The Darkness: The Conglomerate Trilogy (Volume 2) by Frisbee Jr William S

Author:Frisbee Jr, William S
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Chakram Publishing
Published: 2017-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Prisoners

Luke stared at the prisoners, a display on his internal screen for each one. One was still unconscious but would recover. He was the captain based on the suit markings. The other one had been a lower ranking bridge officer, and the third had been the chief engineer. There had only been four Tonkan on the corvette and the forth had been the body wedged in the hull.

The Tonkans as a race were large and brawny, with apelike arms, shorter legs, greenish leather skin and flat noseless faces. They were carnivores with sharp teeth and forward set, bright orange eyes pierced by black pupils. They had no hair, but they had ridges up along the sides of their heads. Wearing battle armor, they looked almost like upright apes and their voices were harsh, with high-pitched squeaks and wheezes. Their ears were hidden on the side of their head but were supposed to be more acute than a human's.

Right now, the two Tonkan that were awake sat on their bunks staring at the floor.

"No suicide devices," Brita said, looking at the same displays as everyone took their seat in the conference room.

"Tonkan space ship crews rarely have suicide devices," Falla Shum said. "Boarding actions are almost unheard of among the Tonkan, or within the Conglomerate, especially against hostile vessels. A hostile vessel will be destroyed or it may self-destruct. It happens so rarely they do not consider it a danger like ground troops."

"Do Topa ever interrogate prisoners?" Luke asked.

"The Tal never take prisoners," Falla Shum answered staring at Luke. "It is beneath us and we do not kill unarmed, defenseless opponents, so prisoners present a quandary."

Luke stared back. That sounded harsh, but then according to the history he had read when the Tal were called upon the reason was clear.

"Well," Bruce said. "The Tonkan are clan oriented and there is enough inbreeding to identify clans by genetics but we don't have any record of the Tonkan clan we are dealing with. Admitted the Proud Infidel's databases are not complete, but we have nothing on these clowns."

Luke nodded and looked at the droid Captain Chapman. "How about the data core's or black boxes?"

"That is heavy duty encryption," Chapman said. "All available processing power is being focused on cracking it, but it might take a while. Intelligence teams have recovered writing and language samples. It appears they speak a known Tonkan dialect. The samples we retrieved were very informative. One was a recording of a Tonkan martial arts dance, designed more for amusement than instruction. It reports it comes from a planet 'Chubachi' and the city of 'Chubadach' which is not listed in any of the Conglomerate databases so I believe it exists in dark space."

Luke glanced at Falla Shum who remained emotionless and unreadable.

"We could not crack any other recordings," Chapman said. "We only got this one because it was on a hand-held reader and had not been turned off, or screen locked. I expect more results within the day. I still have intelligence teams going through the corvette.

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