When the two soldiers emerged it was into the light of day. The night had passed and with it the storm. There was an almost painful clarity to the wasteland vista. Every cloud had been blown away by the shrieking winds and the sky was a brilliant blue. You never got to see blue skies anymore. Too much of a compositional change in the upper atmosphere but on rare occasions like this one you got to see what your grandfather had seen when he looked up into the sky. Both of them were transfixed. They stood in the fine ankle deep layer of silty dust the storm had left and stared.
The two of them were so overwhelmed that it was the better part of half an hour before Xia slowly ripped her eyes from the clear sky and lay an armored gauntlet on Mischa's shoulder. He started, an unusual occurrence for him as he was usually so hard to surprise and then shook the nostalgia from his features. "No use getting transfixed by beauty" he grumbled and with that brought his eyes almost angrily down to earth.
It was only a few short kilometers back to the entrance to the mole town and from there it was a mere hundred and twenty meters to the ruins were the militant caravan had concealed their vehicles and heavier equipment. The journey took most of the day for as physically short as the distance was, it was a long long way when you were ducking patrols and watchers. The Scrin seemed to have comprehended that its prey had escaped and had given up on total concealment. Luckily for the pair of them it had not abandon stealth altogether. The thralls that were on patrol stuck to the shadows and were not so great in number as to make evasion impossible.
Mischa took point. He moved with an awkward list but still he was silent as a ghost. When they found their way to the camo netting, and now, sand covered vehicles it was almost a shock to find that there wasn't even a posted guard. Mischa reeled at the implications. The guiding Scrin intelligence had shown itself to be no man's fool and yet here not half a click from the entrance to it's lair it had failed to secure an obvious resource. A resource placed here by men and women that it had under its complete dominion. He shared a look with his companion as the both of them came to the same conclusion.
"It can't read minds It can only control them!" Xia was nearly ecstatic with glee. She was most likely grinning behind those leering ruby optics. As it was the comms conveyed her enthusiasm well enough. "It never needed to be line of sight with me to give commands and it always seemed to be able to alter it's instructions in a moments notice, even when I was far away and alone. I always assumed that it could read my thoughts." There was a small glow of wonder in every word as she continued her musing. "Hmmm, so either it can see through the eyes of its thralls or it has some other method of getting real time status reports, but their might be some language barrier or something that prevents it from accessing memory. Or maybe it only has access to physical sense data and it never had any clue what was going on in my head!"
"Both are possible," came Mischa's soft response,"it also might be the case that it can read minds but it just takes more effort than it can sustain. This Scrin is already far more powerful than the GDI InOps and Black Eye dossiers suggests that it should be. Most mastermind class Scrin seemed to have trouble controlling more than a handful of people at the same time, no more than a dozen by all accounts and they had to be in close proximity too. This one has a couple hundred under its dominion and still has juice to spare."
"Don't be such a downer Meesh." Xia responded. "For all we know it can also kill you with its brain or see the future."
"But it's never shown those sorts of abilities" Mischa countered, "it has shown the ability to control minds."
"Yes, exactly! But it hasn't shown the ability to read them." she had a triumphant air to her. "You say this thing is canny. I agree with you. But I say that if it is as canny as we both think it is and it has shown itself to be then it would have put a priority on learning where a group of interlopers as obviously threatening as our convoy came from. But it had us for nearly three days and it didn't. It doesn't matter what manner of limitation prevented it from finding these things out, only that it is limited." She chuckled. "I think," she said smugly, "our chances just improved."
Mischa for his part said nothing.
It didn't take long to loot some key pieces of gear and pull the storm tarps and camo netting from one of the raider buggies. Most of the vehicles had been spared the full fury of the storm by a combination of luck, the tarps and a few key sheltering walls. There was still damage of course, that was unavoidable, but the thing was that given the condition of your average Raider vehicle it was hard to tell what damage was new and what damage was old. Militants would often joke that a raider could take a rail ionized sabot and still be driven. The joke generally stopped being funny when the motor pool gave you a sabot damaged buggy with only cosmetic repairs. When this happened the issuing quartermaster or salvage chief would often offer a bit of friendly advice to the proud new owners of a slightly used raider buggy. The phrasing would of course differ but the underlying message was always' make sure you wash it thoroughly, inside and out. And don't think too hard on anything you find.' The guys that still laughed after that were the sort you needed to keep an eye on. Either they were the true soldiers, harder than stone, or they were psychopaths.
