Free Broken Crescent by S. Andrew Swann Page A

do anything to you guys. I can cooperate, but I’m sick. I need medical attention.”
    It was probably too much to hope for. They conferred a while, probably deciphering his compound sentences. Then Scarface yielded the floor. The new speaker had a feminine voice and wore a mask with a very human face—though it was a face frozen in the midst of screaming.
    “EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”
    Nate felt a little uneasy about the question. He didn’t want to tell anything about the alien presence in the void. Not only did he have a bad feeling about the thing, @, itself, but he had a gut sense that the folks here might react badly to it.
    “I don’t remember exactly what happened.”
    “EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK.”
    No shit.
    Well, if anything, these guys would be the last ones to accuse him of being nuts. Nate shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything you want—” Nate started coughing. His voice wasn’t up to a speech. The coughs shook his ribs until they ached. When it was over, he wiped his mouth and saw traces of blood. “But you’re killing me right now, holding me in that cesspit.” Nate shook his head. He was feeling a little light-headed and wasn’t exactly sure what he was saying. “I was a bad boy in high school, guys. Caused enough server problems to give me a nice long stretch in the Federal pen—which compares real well with this place, so if you have extradition to the United States please use it—you guys really have no idea what I’m talking about. . . .”
    “CONTINUERESUME TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”
    “Sure,” Nate coughed into his hand again. “I reformed, put on a white hat. MS in Comp Sci and a 60K job running net security. That was the plan. Then this @ guy—whose handle would take too long to explain to computer illiterates—starts threatening to blow Azrael’s cover. A Fed shows up, I book, and fall into this spaceless black that doesn’t have anything in it but me and this alien whatsis. Tells me to choose. One side was the Fed, so I went the other way. My mistake, sorry.”
    Nate broke off with another coughing fit. The more he spoke, the worse it was getting. When he was through trying to hack a lung up his throat, he hyper-ventilated and decided that he would stick to one-sentence answers for the rest of the interview.
    Fortunately, he had a reprieve as the masked contingent conferred over his latest revelation.
    Nate put his head in his hands. The dizziness was getting worse, and he didn’t want to pass out. The fact was, he relished every moment he was out of that hole they were keeping him in. He was actually more afraid of going back to that pit than he was of them killing him.
    Hang on to the slim hope that when they understand what happened to you that they won’t treat you as a foreign trespasser or a spy. It’s not your fault you’re here.
    “IDENTITYNATURE NAMEAZRAEL TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.” This speaker wore one of the animal masks. It was something like an Egyptian jackal head.
    “It’s the alias I used when I was doing the black-hat hacking, viruses, back doors, that sort of thing . . .” Nate wondered if any of this was translating at all. These guys looked as if their only concept of a server was the guy who brought the wine to your table. It certainly looked as if he’d confused them. Their conferring lasted almost as long as it had the last time.
    “IDENTITYEQUIVALENCE NAMEAZRAEL YOUNATEBLACK.”
    Nate nodded weakly. “Yeah, you got it.” Parsing their questions was almost as fatiguing as answering them.
    “IDENTITYNATURE BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”
    Huh? “I don’t understand.”
    “IDENTITYNATURE BLACKDARKNESSVOID TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH