WARNING: This chapter contains alternate character death and implied torture. Nothing nasty. Also contains extensive spoilers for Incentive', my previous fic.
PART THREE: INVICTI
NINE
Malcolm Reed laced his hands together behind his head, his tangled hair catching in his long fingers, blank eyes staring helplessly up into the dark, and did nothing. Perhaps once upon a time he would have been waiting - a word that despite its clinical definition suggested action, the very essence of a verb, to do - but not anymore. Waiting implied an awareness of time that simply wasn't there. He had learned not to wait in ways that would shock his old friends to an early grave, so now he didn't wait, didn't hope for tomorrow or dwell on today. He did nothing, his mind cast adrift, smelling the crisp, recycled aroma of the ship's air, hearing its low rumble of engines and life support systems, feeling the gentle background purr of a million different operations thrumming through the bank and through him. He had missed this; for months now everything had been too quiet, too pale, unreal. The most recent weeks had been a chaos of noise, destruction, running, fighting . . . but for the most part, even those had been rain spots thumping brutal, bruised craters in dry earth. Moments of activity in an unending drudgery, long days of hiding, sneaking, sleeping, planning. Death. Always, there was death. Three weeks ago, his party had been three; now it was two, another man down, another of Enterprise's finest buried in an unmarked grave where they would never find him. Death stalked, and it had taken some perverse liking to Malcolm Reed, like a shadow pinned to his own cautious foot. It had begun with her; and it had never ended.
(How would you like to go back to them, Mr. Reed? It can be arranged)
He blinked and he stared into nothing, wishing he could feel the fear that threat was intended to provoke. Wishing he could shudder, some small, human indication of life. He almost tapped the fingers of his right hand against his skull; almost. It seemed like too much unneeded effort, strength wasted. Time wasted.
He smirked, unable to taste any real mirth in it. What was time, anyway, but a way to keep account of the injuries? A way to mark the losses, those hours nothing more than all the gravestones he had never been able to leave. It healed the memory, he had been told; it faded the deepest wounds. But to him, one hour had destroyed his interest in time forever. And it had been forever.
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It was a routine mission with no reason to fail, and that, perhaps, has made it a danger . . . defences grow lax when the crew grows complacent. When he grows complacent. He can no longer remember the incident that sparked the notion; there is only this thin flutter of disquiet in the hollow between his stomach and his heart, and the vague impression of water and of shadows on a hillside . . .
He stretches out slowly on the narrow bench, flinching as the raw wounds in his back rub scathingly against the metal, and presses his face into the crook of his elbow. At least he can think with the harsh overhead lights fenced back this way, his eyes masked by the cool cotton fabric of his uniform, and his unkempt hair forced back from his temples by the cuff of his sleeve. He can think, if only in droning circles like a trapped bluebottle, piecing together the remnants of the incident still in his memory; but the picture remains obstinately incomplete.
He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his arm harder into them; his saturated uniform stinks of smoke and sweat. He has woken to find her gone and her last call for help hanging statically on the dense air, long after the mouth that uttered it is no longer in sight. Then blackness until he woke here.
Wherever here is.
She is gone, and he is here, for better or for worse. He prays, in a corner of himself where words are meaningless, that she has escaped - but he knows, in his heart, that she has done no such thing. Hoshi rarely screams these days unless it is a cry for help - still too naive, too innocent, to realise that it is the worst thing she can do. The help hadn't come because he had been powerless to give it, and the knowledge grates like a splinter under the skin; he has a duty to perform, a promise made to the captain that Hoshi will be safe in his hands, and in that duty he has failed. The penetrating silence only makes the accusation echo like a tired drumbeat in his head.
He has woken to this near physical silence, lying tangled on the cold metal floor and staring up into equally cold and colourless lights that hang too low over him and blot out his peripheral vision. He opened his eyes to this hideous glare with the expectation that he will find Hoshi here with him, and stirs with a mild rebuke already on his tongue, only to find himself alone.
Without someone to protect, he doesn't known quite what to do. So he waits.
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Everyone he has ever trained with or served with has assumed Malcolm Reed will be the kind of man to resist forcible incentives. They surmise that his silence will not bend. They see an impenetrable, dutiful officer, one that will remember his place and his obligations in trying times. They even consider him fearless.
The swish of something gliding away and the surreptitious snatch of motion in the corner of his eye startles him, but only for a split-second which he knows he will leave out of his official report, should he live to make one. A section of the wall to his left opens onto an alcove, revealing a console whose tiny lights and beckoning blink seem almost to grin, accusingly, at him. Maybe it is merely the position of those lights which give the illusion of a mouth, toothless and lopsided, smirking broadly at him - or maybe it is his headache returning. Whatever the reason, it takes only one glance for him to take an instant disliking to it. To its idiotic, grinning face, and its silent, patient hum.
