Wraith Ships: Under Time Pressure, the Skilled Interogator Cracks His Client Before Lunchtime

Wraith Ships: Under Time Pressure, the Skilled Interogator Cracks His Client Before Lunchtime

If you have a client who bites, when you know you've got trouble on your hands. The client was Edgar Brunella Penvash, a logistics support guy who had stolen millions in some extremely cunning manner which a line-item AI analysis had failed to decrypt.
Unfortunately, after being arrested he had fallen into the grubby paws of DEO, the Department of External Oversight. Those goons look like extras in a low-budget horror movie, and their expertise is right down there with their looks.
The DEO is a byword for aggression, brutality and incompetence, and the only outfit that is worse than them is the JayCees, the Jehovah's Crusaders.
During my training, I saw a tape of a JC interrogation session. It was in a lesson which was on the timetable with the rubric "HOW NOT TO DO IT."
Before we started, the base commander himself showed up and briefed us. We were going to see a recording, the possession or viewing of which was a serious crimial offence. We could opt out and cut the class, but, if we, of our own free will, chose to stay, then we would be bound by the Code of Secrecy, under the terms of the blood oath to the Dark Mutilator which we had taken during our induction ceremony.
Naturally, we all chose to stay.
The JC interrogation goes like this:
1. They greet the client in the name of Jesus Christ.
2. One of them kicks him in the balls.
3. They beat the shit out of him, going at him with bare knuckles, seven against one, then throw him in a bath of cow shit.
4. A team of robots arives and subjects him to anal rape.
5. A cyborg version of the Virgin Mary then shows up, mocks his sexual prowess then pisses all over him.
6. The JCs then invoke the sacred name of Joseph of Arithemea, who (but surely you know this) is the dude who won the adoration of the angels and the favor of the All Highest by making his pre-purchased tomb available so the body of the crucified Christ could be laid to rest in it.
And, having invoked the name of JA, they cut open the client's testicles with a rusty razor blade then pour sulfuric acid into the wound.
That is how they start, but it gets worse. Much worse.
Unfortunately, the client was a devout member of the Catholic Cult, and he complained to his Church. The complaint got kicked all the way up to Benedict 498 in Rome, and that guy, well, he didn't end up getting called Pope Iron Balls for nothing. He went ballistic.
It is true that, these days, the Church of Rome is no more than a shadow of its former self. It has never recovered from the invasion of the Andromeda Galaxy, during which the victorious arachnids crucified every single Christian they could get their hands on.
These days, the Church has a mere twenty-seven billion adherents, most of them members of the Etruscan Disapora, living under the aegis of the Sacradlom.
However, the Church still has clout, and Pope Iron Balls used it to bring something pretty close to the wrath of God down upon the Jaycees.
As I say, the guys from DOE are almost as bad as the JCs, so I was sure they would have screwed up the preliminary interrogation. They had taken the precaution of stashing the record in an Archivist-only repository, but, fortunately, I had the required security level to get into it.
My Golden Day was my twenty-third birthday, the day on which three of my dreams came true. First, I managed to con the virginal Pamela Moana into drinking a soda spiked with a hefty dose of the rape drug known as Compliance. With the help of a matching dose of Ironman, I then fucked her seven times, and later posted carefully-edited free video of the event online.
The second joyful thing was that Hucks Buxom, the schoolboy bully who had made my teenage years nightmarish, accepted my invitation to sit down and have a quiet drink.
I took a massive dose of Wagon Rider, the enzyme which neutralizes any alcohol in your system. Thus supplemented, I led him into the realms of drinking games. I got him bugger drunk then buggered him, then I sold him to the gang of stinky old homeless guys who used to hang out in Reincarnation Park so they could do the same.
They paid a grand total of five dollars to buy him, and they had so much vigor at their disposal that, in the aftermath of his rape, the bloodstains were still visible on the concrete sidewalk five days afterwards.
The third golden event of my golden day was when I arrived home to find that none other than the Sector Commander had come in person to my home to tell me that my security rating had been raised to that of Archivist, which is as high as it gets.
That rating makes me omniscient so I was able to take a squiz at what DOE had been doing. And, yes, in taking their first shot at the client they had screwed up big time.
