Author's Note:
This continues on from
http://www.writingforums.com/showthread.php?t=54768 bgut should make vague sense without the earlier installments. I'm looking for particular criticism regarding the dialogue, which I tend to struggle with, and the general workability of the narrative style. Any other comments are also appreciated.
Waking up hurt. Someone had obviously decided that Phoenix didn’t deserve painkillers.
He was handcuffed to a bare metal chair. Silhouetted by a bright spotlight, a fan whirred slowly in front of him. To his right, there was a table covered in delicate, shining metal instruments.
So, it was going to be one of those interrogations.
“Ah, I see we are awake.” The interrogator was obviously one for theatrics. In other circumstances, Johnny would have traded techniques, but here and now, talking hurt.
“Name and number is all I’d give you, but I doubt you’d believe me then, seeing as I’m very publicly somewhere else at the moment.” Phoenix spoke through gritted teeth. A large part of him wanted to break the cuffs; easily enough done, and, while he could pick the lock with the pin under the nail of his left index finger, that would take too much time and concentration. While the animal part of his brain just wanted sleep and painkillers, the cores were still thinking. Combat AIs didn’t feel pain. Killing the interrogator would be fun, and maybe he’d find some pills on the corpse, but it wouldn’t last long.
Johnny didn’t even know what system he was in, or what he was doing here. Killing what was probably a cop wouldn’t help him for long.
“That’s not very cooperative.” The man walked around, into Johnny’s field of vision. “I really will need a little bit more information than that.”
Johnny’s eyes adapted, filtering out the bright background light. The man was small and lean, wearing an immaculate black uniform.
“Lemme guess…next you’re going to say you have ways of making me talk?”
“Well….we do.” The man smiled like a skull, picking up a small knife. He ran it delicately up Phoenix’s arm, across his shoulder and throat to his Adam’s apple. “Where shall I start, I wonder?”
The theatrics were getting dull, and so was the pain. With an audible click, Johnny dislocated his shoulder, allowing his cuffed arm just a little bit more movement. Not much, but enough to rotate his hand.
Few people realize just how delicate the human elbow is. Johnny Phoenix was not one of those people, and his fingers were now jammed vice-like into several pressure points, so inside the joint itself, between the bones.
The knife dropped, scratching Johnny’s chest, and bouncing handle-first off his leg to the floor.
Another click and his shoulder was back in place, which pulled his hand down just a little tiny bit. As the force was transferred into the interrogator’s elbow, his head jolted down towards Johnny’s, and he moaned.
Johnny squeezed.
“Torture me? Yeah, that’s a really good fucking idea. You know how when you lose a limb, the brain still gets flashed of pain from the old nerve connections? Ghost pain? Well I’ve lost every fucking limb a few times before. Every square millimeter of my skin has been burned. I can’t even be bothered checking how many times I’ve been shot. And, if that wasn’t enough, I’ve got a broken direct network connection to my poor goddamn sister who…why the fuck am I telling you this? Oh, yeah. Torture me. I might even fucking feel it if you’re really good. I’ve died four times already, you know. It’s over-rated, but it really, really hurts.”
The interrogator’s eyes were wide. He was clearly not used to being grabbed by men he was trying to intimidate. Phoenix pressed home the advantage with a quick head-butt.
The interrogator staggered backwards.
Breaking the cuffs would just add more pain to the pile, but lockpicking was too complicated, and they weren’t close enough together for him to slit open his subdermal wrist pouch for laser cutter.
Needs must.
The chair gave way first, and Johnny found himself standing with his arms cuffed to two twisted and broken alloy pipes. It was a simple matter then to rip the chair from the floor and release his feet. By flicking his wrists up, he grabbed the metal pipes as clubs.
Still staring at Johnny, the torturer was sidling away. Johnny looked at where he was going. An intercom or panic button or the like, mounted just below eye level.
Two steps later, he broke the man’s arm with a blow from one pipe and popped off a kneecap with a quick jab and twist of the other. Releasing the right club to hang from the handcuff again, he flicked the left around to the front of the now-kneeling man’s neck.
With both hands now clenched around the one pipe, Johnny pulled the crippled man to his feet.
“Now, friend, how about you tell me a few things…”
“Major Lee Takeshi. Nu-Zhuhai police. Special squad. Number XG84. That’s all you were going to tell me, right?”
Brave man. Phoenix repaid his bravery by shattering the other kneecap.
“I wonder if they can rebuild or regrow knees out here. I hear that even some of the doctors on Earth found it hard before they started using nano-surgery...”
“Fuck you, whitey.”
Phoenix just plain wasn’t in the mood. Talking hurt a little too much. He removed the pipe from the man’s neck, headbutted him and then kicked him barefoot into the wall. The man glanced towards the panic button. Johnny’s club crushed the hand reaching for it.
“Oh…I see you’ve met the Major.”
A woman’s voice. Her voice. Fragments of memory came back. The chase. The apartment. The mission. The trapdoor.
The pimps?
It was about now that Johnny realized that he was naked, but for the cuffs around his wrists and ankles, and the tattooed swirls, lines, circuits and pictures of his downtown tribe markings.
Funny, really, that they were visible here. The inks beneath his skin – faithfully recreated by his legion of onboard nanosurgeons when necessary – were usually clear. He’d been given the markings as an initiation, but he was still expected to infiltrate normal uptown Terran society…mostly to kill people.
That was before the Marine Corp, of course. Well, mostly.
The tattoos became visible only when he sprayed himself with an esoteric chemical compound with very few uses and fewer manufacturers. One of its uses though was as a stabilizer for a certain family of gaseous drugs, most of which functioned as inhalable truth serums.
It had taken one core less than a millisecond to verify that, and the drug’s presence in the atmosphere when he awoke. Johnny really should have paid more attention to the AI.
This meant, however, that the fan wasn’t just grandstanding. It also meant that now was a perfect time to ask her some questions…
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