shiiki
in
shiikifics
FIC: Five Days, Chapter 1
Title: Five Days
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Samm, Kira Walker, various others, Gen
Fandom: Partials
Summary: Alone in enemy territory with only five days to live, Samm makes an unexpected ally and reaches some stunning conclusions about the fate of their two species. Alternate PoV of Part II of Partials.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: Capture
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, multiple others
Word Count: 3,498
Chapter Summary: After a failed ambush, Samm awakens, only to find that he is alone, in captivity, and has been given only five more days to live.
Day 0
The darkness was enclosing him, as thick and oppressive as the coal mines he’d once been in. Samm’s lungs choked up as his mind struggled towards awareness. He was dimly aware of being pinned in place. There was … an explosion, he thought. It must be the debris, heavy concrete from the fallen structures holding him in place.
There was a faint mumble of voices, sounding close by yet soft and distorted, as though his ears were full of cotton wool. He couldn’t make out individual words or voices. Samm breathed in deeply but no data arrived. Where was everyone else? He reached out blindly and his armed, half-pinned by something solid, brushed against something warm and soft.
His eyes felt weighed down by the same heaviness across his entire body. It was closing back in, dragging him away from consciousness. Samm barely managed to lift one eyelid. He fixed on a pair of bright brown eyes before the world caved back in on him, and he sank into the darkness.
*
He was in the mines again, shovel in hand. Beams of light from hundreds of headlamps attacked the pitch black of the tunnels, but it always seemed to Samm that they never managed to push back the pervasive blackness.
Here in the mines, darkness had a life of its own. He wasn’t scared of it exactly. There was just an uncomfortable constriction he felt every time he descended, like a noose hovering close to his neck that threatened to tighten the deeper he went.
Samm hated it. The thought repeated in his head many times every shift, reverberating along with his discomfort on the link. It intensified with the concurrent feelings of the other Partials on his mining team. They didn’t share his aversion of the environment, but they all harboured their own versions of hatred, either for the work, its arbitrary assignment, or their treatment by the humans who had put them here. One of his team was an officer model, and he spewed a potent mix of anger and humiliation onto the link. Their shared sense felt like a ticking time bomb these days, helplessness and resentment building up into an incendiary combination that seeped through their breaths in the close confines of a mining tunnel. More and more, Samm felt like the air was heavy with its fuel, ready to explode.
Their shift ended at last and they shuffled into the mine elevator, emerging from the depths of the mountains into the cool Wyoming night. The suffocating hold on Samm slowly dissipated …
*
He clawed himself out of dreams of coal mines and tried to focus on the present. The heaviness was lifting, but Samm’s limbs remained pinned and a smoky veil seemed to hang over his mind. He forced his eyes open to take in his surroundings: he was in the centre of a small chamber, bound to a cold metal structure. There was a solitary feel to the room, but he wasn’t alone. Fanning out in a circle by the walls were uniformed guards, at least ten of them, each one heavily armed and in a defensive stance.
Is this B Company headquarters?
No, something was off with this assessment. Too many guards, several of whom did not appear to fit the soldier models. This last ruled out the likelihood that he’d been captured by any of the Partial factions, in fact, but Samm’s mind resisted drawing the alternative conclusion. The implications were unthinkable.
He shifted his attention instead to the layout of the room. To his left, five chairs behind a long table; to his right, more chairs laid out in neat rows facing the five at the front. The door was on the opposite side of the chamber. It opened and four people were marched in by more armed guards, who took their places around the rim of the room once their chargers were seated. Samm eyed the four newcomers carefully. These did correspond vaguely with the soldier Partial models - three of them did, at least. The two males appeared to be infantrymen like him. One of the females fit the pilot moulds, small and compact. The last female was unplaceable: tall and wiry, brown-skinned with long, dark hair. She glanced at Samm, but quickly averted her gaze when she saw that he was scrutinising them.
He couldn’t fathom why they were under guard along with him, though clearly they were being treated as less of an enemy. They were unchained, for one-Samm reassessed his own restraints and almost scoffed at the ludicrous amount of rope, straps, and even chains that had been wound around his body, locking him to his metal rig. He breathed in deeply, trying to take in their link data, but it was completely silent.
