![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Derelict
The tableaux is disturbing, but he comes quietly.
When the advance team finally cuts through the unknown materials of the little craft's hull and float through the umbilical, instead of the two people promised by the first distress call, there's one person, and one corpse. The man who spoke with a soft, lilting accent and neatly diplomatic phrases has had his skull opened against the floor, and his brain scooped out. They aren't sure what the other passenger did with it. He looks odd, in the helmets' cameras: his black and gold uniform is immaculate, but his cheek his finely misted with blood, and he has darkness under his fingernails. They find him kneeling by the body. For a moment, when the door first opens, the cameras catch a glimpse of something that might be grief on his face, but when he looks up, there's only blank acquiescence.
The computers seem to be wiped, but it's hard to be sure with such unfamiliar systems. The craft has no weapons, and no apparent physical booby traps. Aside from small, neat living spaces, appointed with a tastefully restrained sort of luxury, most of the space is devoted to life support, hydroponics and aquaculture. The fish tanks are woven through the gardens; every piece of vital machinery is also elegant. Jewel-toned fish watch with flickering interest as the team makes its way to and from the bridge.
There is a bustle of confusion about how actually to deal with him; they were sent at least partly as a humanitarian rescue. Their orders were to secure the ship and retrieve the passengers with all reasonable courtesy. They knew something had likely gone wrong, when the man who named himself Nirai Kujen stopped answering any communications, and further when the drifting ship failed to open its hatch. But what to do with the man who remains? Killing his companion on the very verge of rescue is shocking, but he offers no violence to the Barrayaran soldiers.
Nor does he answer any of the questions put to him in the first shocked encounter. When the squad sergeant says, You need to come with us, sir, he rises and follows. The room they put him in isn't specifically intended as a cell, but it's cramped ship quarters, and they do lock him in.
He's not non-responsive - he looks at the people who speak to him, never takes his eyes off them. But he's silent when they ask his name, when they ask where they come from, when they ask why he killed Nirai Kujen. When they ask if he is mute, if he can understand them, he blinks.
"I understand. We deciphered your language together," he says, and his accent is a little broader than Nirai Kujen's, his voice smooth and low. "I'd like to talk to the person in charge."
He doesn't, it eventually becomes clear, mean the commanding officer of the vessel.
He knows the word Emperor, and eventually clarifies, although it sounds particularly stilted in his mouth, more foreign than the rest.
"Or," he adds, with a quirk of his mouth that is almost a smile, a flash of his eyes away from his interlocutor to the concealed camera. "Perhaps his secretary."
The Emperor, he is told, is not available to mysterious, murderous foreigners. Perhaps, if he would be willing to testify to his benign intentions under a truth drug they provide...?
No. He is not willing.
It is at this point that an executive decision is made to dose him anyway.
They don't ever manage to inform him: the first moment a soldier enters his room with the kit, he produces a shank, slim as a knitting needle, slightly curved, precisely the density of human bone, missed by every surreptitious scan. The recording has to be slowed to quarter-speed to follow the speed and exact sequence of events. Blank-faced, straight-backed, the man makes an unflinching attempt to bury the weapon into his own eye, and - presumably, given it's length - his brain.
(Nirai Kujen's brain, a separate report notes, was likely fed to the largest tank of fish, leaving only a greasy residue in their filter and very broken fragments of human DNA.)
The guard accompanying the soldier with the kit immediately draws his stunner at the rapid motion the man drawing the ersatz blade; the man throws himself to the side before he can aim it. The wide beam gets him all down the side, and he scrabbles for the weapon with his other hand, shaking on the floor, before the second burst.
He comes to thoroughly restrained. He begs, with a quiet solemn dignity, to be killed. He tells them they don't want to know what they think they want to know. He does not have a fastpenta allergy.
When the stoic blankness of his expression turns to a hazy, distant blankness, the interrogator quietly reiterates that they would like to be allies, that they rescued him from a derelict. Explains that they just need to know a few things. Per the usual script, the first question is for his name.
"I am the immolation fox," he answers, a soft smile slowly settling on his face.
"Alright. What does that mean?"
"I am the immolation fox," he repeats, as though this were obvious. The interrogator moves on.
"Why did you kill Nirai Kujen?"
The smile disappears.
"I am the immolation fox."
Every time, the emphasis is just slightly different. He truly seems to hear and understand the questions, to even be responding to them. But every question has the same answer. After fifteen minutes, he starts to laugh, an awful raw hysterical sound. After twenty minutes, the commanding officer calls a halt, and he is given the antagonist. He's still laughing when it fades, and he slumps exhausted in his bonds.