An open topped raider buggy would have been slightly less than ideal when there was a class IV boiling off of sinister seven but under almost any other circumstance it was a great vehicle. It was one of the older models, mounting a heavy machine gun rather than one of those snazzy spitfire lasers but in many ways Mischa preferred the heavy thundering ballistic weapon to the more advanced energy weapon.
For one the simple fifty was far more reliable. Not in a straight up fashion as it was actually more likely to jam or foul what with all the moving parts, explosions, heat and powder, but it could be repaired by ignorance and vigorous beating. Laser weaponry on the other hand, well beating always worked it just took an advanced degree or two to know where and how. There was also a certain sad loss of firepower compared to the laser but the integrated fourty millimeter automatic grenade launcher did a lot to make up the difference. also there was also the fact that the tiberoid power core provided a nearly unlimited number of shots...
On second thought, Mischa realized that he didn't in fact prefer the old machine gun. It was noisy and smoky, cordite made him vaguely nauseous and it was always spitting hot brass that tended to find its way into collars and poorly secured waistbands.
The two of them made their preparations as quickly and as quietly as possible. Every spare bit of ammunition for every gun they had looted went into the open framed vehicle, every spare ration along with a heap helping of the more entertaining goodies that the militants had stashed. Chocolate, porn, some handheld devices that played interesting games and all manner of other useful stuff. You never knew when this sort of thing would be the difference between life and death.
No lies.
Mischa had once been spared a certain death by the timely albeit stereotypical production of one dirty magazine, a fifth of vodka and the promise of more to come. If he was being honest with himself Mischa would have admitted that he was simply being obsessive and giving into an old fear. Still part of what made this sort of compulsion powerful was the all too common failure of self examination and a stalwart refusal of the conscious mind in admitting it was being flogged by terror.
It was a harried hour of preparation before the moment of truth came and they put the precautions of the alien intelligence to the test. He was not of the mind to see what sort of afterlife Kane had set aside for him. If any. Still he was pretty certain that he knew the score and could make a successful break. Which in retrospect was terribly presumptive.
The colloquial term for a weaponized sonic device was a 'disruptor'. It was so named because it created a destructive resonance within the target, snapping molecular bonds and "disrupting" the physical integrity of the affected object. It was a common misconception that disruptors microwaved their targets. It was a forgivable mistake as the red hash that a human being was rendered into if subjected to a sonic resonance weapon certainly looked like a tomato left too long in the cooker. In reality the damage came as much from the formation of new exothermic bonds by the recently liberated atoms as it did from the excitation of water molecules.
Generally the damage that the weapon did wasn't truly comparable to the gold standard of destruction that was your average railgun. You could bark on about the varied advantages that the weaponized energy wave presented but in terms of straight up power it always came up short. There was an old saw about directed energy weapons. It basically said that any DEW worth firing would be more effective if you hooked a detonator to the power source and lobbed it at your target. There were exceptions. Nod had proven that with their obelisks even as early as the first war and then GDI had seconded the motion with their orbital ion cannons. Still, save for the ubiquitous laser technology that the brotherhood employed most of the time you were better off using small bits of metal to perforate your target than relying on an esoteric weapon.
Yet, despite the drop off in direct damage most GDI troopers loved disruptors. The why of it was simple enough. They killed. Unlike a rail sabot which might over penetrate or even fail to penetrate some bit of heavy cover a disruptor wave front flatly did not care. Many solid objects actually transmitted the wave faster than air and while sandbags might dampen some of the destructive harmonics they and other forms of reliable cover usually failed to ablate even a fraction of the killing power.
