Green eyes, once loving, soft and beautiful were now bloodshot and intense, energized with a rage that encompassed the woman’s entire being. For her, the blood lust was beginning to change her, not just mentally but physically as well. It would eventually destroy her, her quest for vengeance, her undoing by her own hand.
Two Brutor men, adorned in special operations combat gear walked quickly down the hallway of the underground bunker. Between the men was their prisoner, fully nude except for a stained burlap sack over his head. He was an elderly man with slackened pale skin that showed his age in wrinkles. The prisoner forcefully bent over with his arms restrained, the two soldiers holding him in the stress position as they marched him down the hallway. They passed several metal doors along the hallway. From inside a few of the rooms unintelligible voices could be heard from the residents within. Some of them were screaming nonsensically, others silent in acceptance of their fate.
At the end of the hallway was another door, identical to the others. As the soldiers neared the door, they slowed and halted just before it. The man that they held could be heard groaning softly and shivering in the coldness as his naked body was exposed. The soldier on the right kicked the bottom of the door three times to knock loudly. Another soldier dressed in the same uniform opened the door roughly from inside and the trio entered.
The interrogation room that they entered was small and felt very crowded with the three newcomers. The floors and walls were covered in tiles and in the center of the room was a metal chair, sitting directly over a rusted drain covering. The floor sloped in towards the center allowing any fluids to exit through the dark hole in the center. Along the walls on the far side of the room was a small platform with several shelves housing numerous devices and tools of torture. Above the chair hung a light that shone a directed beam of light directly down on the chair, allowing whoever occupied it to see only a small circle around themselves with the rest of the room remaining in darkness to them.
The two soldiers dragged the man into the room, supporting his entire weight as his feet dragged against the tile floor. Roughly slammed the naked man down onto the metal chair, they pulled his arms behind the backing and fastening straps to his wrists binding him to the chair. Then moving down to his legs and strapping them to the legs of the chair. The soldiers stood upright and nodded to the shadows on the far side of the room, then awaited instructions.
A dark Brutor woman stepped into the light. She stood at average height for a woman of her clan and her bald head allowed her facial nano-tattoos to be seen. Normally the tattoos that reached from her lips to her temples formed dark black lines. Today however her mood had forced them to change to a blood red color, visually depicting her rage. The woman wore only a ceremonial white cloth, banded by a fibrous rope as a belt around her waist. The cloth fell loosely down to her knees exposing her bare legs and feet as she stepped into the center of the room.
As Hasna Mehra stepped towards the naked and shivering man, the two soldiers who escorted him stepped out of the room. The large metal door swinging closed with a loud noise. A rusted bolt slammed home, locking the occupants inside.
Hasna paced slowly around the elderly man, she made very little sound as her bare feet encircled the chair. As she silently stepped behind the chair, she grasped the hood on the man’s head and roughly tugged it off, tossing the brown burlap sack to the side of the room and watching the man’s reaction to his surroundings. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he squinted in an attempt to see beyond the dark veil where the spotlight above him ended.
Josiah Donovan was 70 years old. He had a balding head of grey hair. Laugh lines dug deeply into the skin around his blue eyes. He had lived a long and prosperous life selling information to the Ministry of Internal Order which had granted his family a fair amount of wealth. Not entirely shocked that this was happening to him, he was however still fearful of what was about to happen to him. Josiah blinked rapidly in another attempt to adjust his vision to the lighting of the room and discovering the dangerous environment that he was in. Josiah attempted in vain to cover his privates from view as his eyes darted from one corner of the room to the other.
Hasna stood behind the man watching his frantic attempts to make sense of his situation. She felt enthralled by the situation. An almost perverse smile spread across her lips. This was the moment that she would begin making things right. This was the moment that she had waited so many years for. Vengeance would be hers, and this was the beginning of that vengeance.
Squatting down on her haunches behind the man, she placed a large wooden bowl beneath his hands where they were tied to the chair. She stood and slowly stepped around the chair in front of the man, illuminating herself to her captive. The man looked up at her in confusion. He could not place the woman’s face but she seemed familiar to him somehow. Hasna came to the point directly in front of the man and squatted down to his eye level. Her gaze was one of pure malice.
