The auto-landing sequence settled the canoe gently enough in the landing area in front of the facility and extended its ramp. The Opener of the Way boarded the small ship in person, accompanied by a couple of the same sort of oversized Exalted Callie had encountered on the orbital facility. “Captain Machedo.” The Opener fluttered her limbs in what Callie recognized as a rude gesture, in contrast to her welcoming tones. “What a great pleasure. You are certainly the most audacious human we’ve encountered in a long time. There have been occasional resistance leaders who demonstrated such boldness, but they lacked your follow-through. We’re still very curious about how you took control of our systems at the shipyard, and on the orbital base. We’ll have a nice talk about the advances in computer science you brought from wherever it is you came from. But first, I brought you a gift – a little something to help facilitate a meaningful and clear dialogue between us.”

  Callie convincingly glared hate, and she jerked her head around and tried to struggle free from the wire when the Opener approached with a silver collar. The Exalted guards held Callie’s head firmly still while the Opener fastened the device around Callie’s throat. “There. How’s that fit?”

  “Cold. Tight. Bad.”

  The Opener patted Callie’s cheek with a tentacle. “You’ll soon get used to it. In time the medical monitor will seem so much a part of you that you’d feel naked without it.”

  “Medical monitor,” Callie said.

  “Oh, all right. Why be coy? It’s just us here. Slave collar. You are a slave now, Captain Machedo, and you will not be a happy one. Such is the fate of lesser beings who don’t know their place.” She turned to her guards. “Search her for weapons and then bring her inside. Put her in holding pen three until I’m ready for her. Leave her bound in the pen, at least until she soils herself. Some of our guards and researchers talk too much, so tales of her exploits have spread among the subjects. I want them to see that their would-be liberator is just a human, and remove any mystique or dignity they might foolishly ascribe her. Leaving her tied up in her own filth should go some way toward that.” She turned back to Callie. “Then we’ll hose you off and have a chat about where you came from and what other visitors we might expect.”

  “I won’t cooperate with you,” Callie said. “You think I haven’t been tortured before? I’ve been held by pirates. I was taken by terrorists once. I’m not worried about a bunch of scientists.”

  “I’ll ask my questions nicely first,” the Opener said. “Then we’ll try hurting you. Or threatening other prisoners, to see if you have an altruistic streak – though since you didn’t come here willingly, but had to be captured and bound by your own allies, my working theory is that you don’t actually care about the other humans too much. I suspect you’re driven by ego and a desire for self-aggrandizement. I’m confident you’ll tell me what I want to know. We’re going to experiment with different interrogation techniques – because we’re scientists. One technique we’ve used with other self-centered prisoners is to feed them Jörmungandr-worm eggs. If they answer questions promptly, I provide enough anti-parasitic medication to limit the growth of the worms, but not kill them. If the prisoners refuse to cooperate, I let nature take its course. The presence of the parasite is very noticeable, and uncomfortable, from the time they’re about half a meter long, but that’s a long way from their full maturity.”

  “You’re a monster,” Callie said.

  “When we arrived here, the human scientists had colonies of mice. They experimented on those mice, deliberately infected them with diseases, exposed them to unknown pathogens, subjected them to experimental medical treatments, and vivisected them as needed. When the colony of mice got too large, they killed the excess members to bring the population to manageable levels. I’m sure the mice considered those humans monsters. Or perhaps gods. To the pen.” The Opener bustled away.

  Callie kept her face stony. It was hard not to smile. She hadn’t expected to be put in with other prisoners right away.

  The guards patted her down thoroughly – and unpleasantly invasively, but she’d been prepared for that – and didn’t find any weapons. They grabbed her and pulled her toward the facility, her toes mostly dragging on the ground but sometimes clearing it entirely. It was surreal being flanked by Liars almost as tall as she was. They passed through three airlock-style security doors, with full quarantine-level protections, complete with blasts of air and geysers of decontaminant spray. The Exalted wanted to make sure the only pathogens down here were those they’d introduced deliberately.

