The Technician's Fight, Draft 1, CH50

The room Jeremy stepped into was…empty.

His orders had been to report for the next part of his interrogation training. As this was hunter related, he wore his uniform, but hadn’t expected he’d have to fight.

The empty room made him think this was no longer an impossibility.

The door closed, and he fought the urge to check if it was locked.

A hunter was to stand while waiting. So he stood.

He checked his tablet to find ten minutes had passed. He, again, fought the urge to check the door. He knew he had the right room, so this was…part of his training. What part that might be, he had no idea. Thur had said things would be explained before they continued.

This didn’t feel like an explanation waiting to happen.

Unable to take the stillness anymore, he walked around the room. The walls had geometric patterns that felt more like how they had been put together than decorations. A glance at the door as he passed it didn’t tell him anything. The panel had no indicators.

He timed his fourth circuit around the room. A minute and twelve second at a slow pace. So, fifty meters in circumference? Twelve, thirteen meters in diameter? Plenty of space to fight—

“Do you know why you are here?” a male asked, behind Jeremy.

He spun, stepping away from the wall for more maneuverability, and found no one there.

“You are here,” the man said, behind him again, “because you betrayed everyone you care about.”

Again, he wasn’t there when Jeremy turned.

“Directional sound projection,” he muttered; probably a recording.

“What do you have to say to that?”

Jeremy glanced over his shoulder instead of giving them the satisfaction, and startled at the male standing there. Jeremy backed, claws out, before it registered the male’s hands were behind his back.

The male’s fur was light ash, with shimmers that pulled to the blue where the room’s light hit it at the right angle. He wore the standard combat black of the hunter’s uniform.

How the male had entered without Jeremy noticing was beyond him. The silent technology that let whatever geometric pattern move to let him pass was impressive.

“I talked, because I broke.” Then he couldn’t keep from adding, to point out he wasn’t different. “Like everyone else.”

“Like everyone else,” the beta said with a nod. Betas didn’t have an insignia. No one of rank did. But this male had the presence of a Beta. That of someone with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. “We all break. It’s one of the fundamental laws of information gathering. With enough pressure, with the right kind of pressure, everyone will break.” He nodded to something behind Jeremy, and he looked at himself, curled up on the thin mattress, crying.

“What—”

The male was gone. He’d fallen for being distracted so he could slip away.

Were they going to do this in the most confusing way they could? Did they expect him to catch on? Look as the male slipped back in and point? Or was it what he wanted to do? Show them he was clever enough to figure things out? He turned to look at himself on the thin mattress.

A stark reminder he wasn’t as clever as he liked to think.

“If that is a truth,” the male said, and Jeremy had to turn again. He was on the other side of the room, and Jeremy couldn’t keep from studying the wall for flaws in how the pieces connected that would reveal the door. “Then it is a hunter’s job to ensure his interrogator applies as little pressure, and in the wrong way.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“That will be covered in depth throughout your training, but it can be summed up simply. You lie.”

“I tried that.” Jeremy motioned to the screen and was surprised to find himself in an argument with someone who wasn’t there. He faced the beta, to find he was gone again.

“You weren’t trained,” the male said in his ear, and Jeremy jumped, spinning to find no one there. Motion in the corner of his eye revealed no one there either.

“That is what we will train you in.”

Jeremy spun and thought he caught the male vanishing, but he was certain the wall he’d been before hadn’t changed.

“Along with teaching you to endure pain, and humiliation, and confusion.”

The voice kept shifting, but he kept missing the male, as if all he was doing was poking his head in and out. That would require less of the walls to shift, making it easier to accomplish.

Still. “Okay. How are you pulling this off?” he demanded.

“It’s easy,” the male said, behind him, and Jeremy turned to no one. The door he now faced opened, and the male stepped into the room. “When I wasn’t here.”

Jeremy stared as the male came to a stop a few paces away. He so wanted to touch him, to be certain.

“Projections? I’ve never seen anything that good. There were no artifacts at all.”

