Read A Stark And Wormy Knight for Free Online Page B

martyr?
    “Kane comma Lamentation,” she says. “Quite a name. Is that your enemies lamenting, or is it you, crying out helplessly before the power of your God?” She holds up her hand. “Don’t bother to answer. In parts of the Covenant system you’re a hero, you know – a sort of superhero. Were you aware of that? Or have you been traveling too much?”
    He does his best to ignore her. He knows he will be lied to, manipulated, that the psychological torments will be more subtle and more important than the physical torture. The only thing he does not understand is: Why her — why the prime minister herself? Surely he isn’t so important. The fact that she stands in front of him at this moment instead of in front of God is, after all, a demonstration that he is a failure.
    As if in answer to this thought, a voice murmurs in the back, of his skull, “Arjuna’s Angel of Death captured in attempt on PM Januari.” Another inquires, “Have you smelled yourself lately? Even members of parliament can lose freshness – just ask one!” Even here, in the heart of the beast, the voices in his head will not be silenced.
    “We need to study you,” the prime minister says at last. “We haven’t caught a Guardian-class agent before – not one of the new ones, like you. We didn’t know if we could do it — the scrambler field was only recently developed.” She smiles again, a quick icy flash like a first glimpse of snow in high mountains. “It wouldn’t have meant anything if you’d succeeded, you know. There are at least a dozen more in my party who can take my place and keep this system safe against you and your masters. But I made good bait — and you leaped into the trap. Now we’re going to find out what makes you such a nasty instrument, little Death Angel.”
    * * *
    He hopes that now the charade is over they will at least shut off the seed in his head. Instead, they leave it in place but disable his controls so that he can’t affect it at all. Children’s voices sing to him about the value of starting each day with a healthy breakfast and he grinds his teeth. The mad chorus yammers and sings to him nonstop. The pagan seed shows him pictures he does not want to see, gives him information about which he does not care, and always, always, it denies that Kane’s God exists.
    The Archimedeans claim they have no death penalty. Is this what they do instead? Drive their prisoners to suicide?
    If so, he will not do their work for them. He has internal resources they cannot disable without killing him and he was prepared to survive torture of a more obvious sort — why not this? He dilutes the waves of despair that wash through him at night when the lights go out and he is alone with the idiot babble of their idiot planet.
    No, Kane will not do their job for him. He will not murder himself. But it gives him an idea.
    * * *
    If he had done it in his cell they might have been more suspicious, but when his heart stops in the course of a rather invasive procedure to learn how the note biotech has grown into his nervous system, they are caught by surprise.
    “It must be a failsafe!” one of the doctors cries. Kane hears him as though from a great distance – already his higher systems are shutting down. “Some kind of auto-destruct!”
    “Maybe it’s just cardiac arrest…” says another, but it’s only a whisper and he is falling down a long tunnel. He almost thinks he can hear Spirit calling after him…
    And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
    His heart starts pumping again twenty minutes later. The doctors, unaware of the sophistication of his autonomic control, are trying to shock his system back to life. Kane hoped he would be down longer and that they would give him up for dead but that was overly optimistic: instead he has to roll off the table, naked