He eyes the bright console, watching its screen light up and darken down, a definite pattern formed by the repetition. Trembling and unaware he even does so, Malcolm Reed approaches the console, drawn by its siren's song, and stands, hands slack at his sides, taking in the readings on the small screen.
He knows this.
A nameless alien creation returns his stare, yet in all but the intricate pictorial language it is a system he feels he knows, a hierarchy of protocols and procedures second nature to him. He can solve the launch techniques in a matter of minutes, guided by an indefinite instinct, and barely break into a sweat. If he chooses.
Slowly, Malcolm reaches across and presses the largest of the switches. The small screen sputters and dies with one final flare.
He will resist. As long as he has to.
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Darkness was like the layers of an onion, he had decided a long time ago. He supposed some might argue that the shading scale from a secondary school art class was a more appropriate, certainly more literal, analogy, but to him, that wasn't right. A shading scale was nothing but orderliness, chronology, a progression clearly seen from the first white square to the last, solid black one. Grey in between, slabs that darkened with each step, the purest to the densest. The steps from light to shadow. So gradual you hardly noticed them deepening, not at first. So subtle that the blackness closed before you knew the white had existed. It wasn't right. Darkness, in whatever shade or texture, wasn't a straight line, anymore than time was; darkness was like the layers of an onion. It circled you in rings, some distant, light, more charcoal than ebony; but those rings tightened, the longer you spent inside them. They squeezed and shrank like a lassoo, drawing in to you in its centre, until it crushes all the breath from your lungs and is blacker than a devil's heart.
But those rings could pull away again. Instead of counting from the outside in, a contraction ending in something too horrible to openly discuss, you could count from the inside out. Blackness could fade back to that hazy twilit moon glow of a warm summer night on earth, star-shod, brilliant.
If you had the gift.
Malcolm at last removed his laced hands and folded them across his chest, loosely. One still stung from the fight earlier today; the other was a little heavy, numbed and prickling from staying in one position too long, but unhurt. No, it was his stomach that did the hurting, his chest, and he folded his arms across his torso not to protect them but to soften the pain. It felt like he was holding it in.
He was hungry - starving, in fact, and it was no idle joke to say so - but that was hardly a newsflash. He'd gone a lot longer than this without eating; without bothering to, without remembering to, without being given the choice. Didn't matter. What mattered was that his stomach hurt, and his chest, and his head, and even that wasn't the real reason. No, what mattered was why.
He blinked, sorting the layers of darkness above him. It wasn't uniform, as he supposed most people might think; between this bunk and the ceiling he had once stared at night after night, waiting for sleep, there were sediments, and he saw through them clearly. This Jonathan Archer had disabled the lights, to stop him from escaping. The truth was that he hadn't escaped because he didn't want to. There were too many questions about this place he had heard about but only today seen; too many details that he'd never been told. Never found out. Whichever. There were too many faces risen from whatever grave they'd found, and he couldn't leave. Not just yet.
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Not for the first time, Malcolm finds himself wishing he had made it a practice to wear a watch. His grandfather had quite the phobia about it - asserting that you can't keep time if you don't know the time—and had been scrupulous in never leaving his house without the comforting band of flexible gold plate fastened securely to his wrist. That old watch had been an antique, a Rolex with its now rare interior workings untouched and unreplaced since its original sale, and once his grandfather had permitted Malcolm to try it on, a privilege extended to very few. Grandad Reed's timepiece was not a matter to be taken lightly, or an honour to be refused. It had slithered up and down the length of his thin forearm ridiculously, the wrist of the ten-year-old he had been swamped even in its tightest setting, but with the fond indulgence that is only possible when years lie between the event and the memory, Malcolm can recall how he had worn it all that day, proudly sporting the token of Grandad Reed's unspoken affection. How his grandfather had smiled almost knowingly at a young boy's boundless enthusiasm for all things grown up.
His father had owned a watch, too. But Malcolm had never been allowed to try that one on.
A blaze of memory jabs at him, as if a shock has stunned life into a dead battery - a line of black silhouettes against the alien moonrise, figures in silent regiments like standing stones against the leaden sky, watching he and Hoshi with a clear intent black as their armour. No. No small race, this; though the errant stab of recall ends there, with he and Hoshi stranded in a dark meadow without cover and surrounded by those grim living barriers all around, it is all he need see, for now. All he feels he can assimilate, with so much still unknown. It is enough to remember that those creatures on the hill had been human-sized, perhaps even a little more.
Malcolm curls two fingers around the collar of his uniform, testing the skin at the base of his skull with his fingertips, dabbing at the greasy sheen clinging to the hairline. He tries not to let the presence of his own bloody sweat frighten him.