The male smiled. “They aren’t that good. That is the point of this demonstration. You can’t trust your senses.” A second male appeared, then a third. Identical to the one before him.

Only, he realized now that he had the time to study the projections, they weren’t. The fidelity was good, he could admit that, but not perfect. So how had he been fooled?

“You believed a specific thing was happening,” the male said. “So your mind dismissed what didn’t fit that belief and reinforced what did.”

Jeremy looked at the walls. “I decided the walls had secret passages to explain how ‘you’ moved around so quickly. I dismissed the lack of sound as some tech I didn’t know of. When you were too far from a wall, it was me not having looked well enough.”

“You did your interrogator’s work for them.”

“How many hunters are fooled like this?” he asked, curious as to where he stood.

“All of them,” the male replied as if the answer was obvious. “The gods did not make any of us as they are—”

“I wasn’t created by some god.”

The male studied him with a seriousness that made Jeremy uncomfortable.

“Hunter, you need to accept that when I include you in the work of the gods, that is not something open to debate. If you wish to debate the existence of the gods. Yours, mine, or another species’, there are plenty of people on this ship who will be happy to have that discussion with you. I am not one of them. My only job, in your regard, is to train you. I will do so as I see fit, and invoke gods as required, am I clear?”

The level way the male spoke, the utter lack of inflection as he laid down his beliefs made Jeremy swallow hard. “Yes, beta.”

“Good. You will address me as Beta Goramik Toribar sel Gezbiliam. I and my pack will see to building your endurance to methods that will be used to torture you. We will not be gentle. Our training has caused many would be hunters to quit. I don’t hold it against them. I won’t hold it against you if that is the decision you make. I respect someone who can face a challenge and decide it is too much, instead of allowing themselves to be injured in ways difficult for them to heal from.”

Jeremy looked at the screen again. The memories of how he’d been when his pack took him out. How worthless of them he’d felt. Even now, understanding he had done nothing the others hadn’t, the memories unsettled him.

When he looked at the male again, he was surprised to find him there, in the same position.

He motioned to the door. “Do you wish to end this, knowing what you already went through is nothing like what we will put you through in the coming months?”

He closed his eyes. Did he want to quit? The temptation was there. Jeremy didn’t consider himself particularly brave. He did what needed to be done, and he could see that from the outside, some had seemed brave. But he didn’t tackle things he knew he couldn’t handle.

What about those he didn’t know he couldn’t handle?

The door would always be there. And the male had implied he could end this at anytime. If he quit, it would be because he knew he couldn’t handle what it meant to be a hunter. Not because he thought it.

He shook his head.

“Good. Then go home and rest. Your next session is tomorrow.”

“But—” Jeremy motioned to the screen and immediately away, face burning; he was taking a leak.

“Yes?”

“I thought that would be explained to me.”

“What is there to be explained? How you broke? What is the piece of information that proved too much when you were confronted with it?”

“Yeah.”

“What would it serve?”

“So I can be ready the next time?”

The male nodded. “You can’t be ready, hunter. You never will be. Given enough time, and the right kind of pressure, it is an inevitability that you will break. Telling you how you broke this time will only cause you to be unprepared for how you will break next time.”

“You’re saying nothing I can do will ever prepare me?” That felt counter to them training him.

“I am saying that no amount of research will prepare you. I understand how you think, hunter. You aren’t the only one among us who believes that access to a large enough set of data will solve every problem. You can’t prepare for what will be done to you when you are captured by an enemy. All you can do is be ready to endure. Be ready to stretch your stay with them for as long as possible so they will either make a mistake you will be able to use to escape, or be killed in the attempt. Or so you can be rescued. And you need to understand that part, hunter. If you can’t, we are wasting our time. You will be rescued if you give us the time. I don’t care who your Heart is. I don’t care what gods made or didn’t make you. You are a hunter, and I will not stand the thought that one of you is in the hands of our enemies. Is that clear? Can you believe that without doubt?”