“W-w-what do you want from me?” Josiah stammered, as he said this a large tremble passed through his body.
Hasna remained silent, only starring into the elderly man’s pale blue eyes for a moment before standing and moving to a bench on the side of the room. When she came back it was with a single photograph in her hand which she thrust in front of Josiah. The photo showed a pile of several pale bodies lying in a heap inside of a room similar to the one they were currently in.
Josiah looked at the photo. “So, this is my fate?” He asked.
“Look closer, slaver.” Hasna responded.
Josiah leaned forward and suddenly recognized the bodies, all of them wore his face. His eyes shifted from the photo to Hasna, realizing that they were his emergency backup clones.
“You don’t get to wake up again.” Hasna smirked at the man. She watched his horrified reaction closely as he came face to face with true mortality.
“What do you want?” He repeated to the woman.
“I first want you to understand the situation that you find yourself in.” Hasna began. “You are going to die in this room, regardless of what you say or do.” As she said this her voice shifted, no longer low and business like but instead softer and empathetic.
“So, you just want to kill me then.” The man nodded, looking down at his legs as he tried to prepare himself mentally for his end.
A sharp laugh came from the Brutor woman. “Oh no, you have information that I want, we are going to go through your entire list of contacts. I am going to get every ounce of information from you.” She said
“Why would I give you anything?” Josiah replied
Hasna smiled a wicked smile. “To save the mind of your loving wife of course.” She said as if it were so simple. “Mikayla.”
At the mention of his wife’s name, a tear formed in Josiah’s eye. Now he truly understood his situation. The Brutor woman was not lying to him, he knew that in his heart. He imagined his sweet wife of 47 years in a room such as this. He only wished for a moment that he could be there to comfort her.
Josiah nodded to Hasna “I will give you whatever you want, but please spare my wife.”
Again, Hasna broke into laughter. “Oh, sweet old man!” Hasna suddenly grabbed the man by his face with both of her hands. She pulled his face towards hers and looked deeply into his eyes. Her bottom lip began to quiver, from excitement or from rage, neither of the two could tell.
Josiah looked into Hasna’s green eyes with absolute fear. ‘This woman was indeed insane!’ he thought. ‘look at the madness in her!’
“You get to decide if your wife dies a quick death, or…” Hasna trailed off as she released Josiah’s head and moved again to the bench and bringing back a data pad. She thrust it in front of his eyes.
The live feed was from space, a holo-projection was attached to some flat surface. Stars could be seen in the background as the object that the holo was on was slowly spinning.
“Your wife is inside of this container” Hasna said as she watched the man view the feed. “I have an explosive attached to the container. If you give me the information that I seek, I will detonate the explosive and your wife will die.”
Josiah waited for a moment; he knew that there had to be more to this. As he waited something came into the view of the live feed. Ships… a fleet of Sansha’s Nation ships.
“If you don’t.” Hasna grinned “I will decloak the container, and your wife will live for a very, very long time.”
Tears now flowed freely from Josiah Donovan. If his wife was captured by Sansha’s Nation, she would become of their drones. Her mind would be enslaved behind a control implant. Mikayla would very likely live a long life of the worst torment imaginable.
“Let’s begin, Mr. Donovan” Hasna said through a wicked smile. “Who do you report your findings to in the Ministry?”
Several bloody hours passed as Hasna worked her malice on the elderly man. The room now felt humid and hot. What remained of Josiah Donovan, the informant to the Ministry of Internal Order would not have been recognized by those who knew the man. His muscles were so exhausted that he could no longer even tremble. Large sections of his flesh had been opened. Boils from cauterizing burns could be seen from all angles.
