Peter Weihing was on his feet. It was not a videoconference, so he could throw his arms around and circle the chair he had flung away from the conference table in anger. Meanwhile, he threw cranky, sideways looks at Charles Cotas.
"Anselm Gakhal here."
Peter prepared his throat for an enthusiastic response. "Good morning, Anselm."
Gakhal answered with, "I am here with the board." The liaisons of heads of state for Kinder Group member nations.
Weihing paused to press the tips of his fingers together. He wanted the proper focus. "Greetings to all."
There was no reply.
Charles Cotas, seated above a file he did not need to consult, swiveled to face the wall. It was cherry panel with wainscoting, the wall. Very bare. He grazed his chin with his palm, smacking his lips. Waiting to hear Gakhal say it.
"How is my gift set?" Gakhal asked, predictably.
Weihing shut his eyes. "The knives are intact, but I'm afraid one of the swords has been broken."
"Do we have the tracking number?"
"I believe we do."
"It's a one of a kind sword. If I can't have it, I don't think just anyone should get it. Ask your package carrier to locate my gift set, Peter."
"It's been done."
"Good, your people are very good. Now, there is an emergency session of the Commission on Weapons and Defense at ITAN. This might be a difficult time to have my gift set unaccounted for."
"I understand."
Gakhal said, presumably to the board, "Does anyone have questions for Mr. Weihing?"
There were no questions.
The meeting was over.
* * *
He woke when he became aware that blood was coming out of his ears. The sensation was similar to the warm, sticky fluid that oozed over fevered skin from a punctured abscess. He expected next to hear the insistent thrumming of flies, smell ripe corpses thrown one upon another into a pit. A long time ago, as he seized the limbs of dead men and women, heaved the dead into the ground, many of the bodies still warm, pus had burst from boils large as his knuckles. It was his punishment and the punishment of his comrades to handle plague victims. He was still very young and a prisoner of war. The memory was tripped by the liquid in his ear canal. Fresh pimples of sweat on his temple, neck, chest, and groin accompanied the memory. Tickled by non-existent insects, his nostrils twitched. And the muscles in his arms fretted, bunching and twisting, forgetting that he was in restraints until the steel and leather edge of the straps reminded. Then his eyelids lifted. Not much, not much. Enough to let in a little light, a little information.
It was all a nightmare, the past, the present.
Except his ears were really bleeding, and suddenly he remembered death on the wind, the shaking ground, the vibrations of the planet's mantle as the power from his body shredded its surface. Human lives like little lamps flung into the chasm, going out in the wide black, the screams of the dying wafting to him on the backdraft as his eyes and nose and ears began to burn. Memory of a collapsing building, far away, the ground sucked away, caving in. The power wending forth through his pores against the rock and dirt.
The end is only the beginning.
He was with a Volodyan interrogation team, detained, they told him, under a federal article that permitted the Federal Authority and government troops to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely. Before the first beating there had been a kind of information session, a short speech by a senior intelligence officer about his, Hephaestion's, situation. The Volods called it Intake. Presumably, there were detainees who cracked at Intake, recognizing the inevitable.
He was at Sarika Base because he had allowed his arrest, though the official, his cronies, and Zoa did not know it. During the reception by the official, Hephaestion still had use of his power.
There was the matter of his energy matrix, his signature, stored in Zoa's computer and in some unknown facility, the mainframe or cube that had downloaded his signature to her palm unit.
First he must get through this, the interrogation.
The first beating disconnected his will from his power.
They had taken him from the reception block into a three-story structure, along a recently renovated unit, and out into a concrete courtyard. Three soldiers beat him in the legs and arms with metal batons, then kicked him in the stomach and head. His power sank beyond his cognizance, turned to what it perceived as its primary directive: Hephaestion's preservation.
