Killing Ground Part 13

The Cyberman let Taggart go, and only then did he realize how weak his legs felt. He struggled to stop himself from collapsing as the Cyberleader confronted him. 'You have betrayed our race.' It was not a question.

'Yes.' Taggart's vocal chords didn't engage and his confession came out as a husky rattle. Get it over with, he thought. Kill me!

'You have been working to ferment rebellion against us.'

He almost answered in the affirmative again, but caught himself in time. He still couldn't speak so he shook his head instead. He knew that his autonomic responses had given his guilt away, though. He made a belated attempt to control his facial expression - but, at an inaudible signal from its Leader, the Cyberman behind him dug the fingers of both hands into his shoulders. Taggart squealed and the precarious support of his legs gave way. His knees struck the floor with a painful clang. The Cyberman bent forward and increased the pressure so that he felt as if it might drive him into the ground.

'You have been working to ferment rebellion against us.'

'Yes!' he cried, and his captor relented but didn't release its hold.

'Many components of the human body are not needed during conversion,' the Cyberleader warned. 'Should you attempt a further deception, we will break a redundant part of your bone structure. I believe the pain for you would be -' It paused, as if searching its vocabulary for the correct words. '- quite exquisite!' Taggart remembered Lakesmith's blood-freezing cries and didn't doubt the truth of that. In a public show of power, the Cybermen had torn the old rebel leader's arm from its socket, snapped his spine and even pulled a rib through the walls of his stomach. All with their bare hands.

Lakesmith s survival had been a miracle. Scant wonder that he had volunteered for Max's operations. What had he to lose?

'I'm not controlling the rebels,' Taggart insisted pathetically, as if it might save him. That provoked no reaction, so he stumbled on: 'Henneker is. Ted Henneker. He's using Arthur Lakesmith - you remember Lakesmith? - but he's the one who's running things.'

Despite the slackening of the Cyberman's grip, his muscles ached. A dull throbbing sent sharp knife blades slicing down his sides. His eyes were watering and his vision was misted as he looked up at the Leader to see if he had said enough.

'Continue.'

Taggart's stomach somersaulted and he felt the sick fear of a terrible moment fifteen years ago, returning with unbearable force. He had already repeated everything that Madrox knew. To say more would be to doom Agora's second rebellion as surely as he had helped to doom its first.

'I don't know anything else,' he said, and the pressure on his shoulders increased without warning. He gasped and crumpled further, seeing black spots as something gyrated inside his head. He prayed that he might find safety in unconsciousness; perhaps he would wake up somewhere better. But such release was not to be. He was freed unexpectedly, and he pitched forward onto the unyielding floor, whimpering. The Cyberleader poked at him with its toe, then gave the dispa.s.sionate order: 'Break him.'

'No!' Taggart rolled onto his back and put up his arms in a futile warding-off gesture. The Cyberman simply s.n.a.t.c.hed one of the limbs with both hands and snapped his left forearm without effort. Taggart yelped at the poker-hot pain and felt bile rising in his oesophagus.

'Where are the rebels based?'

Taggart dearly wanted to deny that he knew the answer (a few hours ago, it would have been true, too - d.a.m.n his curiosity!). His lips moved accordingly, but he couldn't bring himself to speak the lie. The price of discovery was too great.

But, equally, the silence of his indecision tempted retribution. 'We will continue to damage you until you speak,' said the Cyberleader, nodding towards its subordinate. The grip was shifted to Taggart's wrist. He felt his bladder let go.

'I'll tell you what you want to know, I swear, just don't hurt me again, I'll tell you...' His voice petered out into a croak as his captor took his other arm, hauled him to his feet and let go. Taggart's face was flushed and uncomfortably hot and wet. He wiped his sleeve across it, but it did no good. He blinked away tears and looked to the Cyberleader, shaking as a cold wave broke across his body.

'I'll tell you what you want to know,' he whispered, knowing that he was signing the death warrants of dozens.

Hegelia was sitting uncomfortably on the floor of the Cyber ship's rear chamber, back to back with the unconscious Doctor, their wrists tied by wire. She was trying to persuade herself that, despite her setback, she had gained something. Cyber troops were herding Agorans into the compartments on the highest level. The conversion process would begin soon and she would become one of the privileged few to have seen it.

