A Choice of Treasons (78 page)

Someone was dragging York—two someones—dragging him by the cable connecting his leg manacles, dragging him on his back down some corridor. The lights in the deck above flashed by him as if the lights were moving and he was stationary. But then a jolt reminded him of his broken legs, and he tried to forget the splintered bone jutting out through his thigh. He was getting close. Soon he would die no matter how hard they tried to keep him alive, and he prayed he wouldn’t have to wait long for that. He passed out again . . .

. . . He came to when they dropped him into a chair and his face slammed painfully down on the table in front of him. He passed out for a time, came to again with someone sounding official saying, “This court will come to order. Mister prosecutor. Read the charges into the log.”

Someone else, also sounding official, read out a long list of crimes. Then the first official asked, “How does the prisoner plead?”

Someone nudged York and growled in his ear, “Stand up and say ‘Not Guilty.’”

Both his arms were broken so he couldn’t lean on them to climb to his feet, and even if he could, both his legs were broken so he couldn’t stand, and even if he could his jaw was broken so he couldn’t speak. He managed to grunt something like,
Uzusshuhhbuhh
, then someone swatted him in the ribs—broken ribs—and he was too weak to even scream.

“Cut,” someone shouted, a very unofficial voice. “That’s enough. This just isn’t working.”

The voice was so out of place York made an attempt to open his eyes, got one opened, though he left his face resting on one cheek on the table. He was in a military court, very official, very correct, very proper, but this civilian in fashionable, but improper, attire marched right through the middle of it up to the justices, waving his hands. “This isn’t working at all. His Grace wants the empire to see a dangerously mad megalomaniac. And look at him. Whose idea was it to beat the poor fool into something resembling chopped protein cake? All we’re going to get on camera is
pathetic
, and that’s the last thing . . .”

York saw Alsa standing to one side and their eyes met. There were tears in her eyes. He lifted his face off the table, couldn’t really do more than make a quick scan of the room before his vision blurred; he closed his eyes and lowered his face back to the table.

He replayed the image in the darkness of his mind. Most of his officers were there, those still alive, standing silently in the prisoner’s box. And the empress was there, looking frightened; and the emperor, also frightened; and the d’Hart woman—more horrified and disgusted than frightened—

York felt unconsciousness coming on. He watched it approach and he welcomed it, hoping he wouldn’t have to return to the living.

York slammed awake as a wave of intense hatred washed through him, and he almost vomited. He stood up, stood amazingly on healthy and whole legs, bellowed at the top of his lungs a curse that frightened even him.

There was a face in front of him. He reached out, put his fingers around the throat, fingers that only moments ago had been broken and disfigured and were now whole and strong, and he squeezed with maniacal, vice-like strength. He felt the man’s voice box crush, the neck snap, and he kept screaming and squeezing, and everyone around him was screaming also. Then all his strength left him, and so did the anger, and he collapsed back into the chair.

“You’ll have to control him better than that,” that unofficial voice said into the stillness that followed.

York lay there, not paralyzed, but so overcome with a deep lethargy that he couldn’t move. But his eyes were open; he was conscious, and basically alert.

“Sorry,” someone answered. “I’m having trouble getting the signals calibrated. All the speed-healing and regrowth have really screwed up his neurotransmitters.”

Implants
, he realized. They were controlling him through his implants and a neural probe. He couldn’t move but he could feel the weight of the small transceiver remote clipped behind his ear where it wouldn’t show on the cameras. Using it they could transmit signals directly into his cerebral cortex. He guessed it was also controlling an injector pack buried somewhere beneath his skin. With the right combination of neural signals and drugs they could control him nicely.

An AI security guard bent down over the fellow whose neck York had just broken, examined him carefully and stood up shaking his head.

“Damn it,” the first voice said. “Good vid-techs are expensive, and the insurance is going to run us way over budget.”

As two guards dragged the body away a woman stepped into view in front of York holding a small control unit in both hands. “Let me try again.” She made a few adjustments to her control unit, glanced at York and hesitated suspiciously, took a cautious step back, then pointed the unit at York and did something.

He was prepared in a way, had a vague idea of what to expect. Anger, hatred, fear, nausea, terror, lust—they all flushed through him. He was up out of the chair and already over the table screaming, “You fucking whooorrreeeeeeee!” reaching for her with only one thought in mind.

She casually flicked a switch on the control unit, and dropped him in his tracks in a state of complete lethargy, managed to control him so precisely he didn’t hit the floor hard, just quietly sat down. He didn’t move while she fiddled at her control box. “All right,” she said. “Let’s try
calm reason
.”

York felt control return and he looked around. They were all there again, his officers, the empress, the emperor, the d’Hart woman, staring at him like some freak. He stood, brushed dust off his uniform, noticed they’d given him a nice new uniform. The vid-director pointed to York’s chair and said, “Please take a seat, Lieutenant Ballin.”

York realized it was a lot easier to just play along, so he sat down. The vid-director looked at the technician with the control box. “Very good. Now let me see solid anger, slightly out of control, but none of this berserk stuff.”

That was enough, York thought. He stood. “Now wait a minute,” he argued. “You have no right to treat anyone this way.”

“More anger,” the vid-director said.

That made York really angry. “God damn it,” he shouted. “Listen to me.”

“Excellent,” the vid-director said. “That’s enough. Shut him down.”

The lethargy returned and York sat down, no longer caring.

