Interrogation

“If you don’t want people’s perceptions of you to be colored by your past, make sure that your past is as clean as it can be.”

-from Realtalk: A Governor Speaks Out, by Raj Calai

The Impulse arrived prepared. They jumped in as silently and unobtrusively as they could, not entirely sure of what they would find. They were expecting either a station or nothing. What they found, however, once their instruments had time to adjust and take readings of their new location, was odd. For one thing, their main and backup gravimeters were going absolutely haywire, which caused great muttering among the bridge crew. For another, scattered around in space were little ships: probably shuttles and dogfighters, alive with radio signals. There was no mothership to be seen, which was extremely odd.

Sid and Kino were on the bridge. Sid was seated next to Captain Wen, but Kino was wandering around, looking much like a caged animal as she inspected the consoles of the bridge crew. Everyone had gotten used to her doing that by now, since she and Sid had been regular features on the ship, but Sid was glad that she didn't insist on hovering over his shoulder.

“Do the shuttles know we're here?” Sid asked, leaning forward in his seat.

“We're running cold, and our exterior is designed to be low visibility, so probably not,” Captain Wen said.

Sid pulled up the gravimeter reading on his tablet. “Could this be a micro black hole?” he asked.

“Maybe. We'd be able to see if we got between it and a star, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty small. It's not a danger to us either way. Those readings are barely anything.”

The gravitational readings that they were getting were approximately equivalent to the force that Emerri's star exerted at approximately the distance of its furthest planet. Even without a stardrive capable of faster than light travel, any shuttle could easily fly away from a micro black hole at this radius.

“Could the ship that those shuttles belong to be close to it? The black hole, I mean. On the other side, so we can't see it?”

“I have heard rumors that pirates are suicidally obsessed with black holes, but I don't know why they'd litter their shuttles everywhere. There's something going on here,” Wen said. “I don't like it.”

“Neither do I. Do you think...” Sid paused for a second. “Could we capture one of those shuttles, without them noticing?”

Wen laughed. “You're out of your mind. Look how much they're talking to each other.” Indeed, the encrypted radio signals being sent out omnidirectionally from each of the shuttles lit up the display like little clouds. The shuttles would notice as soon as one of their number stopped broadcasting, or broadcast a distress message.

“If we did take them on, would they be a threat?”

“You insult me,” Wen said. “The only difficulty would be taking them alive.”

Sid considered this for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck. “That's what we're going to do, right? Get them?”

“I didn't come all this way for nothing,” Wen said. “They look like pirate shuttles. We can at least try to interrogate them for information, even if there's no physical connection.”

“You think there's no chance Yan is on one of those?”

“If I had a valuable and dangerous prisoner, I would not want to leave her in a confined space with access to a radio and guns,” Wen said.

“It's not like a shuttle engine would be able to get her anywhere,” Sid said. “But I see your point. Hey, Kino.”

“What?” Kino asked, coming over at the sound of her name. She didn't particularly like Captain Wen, so the two generally ignored each other. Unfortunately for the both of them (and Sid as their go-between), this was a critical moment and it would be best if both of the apprentices were involved.

“You ready to see a pirate fight?”

“You sound cheerful,” she said.

“I'm mostly frustrated. But a lead's a lead,” Sid said, keeping a smile on his face. He turned to Wen. “How are we going to do this?”

Wen scratched his chin. “How long are you willing to wait?”

“What are my options?” Sid asked.

“We can send our dogs out now, or we can wait and jump in right on top of one of them.”

“What are the odds on each of those plans?” Kino asked.

“If we send our dogs out, they'll know we're here as soon as their instruments pick us up. They'd be able to run, but probably not very far. There's a chance they could get back to their mothership, wherever it's hiding. I severely doubt there would be any real contest between our dogs and theirs.”

“And if we jump in?” Kino asked.

“We're more likely to catch one alive, and it will be much easier on our pilots,” Wen said. “But we also can't guarantee that they'll all stick around. And there's the tiny chance that they'll see us. Not a big chance, but it exists.”

“If they weren't sticking around, what are the chances that they'd be here at all?” Kino asked. “They look like they're just sitting around.”

Wen nodded. “I agree. I think we have the luxury of time. If you're alright with waiting, that's what I'd like to do.”

