Confined

Also by Bernard Wilkerson

  The Worlds of the Dead series

  Beaches of Brazil

  Communion

  Discovery

  The Creation series

  In the Beginning

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Earth: Book One

  Episode 1: Defeat

  Episode 2: Flight

  Episode 3: Maneuvers

  Episode 4: Insertion

  Episode 5: Envelopment

  Episode 6: Ambush

  Episode 7: Feint

  Episode 8: Counterattack

  Episode 9: Withdrawal

  OR

  Get the Omnibus edition (episodes 1 thru 9)

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Book Two

  Hrwang

  Copyright © 2016 by Bernard Wilkerson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.

  Requests for permission should be submitted to [email protected].

  For information about the author, go to

  www.bernardwilkerson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo courtesy of NASA.

  Episode 1

  CONFINED

  1

  Eva Gilliam woke up.

  The feeling was unpleasant.

  More than unpleasant. Awful. She hurt everywhere. Random images flooded her mind, horrifying her, and she wished she hadn’t woken up.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and willed it all to go away.

  She didn’t go back to sleep, and she quickly became aware of her face pressed into rough, cold stone. The irregular surface crushed the skin on her cheek and mashed her eye, making her see stars.

  Eva shifted a little to relieve the pressure on her face and reopened her eyes.

  She couldn’t see anything.

  She blinked her eyes and moved a little more.

  It made her entire body hurt.

  Confused and in pain, she squeezed her eyes shut again and focused on breathing. After several breaths, she felt calmer and opened her eyes once more.

  Complete blackness.

  She wanted to bring her hand up in front of her face, to wave it around and try to see it, but her body didn’t obey her mind. Her hand remained where it was.

  She now felt more, specific pains. Her back and legs stung from the whip, her jaw throbbed from clenching the leather wrapped wood, and her wrists and ankles ached from where the ropes had held them. Her entire body protested the abusive treatment she’d received, protested the cold it felt now, and protested awakening from a two and a half year long hibernation sleep without having received proper, post-hibernation recovery treatment.

  Assess. Plan. Act.

  Her training wanted to take over, but her body refused to respond. It suffered, and it wanted her mind to suffer with it, and though she tried, Eva couldn’t compartmentalize the suffering away.

  Trained to withstand torture, she never actually expected to experience it.

  Before she first went into cold sleep aboard the Lord Admiral’s spaceship, Command First Class of the Fleet of the People, the waking procedure had been explained to her. She would be helped gently out of her cold sleep bed, led to a quick shower to rinse off the fluid that perserved the life of her body during hibernation, then dressed in something warm, fed a little broth, and allowed to sleep. Real sleep. Some people slept eight to ten hours after awakening, some slept as long as twenty. Whatever a person’s body required.

  People required actual sleep for rejuvenation, not artificially induced hibernation sleep, and she was told she’d be allowed to rest properly and spend a few days afterwards recovering.

  No one fed her broth when they woke her up.

  Instead, rough hands dragged her out of her cold sleep chamber, covered her in something, and carried her into a smaller vehicle which immediately began planetary entry.

  Her confused mind couldn’t grasp the situation, couldn’t make her mouth ask the questions it needed to ask, and couldn’t call on her training to respond to the threat.

  She blacked out.

  Cold water splashing on her naked body woke her up, and she found herself being tied facedown on a wooden plank. Survival instinct immediately kicked in and she tried to fight, but the hands that held her were strong and kept her immobilized until the knots were complete.

  As soon as those hands let go, she struggled, but the rope held her fast.

  She couldn’t escape.

  The words spoken around her were in Est, the language of the Hrwang and the language of the Lord Admiral, and they evoked fuzzy images in her mind. Not a complete understanding, but the words suggested limited mental pictures that allowed her to guess at what was being said.

  Jeering followed a solemn pronouncement, and then the first blow of a whip fell.

  Eva had not been aware of the leather covered dowel placed in her mouth but felt grateful for it as she involuntarily bit down. Hard. If the dowel hadn’t been in her mouth and if her tongue had been in the way, she would have bitten it off.

