Illusions and Realities part 4 - another chapter

[peladonww]

All characters belong to whosoever the law says they, do where that is not me I'm content, For fun only.

Chapter 11

“Why? The word was softly said but Avon’s tone left no room for any denial.

For a moment there was near silence, the only sound the creak of boots or belt as the guard shifted position as if preparing for some sudden violence. But the questioner made no move and the prisoner seemed to relax as though some anticipated point had been arrived at with somewhat less trauma and difficulty than had been expected.

“Ahh.” Carnell smiled slightly “Which particular ‘why’ did you have in mind? Why now? Why this?”

“Why not simply kill me?” Avon’s voice took on a harsh note, “I doubt that my trial and execution would have been as simple as before the war, but if I had died on Terminal then who would have known? Surely Servalan didn’t believe that the others would have sought any vengeance for my death, nor would she care if they had. So why keep me alive?”

Carnell leaned forward to clasp his hands lightly on the table between them.

“Oh that ‘why’ is simple enough to answer, necessity and the war, or rather necessity arising from the war. You had something Servalan needed very badly, and she is quite capable of suborning an immediate desire for vengeance, which I will not deny that she had, for a long term gain.”

“That ‘something’ being the Liberator.” Avon responded.

Carnell smiled again.

“Of course.” He sat back and met Avon’s eyes with a look that implied some shared understanding. “She would settle for some of its technology if she had to, but capturing the ship itself was always her preferred option. The benefits would have been so much more immediate and certain, and with her enemies so close on her heels time was a major factor.”

His eyes narrowed and his expression took on a slightly wry tinge.

“At Terminal she had hoped to persuade you to give her the ship in return for Blake and your own life, and she was so sure that you would do it that she had no alternative plan prepared. So when you thwarted her and sent the ship away it became necessary to …... improvise.”

“Improvise?” Avon’s brows rose, “This all seems to be rather elaborate for an improvisation.”

The prisoner tilted his head to one side as if considering the matter before nodding.

“I imagine that it does, but I can assure you that none of this was ever a part of the plan that took you to Terminal, and in some ways it was the lack of preparation of an alternative that forced the complexities.”

He shrugged.

“In the days immediately after your capture she hoped that the ship would return and that the others could be persuaded to trade it for you; and Blake of course.”

Avon’s lips twisted in something close to a smile.

“Really, I cannot imagine why.”

Carnell shrugged again.

“Well she does not know that much about them,” his voice was gently mocking, “even less than she knew about you, as I realised somewhat late, and to my cost. But she felt that Tarrant, at least, would be inspired by some noble desire to save a comrade.”

Avon’s half smile faded.

“Not even Tarrant is that stupid.” He said softly.

The other man inclined his head in agreement.

“I’d assume not, otherwise how would he have survived two years under your… command?

Avon’s expression took on a fixed and carefully neutral quality.

“Like Servalan I have more patience than I am generally given credit for, and Tarrant was not under my command. The Liberator is mine but I am not its commander in any military sense. Tarrant earned his right to stay by his skills and I agreed to accept that skill in return for the ships protection, but nothing more than that. A simple business arrangement; so why should Servalan assume it to be anything else?”

Carnell noted Avon’s claim of the ship and denial of command with interest but he let it lie unchallenged.

“I really could not say, but what ever her reasons she clearly expected that an opportunity to trade you for the ship would soon arise, and that she would be successful in doing so.” He smiled slightly, “Though I doubt any of you would have survived for very long after her leaving with it.”

Carnell, recalling some of his discussions with Madame President in the first days after Avon’s capture, suddenly wondered if that was true; but, looking at the carefully blank expression of the man the other side of the table he decided that this was not the time to mention that and so he continued.

“However you did not behave as she had expected you would do when faced with our little illusion of Blake at Terminal. When you sent the ship away she was astonished and outraged in equal measure, but she hung on to the belief that the others would come back for you in the end, if only because they needed your skills. I think she was very surprised when they did not.”

Avon leaned back and folded his arms.

“You were not I assume.”

“No. It soon became clear to me that other factors were in play, not least some pre planned agenda of your own. I had seen your original files, or rather the little you had not managed to destroy, and the information she had collected on you since, not much but a little, and I had already concluded that you were not just the clever and amoral crook her descriptions of you implied. But that your motivations were more complex and sophisticated. I do wish I had understood how far from the reality her descriptions of you were somewhat earlier in the game, and perhaps I should have done so, but in my defence I must say that Servalan can be very persuasive, after all lying is one of her stock skills, and there really was so little recent information on any of you to judge by. But by that point I was able come to some impartial conclusions, about you at least, I was sure that you would have taken precautions to prevent them returning for you immediately, should the need arise, before you left the ship.”