She felt the wire which bound her twisting and pulling against her skin. The Doctor was awake, but feigning slumber and working on escape. 'I have been told to inform you,' she said in a loud enough voice, 'that if you slip your bonds, the Cybermen will shoot us both.'

He ceased his struggles and she felt his shoulders slump. 'Accept defeat.

Enjoy the spectacle. We are quite honoured to be witnessing this procedure.'

'I find nothing honourable in the perpetration of casual slaughter!'

snapped the Doctor.

'Why employ such pejorative language? All we are seeing is the use by one race of another for the purpose of their continuance. The Cybermen are acting no more cruelly than do carnivorous species.'

'Except that most carnivores aren't blessed with such willing victims,'

said the Doctor with heavy disapproval.

'There is no point in fighting them. One may as well stop the caterpillar from attaining its imago form; to deny it increased brain power and defensive abilities. It could be argued that the Cybermen are pushing humankind beyond the confines of its evolutionary cul-de-sac.

They can be seen as a natural force.'

'The Cybermen have nothing to do with nature,' the Doctor retorted.

'They are an abhorrence! You could see that if you only had a heart.'

'I do have a heart,' she said stiffly.

'Oh, but don't you wish you didn't!'

Hegelia was not surprised that he knew. She was disappointed, however, that he didn't understand. 'I am the foremost authority of my time on the Cybermen, Doctor. I have dredged up every last doc.u.ment which exists about them, every text file written. I have studied fragments of their buildings, the burnt-out sh.e.l.ls of their vessels and even the remnants of their corpses. But all that is nothing compared to the experience which I am now earning.'

'I'm pleased for you - but some things aren't worth experiencing.'

'I think they are. How do you imagine I feel, Doctor, having spent my life in the pursuit of total knowledge, to be unable to discover the one most basic fact of the Cybermen's existence? I need to know what happens to the mind once it has been operated upon. Does the personality of the individual endure somehow, subverted or altered?

Would I be conscious of my actions? Could I disapprove or would I willingly serve the Cyber cause? What would it feel like?'

'I do understand,' said the Doctor, 'but you're asking the same questions which sentient lifeforms have asked about death since the beginning of time - and the problem is the same. However it feels, whatever you find there, you can't tell anyone about it.'

'That does not matter,' said Hegelia. 'I would know. At last, I would know all.'

'And once your emotions had been neutered and your heart and soul ripped out, you wouldn't care in the slightest.'

'You talk about soul - but my transition, my glorious synthesis, could only bring me one step closer to communing with the world-soul, to which we are all connected.'

The Doctor fell silent, but Hegelia could hear him sighing and she felt his head shake. Let him think what he would. She had adjusted to her disappointment now, and her mind was ticking over with new ideas.

She would get what she wanted.

She craned her neck to see what was happening on the topmost balcony. Most of the compartments seemed full. She could discern the silhouettes of human forms, immobile behind gla.s.s doors. Beside her, the Cyberman stationed at the chamber's base had finished its preparatory work. The consoles stood ready for the last human to arrive, whereupon the conversion machinery could be put into action.

Hegelia ached with the bittersweet antic.i.p.ation of that moment.

Scenes from Ben Taggart's latest nightmare: 'Where are the rebels located?'

'What are they planning?'

'When will they act?'

He sat on the floor of the tiny metal cell, knees up against his forehead, arms wrapped about them, fingers laced together. His eyes were tightly closed and he wished with all his soul that he could open them to discover that the last thirty minutes had not happened.

Why had he said so much?

That question didn't need to be asked. Ben Taggart was a coward and always had been. In the face of torture, he had reverted to type and given in. He had told the Cyberleader what it wanted to know.

Taggart bit back a sob and contracted his muscles, as if hoping to wrap himself into a ball which reality couldn't pierce. A searing pain shot up his broken left arm. He almost welcomed this punishment for his sins. It was nothing compared to what he had let his so-called friends in for with his weakness.

'Where are the rebels located?'

'They have an underground hideout. It's right outside Population Control, on the outskirts of Sector Two. The access hatch is hidden under foliage.'

'What are they planning?'

He had lost all sense of time. He didn't know how long he had spent here, wallowing in the misery of his memories. In those few, isolated moments when Taggart was able to suppress recriminations, he found that there was more than enough self-pity to occupy his mind instead.

His own position was hardly enviable. He was cold and alone, abandoned in a claustrophobic holding cell with conversion the only future he had to look forward to. He wondered what it would feel like and imagined that it would be like dying. Which might well be for the best, he supposed.

