Firefly--The Ghost Machine, page 21
So saying, she lunged for the controls and started thumping clusters of buttons at random.
The Seraphim whirled and cavorted giddily.
Wash shoved River aside and fought to regain control of the ship. “What the hell’s gotten into you?” he barked as the Seraphim settled, steady once more. “You don’t treat a fine piece of astroengineering like this like that.”
“I’m trying to shake you up, Wash. I don’t want to hit you, so I’m doing the next best thing.”
“You’re nuts.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Nuttier’n squirrel poop.”
“I’ve not been told that before.”
River made a bid to wrest the yoke from Wash’s clutches.
Suddenly two hands seized her by the shoulders and yanked her away. The same two hands tossed her mercilessly to one side, so that she fetched up in a corner of the Seraphim’s bridge.
“Wash,” said Zoë. “Is this girl the reason we’re Crazy Ivan-ing all over the place?”
“It so happens she is,” Wash said, pleased to see his wife.
“Let me deal with her.”
“Be my guest.”
Zoë stalked towards River intimidatingly. “Now see here, you bù huĭ hèn de pō fù. My kids are on this ship, and you’re scaring them by making it veer about every which way. I’m not fond of people scaring my kids. Anyone does that, quickly learns not to do it twice.”
Which are you?” River said, as Zoë loomed over her. “Badass-warrior Zoë? Blue-Sun-stooge Zoë? Or is it both at once? I’m confused.”
“You’re confused?” said Zoë. “Aren’t you River Tam, who can barely string a coherent sentence together? Yet you’re talking like a normal person.”
“Huh.” River pondered it. “So I am. I guess this is the me who isn’t all the other me’s, the me underneath that muddled mess of Rivers the doctors at the Academy created. The real me. Only in dreams. Of course, Blue-Sun-stooge Zoë isn’t supposed to know how I normally am. But then we aren’t supposed to be on the bridge of a Seraphim, either. Wash and I are both dreaming at once. I’m in his dream but also in mine. The two are overlapping. The intersecting region in a Venn diagram. This is going to take a little getting used to.”
“How about I simplify it for you?” Zoë reached down and grabbed River by the hair. She hauled her upright and started dragging her towards the door connecting the bridge to the rest of the ship. “You don’t belong here. Out you go.”
River’s response was to push off the floor with both feet and perform a perfectly executed backflip. She swung herself over Zoë’s head, landing astride her shoulders. Her own head stayed low, her hair still in Zoë’s grasp.
She could do this sort of thing in dreams. She could do it in real life, too, for that matter. She just hadn’t had cause to yet.
Scissoring her legs around Zoë’s neck, she began to squeeze. Zoë let go of her hair and seized ahold of her thighs with both hands in order to pry them apart. River simply squeezed tighter.
Wash, meanwhile, was blithely flying the Seraphim. Either he was unaware of the fight going on right behind him or he didn’t care.
Zoë threw herself backwards, sending both her and River crashing into a wall. She was attempting to dislodge River, but River clung on.
River kept having to tell herself this wasn’t the real Zoë, this was just a dream construct. She admired the real Zoë hugely for her cool-headedness under pressure, her skills as a strategist, the way she acted unhesitatingly. This Zoë was not that Zoë. Still it felt bad trying to throttle her into submission.
Now Zoë began pummeling River’s knees in hopes of breaking her hold that way.
Dream pain still hurts, River thought, but she grinned and bore it.
Gradually Zoë’s efforts weakened. River was cutting off the supply of air to her lungs and blood to her brain. She should pass out at any moment.
The punches faltered. Zoë tottered. She sagged to the floor.
River relaxed her grip.
Quick as lightning, Zoë was back up on her feet.
“So easily hoodwinked,” she snarled, and delivered three astonishingly swift blows to River’s face.
Reeling, River felt herself being hustled out of the bridge through the doorway. She tried to resist, but in vain. Zoë hurled her to the floor in the corridor outside.