He gave another depreciating smile.

“As I have already told you time was not on our side and we could not wait to see how long those precautions would inhibit their return. Nor could we know where any action you had initiated would take them in the interim.”

Carnell let his smile widen.

“Servalan may or may not have come to the same conclusion, she did not share her view on that with us, but as the days passed and the ship did not return she must have suspected. Then we came across the transmission that suggested the ship was in trouble, whilst Servalan was not prepared to believe that the ship was damaged beyond repair she was persuaded that waiting for it to return was too risky a course of action under the circumstances.”

“Really?”

The tone of Avon’s voice was harsh but his expression remained blank, and Carnell read that as a warning not to probe any further about Terminal and his motivation for going there; deciding to heed it he inclined his head in agreement.

“Yes, and it was easier than might have been expected, suggesting that there were things she did not tell us.”

He was silent for a moment then he leaned back and looked at Avon with a steady, serious look.

“The Federation is facing ruin, at least in Servalan’s eyes, but I think you are already aware of that. Besides, as you now know, matters at Terminal were not completely under her control, a situation she found…. distasteful. But she had little choice when she was reluctant to take you back into Federation space and risk you being taken by a competing faction. She has enemies, more than ever before and far more than you may realise.”

Avon met Carnell’s look, still expressionless but obviously considering the statements just made, finally he nodded.

“Yes, I imagine she would have. So she accepted that she was unlikely to get Liberator delivered to her in an acceptable timeframe, but that does not explain her subsequent actions. Why not interrogate me in the usual manner?”

Carnell hesitated for a moment knowing the danger that lied buried within the answer to that question. For a moment his mind drifted back to the long hours he had spent pouring over this man’s records, looking, with increasing exasperation, for some clue as to what his opponent had been doing and thinking in the period since the end of the war with the aliens. He had started the searching for the obvious reason, the need to find some hook on which to hang their threadbare tales and some indication of the difficulties they would face in persuading him of their reality, but the more he had trawled through Servalan’s meagre database the greater his desire to know what the other man had been doing and thinking had become. What little he knew of his adversary suggested that he was not one to drift, and yet that seemed to be what he had done. Carnell had soon come to the conclusion that there had been more to it than that, that Avon was actively engaged in something during that time, but there had never been enough evidence to suggest what that something might be, much less to make any use of it. It had left him with many questions that he had never succeeded in answering. How much had Avon known of Servalan’s difficulties? Had be been the cause of some of them? Why was she so sure he would tell them nothing?

That last was one of the most intriguing questions, not just because she had refused to discuss it despite the stakes involved, but because she had shown a strange, ambivalent, attitude towards the subject of those discussions, an almost superstitious belief in his endurance and ability. Yet they had been unable to find the rational for it and that had set him wondering how much she had hidden from them and why. That thought resurfaced as he watched the man on the other side of the table and remembered those conversations with Servalan before they left Terminal, before she accepted that Liberator was not going to return in time. Her exasperation had been clear.

“There is no sign of where they are gone, not a single sighting since they arrived here. Yes the ship may be damaged but it is not so easy to destroy. No, Avon is behind it, I’m sure of it.”

“Then add it to your list of questions Ma’am. Once he cracks you will have time enough to answer them all, if he is hiding the ship from you then he is hiding it from everyone else too.”

She had flicked an impatient hand and turned to stare at the security images, to the sight of a man raving at the terror and pain pumped into his blood by a white masked bystander as a federation interrogator recited a list of prepared questions. Servalan was silent for a moment as she watched the sight with a tight and brooding expression, then she slowly shook her head as if coming to a decision and turned back to face him.

“No. He will not speak Carnell, and I’ll not lose him and to a fruitless and protracted interrogation. But I doubt there are many of that ship’s secrets that he hasn’t mastered to some degree and so you will find another way to prise it from his head, or persuade him to co-operate, if you value your life. Fail me again and you and your employers will pay dearly for it.”

Yes he would like to know why Servalan believed that the interrogators would fail, even before they had really started, very much indeed!

But Avon’s steady gaze held a hint of threat, making it clear that this was no time for such distractions and so he pushed the wondering and the memory aside, shrugged and answered.

