Chapter 6: Torture doesn’t always work

It was early morning and the Avenger was flying low and slow enough for people to walk the flight deck unaided. The sky was clear and the sun was still close enough to the horizon to cast everything in a light orange. According to Bradford the Commander had been up there since dawn, watching the sunrise or something else that sounded vaguely poetic. According to Bradford he’d been up there for longer than normal, but no one would hold it against him. The Commander often spent days at a time in the situation room, napping between updates in his chair and leaving only to use the bathroom (rarely enough that his bladder had become legendary amongst anyone that worked on the bridge) and taking meals while still staring at the monitors. Everyone thought he deserved a little fresh air every now and again.

Cheng and O’Neill found him standing on the rear observation deck, leaning on the railing and watching the treetops disappear behind them. The twenty years since the aliens had invaded had seen a sharp reduction in the world’s agricultural output and logging operations, and an expansion by the forests across the many abandoned farms and fields. The Amazon was apparently doing very well if Cesar Vargas was to be believed. The Mexican commando had fought ADVENT across Central and South America, so he probably knew what he was talking about. Then again he also claimed to have spotted a cow in a clearing recently, and when was the last time anyone had seen a cow?

“If the maps are right,” he said hearing the hatch slide open and shut, and their footsteps stop a few metres away, “we’re above a lumber plantation right now. All of this should have been chopped down a decade ago, then replanted, then chopped down again. That’s why they’re planted in straight lines. See?” He pointed down towards the trees that did in fact look like they stood in roughly straight lines, “Instead it’s just grown and grown. It probably doesn’t matter, but it feels like it should.” He sighed then raised a hand in a half-bored come forward motion.

Cheng stepped aside and O’Neill pushed their prisoner forward.

***

Li Ming Cheng was fourteen when the aliens invaded. Her father was an upper-middle ranking member of the Communist Party, a popular and hard-working man who had spent time in China’s vast and sometimes over-complicated diplomatic corps. Her mother was also a member, less well-known but still highly respected. She managed a local branch of the party, coordinating with members from the business community and overseeing annual recruitment. By that age Li Ming was taller than both of them, to everyone’s great surprise.

No one knew quite why, but everyone found it endlessly amusing. Her father blamed the four years spent in the United States (where she’d learnt to speak English) and all the rich American diet. Li Ming’s mother pointed out that while her uncle wasn’t significantly taller, his son was. Perhaps the genes just skipped a generation. Li Ming was strong as well. Years playing soccer (as the goalkeeper of course) and rowing (doubles and quads) left her with broad shoulders and thick limbs on what would normally have been a lanky frame. She tried basketball, but to everyone’s surprise was awful at it.

Then the aliens invaded. No one knew at first. There was some sort of attack in Hamburg. An explosion some said. A chemical or biological attack someone said later. Likely culprits were suggested than dismissed. Others claimed responsibility. Terrorist groups and, both bizarrely and unsurprisingly, The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They were all similarly dismissed. Then Edmonton in Canada was attacked. Mumbai. Adelaide. Johannesburg. Seoul. Rio. Singapore. People dying. People disappearing. Her father heard rumours about involvement by the People’s Liberation Army with some sort of joint special operations unit trying to stop those responsible. But no one seemed sure who was responsible, or at least the people who did know kept it to themselves. The Chinese propaganda and censorship machine went into overdrive and Li Ming’s father, forever the diplomat, complained constantly in private about the nation’s increasing isolation.

Eventually, as it always does, the truth became known. Li Ming would never be sure exactly when it happened, or why, but one day everyone seemed to know the culprits were not from earth. Perhaps not even from the same dimension that earth occupied. Fierce beasts, little grey creatures with psychic powers, incredibly powerful machines and weapons from another world or worlds. The air force was practically wiped out not long after everybody found out that humanity was at war. A force fifty thousand strong mobilised to help their neighbours, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, was destroyed before it even crossed the border. Her father heard rumours that the international joint task force that was meant to stop the aliens had failed. Had been destroyed.