  Her mind protested at the second blow and she wanted to reason with someone, to talk to them, to manipulate them to make them stop hurting her. This had to be a mistake. She was Eva Estelle Gilliam, agent for the U.S. Government, infiltrator of the Hrwang leadership, and paramour of the alien’s supreme commander, the Lord Admiral. No one could tie her up and whip her like this.

  A third blow fell.

  Her cover must have been blown.

  She thought she’d been the perfect mole. She thought she had the Lord Admiral wrapped around her finger, that he believed everything she said, and that he trusted her completely.

  The Lieutenant Grenadier must have ratted her out. He had discovered her secret and although he loved her, he must have betrayed her.

  The fourth lash on her back reminded her of his horrible death. It couldn’t have been him.

  Somehow the Lord Admiral must have learned the truth after he put her into cold sleep, and he was punishing her now. She would be executed after the flogging and she would have failed in her mission to accompany the aliens back to their home world and find a way to save hers.

  It had been a desperate bid, a hopeless cause, just like everything she had done since she had used her athletic body to get close to the alien leader. Nothing she did had stopped the attacks against her people, had relieved their suffering, or had thrown off the yoke of alien oppression. Nothing she had learned had changed the balance of power between alien and human, and despite the hope placed in her by her friends and her Director at the Agency, nothing would come of her current mission.

  She cried out in pain when the fifth lash struck her legs.

  Her skin burned, her muscles knotted, and she tensed, anticipating the next blow. It didn’t come and she relaxed a little, then it fell, followed quickly by another.

  She screamed.

  The irregular timing of the lashing made an already barbarous torture more inhumane, and Eva’s hands grabbed their restraints, her fists tightening on the ropes that bound her, and the whip struck again.

  Instead of striking across her back, the next lash went longways down her body and she bucked involuntarily in response and must have pass
ed out. She awoke to someone holding a pungent substance under her nose.

  “She’s ready,” the man said in Est and stepped away. The whip came down again and she cried out in panic. This was never going to end.

  Voices still jeered and their words began to resolve themselves into clearer images in her mind. She understood those words to be mostly biblical epithets hurled at prostitutes, and after a brief consideration of what she had done over the past few weeks, she concluded that, in the eyes of the aliens, she was guilty as charged. The Lord Admiral had most certainly uncovered her deception.

  Another blow fell.

  She’d acted intentionally, knowing what the consequences of failure were. Torture. Death. Worse. She’d taken the risk, perhaps without completely understanding that risk, perhaps overconfident in her ability to do what she wanted in order to strike back at the invading aliens, but she’d taken the risk and now she’d been caught. Negotiation, manipulation, pleas for mercy, lies, none of it would save her now. She was done for and she knew it. There was no hope.

  She remembered a t-shirt she saw on some greasy haired, scrawny kid with thick glasses and torn jeans in college. The picture on his shirt epitomized the lack of hope. She formed a mental image of it in her mind; a mouse flipping off an onrushing hawk.

  It read, “Last Act of Defiance.”

  Eva knew that defiance was all she had left. She flipped a mental bird at her torturer and concentrated on that image to the exclusion of all else, not crying out in pain, not thinking about the lashes ruining the skin on her back, not dwelling on what would happen after the lashing ended.

  Her next memory was of waking up, lying on cold stone.

  She shivered in the dark and every movement hurt, but her body wanted to contract into a ball to preserve whatever heat it still possessed and she allowed it, crying out in pain with the movement.

  “You’re awake,” a voice said in Est from a distance. She didn’t recognize the speaker, but she understood his words clearly. Still unsure of whether she was actually on the Hrwang home world or on Earth, she decided she must be on Hrwang because she understood the language so well. She must have completed the sleep conditioning she had requested, learning Est the same way the Lord Admiral had learned English, her mind absorbing the foreign language during her two and a half year journey. With some practice, she could become fluent.