This was what made sonic weapons so fantastic. The degree to which it forgave mistakes was miraculous. It was the ultimate point and click weapon. With a disruptor in your hands there wasn't any cover on the field, only concealment. Even a glancing blow with the already large wave front of the disruptive pulse could reliably achieve an infantry kill. A disruptor would literally cause the affected tissue to explode. Scalding the victim with various ugly organic by products and causing gross irreparable trauma. What was better was the various degrees to which it ruined tiberium's day. This was originally the entire purpose of the devices, what they were developed for but to the average operator the fact that the weapon was even more effective against scrin biomechanoids was simply gravy.
All of this became highly relevant to Mischa and his travelling companion when two minutes and twelve seconds after he stomped on the accelerator of his newly acquired raider a blinding white pulse accompanied by a banshee howl cut straight through the engine block of his vehicle. It took two point three seconds for the entire superstructure of the vehicle to come to the realization that the disruptor pulse had rendered it insolvent and collapse into a tangle of rebar. In that scant time five distinct thoughts occurred to Mischa.
First, 'Wow, that was a good shot', near as he could surmise the pulse had come from a pitiful collection of scrub bush nearly four hundred meters to the north west. He had been travelling at close to a hundred and fifty at an oblique angle. Once he accounted for the angular deflection he realized that whoever had made the shot had hit a target less than half a meter in size more than a hundred meters beyond the manufacturer's recommended maximum range. A single degree of error would have put the pulse through his pelvis or made it a clean miss.
Second, 'I guess those raiders didn't buy my line of bullshit.' The only rational reason why a sonic weapon was being used on his vehicle was that the Zone Raider company had, despite all indications otherwise, ignored his deception and circled back around to entrap either he himself or his suspected companions. He wondered whether they had picked him out in the driver's seat of the buggy and decided to have a little chat or if they would have extended this courtesy to any Noddie.
Third, 'The buggy's communication gear is most likely trashed but my suit has a laser comm relay that might do the trick. Xia probably doesn't know the sequence yet so I am going to have to walk her through it.' This thought was rather self explanatory. The pony tower that Mischa was hoping to put an SOS on was only ten or so clicks away. It was positioned in a little crag of the geography on top of a hill and if he could only get a few moments of free time and another half a click to the northwest he could get his message off.
Fourth,'I am about to be in a hundred and fifty kph roll over and I am not wearing a seatbelt' A barrage of statistics flooded his mind, unsecured vs secured, roll over vs head on, under a hundred vs over a hundred. He kept trying to apply these numbers to himself. For a normal human being the odds of surviving were essentially a crapshoot, would he be lucky? Was he in danger at all? Xia had his armor. He reckoned that should keep her safe. For himself he hoped that he wasn't going to break anything. Again.
Fifth, 'Fuck'.
It was all chaos and screaming metal after that. Mischa did his level best to keep his head between his legs but it was a losing battle. Stars flared in his vision as his head thumped into the rollbar, the steering wheel and then the roll bar again. He tasted blood and felt pain.
When the movement had stopped he saw sky. There was movement, Xia's enormous black boot trying to find purchase on something.
He was moving too.
His left hand was grabbing at one of the satchels, his right hand was trying to haul his body from the crushed vehicle. His legs hurt but they were moving and he didn't feel bones grinding within them. Thank Kane that nothing new was broken down south. This was good, he would have hated to undo the good surgical work that Xia had done.
It hurt to breath so he hadn't gotten off scot free. His rib cage was in tatters. He could count at least five cracked ribs and two that he was certain were quite well and broken. That was sad. He had had quite enough with all the broken bones today but he supposed that it wasn't his call.
There was the stuttering sound of jump jets flaring followed by the heavy thud of the entire zone raider contingent landing in quick succession. Well almost the entire contingent, as near as he could discern. His amped up senses had picked out nine distinct landings, which left three of the crew unaccounted for.