“And stay out!” she said, hitting the switch that closed the door.
River sprang up, trying to get to the door before it slammed shut.
Too late.
A message lit up in red on the status panel beside the door: LOCK ENGAGED. NO ENTRY.
“Zhēn dăo méi,” River hissed.
She hammered on the door a few times with her fists. Nothing from the other side but derisive laughter.
She perceived quite clearly that she had been shut out of Wash’s dream-state. The door symbolized that. And even if she did manage to break in again, Zoë had become Wash’s appointed gatekeeper, there to guard against further incursion. She would defy River every step of the way.
River had had the one chance with Wash and it hadn’t worked out. He was now fully resistant to any attempt she made to wake him.
That left her no choice.
She was going to have to wake one of the others.
But which one?
Strapped to a chair, buck naked, Zoë screamed.
She hated herself for screaming. She was desperate not to show weakness before this man.
But the pain was so acute, so all-consuming, that screaming was the only thing she could do.
Derrial Book, the Butcher of Beylix, stepped back from her. The drill-like tool in his hand was akin to something a surgeon or a dentist might use. It was doubtful, however, that a medical professional would use it the way he was. Blood dripped from its cylindrical steel bit, whose rotations had slowed to a standstill. Blood, little shreds of flesh, and even the odd tiny bone fragment.
Zoë’s breath came in short, hissing gasps. She fought to get it under control. Cold perspiration coated her face. She hurt in about a dozen places at once. She couldn’t tell which was the freshest source of pain, couldn’t even look down at herself to see her wounds. Her head was held rigidly in place by a band attached to the chair back. She could look only at Book.
“Now then,” he said. “That was just the warm-up. A few exploratory probings, to see what you’re made of. I can tell you’re a tough woman, Miz Alleyne. You’re going to last as long as any of your colleagues ever did. Longer, perhaps. But that’s only to your disadvantage, and my advantage.”
“Bèn tiān sheng de yī duī ròu,” Zoë spat.
“Stupid inbred sack of meat I may be,” Book said placidly, “but I am not the one being tortured. Nor am I the one who has been relentlessly pursuing Alliance officers to the ends of the ’verse and either dragging them off to face a kangaroo court or summarily executing them. That sort of behavior cannot stand, Miz Alleyne. Those men and women are heroes. Heroes in a war we ought to have won. And you are treating them as villains. The real villains here are your paymasters on Londinium, the so-called Accord. That motley assemblage of former Browncoat bigwigs. Do you think they weren’t guilty of deeds just as bad? Do you honestly believe your side’s hands are any less bloodstained than ours?”
“We tried to fight clean,” Zoë said. “If it happened we did wrong now and then, it was in the name of right.”
“Ah, the old ‘the end justifies the means’ argument. But turn that on its head. What if you’d lost? Then the end wouldn’t have been worth any of the steps you took to get there. Until Serenity Valley, the Unification War was poised on a knife-edge. That it tipped in the Independents’ favor is just a quirk of fate. If it had tipped in ours—well, you and I would not be having this fascinating conversation, for one.”
“And wouldn’t that be a pity.”
Book smiled, and Zoë was struck by the weirdest feeling. She felt that, under other circumstances, she might have liked this man. She might even have considered him a friend.
Or was that just one of his torturer tactics? Coming across as nice and kind and reasonable, even when he was doing vile things you? Didn’t that just make the whole situation worse? When pain was being inflicted by someone so seemingly likable, that made it that much more intense and humiliating.
“A pity indeed, Zoë,” Book said. “May I call you Zoë? ‘Miz Alleyne’ feels so formal, and we seem to have got to know each other rather well already, despite it being such a short acquaintance.”
“You can call me Zoë, long as I can keep calling you bèn tiān sheng de yī duī ròu.”
This time Book simply brushed the insult aside. “The fact is, Zoë, we who served in the Alliance armed forces can’t have you and others like you hunting us down. We don’t deserve such shabby treatment. We were simply carrying out our orders, doing what we could to end the war as swiftly as possible.”
