The Minus Faction, Episode One: Breakout Read Online Free PDF Page B

private security firms to keep the costs down, but it's just assumed some of their people will get took. If they have the budget that quarter, they pay. If not . . ." John shrugged. "These companies hire foreign talent. They ship them in, non-Westerners. If a German or an American gets kidnapped, it's bad headlines. So that's no good. And if you hire the locals, odds are some of them will have connections to a warlord and shit will get stolen. Or worse. So companies ship workers in. Damn fools get recruited from India or Nigeria or wherever. Dreams of big money. Most have families back home. Just poor folks trying to do the best they can."
    Amarta was silent and still. John hadn't said this much ever.
    "I was held in a big pit in the ground, hidden under a concrete building. Most of the cells were just 'leased.' Not too many long-term residents. Like with any inventory, the money is in the turns, right? Guys would either get ransomed or killed. But they didn't know who would pay for my lodging, so staying alive meant convincing them I had value, but not in a way that gave anything away."
    "I imagine that wasn't easy."
    "I was highly motivated. After a week or so I got moved to one of the special cells, deeper down. Just a big dug-out room. Cheap fluorescent lights overhead. Smell of dirt and the shit and piss from the buckets in the corner. There was an old woman there. Dirty, tattered robes. Looked like she was Tibetan maybe. Hard to tell. She'd been there awhile, that's for sure."
    "How could you tell?"
    "Her hair and fingernails. I ain't ever seen anything like that before. She was their medic, I think. Every now and then they'd bring someone down and she'd patch them up. She did everything with that kind of Buddhist serenity. She never argued, never tried to escape. Some of those guys over there, they don't think much about keeping a woman locked up. She just accepted it, like that was her life and she was going to live it on her terms."
    John looked Dr. Zabora right in the eyes. "When I wouldn't give them what they wanted, the torture started."
    Amarta took a long, slow, deep breath. She had asked for this.
    "I mean, they had hit me, dunked me in water, stuff like that. But now it was a different crew. I'd dangled enough out there to make them think I was valuable, probably more than I should have because they got serious. Real serious." John looked down at his left hand, shriveled and clenched. "I couldn't take it. I would have told them anything."
    "I think that's completely understandable, Captain."
    "It wasn't the pain. Well, that too, I guess. I was scared. Afraid of letting everyone down. My unit. My country. My family. But . . . I knew I couldn't take it. It was only a matter of time."
    Amarta frowned.
    "One time they pulled back the skin from my scrotum. They hooked it up to a generator. I almost spilled it all right then. It was the smell more than anything. And the fear that I'd never . . . You know."
    Dr. Zabora choked on a knot in her throat. She felt a tear gather in one eye. She was glad she had folded her arms earlier. It hid her shaking hands. She felt she needed to acknowledge such a personal admission. "I see. I--I can't imagine."
    "I think the old woman saw it in my eyes, the fear. She knew a little Farsi and so did I. She started to teach."
    "Teach?" Amarta kept swallowing the lump in her throat, but it wouldn't budge.
    "A way to escape the pain. Some ancient, ancient shit, Doc. I didn't listen right away. Not really. I suppose no one wants to believe at first. But desperation—real desperation, the kind folks here don't ever have to experience—it drives you to do funny things." John snorted.
    Amarta waited.
    "I figured out how she could accept it. They had her body all right, but she was a pacifist and a master and her mind . . . Her mind could go anywhere . She taught me. She taught me how to leave my body." Regent looked his doctor in the eye again. "To project my consciousness."
    He was serious.