His left hand found what it was looking for and it was at this time that he realized just how desperate he was. He had a plan it appeared, the sort of plan that he had a sinking feeling would appeal to Xia and her abiding deathwish.
His right hand was having a good bit less success. The twisted metal of the crashed buggy had contrived to wrap itself around his pelvis in such away that he couldn't free himself. He was pinned, at least for the next few minutes, which given the rapid clomp of approaching GDI boots was essentially all the time he had in the world.
A sudden wracking paralysis gripped his damaged chest. Pain flared and he convulsed like a man stricken with a shaking palsy. A coarse braying wheeze filled the air and it was only after a long moment that Mischa realized he was laughing. There was a wild and despairing edge to it and for some reason he just couldn't reign it in. He was still laughing when heavy gauntlets reached into the vehicle and began tearing it apart.
It was a tense moment for everyone involved, at least that was what Mischa hoped. In truth he didn't know if it was in fact tense as he still for the life of him couldn't get a reading on that fucking corpse white major. She was just staring at him, head tilted like a giant bird of prey regarding the futile struggles of a wounded rabbit. There was tension in rivers running through the rest of the Zone Raider company. Every single one of them was quivering with a nervous combat energy that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite blood lust but had elements of both. There were exceptions of course.
The two lance captains, pretty boy and iron hair were both at their ease, weapons resting at a relaxed couple of degrees from full aim. There was a readiness to them that suggested they felt the mood though. The Major, on the other hand had the manner of a youth lazing on some street corner, all splayed limbs and idle arrogance.
Mischa for his own part was attempting to keep his bravado up but every time his eyes took in the surroundings that effort became a little harder. How could he not be nervous? Taja would have been sorely disappointed in her son but he couldn't always live up to her standards. Breath control didn't always cover it. He was the target of enough firepower to pulp him some fifty five times over. He was still partially trapped by the mangled remains of his only form of conveyance. His only ally was reduced to a bumbling incompetent by his own machinations and furthermore shared both his trapped status and abundance of targeted firepower. His single advantage, the one reason he wasn't already dead, was seventy five kilos of high velocity explosives wrapped in eighty kilos of nails that he was currently hugging tight to his chest. He was doing his best to keep the enormous bomb between him and the majority of the Zone Raiders fire power but there was just so much of it that the task was proving to be difficult.
When he and Xia had been collecting up the various trinkets from the combined supplies of the caravan Mischa had made a beeline for the explosives. His half baked plan to get the raiders to spare their lives long enough for negotiation to take place had been premised around making a giant bomb and then threatening everyone with horrible explosive death.
Truthfully there wasn't nearly enough to make good on the threat.
Yes the bomb was big. Fatally big for regular infantry and certainly fatal for his own unarmored, ground zero sitting, self. But the raiders were protected like all get out. Zone armor, even the lighter raider variant was effectively immune to small arms. Not resistant or even bullet proof. Flatout immune. Sure you could get lucky. Breech the visor. Pop a fragment into some obscure bullet trap. Pit a really hefty calibre against a soft joint or something like that. That meant that even at close range all the shrapnel that he was counting on delivering the lethality of the explosion would be greatly reduced in its effectiveness.
It was a bluff. If their convoy had been lugging around tiberium cored rockets or some of the nastier liquid tiberium demo charges then they would have had a bomb that was capable of killing everyone in the immediate area. A bomb that was worthy of the name. But he didn't, he had a serviceable but probably impotent weapon. He was counting on the possibility of the weapon being tiberoid to stay the hand of his would be killers.
As soon as those heavy hands had begun to tear away at his prison he had started yelling that he had a bomb, that he didn't want to fight, that he wasn't scared to die but he certainly wasn't in any hurry to greet the reaper. The two Zone Raiders who had been ripping his vehicle apart had frozen and then made as if to retreat. Mischa had needed the hostages so he had put the kibosh on that. Yelling that if they made any move to run he would blow them all to kingdom come.
