Shadowkill

##

He stared, astounded.

It was a lie from start to finish.

He played it again, matching her statements with his memory of things she had said and done, things he had seen in the EYEs he had focused on her.

A logical, coherent, convincing LIE. Even her body language lied. She played the terrified child better than she had with him. He looked closer. Yes. Because she was not playing. She BELIEVED and that belief was so strong it colored everything that happened. She fooled the Interrogators and she fooled the probe because she had fooled herself. Formidable.

He played the flake a third time, trying to see how she did it, stopping it again and again to examine face and body. He saw nothing. Somehow, without the help of psych-machines or drugs, she had constructed another personality with another history and sealed off everything of the old. Formidable indeed.

He replaced that flake with the first of the mosaic flakes and watched the snippets recorded there from her time in the ship’s hold.

The fools had left her conscious for at least a month. They had made her sick and filthy and they had ground her helplessness into her-as they had done with him-meaning to make her an easier victim. And as they had done with him, they had completely misread her.

He watched Shadith come awake, watched her struggle to clean herself and fight off cold, fear, sickness.

She lay blank-faced after that, staring at nothing.

He knew what she was doing, by bitter experience he knew. She was mind-riding, using ship’s vermin to hunt out everything she could discover about her captors. She was listening to crewmen and Captain, sucking in data and storing it against future use.

And she was planning.

What the Omphalites saw as near catatonia, he recognized as the intense activity of a brain he had learned to respect.

He tapped his tongue against his teeth when he saw her face change suddenly. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes rolled back in her head. She was concentrating so intently, she looked idiotic. She is doing it, he thought, she is doing it right in front of me.

Her face changed again, slackening as if the energy had drained out of her.

She stopped caring for herself.

Two days later she went deeply unconscious.

Alarm bells rang.

The Omphalites scooped her up, ran her though the ottodoc and dropped her in stasis for the rest of the trip.

He sighed and removed the flake. She must have included a trigger to resurface the hidden memories when the danger was past. He spent a few moments wondering what the trigger was, then let it go. It was not important.

He went through the interrogation sequences one last time, spectator to a superlative performance. Such a deadly dangerous child. And Omphalos has no notion of it. None at all.

Find her. Yes. Trigger that memory. Yes. Set her at Omphalos. Yessss. And kill her when it’s over, before she kills me. Yes.

They are dropping her into contract labor. Where?

They already think I am warped about her. Let them think it; keep picking at them, make them so tired of my agitations they tell me what I need to know.

He ejected that flake and began sketching possible avenues of attack on the Pandai of Bol Mutiar. He was smiling as he worked.

Miralys/Digby 1