Perdition's Child

Chapter 12

It was still black out and Mehk couldn't see where they were smuggling him beyond the occasional neon sign that flashed through the car windows. Bound up in a blanket and gagged on the floor of the back seat, he was out of ideas and exhausted. He tried to let the rumble of the mag engine soothe him to sleep, but jolts of panic made him twitch back awake. Soft whines built in his throat against his will, but Ritcha's people had no pity.

What did I do? A yellow and orange light flashed by and he directed his question towards it. A few cycles ago he'd been sleeping in the warm desert sands and his biggest concern in life was getting a bigger towing system, now he was billions of miles from home at the mercy of a terrorist group. He had a thing inside him that was going to use him as a weapon against some uncountable number of poor undeserving bastards because he was a coward, and there was nothing he could do.

And it had all been his own doing.

He fell into a stunned daze for awhile, but eventually he was knocked out of it by being roughly dragged from the car. "Get him out of that, I need access to an arm or something." Ritcha's favorite pair of goons unrolled him and cuffed his arms behind his back to some kind of support pillar, leaving the gag in. Ritcha leaned behind him and something sharp jabbed into his shoulder, making Mehk jerk sharply and let out a muffled yowl.

"Let's go, there's not much extra time. It's late already, I hope everyone got the message... " They left him flailing against the cuffs in the dark. He watched their taillights disappear as some kind of huge elevator door closed. He couldn't see anything at all in the dimness. Faint lights on the ceilings did nothing more than hint at walls. Mehk screamed through his gag and prayed that someone would hear him, but eventually he was forced to accept he was entirely on his own.

More or less.

What good had it done to give in? Ritcha had simply broken him and taken what he wanted, discarding the rest. But why? Lellian psychology being what it was, Mehk would have followed him...

It occurred to him that he would have been better off choosing the slit throat, as he would have fallen unconscious immediately. What would kill him here? The cult members, the Shitara they called themselves, had immediately rushed to get their affairs in order after hearing the word the virus had passed on. They'd spent the last few hours packing their things, apparently not intending to stick around for the main event.

Light began to filter in; The artificial sun was much bigger and closer than it had looked before. Some distant part of his brain made the connection that he must be in one of the towers that stretched between the opposite walls of the station.

Something snapped inside and he began to giggle helplessly around the gag, inexplicably amused that he'd been terrified that he'd fall into the simulated star when the star should have been worried about him instead.

Mehk tried to rub his sore shoulder against the pillar he was tied to, but whatever had been jabbed into him wasn't coming out that easily. He sat back and watched the little people walking miles below like insects. Everything was controlled by computers, so there were plenty of choices for how this might go down. Maybe the virus would switch off the air. Or the gravity. Mehk tried to think of all the ways zero gravity would mess up a city, but he wasn't nearly imaginative enough.