But it is difficult.
If Hoshi's being held in similar conditions, he reflects blackly, then she'll be climbing the walls by now. He almost dares hope she is enjoying better treatment as their sole communications medium, in all likelihood serving as translator . . . but that thought is one he deadens, swiftly. Thinking about Hoshi isn't going to make this situation any easier. Quite possibly her involvement in this ended with that robotic message, and this battle is now solely his, and not hers.
But he will ask, just to be sure.
Just to know that she's all right.
"It's your duty, Lieutenant," he murmurs, berating himself for the hesitation as it comes. "Only your duty."
He holds out for what might be minutes, had he possessed any way to mark the time besides his own biological clock remotely informing him that he is starving, but eventually the garish console wins. He is still adamant that this first look will go no further . . . but he gives in, after a struggle, and takes that first look he swore so vehemently against. The console, he soon discovers, is unbelievably simple to decipher. Even without a means to translate the purely iconic labels and controls it poses no problem to him, the on-screen diagrams unmistakably pointing the way. He can't help but smile, albeit grimly, at that; some things, it seems, truly are universal. He follows where the blueprints lead, hand resting pensively on the controls, his sweat pooling under his fingertips onto the black keys below.
It is a sensor scan. A labyrinthine tracery of fine, electric lines represents a vast complex of some kind, apparently their intended target; and between these lines, some moving, some stationary, are thousands of tiny red dots like swarms of locusts on a field of wheat.
Red dots. Moving red dots.
Lifesigns. Although the language surrounding this diagram tells him nothing, he doesn't need to see a number. There are thousands, and this phase cannon is trained directly on them.
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He is debating lying down for a while, if only to spare his legs from any worse cramp than he already has, when there is a crackle, and the voice comes. It fills the tiny space with dead echoes.
"Why have you not launched the weapon?" it says, tonelessly.
Malcolm closes his eyes, and swallows. His throat is swollen with thirst. "Because that's not what I do," he says, quietly. "You want me to shoot that thing at thousands of people. I don't know what impression you have of me, but I'm not a killer."
"We have knowledge of your vessel. We know you are the tactical officer. Destruction is your job. Make the weapon work."
The accusation bites; not because it is true, but because of what it makes him out to be. "In a fair battle, I would," he growls, between his teeth. "I do what has to be done to disable an enemy ship. But I don't destroy them. Give me credit that I have some ethics. Even if you don't." He waits, doubting that this message is anything more than a recording; and doubting, in tandem, that anybody could hear him.
There is only ambiguous silence.
"Where's Hoshi?" he demands, after a moment.
"We are willing to hold you here until you comply," the voice repeats, regardless of his question. "The target has been selected for you. We know you can operate this weapon."
Malcolm growls low in his throat, and smashes his fist into the wall. He no longer doubts that at least one of these beings hears him, and to a degree understands him - with or without Hoshi's help, he doesn't know. But the answers he receives all make use of those same few sentences, clearly all they have prepared and recorded, each time selecting the phrase which matches his inquiry or the answer they wish to give. He doubts he will get more from them until they have gone away and spliced together a larger vocabulary.
Good. The more reason he gives them to keep Hoshi alive, if she really is here, the better.
A moment later every one of those assumptions is crushed. "The woman will be terminated unless you comply," the voice replies, pleasantly. "Make the weapon work. You have one hour."
This time the monitor he hates with such black passion jolts to life on its own. Gone are the blueprints, the dots, the aerial survey map; in their place, only a row of cold green zeros glows, apparitions in a dream he can't wake from. Not this time. As he watches, fascinated and morbidly hypnotised, those numbers click from 0:00:00 to 0:00:01.
One hour. The voice has gone, and with it, all chance of negotiating, of offering something other than this favour in return for Hoshi's life.
Malcolm slumps down where he kneels, presses his hand to his eyes to force away the dreadful pound already beginning there, and for a long time, he neither thinks nor feels anything at all.
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He hadn't woken from that dream for three months, and the apparitions had been there throughout his whole stay, always taunting him, silently thanking him. They thanked him for not firing on their city, and in his disturbed dreams he almost felt at ease . . . but when he woke, the universe felt thankless once more. The hour had ended, and so had her life. They had told him, and he hadn't believed them. Then they had shown him her body, on the monitor, cold and dead and with her hazel-cream skin blue and veined with emptiness. Her dark hair, falling like a matted black veil over her shoulders and wrapping itself around her slender throat. Still, he hadn't believed them. And still, he had seen none of his captors. For two days and a night they had left him to torture himself, and he had done so, with extraordinary talent. Half of him had listened for those boots on metal because the only alternative was starvation, and a death that would give him more time to dwell on his mistakes than he could bear - but the other half had almost willed himself not to hear them, knowing that nothing they brought would be good.
