Dying hurt less than he thought it would. He must have gone into shock, because the nerves that should be howling in pain were merely lodging a formal complaint. The worst part was in his chest, where his lungs were filling with blood, but even that was only a minor tickle of discomfort, more akin to a bad flu than the unremitting Hell he had been expecting. His swollen breasts – breasts? shuddered with the effort of gasping another shallow breath of air into his lungs. The child in his belly was already dead. The flechette rifle used by the firing squad had torn his torso to ribbons. He inwardly wept for his lost daughter, but at the same time, felt a cold, quiet pride. It was all so confusing. It was like being two different people at once. The Deathdealer battalion fired another volley into the captives and everything went dark.
Another scene, another nightmare. They were high in the mountains now, and the air was thin and never quite seemed up to the task of oxygenating his hungry blood. His young wife – they were newlyweds – curled against his thin chest for warmth. Fortunately, she was finally asleep. The fever made her feel hot against his skin even though he knew that in reality, she desperately needed to be protected from the chill leaking through the thin canvas skin of the tent. He was hungry. There wasn't enough to eat in the refugee camp, and his lips were so dry they were burst open and oozing blood.
"Raktayana!" someone suddenly shouted.
He went rigid in his sleeping bag. Raktayana – a Consortium aerial fighter. What could it possibly be doing up here? The Elgaic Aeronautical Division, a handful of craft, really, had been entirely destroyed within the first week of the war. There were no factories nearby, no army divisions, just a small squalid mountain town and the large Karaseem refugee camp it grudgingly allowed to persist. If the Consortium was sending fighters, it could only mean –
"No," he whispered aloud, trying to shake his wife from her torpor.
Too late. The sky suddenly erupted with profane light. Faster than he could have ever believed, glowing droplets of liquid fire rained through the roof of the tent. His wife screamed in a tone that he'd never heard her make before; in fact, a tone that didn't sound human at all, it was animalistic, as though she'd reverted to an earlier evolutionary form. Horrifying pain overtook him almost simultaneously. It dawned on him that a few droplets of fire-jelly were burning into his flesh. There was no way to put it out or get it off, it would smolder its way through his wounds for minutes before finally giving up enough of its heat to solidify. The pain was vivid. It was beyond anything his wildest nightmares could have conceived. His wife's shrieks of agony – she must have been touched by drops of the jelly too – were becoming mixed with blood-gurgles. In a way, he was thankful for that. It meant she would die more quickly.
He could feel the fiery droplets of molten metal worming their way into his flesh. Fruitlessly, he scratched at his back, as though he could somehow pull the lava-hot drops out of him as though they were an errant splinter. All thoughts were clouded out of his head by the almighty pain. He couldn't even hear his wife screaming anymore; all of his senses were muddied, blurred into a vague haze, leaving only a hot star of unfathomable agony to keep him company. He didn't even know he was on the floor of the tent writhing. He knew nothing. Nothing but an eternity of pain, so much suffering that he didn't even feel the touch of death when it finally came for him, just a long, lingering echo of the fury of the fire-jelly.
And satisfaction.
What?
Satisfaction. The sense of a job well done. Perhaps not a pretty job, perhaps not a desirable job, but a necessary job. A necessary evil, performed in the dutiful service to a greater good.
General Contact Unit Grey Area was referred to by its peers as the most vicious slur any of them could think of – Meatfucker. Its fascination with genocide, cruelty, and death didn't just walk the line of psychopathy but was generally acknowledged to be a full-blown case. So, this human thought he was tough, did he? Grey Area would have snorted if he were a human rather than a ship Mind. Well, there was always more where that came from.
This time he was tied to a chair. He was in a chilly, unwindowed basement, and a fluorescent light overhead lit the room with garish tones of beige. The walls were painted grey and the room was almost entirely empty – a shelf stood in one corner, containing a random collection of things that household basements tend to accumulate. Perhaps a converted civilian home, then, rather than an official facility. It all seemed strangely familiar, somehow. An Elgaic intelligence officer stood a meter away from him, glaring down, and the look in his eyes that would have intimidated any lesser man. But he only stared back with pride and determination. Nearby, there was a table with a variety of household tools that brooded with quiet menace.
"Forgive the cliché, but – I have ways of making you talk," the Elgaic said with a jerky grin.
But no. It was too late, he saw it. The enemy officer had a scar on the tongue that indicated that the Elgaic was ethnically Karaseem. He began to laugh, a deep, hard, sincere laughter; laughter that communicated more than any spoken language ever could. His laughter was both bitter and genuinely mirthful. It was the laughter of profoundest and darkest irony.