Another mystery: it wasn’t just that everyone in the room was keeping their emotions carefully blank, which would have been odd enough in itself. There was a hollow emptiness to his link sense that he associated with being alone. If he hadn’t opened his eyes, he wouldn’t have known the others were in the room with him. For a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating the whole thing.
If so, it was an extremely detailed hallucination. Samm ran through other explanations in his head, each one wilder than the last: an invisible sort of gas mask, advanced biological shielding, interference with his own senses. Nothing really plausible suggested itself.
The door opened again and another small group entered, unguarded this time. Five of them took seats at the table; the others filed towards the back of the room, with the exception of one female, a leggy blonde, who seated herself next to the unplaceable dark-haired girl and began whispering to her.
There were too many variations, too many age ranges. He hadn’t seen one in eleven years, but he remembered well enough that humans didn’t have specific models - they came in all shapes and sizes. It was becoming harder to deny the humiliating conclusion that he had indeed been captured by humans.
The irony was not lost on him.
Samm tried to run through the intel in his head: the humans were gathered in communities on Long Island; they had some semblance of a military patrolling its North Shore, based off Queens, but it was weak and limited; no human was any match for a Partial. There were some drifters scattered about - they’d in fact been the real target of Samm’s mission. He realised now that they must somehow have ran into an actual group of humans. They’d believed it to be a B Company faction, but given his situation now …
His entire predicament suggested that a lot of the intel was faulty. To begin with, the organised and unanticipated group of human military in Manhattan. Samm scanned the room again, wondering if it had involved any of the guards present. Secondly, they had been cunning enough to take out his squad in groups - the first rigged explosion cutting down half of them, then a second one set off when Samm’s team had tried to get the drop on them. Samm’s memory of this was more fuzzy; he knew they’d picked off one of the scouts, tracked down the main group and taken out the sentry. The explosion had come after they’d initiated a chase. Beyond that … well, he supposed that was when they’d got him.
Either way, it was clear that the humans were much more dangerous than the D Company generals had led Samm to believe.
‘The hearing is now in session.’ The tall, clean-shaven man had taken the middle seat at the table. He stood now, addressing the room but seeming unable to take his eyes off Samm. The four others on either side of him-two male, two female, all looking considerably older-were less fixated, but their eyes kept darting towards Samm as well: furtive glances that swept away as soon as their gazes locked. The man at the centre finally looked away to the humans in the front row. ‘This hearing has been called for two reasons: the discipline of these four young adults, and the determination of what should be done with this-’ his eyes darted back to Samm, ‘-Partial.’
That Samm wasn’t dead like the rest of his squad was curious enough; they’d all been shooting to kill on site. He couldn’t fathom what involvement he might have in a tribunal, let alone being party to a hearing for four other humans. The only circumstance he knew of that even involved a trial was within a Partial’s own faction - getting court-martialled for disobedience or betrayal. Had he been captured by a different faction, it would have meant imprisonment to begin with; depending on which faction it was and how pliable his loyalties were, interrogation or execution could follow. In any case, the link would indicate what they intended to do with him.
Samm scrutinised the man carefully, searching for any data that might accompany his words, but he could feel nothing. Did humans perhaps have a shorter link range? Their senses were duller, that he knew; did their data not travel as far, too? He cursed the headache that was making it hard to think.
With no idea what to expect, Samm considered his circumstances. The fact that he was in a hearing seemed positive; that he was chained up and guarded less so, though it could be only an over-enthusiastic precaution. He thought of his mission; his link data would convey the bare facts of it: their search for a human drifter, their mistaken run-in with the human military. If they’d known the group was human, they’d surely have approached more carefully, possibly adjusted their strategy. Would his squad captain have considered a truce feasible? Samm couldn’t be sure. He wondered if he could suggest one now. It had been eleven years since their species had clashed, enough time for animosity to die.
And we need them.
The trial proceedings passed along into familiar territory: a disciplinary hearing within the military. Samm was grimly satisfied to note that he had accurately pegged at least two of the four humans standing trial-it was the male and female who best fit the Partial moulds. The charges were unauthorised activity, though their juror didn’t reveal directly what they’d actually done. He suspected it must be connected with the two others and himself; there was little justification for conducted a military hearing in their presence otherwise. The convoluted way humans did things was making his head spin.