Then, on the second evening, they had come for him. He had followed those silent monoliths of thorny black metal without a word.
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He stares down at the dull glint of tarnished metal just peeking out into the light along the slab's rim, because it is easier than seeing what they brought him here to see. If he focuses, he can almost pretend that bench is empty . . . but no. Perhaps not; even if avoiding it directly can soften the blow, it can do nothing to make him believe that blow is all in his mind. Even staring at the edge like this he is reminded of a glimpse of dead flesh at the corner of his eye, to his left - a hand, limp and lifeless as it slips from the slab and reaches its lax fingertips toward the slick, featureless floor.
He swallows, wrenching down a low moan choked with saliva. One of them watches him from the doorway, eight feet of armoured metal plating filling the one and only way of escape. Gauntleted hands clutch a weapon he knows they won't use. Not on him. Their killing is done, for one day. A passionless visor without eyes that he can see continues to spectate, silent, unmoving, a serrated vacuum of what glaring light and precious little warmth there is in the morgue they have brought him to.
He absently swipes at the itching, desperate heat in his eyes with one hand, forcing it still, refusing to let his guard see him tremble. He knows that asking for a moment alone with her will be useless - unheard, perhaps, but certainly ignored or misunderstood. He hates that figure for watching the only small gesture of burial he can give her, for desecrating the moment with its skeletal presence, but it is a choice between suffering it to be marred or giving her nothing at all. She will have no headstone, no funeral, only a paltry Starfleet ceremony conducted by her closest circle of friends - Missing In Action, Ensign Hoshi Sato. It is with a shiver not in his muscles but in his bones that he realises her name will not be the only one remembered. Missing In Action, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed. Presumed dead.
Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, presumed dead but in some unplugged way very much alive, turns slowly back to the motionless, colourless, unharmed body of Ensign Hoshi Sato and tightens his jaw against the flood he knows is coming. It has been years since he cried. Really cried. Flickering eyelashes in moments of weakness didn't count. Keeping it back, holding it in, none of it counted. He reaches across to smooth her tangled hair from her marble throat, to cut the noose that appears to strangle the life from her even though she is dead, but his hand stops, halfway. Can he touch her, so cold, so . . . unreal? It isn't death that scares him, and he has touched enough corpses in his time to do it without thought . . . but this is Hoshi. He remembers her warm and breathing, huddled to him under a copse of trees in torrential rain. He can't touch her like this.
But he does. Gently he lets his long fingers strum the hair aside, freeing her face, and it is only now that he realises he hopes to find her eyes closed. Closed, as if she were sleeping. Not open and accusing him of failing in his duty to protect her.
He strokes through her hair in long, sweeping glides for a moment, letting himself see, letting himself accept. Then he stoops, and presses his lips tenderly to her bone-white forehead. He wants to say goodbye. But he can't. He can't accept that he will never see her looking at him with eyes that could swallow universes whole ever again.
"Go ahead," he murmurs, and turning, stares with unbreakable intent at the visored helmet, at the solid metal wall where eyes should be. "I know you hear me. I know you can understand me if you choose to. Go ahead and kill me now because I'm about as much use to you as a corpse at this point in time anyway. Come on! I won't fight. Easiest kill you ever had. He hangs his head at last, and his voice drops to a husk of its former self, a shadow, a glimmer of pain beneath the bravado. Except for Hoshi, he whispers. She was no threat to you.
He feels the betrayal on his face, too late. The armoured guard tilts its solid head to one side, its grip on the gun unmoving. It is watching the single tear blazing down Malcolm's face as if it has never seen such a thing before. As if it doesn't understand. Which, Malcolm is certain, it doesn't.
The guard continues to look at him for quite some time. It doesn't kill him. It doesn't usher him away with the butt of that wicked rifle. It watches, studying the motionless human the way a scientist might study his favorite lab rat. Waiting for him to produce water from his eyes again. But that single tear dries alone and isn't repeated . . . not until what seems like hours later, when his guard tires of waiting, and takes him back to his cell.
As the door glides closed, invisible, not even a hairline crack in the wall, Malcolm Reed, Missing In Action, Presumed Dead, compacts himself into the tightest corner he can find - under that low bunk, hidden from the sordid white lights overhead, bathed in swooning shadow. He lets minutes pass, before he is certain he is alone. Then he buries his face in the cool cotton fabric of his right arm, and tries to pretend the hot moisture soaking his sleeve is nothing more than sweat.
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They don't come for him for a day after that, and although he is brought water and some barely edible synthesised biscuits, he touches neither. But on his third day in his cell, they come for him again.
And then the fun begins.