igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
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Switching between the two sets of characters here leaves rather more of an unresolved cliffhanger at the end of the previous chapter than I'd realised!


Chapter 11: That Far Country

Dar watched the two offworlders in the shadowy light, wondering how much to tell them; how far he must betray his friend and that scarred, unhappy past. They’d given him a wild enough story of alien marvels, of teleport travel and miraculous escapes, and he was not entirely sure he believed it.

But whatever —whoever— they were, they would be new faces to Erik. They would have that moment’s precious advantage... and whatever tales they had heard, they were not in unthinking awe of the Ghost. They had not been terrorised, dominated and manipulated; they had not been moulded like the Organisation into an instrument aimed by Erik’s hand. And they had not seen Buquet’s body, broadcast one morning in all its splayed ragdoll ruin as a warning. As an object lesson, Erik had said blandly, when Dar, who’d had to deal with the Federation and the resulting enquiry, had dared to question the act.

The Ghost hadn’t been content to break Buquet’s neck. He’d broken practically every other bone in his body. Most of them, Dar thought, all too familiar with human debris, after death. Most of them.

No, Erik would not listen to any member of the Organisation who dared cross his will, and Dar knew better than to send any of his trusted men up there. They would not go; and if they did, he very much feared they would not come back. If he could have gone himself, he might have taken the chance. He had saved Erik’s life, once, and for all his friend’s increasing instability that memory had kept him safe in all their disagreements over the years. But with the Operation fully mobilised and the Ghost out of action, Dar Ogar could not be spared for the hours such a mission would take.

He looked again at the two in front of him: broadshouldered Gan, as tall as Erik and twice his weight, who moved with the calm restraint of a man who knew his own limits and looked for Blake to take the lead... and Blake, who spoke with conviction, and whose dark eyes in that mobile, heavy face were those of both an honest man and a passionate one. Blake had lost family in this cause of his; had perhaps lost friends to treachery or ill-judgment. He had not said so, but Dar had seen and judged enough men to mark the signs of it upon him. And Gan — Dar’s gaze narrowed — Gan, he thought, had become a follower not by choice alone but out of necessity. They had crippled something in him; Dar could not have said what, but he had seen that look in the eyes of others in his days on Procrus Three. He had seen it all too often in Erik, since.

If any two men on Newparis stood any chance of getting close to Erik in his present mood, it seemed to Dar that these two bore as much hope as most. And if they were to have that chance, then they deserved to know what they were dealing with. To give what pity they could find.

“I was head of Security on the planet Procrus Three,” he began simply. “We took... patients from the Federation justice system. Some of them were guilty; some of them... well, it was not for us to wonder. The labs did good business and we staff got paid, that was enough.”

He took a breath. “Erik — in case you had doubted it — was guilty. Blackmail, menaces, fraud... and then he turned his talents to accessing the credit transfer network. He cost the Federation a lot of money before they tracked him down, and three men died. He was a genius, and dangerous, even then.”

Proud, too; but they’d broken him. By the time Dar had first seen him, he’d been moaning human wreckage like the rest.

“Someone in the Justice Department decided abilities like that were too good to waste. They had him assigned to Procrus Three for conditioning and facial implant, to keep him stable and loyal. Would it surprise you at all to know that half the great minds of the Federation have been sourced from among the criminal elements, and kept in line with implants?”

Blake’s face echoed the cynical set of his own. Gan’s gaze was very steady, but he had gone pale. Dar tucked it away in a corner of his mind for future consideration.

“Erik’s surgery went well; our laboratories were among the best. The conditioning... did not.” He looked across at the other two again, judging his words. “He broke restraints and ripped out the implant with his bare hands. When they came to sedate him, he— he strangled the med-tech who treated him.”

It had not been so clean, or so quick, as that. But the agonised details of that death, at least, they did not need to know. Some of Erik’s crimes were beyond forgiveness. To anyone who had seen the handiwork of the labs, this one was not.

“It was then,” Dar said quietly, “that they broke his fingers.”

Gan was not the only one who had lost colour now. The grey sweat under Blake’s dark curls betrayed an all too vivid idea of what had gone unsaid.

“After that”—Dar shrugged—“it was a Security matter. I heard all this only at second-hand, you understand: some of it as briefings, some of it, a very little, from Erik himself later. When I first knew him, he was a reject case. One more prisoner in the MaxSec block, too dangerous to treat and too broken to be any use. They had the damage to his face and hands encased in some kind of quick-gel foam, and he couldn’t even feed himself. All he had left was the shreds of his mind... and the power of his voice.”

Blake made a quick movement, shadows shifting across his face as he drew breath, and Dar cut him off. “Not the Ghost’s voice — though I’ll admit there’s a power in that. No, he had no electronics then and no strength left to scheme. Most of the time, I think, he scarcely knew what he was saying. But I came to spend hours outside his cell, just talking to him. Trying to draw him out and put him back together... because in spite of all I’d heard, I had this idea from those broken scraps and murmurs that there was something in there worth rescuing. A soul in torment that had never thought as others had. A human being that just needed to learn how to be human again.”