The juror darted a furtive glance at Samm as he revealed, ‘We can’t spare many trained soldiers. Even criminals,’ adding to Samm’s bewilderment. It did confirm one piece of intel, though-the human military was limited.
Which still doesn’t explain how they got the better of us.
The female was let off with a mere slap of the wrist: reassignment. The male, higher in their hierarchy, was dishonourably discharged-a more painful punishment. Nothing out of the ordinary so far, besides the fact that the decisions had apparently been made in a private military tribunal. Why deal with it again in this hearing? Samm eyed the two human soldiers. He was intrigued to see tears streaming down the girl’s face as she accepted her light sentence. It was an incongruously extreme display of emotion. Her fellow human-the dark-haired girl-touched her knee, and in turn whispered to the discharged officer.
She’s a civilian, noted Samm, though this gave him no extra information. There was no such rank in Partial society, where every individual was military.
The civilian hearing proceeded, beginning immediately with the military girl countering a dismissal order. Samm linked amazement, both at her temerity and ability to refuse-and especially the way the humans just accepted it.
The first civilian charge continued as an odd exchange between the centre juror and the man in the group-apparently the oldest of the four, at twenty-two. Two years older than the oldest of us-the thought crept chillingly into Samm’s mind and he pushed it away, hoping it hadn’t linked obviously. It struck him as a piece of information he should be holding back. He didn’t know if the humans were receiving his link data; just because they weren’t broadcasting very far didn’t mean they couldn’t link him.
The twenty-two-year-old broke into an impassioned speech: ‘I was eleven years old in the Break-I watched my father die in a Partial attack. I watched my mom and my brothers die two weeks later in a high school gym packed so full of refugees that RM went through it like a brush fire.’
Samm tried to ignore the twist in his gut as this eloquent verbal picture churned up the faint memory of watching the humans die in the plague eleven years ago, the Partials just as helpless to reverse it. It was the chronic guilt that could not be assuaged: responsibility for an unintended consequence in their war for freedom. All their research after had never uncovered how they had unwittingly committed mass genocide.
The man finished his speech dramatically, cleverly diffusing the responsibility of age that was undoubtedly intended to fall on his head. Samm had to hand it to him; the human was quite tactically sound. Attention shifted to the last member of the group as she got to her feet, threw her head back, and proclaimed herself fully cognisant of the risks and consequences of her actions. She was, thought Samm, quite a dramatic specimen, remembering her various actions before, too.
‘What were you planning to do with this Partial once you caught it?’
The words hit Samm solidly in the face. Even flat and emotionless as they were, unaccompanied by link data, they made his mind reel with the implications. Though he had been vaguely putting two and two together-the numbers of the group adding up, his fate in conjunction with the trial of these four-he’d still favoured the explanation of a human military strike force taking out his squad and captured him. That picture crumbled now, leaving him in disbelieving shame.
Two untrained civilians survived a fight with my squad-killing everyone except me-and captured me alive?
Information was coming in fast now, with all the implications behind each statement. Samm struggled to concentrate on what it meant: comments about containment, contamination … the civilian girl turned to him then and he got a good look at her face. He felt a jolt as their eyes met and he recognised their bright brown-the exact ones he recalled from a single lucid moment before waking up in the chamber. He knew without a doubt then that she had been complicit in his capture, one of those responsible for killing his squad.
And then she said, ‘I was going to cut off its hand and test it in the field with a medicomp we brought to Brooklyn.’
She was going to what?! If the earlier realisation that his captors were unsanctioned youths working independently had been a sledgehammer to the head, this revelation was a bomb exploding in his face. Samm recoiled automatically. This innocent-looking human girl was calmly relaying her intention to dismember him, with no concern for his dignity. In her mind, he was an experimental subject, not a living being deserving of respect. The cruelty of it threw him violently back to a memory of his life before the revolution. The resentment he’d felt at the regular disdain from his old mine supervisor, who had always treated his Partial workers as no more than machines deployed in his incapable hands, surged to the forefront of his data. It fuelled his outrage in an incendiary combination of emotions.