A little over nine months after the first attack in Hamburg the central government surrendered to the aliens and the rapidly forming ADVENT Administration. No one was quite sure how many had to die before the simple mathematics of attrition forced the PLA to admit defeat, but it was estimated to be in the millions. Not everyone surrendered, however. Before the war the Party stood as the single largest political organisation in the world, eighty-seven million strong. Those at the very top may have been forced to give in, but far too many had lost a son, a wife, a cousin, a mother, to simply stop fighting.

A month before Beijing surrendered Li Ming’s mother disappeared during an attack on a shopping district. There were a lot of bodies but none of them belonged to her mother, one of two hundred and ninety-three people who simply disappeared during the attack. Well, two hundred and ninety-four. Li Ming’s mother was pregnant. With the relaxing of the One Child Policy, her parents had applied successfully for permission to have a second child. Even with the attacks increasing, even when everyone realised that humanity was at war, they had kept trying for another child. Were overjoyed when the results were positive.

Her father cried all night when her mother disappeared. Then went back to work the next day.

When the leadership in Beijing surrendered Li Ming and her father went into exile.

***

Vargas leaned against the wall on one side of a metal sliding door that led to the security room of their target location, Krause the other, Cheng watched over her shoulder. Behind them the enormous, expansive lobby of the administration’s regional something-or-other headquarters was a mess of broken glass from shattered windows, splintered furniture and pillars pockmarked with bullet holes. The corpses of several black-armoured troopers were scattered about the lobby and just outside the building, a viper was bent backwards over a window frame with its jaw agape, a red-armoured officer lay face down at the bottom of the large fountain decorating the exterior of the entrance, a sectoid was still twitching behind the receptionist’s counter. Navarro and Banerjee were running across the roof. They’d provided fire support through the lobby’s skylight and were now moving towards the opposite side of the building to provide overwatch during exfiltration.

Two deep breaths then Cheng nodded at Vargas. He nodded back, made sure his shotgun was cocked and opened his hand over the door panel. Cheng raised her own hand so it was visible to Krause without the German taking her eyes off the door, used it to count up and gave the ‘go’ signal on five. Vargas mashed the keypad.

The door slip open with a whoosh and suddenly all three of them had charged into the darkened room beyond. One wall was just a mass of screens covered in camera feeds and scrolling information in the senseless alien language hanging above a mass of consoles, providing the only light in the room yet somehow filling every corner. The other wall was occupied by a large door that led to the opposite side of the building to where they entered, flanked by an empty gun rack on one side and another console on the other.

Gun up, sweeping the room, Cheng heard a scream and looked over to where Krause was standing over a woman with straight black hair, pale olive skin and a nice black pantsuit, who’d stumbled onto her ass backtracking away from the three heavily armed intruders. Krause let her gatling gun fall to her side, batted away a weak attempt by the woman to protect her face and hit her once, twice, watched her head fall against the floor, pulled it up by the hair and hit her a third time.

“Shit,” the Commander’s voice rang in their ears, “Menace One we just detected another alarm sound. She must have hit a panic button. They know you’re in there.”

It wasn’t much of a warning, but it was enough. The door to the outside slid open and a trooper and viper charged in. Vargas’ shotgun boomed, cutting off the commando’s curse and throwing the dead viper against the doorframe in a clatter of scales and armour. A burst from Cheng’s gatling gun cut the trooper nearly in two, carving it apart from right armpit to left hip.

They stared at the door, waiting for a third enemy to appear, heard the sounds of another sectoid warbling nearby. It didn’t choose to peak its head around the corner just yet, however. Krause, not wasting time, pulled a photo from one of her many pockets and compared the face in the picture to the battered and bleeding face of the woman she’d just punched out. The German turned the woman’s head left and right, then turned to Cheng and nodded.

“Avenger this is Menace One-One,” Cheng said into her throat mic, “target confirmed and in custody,” Krause had spun the unconscious woman over and was zip-tying her hands behind her back, “proceeding to extraction zone. Over.”

“Understood Menace One. Be aware, there’s still at least one more hostile in the area and we detect enemy reinforcements en route. This is capture or kill mission. If getting her out alive becomes to difficult put a bullet in her head and leave the body.”