Sid scrunched up his face a little bit. He definitely did not want to wait another eight hours for the ship to be ready to jump, but it did seem like the sounder plan. He did want to catch them alive, after all.

“Two questions,” he finally said. “Is there any way we can hear what they're saying over the radio?”

“If they switch to clear signals, sure. Right now it's encrypted and we don't have a way to break that.”

“All the technology in the universe, and you can't crack a communications code?” Sid asked.

Wen raised an eyebrow. “If you have the next ten million years to wait, we can brute force it,” he said.

“Nevermind, sorry I asked. But my other question is, what if we jump in, and the mothership comes to answer the distress call. Will that be a problem?”

“On the contrary, I think it would be a wonderful opportunity,” Wen said. “If we can use the shuttle as bait, all the better. There's probably more information on a big ship.”

“Then wouldn't it be better to go in right away?”

“We come back to the question of live capture. The more time they know we're coming, the more time they have to do anything they need to do.”

Sid nodded. He didn't love the sound of that, but he had learned his lesson from giving advance warning at the LT, for all the good it had done. “Alright. We can jump in, then.”

---

It was a tense eight hours, watching and waiting. The pirate shuttles, for reasons that none of the crew of the Impulse could discern, stayed right in position, arrayed out as though around the face of a sphere. It was as if they were waiting for something.

The mothership never made an appearance either. It was unlikely that it was staying cold and radio silent, since the shuttles were doing less than nothing to disguise their presence. The idea that it was behind the black hole still held, but there was also a sneaking suspicion that it simply wasn't around. All of this raised more questions than it answered.

Sid tried to sleep during the waiting time, found that he barely could, and instead wandered the halls of the ship, trying to keep his mind alert and away from nagging fears. He kept returning to Ervantes's door, but just walked past it, not wanting to bother him if he was sleeping. They had made up, a little bit, but there was a weird atmosphere between them. Ervantes still had reservations about Sid, which he could understand, even if he didn't like. Maybe this whole trip would be an opportunity for him to prove himself in Ervantes's eyes.

He drank a lot of coffee, and was practically vibrating by time he returned to the bridge. Kino seemed off. Her sleeves weren't even torn apart, for once, she just was mouthing something over and over. Sid read her lips and saw that it was one of the common prayers. They could all use one, so he wasn't going to stop her.

She stood on the side of the room, and Sid returned to his place next to Wen. Ervantes was on the bridge as well, standing next to Kino. His liaison duties had been reinstated, apparently, since they were on a real mission again.

Captain Wen called out a countdown to jump, and they moved. Such a short jump hardly changed their perspective in the sky. The only thing that was different was the sudden presence of a shuttle right in the center of their view screen. They were less than a hundred meters away from it. It was tiny, a ragged looking dogfighter, and it took a few seconds for it to respond to the new presence in its area.

It tried to accelerate away, but the Impulse already had her guns locked on its side, and she fired on it. Being so close, the impact looked instantaneous, and the tiny ship was sent spinning. The flare from its tiny drive died immediately. From inside the Impulse, several Imperial dogfighters rushed out, flying to incapacitate the wounded ship completely. They targeted its guns, which were immediately destroyed, and fired a salvo at its underbay where its missiles were kept. By the end of it, the ship had suffered so many impacts that Sid had to wonder if the crew inside were even alive. Certainly being jerked around that much would be painful. And that was assuming that the crew had been tied down in their seats when the Impulse came in. If they had been floating loose in the cabin, they very well might have snapped their necks fifty times over.

A small but powerful carrier drone latched on to the side of the shuttle, stabilizing it in space so that it was easier for the the next extraction phase to begin.

It was almost surgical in its precision. Sid's nails dug into the side of his chair as he watched suited Fleet soldiers launch out and fly towards the shuttle. It was an odd and uncomfortable thing to watch from the outside as they sliced the shuttle open, allowing them entrance and causing all the air to rush out. Sid felt a twist of empathy in his gut for the people in the ship, but tried to squash it. He needed to focus. It was a good thing that they were going to be able to capture these people alive.

Within a minute, the Fleet soldiers had gone inside the ship and retrieved the bodies of the crew. They jammed them into coffin shaped rescue pods carried by the drone that was hooked onto the side of the ship.

