by Xenutia

E-mail: [email protected]
Rating: PG
Category: Friendship/Angst/some Humour
Codes: R/S
Summary: Reed awakes from an accident to find himself held prisoner in a tank without windows or doors, and with no idea how he got there. As he slowly pieces together the events leading up to his capture, he is forced to re-evaluate a lot of things . . . including a certain comm officer . . .
Author's Notes: Special thanks to shi shi for looking over this in its early stages, telling me where I was going wrong (which it did a lot), and basically just kick-starting me whenever I stalled . . . thanks, luv! Couldn't do it without you.

ONE

Some might say he was a silent man, and in many ways, they would be right. He liked to keep a certain economy with words, when it suited him. It added an air of mystery, and prevented that oldest of proverbial misunderstandings; better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. But a man using silence as a shield did not necessarily have to enjoy listening to it when he found himself surrounded by quiet so dense it made his ears hurt. Today, the total absence of sound besides his own had taken on a living, breathing persona far more powerful than the roar in his head or the dull sensations of startled agony that assaulted him, more powerful, even, than his own capacity for silence . . .

. . . and it had begun, conversely, with a noise like nothing he had ever heard.

It had been a routine mission with no reason to fail, and that, perhaps, had made it a danger . . . defences grew lax when the crew grew complacent. When he grew complacent. He could no longer remember the incident that had sparked the notion; there was only this thin flutter of disquiet in the hollow between his stomach and his heart, and the vague impression of water and of shadows on a hillside . . .

He stretched out slowly on the narrow bench, flinching as the raw wounds in his back rubbed scathingly against the metal, and pressed his face into the crook of his elbow. At least he could think with the harsh overhead lights fenced back this way, his eyes masked by the cool cotton fabric of his uniform, and his unkempt hair forced back from his temples by the cuff of his sleeve. He could think, if only in droning circles like a trapped bluebottle, piecing together the remnants of the incident still in his memory; but the picture remained obstinately incomplete.

She stood out amongst the jumbled fragments like a lone flower in a battlefield, and always she uttered the same, incoherent cry; always she was gone when he opened his eyes. As she had been gone when he finally came to in the remains of the crashed alien land vehicle, startled from unconsciousness by her scream receding into the distance. As the sound penetrated the shroud of shifting black unfolding over him, his immediate thought had been one of impulsive frustration, almost anger—couldn't she see that by screaming she only drew the danger to her, gave herself away? Such an undeniably human sound could be mistaken for nothing else, she may as well have sent up a flare. If he had broken through into the conscious world long enough to continue the thought, he would have wished he could clap a hand over her mouth to silence her. But the shriek subsided, and the blackness had taken him again before a muscle could respond.

These fragments remained, an uncracked code in his head.

He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his arm harder into them; his saturated uniform stank of smoke and sweat. He had woken to find her gone and her last call for help hanging statically on the dense air, long after the mouth that had uttered it was no longer in sight. Then had come blackness until he woke here.

Wherever here was.

He took his arm away, reluctant to concede that his attempts at dredging up the sunken memories had captured nothing, but forced to accept that it was the truth. The achingly white lights glared from the low ceiling above him, stealing any inclination for rest away, obliterating his reason and leaving him with a mild drone of a headache. She was gone, and he was here, for better or for worse. He prayed, in a corner of himself where words were meaningless, that she had escaped when the vehicle crashed—but he knew, in his heart, that she had not. Hoshi rarely screamed these days unless it was a cry for help—still too naive, too innocent, to realise that it was the worst thing she could do. The help had not come because he had been powerless to give it, and the knowledge grated like a splinter under the skin; he had a duty to perform, a promise made to the captain that Hoshi would be safe in his hands, and in that duty he had failed. The penetrating silence only made the accusation echo like a tired drumbeat in his head.

He had woken the second time to this near physical silence, lying tangled on the cold metal floor and staring up into equally cold and colourless lights that hung too low over him and blotted out his peripheral vision. He had opened his eyes to this hideous glare with the expectation that he would find Hoshi here with him, and had stirred with a mild rebuke already on his tongue, only to find himself alone.

Without someone to protect, he hadn't known quite what to do. So he waited.

The gunmetal walls loomed on all sides, tapering from wide floor to narrow ceiling; and that ceiling, as he lie now on this hard bench, hung low enough for his outstretched fingers to brush against at arm's length. He could not sit upright on this bench without bending his neck, could only sit on the floor or lie, as he did now, on the thin board fastened to the wall. The room's width, such as it was, allowed him to place one palm flush against each wall and barely feel a strain in his arms.