"Why haven't you asked us for anything?" asks a soft-spoken captain, after the man accepts a sip of water held to his mouth.
"I've asked to speak to the - Emperor," he replies evenly, if slightly raspy.
"But nothing else, no comforts, no questions? We could go one for one."
After a long pause, he says, "I'd like to check on the fish." When the captain raises his eyebrows, he frowns, protests. "They're good stock, they deserve better than wary neglect. They shouldn't starve or be poisoned by their own waste just because they were mine."
A generous arrangement is offered. The man will not be allowed back on his vessel, but a marine with a helmet cam and comm link will tend the aquariums under his direction. One feeding for one answer.
He has no tells in his face, but one of his hands goes just a little bit tense. The Captain volunteers the amount of time it's been since the ship was boarded, though the prisoner has no way of confirming the information. He resists. He wavers.
"What question?"
The same protocol at one hundredth the speed: an easy question, to initiate the habit of answering.
"What's your name?"
"Jedao," says Jedao, after one long beat.
"Nothing else?" The original agreement specified an allowance for clarifications.
His eyes fall to his hands.
"Nothing else I still have the right to. Please show me my fish, now."
He makes no attempt at trickery or sabotage during the aquarium tending. He's close-mouthed about the state of the main filter (samples already taken), except to indicate which bottle in a small kit contains lipidase enzymes and the number of spritzes to apply. The fish are fed; the water is tested for pH and nitrate levels. He actually smiles, as he watches and guides the marine through the small tasks of aquaculture. He coos a few times at the more inquisitive fish. Some of them have names, too. He slumps in his seat afterward, as if deeply relieved.
He eats. He sleeps. He does not protest his constant guard. He sleeps better, in fact, than he did before.
But when the fish are due for another feeding - he still refuses to say why he killed Nirai Kujen, or where they came from, or how their ship works, or what his uniform is for. "Please ask me something else," he says, but again and again, he refuses to answer. "Please, it's not their fault." Eventually, he swallows and turns his face away - the only substantive movement possible, the way his wrists and ankles are chained. He closes his eyes.
"Let me speak to your Emperor, or kill me and stop wasting your time."
He doesn't sound angry. He sounds sad, and very, very tired.
When the advance team finally cuts through the unknown materials of the little craft's hull and float through the umbilical, instead of the two people promised by the first distress call, there's one person, and one corpse. The man who spoke with a soft, lilting accent and neatly diplomatic phrases has had his skull opened against the floor, and his brain scooped out. They aren't sure what the other passenger did with it. He looks odd, in the helmets' cameras: his black and gold uniform is immaculate, but his cheek his finely misted with blood, and he has darkness under his fingernails. They find him kneeling by the body. For a moment, when the door first opens, the cameras catch a glimpse of something that might be grief on his face, but when he looks up, there's only blank acquiescence.
The computers seem to be wiped, but it's hard to be sure with such unfamiliar systems. The craft has no weapons, and no apparent physical booby traps. Aside from small, neat living spaces, appointed with a tastefully restrained sort of luxury, most of the space is devoted to life support, hydroponics and aquaculture. The fish tanks are woven through the gardens; every piece of vital machinery is also elegant. Jewel-toned fish watch with flickering interest as the team makes its way to and from the bridge.
There is a bustle of confusion about how actually to deal with him; they were sent at least partly as a humanitarian rescue. Their orders were to secure the ship and retrieve the passengers with all reasonable courtesy. They knew something had likely gone wrong, when the man who named himself Nirai Kujen stopped answering any communications, and further when the drifting ship failed to open its hatch. But what to do with the man who remains? Killing his companion on the very verge of rescue is shocking, but he offers no violence to the Barrayaran soldiers.
Nor does he answer any of the questions put to him in the first shocked encounter. When the squad sergeant says, You need to come with us, sir, he rises and follows. The room they put him in isn't specifically intended as a cell, but it's cramped ship quarters, and they do lock him in.
He's not non-responsive - he looks at the people who speak to him, never takes his eyes off them. But he's silent when they ask his name, when they ask where they come from, when they ask why he killed Nirai Kujen. When they ask if he is mute, if he can understand them, he blinks.
"I understand. We deciphered your language together," he says, and his accent is a little broader than Nirai Kujen's, his voice smooth and low. "I'd like to talk to the person in charge."
He doesn't, it eventually becomes clear, mean the commanding officer of the vessel.
