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

her BrainPal took the data from her voice (and from Two’s) and used it to paint a picture of the room, marking every surface that sound reflected off of, polling the delay between the ears to locate the surface in the room and adding each additional piece of data to give a complete audio portrait of the room, of Six and of everything within earshot.
    What Lee had learned:
    One, that Two was (or, more accurately, was speaking to her through) a PDA set up on a table a meter and a half away, directly in front of her. This was the same table on which Six kept the bottles from which she fed Lee soup and water.
    Two, Six was a woman, about 165 centimeters tall and weighing about fifty-five kilos. When Lee was talking directly into her face, she got a reasonably good “look” at Six; she guessed Six was roughly forty to fifty years of age, presuming she was not ever in the CDF.
    Three, to the side of the chair was another table, less than a meter away, on which sat a shotgun and various surgical, cutting and shearing implements. Which confirmed for Lee that Two was full of shit about the torture assurances, and that she wasn’t likely to get out of the room alive—nor was Hughes going to get out of hers.
    What Lee suspected: Six would return at some point, Two would declare regretfully that they would have to go over answers again, this time with some added incentive in the form of pain, and then at the end of it she would be fed the shotgun while Two and his friends reviewed any discrepancies in her stories and the stories they got from Hughes. Which meant Lee had an indeterminate but short amount of time to escape the chair, rescue Hughes and escape from wherever they were.
    She had no idea how she was going to do that.
    “Come on,” she said to herself, and thumped the back of her head against the headrest as much as she could with the restraint on her neck. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was enough to clack her jaw, driving her left incisors into the edge of her tongue. There was a small nip of pain and then the odd, not-at-all-coppery taste of SmartBlood, oozing out from the wound.
    Lee grimaced. She could never get used to the taste of SmartBlood. It was the stuff the CDF used to replace human blood in its soldiers for its superior oxygen-handling capabilities; the nanobiotic machines could hold several times more oxygen than red blood cells could. It meant that a CDF soldier could survive without taking a breath far longer than a normal human could. It also meant that SmartBlood could become so superoxygenated that a favorite party trick of CDF soldiers was forcing the nanobots in the SmartBlood, which could be programmed via BrainPal, to incinerate themselves in a flash. It was a surprisingly excellent way to get rid of bloodsucking insects: Let them feed off your flesh and then, as they fly away, ignite the SmartBlood in their bodies.
    If only Six were a vampire, Lee thought. I’d show her . She spat the SmartBlood that had accumulated in her mouth and did a poor job of it, spattering it onto her right wrist and the restraint over it.
    Hello, her brain said again.
    As it did so, the door opened. Lee opened up a visual window of the room and started tracking the new sounds and their reflections on them. In a few seconds, Six came into view, positioning herself between the chair Lee was restrained in and the table holding the shotgun and surgical implements. Lee “watched” Six almost disappear as she stopped moving and her sounds ceased except for her breathing and then became silhouetted again when Two spoke from the PDA.
    “I’m afraid I have some very bad news, Lieutenant Lee,” Two said. “I took the information you gave me back to my colleagues, and as impressed as they were with your willingness to share, that same willingness has made them suspicious. They believe a CDF soldier would never willingly volunteer the information you have, or as much information as you have. They suspect that while you are