Sensation was a fire-breathing monster, searing its way through his flesh and gnawing at the ends of raw and tender nerve endings. Still he fought against it, howling into the depths of his mind as he tried to keep thick unconsciousness heaped deep around him. In his struggle he watched images dart past his mind’s eye, almost too quick to identify: a silver ship, a giant station in space, alien creatures, agonizing pain. One after another they came, a rushing river that refused his will’s demand to slow.
His eyes finally fluttered open after what seemed an eternity in the maelstrom’s grip and, like the ebbing of the tide, the pain rapidly retreated until he was once again alone in his mind.
“Welcome back, doctor.” A soft voice whispered from somewhere by his feet, each tone carrying culture, sophistication and intelligence.
For a brief moment his mind whirled, searching for self. There, floating like flotsam in a storm’s wake: He was Ian Finn.
“I’m surprised you’re still here, vev’Norantus.” He husked through a desert-dry mouth and cracked throat, the name belonging to the voice’s owner appearing out of the broken remains of his memory.
“Isn’t this the twelfth time I’ve been brought back?”
“Fifteen, but who’s counting, doctor.” The voice replied, never changing. “You really should stop resisting. It would negate the necessity in killing you over and over.”
“What can I say?” Finn rasped, his hands trembling as he pulled them from beneath the thin blanket covering his naked body. He reached up to his neck and felt a chill wash through his body as his fingers fell across the all-too familiar metal bonded to his flesh.
“I’m a tough nut to crack.”
“An interesting term of description.” The voice admitted. There was a shifting in the shadows just outside of Finn’s view. Then the sculpted features of a golden being hove into view to gaze down at him with a frown, its blue eyes studying him like he was some sort of lab animal.
“But appropriate, considering how you still resist our will.” The being’s mouth opened to utter, revealing itself as vev’Norantus.
Finn closed his eyes against sight of the Halinor’s perfect face.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Praetor? I don’t know where to find this ‘Crown of Oberon’ you keep talking about.” He rasped tiredly, already anticipating the searing waves of pain emanating from the metallic half moon molecular bonded to his neck, the source of agony enough to kill him fourteen times now after his refusal to give his captors what they wanted.
“I didn’t even know the damn thing existed until the Pax contacted the Directorate a few days ago.”
“Yet you had contact with several Isivir agents, doctor, including the sanctimonious Deks Rountree in that short period of time.” Vev’Norantus’ voice abruptly hardened and instinctively Finn braced for the first shock of pain. It seemed the Halinor’s threshold for frustration was quickly and easily reached. And, as soon as vev’Norantus was frustrated, he started sending blasts of pain from the dominance collar through Finn’s body.
They came in waves, piggy-backing along Finn’s own nervous system to attack the ganglia and nerve centers deep in the body, forcing them to shiver their way into crazed activity. Nerve impulse after nerve impulse swept then through the body, hyper-stimulating the senses and wracking muscle tissue with knotting cramps.
Within heartbeats the cramps were ripping his muscles apart, muscle fighting against muscle in a chaotic battle of pain and futility. At the same time, the over-stimulated muscles broke bone and ruptured internal organs in their frenzy, literally twisting and bending the rest of the body into a shapeless bag of meat. Blood poured from ruptured vessels, fountaining out of nostrils and mouth as the body beat itself to death. And, all the while the brain gathered in every report of pain until it too was overwhelmed and the victim fell unconscious, mere moments before death.
That death Finn knew well, having suffered through it fifteen times. And, as he felt the collar warm against his flesh, he knew he was about to suffer it again. Silently he howled in the depths of his mind, knowing this time the pain would be enough to send him finally over the edge into insanity, an edge he had walked precariously close to the last two times. Would he then wake again, this time mad from the torture, his broken spirit captured by the Praetors’ strange technology to be poured once again into his body, cloned from the cell sample the Viseith agent took onboard the Indurin before killing him originally?
It was a shock that first time, waking with his neck still aching in memory of the twist that snapped it, severing his spinal cord and sending a neural shock into his brain with sufficient force to kill him almost instantly. But he didn’t wake in a bed that time, opening his eyes to find himself suspended instead in a great, encased tube, surrounded by a thick, green gel. A mask covered his nostrils and mouth, a steady stream of air flowing from it to fill his lungs with clean, if somewhat antiseptic-tasting oxygen.
He had been naked that first time, the neutral buoyancy of the gel cradling him against gravity like amniotic fluid, tubes into his body his umbilicus, providing nutrients to his rapidly regrowing body. Gone were the scars gathered from a lifetime of living; the long purple line along his left forearm from falling out of a tree when he was a boy, the moon-shaped scar from the emergency appendectomy he suffered in his second year of university to remove a burst appendix, and the slightly crooked cant of the small finger on his right hand, dislocated and never properly repaired when he was a teenager.
They were all gone, erased when his body was remade from the sample of DNA the Viseith drew from the cells stolen out of the tissue of his neck. Remade into perfection, his DNA cleaned and re-engineered to create a better Finn, faster and stronger than nature originally gifted him. His nervous system too benefited from the re-engineering, his brain hardwired to be more efficient, retain more information and function faster. His reflexes were improved to razor-edge and he found himself with infinite control over his body.
As beneficial as he thought it was when he first discovered the improvements, Finn quickly realized the downside to the heightened sensation and nervous control when they pulled him from the tank and put the dominance collar on him. Because it rapidly became apparent that they hadn’t improved his nervous system in order to make him think faster, but to feel the collar’s fiery grip that much more strongly.
