She made her way up the narrow spine of the ship to the cockpit, where a cheerful pilot with a salt-and-pepper beard sat beside a droid copilot who never once turned his head.
"Colonel, I'll have to set you down a few miles from the facility. Security precaution. The warden's people will bring you the rest of the way," the pilot said.
"Thanks, Frank. I love you."
"Save that for the inmates. I'm sure they're starving for female company." Frank grinned. "Researching Enjarian artefacts wasn't dangerous enough for you, huh. Had to go and book a trip to see him, of all people."
"I'll miss your jokes when he's eating me."
"Rumours, mostly." Frank reached over and tapped the head of the cyborg beside him, who bore it with visible, patient discomfort. "This is my new friend, Link. He doesn't talk much, and he's about the most reliable thing I've ever flown with. Perfect for me."
"Get a room, you two."
Link was more machine than man; only a quarter of his face still wore human flesh, along with his limbs, his neck, a strip down his back. He touched two fingers to his brow in a short, formal bow. Lyn winked back at him, an old joke between old friends.
They landed on a bare cliff overlooking a canyon, and a pair of Szczcn-ians met her there. Upright alligators with hunched backs, silent at her sides as they walked her down through an entrance cut straight into the rock. The walls of the prison were the same grey stone as the rest of the planet, unsurprisingly, since it was the only material Dra'as Gormud had ever offered anyone. Lyn expected nothing better of a place built by Szczcn-ians; in her private opinion they were the least imaginative species in the galaxy, a judgment their own language seemed determined to confirm: grunts strung together with no vowels at all.
"Tell me a joke," she said to one of them. It ignored her.
"Mockery will not serve you well here," the other one said.
The warden's door read DOOSHIMA. Inside, holographic reproductions of famous paintings of fish hung on every wall, and the only light came from tanks of exotic aquatic wildlife, throwing a wet blue shimmer across the room. The warden himself had a long snout, bulbous eyes, and webbed feet.
What in the galaxy was a Nemoidian doing all the way out here.
"Greetings, Lady," he said, gills flaring. "I read your orders, this be much fun. We have man in shackles all day, we finally get to ask him questions, yeah?"
His Basic was atrocious. Lyn made herself understand it anyway.
"I want him unshackled when we meet."
His gills went wild, fluttering open and shut, eyes blinking rapid-fire.
"Are you crazy woman?! He eat you whole, like salmon."
She didn't flinch. "And no one is to raise an alarm or come to my aid, no matter what happens in that room."
He stared at her for a long moment, mouth slowly closing. "Ok Lady. But it's your funeral. I no come with you. I live." He barked something at the guards and had them out the door before she could change her mind.
They took her down. And down. Every time she thought they'd reached the bottom, another stair opened beneath the last one, the air growing colder and staler with every level, until finally two guards with blackened eyes swung open a set of heavy metal doors onto a bare cavernous room, and in the middle of it, chained hand and foot, stood the largest man Lyn had ever seen in the flesh. A leather muzzle covered the lower half of his face. A metal rod at his back sparked at intervals, feeding current into his spine on some automated schedule that no one had bothered to disable for her visit.
One of the guards smiled at her, showing several teeth missing, the gum-line still crusted dark with blood.
"Did he do that?" Lyn asked.
Their silence answered for them.
They unshackled him, handed her the muzzle key, and were gone before the doors had finished shutting, leaving her alone with him in a room that smelled like rust and old sweat.
He rolled his shoulders once the restraints fell away and rose to his full height, a man well over six and a half feet, rubbing the raw welts the shackles had left on his wrists. He circled her the way a predator sizes up something it hasn't decided whether to eat yet, and though his voice, when it came, wasn't especially deep, it seemed to move through the floor and up through the soles of her boots.
"You must be a scientist," he said.
"How would you know that?"
"Your stripes say Colonel. Your uniform says you've never once seen battle. Your posture says you've never spent an honest hour marching or standing at attention in your life."
"That's not proof of anything. What if I'm signal corps?"
"Signal corps would be an idiotic guess, and you don't strike me as an idiot. Which department else would they send to talk to a traitor on the eve of his execution?"
"I don't consider you a traitor, Lord Commander Wrath. I consider you a hero of the Union."
"Titles mean nothing in here. And flattery is wasted on a dead man." His voice caught, low and seething. "I hold no rank in this place."
"I need to know what you found aboard the UNS Omen, in the final days of the Second Akkadian War."
"Why not ask my crew? Study the wreck? Pull the flight logs?"
"You're the only one from that mission left alive. The wreck was destroyed on orders from well above your rank, the flight logs were corrupted, the captain's own report was never filed, and the Omen itself was decommissioned and scrapped within the month. That ship was the pride of the First Fleet, Commander. Someone did not want the truth of what happened on her getting out, and they were thorough about it."