Lighting the Fire Part 2
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Mike kept to one side of the airlock, watching dispassionately as Harbinger’s medic cleaned and dressed Li’s graze. A shallow hit on the right arm, barely leave a scar. So said the medic, doing his best to calm a severely rattled Li. Now that they were safe aboard and apparently unmolested by Alliance pursuit, Mike sank down to rest, propped against the bulkhead with his legs outstretched on the deck. It would take very little to get him prone and asleep in seconds. Maybe later. He still had some work to do. Debriefing Li, for one. Verifying the info he carried, for another. As for their extraction… Going over it step by step, Mike connected the dots, saw the big picture, and frowned at the result. Verification was a bitch at the best of times and right now it wasn’t looking too good.
Shit.
Mike scrubbed his face with his hands and rose. Li was practically limp with relief at the last minute rescue. Safe, warm, and in relatively one piece, he wouldn’t suspect a thing.
Time to get started.
Mike caught the medic’s eye and tilted his head toward the inner door of the airlock. The medic nodded, checked Li’s bandage one last time and left. Li watched the man go and drew breath to protest, but Mike beat him to it.
“That LZ was hot. You mind tellin’ me why?”
“What?”
“They knew where we was, little man.” Mike’s quiet drawl was underscored by the steel in his tone as he got right up in Li’s face. “Tell me why.”
“I don’t know.”
Li backed away and fetched up hard against the bulkhead. Mike closed the gap immediately and grabbed Li’s shirt.
“I’m ’onna pass you a slap, you don’t tell me.” Mike raised a hand for emphasis and gave Li a shake. “How’d they know, huh? How?”
“You’re crazy—.”
Mike slammed Li open-handed across the face, drawing blood.
“Not crazy enough.” Another slap. “Not yet. How’d they know, huh? How?”
“You’re not—Help!” Li finally got a clue and started screaming at the airlock door. “Somebody! Get this crazy bastard off me!”
“Wrong answer.” Mike put him in a submission hold and applied the pressure, his lazy tone making it clear that he was enjoying every minute of this. “Who are you workin’ for, you?”
More protests. Mike tightened his grip just a touch, his voice silky. “You think this hurts you now, mon ami, wait til I fetch me my pliers. Is that what you want?”
“No!”
“Tell me what I wanna know. Who are you? Who you workin’ for? Tell me why we ain’t kickin’ you out the fuckin’ door once we clear atmo.”
More protests, more struggling. Still no answers.
Mike shoved Li face-up against the bulkhead and handcuffed him, not too careful about how tight the things were. He snapped them shut, spun the defector around, and chained him to a support beam.
“Stay put,” he growled.
After making certain the airlock controls were offline from the inside, Mike left for the bridge, letting the subject sweat it out for a while. What he wanted to do next required permission. He stuck his head inside and scanned the bridge, found the person he was looking for, and strode forward.
“Ma’am? Please may I have a word?” His syntax shifted subtly to the higher-toned Old French Creole, even as his manner became polite and deferential to match.
When their contact stepped onto the bridge, Kramer turned and pinned him with a stern look. She wasn’t angry, just authoritative when she demanded, “Mister Carter, would you like to tell me what precisely happened down there? That LZ was supposed to be clear.” Not that it ever goes the way you plan it.
“I mean to find out but I’ll need help from one of your crew.” His reply was just as matter-of-fact as her question, delivered without a flinch despite her best glare. Still polite, but no quarter asked or given.
Kramer raised a single eyebrow in question, leaving him to explain himself without bothering to frame the query.
He waved her toward the corridor aft. “After you, Ma’am.”
Slanting a look around the bridge, she didn’t hesitate. “Connelly, you have the helm.” And with that, she turned and walked off the bridge. Once in the corridor, she stopped and asked her visitor. “Just what do you need?”
“I need someone to stand in as a prisoner. Torture by proxy.”
Now there’s something you don’t get every day. “You want to run that by me again?” she demanded. “What the hell for?”
“Head job. It’ll take too long to break our man back there physically. I got to crack him some other way. The head’s the quickest way to do it.”
Kramer wasn’t prone to indecision, and this time was no different. It took her less than two seconds to decide. Poking her head back into the bridge, she called out her orders.