“She did. We did our best to restrain her, and I think she was reluctant to do it, but in many ways she had no choice. So you were interrogated on Terminal, you do not remember it because we blocked that memory when we began to prepare the Xenon timeline, but it happened.”

His look took on a speculative edge as they verged again towards those things he had personally wondered about for some time.

“She got little or nothing out of it, which is why we had to find another way. You seemed to have been remarkable resistant to standard techniques, one might even say you seemed to be prepared against them. That only left moré… extreme measures. However Servalan ruled most of them out. Killing you or damaging your mind or memory would not have served her purposes and she seemed most reluctant to take the risk. I must confess to being intrigued by both.

“Both?”

Carnell hesitated for a moment, maybe he might find the seed of an answer if he went about it carefully, or just confirm that there was something to be found? He chose his words carefully.

“Yes, both your resistance and her acceptance that you would die before you gave her what she wanted. It was almost as if she had prior knowledge that the interrogators would fail and was already part way resigned to it. Yet I cannot see why she should have been so.” He smiled ruefully, “But then I suppose it is too much to assume that you will be willing to satisfy my curiosity?”

Avon’s mouth thinned as if some unpleasant memory had surfaced but the expression quickly vanished and his voice was steady enough.

“It is.”

Carnell felt his instinct quicken, so there was something to be discovered! But seeing that stony look he knew that he would not find it just yet, still patience was part of his craft and he doubted this would be the last time they would meet. He smiled and shrugged slightly.

“Ah well, I expected nothing else but it would have professionally negligent of me not have asked.”

Avon ignored that comment and returned to his initial question.

“So, she tried and failed but that does not explain why she did not kill me then. Why keep me alive. A claim that she had me would have been as effective in her pursuit of the others as actually having me, and no doubt she could fabricate my voice in the same way she managed Blake’s. So, why keep me alive, why the elaborate charade?”

Carnell gave the man opposite one of the most charming of his battery of smiles.

“I will confess that she seemed strangely reluctant to do so, and that she had a flatteringly high estimation of your ability. “

The smile dies in the face of Avon’s lack of response and he shifted to brisk professionalism.

“Servalan is not the most confiding of individuals, and I have already downgraded my assessment of the percentage of truth in the information she provided to us during this matter. However I have also observed that she gives away most when she tries to be enigmatic, on that basis I would assume that it probably has something to do with a place called Kairos.”

***

In her quarters on the base Soolin lay on her bunk and waited with growing unease. She wasn’t at all sure what she was waiting for, just….something.

She had to admit that she was piqued. She had expected Avon to show more interest in her once he knew the truth of these last months and the fact that he had not had both worried and annoyed her. She had spent more than two Earth years as part of his world, at least in his experience, and the last two months of that time they had been in the closest quarters possible. Yet when he had met her on the flight deck of the Liberator it was as if he hadn’t seen her at all.

Blake had paraded her; there was no other word for it, as proof of the reality and illusions of Gauda Prime during the hours that Avon had spent on the flight deck with the others. It was clear that Blake, as much as anyone else, was not convinced that Avon had truly accepted what had happened and his eyes had constantly flicked between the two of them. But only the hint of a frown had betrayed his uncertainty and confusion at the outcome.

Her appearance had neither angered Avon nor intrigued him and she had shared what she perceived to be Blake’s growing concern. They had spent weeks being pursued through a freezing forest, dependant upon each other to survive, and yet in their first meeting after he had discovered the full truth he shown something close to disinterest in her. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad or angry.

As it was she had reverted to her matrix role, matching his sangfroid and chilly dignity with her own casual indifference, all the time aware of the eyes of Blake and the others watching her closely. No denying it had been an uncomfortable period, and yet it could have been so much worse.

The interactions between the others had provided some distraction from her discomfort, for they seemed as nonplussed as she by Avon’s conduct. What they had expected him to do once he had left the sanctuary of his quarters to join them on the flight deck she could not be certain but she doubted that his calm absorption in something at his console had been their expectation. The sudden air of tension as he had descended the steps had betrayed their anxiety, the silence as he crossed to what must have been his flight station an eloquent testimony to their uncertainty. Yet the whole event had been an anticlimax, for despite the mix of pre war and post war crew members Avon had behaved as if nothing had happened. When eventually he spoke to them it was a barrage of questions about the status of the ship, the proximity or otherwise of Servalan’s forces and the identity of those on the ground in the captured base. If he had been surprised by the scale and range of the personnel involved in finding him he had not shown it. The only crack in his composure had been his momentary stillness when Jenna had mentioned Grant, but even that had passed with a calm and ironic, ‘yes I suppose he would be’ and a slight and enigmatic smile. After the first ten minutes the others seemed to slip back into old patterns of behaviour and Avon responded in, as far as she could tell, the same manner. Almost as if he had never been away. Almost.

