The jolt woke him: unbearable pain lancing up his calf into his thigh and searing through dark dreams.
He was scrambling blindly away to escape from it even before his eyes opened, but he came up short against the hard wall of the cell's far corner.
A desperate glance around showed him that he and his now four armoured captors were alone in the foul little room. Hoshi. What the fuck had the other three done with Hoshi?
The pain was from an iron device fastened around his left ankle. Its outer surface seemed to be completely smooth, but the inside was clearly capable of inflicting awful pain somehow. He wouldn't have been surprised to see blood leaking from beneath it, but there was nothing – presumably the device connected somehow with his nervous system, though the sensation had been more like having a thousand red-hot knives thrust into his leg.
His next discovery was that he had a collar around his neck. It felt like leather, and was attached to the thin metal chain whose other end one of the guards was holding. It had been left loose enough to allow him to run himself into the wall in the agony of his awakening (presumably this was felt to be amusing), but as soon as his swimming head cleared, the leash began to be hauled in. He set his hand to the chain and dug his feet into the straw in the effort to resist, but the reward for that was predictable: another blast of pain up his leg, this one so hard that he had to grit his teeth together to stop himself from crying out.
The drag on the chain didn't let up. Nor did it seem likely he'd have been able to resist it effectively even if he hadn't felt as though his whole left leg was being incinerated; the guards must be immensely strong, for the one who was dragging him hardly seemed to be exerting any effort. He was hauled across the cell, too mad with pain to be able to stand up and go obediently where he was wanted.
When they got him into the corridor the pain subsided; the control (wherever it was, for he could see nothing that corresponded to a hand-held device) had presumably been switched off again. The collar and leash hauled him unceremoniously to his feet, where he found that the four guards who now surrounded him were at least half a metre taller than he and intimidating in the extreme, even if he hadn't been now obliged to rest half of his weight on a leg that was trembling and tingling with shock.
He'd been hoping against hope that whoever came for him and Hoshi would be people to whose reason he could appeal, but as soon as he'd seen them he'd known that hope was almost certainly in vain. Two other prisoners had been dragged away to a fate unknown, and now they were coming for a third; his duty had been clear. If they wouldn't listen to him, he had to try to create a chance for Hoshi to escape.
Well. That had been the idea. In the event, he hadn't even got to the end of his request to be allowed to explain who he and Hoshi were. He could remember some violent sensation of shock – presumably he'd been hit with some kind of a stun weapon, for he remembered nothing afterwards. At a guess, they could have used it on Hoshi too.
"We are innocent," he said now as steadily as he could, controlling his dread that they might have no translation device; perhaps now they had him secured they might be willing to listen to him. "We are officers from the Starfleet ship Enterprise. We have not committed a crime. Please let me speak to someone in authority."
They might have understood him, or they might not have; the results were the same. There was certainly no indication that if they did understand him, they gave a damn. A hard jerk on the chain propelled him along the corridor, glimpsing from the corner of his vision the other cells they passed, most of which were occupied by beings of assorted shapes and sizes – all, apparently, in pairs.
Pairs... there had to be some significance in that, and it was unlikely to be a good one. Half of his pair was missing, and he could only hope desperately that she might somehow have been able to escape. Logic as well as selflessness insisted that her escape was the best option for both of them. If she'd managed to get free, she might be able to hide herself until she could find some way to contact Enterprise. She was the best comm. officer in the Fleet; she was resourceful, she was smart, and if anyone could do it, she could. Maybe he was out of options, but it would be so much easier to endure whatever was to come stoically if only he could be sure she was safe and free, and maybe – just maybe – she might be able to summon help that might come for him in time.
The outside world impinged briefly on his consciousness before another door swallowed him and a seemingly endless series of noisome dark corridors bewildered him. He tried to keep count of the turns, but his head was aching from where it had struck the wall of the cell, his mouth was parched with thirst and he felt more than a little sick. Every now and then the fluttering smoky flames of a torch driven into a bracket on the wall lent some illumination to the world, but either his guards had artificial vision aids of some kind in their helmets or they had night vision that was many times more efficient than that of a human.
Suddenly the background smell intensified, and sounds from the doors on either side suggested that these were animal pens. Below one torch a large pail sat, and the sullen flicker from above gleamed on the liquid surface within.
Water!
It might not be water at all, of course, and even if it was it might be contaminated with all sorts of anything. It could even be a piss-bucket. But right now he couldn't afford to be choosy about his chances.
He'd been stumbling along with his head bowed, trying to give the best impression he could of being thoroughly cowed and hopeless. But as he drew level with the pail, he suddenly lunged sideways towards it.
The four guards were far too bulky for him to actually knock any of them aside, but he managed to create enough of a space to allow him to slip through. He had his neck braced to absorb the jerk of the collar, and it was probably surprise that dragged some of the chain loose – enough, at least, to let him reach the pail. And thanks be to whichever saint was the patron of beleaguered armoury officers, the smell told him it was water. Stale and warm as it might be, it was water.