“Connelly, take the conn, too. Nika, with me.” And then she returned to the man standing in the corridor. Michael Carter, she remembered his name, now. She eyed him up and down, took in the sharp hazel eyes and determined chin. She suspected his drawl was as fake as Harbinger’s borrowed pinger. Still, Carter had installed that self-same pinger and it had gotten them out of a jam. He’d extracted a Fed desk weenie across treacherous ground while under fire and harried by airborne pursuit. Not a man to lightly tangle with, nor one to discount out of hand when he requested something. Neither was Nika a lightweight in either department. A good match to the man standing quietly before her, Kramer reckoned. As the tall blonde slipped off the bridge, Kramer made the introductions. “Nika Earhart, Michael Carter. He needs help with his prisoner.” She nodded to them both. “I’ll be on the bridge if you want me.”
“What do you want me to do?” Nika asked Carter, meeting his eye and nodding easily, one soldier to another.
“Come with me.” Carter said, heading back to the airlock without waiting for her.
Nika didn’t question his brusque move; she was used to that from her Captain. “If you want my help, filling me in would be useful,” she commented mildly as she followed him down the corridor. She watched as he stopped and cast an eye toward the bridge, gauging the distance.
“Now’s as good as any. How much did you overhear?”
“Enough to know that you’re playing my kind of game,” she told him, amused that he’d thought she’d been eavesdropping on her Captain…and that he’d thought right. “What do you have in mind? Beat on the girl to get him to talk, or psychobitch on the loose and you’re the only thing holding her back?”
Mike smiled a slow, grim smile, his lazy drawl a startling contrast to the expression on his face. “Well, now…What say, the lady chooses?”
Nika considered. “How bad a big-bad is this hun dan? If he’s a low-level, we’ll go with the beat-on-the-woman thing. If he’s a high level... I wanna play too.”
“High.”
Nika smiled a slow, wicked smile. “Let’s go play,” she told him quietly. “What do you want from him?”
“His name is Frank Li. He says he wants to defect. Now, me? I think he’s lying. I think he’s a mole. He’s sweetening the deal by giving up information we need, but it won’t mean jack shit if he’s a spy. They found us pretty damn quick on the way to the LZ. Prove me wrong, cherie. Start by making him tell how they found us.”
She considered the task, and then nodded slowly.
“Give me at least a couple of minutes before you come in to leash me,” she said. She pulled off her jacket as she spoke, revealing a pair of sleek pants and a smudged tan tank top that exposed some cleavage. She hung her jacket on a nearby hook with the zero-G suits. Carter watched as she ruffled herself up a little and moved to the airlock. She passed inside without hesitation, closed the door behind her, and affected a shocked look. Li’s head shot upright at her entrance and from his expression she knew exactly how she’d proceed.
“Gorram idiot... what the hell’s he got you all tied up for?” she asked the prisoner.
“Oh, God, Miss….he’s not coming back, is he? You gotta do something about him, he—I don’t know anything, I swear it, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s crazy, he’s—“
Nika flapped her hand: pipe down.
“All right, all right, don’t get your panties in a twist. The Captain says you’re bringing us naval intelligence that’s supposed to be worth our time. So…whatever.”
She paused and when Li relaxed, she strode toward him with a purpose, pulling out her knife. His reaction was so predictable it would have been funny had the situation not been so serious. Li went from relieved to frantic in less than a second and Nika allowed her expression to take on a sympathetic cast.
Play him. Play him good.
“I’m sorry about all this... I really, really am. I’m betting you’re just a grunt out there in the Alliance... someone to send out as bait to see if we'll bite. They don't even give you believable information, do they? ”
She was up against him now, with full body contact from shoulder to groin, completely in his face and breathing his air. Nika pitched her voice lower, making it sultry as she did a come-on grind with her hips. Li’s breathing went shallow. Like any man in his position, he didn’t know what to do with himself. Should he respond in kind or break away? Nika didn’t give him the chance to decide; she shoved him hard against the bulkhead, ignoring Li’s yelp.
“See, grunts?” she told him quietly, casting her eyes coyly down the length of him, tracking her gaze with a finger. Li twitched once and went still. “They don’t get access to useful naval intelligence. Or if they do, Alliance is gorram careful about who they trust with it.” She had that finger hooked in his waistband now, and she jerked him closer, distracting him from her knife hand, held at the ready out of sight on the right.
