Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2) by Eliot Peper

Author:Eliot Peper [Peper, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503904729
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

Dag lay on a small couch in the middle of the room. There was no other furniture, and plywood boards covered the doors to the suite’s adjoining office, bathroom, and bedroom. The audiovisual deluge had been mercifully paused for the delivery of his meal, although she could see the caged light fixtures that had been bolted around the room. The reek of urine and feces wafted over from a plastic bucket in the corner.

Dag’s eyes were wide open and bloodshot, staring straight through Diana into infinity. He was dressed in loose-fitting black pajamas and tucked into a tight ball, knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them.

A hole opened up inside Diana, resolve draining like water from a leaky vessel. It was one thing to imagine Dag under interrogation. It was another to see him in front of her, gaze vacant, eyes sunken, lost in the maze of a mind rebelling against reality. She had seen prisoners reduced to wrecks before, pushed until they babbled whatever they imagined you wanted to hear, inventing fractured fantasies that held together only long enough to taste a sweet sip of water. Desperation was a blunt weapon. It might eke out a crucial detail at a critical juncture, but it also ate away at truth like corrosive acid. Beyond its questionable utility, using such techniques made intelligence officers believe their actions were justifiable, and the reality of a world in which crises were constant and urgent created a race to the bottom when it came to the circumstantial evidence required to justify torture.

Torture. A word that was anathema to the government doublespeak that buried anything distasteful in acronyms and euphemisms, a broken culture that Diana could no longer ignore now that Helen’s power play had ripped the silk glove from the iron fist. This was how Helen guaranteed Diana’s compliance.

Self-disgust spurred Diana to action. Now was not the time for wallowing. Besides the man lying unconscious on the floor, there were six more heavily armed killers roaming this platform who would happily dispatch her and Dag if they were caught. She summoned her feed and triggered the next set of distractions. Smoke would begin to pour from the chopper’s engine housing, whipped by the Arctic wind, a fake malfunction to call their attention away from the action below. Simultaneously an automated SOS notification would ping every feed in the area, the distress call originating from one of the abandoned oil platforms inhabited by libertarian seasteaders who, in this fictional call for help, were suffering a massive fuel leak. The combination should give Diana and Dag a few minutes of respite before being unveiled as a ruse.

Dismissing her feed, Diana knelt in front of Dag. Belatedly realizing that he could see nothing but an indistinct shimmer, she unwrapped her shemaugh. Her disembodied head appearing before him should have provoked a reaction, but Dag’s eyes remained wide and unfocused.

“Dag, honey,” her voice cracked. “It’s me. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

No response.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” she said with a conviction she didn’t feel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.