“Yeah. Right. So noble. And I suppose your interrogations were all part of that.”
“They certainly were,” Book said. “A military, if it is to succeed, needs intelligence about the enemy, and one of the fastest and simplest ways of obtaining said intelligence is extracting it from enemy troops. I did my best to be efficient and cause the minimal amount of suffering to my subjects. Sometimes, alas, in order to do that, I had to cause the maximum amount of suffering in the shortest duration. That’s just the way it goes. With you, it’s a little bit different. There is no purpose to what I am doing, you see, other than to hurt you and debase you. You don’t have any information I need. All I am hoping to achieve is to make your last hours of existence as excruciating and miserable as they can be. Speaking of which…”
Book turned to a workbench that, through no coincidence, sat just within Zoë’s field of vision. On it were laid out all manner of sharp objects: sawtoothed things, bladed things, long pointed things, things with little inbuilt motors, things that retracted, things that expanded. All bore the patina of age but looked well cared for. She imagined these utensils traveled with Book wherever he went. She pictured him poring over them in private, recalling with relish the howls and shrieks each would elicit from his victims and dreaming up new ways of using them.
“You must understand,” the Butcher of Beylix said, “that from here onward your life is going to be measured solely in pain. Time is going to lose all meaning for you. There will simply be periods of torment with intervals for recovery in between. Those will be your day and night. You will weep. You will cry for your mother. You will void your bladder and perhaps also your bowels, although, please, you mustn’t be embarrassed about that—I’m used to it. At several points you will long for death. You will beg me to kill you. But my purpose is not to kill you. Quite the opposite. It is to keep you alive as long as possible.
“Nor,” he continued, “will there be any last-minute reprieve, in case you were holding out that hope. No one knows where you are, not even your erstwhile brother-in-arms, Malcolm Reynolds. No one has any idea where this building is save the Alliance loyalists who brought you here, the same men who stripped you of your weapons and more recently your clothing and fastened you to that chair. The same men, moreover, who are stationed in the hallway outside this room, listening to you suffer. They are probably having a nice smoke. They are almost certainly laughing as they hear you scream. They may even be making bawdy jokes about your undeniable sexual allure and what they would like to have done to you if they’d had their druthers. They will not feel the same way about you, however, when I am through with you. I may indeed invite them in to look at you in your final moments. The revulsion on their faces will tell you all you need to know.”
He selected one of the implements on the workbench, something like a cross between a switchblade and an egg-whisk with an on-off button and a sliding lever embedded in the handle.
“I’ll make sure you will be able to see them,” he said. “But to do that, you only need the use of one of your eyes.”
As he approached the chair, Zoë braced herself. There was nothing else she could do. She had flung abuse at Book, and if any of it had hit home, that would have been some small compensation; but instead it had just bounced off him. She doubted he had a better nature she could try appealing to. She was all out of options.
Except delaying him. Postponing the evil moment as long as possible.
“What made you like this?” she said.
Book paused with the egg-whisk-like implement just inches from her face. “Funny thing,” he said. “I always thought I was destined for holy orders. As a boy and even as a young man, I could imagine nothing better than becoming a Shepherd. I felt God moving strongly within me. I was all about doing good works, and was keen to share my religious certainties with others.”
“And this is how you wound up. I’d say God wasn’t your boss anymore. You’re working for the other guy.”
Book laughed hollowly. “The war soon taught me that God is an irrelevance. A just deity would never have allowed the ’verse to tear itself apart the way it did. He would never have pitched brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. If I’d still harbored any religious inclinations after the war started, they were dispelled by the sight of people in the same predicament you are in, praying to the Lord to deliver them from my ministrations. Needless to say, their prayers were never answered.”
He looked somber for a second, almost mournful.
“And that’s enough procrastinating, Zoë,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed chatting with you, and I imagine there’ll be more opportunities to do so, further down the line. It’s good to pause every now and then, so that we can each regroup and get our strength back.”