He knows the word Emperor, and eventually clarifies, although it sounds particularly stilted in his mouth, more foreign than the rest.
"Or," he adds, with a quirk of his mouth that is almost a smile, a flash of his eyes away from his interlocutor to the concealed camera. "Perhaps his secretary."
The Emperor, he is told, is not available to mysterious, murderous foreigners. Perhaps, if he would be willing to testify to his benign intentions under a truth drug they provide...?
No. He is not willing.
It is at this point that an executive decision is made to dose him anyway.
They don't ever manage to inform him: the first moment a soldier enters his room with the kit, he produces a shank, slim as a knitting needle, slightly curved, precisely the density of human bone, missed by every surreptitious scan. The recording has to be slowed to quarter-speed to follow the speed and exact sequence of events. Blank-faced, straight-backed, the man makes an unflinching attempt to bury the weapon into his own eye, and - presumably, given it's length - his brain.
(Nirai Kujen's brain, a separate report notes, was likely fed to the largest tank of fish, leaving only a greasy residue in their filter and very broken fragments of human DNA.)
The guard accompanying the soldier with the kit immediately draws his stunner at the rapid motion the man drawing the ersatz blade; the man throws himself to the side before he can aim it. The wide beam gets him all down the side, and he scrabbles for the weapon with his other hand, shaking on the floor, before the second burst.
He comes to thoroughly restrained. He begs, with a quiet solemn dignity, to be killed. He tells them they don't want to know what they think they want to know. He does not have a fastpenta allergy.
When the stoic blankness of his expression turns to a hazy, distant blankness, the interrogator quietly reiterates that they would like to be allies, that they rescued him from a derelict. Explains that they just need to know a few things. Per the usual script, the first question is for his name.
"I am the immolation fox," he answers, a soft smile slowly settling on his face.
"Alright. What does that mean?"
"I am the immolation fox," he repeats, as though this were obvious. The interrogator moves on.
"Why did you kill Nirai Kujen?"
The smile disappears.
"I am the immolation fox."
Every time, the emphasis is just slightly different. He truly seems to hear and understand the questions, to even be responding to them. But every question has the same answer. After fifteen minutes, he starts to laugh, an awful raw hysterical sound. After twenty minutes, the commanding officer calls a halt, and he is given the antagonist. He's still laughing when it fades, and he slumps exhausted in his bonds.
"Why haven't you asked us for anything?" asks a soft-spoken captain, after the man accepts a sip of water held to his mouth.
"I've asked to speak to the - Emperor," he replies evenly, if slightly raspy.
"But nothing else, no comforts, no questions? We could go one for one."
After a long pause, he says, "I'd like to check on the fish." When the captain raises his eyebrows, he frowns, protests. "They're good stock, they deserve better than wary neglect. They shouldn't starve or be poisoned by their own waste just because they were mine."
A generous arrangement is offered. The man will not be allowed back on his vessel, but a marine with a helmet cam and comm link will tend the aquariums under his direction. One feeding for one answer.
He has no tells in his face, but one of his hands goes just a little bit tense. The Captain volunteers the amount of time it's been since the ship was boarded, though the prisoner has no way of confirming the information. He resists. He wavers.
"What question?"
The same protocol at one hundredth the speed: an easy question, to initiate the habit of answering.
"What's your name?"
"Jedao," says Jedao, after one long beat.
"Nothing else?" The original agreement specified an allowance for clarifications.
His eyes fall to his hands.
"Nothing else I still have the right to. Please show me my fish, now."
He makes no attempt at trickery or sabotage during the aquarium tending. He's close-mouthed about the state of the main filter (samples already taken), except to indicate which bottle in a small kit contains lipidase enzymes and the number of spritzes to apply. The fish are fed; the water is tested for pH and nitrate levels. He actually smiles, as he watches and guides the marine through the small tasks of aquaculture. He coos a few times at the more inquisitive fish. Some of them have names, too. He slumps in his seat afterward, as if deeply relieved.
He eats. He sleeps. He does not protest his constant guard. He sleeps better, in fact, than he did before.
But when the fish are due for another feeding - he still refuses to say why he killed Nirai Kujen, or where they came from, or how their ship works, or what his uniform is for. "Please ask me something else," he says, but again and again, he refuses to answer. "Please, it's not their fault." Eventually, he swallows and turns his face away - the only substantive movement possible, the way his wrists and ankles are chained. He closes his eyes.
"Let me speak to your Emperor, or kill me and stop wasting your time."
He doesn't sound angry. He sounds sad, and very, very tired.