And then it was over. The drone hauled its passengers and its cargo back towards the Impulse. It had all been so easy, so fast. Sid felt like if he had blinked even once, he would have missed the whole thing.

“Are they alive?” Sid asked, paging down to the team who were coming in.

“Injured and unconscious, but they'll survive,” someone said over the ship's radio.

“Great,” Sid said. He relaxed backwards into his chair, some of the tension leaving his body. Of course, this was only the beginning, but it had gone so much better than he had any right to expect.

“Sir?” one of the bridge crew said, addressing Captain Wen.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“The other shuttles, they're disappearing.”

In all the excitement, the big screen had been focused on the action happening to the closest shuttle. Only one very unlucky bridge crewmember had been monitoring the other shuttles, who were too far away to be able to interfere. Wen flicked the big display to show the wider view of space, overlaid with the radio signals coming off of the other shuttles. The ones that had been closest to them were already gone, completely vanished, but as they watched, the most distant shuttles accelerated, then seemed to disappear from existence, leaving absolutely no trace.

“What the fuck?” Sid said under his breath. Or he thought he said under his breath, anyway. Wen turned to look at him and Sid cringed. But he could see in his eyes that Wen, even if he wasn't going to stoop to swearing on the bridge, felt the same way.

“Were they jumping?” Wen asked. “Can we get someone to check if there's drive signatures?”

“They definitely weren't jumping,” the lieutenant who had brought the issue to their attention said. “If they were, they wouldn't have bothered to accelerate.” She pulled up a diagram on her screen. “Look where they all were and where they all went. If we had more data points I could say for sure, but it looks like they passed beyond some sort of... Event horizon? That's not the right word, but I don't have a better way to describe it. Their signals just got cut dead.”

“Could a black hole do that?” Sid asked.

“No,” the lieutenant said. “Definitely not.”

“There's no way they could have just gone cold, correct?” Wen asked.

“We'd see the residual heat from their engines.”

“Is whatever happened to them any danger to us?” Wen asked.

“Since they went right towards it, and they seemed to expect it, probably not. Unless they can use it to mass their forces and attack us, I don't think whatever made them disappear is inherently a danger,” the lieutenant said. She had a bit of a cagey look on her face that indicated that she wasn't entirely sure of what she was saying.

“Right. We aren't going to move for the next eight hours, so I want the dogs out and on alert, and I want four crews to go chase one of those shuttles. Go where they went. Carefully,” Wen said. “And put Rook onto one of the crews.” Rook was one of the two sensitives aboard the Impulse. It was a risk to send out a sensitive, as they were such an important asset, so it was an interesting choice on Wen's part. “I don't like the look of this.”

The bridge scrambled to obey; the crew coordinator got on the ship's comms to assign duties to the dogfighters and crews who would be going out. The dogfighters launched immediately, having already been prepared. The crews who were going to follow where the little pirate shuttles had gone took a few minutes longer to assemble, but sailed out of the Impulse's bays and off towards where the ships had vanished. They weren't accelerating particularly hard, and the shuttle they were following had been a decent distance away, so it would take them a while to get where they were going.

Sid stood up. “I'm going to go investigate our catch,” he said. “Kino? Lieutenant Cesper?”

Wen waved him off. “Let me know what you find.”

Kino nodded and followed Sid off the bridge, with Ervantes trailing slightly behind. Kino was looking more nervous by the minute as they walked down towards the medical area where their captives had been brought.

“You okay?” Sid asked her, nudging her shoulder with his.

“Fine,” she said.

“If it's any consolation, I doubt we're going to get much useful information,” Sid said.

“I don't know why you say that. The pirates...” She hesitated as she said that, putting a noticeable gap in between her words on Sid's glasses. “They are pirates, right?”

“The shuttle we hauled in is old Imperial make. I can't believe you didn't notice the Hauler logo on the side. Definitely pirates.”

Something in Kino's posture relaxed fractionally. Sid could understand her desire to encounter pirates rather than the Empire's actual enemies. After all, pirates were independent, rarely organized, and not a threat. If this was a place where the Adversary tended to gather, they could be well armed and easily able to take down an Imperial ship. So he had heard, anyway.