So that brought them to now. He had two of the Raider contingent sitting on the remnants of a tire ripped from his buggy during the crash, nervously eying the weapons that he had coerced them into tossing on the ground, he had six raiders in an enfilading crescent he had three unaccounted for and he had the Major sitting on a rocky outcrop maybe twenty meters off. Xia was behind him working her feet loose. She had been standing in the gunners cupola and the shin straps had prevented her from being flung from the vehicle as it crashed but now the warped buckles refused to open.
"Your plan seems to be a little bit on the lacking side." The major had cracked her helmet and that brittle monotone of hers carried easily. "I know you don't want to die, I can see the trepidation painted on your eyes. I can almost smell your cowardice." She crinkled her nose, causing the scar flesh to stretch awkwardly. "A foul stench at that."
"It's the only plan I could come up with in the short amount of time that your sharpshooter gave me." Mischa shouted the retort. He didn't have an officers vocal cords. Even with the major's conversational tones she had an ability to project that he couldn't match.
"I suppose that your options were somewhat on the limited side. Constrained as it were." She reached into a pouch slung across her breastplate and withdrew a crumpled cigarette. She lit it with an old fashioned match fished out of another nook in her armor. She took along draw and then shook the match out before tossing it aside. "Tiberium, all these storms, dries the soil out." she waved a hand to take in the scrub." Even before the blight Texas was vulnerable to wildfire. Wouldn't do to start a blaze by accident."
"Fucking fascinating!" Mischa tried and failed to keep the worry and irritation out of his voice. "How is this relevant to our current impasse?"
The major didn't seem to hear him, or at least did a killer impression of failing to hear. She pulled a second match from her bandolier and spent a long moment contemplating it. Her dead eyes held the all weather match, examining its rough facets.
"Mr. Teller, Mr. Wollinski." The two Raiders sitting on the tire trying not make a dive for their guns stiffened and reoriented on the Major. They didn't open their visors but they responded out loud instead of using the comms net.
"Yes ma'am?" They shouted.
"Officially we are not at war with the Brotherhood of that not correct? Officially a ceasefire was declared following the end of the Third War and while no binding treaty has been signed it has been the understanding of both sides that any spark could reignite old hostilities. The brotherhood hasn't the leadership to stop all of its more fanatic elements but there hasn't been a serious military movements by the Black Hand in what? Three years?" Both of the soldiers nodded in assent and one of them spoke up.
"Last real activity was that strike on the Rockies base right?" A chorus of nods ran through the major turned her gaze back on Mischa and his skin crawled. "We can assume that the name you gave me last time was a falsehood. A fabrication. A ruse." There was a pause where in a normal human being Mischa would have expected a smile. Instead there was a flare of pure rage that crinkled the major's brow. There and gone between one heartbeat and the next. "So… liar… what is your 'real' name?"
Mischa almost didn't answer. He was strangely offended by being called a liar. It was just so… out of proportion with all the bad things that he had done in his life. If the major had called him an inhuman murdering deviant it would have been so much water off of the proverbial duck's back. But being called a liar?
Still a suspicious voice in the back of his mind that sounded strangely like Taja whispered that losing his cool was just what the cold major wanted from him. So he focused on his breath and spoke, or rather shouted, evenly.
"Mischa Summers was what my parents called me but I am just plain Mischa to most everyone else." Unfortunately he could still hear some pique in his voice."What about you? Who do I have the pleasure of addressing."
"You have the pleasure of addressing Major Wilhelmina Wednesday of the Seventh Zone Operations Group. Special Tasks Directorate, on detached duty. Commanding officer of the two hundred seventy first raider company, colloquially known as Odin's Murder." Her head rolled in the recesses of her armor and the crick crackle of her cervical vertebrae was disturbingly audible. "My men call me Major Wednesday. When they think I can't hear them they call me 'corpse eye'. My captains and the few who earn my respect call me 'Will'. My commanding officers prefer not to let my name touch their lips but when they do I am usually referred to as 'that stone cold bitch from ZOG 7'. My husband calls me Mina and the few enemies I have call me 'ruthless," She paused and struck the match on the side of her jaw, scoring an angry red line in her pallid skin "and I..." she contemplated the flame for a bare handful of heartbeats and then threw the match into a cluster of dry sage. She turned as the first crackles of flame started to echo in the stillness following the storm."...don't give a fuck."
