Part Two

Harper tossed the gun down on his bed. It was a good gun, better than the worn out and dangerous stuff he’d used in his youth. The Nietzscheans had said that anyone who got killed by a kludge deserved to die; that any Nietzschean inferior enough to be caught by the pitiful rabble on Earth was best removed from the gene pool. Harper had lost count of the number that had fallen to his weapons. If you counted the Witchhead Nebula, thousands.

Harper lay down beside the gun, if he’d had something this good back on Earth he might never have been captured and tortured, he might not have the knowledge that he owed his life to a Nietzschean; to whoring in a dark alleyway. Harper thought back to his last year on Earth.

~

The gun died on him as he ran; he’d lost his shriller when the explosion had knocked him off his feet and now the only thing he had to help his getaway was his speed.

It wasn’t enough.

It only took one Nietzschean to capture him. The big bastard just grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and knocked him unconscious. And when he woke up he was a guest of the Dragons.

The first beating was almost perfunctory: they ripped off his clothes and took turns punching and kicking him until he threw up. They weren’t interested in getting information out of him: they just wanted to soften him up. Or maybe they didn’t like the fact that he’d helped take out a major munitions dump. After that they got a little more serious. Harper hadn’t been sure how many days passed: they never let him sleep for more than an hour anyway. It all blended into blood and pain and humiliation.

They dragged him out of his cell for the latest round of, ‘Who helped you? Where can we find them?’, when he was pulled up short, his head tugged back by a hand in his hair and he came face to face with the Niet from the alley.

"Has he talked?" The words were for the guards but Cuchulain’s eyes never left Harper’s.

"Not yet, but he will. The General will be back in a couple of days and you know no kludge has held out longer than three hours with him. This one will be telling us if he screwed his mother once he gets a taste of Alpha discipline." The guard laughed.

Cuchulain released Harper’s head and stepped back. "Tell me everything he says. I want to know first."

"Yes sir," The guard said, dragging Harper off for his next interrogation.

The next three hours passed in agony: today’s questioner had a thing for electricity. Harper hung by his wrists in the middle of the room and screamed his throat raw as the electrodes were brushed over him. His genitals seemed to be a favourite spot, as were the soles of his feet and the back of his neck.  He never knew where they were going to fry him next, not that it mattered that much: it hurt everywhere.  Every half an hour or so they’d douse him in seawater to help conduct the current better. The water had smelled foul and stale and it stung like fire in his burns and cuts but it was cool and he came to look forward to the sound of guard picking up the bucket.

Without warning it was over again. For an hour or so at any rate. Harper was dumped back in his cell where he slumped to the bare floor and fell asleep immediately, the pain of his injuries unable to counteract the exhaustion.

As always he was woken before he’d had a chance to get more that a foothold in sleep. This time though he wasn’t kicked, but shaken awake.

"Kludge, wake up." Cuchulain’s voice echoed around the tiny cell.

Harper stared up at the Niet towering over him and his guts twisted. "What are you doing here?"

"I haven’t decided yet." Cuchulain was holding a med-spray in one hand and a battered rebel weapon in the other. He held up the med-spray, "In here is a virus that will ensure that the next time you are tortured your heart will fail. No one can trace it and you won’t be able to tell anyone about the Nietzschean you used to blow for small change," Cuchulain grimaced. "I will be an important man soon and I don’t need any of the inferior creatures around here knowing of my…weakness."

"So you’re here to kill me?" Harper almost welcomed the news.

"Perhaps not. My main rival is in charge getting information from you and rounding up your conspirators. If you were to escape it would reflect badly on him.  It seems you can still be of use to me," Cuchulain smiled coldly down at Harper.

"Escape?" Harper trembled, hope flowing through his veins.

"But you could be recaptured and eventually you’d tell them who set you free. So…" Cuchulain lunged forwards and pressed the hypospray to Harper’s neck. The virus hissed into Harper’s body and Harper screamed.

"Don’t worry, as long as you do not experience intense pain in the next six days you won’t die." Cuchulain tossed the battered gun into Harper’s lap. "Take this and shoot as many people as you want on the way out. None of them are loyal to me. I suggest you make your way to the spaceport and get off the planet. If I see you again I will kill you. You’ve served your purpose."

Harper raised the weapon and pointed it shakily at Cuchulain who laughed. "You won’t shoot me, little kludge."

"Why not?"

"Because you’re too slow." Cuchulain snatched the gun from Harper’s hand, twirled it and handed it back. "Because I’m your best chance of getting off world, and because you owe me."

Harper shook his head. "I owe you? Are you crazy?"

"You can’t fool me, pretty little kludge." Cuchulain crouched down beside Harper and stroked his face with the back of one hand. "The money I gave you paid for food and medicine. Don’t think I don’t know that the only reason you stopped coming to our place was because your friend watched us together that last time."

"No, that would have been the last time anyway."

"I don’t think so." Cuchulain reached down and caressed Harper’s cock. "You were starting to like it."

"NO! I never liked it." Harper shuffled backwards, away from Cuchulain in horror.

"Maybe not in your head, but your body betrayed you. I could smell your arousal, that’s why I let your friend watch. Did you two jerk each other off after I’d finished with you?"

Harper felt queasy, the idea that he’d enjoyed being abused in that alleyway was sick. "You’re a twisted fuck aren’t you?"

"Some of my rivals here might think paying a kludge for sexual favours was a deviant weakness, but they lack…subtlety. Now do you want to get out of here or not?"

Harper pulled himself wearily to his feet and staggered to the door. Cuchulain picked up a small sack and fished out some snips of wire and a small tool and tossed them on the floor.

"It has to look like you escaped by yourself; you’re known to be quite ingenious when it comes to machinery." Harper nodded and followed Cuchulain out of the cellblock. Two guards were quickly dispatched with Harper’s weapon and they soon arrived at a grating leading to the local sewer system.

Cuchulain handed him the sack. "There’s clothes in there and a pass into the space port. I’m assuming you have the technical abilities to hide yourself on an outgoing freighter. If I see you on Earth again your life is forfeit."

"Why not just kill me now Uber?" Harper was dizzy and sick and desperately in need of rest.

Cuchulain pressed Harper up close to the wall and whispered in his ear. "Because I like the thought of you living the rest of your life knowing the first time you took sexual pleasure from another person it was with a Nietzschean.  I like knowing  that I corrupted you. I like to know that you will live with the knowledge that you owe your life to what we did together. You’re a smart little kludge and some day I’ll collect on your debt."

"I owe you nothing," Harper whispered. "You did all this for your own reasons."

"You can tell yourself that if it makes you feel better, but we both know the truth."  Cuchulain bit down on Harper's neck, leaving a mark, before releasing him.

Harper staggered away down the tunnel, laughter echoing after him.

"You’re mine Seamus Harper, you have been since the first time you took my money."

~

And now that debt could never be repaid. Harper gritted his teeth at the realisation that he was going to die with that debt still on his side of the scales. Cuchulain’s last little stab of poison. Something he could never talk about, something he could never be absolved of. The Magog were his demons but the Nietzscheans…the Nietzscheans were the real evil.

Harper rolled of his bed and threw the gun into the back of his closet.

The past was dead and gone, time to move on.

The end
 
 

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