A perfect half circle of some unidentifiable metal alloy a finger-width wide, the collar fit easily around his neck, lying against his collarbone to send metallic fibrils deep into his body in their search for his nerve centers. At the same time the collar bonded itself at the molecular level to his skin, effectively becoming part of his body and quite irremovable. Completed by a remotely operated control device, the unit became a tool of horrible torture, morbidly effective in its task of breaking one’s spirit.
Finn had tasted its fire the first time vev’Norantus demanded he tell them where the humans were hiding the Crown of Oberon, the questions coming hard and fast as a knot of healers dried Finn off from his time in the tank. Burned into his synapses via gel electro-transfer, Finn was stunned to find the Sidhe language at his fingertips, his comprehension and usage of it flawless.
Unfortunately that also had the secondary effect of making him available for uncompromising interrogation. When the human didn’t give him the answers he wanted, vev’Norantus sent a wash of fire through Finn’s body and the gasping human dropped to his knees, pain stealing his strength in an instant, the first of many that would follow with devastating effect.
Ironically, though the collar was effective in its delivery, it failed to break Finn’s spirit. Even after sending him to his death fourteen times, Finn somehow resisted, refusing to provide the Halinor traitor what he wanted. Of course, he was aided in that endeavor by not actually having the answers himself, making it easy to deny the Praetor what he sought.
Yes, the collar had failed to break him. But now it threatened to drive him insane, his mind no longer capable of withstanding another descent into the pain-filled depths the collar dragged him to, genetically enhanced or not. Even as it warmed against his skin, he instinctively cringed, the howling in his mind becoming deafening.
“Surely Rountree, so full of himself and his allegiance to the Pax, let something go that you can tell us, hm? A boast, bold as that Juresil popinjay, let slip at a moment of weakness?”
“Nothing.” Finn grated through clenched teeth. “How many times do I have to tell you, you Halinor idiot? I know nothing!” He tensed against the anticipated onslaught.
Only to relax a moment later when it didn’t come.
“I think he’s telling the truth, vev’Norantus.” A second voice interjected, one Finn hadn’t heard before. “No-one can withstand the torment the collar’s put this human through without slipping at least once. And Finn’s maintained the consistency of his story with a faithfulness enviable by the druids.”
Finn’s eyes flickered open in time to see the frowning Halinor look at the second speaker over the human’s body. The muscle in vev’Norantus’ jaw jumped wildly from his effort to restrain himself from activating the collar’s fatal rush of energy. Then the bright blue eyes were swinging back down onto him.
“Count yourself lucky this time, human.” The Praetor tightly hissed, roughly stuffing the dominator collar’s control tab into a tunic pocket. Then he was gone, leaving the space directly over Finn’s head momentarily empty.
“He’s gone, but you are not. Are you, my mysterious benefactor.” Finn husked after a long pause to insure vev’Norantus didn’t return. He carefully sat up, eyes stabbing into the heavy shadows that cloaked the room’s remaining space.
The second Praetor, however, stayed hidden.
“Hardly a benefactor, Doctor Finn.” The voice replied, too indistinct for Finn to mark it as male or female. “Just not as willing as Master vev’Norantus to continue wasting time. Ours is growing precariously short as the Pax races more quickly towards our common goal.”
The shadows shifted and a second Halinor drew out of the darkness, wrapped in an indigo robe that hide it still. There was no mistaking the face that peered down at him from within the deep cowl, however. Nor her beauty; breathtaking enough to send a stab of desire through Finn’s body. If she noticed the widening of his pupils in response to her appearance, the female alien didn’t indicate. Instead she maintained a cool aloofness, completely untouched by passion.
“Instead of eliciting information through torture, you’ll become our guide, directing us through your home systems in our search for the Crown of Oberon.”
“And if I don’t, you’ll twist me into rubber anyway.” Finn deadpanned, the female Praetor’s flat declaration jolting any lasting desire from him with a chilling rush.
The Halinor smiled thinly.
“You see the right of it.” She rasped.
“Ah. So, other than not dying, what’s my motivation here? Work with the Praetors so they can get their hands on the talisman and rip the Pax apart in a civil war vicious enough to spread through the galactic arm and swallow the Directorate? That hardly sounds appealing.”
“I care not what appeals to you, doctor.” The smile had vanished as soon as Finn began speaking. “Nor do I care about your motivation. You will do our bidding and help us find the Crown or you will die without coming back. Nothing more, nothing less.” She drew out a dominator collar control tab from a hidden pocket inside her robe, holding it up in Finn’s view.
“Do you choose to die, doctor?” Her thumb pressed against the tab’s side and Finn winced as the collar warmed against his skin.
“Your argument, as skeletal as it was, is compelling.” He muttered after a second’s hesitation. “I’ll render whatever aide I can, as long as it doesn’t harm Humanity or the Directorate.”
“I promise nothing.” The Sidhe returned the control tab to its hidden pocket.
“I didn’t expect you to.” Finn sat up with a grunt, inwardly crying in relief as the collar cooled. “Just know you’ll have to kill me as soon as you threaten my people.”
“So noted.” The female Halinor flatly rasped. “You’ll find clothing on a table five paces to your right. I will return as soon as you’re dressed and we’ll begin.”
Then she was gone, turning and stepping back into the shadows before Finn could do more than nod in acknowledgement. A heartbeat later he sensed he was alone.
“Well, damn.” He muttered to no one in particular.
“If that doesn’t suck!”