He was so angry angry. It was worse than Meijer's ugly, hungry stare. It was worse than the silent Ants. She felt it when she touched him, when she pressed electrodes to his throat or spine, when she felt his re-set arm. She wondered if Meijer felt it, if that was why he wanted to hurt him, to get him to scream so he'd be scared and not so angry angry.
15.'Did you keep any of his clothes, or personal effects?'
'No. Yes, maybe. I'll find out. If you reckon it's important.'
They put the boy into a chair, an abbreviated version of the medical bench, built from slabs of plant tissue, fat seams at each edge where the pieces had grown together. There were thick, bony clasps for his wrists and ankles. It had been designed with humans in mind.
They pulled his head forward and installed the Leech on the back of his neck.
They switched on a computer screen. A geometric shape rotated on the screen: the patterns of the boy's mind. It pulsed with strange, mathematical life.
'The Leech,' lectured Meijer, 'stimulates each part of the brain in turn. It records the response, converts it, and passes it on to the computer. That way it gets not only memories, but also skills, thought patterns, sensory impressions.
When it's finished, it severs the brainstem. Quick and painless. But of course, with Number 24, the process never reaches that stage.'
He activated the Leech. There was a gentle humming.
The boy went into spasms, biting his lips and tongue. He spat blood, his limbs smacking against the skin of the chair.
The shape on the screen flared with light, each part distorting and changing colour as his mind was ripped out a piece at a time.
It went on for fifteen minutes. The boy gave a final spasm and died. Blood and clear fluid trickled from his nose and ears. His head hung down on his chest. The hired hands dragged what was left of him out of the chair and wheeled it away.
Ms Cohen exited the processing room and returned to the laboratory.
Meijer found her there, pacing in tiny circles, fingernails plucking at her face. He put his arm around her, and she jerked away, stumbling backwards across the rough floor. 'You've done that that to him? to him? Eighteen times? Eighteen times? ' she screamed, pointing at the figure on the bench. ' she screamed, pointing at the figure on the bench.
'It doesn't last so long with him,' said Meijer. 'The thing barely gets started when he '
'Oh Jesus!' said Ms Cohen. 'Oh Jesus, I don't think I can do this, I don't think I can do this.'
Meijer's hand came down on her shoulder and gripped, hard. 'You better listen, lady. Either you get him in the chair and you get it to work, or you end up in there yourself.' He shook her, not gently. 'Understand? Do you understand?'
'I'm going to throw up again.'
16.'Understand. It's him in there or it's you. You're just surviving, right, you're just surviving!'
'Oh Jesus. Don't do it to me. Please. Please. Oh Jesus, please.'
Meijer shoved her towards the medical bench. 'You'll find a way.'
They put Number 24 in the chair and put the Leech on him. Ms Cohen turned it over in her hands first. It was a curved bit of vegetable matter with a few irregular bumps, innocuous, like a courgette. But there was circuitry etched on the inner side, and it felt warm. Alive.
It fit snugly along the base of 24's neck. Ms Cohen thought she saw it move, settling into place.
The image of his mind on the screen was a seething fractal, twisting and curling in unexpected ways. An alien brain, an alien mind.
Meijer watched her watching the screen. 'The Leech can handle just about any form of intelligence. It can scan his mind, it just can't process it.'
Number 24 was staring into nothing again, his hands hanging limply over the arms of the chair. But she could see the tiny beads of sweat on his forehead, and she wondered if Meijer had guessed.
'I'll be sad to see this one go,' said the hired hand, grabbing a handful of the subject's hair. 'He's really brightened life up on this tub. Isn't that right, Gingerbread?' He gripped the man's throat in his other hand, pressing his thumb into the windpipe until the sound of his breathing changed. 'Been a while since we had a challenge.'
'Meijer,' said Ms Cohen. 'Please let go of him.'
The hired hand straightened, looking at her with brute surprise. 'What?'