“Roger that,” Cheng replied, and hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

Krause picked up the woman and threw her over her shoulder.

***

In a fledgling resistance movement everyone must work. Li Ming, fifteen when she and her father joined the government in exile and stronger than most kids her age by a wide margin, was no different. She ran messages through towns, helped set up defences in mobile camps, tailed ADVENT officials, VIPs and patrols, collected salvage from junkyards, derelict buildings (sometimes hours before demolition) and battlefields, anything that could be useful.

Her father quickly became a powerful personality in what continued to call itself the People’s Liberation Army. He had many friends in the surviving bureaucracies and a talent for making new ones that had and continued to make him a good diplomat. He was good at putting information together and predicting the alien administration’s response to PLA strikes. He quickly endeared himself to the rest of the leadership, particularly General Xing, arguably the man in overall control of the resistance forces, a cunning fighter who understood better than anyone they couldn’t win the kind of wars they were used to fighting. Attrition had failed, especially with so much of the old PLA having surrendered to ADVENT on the orders of the (“traitorous sons of whores”) central government. He was also prone to quoting Mao at awkward moments in order to stop arguments.

When Li Ming turned 16 her father agreed to let her join the fighters. The training was not as thorough as it once would have been, and facilities were limited, but she showed a talent for killing aliens and the early breeds of ADVENT troops. One particularly messy mission saw General Xing himself call her an “artist with a rocket launcher.”

It’s odd to say it, given the desperate situation, but for two years she was content. Not happy, exactly, but content.

That changed six months after her eighteenth birthday when Li Ming was promoted. She was sent to Shanghai to the militant arm of the local resistance cell led by a woman who called herself Fox. Li Ming was young but had time and again shown great tactical aptitude and the ability to get more experienced soldiers to do what she wanted. The Shanghai cell had been gutted by recent raids and most of its fifty remaining fighters were raw and inexperienced. Fox needed skilled squad leaders to keep her fighters alive and Li Ming jumped at the chance to kill aliens in a different city, even if it meant leaving her father behind.

What she found in Shanghai was politics.

***

The woman’s name was Elena Volkova and she had information that the Spokesman needed. The names of several informants, what resistance locations and spies had already been compromised and the schedules of a number of supply shipments that travelled between New York and Boston. She had a mother and a dog. She worked within the ADVENT security apparatus managing the human faces they employed to betray their own. They didn’t know anything else about her and didn’t need to.

She was tied to a chair in one of the recently cleared holds of the Avenger, a stark, spartan room that the Commander had already slated be where a second power generator would be built. It was kept purposely cold and permanently lit. The Commander visited her at the beginning, sipping coffee and offering her a chance to tell them what they wanted to know before things got unpleasant. The woman refused, told him defiantly to go fuck himself, warned what would happen when her employers arrived to get her back, swore she wouldn’t talk. The Commander nodded and left without another word. An hour later Cheng and O’Neill, still wearing bandages on his shoulder and jaw from a stun lancers strike a few weeks back, entered and cut away her expensive pantsuit with their fighting knives.

Then Cheng began to hit her. Over and over again. Simple strikes around her kidneys, hard slaps across the face and breasts, slowly Volkova became bloody, black and blue. O’Neill had brought in a chair and would ask her questions between blows in his quiet, reasonable voice. Demand answers. Occasionally he’d reach forward and slap her, as if to remind her whose side he was on despite his tone, but it was Cheng who did most of the work. They kept it up for a few hours, then went for lunch.

When they came back a few hours later Cheng hit her again. And again. And again. Then she started breaking fingers.

***

What Li Ming discovered in Shanghai was politics. While the other cells she and her father had spent time in had always had a clear chain of command, usually beneath some pre-surrender PLA officer who’d survived the war, the Shanghai group was worryingly democratic. Fox was a good soldier, good at planning operations and better at executing them, but she shared control of the group with a man named Cho.

Cho had been a low ranking member of the Ministry of State, claimed to have been part of the counterintelligence arm of the Ministry in fact. Even though he never quite managed to convince Fox (or Li Ming for that matter) of his credentials he managed to run the group’s intelligence network relatively competently, and he managed to inspire a surprising amount of loyalty from his underlings.