  The guards hauled her through a nice lobby with shiny floors and big windows offering views of the waterfalls, then into a gleaming elevator, and from there: down, down, down.

  The elevator opened on rather less pleasant surroundings. This level wasn’t anything like a hospital – it was more akin to a military facility, all gray concrete walls and steel barriers and iron drains in the floor. The guards whipped out telescoping batons with black balls on the ends that crackled with electricity, then opened up a steel door and tossed Callie in, still bound. She hit the ground hard on her side, gritted her teeth, and lifted her head to get a look around.

  The holding pen was a huge hexagonal room with high ceilings, the lights protected by metal cages. There were about a hundred humans in the pen, milling around. There were sleeping alcoves set into the walls on one side, and on the other side, a low wall hiding what Callie assumed were latrines, based on the strong smell of astringent disinfectant. The humans all craned to get a look at her, but none approached.

  “Hello,” Callie said from the floor, wire cutting into her arms and legs, cheek burning from being scraped on concrete. “I’m Captain Kalea Machedo. I’m here to rescue you.”

  An older woman knelt beside her. “Let’s get this wire off you.” She reached out – and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell over, twitching and jittering.

  “Fuckers,” Callie whispered. The woman’s slave collar had stopped her from helping, and now the other humans pulled even farther away, except for a couple who lifted the old woman and carried her to a safe distance as well. “Nobody needs to untie me,” she said. “This is all part of the plan. Just out of curiosity, are all the holding pens on this level?”

  The humans exchanged glances, and one teenage girl said, “We call them dormitories, but yes. This floor is like a big honeycomb, full of rooms like this one. They moved me from my old dormitory because I kept getting in fights with another girl, so I’ve seen they’re the same.” She hunched her shoulders, expecting to be zapped for her impudence, but apparently the Opener didn’t object to a little conversation. Probably hoping Callie would reveal something of use to her.

  “Excellent.” Callie twisted her bound hands around until she could press a button hidden on the underside of her left manacle with her right thumb. The Exalted guards had checked her quite thoroughly for weapons, but they’d left her in the restraints she arrived in – an understandable oversight, since they believed she’d been sent here unwillingly. Her Exalted captors should have questioned their underlying assumptions a little more.

  Nothing obvious happened when she pressed the manacle, which was one downside. Ashok had assured her the bracelet would do the job, but she wouldn’t know it worked until she actually saw it work.

  Her engineer had spent a long and sleepless night with Lantern and Shall, examining slave collars recovered from the attack on the orbital station. The weak link in that plan had been the necessity of forcing an unlock code out of the director – if Kerneghan had died, or been particularly recalcitrant or zealous and refused to deactivate the collars, the resistance would have struggled to remove thousands of the filthy things before the Exalted could trigger them. After that raid, Callie had tasked her engineering-minded crew members to come up with a better way to free the prisoners.

  Shall had liberated a lot of data from the orbital station, and Ashok had sorted through the code until he could reverse-engineer the heavily encrypted signal used to control the collars. He’d only made a couple of them explode before figuring out how to unlock them instead. From there, he’d built a transmitter small enough to conceal inside a bracelet that could send out a mass-unlock signal to any collars in the vicinity. The signal carried a tiny program that turned each unlocked collar into a transmitter of its own, albeit with a smaller radius, to deactivate any other collars in the vicinity, multiplying her initial range.

  Callie did a slow ten count, then sat up and started to wriggle out of the wire that bound her. She knew exactly where the knots were loose and most likely to give, and had practiced escaping these bonds three times before getting on the canoe.

  The prisoners watched her, wide-eyed, waiting for her to get zapped… but there was no zap forthcoming. Once she’d wriggled her arms free, she twisted her wrists just so, and the cable connecting the manacles split in two, freeing her arms. Now the manacles were just bracelets. She reached up, fiddled with her collar, and unclasped it. She tossed it into the corner, where it lay like a dead silver snake. “Most of you should be free by now, too,” she said. “Those of you way off in the back, maybe give it another minute.”