His hatred exploded out over the link, so intense and ferocious he imaged the whole chamber must be awash in it. Any Partial would have halted uncomfortably with that much emotion directed at them. The humans remained unaffected, however. They continued to discuss the transgressions of Samm’s would-be butcher-all in terms of the risk to human life, of course. It seemed to him a cold, cost-analysis approach, loudly debated in terms of a mystifying rubric of protecting pregnancies and breeding capabilities.
His presence at the hearing, Samm realised, had nothing to do with his being on trial. They regarded him as only tangentially related, a piece of evidence of the actual criminals’ wrongdoing. In eleven years, Samm thought bitterly, nothing has changed. His brief considerations of negotiating a truce fled, shattered by the force of his anger.
So incensed was he, Samm could barely follow the ensuing exchange between the humans as they argued in an extravagantly dramatic fashion. The content of their debate barely made an impression on him-he vaguely registered the subject of RM being brought up as justification-until the discussion circled round to him specifically.
‘Well, you have the floor now. What do you want to say?’ Gimlet eyes bore into him coldly. Samm stared back silently, letting his linked rage speak for him.
‘Why were you in Manhattan?’ asked a weathered-looking woman. ‘You were part of an armed strike team making a temporary camp only miles from our border. What was your mission?’
Samm focused on his anger, giving them nothing but cold hatred as the woman prodded him with more questions.
‘Just kill it,’ said another juror. ‘We should never have brought it here to begin with.’
‘Study it!’ The girl leapt to her feet, her whole body trembling. ‘Going out on our own was dumb, and there’s a million ways it could have gone wrong, and probably a million ways it could still go wrong, but look at what we’ve got: a live Partial, right there, just waiting to be studied.’ She gestured wildly at Samm; her voice rose and fell with passionate inflection as she continued. ‘Punish us if you want - kill us if you want us killed - but somebody, please take advantage of this opportunity and study it. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong - that’s okay, the damage has already been done. But if I’m right, we can cure RM and finally start putting our society back together again.’
I could have told you it’s useless, Samm seethed silently. We’ve studied it just as long, and with more advanced technology, and we still don’t know why or how it happened. You could have asked, but you never even considered it, did you? You just think of us as things you can cut up to perform some insane medical experiment … for what, to satisfy your perverse curiosity? It wasn’t even like the humans needed to cure RM-everyone still alive had to be immune: they needed no inoculation, surely immunity sufficed as a cure? They had no guilt to assuage, no reason to mire themselves in a plague of eleven years past.
Do they? The question hovered under the inferno in his mind, as the girl finished her impassioned speech and the room fell into silence, broken only by the whispered conference of the jury. The reasoning for the girl’s obsession with RM had been hinted at during the course of the trial; Samm just hadn’t attended much to it. He was hardly in the mood to accept a justification for her high-handed decisions, anyway.
Minutes passed; at last, the jury rose to deliver a verdict. ‘The Senate has reached a decision. We have become convinced of the necessity for study: The Partials are immune to RM, and if we can discover the secrets behind that immunity, we may finally be able to find a cure. This Partial’s body may be the key to our survival, and it doesn’t appear to present any immediate threat when restrained and sedated.’
The last word pierced through the red-hot fog in his mind. That explains the headache … and why I’m finding it hard to focus.
‘We are moving the Partial to a secure facility in the hospital, confidentially and under guard, where it may be studied and analysed in detail. After five days, it will be dismantled and disposed of.’
The cruelty of these words slammed into him, another anvil bludgeoning him in the head. Not the fact that they intended to kill him eventually-that wouldn’t have been surprising even among Partials-but the attitude towards it. The baldness of the words stabbed him keenly: eleven years later, and they were still inferior to the humans, no more than a synthesised weapon to be disposed of.
Samm’s thoughts dissolved into an age-old cry of despair: You created me. You gave me thoughts and feelings and yet I’m just a piece of equipment to you.
His rage and pain fanned out on the link as they rolled the entire block of steel he was tied to out of the room. But though he breathed out his hurt, the link stayed painfully detached.