At the periphery of her vision, Zoë glimpsed a thin, pale girl in a long, floaty dress. She was standing in a corner of the room. She hadn’t been there a moment earlier. She had just sort of flickered into view.
“Who—?” she began, and then the implement in the Butcher of Beylix’s hands started to whine and whirr, and there was blinding agony.
Literally blinding.
For several seconds, River was too appalled to act. The sight of Zoë in that chair was horrific. Not just her injuries but her helplessness. It wasn’t the real Zoë, of course. River knew that. Just a dream Zoë. But even so, she was repelled by what she was seeing.
The fact that Zoë’s torturer was Shepherd Book only made it worse. When, a while earlier, River had seen him introduce himself to Zoë as the Butcher of Beylix, it had been like a punch to the gut. The shock had made her reel inwardly.
More shocking still was watching him ply his trade now. The calm adroitness with which he delved his cutting implement into Zoë’s eye socket. His indifference to the piteous wail that escaped her throat and the frantic flexing of her body against its restraints. The slight flaring of his upper lip as he expertly torqued and tugged. The practiced ease of it all.
Book straightened up, and Zoë’s struggles subsided, her whole body going limp. Within the bulbous end of the egg-whisk thing there was a bloodied ball of jelly. In Zoë’s face there was a hollow, dripping gouge where that ball of jelly belonged.
Book turned to the workbench and laid the torture implement down.
That was when he noticed River.
“Ah,” he said. “It appears we have a witness. Just wait there, young lady. I’ll come to you in due course.”
“You don’t scare me,” River said. “You did once, when your hair was big and frizzy. It’s all close-cropped now. But even if it wasn’t, I can handle you.”
“Can you?” Book picked up a knife fashioned from a single piece of stainless steel with a wickedly curved blade. He moved towards River. “I believe you know me as a good man.” He jerked a thumb towards Zoë, who had passed out from her ordeal. “Not the person Zoë there has met, but someone else. You would never expect me to harm you. But I think, River, you always intuited that beneath my Shepherdly exterior lies something darker. I think Zoë— the real Zoë—was aware of it too. During my time aboard Serenity there were several occasions when hints of my dubious past revealed themselves. Hence Zoë has envisaged me as this fictitious character called the Butcher of Beylix. For I am her worst fears realized. I am the turncoat comrade. I am the sternly smiling face of the Alliance. I am the deep-seated sense shared by all those who come through a war unscathed, that they didn’t deserve to. I am—”
“Someone who talks too much.”
River darted at Book, driving an elbow into his midriff and at the same time batting his knife hand aside with her other arm. Book stumbled back against his workbench, which rocked with the impact. Several of his torture devices slid off and fell to the floor with a clatter.
River pressed home the attack. Still warding off Book’s knife hand, she battered his ribs, sternum, and gut with a flurry of vicious short-range jabs. The blows landed thick and fast. She was determined not to give him a moment’s respite.
She became aware of laughter—a low, genial chuckling. She looked up to see Book grinning twinkly-eyed at her and shaking his head.
“You can’t hurt me, River,” he said. “You can’t because deep down you don’t want to. To you, I am still wise, winsome Shepherd Book. You can’t get over that, and it makes me impervious to your assault. Do your worst. I can take it.”
River stepped back, panting. He was right. She had liked the real Book. He had always exuded a sense of peace and dependability. This Book wasn’t that Book, but he was similar enough. Her fondness for him was working against her. It encased him in a kind of armor.
Dream logic really sucked sometimes.
The knife flashed through the air. River barely saw the thrust coming. She ducked aside, the blade missing her by mere millimeters.
She aimed a retaliatory heel-kick at Book’s leg. The move ought to have dislocated his kneecap. Book just smiled.
Again the knife came towards her, its blade a shimmering arc. She shot up both hands to catch Book’s wrist. The knife stalled in midair.