  The door opened, and the Exalted guards rushed in. Callie rushed them right back, kicked one in the pseudopod (she had on her good kicking bots), and made it drop its shock baton. She bent to scoop up the weapon – but she didn’t time it right, and the other guard got closer, and jammed his baton into her side. Electricity jolted through her, and she spasmed away, breaking contact with the weapon, but that didn’t do anything about her seized muscles. She tasted metal and then she tasted blood, because when she hit the ground in a clenched heap she bit her own tongue. Callie could barely move her head, and watched from the corner of her eye as the guards converged on her, batons sparking. Okay, maybe she’d been a little reckless here. It happened; even she could make mistakes. After all, either you were perfect all the time, which was impossible, or you made the odd error, and just hoped it wouldn’t be fatal –

  Something silver bounced off one of the guard’s heads. He looked up, and another one hit him – it was a slave collar. The guards started to back away, raising their batons, but then several prisoners rushed them – including the teenage girl who’d spoken to her, and the old woman who’d tried to help her.

  The guards were big, strong, armed, and hopelessly outnumbered.

  Other prisoners helped Callie up, massaging her arms and legs in a way that suggested they’d dealt with the aftermath of a shock baton often. She got to her feet, and watched as one of the prisoners jammed a shock baton into the flesh beneath one of the guard’s eyes. The Exalted convulsed wildly, smacking its compatriot hard with multiple tentacles and sending it reeling back. Other prisoners converged on the guards and they vanished from her sight.

  The teenage girl approached Callie, touching her bare neck with an expression of wonder. “Oh, wow.”

  “Right?” Callie said. “Some more guards will come in here pretty soon, with their zap sticks, but, as you’ve already figured out… there are like a hundred of you, and they can’t remote control you anymore.

  “Who are you?” the old woman asked, limping over and massaging the back of her neck.

  “I already said. I’m Kalea Machedo. I’m here to rescue you. Actually, I’m here to help you rescue yourselves. The guards left your door open, so nothing’s stopping you from going out into the corridor and liberating your fellow prisoners.”

  “What are you going to do?” the older woman asked.

  “As much as I can to help.” Callie pushed a button on her right manacle, which wasn’t a manacle at all, but her personal short-range teleporter.

  She knew she’d eventually run out of the element of surprise in the Vanir system, but she wasn’t out of tricks yet.

  CHAPTER 21

  Callie teleported into the most distant hexagon on this level and introduced herself to the prisoners there, then walked from dormitory to dormitory, the signal pulse in her bracelet radiating outward to deactivate every collar in range. After she’d liberated half a dozen chambers, she started finding unconscious humans in the pens – the Opener had sedated them, not killed them, which was the response the resistance generals had anticipated. Callie had still been worried the Exalted would get frustrated and go lethal, even if it was a waste of test subjects, so she was relieved.

  Callie deactivated the collars on the sleeping prisoners, too, and moved on to the next chamber. By then there were something like seven hundred humans running loose all over the level, tearing open doors and attacking guards, with many spreading the signal that had liberated them to others.

  Eventually Callie decided she’d reached a tipping point, and that the crowd here had things well in hand. She picked up a shock baton from the floor beside an unconscious Exalted guard. She had a while before her teleporter would work again – it took just under four hours to recharge between jumps – but there were guards with keycards sprawled all over, so it was easy enough to snag a badge to let her access the rest of the station.

  When she reached the elevator there were groups of humans there, all armed with shock batons. The lift doors opened, and three Exalted guards burst out, but despite their riot shields and heavier weapons, they were immediately overwhelmed by the crowd and zapped into submission. The staff really was not prepared to deal with riots and escape attempts here. Her late friend Warwick, head of security on Meditreme Station, would have fired the lot of them.

  Callie said “Good job,” to the humans, then stepped onto the elevator, tapped her stolen badge against the panel, and hit all the buttons. The doors opened on each level, and at every stop she triggered the signal, unlocking collars in offices, the infirmary, everywhere. Once or twice guards tried to rush her but she was ready with boots and baton to shove them back.

