Engineman - Eric Brown [111]
She asked herself why the Organisation might be so interested in her father. What did they mean by his contacts on Earth?
They marched her around the back of the control tower. She expected to be put up against the wall and summarily executed. The guards held her between them, looking across the tarmac to a blast-barrier used to test the engines of fliers, twenty metres away. With Forster, they seemed to be watching, waiting for something.
Was this yet another psychological trick, a delay to let her dwell on the fact of her death; as if she might weaken at the eleventh hour, tell him what he wanted to hear?
A truck crossed the tarmac and drew up beside the blast-barrier. Six militia-men jumped from the back of the truck, pulling after them two civilians - one in peasant's garb, the other wearing radiation silvers. They had their hands bound behind their backs, their heads bowed. The guards bundled them across to the blast-barrier.
"Disciples," Forster informed her. "Caught trying to sabotage the Zambique-Guernica mono-link."
She watched, unable to look away or close her eyes. The Disciples were made to kneel, facing the barrier. As they did so, the men raised their heads in a gesture Ella found at once hopeless and dignified. She heard their chant drift through the warm morning air. "We cast off this cruel illusion..."
The guards placed pistols at the base of the Disciple's skulls and fired, the recoil pushing their arms into the air with a flourish like that of a pianist. The Disciples crumpled, legs tucked beneath their bodies in a tragic recapitulation of the foetal posture. The guards took their arms and legs, staggered with the bodies and swung them like sacks of grain into the back of the truck. Then they turned and stared across at Ella.
She looked at Forster, shaking her head. "You can't intimidate me. I'm ready to die. This is one game you've lost-"
Something cunning in his expression made her stop. "Lost?" He smiled. "I don't know the meaning of the word. What you experienced in the hangar was merely the first round of the contest." He signalled to the guards. "Take her inside."
She wanted to scream; she wanted to beg them to kill her. They escorted her through a door and into the control tower, along a corridor. She was taken to a small room furnished with a bed and a chair. A window overlooked the tarmac and the blast-barrier where the execution squad still waited. The door was locked behind her. She sat on the bed, staring down numbly at her shaking hands, watching them through a film of tears.
She wondered what further horrors Forster had in store for her. Would they resort to physical torture? Would she be able to withstand protracted physical pain any better than the attention of the incapacitator?
At a sound from beyond the door, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. Forster entered the room smartly, leaving the door open. He looked Ella up and down. "Hunter, your clothing is a disgrace. Would you like to change?"
She just stared at him, non-plussed by the banality of his question.
He turned to the door. "Corporal."
The guard stepped forward and handed Forster a folded garment. Forster dropped it on the bed beside Ella. "Why not try it on?" he suggested.
Ella stared at it, her pulse accelerating. She picked it up; it hung from her grasp like a sad, discarded epidermis. She would have recognised Eddie's silversuit anywhere. The name-tag was missing.
Oh, Fernandez... She'd left it at the hillside shack two days ago.
"You do recognise it, don't you?" Forster asked.
"What do you mean?" Ella stammered. "I haven't... I've never seen it before."
"No? Forensic tests revealed that tissue samples found on it belong to you. We found it yesterday, on premises belonging to Conchita Rodriguez."
She looked up at Forster, anguish burning inside her. "What have you done with her?"
Forster smiled, cocked a finger pistol-fashion, indicating through the window. "Rodriguez is in the best of health," he said. "For the