“It'll make getting information out of them easier, anyway. They'll speak our language.”

“Yours, maybe. There's plenty of pirates who don't speak New Imperial, I think.”

Sid laughed. True, pirates and spacers were united by their use of sign language, which was handy when outside of the cozy atmosphere of a ship. Still, most of them only had a bare technical vocabulary. He didn't trust that he would be able to conduct an interrogation in sign, but there would definitely be someone on the Impulse who could translate, no matter what language the pirates actually spoke. The Fleet pulled crew from every planet in the Empire.

Ervantes was silent as they walked. Sid turned half around to look at him. “How are you feeling about this?” he asked.

“About the same as Captain Wen,” Ervantes said. “There's something strange going on here. I don't like things that I can't explain. Other than that, it's luckily not my place to make decisions based on how I feel.”

“I care how you feel,” Sid said. He was too buzzing with anticipation to be able to have a real conversation with Ervantes, so he turned back around.

Sid was familiar with the medical bay from his brief stay in it not too long ago. The whole place was shiny and well organized, but now it was filled with Fleet soldiers rushing this way and that. It was probably an inordinate amount of excitement for just some prisoners, but Sid wasn't a doctor, so what did he know.

He flagged down one of the head nurses. “What's the status?” he asked.

The nurse pulled down his face mask so that Sid could see his lips. How nice of him. “One of them is unconscious from a head injury. We're running tests to see if there's anything that can be done. The other has a broken leg that we're getting set now.”

“Rough time in there, hunh?”

“Yes, Apprentice Welslak.”

Something Kino was doing caught Sid's eye. She was standing on her tiptoes, trying to peer over the shoulders of the medical personnel to catch a glimpse as one prone figure was rolled past on a gurney.

“Can we talk to the one who's awake?”

“Let me check with the doctor,” the nurse said. Sid nodded, and he walked away.

Sid joined Kino. “How'd he look?”

“His whole face was messed up,” Kino said.

“Do you think he'll survive?”

Kino shrugged, arms flopping at her sides limply. “I don't know.”

“Let's hope the other one can talk then.”

“I'm in charge here,” he sent through the power, nudging Kino.

The message that he got in response from Kino was slightly garbled, but amounted to a simple 'calm down'. Sid had never calmed down in his life and he wasn't about to start now.

Sid grew impatient as he waited. How long did it take to put a broken leg in a cast? He supposed he should just be grateful that they hadn't said there would need to be pins or anything put in, which would definitely put a damper on their ability to talk to this pirate.

Finally, finally, they were allowed to enter the room where the pirate was being kept. She was laying on the medical ward cot, her left leg cast in thick plastic. She was still wearing her own ship's uniform, though the leg of it had been cut off to give the medical team access. Her skin was a medium tan, similar to Kino's, but she was covered all over in the angry red rash that came with rapid depressurization. Sid vaguely wondered how bad her other symptoms of that were. He had had it pretty bad and didn't really wish it on anybody.

The pirate woman's eyes were closed, and she lay back stiffly. Her mouth was open and everyone could hear her breathe loudly. Her left arm was cuffed to the side of the bed.

“Do you speak New Imperial?” Sid asked.

“Yes, fucker,” she said, not opening her eyes. “You could have asked anybody else that.”

Of all the responses, that was not exactly one that he was expecting. He thought it was almost funny. He wasn't going to laugh, though.

“What's your name?” Sid asked.

“Heaven-Blessed Yossar,” the woman said with a slight smile. She might have been lying, though it didn't matter. Yossar. The name sounded familiar.

“And what ship are you from, Ms. Yossar?”

“You aren't even going to do me the courtesy of giving your name?”

“You aren't even going to do me the courtesy of opening your eyes?” Sid asked in return. “It's easier to have a conversation when we can see each other.”

“No, I don't believe I owe you any courtesy, considering that you're the ones who broke my leg and wrecked my shuttle.”

“Then do I owe you my name?” Across the bed, Ervantes looked pained, watching this conversation happen. Sid tried to tone it down.

“You're boutta owe me more painkillers,” Yossar said. “This hurts like fire.”

“Let me ask my questions, and you can have as many painkillers as you need. What ship are you with?”