“So your little story about wanting to leave is believable enough,” she purred. “Trouble is … you wouldn’t have the information to offer if you were just a grunt. And Alliance officers just don’t defect all that often. Not for real anyway.” She ran the knife very lightly up the outside of his leg, barely scraping the material, breathing against his neck. She felt it the second Li realized it wasn’t her finger traveling up his thigh. Fear had him galvanized.
“So now I gotta find out the hard way whether you told them about the landing zone or if they found out some other way. And I like doing it the hard way.” She smiled slowly, showing him her teeth. giving him every indication she would enjoy what came next. “I think you better tell my boss what he wants to know, though. Otherwise….Cuz see.... I really like to cut on guys. Most of them are liars. And it makes me all hot and bothered to see ‘em squirm on the end of my knife like a fish on a hook.”
“I swear …” Li swallowed hard, his expression beseeching and his voice unsteady. “I didn’t tell them anything. But… you’re right, I’m not a grunt. My name is Frank Li, I’m a lieutenant commander in the Alliance naval forces, an intelligence analyst. That’s how I got my hands on the information. But I didn’t tell them about the landing zone, and I’m not a mole!”
“And I’m to just trust your word on that?” Nika pressed seductively closer and deliberately turned her blade inward, drawing its razor’s edge in a shallow slash across his hip.
Li screamed as the pain from the cut blazed through him.
“Please,” she scoffed as he bucked against her, panicked. “How many of us would still be breathing if we took a Fed’s word for it?”
“Help! Somebody?! Help! Don’t let her cut me!” Tears flooded Li’s face as he realized the futility of resisting: handcuffed and chained to a wall, trapped with a knife-wielding woman with a taste for sado-eroticism, he didn’t have a chance. “I’m telling you everything I know, I swear it! On my life, I swear it! Oh, God, please….On my life, I swear it!”
“Your life may well be forfeit if you’re lying.” Nika said silkily and then affected a pout. “It’s a pity I can’t cut out your tongue… but I know exactly how to make you tell us how they found our landing zone,” she husked, leaning in close again, her knife point once more gliding up his leg.
“Please, God, don’t let her CUT—!” His scream squeaked to an abrupt halt when her knife found his scrotum. She hadn’t cut him, not yet, but the pressure was sufficient to tear through his trousers. The sound of cloth giving way was loud in sudden silence of the airlock. Nika made her expression positively anticipatory and Li lost it completely: He squealed like a piglet, eyes rolling white, and thrashed in mortal terror.
“Stand down, cherie. I told you to sweat him, not slash him.”
Mike’s voice was velvet over steel as he crossed the airlock in two steps, pulling Nika away from the prisoner, gripping her knife hand hard. She struggled briefly against his grasp, her eyes glittering over her feral smile, and he gave her an admonitory shake. Then he slid his gaze to Li. “And now, mon ami, you’ve got ten seconds to convince me not to let her go.”
“God help me, you’re both crazy,” Li gasped, anger rising to the surface past his fear. “I get it. Bad cop, worse cop—.”
“And gettin’ worse by the second.” Mike lifted three of his fingers free of Nika’s wrist, holding her back with just his forefinger and thumb. Damned if the woman didn’t throw him an evil grin and make the airlock overheads flash on that blade of hers. Mike stared pointedly at the blood soaking Li’s trousered hip. “What say I just let her finish what she started?”
Li’s anger subsided beneath the fear again.
“Please,” he choked out. “I swear to God, I didn’t tell them anything. I didn’t have to.” He swallowed and paused, and Mike jiggled Nika’s wrist.
The knife, little man. The knife….
“No, don’t!” Li hesitated, poised between hope and terror, and the words started pouring out of him. “I’m . . . I’m Lo-Jacked. I’ll show you where it is, I swear. I’ll show you. Just let me loose. Please, I’ll show you where it is. They do it to everybody in the military. We’re all ’jacked. Every last one of us. Let me go and I’ll prove it to you. Please, you have to believe me. I can prove it. I can show you. Please.”
“Where?” Mike asked, watching Li narrowly.
“Left…left bicep,” Li stammered.
Mike traded a look with Nika and she raised a brow at him: your call.
“Cherie.”
Mike nodded toward Li and released Nika. She stepped right up, grabbed Li’s left arm and Li started to thrash, terrified. Mike took Li’s jaw in hand and tightened his grip, forcing the man to look at him.
