“They’ve betrayed you!”
The little interrogator swung the screen round, clicked on a few patches and swung it back. Fassin watched Thay, Sonj and Mome — all stuck in seats like the one he was secured in, and Sonj looking pretty beaten-up — say they thought that Fassin held Beyonder sympathies and was a danger to society who needed watching. They each mumbled something to that effect, signed the screen and pressed a thumb against the print patch (Sonj’s left a smear of blood).
The screenage shook him. It had probably been faked, but all the same. He sat back. “You faked that,” he said, unsteadily. The little man laughed. “Are you mad? Why would we bother?”
“I don’t know,” Fass admitted. “But I know my friends. They wouldn’t—”
The little man sat forward. “So just sign this and in the highly unlikely event that it ever crops up, just say yours has been faked.”
“So why not fake it anyway?” Fassin shouted.
“Because then you won’t have betrayed them!” the little man yelled back. “Come on! Sign and you can go. I’ve got better things to do.”
“But why do any of this?” Fassin said, wanting to cry. “Why make anybody betray anybody?”
The little man looked at him for a moment. “Mr Taak,” he said, sitting back, sounding patient. “I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they’re nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they’ll be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is controclass="underline" control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.”
“But—”
“Be quiet. The idiotic issue you chose to complain about -ownership of a habitat — really has nothing to do with you. It’s a legal matter, an ownership thing. You weren’t even born here and you wouldn’t have stayed beyond a few more months anyway, admit it. You should have kept out of it. You chose not to, you put yourself in harm’s way and now you’re paying the price. Part of that price is letting us know that you have made an effort to dissociate yourself from the people you were complicit with. Once you do that, you can go. Home, I would suggest. I mean to ’glantine.”
“And if I say no?”
“You mean not sign?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Then it’s taken out of my hands. You’ll go to meet people who enjoy doing this sort of thing.”
This time, when the little man moved his hand over the desk, Fassin screamed with the pain. He must have bitten his tongue. There was a taste of iron and his mouth filled with fresh blood and hot saliva.
“Because I,” the little man said wearily, “don’t.”
In the end Fassin signed. He’d kind of known he would.
The little man looked happy, and a couple of big female guards came in and helped Fassin from the chair, his bonds unfastened.
“Thank you, Mr Taak,” the little man said, and grasped his hand and shook it before they took him out of the room. “I hate all that unpleasantness, and it is always so good to see somebody being sensible. Try not to think too badly of me. Good luck to you.”
They got him showered down and fixed up and he left after a medical and a cup of soup, dressed in paper-thin overalls. He looked around when they ushered him through the doorways into what passed for outside in a hab. He’d been somewhere inside the Diegesian’s palace.
Back at the nest, turmoil. The place had been raided, trashed, everything in it broken or sprayed with stinking, vomit-inducing crowd-control goo. They went to a bar instead and didn’t really talk about anything after the protest and the crackdown. They talked instead of rumours of people being killed and others disappearing.
K wasn’t there. She’d been beaten up when the troopers came to turn the nest over. She was in a prison hospital ship for three weeks, then killed herself with a broken glass the day she was released.
It was months before Fassin learned the truth. K had been sent into a nightmare tream. Somebody who’d come with the law officers — maybe just one of them who happened to know how to handle tream gear — had found her still floating, not yet out of the delving tream, and altered the settings on the traumalyser and the subsal while some others had held her down and worked her over. Whoever did the thing with the traumalyser must have carried that sort of template chip around with them, just for such eventualities. Then they’d left her, bloody and bound, to some speeded-up nightmare of horror, rape and torture.
They were all split up, doing other, mostly more responsible things when they pieced all this together. They talked about a complaint, an investigation, a protest.
Fassin went back to ’glantine and booked a place on the Seer induction course for the term after next. Then he returned to the habs, and then to Sepekte’s Boogeytown, to the roaring life, the drink and drugs and fucking and fun, and — after a while, gradually, carefully — made a few inquiries, hung out in the right places, and met certain people. Apparently he passed a few tests without realising he’d been taking them, and then one night he was introduced to a girl who called herself Aun Liss.
* * *
“Fassin!”
His name jolted him awake. Third Fury; cabin. Still night-dark. Clanging noise. The screen showed hour Four. The screen was red and flashing. Had somebody spoken?
“What?” he said, tearing the restraints away and levering himself out of bed, floating towards the centre of the cabin.
“Herv Apsile,” said a voice. Sounded like Apsile. Sounded like Apsile in a state of some excitement or distress. “We have a situation. Looks like an attack.”
Oh, shit. Fassin pulled on clothes, called up full lights. “That fucking horrendous clanging noise the alarm?”
“That’s right.”
“You in Facility Command?”
“Yes.”
“Who do we think?” A light flashed over a storage locker and it revolved, revealing an emergency esuit.
“Don’t know. Two naval units vaporised already. Get suited and—”
The lights — all the lights — flickered. The screen did not come back on. A tremor made the cabin shake. Something broke in the bathroom with a sharp crack.
“You feel that? You still there?” Apsile said.
“Yes to both,” Fassin said. He was looking at the esuit.
“Suit up and take a drop shaft to the emergency shelter.” Apsile paused. “You got that?” Another pause. “Fass?”
“Here.” Fassin started pulling all his clothes off again. “That what you’re going to do, Herv?”
“That’s what we’re both supposed to do.”
Another tremble made the whole cabin rattle. The air seemed to quake like jelly.
The alarm shut off. Somehow, though, not in an encouraging way.
The screen flashed once, screeched.
Fassin hauled the esuit out of its locker. “How’s the main hangar?” he asked.
“Intact. Whatever’s hitting us seems to be coming in from the Nasq spin-side, slightly retro.”
“So heading into the centre’s going to be putting us closer,” Fassin said. Was that a draught? He could hear a hissing sound. He clipped the esuit collar round his neck and let the gel helmet deploy. It turned everything hazy and quiet for a moment, then decided the situation wasn’t too dire yet, and opened slits for him to breathe, talk and hear through. The face-mask section thinned to near-perfect transparency.
“For now,” Apsile agreed. “If the direction of the hostile fire stays constant we’ll be coming round to face it full on in two hours.”