“Hands behind your back. You make a move, I’ll hose you down.”
I do as instructed and put my hands behind my back. Immediately, someone else grabs me by the uniform and yanks me back roughly. Then I feel the hard plastic of a set of flex cuffs closing around my wrists.
Agent Green gets up from the deck and steadies himself. He wipes the blood out of his face with the back of his hand. The front of his loaner overalls is stained with red splotches. The high collar of his suit underneath has blood spatters on it as well. He looks at me with narrow eyes. Then he walks up to where the SPs are tightening the cuffs and patting me down. Without a word, he hauls off and punches me in the face, a solid right cross that cracks into my cheekbone and makes me see stars. My knees buckle, but the SPs on either side of me keep me from falling down. Agent Green takes a step back and observes me as I sway. The side of my face is numb, but I know that the numbness will turn into throbbing pain in a few moments.
“Toughest guy on the block, huh?” I say.
He doesn’t even try to make his next shot a surprise. It’s a hard punch thrown wide from the shoulder, and his fist slams into the bridge of my nose, right in the spot where I hit him just a few moments ago. This time, my vision goes red, then black. The sudden sharp pain between my eyes tells me that my nose is broken. I fall backwards, and the SPs just let go of my arms and let me crash to the deck. Warm blood runs down my upper lip and then into my mouth, and I cough. Agent Green has a good, solid punch for a bureaucrat.
“Now we’re even,” he says to me. I open my eyes and look up at him. He wipes his own bloody nose on the sleeve of his overalls, leaving a dark red streak on the fabric.
“Take Staff Sergeant Grayson out of here and move him to the detention area on Foxtrot concourse. If he tries any tough-guy shit, shoot him in the spine and leave him for the cleanup robots.”
The SPs march me through Indy’s corridors and over to the docking collar. Two of them are behind me, weapons across their chests, and two are on either side of me, guiding me by the shoulders. When we reach the main airlock, Staff Sergeant Philbrick and Corporal DeLuca aren’t at their posts anymore. Instead, there’s a pair of SPs guarding Indy’s side of the docking collar.
When we pass through Indy’s main airlock and step out into the flexible collar connecting us to the station, it occurs to me that I may never step onto a spaceship again. I don’t have any personal gear left in my berth, but I’ve lived and fought with the people on that ship for a few tense months now, and not being able to say good-bye to them as I get hauled off Indy like a bag of refuse hurts a lot more than the broken nose or the sore and puffy cheekbone.
The corridors of Foxtrot concourse are nearly deserted. There are a few civilian techs scurrying about, but they give us wide berths. I’ve never seen a space station this empty. The impression is compounded by the fact that Independence is bigger and roomier than Gateway, which is always packed to the bulkheads with military personnel and materials in transit. Of all the sights I’ve seen since the Lankies arrived in the solar system, seeing one of the NAC’s two major space hubs almost devoid of people is possibly the most apocalyptic.
The civilian security police march me down the length of Foxtrot concourse, which is a long hike down the central corridor. At the main junction that connects the concourse to the central part of the station, there’s a security booth next to a wide airlock. The lead cop swipes his security tag at the door. Inside, there’s a duty desk and two more civilian police, both in regular black police fatigues with sidearms on their duty belts.
The SPs pat me down again. One of them runs a scanner up and down my body.
“Clean. Give the guy something for his nose. He’ll bleed all over the detention unit.”
One of the SPs uncuffs me, then another behind the desk produces a rolled-up bandage pad and tosses it over to me. I catch it and press it against my nose. The blood on my face is fairly well clotted now, and I do my best to clean some of the sticky mess, with limited success. The bridge of my nose hurts like hell, and I have a massive headache now, but I don’t want to ask the SPs for pain meds. I don’t want to ask them for any favors at all. They remind me too much of the casually brutal riot cops I met last time I went down to Earth a few months ago.
“I’m going to take the cuffs off,” the cop to my right says. “No funny shit, or that bloody nose will be the least of your problems today. Understood?”
“Understood,” I say.
The cop releases the flex cuffs, which were tight enough on my wrists to leave deep red marks.
“This way,” he says. “Nice and easy.”
He leads me to a door at the back of the security station and opens it with his ID tag. We walk through the door into a detention berth. It’s a room maybe five meters wide and long, with stainless steel benches along the walls that are bolted to the floor. There’s a toilet in the corner of the room, and a holoscreen high up on one wall near the ceiling. It’s showing Network news with the sound muted.
“Have a seat and relax for a little while until the MPs come and pick you up.”
“Relax,” I say. The wad of bandage I’m pressing against my face is now tinted in various shades of red, and my head hurts enough to make my eyes water. “That’s just what I’ll do. Thanks.”
The cop leaves the room and closes the door behind him. I walk over to one of the benches lining the walls and lie down on it. I’ve not been in a detention cell in five years of service, but from the look of things, I’m going to have to get used to this sort of environment.
I close my eyes and try to ignore the pain enough to take a nap, without great success.
A little while later, the door of the detention berth opens again. I sit up, expecting the MP detail that will haul me off to the shuttle down to the fleet brig in Norfolk. But the newcomers aren’t military police. The civvie cop walks in, followed by Dmitry and Colonel Campbell.
“Have a seat, gentlemen,” the cop says.
Colonel Campbell nods at me and sits down on the bench nearby.
Dmitry rubs his wrists and looks around the room. Then he looks at me and shakes his head slightly. “Andrew, my friend,” he says. “You look like garbage. Have you had not-good ideas again?”
“Iz ognya da v polymya,” I agree.
CHAPTER 11
“Why did you have to go and pick a fight with those CSS goons?” Colonel Campbell asks.
I’m lying down on my bench again because it’s easier to keep the blood in my head that way. Dmitry is sitting leaned back against the stark white wall of the detention berth, arms folded, watching the muted Network screen with a slightly bored expression. Colonel Campbell is pacing around in what little space there is, hands in the pockets of his CDU fatigues.