Free Star Wars - Gathering Shadows - The Origin of the Black Curs - Unpublished by Kathy Burdette

For the first time in years, Harkness couldn’t stand the silence.
    He had two options: he could lie with his good eye open and think, or he could lie with his good eye shut and think. It didn’t matter either way, because the cell was pitch black and the only indication that he wasn’t having a strange dream was the smell of something dead or dying in the same room.
    Maybe it was him. All during the interrogation, Harkness had kept his focus away from the pain and the questions, and where he had put his focus he could not remember, but he wasn’t required to do it anymore. It hurt to breathe; it hurt to be wearing clothes; it hurt to swallow. The nicest thing the Imperials had done for him was not to put his boots back on his stinging feet.
    Moreover, there was a humming sound in his head. It could have been something to do with where he had placed his focus, or it could have been an after-effect of the drugs. Which brought to mind the image of the round, black interrogator droid that had administered them. Which, in turn, had left him with a vision of sickly colors, distorted sounds, and a sensation similar to that of having needles in his brain and his eyes and the whole inside of his head. That thought, coupled with the humming sound, sent him into a near panic, and he decided to drown both elements out entirely.
    “Hey!” he said. His voice was hoarse and thick, but it echoed and that made him feel better. At least he wasn’t floating in some infinite vacuum. “Hey, yeah. This is great. Way to be, Harkness.”
    He thought about all the stories he had heard about prisoners who had been locked up alone for decades and gone insane. He had expected that any time in solitary confinement would be paradise, but now he could see himself in two years, drooling, talking to himself all the time. People would look at him funny and whisper about him. On the other hand, wasn’t that their normal practice anyway? Harkness decided he would probably be fine as long as he never answered himself.
    “Well,” he said. “Maybe it could be worse.”
    “I doubt it.”
    Harkness froze. He had been answered by a female voice a short distance away.
    “Hello?” he said tentatively.
    “Yeah?” said the woman. Her voice was raw, and its thick, nasal quality suggested that she had a broken nose; but her tone was steady. The sound of a person in the comfortable situation of things not being able to become worse.
    “Who’s there?” he asked.
    She slurred her words together, and It took a moment for Harkness to extrapolate what she had actually said: “Master Sergeant Jai Raventhorn, Alliance Infiltrators.”
    Harkness absorbed that. “I thought High Command dissolved the Infiltrators,” he said.
    “Rub it in, why don’t you,” said the woman.
    “Hah!” said Harkness. It wasn’t a real laugh, but it was the only positive response he could come up with. Raventhorn’s voice carried the depth of the numbness, the pain, the humiliation, and the relief that was in Harkness right then, and he dismissed the automatic assumption that she was some COMPNOR agent planted in the cell to get him to talk casually.
    It also sounded as though she were shivering, as Harkness was. Most likely she had been done exactly the same way he had, and that made him furious. But he didn’t want to tell her that because she might think he was being patronizing.
    “So what do you do now instead, Sergeant Raventhorn?” he asked.
    “Who wants to know?”
    “Harkness.”
    “Harkness what?”
    It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t recall his first name. If he had one at all.
    “Harkness what?” Jai asked again.
    “I…think it’s just Harkness,” he said. More enthusiastically, he added, “I’m a mercenary.”
    “A merc. Really. I don’t think that’s what I am.”
    “Try to remember. We’re just experiencing the after-effects of the mind-probe.”
    This was just a guess on Harkness’ part. But it made him feel better, and Jai