The worst part of it was the waiting. He felt a sudden empathy with the poor souls who had sat in cells like this for days, weeks, sometimes years. He wondered how many of those people he had brought to Population Control himself. The faces of some of them flashed across the backs of his eyelids - faces Taggart had hoped and believed he had forgotten. He opened his eyes to banish the spectres and tried to focus on the room's bare walls instead.

He remembered the Leader, announcing that it would send out a contingent of Cybermen to locate the rebels' bunker and to destroy al those within. 'The organics require a further demonstration of our superiority. They will have one.'

A series of clangs cut through his reverie. For the second time that day, Taggart was to be collected. He used his good arm to lever himself to his feet. The seam of the cell's back door was invisible, but he knew where it was. He waited for it to open.

In an unexpected and unwanted contrast to the calm resignation of earlier, Taggart started to cry. His attempts to compose himself were only partially successful and he greeted his latest Cyberman escort with a crumpled face and streaming eyes. At the creature's wordless bidding, he stepped through into the corridor which he knew would take him to the Cyber ship, joining a straggling group of fellow sacrifices. They shuffled on in silence, Taggart's arm throbbing and hanging like a dead weight, slowing him down. They halted three times, waiting as the Cyberman ushered three more frightened men out of their cramped cells to join them.

As the funeral procession continued, Taggart tried his best to be optimistic. He did have one small hope, he consoled himself.

He didn't know quite how it had happened. Perhaps, somewhere in his subconscious, he had possessed one small, untapped reserve of courage. Perhaps he had been motivated by Henneker's stinging criticism or by Max's trust and had wanted to prove himself. Or maybe he had just been more scared of Lakesmith, the lumbering Bronze Knight, than of the Cyberleader. Whatever. Taggart had been surprised to find a lie tripping easily off his tongue. He had told his interrogator that the rebels had constructed a surface-to-air missile, with which they intended to shoot down the Cyber ship as it departed. He had insisted that only Henneker and two or three friends were involved in the plan; that he had discovered it by accident and had merely committed the crime of silence. Then, when he had expected only more pain, the Cyberleader had sent him away. It had believed him.

The rebels had a chance. Their position had been compromised, but their weaponry had not. The Cybermen had no idea what they were marching into. That might make a difference.

As Ben Taggart emerged into the conversion chamber, he realized with a depressing sense of futility that he would never know whether it had done or not.

8.

How Does It Feel?

rant and Jolarr had been left alone with seven Bronze Knights for ove G r two hours, and in that time, not a word had been spoken.

After twenty minutes, Grant had built up the courage to slip through the semi-circle of cyborgs and to take a seat beside their alien captive.

Jolarr had rewarded his attempt to give moral support with a faint appreciative smile.

At last, Max reappeared at the curtain. Looming behind her were the shadows of two more Knights. Grant rose and stared at them as they tottered, unsteady on their new legs, into the already overcrowded area.

He was fascinated by the thought that one of them had been his close acquaintance of the past few weeks. The creatures were identical, though; he couldn't make out which was Henneker. Jolarr stood too and edged behind Grant for what little shielding he could offer. His expression was stiff with apprehension. Grant hoped that Max would protect him.

'Where are the next two volunteers?' the foremost of the new Knights asked.

'n.o.body has entered the bunker,' a predecessor reported.

'They have failed us. I will collect them.'

Max reacted with astonishment. She darted to block the Knight's path to the exit ladder. 'Are you mad? You can't show yourself out there, you'll terrify people!'

'That is unimportant.'

'And what if die Cybermen learn about you? We'll lose our element of surprise.'

'We need organic stock. If the humans will not honour their promises to provide it, they must be made to do so.'

'Henneker?'

Grant didn't know what had made him call the name, apart from the recognition of something familiar beneath the artificial tones which all Bronze Knights shared. He was terrified of what the rebel leader had become, but at the same time, he felt himself compulsively drawn to this awesome fusion of biology and technology. The Knight pivoted to face him and Grant stepped forward tentatively and reached out. His fingers brushed against the coa.r.s.e, grainy texture of its - his? - armour. He recoiled, one whispered, impa.s.sioned question leaping to his tongue. ' How does it feel?' ' How does it feel?'

'I do not understand.'

Gesticulating hopelessly, Grant tried to put thoughts into words.

'The brain alterations. What have they done to you?'