After the beating, they took him to an interrogation room. They tethered him to a metal chair, ankles to metal posts, arms spread the length of steel rests with straps on his biceps, forearms, and wrists. His shirt, a soiled rag, was torn open so they could fix their transmitter pads in a line down the center of his torso. His feet, too, were bared. There were pads on the inside of his ankles, and a pad on his brow. When the pads were activated, his ears bled.
Just as his ears bled when he used his power to its utter depletion.
How many times across his existence had he emptied himself?
More memories.
-- Are there no pleasant ones? No pleasant memories?
-- See for yourself, he answered the intruder in his skull.
"We want to tidy our records," the middle-aged man in a suit began. "State your name, please."
Hephaestion understood that cooperation at any level led to further cooperation and he was about to be tortured.
The Kinder term for what had happened was "broken sword." Every mission had a "broken sword" scenario. In this instance, he expected his XTO Sun Energies cover to hold. The company office in Bhavaja would immediately provide the Volodyan government with his Rambach identity's background. He was an ex-army corps engineer with an advanced academic degree who had traveled Kodopovec Province with six colleagues on company business. The government of Volodya would be led to believe that those colleagues had returned to Borazjis by jet the day before his arrest. He, Rambach, had remained for a final meeting with the accountants. He was screwing a local university girl. No one knew her name. She was anti-regime, and so was Rambach.
XTO Sun Energies would send its government liaison with an inquiry about Rambach's arrest to the Volodyan state department. The state department invariably referred these matters to the Federal Authority. At FA headquarters, the Volods would take a report from the company and vow to look into the company employee's case. International Relief and ITAN asked for a database of such queries. Volodya was not an ITAN member nation but it wanted to be. The database held thousands of queries about nationals and foreigners. Most case dispositions read "Released from custody." Few detainees were seen again.
"You will be in my custody, not theirs," Zoa had said.
-- You do not know the Volods very well.
The transmitter pads fixed to his body received a signal from a remote controlled by the federal intelligence officer. The signal affected the nervous system.
He was tortured, then put in a holding cell without a cot. He was weak enough to need sleep. When he drifted off, they came for him, and tortured him again.
Three days later, he lifted his eyelids. He was in the metal chair, liquid running from his ears. The Volod commander waved the remote, taunting him.
What is your name? Where were you born? Only trained military personnel resist these questions, the commander insisted.
"You are an engineer, are you not?" The Volod interrogator was impatient. "I am not asking for things unknown. We only want to confirm our files. Your name, now. What is it?"
The Volod intelligence commander had said his name was Libing, Caspar Libing.
Zoa stood behind the one-way glass in an observation room. He knew because over the telepathic link she had told him where she was. He could not sense her, had never sensed her.
But if he had been able to as soon as they beat him he would have lost the ability.
His power lived inside him, small, dark, and unreachable as a seedling.
-- Where is John Manegold?
An interrogation within an interrogation. Zoa had no intention of waiting for the Volods to grant her time with him. She was conducting her own interview. Every hour learning something the Volods did not and could not appreciate. Her replacement computer recording the reaction of his body to the torture. Measuring the knitting of bones and flesh damaged in the beating. She had drawn blood once, while he was in the chair, using a silver tube with a shielded needle. At the same time she had leaned over him and sniffed, her dark blue eyes inching wonderingly up his neck and to his face. She said nothing, had no inclination to communicate without her telepathy. Meanwhile she put together his physical profile, asking, finally, the essential question.
When she asked for John the man, and not John's body, he knew that she understood he and John were not ordinary.
Information she wasn't sharing.
"Fuck yourself," he said to the Volod commander with the pad remote.
And to Zoa--
--I'm busy right now. Please call later.
The Volod commander smiled and pressed the remote.
Hephaestion's power uncoiled like a snake, snatching him one or two levels above the agony, clenching him like a parent against the fire of pain, breathing on him its cool breath.
When the power let go, he found respite in oblivion. He had earned it.
* * *
From the doorway a government trooper stared across the shadows at him. A clipboard hung in her left hand. Her right hand brushed a slim hip covered by uniform trousers.
