It was clear the voice was reading from a file, but the light of the lamp kept Clarke from seeing the faint back-light of a wristband at the other end of the desk. He kept quiet, his mind blank, his respiration in check so his pulse wouldn’t skyrocket.
“Cargo hauler, independent contracts. Three Free Traders in the last five years, currently a dock worker between contracts. Moderate consumer of alcoholic beverages, no criminal records, a timely tax payer. Excellent health, no stim juice rejection yet. Current partner…Julia Fillon, known EIF collaborator.”
Clarke’s jaw tightened. He didn’t know about Julia’s association with the EIF, though he wasn’t going to act like he never saw it coming. The girl thought she was immortal. Clarke knew otherwise. He had seen too many like her die.
“Internal Affairs’ dossier marks you as…inconsequential, but to be kept on watch,” the voice went on. At the end of each sentence, the voice waited for a couple seconds, as if waiting for Clarke to confirm or deny his claims.
Good to know I’m appreciated, Clarke thought, grimly. He said nothing.
“Quite a boring curriculum, isn’t it? But if we look back ten years…things get interesting,” the voice said.
Pause. Silence. The man continued:
“Lieutenant Commander Joseph A. Clarke of the Systems Alliance Defense Fleet, serving in the SADF destroyer Applegate, stationed in high Jagal’s orbit.”
Clarke cringed. He knew what was coming next. The voice read a passage out of the dossier:
“During the Battle of Broken Sky, Clarke assumed command of the Applegate after its Captain was terminated during firing exchange with the dreadnought Mississippi. Disobeying previous instructions to maintain engagement with the Mississippi, Clarke instructed the Applegate’s crew to evacuate the vessel while directing the remaining transports to non-combat endeavors. After the battle was over, Clarke was found inside the Applegate as its last remaining occupant.”
Even after a decade, Clarke could still remember the week and a half he had spent inside that emergency cabin deep in the destroyer’s bowels, equipped only with meager rations long past their expiration date, and a faulty life-support machine that had maintained pressurization only by a miracle.
Sometimes, he still had dreams about it, the hours that lasted as long as cycles in the interminable silence, all alone with the knowledge that out there, his people were getting slaughtered.
That was if he was lucky. If he wasn’t, he dreamed about the battle beforehand. About the Mississippi’s cannons tearing apart ship armor plating like it was wet cardboard, the volleys of torpedoes that had deleted battleship Peregrine off the tactical grid with no survivors.
“Clarke spent the months after the battle in a cell,” the voice went on, “and merely escaped death by firing squad on a technicality. He was discharged out of the DF in disgrace, his name scraped out of its registry. He has spent the following decade on Jagal while not in a merchant ship contract. He has kept a low profile, presumably to avoid the…dangers…of public life.”
The voice kept quiet again, like daring Clarke to contradict the dossier, to say that wasn’t how it had happened. But what would Clarke gain by doing that? Internal Affairs didn’t care about the truth. They cared about keeping peace on a planet besieged by decades-long overseer, capable of glassing the capital city with the push of a button.
“Is there anything you want to add?” the voice said.
Go fuck yourself. Clarke said nothing.
“Very well,” the voice said. The beam of light shining on Clarke’s face got narrower, closer, and he could now feel an actual mask of heat pouring on his face. A little longer and he’d begin to sweat. “Silence will only make it harder on yourself, you know? You may want to try to go with a clear conscience when your times comes. It’ll make it easier.”
The man chuckled to himself, and went on, saying, “There’s little to discuss, Clarke. It seems rather open and shut. You were allowed to live—if you may call what you do living—this long because IA had more important things to focus on, and it was good for the morale of the other veterans of Broken Sky to keep you around. But, what do you know, times change. There’s an opening in our agenda. And what better way to use our free time than doing some house cleaning?”
That got Clarke to break his silence.
“Stop talking about it, and do it, instead of wasting my time,” he told, shifting his face in the direction the man’s voice was coming from.
“Ah,” said the man, “that would be wasteful. Bullets are expensive, haven’t you heard? We’re under siege, after all. No, Clarke, we will not kill you until you earn back the price of your bullet. Shame you don’t like to talk, but we have tools for people like you.”
Hair stood on end on Clarke’s arms. Apart from the obvious threat, there had been something in that spiel that didn’t mesh up with Clarke’s expectations. Like a completed puzzle with a piece from a different set right at the middle.
Something is wrong, Clarke thought.
Interrogation was a nasty business, with no way of coming on top. In the end, everyone talks. Even in the rigid beliefs of the Systems Alliance navy, there was little shame in breaking under torture.
But that didn’t mean it had to be easy, or that a determined soldier couldn’t stick it to the interrogators in some way, if he kept calm and was smart.
“Wait,” Clarke said, adding a desperate note to his voice to appease the men behind the desk. “Give me a minute to think.”
“You have until my tools get here.”
Clarke had been trained, along with all the other officers of his class, in three main ways of resisting interrogations. One was to lie to gain time, another was to give fake information to alert his allies that he had been compromised. Neither worked in this situation. There wasn’t an army waiting for him to alert them, and he could not lie when he didn’t know what his captors wanted.
But he could try the third option. Play along, fish for information, try to learn something about his captors. Maybe, with a mad stroke of luck, capitalize on a chance to escape. Or at least sell his hide at a higher price.
I may as well keep going and see where this takes me.
“What do you want from me?” he asked aloud.
“Not so brave after all, huh?” came the instant reply. “I guess the Fleet’s name for you was justified. Craven Clarke.”
“Must be. The SA is never wrong.” The jibe meant little to Clarke, one of many nicknames used during his trial by the Tal-Kader lawyers trying to get him killed by firing squad.
“Well said, Craven Clarke. You should have kept that in mind when the Applegate received instructions to fight on.”
Clarke didn’t answer. Instead, he waited for the man to get to the point. When the interrogator realized it, he said:
“We want you to confirm the identities of the EIF cell operating under Dock 23. We have a document for you to sign. Their names are already in it.”
It was too much. Clarke had to rein in a badly contained laugh. “A signed confession? Just do it yourself, it’s not like you care about proper procedure.”
“Don’t be a smartass,” the man warned him. “A bunch of loyalists are not worth what I’ll do to you.”
“Here, I’ll just tell you how many loyalists I know. None. You want me to sign an empty document?”
“Wrong answer, asshole. You should be ashamed, Clarke. A former Defense Fleet rising star, well on the path to being made Captain and who knows what else, reduced to this. To defend a bunch of…anarchists and pirates who enjoy raiding convoys and cycling the crews out of airlocks.”