"Oh" was the best that Mischa could manage. He wanted to add a 'shit' to the end of that but the small part of him that wasn't scared spitless of this psychotic whore was telling the rest of him that showing weakness to this one was like exposing his belly to a wolf. He tested and discarded a large selection of possible responses. Ran the odds and found that he couldn't for the life of him come up with something clever to say. That gaze dried him up. He couldn't hide from the endless rage that was bottled up behind those pale eyes. He felt guilt too. He knew that in some indirect manner he had participated in the forging of the monster that now was poised to devour him.
"So," said Major Wednesday "how are we to settle this impasse. I desperately want to torture then kill you and have little to no regard for the possible consequences thereof. Still given a robust set of options I want to preserve the lives of my men and that little nail bomb of yours is not conducive to that goal. Or rather it is conducive to one of my goals but not the other. You on the other hand have only one goal, you want to live, and perhaps you want the life of your black hand compatriot spared as well. The thing is that I just don't see how you are going to accomplish that. I have destroyed your only means of conveyance and even if you get out of this current situation you are still on foot and I will be free to hunt you down like the foul cur that you are.
"Thing is," she continued, "I would give both Teller and Wollinski even odds of living through your little nail bomb. See, one of the handy little doodads that Mr Garcia over there is toting is a tiberium resonance scanner. Dandy little device, brand new prototype, another innovation courtesy of the Scrin. InOps says that your amoral science arm is developing something similar.
"All classified info by the way. Still what is a little courtesy to a man who is going to die." She inhaled deeply sucking smoke from the now almost stubbed cigarette and let that raging gaze wander. "Here is the funny thing, Mr. Garcia tells me that he is picking up more tiberium in your black guts than he is in that bomb." She gave a theatrical shrug" Now me, I don't trust any device that hasn't been in service at least a decade, so I take that with a grain of salt. Who knows if it can even detect that shit in solution."
The major abruptly stood. Let the stubby remains of her smoke fall to the dusty soil. She then ground it down with an armored heel ignoring the growing flames in the sage behind her. She picked up her heavy scram rail, checked its chamber and then shouldered it, bringing the enormous weapon to bear on Mischa. When she spoke there was a sense of something crumbling, a barrier slowly eroding. Her dead eyes gained some semblance of life and as bad as her creepy emotional deadness was this was worse.
"Thing is scum, I have a talent. A gift. An affinity if you will."
Her teeth peeled slowly back, a snarl that seemed to be only a faint reflection of the bottomless hate that burned behind her crow marked visage. She wasn't feeling anything new, this was the same hate that Mischa had seen before in the wastes. He had a sure knowledge that this was who she was all the time, day and night. Only now, her control was slipping, or she was letting it slip. The blood thirst that she kept harnessed day in and day out was now being freed to hunt. In some ways it had been the control that Mischa had feared. There was simply a terrible power in a will that could keep such animosity bottled up. Now that this anger was being loosed Mischa could feel some small measure of relief that she was not in fact super human. Relief matched by a new dread. Before he could trust her to play according to the rules of logic. Now she was casting off moorings, setting sail on a sea of vengeance where logic was merely a captains fancy. A futile struggle against wind and currents.
She continued, her voice now laced with a hissing malice.
"I can't be deceived. I knew you were lying before. Even if I wasn't sure about what, and I know you are lying now. I saw your hope crumble when I called your bluff and now there is nothing keeping me from reaming out your skull with a sabot. "The bore of her weapon now flawlessly tracked a spot a few centimeters to the left of Mischa's nose. When he moved his head her aim matched him.
"We all have talents Major, I for one am a film historian" Xia spoke. The major's eyes flew to her and Mischa saw a shudder, a barely suppressed urge to pull the trigger coursing through her body.