"This is an inventory of the property taken from your hotel," the woman said. An unknown voice, low. She wore trooper boots.
From the waist down, that was how Hephaestion saw her. He would not turn his head. He was naked. The cell was concrete and barren like the cage of an animal, only without any straw. In the middle of the floor was a drain. The cage could be scoured with a hose. Feces, urine, vomit, everything was dissolved under the pressure of the hose and forced down the drain.
They had not yet used the hose on him. Quite possibly that experience was in front of him.
He sat with his knees to his chest against the far wall.
Until the door opened he was not really in the cell, not mentally. The trooper's arrival brought him from the other place, from sanctuary. Now he occupied the cell completely, and his flesh, he had filled that as well. His flesh with its new bruises, the imprint of soldiers' boots throbbing, the body memory of transmitter pads juicing his nerve ends, contracting his muscles, burning his skull.
"You are Bojidar Rambach. I am holding an inventory of the property taken from your hotel under article 412. These items may be forwarded to your family if you agree that these are in fact your items and sign this document."
There it was. In the pit of his stomach. Like freezing acid.
Fear.
Here it comes.
He blinked up at her, to see her face. Her name--
"Do you speak Volodyan, Mr. Rambach?"
He unclenched his jaw, allowed his mouth to open and close before answering. "Yes."
"May I come closer, Mr. Rambach?"
He shook his head. Why should he want a pretty trooper to stand next to him? Why should he, at this point, want anything that reminded of life?
She advanced even so, a slim, compact woman about Dance's size but with a wave of straight brown hair aligned neatly behind little ears. Her eyes were large and gray and strong, so that her gaze felt something like pressure against a wound. He was the wound, a lost, tormented thing. She walked up to him, right up to him, as fearless as Dance, Siris, as undaunted as Zoa. She squatted, her gaze steady. His nearness was nothing to her. She dealt with broken lives all the time. Most smelled like excrement and week-old sweat. At least there was no waste matter on the floor.
She rotated the clipboard and pointed it toward his chest.
"Your property inventory, Mr. Rambach. Can you read?"
"I--" He swallowed. "How much time do I have?"
She stared at him. "Did you give him proper burial?" She asked this softly.
He was not sure that he heard her properly.
She recognized his puzzlement. "Did you give John Manegold a decent burial?"
He returned her gaze. "Yes, you can tell Commander Libing that we buried him."
She sighed and nodded. "That will mean something to the commander." She pushed the clipboard into his chest. "Sign this, so your things can go home."
"No."
"Fine." The clipboard was withdrawn with a snap of the wrist. "You are going with the alien to a post-mortem at their laboratory in the UKSB. Your family will never see your remains. You will never be heard from again."
"I know that."
"Are there any words you wish to give your family? There is always a record of these things. It may be many years before the record is opened, but then it may be of use to someone to know what you were thinking." She hesitated. "Have you seen it? Have you seen the weapon?"
"What?"
"There is no illuma in your blood or on your clothes and property but what does that mean? You never touched the weapon, all right. Did you see the weapon? Are you the one who arranged the Quiranium for the detonator?"
"May I have clothes?"
She stood up. "I'll ask. I'll see. I doubt it. The weapon, it is not what you think. Surely, you must know enough to be afraid for your family. One Needle will not fall. A thousand Needles, a thousand, will fall. The weapon will change the world as we know it."
First, polite threats, next beatings and torture. Finally, a death sentence and a pretty trooper to appeal to his humanity. He wondered if it ever worked. Yes, of course, it must.
"I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of weapon are you searching for?"
She whispered, "The weapon," as though afraid others would hear.
He looked up at her now. "Will you get me something to wear?"
A clipped breath. "You've nothing for me, then?"
"If there is a weapon, I know nothing about it. Nor would ... nor would he ..." She blinked. "That hasn't occurred to you, has it? That Manegold was innocent, and I am too?"
