Free Starfist: Kingdom's Fury by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Page B

broken body. He depressed the button for several seconds, causing the woman to writhe against the restraints in uncontrollable spasms. Dominic de Tomas, Dean of the Collegium, lifted his thumb, and the current abruptly ceased. The woman lay on the table semiconscious, struggling for breath. The interview, as de Tomas called such sessions, had been going on for over an hour, and he was beginning to lose interest since his victim was nearing the end of her endurance.
    "Primitive, but effective," de Tomas remarked to a black-uniformed guard standing nearby at rigid attention. It was not often the Dean of the Collegium himself participated in the sessions, and the guards and technicians were impressed. De Tomas smiled amiably at the woman panting and gasping on the bloodstained rack.
    She had been a minister of the Anabaptist Sect, in fact one of the last of the Anabaptist leaders on Kingdom, thanks to de Tomas's unflagging pursuit of dangerous thinkers. The few remaining Anabaptists had converted to more politically correct sects, but the dying woman on the rack stubbornly refused to recant. That was all the same to Dominic de Tomas because the minister would die no matter what she promised to do under his torture.
    De Tomas walked over and stood looking down at the minister, who was slowly recovering the power of speech. "We have modern and humane methods to make people do what we want," he said. "But in your case I decided to use electroshock because . . . well, it's more painful, and because I have no further use for you, and, to be perfectly honest, because you are impossibly ugly."
    The guards and technicians present chuckled at his banter. They were all loyal members of de Tomas's Special Group, an organization of highly trained and dedicated armed men, rivals in many ways of the Kingdomite Army of the Lord. He had built their strength to well over one thousand members, and had even given them military ranks and titles, as well as the latest weapons. It was they who enabled him to enforce his will as the Dean of the Collegium. They were handpicked men who had completed a rigorous course of indoctrination and training, after which they had sworn a blood oath of total loyalty to de Tomas.
    Unlike de Tomas himself, who believed in nothing, they had been indoctrinated into a military cult based on the twelfth-century Germanic Order of Teutonic Knights. Their icons of military virtue were the German prince of the Cherusci tribe known as Hermann Arminius, who destroyed Quintilius Varus's legions in 9 A.D. in the Teutoburger Wald; and Heinrich I, "the Fowler," who was elected king of the Germans in 919. In fact, the logo of the Collegium, which de Tomas had designed shortly after becoming dean, was a silver goshawk symbolic of Heinrich, wings spread, perched on two golden lightning bolts—representing Arminius's victory over the Romans. De Tomas artfully, but not overtly, encouraged the belief among his followers that he was the reincarnation of Heinrich. Whether his men believed this or not, they did believe that Dominic de Tomas was their leader, for whom they would gladly sacrifice their own lives. They also believed that anyone who opposed the work of the Collegium, and especially those brought before it for heresy, were enemies of the state who deserved death, and were unfailingly rewarded with it.
    The fact that Dominic de Tomas himself was not of Teutonic origin had no bearing on his status as the leader of the Special Group, or what amounted to chief priest of the order.
    De Tomas beckoned to the technician in charge of the interrogation lab, a stormleader, the equivalent of a lieutenant in the Army of the Lord. "I've had my amusement for today," he said. "Into the furnace with her . . . slowly and feet first.
    Revive the bitch periodically. Put it all on a vid, so I can watch later. You know the procedure." He shrugged. "I have an important meeting to attend now." He gestured at a Shooter, one of four handpicked