They had messed up by using third degree techniques on Brunella. Not very bright because (a) he was a recipient of the Iron Cross, most ancient and most honorable of our medals. This award is taken very seriously. They don't give it out like candy. You can only win it by displaying conspicuous valor on the field of battle, and anyone who had won it is, obviously, a tough guy's tough guy.
On top of that, before getting kicked upstairs into the administrative echelons, Brunella had been career military with PR, the Planetary Rangers. These are, as everyone knows (or should know) very much the Ultimate Warriors, survivalists with killing machine capabilities, specializing in deep reconnaisance missions on unfriendly planets.
While roughing up Brunella, the DEO guys had breached regulations by indulging in alcohol. Finally, one of them made the mistake of giving Brunella a "here, pal" turn at the whiskey bottle.
Brunella had reciprocated by smashing the bottle into the guy's face, and shortly had both guys naked and handcuffed.
According to the records from the closed circuit TV cameras, he then amused himself with a Taser that had earlier been used on him.
Then started biting.
Boy, could he ever bite!
As one of his stunts, he went for the testicles of the larger of the two interrogators, and bit each of those prairie oysters clean in half, leaving raw ragged agony exposed to the daylight air.
A salt container being in the pantry, he had then gone and rubbed salt on the wounds.
I was under orders to break the guy by lunchtime, using (get this!) "your renowned magical powers."
So we've left the world of scientific rationality behind and now we're into the witchdoctor zone. Great!
However, the orders could not be ignored. They arrived by courier, not in electronic form but in expensive calligraphy on parchment, the message embossed with the Grand Seal of General Peshev, who signed himself as Sector Commander.
So I was in the gun.
Remember that I was planning to surcease my much-hated (hated by me) wraith ship captain. And, when you kill someone, you always leave loopholes which allow an enemy to skewer you, even if you think you've done everything absolutely by the book.
Anyway, on my orders, Brunella had been deprived of food, sleep and water, so he showed up red-eyed, unshaven, sweaty and a bit stinky (definitely didn't win the battle against BO today), and was, presumably, both significantly dehydrated and ferociously hungry.
I proceeded to set a series of elegant dishes on the laquered bamboo table which sat between us. A very elegant table, on which I had placed my mother's best cloisonne vase, complete with cut flowers filched from her private garden.
I set out chocolates, a small bottle (a miniature) of the fabled Event Horizon rum that you can no longer buy on the open market, and a miniature of the similarly fabled whiskey known as Tennessee Golden.
Also water.
I had ice in a bucket and a study ash tray into which I put blocks of ice so I could smash them musically with a small prospecting hammer.
While I built the feast in Brunella's imagination, I indulged myself by sampling anything that took my fancy. I had fasted in advance of the event, so my manifest enjoyment was true and authentic. No acting, ham or otherwise, required.
Then I sat back and waited until a fresh ice cube placed atop the tuna salad melted into the nothingness of water.
This self-enforced restraint was pushing me to the limits of my endurance, which gave me an index of what my strung-out client must be going through.
He, with impeccable discipline, resisted the temptation to sample. He must have figured out that it was all a con, a Tantalus trick, an offer that would vanish if he reached for it.
Finally, I spoke, opening with a word from Unmodified Courtley, which I had studied when I did my PhD in Diplomatic Negotiations.
"Monsieur," I said, very smoothly.
A petit betrayal, no more than a slight adjustment of the head, signalled that the word had registered. I had placed my arrow exactly at the intended target.
"Monsieur," I continued. "You embarrass me. It is not possible for a gentleman to begin to eat until his honored guest has first partaken of the feast. Please launch yourself, I beg you. I beg this in the name of the Sacred Celestial."
That last request I delivered in Yardish, the Sacred Language of Syria, his home planet, where, as I knew from his file, his family routinely prayed to the Sacred Celestial before each and every meal.
I had set it up perfectly, using an improvised explosive device cunningly concocted out of courtly old-wold politesse, religious programming, nostalgia cues and animal temptation in the form of both life-giving water and connoisseur-optimized feast food.
The blow which I had so cunningly delivered had a spectacular effect. Without any preamble, without so much as a deep breath or a priminary hiccup, Brunella burst into shattering tears, and sobbed his heart out for a solid hour, until, finally, I pulled out a syringe and gave him a shot of Workhoist, so I could get the interrogation session back on track.