"What's so funny, Consortium killer?" the Karaseem officer hissed with rage.
"The irony, Karaska, the irony."
The Elgaic struck a haughty tone. "There might be more irony taking place here than you know."
"Maybe so, maybe so. I suppose you'll want my name, rank, and serial number." He had to think about it for a minute. "Special Operations Lieutenant Arkan vel ra Victrum. Personnel № 769-c-47521. That's all you're going to get out of me regardless of what you do with those little tools; I've taken advanced psychosomatic training at the First School of Psychic Science. I'd prefer it if you just killed me now, but I'm prepared for any eventuality."
The Karaseem smiled. "There is indeed more going on here than you know, vel ra Victrum. You think I want to know about troop movements, or the methodology of your psychic disciplines. This is not the case. I'm after something very different."
"And what might that be?" Arkan asked, almost conversationally.
"I want to plumb the darkest depths of your evil soul," Meatfucker replied through his Karaseem avatar.
"Evil depends on who is making the determination. The cat chases mice, Karaska."
"Stop using that word!" the Karaseem hissed angrily. "You can call me Ariot, since you're never leaving here alive at any rate."
"Well, Ariot Karaska, what could it be about my soul that interests you so much?"
Meatfucker, somewhat unaccustomed to the intricacies of managing a humanoid body, let out an unexpected, undesired sigh. He quickly recomposed himself, brushing an invisible speck of dust off the shoulder of his Elgaic intelligence uniform.
"The Consortium War of the planet Persja, in the Persja Vale star system. 400,000,000 sentients were killed over the course of the war, and the Karaseem people were all but entirely wiped out. The war destroyed 1,160,000,000 buildings and trillions of Persjan credits in capital. Tens of thousands of ships were sunk, leaking millions upon millions of gallons of petroleum into Persjan oceans. It was the largest war to ever take place on Persja, and one of the largest wars to ever take place on a planet of its population and level of technological development."
"You speak of it as if it were in the past, Ariot Karaska."
"The genocide ended approximately 300 Culture years ago."
Arkan pursed his lips with cold amusement. "So, you think highly of yourself as a comedian."
"I am telling the truth, Special Operations Lieutenant Arkan vel ra Victrum. You are in something like an illusion, but a real illusion. Your mind-state is running within my ship-board Mind. You're really you, not physically embodied, but real enough to feel." Meatfucker picked up a saw off the table and tested its heft. "You can feel those ropes binding you to the chair, right?"
It was true enough – the ropes were wrapped tightly around his wrists, tightly enough that a thin trickle of blood spilled from where they were sawing into his flesh every time he moved. It hurt a little, but Arkan had endured much, much worse.
"And what, praytell, would make me likely to believe you?" Arkan asked with an ironic smile.
Suddenly, the scene shifted from a halogen-lit basement to something else altogether. Arkan was still tied to the chair, and the chair was still sitting against a solid floor, but he was enveloped in every direction by a field of stars. He gasped in spite of himself. Below his feet, a large blue orb placidly rotated, and he vaguely recognized the shapes of the western continents of Perska.
"Impossible!" Arkan shouted involuntarily.
"It's entirely possible," Ariot/Meatfucker replied. "It's all as I've told you. You are, in certain senses of the word, dead. This is your soul."
Ariot paused, and then smiled toothily. "And you are in Hell."
Arkan had to admit to himself that he was frightened. The trick with the star field didn't lend itself to any easy explanation; the best Consortium projection technology was moving pictures, and there was no way the provincial Elgaic had anything so sophisticated. The pain in his wrists became more pronounced, not because the bonds were getting any tighter, but because now, Arkan genuinely felt afraid when he hadn't at the prospect of mere torture. He became to hum a hymn from his childhood which was said to banish evil.
"Enough of that!" Meatfucker hissed.
The ship Mind strode up to Arkan and cuffed him sharply in the face. Arkan kept humming. Meatfucker grabbed Arkan's head and began to saw. A flower of pain blossomed in Arkan's ear, where the lobe connected to the rest of his head. It was genuine pain, alright, though nothing nearly so bad as agony of the Consortium fire-jelly. When Meatfucker was finished, he released Arkan's head and tossed the bloody ear at his bound feet. It bounced off the Pesjan's shoe and slowly oozed blood onto the floor of the starfield. Arkan found the effect rather curious. A little puddle of his own blood was eclipsing entire star systems.
"As you can see," Meatfucker announced, mockingly. "Your little childhood rhyme has no power over a demon like me. You are entirely within my power."
The pain was erudite but manageable. "It is a demon, then, who judges me as evil? I should have thought it would be up to the Good to make such determinations."