“Keep talking,” Mike ordered. Beneath his thumb, Mike could feel the man’s pulse pounding. Heading for a heart attack… He released Li and patted him lightly on the cheek, distracting him from Nika and her knife. “Keep talking.”
“It’s just under the skin, a small chip. They told me it was an inoculation package. For all I know, it’s that too, but….It’s there. I swear it. I swear—!”
Li ended on a scream as Nika ripped his sleeve from cuff to armpit on the point of her knife.
“Hey,” Mike gripped Li’s jaw again. “Keep talkin’, mon ami. Don’t look at the girl. Look at me. What’s the range?”
“I don’t know. I…they…”
Nika had her fingers on his upper arm now, searching for the chip.
“Keep talkin’.” Mike ordered. “How did you find out about these things?”
“I…my sister and I….I wanted out. She and I talked about it for months, planning it down to the last detail. We told no one about it. We made all the arrangements ourselves, no go-betweens, and somehow they…they found out. They found her first. They—.”
Li stiffened as Nika found the chip.
“Keep talkin’.” Mike dragged Li back to the task at hand. “What did they do?”
“My sister, she….she made a break for it, tried lay low until our extraction, but they found her. They found her and—oh, GOD—!”
Nika nicked Li’s arm just above the chip, easing it out with a push of her thumb. Blood flowed crimson down Li’s arm, dripping to the deck. Li looked ready to faint and Mike slapped the man lightly again.
“Talk to me. What about your sister, Li?”
Cloth tore. From the corner of his eye, Mike spied Nika binding Li’s wound with a strip of his ruined sleeve.
“They killed her. Claimed she resisted arrest and tried to escape and they shot her. Shot her in the back as she ran. I….That’s how I found out about the chip. My CO pulled me from my post and very kindly told me the news, saying since I was a command level officer I was cleared to know… He told me about the chip, said it was how they’d caught her. Oh, God, they killed her…she was…she was only twenty, for God’s sake. And they shot her down like a… like a dog…”
Li sagged against the chains and the cuffs, broken by fear and grief, and Mike released him gently. Bile hovered at the back of his throat and he swallowed it down. Pity demanded he leave the man alone to grieve, duty demanded he finish the job.
“There’s just one thing, mon ami.” Mike put some steel into his voice and spine. “You knew about the chip before you came callin’ for us. What did you think to do, huh? Lure us in, get us captured, use us to get you off the hook. Is that it?” Mike grabbed a double fistful of Li’s shirt and hauled him upright, glaring at him mere inches from his face. “All that time I hauled your ass over that damn mountain, they was trackin’ us—.”
“All right! All right! I knew! I knew, okay? What the hell was I supposed to do? I thought if I…if I took a bereavement leave of absence, they’d stop watching me long enough for you to get me out. That’s why we were in the mountains, that’s why I asked for a quick extraction. I …thought it was remote enough, I thought it would work and no one would get hurt…I…”
Li ran out of steam and sagged.
“Anyway…I still have the intel.” Li said miserably. “I’ve kept my word. I’ve got everything I promised, took it with me. You can have it. Just take it….I don’t want it…My sister died for it and I don’t…I don’t want it…”
Nika followed Carter out of the airlock at his nod, and waited as he secured the door behind them. When it was shut, he eyed Li through the porthole, regarding the Fed slumped against the bulkhead, emotionally broken and bleeding. Nika held up the bloodied chip. Carter pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and using it as a makeshift glove, gingerly took the chip from her fingers.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“There’s not a single guy in the ’Verse who’s going to lie when he has a knife to his balls and a woman looking dead serious about using it.” She carefully avoided getting blood on her clothing, holding her knife casually.
Carter breathed a laugh. “True. Remind me never to get you angry at me.” He glanced down at the chip, then back up at her. “My gut says we go with it. He’s legit. Can you get a medic on his arm and leg? I have to shut this squealer off and download it.” He held up the chip. “Two shakes. I’ll meet you back here. We’re not done yet.”
He made down the corridor for the cubby they’d arranged for him and Nika called for Fraiser, their medic. She quickly cleaned and sheathed her blade, then pulled her bandana from her pocket and wiped the blood off her hands while she waited. She escorted Fraiser inside when he arrived and went forward to tell her Captain the news about the chip.