Having been broken, he then spilled the whole deal. I was taping the session, which was just as well, because my accounting skills are rudimentary, and I couldn't understand the explanation.
But it was like this. Something like this, at any rate. (I think.)
As our guy on the spot, Brunella had big money economic development incentives in his gift. These were in the form of tax breaks.
The way it's set up is pretty cool. The guy has an astrology blog which he signs with the code name "zelklodzi9", which you can find by using your favorite search engine. You will see a standard mumbo jumbo line about stars and cusps and crap about Scorpio mating with Leo and all the rest of that jazz. But somewhere in the latest entry you will see a message in clear, for example, "and, along with this meteorite display, we have the spring rains. And, of course, the annual Robert Muldoon Memorial Orchid Meet, this year in Close 43 of Haversack Metro."
You go to see the orchids and you see the dude, who you will recognize because both his missing arm and his missing leg are robotic skeletals, not cosmetic prosthetics. You approach him and lay out your unencrypted ID for his inspection.
Then he takes you to a quiet bar and you do the deal.
Now, by some kind of financial jiggery-pokery which Brunella explained but which I could not understand, you could take your tax break (the one that Brunella authorized) and bring it to one of Brunella's buddies, a one-armed one-legged old war veteran more than three degrees of separation away, and this old guy would convert your tax break to cash, taking a tithe for himself, a similar tithe for Brunella, and, in additition to that, some overhead money to pay for his lifestyle, which was one of beer fountains and non-stop fourteen-year-old virgins. (Well, what do you expect? If an alcoholic old combat veteran with a Deep Nine psychological disability rating finds a money river flowing right past his front door, the last thing you can expect to see is a class act.)
A good day's work, hen. Another feather in my cap. But my real business was with Captain Slocum, the wraith ship commander, the guy I so urgently wanted to surcease.
"Tomorrow, Slokezy," I said to my shaving mirror. "Tomorrow, that's when you'll get yours."

WRAITH SHIPS: CHAPTER THREE: THE SECRET OF THE TERRORIST TRAINING CAMPS

WRAITH SHIPS: CHAPTER THREE: THE SECRET OF THE TERRORIST TRAINING CAMPS

If you've had a taste of glory - I mean, real glory, victory parade glory - then it's addictive. Instantly and forever. Just that one sweet taste.
You get into your hotel suite and it's huge, with an enormous vase of fresh cut flowers on the genuine antique table and with a bottle of the best possible sparkling white in a bucket of ice by the flowers.
And when you get to the bedroom you find Miss Flower Festival naked in you bed, and she smiles at you as you turn back the covers to inspect this trophy.
You weren't expecting this, so, seeing that you look slightly disconcerted, she asks, very politely, if perhaps you would prefer your brother. If you would, well, he's just upstairs in a matching suite, oiled, perfumed, lubricated and ready to begin. Just say the word and he'll be right down. Or, if you prefer, he can come down here.
That was the memory I had in mind when I had my meeting with Colonel Cuthbert. Not a fantasy, but a fact. A real memory. Something that actually happened.
One taste and you are addicted.
If we lived in an age of warlords, I would want to be first warlord then emperor. In the absence of such opportunity, celebrity is not a bad substitute.
In the downfall of the Save Our Snails mob, in the police sweep which had brought them into the orbit of the state, I saw my opportunity. If unleashed upon them then I, with my ten years of experience and my fearsome reputation, would crack their secrets out of them and get at what they had been doing.
Rumors were surfacing. Electronic equipement carried into the mountains. Odd, bulky packages being carried over difficult terrain along trails usually seldom or never frequented. In an age of terror, this stank of organized murder in the offing.
So my meeting with Colonel Cuthbert was important. But went badly. he did not like me, and I did not like him, either. And I think our mutual dislike was all too apparent.
Even so, he approved of the report that I had written on my client, a classic piece of ratutil - that is to say, of rational utilitarianism. It boiled down to this: he is old, he is senile, he remembers nothing and the chances of him ever surfacing useful data are precisely zero. We expend resources on him with no possibility of reward. It is time for him to be surceased. Grant me the permission and I will do the job myself, no executioner's fee required.
It was that final point, perhaps, which decided the colonel in my favor. Much to my surprise, he signed the surcease papers permitting me to liquidate my client.