“The Bellringer,” Yossar said. “You'd have known that if you even bothered to look at my shuttle's computer.”

Oh. Oh. Hm. This was not great. No wonder he had recognized the name Yossar. It was the point of contact for the price on his head. Sid tried to not let the panic show in his voice.

“We're still working on getting into your shuttle's computers,” he said. “I think they were pretty damaged.” He could feel his voice crack. Kino was looking at him.

The woman lifted her head up. “Something wrong?” she asked, then opened her eyes. “You!”

Despite her broken leg and her chained hand, the woman lunged forward. Sid scrambled back, barely getting out of the way of Yossar's reaching arm.

“I'll kill you!” she shrieked. Her face was red now, much more than from just the decompression rash. Her eyes bulged, her teeth were bared. Since Sid was decently out of her reaching range, no one did anything to stop her at first.

“Calm down!” Sid said, keeping back.

She was larger than he had first thought. Now that she was not lying so calmly on the bed, her full spacer, genetically modified stature was on display. She yanked at the cuff on her arm, then started to climb off the cot, finally standing on her broken leg, supported only by the cast and sheer force of will. She lunged towards Sid again, dragging the cot along behind her.

Finally, someone did something. Kino held up her hand and the woman froze in place, straining against her own clothing, which Kino was holding with the power. “Sit down,” Kino commanded. “If you want to live, sit down.”

Sid didn't know that they needed to go that far, threatening her with death. He couldn't hear the tone that Kino was delivering it in, but her face was completely still. She hauled backwards on Yossar's clothes, and she collapsed heavily onto the bed. Kino used the bedsheets to wrap around her body, keeping her basically strapped down.

Ervantes actually had his gun out, trained on her. Sid hadn't noticed him take it out, but he wasn't surprised that he had. “Thanks for not shooting her,” Sid said. Ervantes just frowned, not taking his gun off of her until she was completely tied up. She continued to thrash against her restraints, but Kino kept her down.

“It might be best if you left,” Kino said, dropping her arms and looking at Sid. “I can handle this.”

“I don't want you to handle it,” Sid said. Kino just stared at him, and he sighed. “I'm leaving the door open.”

The door probably should have been open in the first place. Realistically, there was no way that a chained down, unarmed woman with a broken leg could have ever hurt two sensitives and a highly trained soldier, but for safety's sake, really, he should have been less dumb. He went outside the room and sat on a chair just outside the door, not visible from the inside. His glasses could still pick up everything that was being said.

“How's your leg?” Kino asked.

“Fuck you.”

“You have no quarrel with me,” Kino said. “I do want only the best for you.”

“You're lying to yourself if you think that's true.” The words passed somewhat jerkingly before Sid's eyes, as if the woman was struggling to breathe. Perhaps Kino had tied her too tightly.

“I certainly don't want the worst for you.”

“Hah.” If the woman wasn't thrashing around, and was able to at least talk this much to Kino, then removing Sid from the room had been the right choice, even if he didn't want to admit it. He didn't trust Kino's people skills one bit, but maybe he wasn't giving her enough credit.

Still, he wanted to be in there. He wanted to be the one making the decisions. It felt like he was constantly being removed from control at the last second, in every aspect of his life, and it frustrated him deeply. He was distracted as he stewed on this, instead of paying attention to the conversation happening.

“Where is your ship?” Kino asked.

Yossar laughed, then coughed. “You idiots,” she said. “If you haven't figured out what's going on here yet, I don't know what to tell you.”

“You could explain,” Kino said.

“I think I won't.” There was a long stretch of silence, presumably Kino staring down Yossar.

“And why were you out without your ship? Shuttles don't usually stray very far.”

“What do pirates do? We catch weaker ships.”

“But you didn't attack us?” Kino asked.

“Idiot girl. You've never heard of a pirate ship that tangled with the Fleet. Look how well it ends up.”

“Who else were you hoping to catch out here? Do people come here often?”

“I don't know.”

“Alright. How long have you been here?”

“Why do you care?”

“I'm trying to establish a timeline.”

There was a long silence.

“You're here looking for Yan BarCarran, correct?”

“So are you.”

“Yes. Did you find her?”