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Samm, Kira Walker, various others, Gen
Fandom: Partials
Summary: Alone in enemy territory with only five days to live, Samm makes an unexpected ally and reaches some stunning conclusions about the fate of their two species. Alternate PoV of Part II of Partials.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: Capture
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, multiple others
Word Count: 3,498
Chapter Summary: After a failed ambush, Samm awakens, only to find that he is alone, in captivity, and has been given only five more days to live.
Day 0
The darkness was enclosing him, as thick and oppressive as the coal mines he’d once been in. Samm’s lungs choked up as his mind struggled towards awareness. He was dimly aware of being pinned in place. There was … an explosion, he thought. It must be the debris, heavy concrete from the fallen structures holding him in place.
There was a faint mumble of voices, sounding close by yet soft and distorted, as though his ears were full of cotton wool. He couldn’t make out individual words or voices. Samm breathed in deeply but no data arrived. Where was everyone else? He reached out blindly and his armed, half-pinned by something solid, brushed against something warm and soft.
His eyes felt weighed down by the same heaviness across his entire body. It was closing back in, dragging him away from consciousness. Samm barely managed to lift one eyelid. He fixed on a pair of bright brown eyes before the world caved back in on him, and he sank into the darkness.
*
He was in the mines again, shovel in hand. Beams of light from hundreds of headlamps attacked the pitch black of the tunnels, but it always seemed to Samm that they never managed to push back the pervasive blackness.
Here in the mines, darkness had a life of its own. He wasn’t scared of it exactly. There was just an uncomfortable constriction he felt every time he descended, like a noose hovering close to his neck that threatened to tighten the deeper he went.
Samm hated it. The thought repeated in his head many times every shift, reverberating along with his discomfort on the link. It intensified with the concurrent feelings of the other Partials on his mining team. They didn’t share his aversion of the environment, but they all harboured their own versions of hatred, either for the work, its arbitrary assignment, or their treatment by the humans who had put them here. One of his team was an officer model, and he spewed a potent mix of anger and humiliation onto the link. Their shared sense felt like a ticking time bomb these days, helplessness and resentment building up into an incendiary combination that seeped through their breaths in the close confines of a mining tunnel. More and more, Samm felt like the air was heavy with its fuel, ready to explode.
Their shift ended at last and they shuffled into the mine elevator, emerging from the depths of the mountains into the cool Wyoming night. The suffocating hold on Samm slowly dissipated …
*
He clawed himself out of dreams of coal mines and tried to focus on the present. The heaviness was lifting, but Samm’s limbs remained pinned and a smoky veil seemed to hang over his mind. He forced his eyes open to take in his surroundings: he was in the centre of a small chamber, bound to a cold metal structure. There was a solitary feel to the room, but he wasn’t alone. Fanning out in a circle by the walls were uniformed guards, at least ten of them, each one heavily armed and in a defensive stance.
Is this B Company headquarters?
No, something was off with this assessment. Too many guards, several of whom did not appear to fit the soldier models. This last ruled out the likelihood that he’d been captured by any of the Partial factions, in fact, but Samm’s mind resisted drawing the alternative conclusion. The implications were unthinkable.
He shifted his attention instead to the layout of the room. To his left, five chairs behind a long table; to his right, more chairs laid out in neat rows facing the five at the front. The door was on the opposite side of the chamber. It opened and four people were marched in by more armed guards, who took their places around the rim of the room once their chargers were seated. Samm eyed the four newcomers carefully. These did correspond vaguely with the soldier Partial models - three of them did, at least. The two males appeared to be infantrymen like him. One of the females fit the pilot moulds, small and compact. The last female was unplaceable: tall and wiry, brown-skinned with long, dark hair. She glanced at Samm, but quickly averted her gaze when she saw that he was scrutinising them.
He couldn’t fathom why they were under guard along with him, though clearly they were being treated as less of an enemy. They were unchained, for one-Samm reassessed his own restraints and almost scoffed at the ludicrous amount of rope, straps, and even chains that had been wound around his body, locking him to his metal rig. He breathed in deeply, trying to take in their link data, but it was completely silent.