For a moment, it seemed that the path to the gateway of my celebrity dream was clear and lit. But then the situation went horribly pearshaped.
Our bottom-feeding tabloid, Pravda, had scored a journalistic coup by cracking the secret of the terrorist training camps.
Pravda had done this by the simple expedient of sending journalists out to the huts and survival shelters in the Traken Mountains, the place where the Save Our Snails mob were said to have been doing mysterious training involving oddly-shaped pieces of equipment and portable electronic gear, and harvesting personal details from the log books.
The log books are mainatined in huts and shelters by DOC, the Department of Conservation, which has "Safety first" as its motto for the mountains.
Here on planet Sentosa, we all think of ourselves as survivalists. We are, after all, all members of the same congregation, all adherents of the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ Survivalist, Christ being the Ultimate Survivor. (Yes, he was crucified, we know that, but he survives because we embody him. We, then, are his immortality.)
But, while our self-image is that of the rugged and independent outdoor expert, the truth is that we are effete city dwellers who have very little hope of surviving once we get very far from the nearest electrical outlet. So, to optimize the chances of recovering either lost hikers (or "trampers," to use the Sendosan word) or, failing that, their bodies, DOC makes it a rule that hikers (in Sendosan, "trampers") should record in the log books (a) their names, (b) their contact details and (c) their intended route.
DOC is hated by most trampers because it ruthlessly enforces the pay-five-dollars-a-night rule. Way back when, you could sleep in the huts and shelters for free, because they were built on public land with donated money and volunteer labor. But then Planetary expropriated the whole lot, and DOC was charged with the mission of setting up a toll booth on the network of mountain trails once known as Freedom's Highway, hallowed ground on account of their role in the bitter guerilla campaigns of the Long War.
Such was the resentment at Planetary's high-handed arrogance that, for the first twenty years of the five-dollar system, it was commonplace for DOC officers to be gunned down and left for dead on distant trails. But those times are gone, and now most trampers toe the line and, obediently, fill out the safety-first log books.
By contacting people who had been in the area, Pravda was able to surface eyeball testimony backed up by digital photographs and home-made video, and, when the truth of the "military training" came out, the supposed terrorist emergency disintegrated into utter farce. And, with it, my dreams of glory.
What the SOS guys had been doing in the mountains was an extremely eccentric sport called "extreme ironing." This requires oddly-shaped packages, weird equipment which is anomalous in a hiking situation, and electronic equipment, the said electronic impedimenta being in the form of a portable steam iron.
The sport, if you can call it that, involves trekking into the mountains and taking along with you (a) a small ironing board, (b) a steam iron which can function as such once it no longer has access to a mains electricity outlet and (c) something to iron.
You iron in extreme conditions and in extreme terrain, braving snow, ice, frost, fog, hail, lightning storms and, in the Plektorite season, descending meteorites.
For the second time in my life, my dreams have been shattered by the Save Our Snails mob, sneaking the whiff of victory in front of my nose then snatching it away again.
So what is left?
Only tottering old Captain Slocum, whose death permit I have in my possession, safe for the moment in my biometric safe. And he, perhaps, is my one last shot at glory. It is, I think, almost impossible, but, even so, I will give it a try. I will attempt the impossible and seek from him the secret of the Wraith Ships.
If I can succeed, and can summon the ships themselves from out of the depths of time and space where they have been lost for so many centuries, then I will be not just a celebrity but a World Historical Figure, which, if you play it right, means, I think, top-quality hotel suites and happy girls forever.
Well, roll on tomorrow!

WRAITH SHIPS: CHAPTER TWO: SAVE OUR SNAILS

WRAITH SHIPS: CHAPTER TWO: SAVE OUR SNAILS

I hate Save Our Snails and all the rest of that mob. They destroyed my childhood dream when I was just eleven years of age, and the damage they have done to my life is permanent and beyond repair. At age eleven, my hope, my dream, my life flame's desire, was nullified by SOS, and for that I will never forgive them.
So here I am, one day after my eleventh birthday, sneaking by night on the lumpy terrain of Rebthot Peat Diggings, property of Jonathan Lucent Rebthot. You have to get past barbed wire (very rusty old wire) which is adorned by red signs saying "MINE FIELD."
I'm half way out, only twenty paces from the Bunyip Tree, when I freeze up. A panic attack. The MINE FIELD signs have been working on me, and now they've precipitated a panic attack. I am marooned. Can't move.
And that's when I hear one of Johnny Reb's dogs waking up inside Blackheart, the Rebthot stronghold.
The dog galvinizes me into action, and I do my own little one-boy infantry assault (yes, I was a mere boy, then, for all that I imagined myself to be a man) to the Bunyip Tree, which was heavy with big orange-purple Bunyip Snails, unique to our planet and doomed to extinction on account of the pollution that would inevitably result from the polyvinyl chloride plant that was soon to open in our neighborhood, over the dead bodies of our Local Council. (All nine members of the Council had committed suicide to protest against Planetary's decision to force us to host the PVC plant.)
The snails - I still remember how they felt under my trembling touch - were velvety, with tiny little prickles in amongst the velvet of their fur. I gathered five, ten, twenty. I only needed half a dozen for my Grand Scheme, but the others would come in handy for trading purposes. I would be the only person in Known Reality to have surplus Bunyip Snails available, and, even at age eleven, I had a realistic appreciation of the kind of leverage that would give me.
I shoveled the snails into the shoplifting pockets built into the lower legs of my denim jeans, and that was when I was grabbed from behind. By who? Johnny Reb, it turned out.
Once he had me down in the basement of the Rebthot stronghold, he did a full-scale Military Interrogation. I mean, the whole thing. Face slapping, a strangulation mask (an efficient alternative to water boarding) and adroit use of both a Taser and a cattle prod. The cattle prod, boy, that was brutal.
I withstood all. If I could resist interrogation, there was a chance that I would get out of here alive with my sacred dream intact.
Here on planet Sentosa, we have more snails than all the planets in the rest of Known Reality put together. I'd always been fascinated by snails, ever since I was old enough to walk, and I'd been collecting them seriously since I was three.
By the time Johnny Reb was interrogating me, I was supported by my dream. Give me a why and I will endure any how.
My dream was to have my own snail museum, a place of elite spaces and crystalline light, a meticulously ordered alternative universe entirely divorced from the sweat and vulgarity of daily life, life as lived by the peasants who inhabited my planet.
So I endured.
But Johnny Reb did not give up. He had his daughter Mezlot phone my mom and con her into believing that I was going to be saying over at the Rebthot place to play mahjong. Actually, I did not then (and do not now) play mahjong.
My mom bought it. She had been a serious alcoholic for at least five years by then, and she wasn't anything you could seriously think of as as a "mother."
Having secured time in which to work, Johnny Reb picked up the phone and summoned five of his cronies, all whiskery whiskey drinkers aged between, I would guess, fifty-five and sixty-five. And, for a solid week, we played games in the basement. Mahjong was one of them, but there were a lot of other games, too.
What happened in that basement is something that I have never discussed with anyone, not even the psychiatrist who worked with me for six months, doing a Deep Dissection, during the first year of my five years of training as an Interrogator.
He wanted to know why I was phobic to, amongst other things, mahjong boards and the tablets used to play the game of mahjong.
I hung tough for the whole week, then Johnny Reb threw me in the shower, shoved a vial of Invigorator into my veins to get my legs working again, had his wife do a makeup job on me and forced me to take three tablets of Sluggard to make sure that I didn't turn friskily informative when I got home.
When I got home, I laid out my precious Bunyip Snails on my quilt, the one my grandmother had made, completing it just the week before. My snails, my precious snails. The achieved foundation of my dream.
"My real life has started," I said.
That was a line straight out of a comic book, I know that. But, with so many years having passed, I can no longer remember which comic book.
A week after Johnny Reb sent me home, a helicopter winched two kids out of the lumpy terrain of Rebthot Peat Diggings. One of them was winched out on a stretcher, having lost both legs, as he had stepped on a Deep Waltz longlast mine (an A#22-7/0-mod-redux#9, if you happen to be an afficionado of the very interesting universe of land mines.) The mine had been there since the Long War, one of the estimated seven billion unexploded mines on our planet, so Johnny Reb didn't get into trouble on account of it.
I gloried, then, in the possession of my snails, all the more precious becuase (albeit unknowingly) I had hazarded my life in a minefield to win them.