The only real constraint appeared to be between him and Blake and even that seemed to be rather one sided. Blake had carefully assumed nothing, asking Avon if he intended to keep her on board, deferring to his right to decide, something that had drawn an amused look from Vila and Jenna, and one of approval from Cally. But Avon had shown no more interest in Blake’s careful tact than he had in her presence. In fact he had shown little interest in anything at all, other than the answers to his questions and whatever he was doing at his station. It was only after they had brought her back here, to her quarters on the base, which it occurred to her that the probability was that he was more concerned about assuring himself of the reality of the ship than the people who inhabited it. Understandable, if a little a chilling; and she reprimanded herself for not thinking of it before, telling herself that it was not a mistake that Carnell or Jocasta would have made.

Carnell and Jocasta. Soolin put her hands behind her head and let her mind wander. What was happening to them now? No doubt they were confined as she was, and with the number of people now on this base the scanners would be fully manned and so there would be no point in escaping even if she could manage it. So where did they go from here? Where did the rebels go come to that? They had the base secured, but could they risk remaining here with Servalan likely to return? Perhaps they might take up Carnell’s idea for Gauda Prime, hide their identities and pretend to be Federation sympathisers while co-ordinating the growing outer world alliances from its shelter. What had been implausible in the pacified world of their expansionist Federation illusion might even work in the more turbulent world of reality. But where would that leave them? Would Blake and his comrades send them home, could they even tell him where their home was? Or where they all bound for some dreary prison complex somewhere?

How would Carnell fare there, or any of the Federation prisoners?

All thoughts of the possible future fled as the door slid open and man she had seen only in passing entered. He was tall and broad but there was nothing threatening about him, not in the way that there could be about Blake; and Avon too come to that. However as she rose to face him something warned her that he should not be underestimated. His eyes maybe, meeting her own with the same calm disinterest that Avon would often show, or the confidence of his bearing, a sense of being at ease with himself and certain of his ability to deal with life.

“We haven’t really met,” his voice had a warm and slightly lilting timbre, “my name is Illyan.”

Soolin sat up and smiled slightly at him.

“It means nothing to me but I assume that you are one of Blake’s people, or Grant’s. So what do you want with me?”

Swinging her feet to the floor she sat on edge of the bunk and looked up at him. He gave her a lopsided smile, suddenly reminding her of Chalco.

“Both and neither, but it is of no consequence. As for what I want with you, well what you might expect, I want information.”

She shrugged.

“I think I’ve told all that I know several times over. Ask my interrogators I don’t think there is much else that I can tell you.”

He crossed the room and took the chair opposite her and met her bland look with a widening smile.

“Please don’t be disingenuous, it’s a waste of both our time; you have merely answered the questions that were put to you - not at all the same thing.”

That caused her a small shock of surprise and she pushed her estimate of the man opposite, and her need for caution, up several notches. She sighed and smiled at him.

“Then ask me some new questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them.”

His eyes narrowed slightly for a brief moment and then he returned her smile with one somewhat wider and more relaxed than she suspected hers had been.

“Very well. When they brought you to Gauda Prime how were you briefed?”

Soolin felt another tingle of shock, somehow unprepared for his casual acceptance of her role and the premeditated nature of it. Unsure quite how to respond she played for time.

“Briefed? In what way do you mean?”

His smile didn’t waver.

“What you might assume I mean. You are clearly a professional and you were brought here to play a given role for a specific purpose. I doubt that purpose was entirely the one Servalan supposed however, so how did your employers brief you?”

“I’m still not sure what you are asking me?”

Illyan looked at her for a long moment, a calmly considering expression in his eyes as if recognising her tactics but not resenting them. For a moment she was again reminded of Blake, and yet of Avon too, and her anxiety increased.

His smiled widened again.

“Very well. Let us break the question down into parts easy for you to understand. Let us start with who you are, or rather what you are. What is your profession?”

Soolin felt a sinking in her stomach knowing that in the current situation the truth was her only option, but remained a very dangerous one. She drew a deep breath and straightened her shoulders as she met his gaze steadily.

“I’m not a gun fighter if that’s what you are asking.”

“It’s not, as I am sure you are aware, but you are good with a gun, I would imagine that was an essential qualification. So I ask you again, what is your profession?”

