Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [50]
“It’s got no engine, Mark. It’s fake.”
“No engine …”
“It’s a shell. Trust me, eh? I’m an engineer. If it could fly, I’d fly it. Steve? You all right, Steve?”
Slowly coming out of his pain-inflicted fog and the shock of reunion with the brother he thought certainly was dead, Steve McClellan shifted his battered body. He leaned heavily on the bottom step of a stairway that led upward from where they crouched. Upward to nothing but a collapsed attic.
He rubbed his face and let his eyes clear on the blessed vision of his brother crouched only inches away.
“You all right?” Mark asked. Leaning away from a crawl of hot smoke from outside, he pulled Steve to a better position.
With only an unconvincing nod, Steve fixed his eyes on his brother, afraid he might pass out and this would be another dream. Pressing a hand to the center of pain in the hollow of his shoulder, he bottled up his anger at the lost months, the lost crewmates.
“They’re using us to train their spies and soldiers, Mark,” he sputtered. “They built a whole Federation spaceport to see what works and what doesn’t, so they can figure out how Federation people live and fight.”
Dan Leith kneaded Steve’s injured arm and shoulder to keep the muscles from stiffening up. “What scares me is that this means enough to them that they do this.”
“This whole complex is a prison of some kind?” Mark glanced around, then looked at the weapon attached into Steve’s belt. “But you’ve got a phaser!”
“They gave us phasers and some other weapons,” Dan explained. His South African accent somehow made his explanation sound efficient. “They want to be able to fight us for real. But we’re on a moon. Everybody comes and leaves by transporter, as did you. Even the Cardie teams who come to fight us. No vessel ever lands here, thus there’s nothing to hijack. We can’t leave.”
Mark peered out a crack in the crumpled sheeting that had once been the solid side of the garage. “But there’s a merchantfleet recruiting office right over there! I can see houses … an apartment complex … a fueling station … stores, industrial supply, bicycle repair—”
“There’s everything,” Dan cut off. “There’s even a dog-clipping shop. The plumbing works, thank God, so we can remain civilized, and the lights, sometimes. It’s a textbook example of a functioning Madred Village.”
Mark bolted around. “Madred? You mean, that dirty arrogant spawn of a reptile had something to do with this place?”
“These villages are his specialty,” Steve said through a cough. “This place is a tapestry of little details he got from people like us who he tortured over the years. There are rumors that he’s got Madred Villages for Romulans and Klingons too. The Cardassians are preparing to go to war with everybody.”
“Who’s shelling us, then?”
“A Cardie assault team up in those hills,” Dan said. “Been here about … isn’t it six weeks now, Steve?”
Grasping his brother’s arm, Steve crushed down a wave of nausea and asked, “Where’ve they had you all these months?”
Mark patted his brother’s hand to reassure him. “A work camp. Sometimes in a cell, if the weather was bad. Once in a while they’d pull one of us out and treat us to the zapper.”
“Damn them all …” Steve felt his face crumple at the idea. They all knew about the insidious subcutaneous torture devices that could make the pain in his shoulder and hip right now seem like a brush with a feather duster. He’d promised his parents that he’d take care of Mark. Now this.
Forcing himself to think about something else, he asked, “How many other prisoners did you see?”
“Most of our crew disappeared eventually, like you did,” Mark said. “Ensigns Seneca, Webb, Yeoman Kelly, Ensign Rankin … Lieutenant Barth, Lieutenant Garland, Annie Cole … about nineteen of us were together in the same cell block, but never in the same cells. When they had us in a work camp, we weren’t allowed to talk much, but at least we could see each other. There were others there too. A couple of Maquis, some merchant spacefarers and their captain, and even a couple of Romulans.