Chapter 4
It was popularly claimed that Talosians "did not take prisoners." (That is, they didn't allow any enemy combatants to survive a battle.) This was probably untrue. The Federation did take prisoners – or would have, but for the Talosians' unflattering preference for suicide over capture. Thus, Kirk was greatly pleased when a skirmish finally yielded him seven prisoners, five crewmembers and two senior officers from the destroyed warship. They were a stiff lot.
"You realize," stated the most senior, "that we only permitted ourselves to be captured through the failure of our ship's self-destruct unit. You'll get nothing out of us. We don't deal with barbarians."
Other members of the crew were a better bet. Particularly the youngest, a slight, tremulous, unseasoned boy. His nerve had already been shattered by the long strain of service: his first separation from home, and that by thousands of parsecs; the nightmare rumors; the tension of waiting for battle and the terror of the battles themselves; and then, he had been injured during capture. It only took a few judicious hints, and a small sample, and he was writhing, hysterically tongue-tied, nearly psychotic. He talked; indeed, he babbled.
"We're not supposed to tell you anything, but they told us you were monsters, they said we had to die rather than be taken or we'd be tortured, we're not to talk, the leader said so, told me personally by radio, please don't hurt me anymore, please, I don't care what the leader wants any more, he can't have known what it's like to be shot at, to kill men – I didn't want to, we blew up a ship, I saw it crack open in space and bodies – please, I'm sorry, I didn't want to, nobody wants to except the leader, and please, it's not my fault, it's not my–"
As McCoy commented, "The war'll be over in no time. If they're sending children like that out to fight, they haven't just scraped the bottom of the barrel, they've overturned it."
The prisoner told them that all Talos-conquered planets had been turned into vast slave outfits, that the slave labor powered the war, that resistance was met by torture and incarceration in enormous prison camps. This confirmed persistent rumors – but then, it was after all pretty standard procedure. The boy added that, officially, such camps didn't exist, but he knew about them, having been involved in shipping groups of prisoners around on several planets before he was sent into active space service. He had guarded prisoners on Talos itself, on Corduban, Fresingjo, and on Vulcan.
But he couldn't tell Kirk anything about individual Vulcans. They all looked the same to him.
And at this point he began to cry violently; they couldn't get another word out of him. McCoy took him to Sickbay, daring anyone to lay so much as a finger on the poor kid. "Treating this thing like a soldier would be making a farce of the whole war," he said. Kirk, with a shrug, had to agree.
"You still call this an 'unjust' war?" he sarcastically asked McCoy.
"I suppose you think there's such a thing as a 'just' one?"