"That one I owed you," said Skyril. He then glanced at Carl. "Want some?"

Carl shook his head. "In good time."

Skyril shrugged, holstering his flack gun, then turned back to Cormac, delivering a hard kick to his guts. Skyril then reached inside a poacher's pocket in his coat and took out a length of reinforcing rod, worn shiny by handling, and stepped in close. Three hits in rapid succession—one felt as if it had snapped Cormac's collar bone, the next slammed hard across his stomach and the next across an elbow as the previous one bowed him over. Cormac went down on his side, fighting for breath. Skyril delivered a few more kicks for good measure, then stepped back.

After a moment Cormac managed, "Aren't… you supposed… to question?"

Carl now stepped up close and squatted down. "As you well know, Cormac, this is the softening-up process. You must be brought to the point where the pain and the damage to your body is too much. We'll use psychotropics on you then, and extract every last shred of information from your head."

At that moment one of the troops came over to speak to Samara. "We've got one ready now." Cormac recognised him as one of those who had been at the work-benches where the CTDs had been delivered.

"But we should wait two hours longer before detonation," the man continued. "We've intelligence that another whole battalion is moving into Dramewood within that time."

"Carl," said Samara.

Carl grimaced in annoyance and stood. "I take it you want me to do this?"

"It's more important than him." She gestured at Cormac then turned back to the trooper. "Carl will go with you to position it," she continued. "Rindle and his squad can take the old ATV, and tell the others to get ready to move out."

"You won't be able to pull all your people out of Dramewood," said Carl.

"No, but that's a small price to pay to take out two ECS battalions," she replied.

They were going to use one of the CTDs here, on this world.

"It'll tidy up things here, too," Samara added, glancing at Cormac.

Carl shook his head. "No, I have to veto that." He gazed steadily at her. "He stays alive until we find out one way or another if he's an agent—that's essential, that's important to more operations than your one here on this world."

Samara was annoyed about that, but nodded acceptance. Cormac wondered about the hierarchy here. Samara seemed to be in charge yet Carl seemed to have some power but was being careful not to step on too many toes, like some envoy from another Separatist group.

To salve her injured pride he added, "By all means keep working on him, but don't kill him. If he is an agent he's probably high-ranking, and using the right techniques we could extract information from him for months."

Carl grinned at Cormac. "Have a nice day," then he moved off with the trooper. Cormac watched him join a group of five other troopers, one of them hoisting a heavy rucksack onto his back—a rucksack certainly containing an active CTD. They began climbing into one of the ATVs while the trooper who had originally come over now spoke to some others, who quickly began packing away equipment and heading towards the door.

"Should we burn off his face or his testicles?" Skyril wondered.

"Carl says we've got to keep him alive," said Samara.

"He's an offworlder," said Skyril.

Grimacing, she replied, "Best we do what he says, but there's a big difference between alive and undamaged." She waved a hand at him, and smirking he moved off.

"Now," she said to Cormac, "let me bring to the forefront of your mind the kind of stuff I'm going to want to know, so you'll have it ready when this all becomes too much."

Skyril was collecting an ancient oxythane bottle with a tube wound around the top to a cutting torch. Behind him the ATV with Carl and the CTD aboard set off towards a roller door at the end of the warehouse, which opened ahead of it. The last of those carrying loads to the older ATV outside departed, and Cormac heard it start up and pull away. That left one ATV and, including Skyril and Samara, seven Separatists.

"First I'll want every AI-net access code in your possession, which I'll check at random while we speak. I'll next want everything you can tell me about the disposition of ECS forces here, inside information on contacts and the status of ECS commanders. Like, for example, who is running you, who are your contacts, and what do they look like." She pulled a palm-top out of her pocket. "I've got numerous pictures in here I'll want you to look at and identify. I know who many of them are, so if you lie, I'll find out." She gave a metallic smile. "Next I'll want you to tell me how you found out about Carl, right from the start, listing who ECS has identified in the Jovian Separatists and the double agents there."

Something quite cold and hard solidified inside Cormac at that moment. In two hours these people intended to detonate a CTD to wipe out two battalions of ECS soldiers. During the time leading up to that, Samara intended to put him through quite easily imaginable agony. But she wouldn't kill him unless it was proven he wasn't an ECS agent. They intended to take him away and continue… interrogating him for months. He must do something, and soon.

Braided monofilament…

Single-strand monofilament was usually used as a cutting weapon, but never for long since though it was incredibly tough, it could develop faults and would often break. For many applications ECS used braided monofilament because it was tough and still narrow enough for a lot of it to be packed into a small space, but it wasn't usually used for cutting. Braided monofilament would slice through flesh and, with a bit of sawing, would go through bone, but Samara had been exaggerating about the loop about his neck taking his head off if he snagged it, though certainly it would have cut in enough to kill him.

He considered how he was bound: Skyril must have put a double loop through the friction device to go about each wrist, before running the filament back to the pillar. Certainly, the filament cutting in above and below a wrist would cause debilitating injury, severing nerves, blood vessels and ligaments, but cutting in against the hard nub of the radius bone just up the wrist on the thumb side, would still leave him with a useable hand. Of course the other hand would be useless.

Skyril dumped the gas bottle down before him, while Samara stood up and stepped back. Cormac squirmed right up against the pillar as if to get as far as he could from the torch Skyril was now lighting. The flame ignited—a blue spear searing out from a constellation of bright white dots. He played with the controls, shifting that constellation about and adjusting the shape and length of the flame, slipping it from its hole-cutting to sheet-slicing setting and back again. Then holding the torch in his right hand, he stooped over Cormac. Cormac cringed back, turning his right hand behind him to a particular angle, then stretching out the fingers of his left hand and abruptly pulling it against the loop of filament, hard.

It was the worst pain he had ever felt, but it coincided with Skyril closing a hand on Cormac's neck, crushing a knee into his stomach and bringing the torch down on his thigh. Cormac screamed, brought his left arm out from behind him and round in an arc, not wanting to see the bloody thing that had been his left hand as the edge of it slammed back up into the man's throat. Skyril lurched back towards Cormac's head, taking pressure off the knee. Cormac struck again, keeping the pressure on, pulling Skyril closer, then brought out his right hand, sufficient slack in the filament now available, and reached under the man's jacket. He found the flack gun, pulled it out only halfway and pulled the trigger. Skyril disappeared to one side, most of his guts preceding him in that direction. Samara was moving fast, pulling something tucked into her belt behind her. Not fast enough. The second shot folded her in half, one of her legs flipped up like that of some grotesque ballerina.