“If we had, you wouldn't want her anymore,” Yossar said.

Sid couldn't help but sigh with relief. At least that was one group of people he didn't have to worry about snatching Yan from. Even though the Bellringer would have probably been the easiest target in terms of a fight, they definitely would have killed her right away, so rescue wouldn't even have been an option.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Like I'd tell you.”

“I can pry it out of your mind,” Kino said. That was a bluff. Kino most definitely could not do that. The Emperor probably could, but Kino... No way.

“If I knew where she was, I'd've been there myself, idiot. Get your hands off me!”

Sid couldn't help but lean into the doorway to see what was going on. Kino was right up in Yossar's face, hand underneath her chin. Yossar tried to lift her head up and lunge to bite Kino, but Kino kept her hands far out of harm's way. Sid didn't see the point in taunting the woman like that, but whatever. Kino had her methods.

“You really don't know?”

“You want me to lie? I'll make up a lie for you.”

“Think it over. Helping us will help you in the long run.”

“I think you'll find that I'm not so eager to cooperate with the man who murdered my family. Certainly not so that he can retrieve the woman who helped him do it. I hope wherever she is, she's rotting.”

“Harsh words for someone who has the chance to avoid the death sentence that piracy brings.”

“I'd rather be dead.”

“Think about it anyway,” Kino said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

Sid saw her shadow move across the floor, and a second later she and Ervantes came out.

“That didn't go great,” Sid said.

“You wouldn't have done better. I don't think she knows very much.”

“She knows something about what's going on in this area of space, though.”

“Whatever it is is easy to figure out, according to her. Let's go back to the bridge and see if they've made any progress with the disappearing shuttles.”

They left the medical area, checking in briefly on the other prisoner who remained unconscious. During the process of capturing the shuttle, he had clearly slammed his head into a sharp piece of wall. The resulting facial trauma was deeply unpleasant, even when covered up by bandages.

The group made their way back up to the bridge and once again arrayed themselves in their usual stations. Sid immediately checked the big display at the front of the room. He didn't see any shuttles aside from the dogfighters carefully deployed around the Impulse. The ships that had been sent out to catch the Bellringer's vanished shuttles were nowhere to be seen.

“What's the status?” Sid asked Captain Wen. “Where did the ships you sent out go?”

“Watch this, they should be coming back in a second.”

Sid did focus intently on the display, and within the next minute, the group of four shuttles popped into existence, radio signals singing away. “Can I ask what's going on?”

“It's not a black hole,” Wen said. “There's a whole system that's hiding.”

“What?”

“We're getting their data back now,” Wen said, pointing at the screen. “There it is.”

It wasn't a live feed, but there was a clear, computer generated image of the star system that was apparently quite close, yet invisible.

“And this is right there?” Sid asked, gesturing futilely to the outside of the ship. “And we can't see it.”

“That is what it appears to be, yes.”

“It doesn't appear to be anything at all. I don't trust things I can't see.”

“I'd've thought that all you sensitives would be more willing to trust in the invisible. It's one of your lot that's doing this,” Wen said.

“Is it a physical barrier? Do you know how?”

“Rook says that there's a mind out there, creating some sort of trap that doesn't let light through. That's all we know. It's one way. They can see us, we can't see them.”

“Great.”

“And we found our missing ship, by the way. She's in orbit around the second planet there.”

“Any reason why she isn't jumping away?”

“She obviously can't,” Kino said, interrupting the conversation. “The woman we captured says they're hunting for a ship. There's no reason that they would send out just their shuttles, without the ship close enough to help with at least one jump. Their stardrive must be dead.”

“Who'd jump this far out with a stardrive on the edge of failing?” Wen asked.

“They sure did manage to get it in orbit...” Sid said. “Captain, I think we should keep the Impulse out of whatever that... barrier... is.”

“You don't have to tell me that,” Wen said with a slight smile. “But we are going to have to deal with the surface of that planet eventually. Look at all the green and blue.” He pointed to the image on the display. “Inhabited.”

Kino looked briefly sick.

“The Adversary?” Sid asked.

“They all are,” Wen said. “So I think we have the answer to at least one of your questions.”

“Yan is on that planet,” Sid said confidently. The only question was where.