Nobody else, I was sure, was going to be doing any snail poaching in, on or near the Rebthot property. My monopoly, my lifelong monopoly, my unique sales point, was locked in and secure for the rest of my life.
Then those Save Our Sails sods, those unspeakable excremental urine-drinkers, they did me in, trashing my dream, destroying my hopes, and sending my dream castles tottering down to ruin.
The Conservation of Species Act, that was what did it. Having strongarmed Planetary by an eighteen-year campaign of terrorist acts, including the use of polonium bombs, cobalt 90, ricin and the mutated and highly lethal strain of nanovirus known as Quelp, they had broken the will of the Central Government to resist.
Under the terms of the Conservation of Species Act, it became illegal to own, kill, farm, breed, collect, sample, scientifically investigate, archive or DNA-type dolphins, whales, penguins, wombats, quokkas, platypuses, tarantula spiders, any cephalopod certified as having an IQ higher than 17 ... and snails.
Any and all collections of any such organisms, whole or fragmentary, were to be surrendered immediatley for destruction.
I saw the details on the TV news in the evening and, that night, set my alarm clock so I woke before dawn. My parents were, convniently, out of the house for the day, attending one of the compulsory marriage-counseling sessions mandated by the court.
Like all boykids on Sentosa, I was competent at basic carpentry, which was a subject that we actually studied at school, where it was called "woodwork." With a boy's lifetime of comic book reading behind me, I knew exactly what I had to do.
By the time I was finished - it took more than a whole working day, but I got it done before a taxi decanted my extremely drunken parents outside the house shortly before four in the morning - if you reached up to the top of my bedroom door then there was a panel you could slide away.
The panel would slide right off, then you could lift it up. And, suspended from it by thin threads of fishing line nylon, there were my precious Bunyip Snails, each in its own little plstic bag, safely wrapped in cotton wool.
I knew from my boyhood comic book reading that, historically, this was one of the stash-em-and-hide-em tricks that had been used, way back when, back in the Twentieth Century, by the Israeli Secret Service ("Israel" being, depending on what reference book you consult, (a) a planet that was part of the Home System, (b) a nation state or (c) a leading chain of fast food restaurants at atime when Planet Earth was ruled by coalitions of such chains, each coalition always at war with all the others.
In my smugness, I was sure that my secret was perfectly safe, and my only bad moment came when my mom, whose sense of smell was much sharper than mine, enquired as to why my bedroom smelt of wood shavings.
A week later, one hour before dawn, my bedroom door shattered into splinters as an elegantly calculated incursion charge blew the door off its hinges.
As I stumbled out of bed, a tear gas grenade went off in the room. And, as I was making futile efforts to open my lock-back pocket knife, I was clubbed into submission. My entire room was smashed, ripped and shredded, and, of course, they found my snails. They had grown up reading exactly the same comic books that I had.
I was interrogated for a solid three months but they got nothing out of me. Nothing. Not one single word. In consequence of this unprecedented feat, I was computer-selected for the career track I am on now.
I have, at this writing, the honor of being an Interrogator, a full colonel in Planetary Interrogation. I won my rank by extorting from General Cheops the prevacise location of the Happy Valley thermonukes. When I got to work, we were only two hours out from Deadline, the moment at which the nukes would do their stuff and cobalt 90 would render our planet uninhabitable.
To do the job, the only piece of equipement I had with me was granny's quilting hook, the one she had used to make the quilt that used to adorn my bed (one of the many things that vanished in my parents' suicide pact fire).
I broke General Cheops in precisely ninety minutes, the most intense ninety minutes of my entire life, so shattering in their intensity that I needed a month to recover.
That is what I am famous for. But now, I think, my apotheosis has arrived. Over the weekend, Planetary has had armed police taking down a whole range of dissident groups, everything from Save Our Snails to Clean Air Now! They have been hauled into court on murky charges, with gagging orders slapped on those few of them who have been granted bail.
I am itching for the call which, I hope, will come before the week is done. But now I have to leave this file for a moment and head off to Brynderwyn Hospice, where, all going well, I will be able to persuade Colonel Cuthbert to sign off on the surcease papers that I need to bring an end to the life of Captain Slocum, the client I have been working with for a solid five years now.