He sighed. “Maybe I was wrong. I’ve wondered that, since. Maybe it was just a way to stick two fingers up at my job; I’d had a sickener of it by that time, and there was too much I couldn’t forget. Maybe he had me hypnotised without my knowing it. But I went back into the fire for him, that night the rebels came. And I’ve never regretted it.”

He supposed he must have known, at the back of his mind, that the Federation would make him their scapegoat for the raid. As Head of Security, it had been his role to protect the complex against outside break-ins... and never mind that the attack had come from off-planet, that the man who called himself Camelot had burned down a dozen military bases under Federation guard across the Second Quadrant, that they’d never tracked down the ship that had brought this Camelot and his group in. Dar Ogar’s career had been over the moment those hot flames had erupted from between the lab blocks, and he’d had nothing left to lose.

But none of that had registered with him at the time. He’d seen the firestorm leap the roof to the MaxSec block and screamed at Dayush, who’d been on duty there, to drop the force grids on the cells. When the man refused, he’d struck him down and used his gun to short out the overrides himself. And when the terrified, dangerous mob of escapees had come rushing out to join their erstwhile jailers in flight, he’d gone back into the inferno within for the sake of the one man whose grotesque, englobed head and hands he had not glimpsed among their number.

The one whose screams he had heard as the fire roared above them. Whose screams he still heard, at times, in his dreams.

“That foam they’d put on him was flammable.” His own voice caught and roughened at the memory. “By the time I got to him, he was pretty well alight. I put him on my back and ran, and the stuff melted and clung to us both. I’ve still got the scars... but not where you can see them. Erik— wasn’t so lucky.”

A sudden, violent exclamation from Blake. “The Camelot atrocity. I knew I’d heard of Procrus Three...”

He was looking haunted. “It was propaganda. We assumed it was Federation propaganda. To burn down a hospital block with patients trapped inside—”

“It happens,” Dar said grimly, remembering the history of the Operation. If Roj Blake was serious about fighting the power of the Civil Administration... he’d learn there was no black and white along that road. Only bloodstained grey. “And you’ll note it wasn’t quite a ‘hospital’, either.”

“He should have checked.” Blake’s ideals had been visibly jarred; Dar shrugged.

“As the Federation checked on Renport, two years later? The way they checked before the surface strike that took out Camelot and most of his following, and blew up a fuel processing plant into the bargain, choking six thousand civilians downwind? It didn’t kill off the resistance; Avalon escaped, and she’s been active for a long time now. But it certainly killed a lot of other people.”

In any game of scoring up atrocities, the Federation would win every time. Not because their commanders were inherently more ruthless than a Camelot — or a Ghost — but because they had infinitely more resources and more opportunity.

“It was the medic with Camelot’s group who saved Erik’s life,” he added quietly, forestalling Blake as the other tried to speak again. “By the time we got out, there wasn’t anyone else around... and the Federation would have had my head for a hydrogen tank by that point, even if I’d tried to buy my way back by turning Erik in. The medic couldn’t save his face, but she did what she could... and his own strength of will did the rest. I’d started off by pitying him; I ended up admiring him. He couldn’t bear anyone to look at him once the dressings came off, but he wouldn’t die and he wouldn’t give up. He fought his way back to functioning almost as well as he ever had, and he’d had more gifts than most to start off with. As for his mind...”

He sighed. “I was the closest thing to a friend I think he’d ever known... and it made a difference. He’d always manipulated people for whatever he wanted. In the months before we came to Newparis, I saw him learn and change. Begin to become the man he had the potential to be. When we set up the Operation together, I thought the Ghost would be a phase: a mask he’d come to live without once Erik could be accepted for who he was. But the more power and influence he gained as the Ghost, the further away that seemed.”

“And the rest is history?” Blake made that a query, and Dar nodded. He’d tried, with Erik. Perhaps to some degree he’d succeeded. He would never be able to tell.

“There’s something to be said for having a criminal genius on your side, I suppose,” Gan said reflectively, breaking the silence, and surprised an unexpected chuckle out of his companion.

“Right now I’d give a good deal to hear from our own private genius,” Blake commented with emphasis, fingering the bracelet he still wore on his arm in lieu of explanation. “But as I doubt Dar has spent time on this story for his own amusement, we’ve got a job to do...”

He looked back at Dar. “You want us to rescue Erik from Cris... or possibly Cris from Erik?”

If that was intended as levity, it was ill-judged indeed. Dar’s voice was cold. “I want that girl out of there before she destroys him. Or else before they destroy one another. If Erik can be made to see reason, so much the better. I can give you no support: I can only get you inside. After that, it’s your affair.”

“In other words, we’re on our own, and dispensable.” Blake’s level gaze met his own. “Well, that’s honest enough... We’ll do our best.”

In the hours that followed — after he’d handed over the detailed directions and the vital deactivators, and betrayed in that action the last shred of Erik’s trust — in the hours that followed, amid the violence of energy discharge and the grunts of dying men, Dar found himself coming back to those words again and again. Blake and Gan would do their best. He had to believe that.

For the sake of gentle Cris, who had always won friends... and for Erik, who had never known how.

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