Most of the fighters hated him. He constantly demanded that targets of his choice (often of no strategic or military value) be attacked, usually claiming that the death or destruction incurred would have some intrinsic propaganda value. A pop-music station that played too many ADVENT Burger commercials. A factory that made billboard screens. But because Fox needed his intelligence network in order to strike at real targets she would usually accede to his demands, coming up with some justification to blow up the office where ADVENT issued fishing licenses. Li Ming understood. She didn’t like it, but she understood. What she couldn’t abide by were Cho’s “penal expeditions.”

Every so often Cho would learn the location of a traitor. Someone who’d provided information to the administration, spied on a neighbour, maybe even just called the police when they saw someone skulking around behind their building in the middle of the night. Fox would need to provide an escort to a few of Cho’s cronies as they paid the “traitor” a visit and made an example of them. Li Ming led an escort team once. She saw the mess they made of the poor woman and her family (her fucking children) and refused to lead another. Or participate in any mission that Cho demanded. He was a paranoid, psychotic bastard and she would “not participate in his little revenge fantasies.” Doing his petty dirty work made her feel less like a resistance fighter against a dangerous, otherworldly oppressor and more like plain and simple terrorist. She didn’t like that.

Fox warned her that she was making an enemy of Cho. That she might not be around to protect Li Ming forever. Li Ming didn’t care, and for all that she went through later never regretted the decision.

***

It took a single night to break Volkova. Truthfully everyone involved was surprised she lasted that long. Cheng turned her once pretty face into a bloody, swollen mess, bruised her sides and broke six fingers. Meanwhile O’Neill kept asking her questions. As the night wore on he only became more reasonable, more sympathetic, asking the necessary questions in his quiet Irish brogue but also offering relief. Release. Return. An end to her current suffering. Safety for her mother. Someone to feed her dog. When Cheng broke her fifth finger she just began muttering “I cannot, I cannot,” over and over again. And O’Neill simply replied, “yes you can, of course you can,” as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The end finally came when Cheng produced a pair of pliers from a pouch on her belt and clicked them menacingly in front of Volkova.

“We’ll start with teeth, then move on to fingernails.”

Volkova shuddered and began to cry, big body-racking sobs that lasted for what felt a long time. Then she told them everything they wanted to know.

It took half-hour to get all the information they were likely to get from Volkova and another half-hour for Central to compare the information against what little they already had and confirm it was good. Volkova was cut free, wrapped in a blanket and given a shot of painkillers and led out of the room, empty save for a chair and her blood. Central told them over their radios that the Commander was on the rear observation deck, do that was where they brought her. The Commander told them about the forest below.

“It probably doesn’t matter, but it feels like it should,” Cheng stepped aside and O’Neill pushed their prisoner forward, the Commander looked at the beaten woman seemed sorry about the whole thing.

“I want to go home please,” Elena said and it was the most pitiful sound Cheng had heard in a long time.

“Tygen and Shen are working on some drugs so if there’s a next time you two won’t have to get your hands so dirty,” he was talking to Cheng and O’Neill but staring at the woman, “Have we gotten everything we can from her?”

“Yessir,” Cheng said robotically.

“Alright. Are you sure you still wish to be the one to do it Mr O’Neill?”

“I am sir.”

“When you’re ready then.”

O’Neill nodded and pushed Elena against the railing in a quick but gentle motion. Her eyes went wild with surprise and fear, but Cheng doubted she had a chance to register O’Neill’s big revolver being pushed underneath her chin before he pulled the trigger. The top of her head blew off in a spray of blood that drifted away behind them. Elena’s body went limp and slumped backwards over the railing, O’Neill reached down and lifted her by the knees the rest of the way. All three of them watched her body cartwheel away into the forest canopy.

***

Li Ming awoke tied to a chair in the centre of a small dark cellar that smelled strongly of piss and mould.

“Good morning Miss Cheng,” Cho was leaning beside the door, a cruel glint in his eye and a calm smile on his face, “I trust you slept well?”