Hasna was now soaked in blood splatter and sweat. The white cloth that she wore looked more like a painting than actual clothing. Her hands shook now, more from exhaustion than from fear or excitement. She held in her hand a blade which had become part of her torture routine. She watched her subject for a moment, making sure that she had gleaned all of the information that she required from the man. Giving herself a short nod as if to confirm to herself that she was complete, Hasna walked behind Josiah and knelt. She grabbed his arm at his wrist and very carefully pressed the tip into the larges vein she could find. The skin broke and she began sliding the blade down the man’s arm, doing her best to keep in line with his vein.
The bowl below the hands of Josiah Donovan was now filling with thick blood. Though he was so used to pain at this point in time that he barely noticed the pinch of the blade as it sliced him. He did register however the pressure and the feeling of his own warm blood flowing rapidly down his hand. Hasna knelt beside Josiah in his final moments. Having opened the man’s veins to the gods, he was now beginning to fade from his life.
“There is something you must know, Mr. Donovan.” Hasna said in a tired and dry voice. She leaned into his ear, her lips hovering close to them. She whispered to him the last words he would ever hear. “There was never an explosive on your wife’s container.” Hasna depressed a button on her data pad, and the container that the holo was attached to in Nation space decloaked. Hasna placed the pad on the man’s legs as his head hung down. His final vision was of a Phantasm approaching, a tractor beam grabbing the container.
Josiah could not speak but groaned as his he wept for the soul of his wife. Her beautiful features passed in front of his vision. ‘What a great love he had with her.’ He thought to himself as he suddenly became incredibly tired. Josiah closed his eyes, opening them slightly as he fought to maintain consciousness. After a moment however, his blood pressure was too low for him to keep going and he faded into a deep deadly sleep.
Hasna watched the life fade from the man. Once the rhythmic pumping had stopped from his arm, she knelt again. The heavy weight of the moment seemed to have vanished from her. She set her blade on the floor next to the bowl behind Josiah Donovan’s lifeless body. The soldier who guarded the door was disciplined but could not help but watch the woman as she knelt down to the bowl of blood. He had witnessed many torture sessions in his time with the Soche army special ops, but none that were quite so… emotionally driven.
Hasna slowly dipped her fingers into the blood and brought her fingertips to her face. A stream of tears began to fall as she used her fingers to trace the lines of her facial tattoo. She stood and turned to the soldier, the lines of blood on her face beginning to drip. The soldier regarded her with a small amount of suspicion as she looked at him. He was unsure of what was going to happen now. Here stood the daughter of his clan’s chief, drenched in blood having just tortured an Amarrian man to death, and sentencing his wife to a near eternity of anguish at the hands of those Nation drones. Hasna locked eyes with him as her tears continued to fall, the small beads glistening down and absorbing into the dark blood on her cheeks.
Walking slowly to the man who had been in her service for several months, Hasna stood on her toes while she reached up to the man, her fingers traced along his face. Slowly she leaned herself in and pressed her lips against his. Her bloodied hands caressing the back of his head and neck as she gave the man a very passionate kiss. She closed her eyes through the tears and imagined herself kissing her love, the man she had lost so long ago. ‘Will this feeling ever go away?’ She thought.
She allowed herself a moment of remembrance before breaking from the kiss, she let go of the soldier who now stood in shock at what had just happened.
“Please ready my ship, we have a ceremony to attend.” She spoke softly to him. As if he had been her lover for a lifetime. Her sweet and warm voice washed over him and made him feel quite off-balance.
The soldier cleared his throat and thought a moment before he spoke, making sure to choose his words very carefully.
“Ma’am” He said quietly and as softly as he could. “Is everything…?”
Hasna smiled and looked down to his lips for a moment. She dropped back down, her bare feet once again on the ground. She retracted her hand from his neck and looked back up at him. “I am fine” She said.
The Soldier smiled back at her and turned to leave. As he grabbed the handle of the metal door he turned back to her. “Ma’am, when we captured this man, he had a cat inside of his ship. What would you like me to do with it?”
Hasna smiled a sad and weary smile “Place it in my ship, I suppose I should give it to someone it would feel at home with.”
The soldier exited the room. Hasna Mehra then quickly walked to a water station in one corner of the room and began scrubbing herself clean before changing into her uniform.