Recognising implacability at the back of his mild expression, and her own defeat too, she shrugged and answered as close to truthfully as she felt she could risk.

“I’m a psychological analyst, and yes being good with a gun was important.”

He sat back into the chair a little further.

“So you are what the Federation would call a psychostrategist?”

“No, though both Carnell and Jocasta are. My background is more about understanding motivations and defusing them than manipulation, my speciality is in alienated groups.”

That brought a slight frown to his face.

They considered Avon to be alienated?”

“Wouldn’t you? He experiences the same alimentation as all people with high intelligence and low levels of externalisation.”

The frown dissolved.

“Ah, I see. Something your society knows a lot about and has good reason to fear.”

It was a statement of fact not a suggestion and Soolin felt another surge of shock, wondering just how much this man knew about her and the others. More than Blake it would seem.

“My society?” she countered.

“Yes. I should perhaps admit to you, in the interest of saving us both fruitless evasions, that I know quite a lot about it, and that my knowledge has been recently added to by the agent they put aboard the Liberator with the intention of stealing it.”

“Stealing the Liberator! I know nothing about that!” The shock, and a feeling close to panic, shook her out of her calm. “I was brought here strictly for the purpose of being Avon’s comrade and companion, to assist in the building of the illusions and to provide a bridge back to reality for him.”

The man called Illyan smiled again.

“Yes I thought that was probably the case. In fact I doubt that anyone here knew anything about the person on the Liberator. So, your role was to be his friend.” His tone hardened, “and no doubts reinforcement for those behaviours they wanted to develop, and a reminder of his past mistakes and guilt when needed. But what was the objective?”

For a moment Soolin stared at him almost blindly for a moment before she sighed and shrugged again...

“I’m not sure that I know.”

Weariness infused her voice and posture.

“I’m no longer sure how much of what I was told was true, and I’m certain I was never told the sum of it. But then I’m not sure that the sum of what it became was ever what was intended. From the little that Carnell told me about the start of the charade it was never intended to go to these lengths. Either to last as long as it did or to become of elaborates. My impression was that it was driven to unexpected lengths by Servalan's behaviour and Avon's residence. So I don’t know just how much they lied to me, or mislead me, call it what you will. But I can promise you that if I had known where it was heading I would never have become involved.”

“Then tell me what you did know. What did Servalan want from this, and what did your employers want from it?”

She hesitated for a moment, but he waited silently and in the end she answered. Slowly but with no obvious reluctance...

“Servalan wanted knowledge, and so did we. No, that’s not quite true, not wanted it but needed it. Her, and us too; he knew things that we needed to know.” Her gaze slipped past him and a frown appeared between her brows. “I think that Servalan saw him as her last chance to halt the slide of the Federation into obscurity, to rescue her ruined empire, though she wasn’t admitting it. We needed to keep her from getting what she wanted and to gain his co-operation for ourselves.”

For a moment she stared blindly past him as if reviewing the last year.

“Perhaps it would have been better just to have asked him for help, offered to pay him perhaps, but Carnell didn’t think that he would agree. With the control of the Liberator and Orac he wouldn’t need what we had to offer him, but we might have things that would have tempted him to other action. We didn’t know enough about hi to be sure. Anyway once we had got involved with Servalan then that approach was out of the question. “

Her eyes came back to meet his.

“But it was never meant to happen the way that it did, that was just bad luck. Avon was supposed to escape from his room during a fire and one of our people was help him escape from the base. We had a group in the plantations waiting to pick him and spirit him away, while leaving enough evidence to convince Servalan that he had died. We didn’t want her to come looking for him.”

“No I can imagine that you didn’t. But that brings us back to what Servalan wanted, and what you wanted and why?”

Soolin was silent for a moment before she gave a short and bitter laugh.

“In the end I suppose we wanted the same thing, the same thing that Avon wanted. Survival and security. You see we, our whole society, took a big gamble before the war and we lost.”

Illyan cocked his head to one side and watched her closely.

“What did you gamble?” He asked softly.

Soolin was silent and impassive for a moment then her mouth twisted in a bitter smile.

“A lot, too much; everything we had in fact. If it had worked then we would have been safe and you and I would never have met. But it didn’t work and we lost everything.”

“How?”

Her smile took on an ironic edge.

“You say there was a thief trying to steal the Liberator, so I assume you have spent some time on it?”

Illyan nodded his expression becoming puzzled.

She leant forward and spoke softly.

“Then I expect you have seen the treasure room.”