  She remembered her mouse and mentally flipped off the speaker.

  The skin on her back suddenly burned as if someone had peeled it away, and in a panic she feared the aliens had flayed her, if only partially. Whispered threats of being flayed alive kept Hrwang soldiers compliant with their commander’s wishes.

  But it was a fatal punishment, and if they had done that to her, she’d be dead.

  “Can you understand me?” the voice asked and Eva ignored it. If the man behind the voice was going to kill her, he should just get it over with. She didn’t want to humor him.

  The cold stone under her sapped the heat from her body and she shivered again, causing every part of her to hurt once more. She couldn’t find a single patch of skin or muscle that didn’t protest the abuse it had received.

  “If you don’t want to talk, I can leave,” the male voice said, and another fear gripped Eva.

  She would be alone if he left.

  The terror she’d experienced when trapped in the Agency safe house returned, her experience of being alone, helpless, and in the dark, and she couldn’t relive that. She remembered the promise she had made to herself at the time that she would kill herself should she find herself in a situation like that again.

  And now that’s exactly where she was.

  Assuming she was on Hrwang, the alien home world, she was probably the only human on the planet. The aliens claimed to be human, just as human as her people, formed just as equally in God’s image as her, but no human would ever inflict as much pain and suffering on another human as the aliens had inflicted on her. No real human would cause another to suffer that much misery. It made the Hrwang less than human.

  Only, she had to confess to herself immediately, she knew her people did cause that much suffering, and more. All the time. It seemed so senseless to her now.

  Alone on an alien world, the proverbial stranger in a strange land, Eva didn’t want to be by herself in her suffering. She didn’t want the owner of the voice in the darkness to leave. She didn’t want to be abandoned.

  “Well, I understand what you’ve been through and that you might not want to talk. Perhaps I’ll stop by tomorrow. If I have time,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say to him to keep him from leaving. Her mouth felt disconnected from her brain. She heard movement and her panic grew and she finally forced words out.

  “I’m cold,” she croaked in Est.

  The man behind the voice left anyway, but sometime later a door clanked open and something soft struck her. The door clanked shut.

  Her frozen body, stiff from cold and pain and abuse, protested as she tried to wrap herself in the wool blanket she’d been given. Finally covered in it, the relief of not having her flesh in direct contact with cold, unforgiving stone comforted her, and she passed out.

  She awoke again, still in the dark. The hurt in her body distracted her from worrying about how much time had passed.

  The distinct possibility of spending the rest of her life in a cold, dark cell frightened her, so she focused instead on the defiant mouse flipping off the hawk and tried to find a comfortable position to huddle inside her blanket.

  Every movement still hurt.

  She decided to catalog her pain and mentally went over every part of her body.

  The greatest extent of suffering belonged to her back, her buttocks, and her legs. The aliens had whipped her everywhere. It reminded her of a story she’d heard in seminary, a religious class she took in high school, about Paul the apostle being lashed thirty-nine times on multiple occasions for teaching the gospel. The man was crazy. She’d kill herself before submitting to another flogging.

  That reminded her again of the promise she had made to herself when she was trapped in the Agency safe house. She might actually have to go through with suicide, although she didn’t think it would be necessary. The Hrwang were going to kill her, and if they didn’t kill her soon, she was going to die of pain anyway. She continued her catalog of hurts.

  One of the most inhuman sides of torture is that it is designed to induce significant pain without causing death. Torturers through the ages have become especially skilled at this, even proud of it, and keeping victims alive during their abuse serves the purposes of diabolical leaders. If the victims die, others can’t be frightened into submission by tales of intense suffering. The threat of torture keeps the masses in line.

  But torturing those already condemned to die only serves the malicious sadism of those ordering the executions. Eva knew she fell into the ranks of such condemned individuals. Espionage of the magnitude she had committed only had one punishment, even in the United States, and there was no way the Lord Admiral could let her live. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, tolerate being deceived by one so close to him, and her proof lay in the treatment she’d received. He’d had her punished, he would allow her to suffer in this cell for a while, then she’d be dragged out and executed. It was the only way this could all end.

