A Dark Reunion

Posted on Fri Mar 20th, 2015 @ 8:24am by Lieutenant Augustus Deakin & Oleran Telan

Mission: Sins of Lives Past
Location: Unknown

Darkness.

Consciousness slowly dragged him out of the fog, but he became all too aware that he couldn’t see. Darkness remained.

He could smell. A dusty, metallic smell. It smelled like rust.

He could hear a distant trickle of liquid, but something told him it wasn’t water. Perhaps the smell?

The atmosphere was thick. Breathable, but not a standard oxygen-nitrogen mix. A pungent taste sluiced over his tongue with each breath.

This wasn’t a pleasant place and the worst of it was the darkness. Pitch black. Somebody could be standing centimetres from him and he wouldn’t know it.

He was sitting in the darkness, his hands and feet bound to the chair on which he sat. Although he couldn’t feel his restraints, he was bound tight. Every subtle movement was met with intransigent resistance from whatever kept him in the chair.

A moment later, a new sound could be heart. A scraping, like something being dragged across a dirty floor. It was close, but it felt far away. The thick atmosphere muffling the sound. How strange? Gus thought as he listened to the new noise. He was remarkably calm, given his situation.

“Is that you, Telan?” he asked the darkness.

The scraping stopped dead. Then a moment later, it resumed and was followed by a thud as though something with moderate mass had dropped on the rocky floor.

“Ahhhhh,” Gus said, grinning and dragging out the syllable. “So it is you.”

The light assaulted him like a blow to the face and he instinctively recoiled and turned his head. It was a blazing white light directed right into his face, it seared his eyes and shot pain into his brain but he didn’t give Telan the satisfaction of making any noise. It was bad enough that the shock of the light made him turn away.

“You used to be much more civil, Augustus,” Telan said from the darkness near the light. “You used to know your place back in the old days. Do you remember the old days, Augustus?”

“Of course I do,” Gus replied, slowly turned back toward the light while averting his eyes from its blaze.

“I trusted you in the old days, Augustus,” Telan continued, his voice calm, measured but unmistakably malicious. “We worked well as a team, you and I.”

Gus deliberately refused to engage, preferring to sit quietly and work on letting his eyes adjust. Whatever it was that Telan was looking for from this interview, he was determined to not let him get it.

There was a shuffle over the dirty ground; Telan moved a little closer. Gus tried to catch him in his periphery, but so far failed. “But it was all a lie, wasn’t it?” Telan spat, the bitter emotions breaking through the attempted calm facade. “You were nothing but a Federation spy!”

Still Gus refused to engage. The Tellarite clearly wanted a confession as part of whatever sick fantasy he was playing out. But Gus maintained a dogged silence, staring off the left of where he could hear Telan sat, searching for a glimpse of his captor.

The blow came fast and brutal from his right, striking the side of his jaw and sending him reeling off to the left, his restraints keeping him from falling to the dirt. His head rang, his jaw pulsed with pain and was likely broken. He tasted blood and spat out at least two teeth.

Someone grabbed his hair and sat him up straight again, forcing him to face the light. He coughed and breathed heavily, but still refused to say anything.

“Admit it!” Telan screeched now. “You were spying for the Federation!”

Although it sent searing pain through him, Gus responded by spitting blood in the direction of Telan’s voice. He smiled for a half a second before a second blow, just as savage as the first, landed on the right side of his face again. As it connected, he heard bone crack and a blinding pain echoed through every fibre of his being.

“Again!” Telan was shouting.

A third blow was struck.

“Again!”

A fourth.

“Make him feel it!”

A fifth.

The final blow sent him tumbling, still bound to the chair, onto the grainy ground. His head impacting hard on the rock.

“Fix him up,” he heard Telan say, though it sounded like he was wearing ear muffs. “We’re just getting started.”

Telan’s gleeful cheers seemed far away and slipped further and further into mute silence. The world spun, around and around until finally he descended into unconsciousness once again.