WRAITH SHIPS CHAPTER ONE

WRAITH SHIPS CHAPTER ONE

When I left home to head for work, I heard screams coming from the Plantation. This is the woodlot out behind our homestead. All we grow there is manuka, a shrub that grows to the size of a small tree and makes nice firewood. We use the firewood for smoking snapper, a name applied to the kind of sea bream which we catch in local waters.
Judging by the screaming, it was a woman who was making the noise. I was all dolled up in my new dress uniform, because I was going to be meeting with Colonel Cuthbert, and I wanted him to sign some surcease papers for me. The last thing I wanted to do was to paddle down the wet and muddy path that leads into the Plantation, but that's what I did.
When I got to the clearing where the incinerator stands, there was a woman staked out on the ground, fresh blood red on her pale thighs. Half a dozen of the Gwenty brats were standing around, three of them with vivid blue paint spattered all over their pubic area. She's obviously had one of those anti-rape packets stashed in her panties, and it had gone off, and now three of the Gwenty brats were splattered with it.
"Get lost, Eater,@ said the largest Gwenty on hand, Barolo, eighteen years of age and a head taller than I was.
I didn't mess around. I hauled out my Taser and I tazed him. Twice. I just love the way they kick around in screaming convulsions. That really does it for me. I love the Taser so much that my first stock purchase ever was ten shares in Taser Transcosmica, our beloved T-trans, most important commercial outfit in Known Reality, if you ask me.
"Call the police," said Miss Bloody Thighs, struggling to the feet.
"Get out of here, bitch," I said.
I didn't want her bringing any cops here. My dad had not yet finished harvesting this year's marijuana crop. Plus I had five totally illegal plants of my own growing in the back of the Plantation - tobacco plants. You get caught with those, it's a death penalty offence. And on top of that there's the methamphetamine lab.
"Get out of here, bitch," I said, "or I'll taze you."
That upset her so much that she started pissing, right then and there. I was disgusted to see the stuff vomiting out of her. I hate it when a woman can't control her excretory functions.
My hatred goes back to the day when I murdered my sister, who was twelve years old at the time. It was my dad who had tasked me to perform this honor killing, just one day before my fourteenth birthday. Here on Sentosa, when you turn fourteen you become criminally liable for your acts, but up until then you get a free ride.
Although sister Belinda was as tall as I was, and almost as strong, taking her down was easy enough, thanks to the piano wire garotte that my father had recommended. But toward the end she lost control of her bowels, and all the excrement she had packed inside herself came shoveling out all over my best suede dress uniform shoes, which were never the same thereafter.
So when I saw Miss Bloody Thighs doing her Me Big Leaky act, I lost my onion, and I tased her. Three times. Just love that sinister clickety-click. In my imagination, it sounds like the hugest scorpion in the world coming scrabbling over wet rock to grab you and do you.
I tazed her three times, leaving her in a weeping heap huddled on the ground.
"Can we do her now?" said Putty Gwenty.
Only nine years old, but, much to my surprise, fairly well hung, and already standing at attention.
"Yeah, okay," I said. "But no knives! That means no blades, no chisels, no screwdrivers, no bamboo stakes, nothing apart from what you were born that. Got that?"
Once I made sure they weren't going to overdo things, I headed for the Brynderwn Hospice.
By now, I wasn't
worried about the raped foreigner going and blabbing to the police. After our local custom of raping tourists got out of head, the govenment put pressure on the cops to crack down. Accordingly, if the rape rate stays below ten percent of what it was formerly, back in the louche days before the crackdown, each cop gets a tax free cash bonus which is equivalent to twice his annual salary.
The cops do a great job of keeping the rape complaint rate right down. They have a simple but effective method. When a woman comes in, they stuff her mouth full of modeling clay then gag her. Then handcuff her and stuff her in a bait bag, one of those big bags which are big enough and strong enough to hold a full-grown cow. Then, that night, they take her out fishing. What they fish for is megasharks. And her function is to make herself useful by going on the big hook and serving as bait.
I used to be friendly with a cop, once, and got invited to a copshop beer bash where they showed off trophy videos. So I saw uncut video of megashark fishing. Boy! Talk about a turn on! Some day, I'd like to get hold of some expendable girl - an unsatisfactory wife, for example - and take her out on the Big Deep to do a bit of that fishing myself.
But I'd need help getting her on the hook. I don't know how that is achieved, getting her meat on the steel, so I'd need some help with that part.