"It speaks!" the words might as well have been a snarl.
"I do," Xia responded, "on special occasions and for friends."
It fascinated Mischa that she was so calm. Her voice so empty of the fear that he felt. He wondered if it was the ignorance that shielded her from the dread he felt. It galled his pride to think that this woman whom he had been certain was his patent inferior might have a genuine advantage over him so he consoled himself with that line of thought. Imagined that she couldn't penetrate the blank mask of the major and see the demon.
"There is an interesting dichotomy." The major's voice trembled on the edge of hysteria, there was a fevered light that gleamed in those mad eyes. "Do you imagine that I am your friend? Or is this one of those rare special occasions? A holiday perhaps. Some noddist christmas or easter. Kanemas maybe? A time perhaps for all the little children to look under the riparius tree and unwrap little chocolate scorpions? Or mayhaps you realize that this is the most momentous time of your worthless and ultimately futile existance. The day of your blessed release from the mortal prison that holds you. Your swift exit stage left from this dreadful farce called life. The day I fucking kill you and piss on your corpse."
In response Xia worked a fat thumb into the release catch for her helm and worked the heavy crown free. Mischa was frankly shocked. He hadn't expected the fine motor control needed to unlatch the suit for at least a few days of living in it. He had shown her how of course, but it required a special set of movements to key the lock. Almost a code really. A tactile encryption. It was a simple precaution against hostile parties removing the suit from an incapacitated brother. The wrong sequence would trigger some rather toxic retaliations. Some aimed at aggressors, others aimed at thieves that would seek to wear that which they had no right to. A true brother, or sister had immunity to that particular venom, it wouldn't do to have your own knife turned against you, but Xia was no true sister. She was wearing borrowed armor. A clumsy mistake could kill her as surely as that scram rail. And yet, she made no mistakes. Her midnight hair spilled free and her blast scarred face came bare to the world.
"You need the Scrin abomination alive more than you need us dead." There was no hint of mockery in her voice or features and yet there was a taunting aspect to the challenge. "We have some small advantage, that, if you spare us, could be leveraged to your benefit. I am not going to lie and say that we have the key to defeating it in our back pocket but we escaped the creature and we know its lair. We know its location and while you can probably figure that out on your own we can give you layout and defenses. We can give you back doors it may flee through and we can give you force composition." Xia swept her hands outward and showed her wrists in a gesture of openness and honesty. "And if it makes a difference I am no sister in the Black Hand, the armor is borrowed."
The major didn't let her aim on Mischa's head waver for an instant. She didn't even let her eyes wander, instead they shifted ever so slightly so that you got the impression that she was keeping Xia in the furthest reaches of her peripheral vision. Mischa was confident that were he not imprisoned in the wreckage of the desert vehicle he could have exploited even this small lessening of focus. He wasn't sure how, but he was certain that it was possible. Trapped as he was there was absolutely nothing for him to do but hope that Xia managed to touch some of their foe's residual sanity. Get her rational controls working again. That was the best case scenario. Retrieve the stone cold bitch. He had no hope that she could awaken any compassion or mercy.
The funny thing, for a certain warped value of funny, was that Mischa had become fairly certain that despite all indications to the contrary the Major was in fact quite compassionate and was simply not acting on the impulse. No one could read another human being that astutely unless they had a phenomenal capacity for empathy. He supposed that it was theoretically possible that you could achieve the same results using only close observation and extrapolation but it just didn't strike him as reasonable. He was willing to wager that she probably empathized a great deal. It was just that, as she had so succinctly pointed out, she 'didn't give a fuck'. This was a thing that hadn't been born, it had been forged. Pieced together one twisted part at a time.
A poisoned dragon
Faintly remembered words from his childhood came drifting in from the nethers of his mind. A great and divine beast rotted from within by some monstrous corruption.
Major Wednesday licked her lips and Mischa almost collapsed with relief. It wasn't the lick of predatory anticipation. It was the lick of uncertainty and boy did Mischa just love being a part of a species that assigned multiple meanings to a lick of the lips.