"You personally killed, or ordered to be killed, over 8,000 Karaseem by various methods. Shooting, starvation, bombing from the air – and all specifically targeted against civilians, not soldiers."
Arkan shrugged. "It was targeted at Karaska. They are parasites, subhumans. If what you're saying is true and the war is really over, with our enemies eliminated, then this is joyous news no matter what you do to me. Our war was successful and we saved our world."
"The Karaseem are human just like you."
"Is that so?" Arkan asked with a snort. He stuck out his tongue, and then pulled it back in. "Did you see the mark of Karas on my tongue? Do we hold down our infants when they are still bloody with placenta fluid, and brand them with a red hot iron? The Consortium is one hundred and four tribes who all banded together with a singularity of purpose – to rid our world of the parasitism and cruelty of the Karaska once and for all. And I am overcome with gladness that, if you are to be believed, we succeeded."
"I can torture you forever, little human. Or at least as long as my ship Mind is intact. You have no understanding of the power over you I have at my disposal. I can make you feel every single death you inflicted, 8000 and more. I can make you experience it dozens of times, hundreds – I can bring an infinity of suffering down upon your head."
"Maybe so." Arkan could feel the blood dripping down the side of his head, staining his Special Operations uniform. The wound thumped with dull red pain in unison with the beating of his heart. "But we won, and I am proud of my service."
Meatfucker regarded its prisoner carefully. It was strange – most would have broken down in sobbing repentance by now. Arkan had an unusually strong will, and Meatfucker found itself wondering if the First School of Psychic Science might indeed be a formidable institution. It made a mental note to look into it later. The ship Mind decided to take a new, more philosophical tack.
"What is it the Karaseem did to make you hate them so much?" it asked.
Arkan warned, "My answer will be long."
"You have more time than you could possibly imagine."
"What could you know of such things? You didn't grow up in Grand Vessail. You didn't see your father die in the Karaska Worker's Revolution, or your mother go hungry so she could keep you from starving. I saw those things with my own eyes, the children at school with sunken bellies and sallow faces! Little girls who should have been playing tag in the snow instead huddled around the only heater in the classroom to save their strength for the walk back home! We starved, you thing, you thing that is only playing at being a hateful Karaska! We carried backpacks full of paper money and it was just enough for a bag of potatoes and nothing more! For years we lived like that."
"It was not some kind of secret to us that all the bankers were Karaska. They played games with the money and somehow, farms that had been family owned for 200 years were suddenly owned by some Karaska banker who let it become overrun with weeds where previously a cornucopia of crops grew. Lines of men stood in the streets begging or looking for day jobs, and our towns were full of shuttered storefronts where there were once merchants of every good you can imagine. And the media – full of Karaska names – told us we'd never been wealthier. A few, the most credulous, believed them. Most held them in contempt."
"Is it any surprise then that the Consortium formed? Vessail was not the only nation where these events were taking place; the entire northwest continent was held in the iron grip of such policies! In public, they pretended to be Vessailian, but in private they conspired against us. They were always so full of advice! Buy such-and-such a stock, and a week later the company would collapse. Take this medication, and within a couple weeks you'd find yourself addicted to it, and feeling worse than when you'd gone in to see the doctor in the first place. And all the while, we were told that we were being foolish, that things in Vessail were better than they'd ever been, even when you could walk anywhere in the city and see begging veterans and hopeless children."
"If what you say is true, thing, than I couldn't be prouder of my life or deeds. It means all of Vessail, all of the Consortium, all of Pesja will never know such days of lies or torment ever again. It's true, isn't it? Oh, how my heart hopes that what you're saying is true!"
"The planet Pesja joined the Culture two hundred and eighty years ago. Your planet was discovered shortly after the Consortium War, and we judged it necessary to accelerate your entry in order to prevent another such event from taking place again," Meatfucker answered dully, feeling sluggish and ill at ease.
"Tell me, are there any hungry children begging on the streets of Grand Vessail?"
"No, there are no children begging any more."
"Do Karaska still brand the tongues of infants?"
"No. There are no Karaseem left to carry on that tradition."
"Then I consider my war won, alien creature. Do with me what you will."
The Karaseem avatar GCU Grey Area was controlling walked out of the scene without another world, until he vanished into the star field. For the next few hours, Arkan struggled with his bonds. He was able to loosen them a little, and he reckoned with another half-dozen hours of deliberate effort, he might just be able to get free. Eventually, he grew weary. The orb of Persja rotated below Arkan's feet in unsearchable silence. Arkan fell asleep, and for the first time since being transferred into mindstate, he had his own dreams and not a nightmare foisted upon him by Meatfucker.