It was utterly inevitable that the punishment came even as he plunged his face into it. He knew he'd have a couple of seconds at best, he had no time to taste it first; he just gulped it down, so thirsty that it tasted like nectar. Then, even as the fire roared up his leg, he dropped his weight deliberately on the rim of the wood so that it tipped over, sending the liquid flooding across the flagstones. He got drenched himself of course, but at least there would be no opportunity now of anyone getting the bright idea of trying to drown him in the pail by way of a reward for his illicit drink.
It seemed that the guards were displeased – either by his initiative, or by getting their feet wet, or possibly both or neither. The pain intensity this time was worse than either of the previous times, and he flailed like a landed salmon, unable to bite back the sounds that issued between his gritted teeth. His instinct was to grab at his tormented leg, trying to somehow push or tear the device off it, but if he did the sensations transferred themselves through his hands into his arms, so he very quickly learned not to try.
He did not know how long the punishment lasted. It felt like a very long time indeed, but at last the red hot knives were withdrawn, and the collar and leash hauled him choking back to his feet.
This time he didn't have to feign difficulty walking. He had a knee that felt as if the inside of it had melted and muscles that felt like cooked spaghetti. A couple of times during the first few paces the knee gave way altogether, and he would have pitched forward but for the jerk of the collar. It seemed that the bastard holding the end of the chain was well aware how bad the effects of the punishment would be, for now he held it aloft, providing a support of sorts so that the prisoner could clutch the chain with both hands and steady his leg under him somehow, stopping himself from falling headlong. Whether this was because they didn't want him to injure himself any further for some reason, or because they didn't want to waste time dragging him up off the floor again, was debatable.
Fortunately the sensations once again wore off relatively quickly. By the time they stopped in front of a large wooden door, he could once again fix all his concentration of the muffled wall of noise behind it – a sound that made his stomach contract with dread.
Shards of light coming through cracks in the wood illuminated his surroundings well enough to let him see that there were racks on the wall on either side where what looked like javelins leaned. They were old and pitted with use, and not one of them was straight enough to be any use whatsoever as a missile. Even the points were effectively blunt – if he could have shot one out of the ship's forward torpedo tube at an extremely large marshmallow at virtually point-blank range it might have achieved something, but as hand-held weapons they were a joke. From a distance they might look good, but the truth was, they were about as much use as a box of bloody toothpicks.
A voice was bellowing outside. He understood none of the words, but he knew well enough the sound of a crowd being whipped up. Sweat broke on his palms.
There was no apparent communication between any of the guards; maybe they'd done this so often it was just a well rehearsed routine, or maybe they had some internal means of talking to one another. Two of them stepped forward, lifted the heavy bar that held the door closed, and thrust it open, letting in a wash of dazzling light that fairly blinded him. In the same moment, the third selected a javelin – presumably the nearest to hand – and cast it out into the glare. The fourth, now behind him, deftly clicked off the fastening that anchored the chain to his collar and gave him a shove between the shoulder-blades even as the ones who'd opened the door grabbed his arms and fairly propelled him out through the doorway, so hard it was all he could do not to fall flat on his face.
Even as he scrambled desperately not to pitch headlong on the soft sand, the roar from above and all around him rose like the baying of wild animals. Squinting, he saw the javelin skittering to a halt a couple of metres away from him, and he lunged for it, snatching it up even as he straightened and turned, forcing his eyes to open and function even as he blinked away tears caused by the terrible brightness of his surroundings.
The stone walls were almost white in colour, like the sand underfoot, throwing back the lights that were ranged behind the seating and focussed onto the arena below. Artificial lights – this was no pre-industrial civilisation, however they aped the brutality of the ancient world for their amusement. The device on his leg had already told him so, but now it was amply confirmed.
The arena was perhaps fifty metres across, and open to the sky, which was cloudless and fading towards dusk. The space was roughly circular, but at intervals buttresses stood forward, presumably to add a little extra feature to the stage on which life and death struggles were acted out for the amusement of the mob. For that was what he already knew this was: the survival of the fittest in its cruellest form.
For a couple of seconds, as his sight adjusted, he dared to hope that he was alone in it. But as his vision cleared, he saw her, and his heart turned over and went into freefall.
Using the base of the javelin for support for the first few paces, though feeling and use were well on the way to returning, he stumbled over to her. "Hoshi!" No time for the absurdities of 'Ensign' now, not with the front of her body an obscenity of drying blood that was stark against the whiteness of the wall. "What have they done to you?"
"Malcolm!" He couldn't blame her for the piteous little gasp of fear and relief as he reached her and propped the javelin against the wall while he began trying to tear at the masses of knots that held her to the post there. "I thought you were dead!"
"Grossly exaggerated rumours," he said as he cursed inwardly; the ropes were like bloody hawsers, resisting all his efforts to pry them loose – perhaps he'd have better luck trying to pry a way through with the point of the javelin? "Have they hurt you?"
"I'm okay, but we've got to get out of here, we've– MALCOLM!"
Her scream was almost drowned in the howl of glee from above.