  Callie anticipated resistance when she arrived in the lobby, but that floor was undefended – the guards were busy on other levels, she supposed. Metal security screens had lowered at some point to seal the front doors and all the windows, but she could deal with that issue later. She had more pressing concerns.

  There was a large round desk in the center of the lobby, staffed by a chimera receptionist – her hair had been replaced with writhing, spaghetti-thin Jörmungandr-worms, giving her the look of a parasitic Medusa. Callie stuck a shock baton in the woman’s terrified face. “Hello. I’m looking for the security office, and the director’s office, in that order.”

  The receptionist mutely pulled up a map on a terminal and turned the screen around for Callie to peruse. A flashing red star marked the director’s office, and a blue one the security office. “Thanks,” Callie said, and shocked the receptionist into unconsciousness, just on general principles.

  She strolled toward the security office, which was locked. Callie tapped her badge and the door unlocked. Oh, you had to laugh. She pulled it open and stepped aside to avoid the Exalted security chief who lumbered out, baton swinging. He was more supervisory than practical, apparently. Probably years since he electro-shocked a defenseless human, so he was out of practice. She caught him in the side with her baton as he went by, shocked him into submission, and then kicked him in the head, again just on general principles. She took his badge in case it could open more doors than the standard variety.

  The security office had a lot of interesting weapons in a wide-open locker, so she helped herself to a couple of sidearms and some non-lethal riot-control grenades. The holster rigs were made for Exalted, but she managed to twist and knot the straps into something like bandoliers. Wasn’t there some ancient human revolutionary leader who’d worn bandoliers criss-crossed over his chest? She recalled seeing a historical sim about it. Viva whoever that was.

  The security chief had been logged into his terminal, and since this place had started out as a human research station and was still partly staffed by human collaborators, the controls were comprehensible. Callie unsealed all the security doors, deactivated the perimeter defenses, and rolled up those steel gates in the lobby. There was an option to seal an escape pod hatch, so she did that, too. Nobody was escaping here but the prisoners.

  Callie opened up a communication channel to a wide array and transmitted, “Vanaheim station has been liberated. Come on down.” True, the station wasn’t entirely liberated, but it would be by the time her crew and the resistance forces arrived. She took a moment to think, decided she’d done all she needed to do here, then smashed up the whole security console with the butt of a gun. No reason to let anyone else come in here and mess with her carefully curated settings.

  She strolled, whistling, to her meeting with the Opener of the Way.

  The director’s office had doors carved of dark, smooth, rich wood, decorated with figures of the Exalted all around the edges, robed figures posed with interlocking tentacles. A great tribe, engaged in a great work. They don’t lack for self-esteem, do they? She knocked on the door with the butt of a sidearm. “Director! Are you ready to start that interrogation yet? I’m feeling loquacious.” She rattled the door, but it didn’t open. There were some hefty locks engaged in there.

  Fortunately, she’d brought that gun from the security office, and it had a multitude of round settings – lethal, crowd control, and, there we go: breaching. She pressed the barrel of the gun against the seam between the doors, halfway down, and pressed the trigger button. The shotgun jumped in her arms, propelling her back a step, and the doors exploded inward, fragments of wood flying.

  She went in, the barrel of the gun resting on her shoulder. The director’s office was circular, with glass walls looking out on an enclosed wraparound courtyard that was like a Vanaheim jungle in miniature, filled with lush trees, flowers, and vines, with a small waterfall as the centerpiece. There was no desk here – humans liked those more than Liars did – but there were various terminals scattered around on tables, and a big glass fishbowl of the sort Liars enjoyed relaxing in. A wooden pillar stood in the center of the room, as big around as a great sequoia, with metal doors set into the side. An executive elevator, probably. Callie pressed the button and revealed an empty car. She stepped inside, considered the buttons, and pressed the top one. Nothing happened. She tried tapping the security chief’s badge against the panel and it obligingly lit up. Callie pressed the top button again, and began to smoothly ascend.