“I can,” he said without hesitation. He’d already seen the length his Heart and his beta were willing to go to rescue him. It was simple to believe his pack, the other hunters on his ship. The other hunters everywhere would see to it one of theirs was rescued, so long as they were given the time to accomplish it.

“Good. Now go home and rest.”

*

“What you want to do,” the female seated across Jeremy said, “is create a persona you can tell your captors about so they’ll have either no reason to disbelieve, or be unable to disprove.” She lacked the intensity of her beta. As far as Jeremy could tell, this was no more than a game to her.

“How do I, a hunter who was infiltrating their ship, convince them I’m some cook they caught by mistake?”

“The first step is that it must be plausible.” She raised a hand to silence his rebuttal. “What plausible means, here, depends entirely on how the story around it is built, and your skills in pulling it off. I’ve met a hunter who managed to convince his captors he was a singer who had joined a pack on a dare with no idea who they were or what he was getting himself into. No ballad producers would ever have considered the premise workable, and yet, he was still sane by the time we rescued him.”

“Good singing voice?” Jeremy couldn’t help asking.

“Amazing. I have no idea why the male’s hunter instead of being back on Kelser, making everyone listening to him swoon.”

“So, whatever I come up with, I need to have the skills to back it up.”

“And you need to account for what they might know about you. You have become a public figure. Not as popular as your Heart, but your connection to him is known.”

“And the fact I’m a hunter has been documented,” he added.

“Although that doesn’t have to mean you remained one.”

“But, according to what I’ve read, going against someone’s expectations is harder than going with them.”

She tilted an ear.

“Your beta pointed out how I did part of the work in convincing myself the projections were him, because that’s what I expected. So I’ve been doing some reading.”

She chuckled. “You must drive your beta crazy.”

“Why would I?”

She looked at him. “You part of a special ops pack?”

“No, why?”

“It’s my experience that most betas preferred their pack to remain known quantities, instead of always changing how they think and work. Special ops is the only place I’ve seen betas prefer those.”

“My beta knows me. We’re on short name basis when not active.”

She nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. “Then do you have thoughts on how to play into your captor’s expectations?”

“What’s known about me is that I’m Earther. I was an Engineer on Einstein. I’m now working on a Kelsirian ship as a technician, and that I’m a hunter.”

“And your Heart is the captain. Among some of our enemies, they might also know he’s the Alpha.”

“Do you think I can use that to convince them to let me go?”

She smiled. “His reputation is fearsome enough it might work, but don’t depend on it.”

“How widespread is what the hunters do?”

“We have more ballads telling that than I can count.”

“How many of them are accurate depictions of who we are?”

She laughed. “None. They’re ballads. Unless you’re looking at the old ones, it’s all entertainment. They’ll stretch truth and replace that with outright lies if they think it’ll be more entertaining.”

“So, I should research that to play into it, or go against it?”

“I wouldn’t account for them at all, but I’m not one for watching so many ballads I can’t remember what is true about who I am anymore.”

“Anyone compile research about them?”

She smiled. “I do not like them enough to know.”

“Got it, I’ll ask my Heart. He’s a fan of ballads. I’m thinking of starting with the fact I’m a technician first, and a hunter second. Basically, that I was trained, so I’d have a chance to survive being on a ship we’re attacking. They bring me to look over the tech, make sure nothing will blow up in our faces. If I’m caught on an Earther ship, that’s even more credible since Earther tech is what I know well.”

“You have the training to support it, so that’s good. What are you going to do when they want to know about our ship?”

“Hopefully, with the training you’ll give me, I can lie in a way they’ll believe.”

She smiled. “Good answer, but try to come up with something to explain it. The reason for this persona is that you can’t be lying when you tell them what you do.”

“But—”

“You will be lying, of course. But you can’t be lying. You need to know those lies so well you believe them. From what I was told, you lack our ability to compartmentalize, so this will be harder for you. But it’s something that will make your imprisonment easier if you can manage it. While you are there, you need to forget who you are, and be your persona.”

Jeremy nodded and wondered if there were Earther psychology books in the station’s database they’d copied.