'I told you. We need him in the best possible physical condition.' Her voice started to tremble. Meijer was staring at her again. 'If you keep if you keep applying your physical therapy . . . '
'Look, it's been a long voyage. And it's only getting longer.' 24 was wheez-ing, trying not to struggle. 'We need a bit of entertainment. The escapes are a nuisance, but they're fun, they're something to do. Back on New Haarlem I used to go motorbike racing. You know what a motorbike is?'
Ms Cohen had no idea what he was talking about. Meijer's stolen English took on a wistful note. 'I used to be the best damn racer in the whole East quarter. It was great. You learnt how to look after the bike, how to fix it, as well as how to ride it. There was always something to do. But here . . . ' His stare dropped away to his prisoner. He let go of the man's throat. 'We need something to do.'
24 gulped air. Ms Cohen said, 'I mean it, Meijer. Leave him alone.'
'Cruk off.'
17.'You wouldn't have woken me up!' blurted Ms Cohen. 'You wouldn't have made me do this if the Ants didn't want his mind. They'd have just dumped him out the airlock like all the other useless bodies. They didn't kill me because they needed me. Meijer, they want to know what he knows. And I want you to stop brutalising him!'
Meijer stood there, staring at her. She bit down on her lip and stared right back at him, hoping he couldn't see her hands shaking and the blush that was spreading across her neck and ears.
'Ah, shit,' said the hired hand at last. 'Do you want to see this process or not?'
He slapped the controls beneath the computer screen. The Leech sizzled into life; Number 24 gasped, convulsed, went rigid in the chair. His eyes were wide, the pupils contracting to points. On the screen, part of the fractal flared as the Leech stimulated the first area of his brain.
His mouth was open. He did not scream.
And then he went completely limp, his head lolling onto his chest.
The Leech spluttered angrily and gave up. The screen went dark. Only the vital signs readout remained, a tiny bunch of squiggling lines.
'That's it?' said Ms Cohen.
'That's all,' said Meijer. 'We've never gotten further than that in nineteen tries.'
Ms Cohen took 24's face in her hands. His hair was wet with sweat. She levered one of his eyes open, carefully. It was a solid disc of blue, the pupil shrunk away to nothing. 'I'll need time to study the results,' she managed.
'Will the Ants give me access to the computer?'
Meijer puffed out his cheeks. 'Don't want much, do you?'
The Ants provided her with an interface based on the starliner's computer a lap-top with a fleshy mess growing over the back and sides. It took her a couple of hours to get used to it, as information was passed back and forth between the electronic and the organic systems. Once or twice, the link cut out completely, and the lighting dimmed and returned. She wondered what that was supposed to mean.
She played back the EEG readings from the process. 24's mind had simply shut down 2.7 seconds after the Leech had begun primary stimulation. It had to be some sort of defence mechanism. Something built into the alien brain to prevent him from being interrogated in just this way?
The alarm started its ear-splitting pinging. She didn't even startle this time.
That had been a slow one; he must've been recovering from the process. She folded up the lap-top, put it on the bench she was using for a bed, and followed the alarms to their source.
Hired hands jogged past her, ignoring her, guns gripped in sweating palms.
18.They came in all shapes and sizes, all ages all human, which made her wonder. Who had they been before they became the Ants' servants? Each of them must have been offered the same deal: help us, and stay out of the big chair.
That was why Groenewegen and Caldwell bet fifty thousand, fifty million.
She'd heard Caldwell win the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Mars Arch. They were going to spend the rest of their lives on this ship. Frightened of the chair, the way Meijer was, the way she was. Just surviving.
She found herself in a storage area with leathery white walls, like the inside of an apple core. Huge cabinets had been dragged into the room and left at untidy angles. A number was scrawled onto each drawer. She found the one labelled 24 and opened it.
A very small pile of things: a slingshot, some coins, a dog-eared paperback.
Debris. The debris of a life that would never be completed. A jade brooch and a toffee wrapped in paper. A life that had been stolen by the Ants.
Ms Cohen went through everything they'd taken from the subject's pockets and cried and cried and cried.
Meijer found her, much later, crumpled in a corner. 'We got him,' he said.
'Kitchen storage. Hiding in a fridge. A force field failed, let him out. We're still trying to work out why.'
