the stringy clots, then grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair to push her head upright again. Now the spike in Frankie’s visual activity had tapered off. The drug’s powers would be peaking now, and would start to fade over the next fifteen minutes.
“Where is Jack?” Eliasz peered into Frankie’s ruined face. “It doesn’t have to hurt anymore. I’m your friend.”
Her words tumbled out, the chemically induced urge suddenly overcoming her will. “She’s got a lab in Vancouver. But I don’t know if that’s where she’s gone.” She paused, her parted lips slack and gory. Frankie would be feeling no pain for the moment; she had just placed her trust in Eliasz, and the multihypnotic would make that feel good, to encourage further bonding with her interrogator. “She’s with a runaway slave, though. Some boy named Threezed she found in the Arctic. He might have taken her somewhere else.”
After her confession, Frankie must have found another way to resist the hypnotic. That was the last useful information they got out of her, though they continued to beat and drug her for the next three hours. At last, when both her arms hung broken at her sides, Frankie passed out and would not wake up.
Eliasz alerted the Federation’s local IPC agents, who relayed their position to police. Fifteen minutes later, two bots arrived, their armored, bipedal bodies similar to Paladin’s own. One addressed Paladin: Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using AF protocol.
Paladin agreed, and they gave their session a number.
I am Talon. Please transmit interrogation file. That is the end of my data.
Paladin sent a series of compressed video files while Talon’s companion lifted the unconscious woman out of the chair, now stained with blotches of blood that were already drying into brown at their edges. Frankie moaned in pain as the bot gripped her upper arm where the jagged edge of a bone had pierced her skin.
“Here is additional information that will aid with a terrorist conviction,” Paladin vocalized. She sent the message thread between Jack and Frankie in a forensic wrapper intended to prove it had not been tampered with since its extraction from Frankie’s server.
“Thanks, guys,” Eliasz addressed the bots. “We’re heading out.”
“The Federation appreciates your work,” Talon vocalized formally, adding via microwave: Good luck to you, Paladin.
The bots clattered down Frankie’s front steps. They were official law enforcement, so there was no need to move stealthily. Perhaps they even wanted the neighbors to see that the notorious pirate had been captured.
“I’ve got the coordinates for an extraction point,” Eliasz told Paladin, who was closing Frankie’s door, locking it unnecessarily. “We move out in thirty minutes.” He beamed a map to Paladin, showing a helicopter pad at the port. They could reach it by walking.