Another mystery: it wasn’t just that everyone in the room was keeping their emotions carefully blank, which would have been odd enough in itself. There was a hollow emptiness to his link sense that he associated with being alone. If he hadn’t opened his eyes, he wouldn’t have known the others were in the room with him. For a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating the whole thing.
If so, it was an extremely detailed hallucination. Samm ran through other explanations in his head, each one wilder than the last: an invisible sort of gas mask, advanced biological shielding, interference with his own senses. Nothing really plausible suggested itself.
The door opened again and another small group entered, unguarded this time. Five of them took seats at the table; the others filed towards the back of the room, with the exception of one female, a leggy blonde, who seated herself next to the unplaceable dark-haired girl and began whispering to her.
There were too many variations, too many age ranges. He hadn’t seen one in eleven years, but he remembered well enough that humans didn’t have specific models - they came in all shapes and sizes. It was becoming harder to deny the humiliating conclusion that he had indeed been captured by humans.
The irony was not lost on him.
Samm tried to run through the intel in his head: the humans were gathered in communities on Long Island; they had some semblance of a military patrolling its North Shore, based off Queens, but it was weak and limited; no human was any match for a Partial. There were some drifters scattered about - they’d in fact been the real target of Samm’s mission. He realised now that they must somehow have ran into an actual group of humans. They’d believed it to be a B Company faction, but given his situation now …
His entire predicament suggested that a lot of the intel was faulty. To begin with, the organised and unanticipated group of human military in Manhattan. Samm scanned the room again, wondering if it had involved any of the guards present. Secondly, they had been cunning enough to take out his squad in groups - the first rigged explosion cutting down half of them, then a second one set off when Samm’s team had tried to get the drop on them. Samm’s memory of this was more fuzzy; he knew they’d picked off one of the scouts, tracked down the main group and taken out the sentry. The explosion had come after they’d initiated a chase. Beyond that … well, he supposed that was when they’d got him.
Either way, it was clear that the humans were much more dangerous than the D Company generals had led Samm to believe.
‘The hearing is now in session.’ The tall, clean-shaven man had taken the middle seat at the table. He stood now, addressing the room but seeming unable to take his eyes off Samm. The four others on either side of him-two male, two female, all looking considerably older-were less fixated, but their eyes kept darting towards Samm as well: furtive glances that swept away as soon as their gazes locked. The man at the centre finally looked away to the humans in the front row. ‘This hearing has been called for two reasons: the discipline of these four young adults, and the determination of what should be done with this-’ his eyes darted back to Samm, ‘-Partial.’
That Samm wasn’t dead like the rest of his squad was curious enough; they’d all been shooting to kill on site. He couldn’t fathom what involvement he might have in a tribunal, let alone being party to a hearing for four other humans. The only circumstance he knew of that even involved a trial was within a Partial’s own faction - getting court-martialled for disobedience or betrayal. Had he been captured by a different faction, it would have meant imprisonment to begin with; depending on which faction it was and how pliable his loyalties were, interrogation or execution could follow. In any case, the link would indicate what they intended to do with him.
Samm scrutinised the man carefully, searching for any data that might accompany his words, but he could feel nothing. Did humans perhaps have a shorter link range? Their senses were duller, that he knew; did their data not travel as far, too? He cursed the headache that was making it hard to think.
With no idea what to expect, Samm considered his circumstances. The fact that he was in a hearing seemed positive; that he was chained up and guarded less so, though it could be only an over-enthusiastic precaution. He thought of his mission; his link data would convey the bare facts of it: their search for a human drifter, their mistaken run-in with the human military. If they’d known the group was human, they’d surely have approached more carefully, possibly adjusted their strategy. Would his squad captain have considered a truce feasible? Samm couldn’t be sure. He wondered if he could suggest one now. It had been eleven years since their species had clashed, enough time for animosity to die.
And we need them.
The trial proceedings passed along into familiar territory: a disciplinary hearing within the military. Samm was grimly satisfied to note that he had accurately pegged at least two of the four humans standing trial-it was the male and female who best fit the Partial moulds. The charges were unauthorised activity, though their juror didn’t reveal directly what they’d actually done. He suspected it must be connected with the two others and himself; there was little justification for conducted a military hearing in their presence otherwise. The convoluted way humans did things was making his head spin.