He drank in the silence like a man willingly taking poison, hearing Hoshi's foolish outburst ring in his ears like gunshots dying on the wind. He had seen nothing of her probable capture, leaving him with the hope that there had been no capture to see . . . and also leaving him with a sugar-sweet taste of dread in his mouth. He couldn't help but fear that her voice, in the end, had cost her her life.

Had he heard weapons as his consciousness lapsed back into the dark? He didn't know. That fragment was one of a number still lost to him.

The low lights reflected harshly back from leaden surfaces and wormed their way into his head as the time passed, igniting flares of agony behind his eyes. His gathering headache rose from a low drone to a peevish wail, spreading disorder throughout his weary body, and the silence beat in his temples like waves pounding on the shore. It was only now that he realised, with far more anger than surprise, that for some hours he had crept and crawled about this tiny space, saying nothing, barely breathing above a whisper, afraid to cave that momentous hush. Afraid to impress himself upon it in case a part of him should be absorbed by it, and never returned.

No set of walls should be capable of doing this to him, none, however small. He was no cadet, no child, no wet-eared ensign feeling his way on shaky space-legs—he was the tactician, the defence and the offence. That he had ever forgotten that fact flowered a bloom of rage in his chest, and he nurtured that spark, tasting it, relishing it.

Anger tasted so much sweeter than fear.

He smashed his fist into the wall beside him, anticipating with almost guilty pleasure the echoes it would stir, unmindful of the pain that exploded in his knuckles; but there were no echoes to break the hush, and the pain came regardless. He punched again, and again, punishing the walls for their silence.

Eventually his fists could take the beating no more; he sank back in a boneless huddle that shuddered with every breath, his face protected from the light by the blissful dark formed in the cradle of his arms, his bruised shoulders braced against the laboured pull of his lungs. This windowless tank was little bigger than a coffin, and as he sat in the centre of it, afraid to touch those defiant walls again, it felt as if the analogy were no analogy at all.

Somewhere between breaths he ceased to count them, and he descended into a restless, heated sleep that broke like mist as a sound invaded the tank. A sound that formed words he should know, as he should know how he came to find himself here, and should know what had befallen Hoshi.

Malcolm Reed, it said, as if no question of its validity had ever arisen or would ever arise. And Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, alone in his prison cell, shivered at the voice whose lambent tones pronounced his name like a death sentence.

It was Hoshi's.

It was Hoshi's, and yet, it was not.

----------------------------------------------------

He straightened instinctively at those two words, only three disconnected syllables forming a mechanical approximation of his name, waking that hungry scream in his back at the sudden movement. It almost masked the chill there. That voice was one he could never confuse; he heard it every day from the station across from his, heard it swell with laughter during a bad movie and quiver with fear in a crisis. It was hers . . . but this voice, at first mistakenly taken to be her, was cold as the breath of wind rattling through an opened tomb, promising a curse for desecrating ancient ground.

Malcolm waited breathlessly for it to come again, hoping to hear his first suspicions confirmed—this was Hoshi's phonetic vocabulary, recorded but filtered in some way into the abrupt address he heard now. He refused to accept that this inhuman voice originated so coldly from her lips. Whatever she had said to his hosts' and in whatever circumstances it had been said, she had provided the source from which this message was made, like a ransom-note hacked letter-by-letter from an old magazine.

The icy hollow in his ribs clamped harder at the sound of her, one question, at least, answered by this intrusion. His visions of her in hiding, free but powerless until the Enterprise retrieved her, died in a heartbeat . . . but so, too, did the desperately rejected images of her lying dead in the belt of woodland where they had been forced to land. Whatever came next, she was as much a prisoner as he was. She had been alive, at least, to record this message for their hosts . . . there was a chance, a reasonable chance, that she was still alive now. He would take whatever chance he could get. He waited with a little more willingness, now, to listen, expecting more. The transmission did not disappoint.

You are the tactical officer on your vessel, It—for he had to think of that sacrilegious butchering of Hoshi's voice as an It'—said. It was not a question.

I am, he began, warily. The message, clearly a recording, did not allow him the luxury of responding further. It cut across him in its impersonal way, mutilating her warm tones into sonorities cold and deathly. They stuck into his bones and lodged there, chips of ice in the deepest corners of his body that would not be melted away by reason.

You understand weapons, it said. We have captured the prototype of a weapon our enemy would rather we never knew existed. You will make it work.