She didn't reply. Meijer squatted down beside her. She held a drawer in her lap, labelled 39. It was empty.
'You didn't keep anything,' she said. 'There's nothing left.'
Meijer didn't say anything. He reached out and put a hand on her leg, just above her knee.
'Why do you bother keeping any of it at all?'
'The Ants like to go through the stuff, see if there's anything worth tinkering with. We decided to keep his things in case there was anything important there.'
'You better not have hurt him.' She shuddered. 'You better leave him alone.
I want him to stay alive. I want to stay alive.'
She put the lid back on the box. Meijer took his hand away.
'Don't worry, lady,' he said. 'They're just having a quiet word with him. They won't do too much. I promise.'
They killed him, of course.
Meijer woke her up to tell her. She was curled on the medical bench, arms wrapped around the modified lap-top.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It was an accident.'
She started crying again.
'I told them to be careful. They were careful. Caldwell says he just keeled over. I guess it finally got too much for him.'
19.'No.'
'He was dead as a Dalek, lady. I checked him myself.'
'No.' She sat up, and the lap-top fell, crunching on the floor. 'No. He's not dead.'
'Cruk it, lady!'
'Listen to me.' She grabbed his collar. 'This is just another escape. Don't you get it? The process. His mind turns off automatically when you try to scan it.
Meijer, he can switch himself off.'
'Oh,' said the hired hand, 'shit!'
Ms Cohen walked forwards slowly, holding the handscan at arm's length, keeping it close to the wall, almost touching the cuticle.
They were right at the edge of the doughnut-shaped ship. The hull was two layers of the same stuff as bacterial spore walls, close to indestructible. They trapped a layer of air between them. It wasn't the most efficient insulation.
She could feel the cold of space leaking through outer wall, air blanket, inner wall. A sandwich. Just big enough for a man to fit inside.
Meijer watched her, his arms folded tightly, his sweat-soaked cap gripped in one hand. 'Is it '
'Shhh.' She put a finger to her lips.
There were places where meteorite strikes had dented the hull, even a dirty scar where living sealant had flowed in to plug a hole. Ms Cohen had heard about life-forms that lived in space, but she had never believed that life could be strong enough to handle the vacuum, the cold, the sudden impacts and changes in gravity. But then, life could take a lot.
A hired hand came running up, panting in the silence. 'She was right. A panel's gone from the airlock some maintenance alarms went off when it cycled.'
Meijer and Ms Cohen exchanged glances. Either 24 had been blown out into space, or The scanner shrieked. 'Here!' she snapped. A trio of hands leapt forward, carrying long squeeze-tubes like pointed squashes. You couldn't cut through that wall with tools even a laser would take hours. The squeeze-tubes spat blobs of enzyme on to the wall, and the hired hands spread the sizzling stuff around with fat gloves.
They caught the chunk of wall as it came free, blood or sap oozing onto the floor. A gust of freezing air blew into the corridor. Ms Cohen dropped her handscan and caught 24 as he tumbled stiffly out from the dark space inside.
His hair and eyebrows were full of frost.
'He's still with us,' she said, snatching up the scanner. 'Oh Jesus, his lungs are a mess.'
20.A single butterfly flickered down and landed on 24's shoulder, touching its antennae to his face. 'Where's that trolley?' snapped Ms Cohen.
None of the hired hands moved to help her. Their faces were pale and taut.
Groenewegen was looking everywhere but at the subject.
No matter what they did, he always escaped. And this time they'd killed him, and he'd escaped that too.
Ms Cohen sat cross-legged on a bench, eating the nothing-flavoured stuff Meijer had brought her in a plastic bowl. She watched Number 24.
He was comatose, a tube coming out of his nose, draining away the fluids from his damaged lungs and throat. They had fastened the shackles around his wrists and ankles, covered him with a silver blanket as though to hide the fact that they'd bound a dying man.
It had been his most desperate escape. He had been nearly frozen to death.
He had been exposed to hard vacuum for at least thirty seconds. When they'd dumped him in the airlock with the other corpses, he'd pried loose a maintenance panel and climbed out through the wall. And the airlock had cycled before he'd been able to get the panel back into place.