The juror darted a furtive glance at Samm as he revealed, ‘We can’t spare many trained soldiers. Even criminals,’ adding to Samm’s bewilderment. It did confirm one piece of intel, though-the human military was limited.
Which still doesn’t explain how they got the better of us.
The female was let off with a mere slap of the wrist: reassignment. The male, higher in their hierarchy, was dishonourably discharged-a more painful punishment. Nothing out of the ordinary so far, besides the fact that the decisions had apparently been made in a private military tribunal. Why deal with it again in this hearing? Samm eyed the two human soldiers. He was intrigued to see tears streaming down the girl’s face as she accepted her light sentence. It was an incongruously extreme display of emotion. Her fellow human-the dark-haired girl-touched her knee, and in turn whispered to the discharged officer.
She’s a civilian, noted Samm, though this gave him no extra information. There was no such rank in Partial society, where every individual was military.
The civilian hearing proceeded, beginning immediately with the military girl countering a dismissal order. Samm linked amazement, both at her temerity and ability to refuse-and especially the way the humans just accepted it.
The first civilian charge continued as an odd exchange between the centre juror and the man in the group-apparently the oldest of the four, at twenty-two. Two years older than the oldest of us-the thought crept chillingly into Samm’s mind and he pushed it away, hoping it hadn’t linked obviously. It struck him as a piece of information he should be holding back. He didn’t know if the humans were receiving his link data; just because they weren’t broadcasting very far didn’t mean they couldn’t link him.
The twenty-two-year-old broke into an impassioned speech: ‘I was eleven years old in the Break-I watched my father die in a Partial attack. I watched my mom and my brothers die two weeks later in a high school gym packed so full of refugees that RM went through it like a brush fire.’
Samm tried to ignore the twist in his gut as this eloquent verbal picture churned up the faint memory of watching the humans die in the plague eleven years ago, the Partials just as helpless to reverse it. It was the chronic guilt that could not be assuaged: responsibility for an unintended consequence in their war for freedom. All their research after had never uncovered how they had unwittingly committed mass genocide.
The man finished his speech dramatically, cleverly diffusing the responsibility of age that was undoubtedly intended to fall on his head. Samm had to hand it to him; the human was quite tactically sound. Attention shifted to the last member of the group as she got to her feet, threw her head back, and proclaimed herself fully cognisant of the risks and consequences of her actions. She was, thought Samm, quite a dramatic specimen, remembering her various actions before, too.
‘What were you planning to do with this Partial once you caught it?’
The words hit Samm solidly in the face. Even flat and emotionless as they were, unaccompanied by link data, they made his mind reel with the implications. Though he had been vaguely putting two and two together-the numbers of the group adding up, his fate in conjunction with the trial of these four-he’d still favoured the explanation of a human military strike force taking out his squad and captured him. That picture crumbled now, leaving him in disbelieving shame.
Two untrained civilians survived a fight with my squad-killing everyone except me-and captured me alive?
Information was coming in fast now, with all the implications behind each statement. Samm struggled to concentrate on what it meant: comments about containment, contamination … the civilian girl turned to him then and he got a good look at her face. He felt a jolt as their eyes met and he recognised their bright brown-the exact ones he recalled from a single lucid moment before waking up in the chamber. He knew without a doubt then that she had been complicit in his capture, one of those responsible for killing his squad.
And then she said, ‘I was going to cut off its hand and test it in the field with a medicomp we brought to Brooklyn.’
She was going to what?! If the earlier realisation that his captors were unsanctioned youths working independently had been a sledgehammer to the head, this revelation was a bomb exploding in his face. Samm recoiled automatically. This innocent-looking human girl was calmly relaying her intention to dismember him, with no concern for his dignity. In her mind, he was an experimental subject, not a living being deserving of respect. The cruelty of it threw him violently back to a memory of his life before the revolution. The resentment he’d felt at the regular disdain from his old mine supervisor, who had always treated his Partial workers as no more than machines deployed in his incapable hands, surged to the forefront of his data. It fuelled his outrage in an incendiary combination of emotions.