Her head felt like it had been split open and her left eye was swollen shut and why the fuck was she tied to a chair? Fuck, she was naked as well and that smell of piss was probably her as well. She looked groggily at Cho, then saw one of his henchman on the other side of the doorway, swore loudly, looked back at Cho.

“Why… What’s happening? Why am I here?”

“Because we need answers Miss Cheng. We need to know why you betrayed the group.”

“Wh-what?”

“Fox was killed last night, during the raid. Another failure.”

“What?”

“Another failure and now our leader is dead.”

Fox was dead. Fuck. Fuck. She’d warned her not to lead the mission last night. Less a raid and more a purposeless attack on a minor radio transmitter, it was nonetheless in one of the most heavily guarded parts of Shanghai. They’d been racking up losses lately, bleeding fighters at an unsustainable rate. Simple attacks on factories and warehouses had been costing more lives than they ever had before. Cho had grown more paranoid and more worried. He’d demanded that they make a statement. Something to show that they couldn’t be stopped, no matter what. He’d pointed out the radio transmitter near the centre of the city and, after threatening to disappear with his all his intelligence sources to find someone new to supply the information to, Fox had belatedly agreed. Morale was low, so she’d decided to lead the ten-member team herself. And now she was dead. Fuck.

“ADVENT was ready for them,” Li Ming realised Cho had continued talking, “cut them off then cut them to pieces. It was almost as if someone had told them about the raid beforehand. And I began to ask myself, who could possibly have told ADVENT about the raid? Who would?” Fuck, “It must be someone who was never as committed to the cause as the rest of us,” fuck, “someone who has shown sympathy for traitors,” fuck, “someone who has not participated in the last few disastrous missions but was involved in their planning,” fuck, “someone like you Miss Cheng.”

Cho smiled even wider, and Li Ming was scared then. She felt small, sitting in that chair, a sensation she’d never felt before and it was not something she ever wanted to feel again. Yet she still managed to force a reply.

Just three words, but for the next two weeks they would become the only thing that kept her sane. A mantra she repeated over and over again.

“I am loyal.”

“No, you’re not,” the smile on Cho’s face slipped slightly, “and you know what I do to the disloyal. But first I want to know why you betrayed your comrades, and believe me I will find out. I’ve been planning this for some time. It may take a while, but you will tell me. They always do. Then we will make an example of you.”

Li Ming had forgotten about Cho’s henchman until he strode up and punched her in the face.

***

Sometime later Shen asked Cheng why they had bothered to shoot Elena Volkova at all. Why not just push her over the side? The fall would have killed her. Cheng told her it was a morbid question. Shen said she needed to know.

“Because we don’t know if the aliens are looking for her, or if they can find her somehow, and we don’t know what kind of information they can get out of a dead brain. We thought it was best not to leave it intact.”

Shen said she’d watched parts of the torture and the execution. Said she threw up when O’Neill pulled the trigger.

“Good, it shows you’re still a little normal.”

Elena Volkova was going to die no matter what. They had nowhere to imprison her once they had information they needed and the local resistance insisted she deserved it. The Commander had suggested drawing straws with Central, O’Neill and Cheng to see who would be the one to pull the trigger. O’Neill had volunteered instead. Insisted he do it, in fact.

***

For two weeks they hurt her. She was beaten first and most regularly. The soles of her feet were hit with bamboo poles and the palms of her hands were branded with firepokers. She spent the first three days tied to the chair, sitting in her own filth, until Cho decided the smell offended him. She was released from the chair and rinsed off with a high pressure hose that left her feeling like someone had taken a belt sander to wherever it touched raw skin. A few days later she was stripped naked and left there shivering in the dark. The next day they replaced the rooms single bulb with a more luminescent one and left it on, alongside a constant stream of death metal for three days. The high-pressure hose made a reappearance and this time it was all bare skin.

But every time they asked her a question she answered with the same three words.

“I am loyal.”

They were a lifeline and she clung to them, repeating them over and over in her head until there was nothing left but those words and what they represented. What she needed to do because of them.