She threw up her chin and muttered. "We are all innocent, Mr. Rambach."
When she was gone only a little while, Zoa came to the door. He was restless and tired of feeling the cold. It would help if they offered him food. His power was like a distant light working to sustain its glimmer against a steady wind.
Five days and he had not been given food.
-- Yes, and no dehydration. Zoa.
-- I am dehydrated.
Zoa entered the cell carrying clean trousers, a button down shirt. The shadows deepened the richness of her skin. Her eyes were wells, unreadable.
-- This is a maintenance worker uniform. Will it suffice?
-- Yes.
His first death he had been naked.
He gathered his limbs under him and stood. Zoa passed on the clothes, then lifted out her curious computer. While he dressed, she observed the screen.
-- There is a weapon involved, and you know of it.
-- Yes. Zoa's reply.
-- It may be time we speak of it in, how shall I say this, realistic terms.
-- I have been trying, Mr. Rambach.
-- No, you are trying to implicate me in a terrorist enterprise. I am not a terrorist. But I think, soon, certainly after the unpleasantness is over, you and I will have something of an equally serious nature to discuss. Is there a weapon unaccounted for, or of an improvised nature, that can destroy a multitude of lives?
-- Yes.
-- Is it yours?
-- Am I supposed to trust you now, Mr. Rambach?
-- I'm here, aren't I? Have I not done all that you asked? I allowed myself to be taken into custody. Don't you think that I knew how it would end? If you don't trust me soon, this will have gone for nothing. And I will not be able to help you.
-- The core module belonged to us. The trigger must be improvised with materials gathered from your planet.
-- When I come back, I will be in your custody?
-- Yes. But first, Mr. Rambach, I am going to record your death for scientific purposes. My office has already questioned my conclusions as to your biology. I used supportive data, of course. However, the data also says that you are human.
-- I am a different kind of human. They're coming.
She looked for the first time away from her computer and at him. "You are experiencing distress."
"Hush," he said. "Record me if you want, you won't be the first. Remember what you promised and I will see you when I wake up." He turned from her and raised his palms to his heart. His head bowed. "Lady of the Blessed Waters, a child who hears your call beseeches you to receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen."
Two men, at the door.
Zoa spoke to them. "I brought him the clothes. He asked for them."
"We consider such things wasteful, Inspector," said one of the Volods, "in our land. I'm going to put holes in his new shirt."
Zoa said: "I'll reimburse you."
Hephaestion looked over his shoulder at the newcomers. One was government intelligence, the other a Federal Authority commander, Caspar Libing. It was Libing who made the comment about the shirt.
Libing exposed a pistol. He held it by his leg, his finger on the trigger.
Hephaestion shifted his bare feet to face the commander. He lowered his hands, fixed his gaze on the drain in the center of the cell. They would wash his blood away through the drain. At the edge of sight, he glimpsed Libing raising the gun, Zoa her computer.
"Say something," the intelligence official urged. "Spare yourself. Give me something I can use to help you."
Libing said, "He suffered enough, you son of a bitch, without you bastards stealing his body for some sort of propaganda war--"
Hephaestion said, "I understand why you care. I've been told about you. I'm sorry for you, Commander Libing, because I don't think he'll forgive you for what you did any time soon. I think he has far to go before he can do that, but I forgive you," and Libing shot him.
The round passed under Hephaestion's heart, exiting his back through a wound the size of a child's small fist. The impact knocked him back a step.
Libing fired again.
This time, the left ventricle was hit. The shock interrupted the connection between brain and body and Hephaestion began to fall.
The third round smacked into his ribs and tumbled through his lungs.
Hephaestion's legs folded, pitching him backward over the drain. His head, arms, and hands thudded the ground and bounced. Blood boiled through his chest. His lungs became liquid, useless. His lips parted for a breath that was not coming as he searched the shadow high above him, where the ceiling used to be.
He lost consciousness two and a half seconds later.
--- Exile continues with the Book of Valten
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