"Assuming that I believe that you possess anything that is worth knowing or having, what is to stop me from simply ripping the information from you." her eyes narrowed "One of the more entertaining side effects of being a living lie detector is that I am a phenomenally effective torturer. Artist of pain, sine qua non. I would be more than willing to spend a little quality time with both of you, see what sort of tune you sing after I have pulled all your toenails out and inscribed a few declensions to Kane in your ribs."
Mischa swung his eyes to Xia and watched for her reaction. True to her stories there was nothing but a stoic determination in her features. It seemed that her spine was in fact quite solid when it was only the prospect of pain. If the major truly was a living lie detector as she so claimed it brought up some fascinating questions. According to Xia she was fearless until her tormentors actually put the knife to her skin. Did that mean Wednesday could only see when you were lying to her? Or could she also see the lies that you told yourself? He could attest that whatever system of discernment that she used it was good. He had always considered his ability to fabricate almost flawless and despite that she had sliced through his deceptions and come to a rightful suspicion.
"I never had my toenails pulled out, but I suppose it isn't that different from, having your fingernails ripped out or having bamboo shoots shoved under your toenails, which are both things that I am quite familiar with." she grimaced. "I can't say that I am all that interested in getting reacquainted with that sort of pain. In fact I would go so far as to say that I would rather die." Xia sighed roughly and gave her head a worried shake.
"Yeah," she said, "I would definitely rather die and chances are that you won't be able to stop me. I can't speak for Micha but somehow I don't think that you can coerce him with pain. Not much more than a few hours ago I did some clumsy amateur surgery on him, without any anesthetics, painkillers or even a stiff drink and he didn't even break a sweat. So between the two of us I will gladly die and he won't care what sort of horrors you can visit." Xia smiled a soft and only slightly mocking smile.
She continued.
"Furthermore we have good motivation to aid you and more resources than simple information to put at your disposal. Micha, in addition to being quite proof against pain, and a superb marksman, is immune to the abomination's mind control."
"Really?" hissed the Major, in tones that suggested she believed none of it. Which, really, Mischa thought was a bit unfair. If she truly was the flawless lie detector that she claimed to be then shouldn't she be able to divine the truth of Xia's statements? The most likely explanations were that she was trying some ploy or another, or she believed that they believed but not that it was true.
There was a lengthy silence, in which everyone save the Major held their breath. She sat there, rifle drooping ever so slightly below a firing ready, lips writhing like there was some foul flavor that coated her tongue, something she just couldn't spit out. Her eyes flickered from left to right, focusing on things near and far, evaluating, remembering, gauging. Finally those eyes stopped dead on Mischa's face and a fatal smirk appeared on her lips, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. The eyes were cold, the corpse mask was back and the genie of wrath was back in the bottle.
"A chance is all that you get." She spoke slowly. Each word a dull lusterless stone. "In exchange for everything you have, everything you can give and everything you can do I will give you the chance to die on your feet. I will give you a sportsmans chance. Freedom from corporeal binding and a small head start. Then I will hunt you down and kill you."
"Do not mistake this for mercy or even respect. This is the absolute limits of my willingness to collaborate with Nod. I will give you the dignity of the dogs that you most certainly are. When I have found and killed you, I will tear the tongues and eyes from your skulls and string them onto my charm bracelet. Then I will leave your corpses for the vultures"
The dead monotone was nearly complete, each word more hollow and empty than the last, even as her thoughts sank further and further into the hateful depths.
"If you fail to provide me with any meaningful help I will reserve the right to kill you by inches. I have not fed a scorpion her own uterus in a long time but I bet you that after ten hours under my tender ministrations I could have you begging for your own flesh. And if you decide to end it all before I get to truly show you the meaning of violation and pain, well I will take immense pleasure in sending you to a coward's grave."
"As for you liar" Her tongue slid slowly along the inside of her mouth, pushing the pale skin into obscene shapes. "I will find you limits"