The Human Division #8: The Sound of Rebellion Read Free

and no way to communicate to anyone except possibly to Two, which did her no good, and Six, which likewise did not give her much to go on. And as much as Lee thought she had a reasonably good brain, all things concerned, there was only so much it could do, trapped as it was in her head.
    “Well, shit,” she said aloud, listening to the sound of her voice travel around the room. The room was large enough and had walls made of a substance that made it acoustically bouncy, probably bare rock or concrete.
    Hello, her brain said.
    She spent the next half hour alone in her head, occasionally humming to herself. If Two was watching, it might confuse him a bit.
    Eventually, the door to the room opened and Six (Lee presumed) came back in.
    “Lieutenant Lee,” said the voice of Two, “are you ready to begin?”
    “I am ready to talk your ears off,” Lee said.

    For the next two hours, Lee spoke at length about any subject that Two wished to know about, which included current CDF troop strength and disposition, CDF and Colonial Union messaging about the break from Earth, what the two organizations were doing to compensate for the loss of human resources from Earth, the state of rebellions of various colonies, both in Lee’s direct experience and from hearsay from other soldiers and Colonial Union staff and the details of Lee’s particular mission on Zhong Guo.
    Lee answered with facts when she could, informed guesses and estimates when she couldn’t and wild supposition when she had to, making sure Two understood which was which and why, so there would be no margin for misunderstanding between the two of them.
    “You are certainly being forthcoming,” Two said at one point.
    “I don’t want a shotgun to the face,” Lee said.
    “I mean that you are offering rather more than your surviving compatriot,” Two said.
    “I’m the lieutenant,” Lee said. “It’s my job to know more than the soldiers under me. If I’m offering you more than Private Hughes, it’s because I know more, not because she’s holding out on you.”
    “Indeed,” Two said. “That’s good news for Private Hughes, then.”
    Lee smiled, knowing now that Hughes was the other soldier held and that for now, at least, she was still alive. “What else do you need to know?” she asked.
    “At the moment, nothing,” Two said. “But I will be back with more questions later. In the meantime, Six will tend to your needs. Thank you, Lieutenant Lee, for your cooperation.”
    “Delighted,” Lee said. And with that, she assumed, Two had wandered away from his microphone to do whatever it is that he did, presumably talk to fellow conspirators (of which Lee assumed there were at least five).
    She heard Six moving about in the room. “Do you mind if I talk?” Lee asked. “I know you can’t answer. But I have to admit this entire incident is making me nervous.” She began talking, primarily about her childhood, while Six fed her and gave her water and then tended to her bodily needs. After twenty minutes, Six went away and Lee shut up.
    It was the room’s acoustics that had given her the idea. Lee had spent years as a performing and recording musician, and part of her job was to make sure the room, whatever room she was in, wouldn’t defeat her instrument or her band. She’d played enough basements with stone and concrete walls to know just how much the sound bouncing off the walls would mess with the performance and also what sorts of materials made what sort of sonic response. She could close her eyes, strike a note in a room and tell you, roughly, how large the room was, what materials the room was made of and whether there were objects in the room bouncing sound off of them. She wasn’t, alas, good enough at it to be able to make an entire map of a room that way.
    But her BrainPal was.
    For two and a half hours Lee had talked, almost constantly, moving her head as much as she could, risking a neck chafe from her restraining strap. As she talked,