Stormblood, стр. 35

I was being held in a server room. Humming mainframes and cabinets lined the membrane-patterned walls. Ribbed cables fed into the dermis of crackling substrates beneath me and the stink of supercooling fluids hung heavy in the air. A winking red terminal connected to the cradle caught my eye, but when I tried to lean in for a better look the restraints crisscrossing my chest pushed back, holding me tighter. My comms were dead, like my suit, access to the net cut off. No, I wasn’t going anywhere.

I don’t know how many hours they left me strapped there, but it was long enough for my arse to turn to rock before the door crashed open and my two least favourite people in the world strolled in. Lasky had a lanyard draped around his neck, a keycard at the end.

‘Comfortable?’ He rapped my armoured shoulder, as if it might echo. To me, it felt like he was touching my flesh. ‘You better be. These cradles are built to take damage.’ He held up the keycard around his neck. ‘Only way you’re getting free is with one of these.’

Hideko rolled her eyes. ‘Just tell us who sent you, we can go from there.’ She unwrapped another stick of gum and slid it into her mouth. ‘No need to die for people who don’t give a toss about you.’

Me and Harmony didn’t see eye to eye, no. But they weren’t my enemies, either. Whatever their broader motives were, they wanted to stop stormtech spreading on the streets, stop more people from dying, stop it from becoming a destructive, franchised drug. Hard to argue with that. Made them the lesser of a million other evils in my book.

These people didn’t know I was onto them, or that Artyom had been my way in. Had to keep it that way. Vital battlefield intel isn’t always about what you know. It’s about what the enemy doesn’t know.

Lasky made a little choking laugh that sounded like someone trying to give birth to a tractor. ‘We’ve got time.’ He clutched my shoulders as the stormtech leaked through the cracks in my common sense. ‘You don’t. I wonder, how many days can we leave you sitting here without food and water? Without sleep?’

I said, very quietly and very calmly, ‘Listen here, you stinking sack of stupid, you touch me again and I’ll break your hand.’

Lasky smiled. Then slammed a wrench into the side of my helmet – once, twice, three times – square on my ear. I choked on my own breath as white-hot pain went rattling through my skull.

‘I’m sorry,’ the little sociopath said, ‘what did you say?’

‘Just tell us who you are.’ Hideko sounded bored to tears. ‘It’ll make all our lives easier.’

But the stormtech was whiplashing me into a frenzy and I wasn’t about to cave now. ‘Go rot in hell, you insufferable waste of oxygen,’ I snapped, breath burning in my throat.

‘This is pointless,’ Hideko sighed, twisting her gum wrapper.

‘Then we use the nightware.’ Lasky stooped down next to me with a smile I really didn’t like. ‘Torturing another human is draining stuff, you know. There’s the screaming. The long hours. The broken bits everywhere. Worst of all: the empathy. After a couple of hours of blood, broken bones, smashed fingers, screams and pleas for mercy, people start to go easy. They might slow down. They might take pity.’ Lasky’s stale breath reeked as he stared at me through my visor. ‘A nightware Rubix won’t.’

Lasky reached behind one of the mainframes to bring out a fat armoured case and pass it over to Hideko. Inside was an array of blinking knobs connected to a cluster of powerful processors I really didn’t like the look of.

‘It’ll infect every inch of your suit’s circuitry. There’s no pleading or bargaining with this,’ Lasky said, savouring every word as Hideko began jacking the nightware into my armour. ‘It’s not programmed to have morals or limits. These Rubix AIs were built up from the brains of psychopaths and serial killers. And that’s before they were tweaked. Mercs and pirates in deepspace use these suckers for advanced interrogation. Most folks are lucky to survive an hour. The AIs need to be kept in a constant state of perpetual pain, to keep them fresh and eager in the tank.’

He turned to Hideko, drumming his fingers across my knee. ‘What do you think it’ll do first? Raise his temperature? Crush him inside? Start the internal wiring and cables growing through his skin?’

Hideko’s gum bubble burst like a gunshot. ‘Difficult to say. Who knows, maybe all three at the same time?’

These people were not in charge. They were bullies who hid behind others, who took as much pleasure in sadism as in knowing they were untouchable.

I knew these types all too well. And knew they meant every word of what they’d said.

‘If it were up to me, I’d put a bullet in your face and be done with you, let someone else play with your corpse,’ Hideko told me, stooped over the nightware case. ‘But not until we know who you are and who’s coming after us. Since you’re not in a talking mood, we’ll get you nice and loosened up for some friends who’d like a chat. See how communicative you are after the nightware’s done its business with you.’

‘How long shall we give him?’ I couldn’t help but watch as Lasky reached for the dial. Cranking up, up, up, past ten hours, past twenty, all the way to thirty. ‘There. Thirty hours sounds like a good round number.’ Lasky patted my chest, pressed his face inches from mine. ‘Don’t worry, big guy, it won’t kill you. We need you alive. But then, alive has a pretty broad range of conditions, doesn’t it?’

The Rubix at Artyom’s bar had been a caterer, working in a public space. What would a Rubix designed for torture and advanced interrogation do to me, given complete control