They continued to feed her regularly and decently. Twice a day, bread and stew. Not much, but not starvation rations. They’d also didn’t leave her tied up again after releasing her from the chair. Meanwhile the guards outside her door never stopped chatting. For members of Cho’s intelligence team they certainly had trouble keeping their mouths shut. She learnt much about them, their families, their friends and the fate of the Shanghai group. Apparently most of the fighters had decided that Li Ming’s arrest after Fox’s death was the last straw and most of them had left. Some disappeared into the city, while others had gone to find other resistance cells and continue the fight under saner leadership. Cho, according to his people, didn’t seem to care. Good riddance. He would build a new force in his own image. His remaining people were worried though. What would happen when General Xing found out that the daughter of one of his most trusted advisors had been arrested on, at best, circumstantial evidence and tortured for days? Cho was sure she’d confess before Xing found out, but the guards were increasingly unsure. All Li Ming needed to do was last a little while longer.

“I am loyal.”

Li Ming was no expert in torture but it all felt very amateurish. Less like a professional interrogation and more like someone who’d seen it work in a film. By the tenth day she was positive that none of her captors, Cho included, knew what they were doing. All she needed to do was bide her time and wait for the right opportunity.

It came on the fifteenth day.

She was woken in the night by the telltale sound of an alien plasma grenade going off, less an explosion and more like an enormous match being lit. She heard the guards at her door swear and run off down the hall. She hadn’t thought of the aliens much since her imprisonment, but as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes she realised that if this was the same building they’d been in before her capture (she hadn’t explored the basement levels fully so couldn’t be sure) it meant they’d been in the same building for nearly a month. Far longer than anyone with half a brain knew to stay in the same location.

Everything hurt but Li Ming knew an opportunity when she heard one. She pushed herself gingerly to her bare feet and padded over to the door, leaning heavily against it and listening through the wood. She heard automatic weapons fire, magnetic rifles, alien plasma weapons. She heard footsteps coming back down the corridor outside, she heard keys clinking, she threw herself away from the door and flattened herself against the wall beside the doorframe.

The boy swore when the door swung open and Li Ming wasn’t huddled in view. He entered stupidly, not checking the corners when he entered. Li Ming didn’t recognise him as one of her torturers and she didn’t care. She grabbed the boy around the knees and lifted, he screamed and hit the ground hard flat on his chest. She didn’t give him any chances, put a knee on his back and slammed his face into the concrete floor twice. Content that he could no longer fight back she put a hand on his jaw and a hand on the back of his head and twisted. They really shouldn’t have fed her so well.

His clothes were too small but they’d do. The boots were too small so barefoot would have to do. He’d entered the room with an old AK-47 and a Makarov tucked into his belt. Both weapons felt small in her hands. But it was enough. The sound of the alien assault was louder now. They were being methodical, but Li Ming had been doing this for long enough that she wasn’t concerned about escaping, even as badly injured as she was.

As she set off down the corridor to her freedom she wondered if Cho was dead yet. Perhaps she’d get to meet him on her way out.

***

They left the Commander alone on the balcony and headed towards the barracks. O’Neill still carried the revolver by his side instead of holstering it. He looked edgier than normal, meaner, angrier. Yet when he spoke his voice was still calm and quiet.

“You’re like me aren’t you?”

The Commander had suggested drawing straws with Central, O’Neill and Cheng to see who would be the one to pull the trigger. O’Neill had volunteered instead. Insisted he do it, in fact. When they asked him why he’d replied that “It’s how I learnt to deal with traitors.”

Cheng had looked in his eyes when he’d said it and expected to see Cho. The cruelty and the pride. But instead she’d just seen sadness. It was the same now. His body language may have looked fearsome but his eyes were upset. He didn’t like it, but it was his self-imposed duty.

“I think I am. I think we’ve both been through what we’ve just done ourselves.”

He nodded, “Was it the aliens that did it to you?”

“No. You?”

“Yeah. You seem… better than me though. Not as… whatever I am.”

“Maybe I’m just better at hiding it.”

“No. No. You… you handle this shit better. Better than anyone.”

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes longer, then O’Neill turned to her again, finally holstered his pistol.

“Did you get the guys who did… who did it to you?”

“Yes,” Cheng said, the lazy grin that characterised her face appearing for the first time since the morning before, “Yes I did.”