His hatred exploded out over the link, so intense and ferocious he imaged the whole chamber must be awash in it. Any Partial would have halted uncomfortably with that much emotion directed at them. The humans remained unaffected, however. They continued to discuss the transgressions of Samm’s would-be butcher-all in terms of the risk to human life, of course. It seemed to him a cold, cost-analysis approach, loudly debated in terms of a mystifying rubric of protecting pregnancies and breeding capabilities.
His presence at the hearing, Samm realised, had nothing to do with his being on trial. They regarded him as only tangentially related, a piece of evidence of the actual criminals’ wrongdoing. In eleven years, Samm thought bitterly, nothing has changed. His brief considerations of negotiating a truce fled, shattered by the force of his anger.
So incensed was he, Samm could barely follow the ensuing exchange between the humans as they argued in an extravagantly dramatic fashion. The content of their debate barely made an impression on him-he vaguely registered the subject of RM being brought up as justification-until the discussion circled round to him specifically.
‘Well, you have the floor now. What do you want to say?’ Gimlet eyes bore into him coldly. Samm stared back silently, letting his linked rage speak for him.
‘Why were you in Manhattan?’ asked a weathered-looking woman. ‘You were part of an armed strike team making a temporary camp only miles from our border. What was your mission?’
Samm focused on his anger, giving them nothing but cold hatred as the woman prodded him with more questions.
‘Just kill it,’ said another juror. ‘We should never have brought it here to begin with.’
‘Study it!’ The girl leapt to her feet, her whole body trembling. ‘Going out on our own was dumb, and there’s a million ways it could have gone wrong, and probably a million ways it could still go wrong, but look at what we’ve got: a live Partial, right there, just waiting to be studied.’ She gestured wildly at Samm; her voice rose and fell with passionate inflection as she continued. ‘Punish us if you want - kill us if you want us killed - but somebody, please take advantage of this opportunity and study it. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong - that’s okay, the damage has already been done. But if I’m right, we can cure RM and finally start putting our society back together again.’
I could have told you it’s useless, Samm seethed silently. We’ve studied it just as long, and with more advanced technology, and we still don’t know why or how it happened. You could have asked, but you never even considered it, did you? You just think of us as things you can cut up to perform some insane medical experiment … for what, to satisfy your perverse curiosity? It wasn’t even like the humans needed to cure RM-everyone still alive had to be immune: they needed no inoculation, surely immunity sufficed as a cure? They had no guilt to assuage, no reason to mire themselves in a plague of eleven years past.
Do they? The question hovered under the inferno in his mind, as the girl finished her impassioned speech and the room fell into silence, broken only by the whispered conference of the jury. The reasoning for the girl’s obsession with RM had been hinted at during the course of the trial; Samm just hadn’t attended much to it. He was hardly in the mood to accept a justification for her high-handed decisions, anyway.
Minutes passed; at last, the jury rose to deliver a verdict. ‘The Senate has reached a decision. We have become convinced of the necessity for study: The Partials are immune to RM, and if we can discover the secrets behind that immunity, we may finally be able to find a cure. This Partial’s body may be the key to our survival, and it doesn’t appear to present any immediate threat when restrained and sedated.’
The last word pierced through the red-hot fog in his mind. That explains the headache … and why I’m finding it hard to focus.
‘We are moving the Partial to a secure facility in the hospital, confidentially and under guard, where it may be studied and analysed in detail. After five days, it will be dismantled and disposed of.’
The cruelty of these words slammed into him, another anvil bludgeoning him in the head. Not the fact that they intended to kill him eventually-that wouldn’t have been surprising even among Partials-but the attitude towards it. The baldness of the words stabbed him keenly: eleven years later, and they were still inferior to the humans, no more than a synthesised weapon to be disposed of.
Samm’s thoughts dissolved into an age-old cry of despair: You created me. You gave me thoughts and feelings and yet I’m just a piece of equipment to you.
His rage and pain fanned out on the link as they rolled the entire block of steel he was tied to out of the room. But though he breathed out his hurt, the link stayed painfully detached.