Malcolm bristled, tiny charges of electricity lighting his skin in his indignation. He held the anger like a shield, feeding from the crackle in his skin and the sweat cooling greasily down his lacerated back. Oh, will I, indeed? he demanded, not caring if any living soul heard his complaints. And just why would I do that?

But the Hoshi-voice remained silent, and if anybody heard his reply, then they ignored his questions.

Malcolm pressed his sweaty knuckles to his mouth, more in perfunctory imitation of previous experience than any real need to do so—but he felt uncomfortably nauseous, hearing so gentle a voice twisted into so clinical a messenger. His mouth felt dirtied with his failure to ask if she was safe, even though he would never have received an answer. The anger had dimmed and only a knot remained deep in his stomach, cleaving its way into his gut like a knife through steak. His lungs could not seem to find enough oxygen in the air they breathed, though air there must be, even in here. His invisible hosts' would have thought of that.

The truth, he discovered now, was that he expected any moment to hear the marching of boots approaching from whatever lie beyond his prison, coming to ensure that he complied with their demands. Coming to do what they should have done, before employing so unorthodox a method of communication, and to do so in the most efficient manner possible.

Everyone he had ever trained with or served with had assumed Malcolm Reed would be the kind of man to resist forcible incentives. They had surmised that his silence would not bend. They had seen an impenetrable, dutiful officer, one that would remember his place and his obligations in trying times. They had even considered him fearless.

They had been mistaken. So he had taught his subordinates and so he would do—but he was still, in some quiet corner of himself where his mind rarely went, afraid. These—people—would only be doing what was logical, what was efficient, was he himself would do in their situation. Less brutally, perhaps, than these beings may, but still he would engage in interrogations of some kind. Had even attempted to do so, all those months ago when an alien creature invaded their cargo bay.

They would do what they had to do, and so, he knew, would he. It was beyond his nature as a security officer to blame them for carrying out their duties.

He waited, counting each breath as it passed his lips, with every moment becoming more certain that those footfalls would come; but also, which every moment, daring to hope a little more that they would not. Maybe there was no way of escape but to face what came, and by accepting the inevitable in silence he would, perhaps, learn something to his advantage. It wouldn't be the first time. He may, at the least, see these people in the flesh. If he faced it. But just maybe he didn't want to have to face it quite so soon. The memory of the beating he had sustained at the hands of the Suliban was still too fresh.

The swish of something gliding away and the surreptitious snatch of motion in the corner of his eye startled him, but only for a split-second which he knew he would leave out of his official report, should he live to make one. A section of the wall to his left had opened onto an alcove, revealing a console whose tiny lights and beckoning blink seemed almost to grin, accusingly, at him. Maybe it was merely the position of those lights which gave the illusion of a mouth, toothless and lopsided, smirking broadly at him—or maybe it was his headache returning. Whatever the reason, it took only one glance for him to take an instant disliking to it. To its idiotic, grinning face, and its silent, patient hum.

Malcolm hesitated where he stood, gravitating slightly towards it, his fingers itching to explore—but he remained rooted to the floor, reticent, snatching back his hand as if burnt every time it tentatively drifted too close. This was evidently what they intended for him to use—his tool for deciphering the unseen weapon from his cell. His tactical mind clamoured, urging him to at least investigate if only to prepare a defence against their demands . . . but while curiosity stung like the snap of a rubber band on inquisitive fingers, he had no intention of complying with their request. There would be no point in fraternising with something in which he would not participate.

He eyed the bright console, watching its screen light up and darken down, a definite pattern formed by the repetition. All the message had said was that they required he decipher the controls, a task he was far from inexperienced with, and which excluded him, in part, from active involvement. He would not be dirtying his hands in an unknown war simply by looking. And if . . . if their methods were to intensify, if those marching feet did come for him, then he would rather be informed of the favour they asked of him. For all he knew, this weapon was inoperable, damaged, or fundamentally non-lethal. Its greatest danger may be no more than sleeping gas, and unless he investigated, unless he made sure of the facts, he may suffer no end of persuasion' for nothing.

Trembling and unaware he even did so, Malcolm Reed approached the console, drawn by its siren's song, and stood, hands slack at his sides, taking in the readings on the small screen.

He knew this.

A nameless alien creation returned his stare, yet in all but the intricate pictorial language it was a system he felt he knew, a hierarchy of protocols and procedures second nature to him. He could solve the launch techniques in a matter of minutes, guided by an indefinite instinct, and barely break into a sweat. If he chose.

Slowly, Malcolm reached across and pressed the largest of the switches. The small screen sputtered and died with one final flare.

He would resist. As long as he had to.

Part 2 coming soon . . .