The next couple of hours were really quite fascinating. York was able to observe the whole thing in a schizophrenic sort of way. They all play-acted their way through his court-martial. The Admiralty Court charged him with just about every heinous crime a mutineer-renegade-rapist-sociopath-pirate could commit. The vid-director regularly stopped the proceedings to adjust camera angles, to coach the justices—which York learned were really just actors—to give instructions to the med-tech controlling the neural probe behind York’s ear. They played York like a finely tuned instrument. They didn’t have to give him any script, didn’t have to depend on his cooperation. When they wanted him to explode at the justices or some poor witness, they’d give him a nice little cocktail laced heavily with frustration, building it to a crescendo, then tossing in a dose of aggression
at the last moment. He would end up ranting with just the right degree of demagoguery, and then they’d turn him off like a light.

All in all, the schizophrenic half of York that had retreated into some depth of his mind to observe the whole thing was quite impressed. At the end, the director even instructed the justices to find him innocent on a few charges. “It’ll look much more believable,” he said. “Find him guilty on the really nasty ones, of course, so we’ve got a reason to execute him. But let him off on a couple of the lesser ones.”

Yes, it was quite impressive. And when they were done, they just switched him off.

York slammed awake, sat up in bed with a scream, threw the blankets off and stumbled across the floor. Vertigo hit him like a bullet and he staggered back toward the bed, sat down there and waited for the nausea and fear to pass. He was sitting there with his face buried in his hands, trying to recall the dream that had frightened him so, when it hit him:
bed, blankets?

He opened his eyes carefully. The room was dark, though someone had programmed the lights for a dim nightglow. “Lights,” he said. “Slow ramp.” The computer brought the lights up slowly.

He looked first at his hands. They were whole and healthy; the fingers weren’t broken and bloody. Then he remembered the court-martial. They’d fixed him up so he could look appropriately sinister, must have had to overdose the hell out of him on accelerated-healing to fix him up so quickly. But he wasn’t back in his cell, nor was he drugged into the next century.

He looked around. He was in a fairly normal bedroom, much like that in a good hotel. A clock on the wall showed mid-morning. He was sitting on a dirt-side bed, not a grav bunk. To his left there appeared to be a large curtained window, and to his right an open set of double doors. He stood again, pulled open the curtains and stared for some moments at what he saw.

He was looking out a real window—not a projection or a screen—at a landscape of green and brown vegetation, with rolling hills and a small river in the distance. There was no sign of man or habitation or civilization anywhere, just those beautiful rolling hills.

He turned about, went through the open doorway into a small sitting room with a vid recessed into one wall, a comfortable looking couch, a small desk with a card viewer and a computer terminal on it. There was another door on the far side of the room, closed, and, as he quickly discovered, locked. It refused to respond to any effort he made to open it, nor to any commands he gave the computer. He set about exploring the limits of his jail: four rooms—roughly the equivalent of an expensive hotel suite. He found fresh uniforms in the closet, all sorts of toilet articles in the fresher—everything nicely stocked, ready for occupancy.

He tried the computer first, had access to all sorts of functions and information, but nothing of any consequence. He could call up books to read, vids to view; he could program his environmental controls, schedule meals and laundry service; basically he had full civilian access to all unclassified information. But he could send no messages; make no contact with the outside world, whatever world this might be.

He shaved, showered, had just put on a fresh uniform when the door opened suddenly and a servant entered the room carrying a large tray. The servant was dressed in a white coat and black slacks, with a white shirt and black tie—a uniform that had changed little in centuries. “Good morning, sir,” the servant said and put the tray down on the table. “The monitors indicated you were up and about so I took the liberty of preparing your breakfast.”

York revised his opinion. The servant was military all the way, probably a noncom, a twenty-year man, probably AI. He placed York’s breakfast on the table with meticulous care, then turned to leave.

“Wait,” York said, and the man turned and hesitated. “Where am I? What is this place?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not allowed to answer questions. If you have any physical needs, you can call me through your terminal.” With that, he turned and left.

Suddenly, York realized, none of it was worth it. It was all a big waste, and he just didn’t have the energy to keep on trying. They would do with him what they would, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He sat down to the breakfast and turned on the vid, scanned the channels for news, found a station broadcasting his court-martial. He ate a little, and watched his own court-martial with rapt fascination. It seemed to take longer than he remembered. The defense council and the prosecutor objected to everything each other did, and the York on the screen frequently burst out with maniacal threats to the justices, the prosecutor, even his own defense council and his own crew. They’d cleaned him up nicely, made him look healthy, though they’d left the chrome-steel eye and the scars on his face. A nice touch, he realized, made him look even more fanatical. They even managed to use the shots of him breaking the vid-tech’s neck, at which point the courtroom burst into pandemonium while three AI guards restrained York. The chief justice called a recess, and a vid announcer’s face appeared. “We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Stay tuned for continued live coverage of the court-martial of the renegade ship captain, York Ballin.”

“Masterful, isn’t it?”

It took York a moment to realize the voice had not come from the vid. He started, turned toward the door to find a tall, rather distinguished looking man, wearing a uniform with admiral’s stripes on the sleeves; he stood just within the open door. York looked at the stripes, the bearing of the man, the way he stood, realized he had to be one of the nine Grand Dukes of the empire. “Your Grace,” York said, standing slowly, then bowing.

“They said you were quick on the uptake,” the man said, crossing the distance between them and extending his hand as if he and York were old friends. He shook York’s hand eagerly. “I’ve wanted to meet you for some time now, Lieutenant. I’m Johan de Satarna.”

Johan Soladin, Duke de Satarna. Perra Soladin’s father, probably second only to Abraxa on the Admiralty Council. York nodded and said again, “Your Grace.”