  Resigned to her fate, Eva fell in and out of consciousness.

  She eventually became aware of another pain, a new pain.

  She was thirsty.

  She also felt hunger. She was supposed to have been fed broth after awakening from cold sleep, and she dreamed of the hot liquid, a little salty, soothing both her hunger and her thirst and warming her stiff muscles from the inside. Her hunger and thirst grew as she shivered inside her blanket until she could think of nothing else but food and water.

  At first she tormented her
self with memories of good meals, feasts, but the memories became bittersweet and she tried to push them aside. She tried to get into the heads of her captors and wondered if the Hrwang were going to execute her by leaving her to die in her cell from hunger, thirst, and exposure.

  But someone had given her a blanket.

  The words of the voice, “I’ll stop by tomorrow,” gave her the hope that her captors perhaps intended to keep her alive at least one more day, which meant that eventually they had to give her water and maybe even food. That hope fueled her focus, and she could think of nothing else for an interminable period of time.

  At the point of peak despair, when she thought she couldn’t live for another minute without something to eat or drink, when she thought she’d go insane from her body’s craving, the door clanked.

  Metallic objects slid on the floor and the door clanked again, but not as loud as it had when she’d received the blanket. It sounded almost as if there was a tiny door in the main one. Perhaps they used it to push food through. Desperate in her hope, she left the warmth of her blanket, tapping her hand carefully forward on the ground in the direction of the sounds she’d heard, and she touched a bowl.

  It contained liquid.

  She drank it down all at once, some of the water spilling on the sides of her mouth and dribbling down her cheek. It wasn’t warm broth, but that didn’t matter. It was water and when the bowl was empty, Eva wanted more.

  She felt around and found a second bowl. It contained a clay-like substance that smelled like Hrwang spices. She took a bite of it, it tasted terrible, but it seemed edible. She devoured all of it and her stomach protested, her throat burned, her mouth gagged, and she threw up.

  The vomit threatened to choke her, but she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t prevent the heaving until her stomach had emptied itself not only of the food, but also of the precious water she’d drank. She cried, backing away from the stench of bile and spice, and crawled back into her blanket. She cried at the lost water, at her lost life, at the lost cause she was a part of. She’d failed, and not only would she suffer for it, but all of Earth would suffer because of her.

  She was utterly lost and she wept in despair.

 

  A light blinded Eva and she shielded her eyes with her arm.

  “Use the pit next time,” a harsh voice commanded, and she heard water flowing onto stone. She couldn’t tell who or how many people were in her cell, and she didn’t know when they had come in. She hadn’t even heard the heavy metal door opening.

  But she felt cold water splashing on her and she shrank from it. The light came off her eyes.

  “There. In the corner.”

  More water, more splashing, and she wanted to rush the guard or guards, wanted to steal the light, drink the water, and she didn’t care if she were killed in the attempt.

  But her body betrayed her. It wouldn’t move out from under her blanket.

  The door closed noisily, the light faded quickly, and Eva’s body told her she had to drink. She crept out from under her blanket, her muscles screaming in protest, and felt for puddles, part of her hoping her vomit had been cleaned up properly, part of her not caring. She felt a puddle and lapped it up like a dog. She felt around more and found one of her bowls. Water had splashed into it and she drank that also. Her food bowl was upside down.

  Temporarily having had enough to drink, still on her hands and knees on the wet stone, she made her way back to her blanket and crawled into it. She shivered and cried, held the slightly damp wool around her cold body, and found herself rocking back and forth. The skin on her back screamed suddenly at her and she stopped moving, stopped allowing the wool to rub on its tender surface, and she tried to lay still.

  If the Lord Admiral didn’t have her executed soon, she was going to rip her blanket into strips, even if she had to use her teeth to tear into it, and make a rope to hang herself with.

  Having a plan made her feel better and she fell asleep.

  2