The Freedom Fighter

[corncobby]

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Chapter 1: Captured

It had taken General Viktor Ivanov more than five years to capture April Chen, the leader of the Adani guerilla movement that provided the sole resistance to the oppressive regime of the Republic of Moravia. The War of the Republics between Moravia and Adani a century ago had devastated the small planet of Zekov, leaving the state of Moravia as the only populated region. The Moravian victory had come at the cost of the lives of every male citizen of Adani, systematically wiped out in a genocide that had gone on for more than a decade. The females were taken into slavery, their condition ever since. They lived either in the homes of Moravian citizens as domestic slaves or in vast camps where they were put to work in factories, mines and construction. They had no rights other than to work submissively under the thumbs of their cruel and sadistic overlords. Babies born to them through artificial insemination in state breeding programs were taken away at birth, boys aborted during pregnancy, girls sent away to be brought up as slaves.
The only resistance against this brutal regime were the young women of the Adani Sem Bruni (Adani Fight Back) who had escaped the camps and fled into the mountains and hills. They conducted a fierce, if inevitably futile, guerilla campaign against Moravia, freeing prisoners and slaves, bombing infrastructure, and assassinating political leaders.

It was a perilous existence for the some 50,000 freedom fighters, for whom capture meant certain torture and execution, but in a world of such cruelty they gave their lives freely. Their leader, 24-year-old April Chen, had seen hundreds of her fellow slaves murdered by the regime and had sworn eternal revenge. It was she who had molded the ragtag escapees into an army and it was her the Moravian state had been determined to catch above all others. Hundreds, if not thousands, of women had been tortured for information on her whereabouts, but in the end it had not been betrayal but pure bad luck that had seen April fall to the enemy. On a routine foraging mission, she had stumbled into a Moravian army patrol that had lost its way in the hills. They had taken her to their local headquarters without knowing her identity, but once there it had not taken long for the officers to realize who had stumbled into their grasp. They had sent her to the capital where she now resided in the notorious Kharzak Prison, a place many Adani women had entered but few ever left.

At this precise moment, she was in her cell strung up naked by her wrists with a bucket of bricks suspended from chains around her ankles. She was gagged and blindfolded and her slender body bore the marks of severe torture. There were burns on her breasts, her armpits, her private parts and her inner thighs, lacerations across her back, dark bruises from her neck down to her knees, and cuts leaking blood from her arms, legs and stomach. These were only the wounds that had been inflicted in the past few hours. April had suffered many more over the past five days, her torturers healing them with lasers whenever they grew too severe.

There were three men stood around her now, thick-armed brutes armed with cattle prods, soldering irons, truncheons, and their own hard fists. The most senior of them, Major Popov, thundered another punch into the underside of the girl’s ribs, hearing a satisfying crunch as he broke an already cracked bone. Corporal Lenkov pressed a cattle prod up between her legs, sending a jolt of 200 volts searing into her private parts. The third man, Private Morozov, had a soldering iron that he slowly drew across the top of her shoulders, tracing a cut recently administered by rattan whip. April was trying not to give the men the satisfaction of hearing her scream, but after five days and nights of relentless torture, her resistance was weakening. Behind the gag of hot chili peppers, she let out a moan of anguished, exhausted agony.

From the corner of the cell, the man in overall charge of her interrogation, Colonel Sidorov, blew out a thin stream of cigarette smoke. He watched impassively as the torture continued, enjoying the sight of the attractive young woman suffering but making sure this pleasure did not show on his grizzled, stubbled face. He had kept her gagged since her interrogation began, when he was dislocating her limbs on the rack, roasting her tits over a fire, beating the soles of her feet on the parrot perch, and frying her body on the electric table. He knew she would not talk yet and he did not want to give her the small satisfaction of spitting out her defiance. The bitch would suffer in silence until he was ready to let her speak.

“You know, you should be relieved we finally caught you, April,” the colonel said as another fist thundered into the young woman’s ribcage. “Do you know how many Adani whores we’ve had to torture to get information about you? How many slaves have had to suffer because of you? There’s a seventeen-year-old girl down the wing who my men have been working on for six weeks now. You should hear her screams when they tear out her fingernails every day, how she begs and pleads for mercy. We’ll be able to let her rest now. Who knows, maybe we’ll hang her soon? She’s been begging us to do that for weeks.”

Behind her gag, April let out a curse of fury which helplessly turned into a scream as Private Mozorov drew the hot iron across another cut on her back. Popov drove his fist into her ribs once more and the girl choked for breath as the air was smashed from her lungs. The 24-year-old was in mortal terror as well as agony as she dangled by the metal cuffs on her wrists. Of all the women in the ASB, she was the only one who had knowledge of all its secret bases and hideouts throughout the country, each guerilla cell operating independently from the others to keep the organization secure in the event of capture and interrogation. She had carried a cyanide pill with her at all times to prevent her from being taken alive, but so sudden and unexpected had her encounter with the lost patrol been that she had had no chance to swallow it. Now she was naked and helpless in the hands of the most ruthless torturers on the planet. If she allowed herself to break, the entire freedom movement was at risk.

Another punch connected with her ribs and a white-hot flash of agony ripped through her body. She felt herself vomiting inside her gag, though there was nothing but blood and bile left to throw up. The cattle prod sent more agony into her private parts, like a thousand hot needles stabbing in and out of her flesh, and then came the even greater torment of the soldering iron searing into the cuts left by her latest flogging. She tried to stop her breathless choking turning into another cry but heard herself sob as the three separate tortures were repeated.

Colonel Sidorov allowed himself a smile. The young resistance leader was a real beauty, much more attractive in the flesh than in the rare photos they had taken of her clad in military fatigues and body armor. She was smaller than he had thought, only around five-foot-six, with a slender waist and full, rounded breasts. He and his men had all enjoyed fucking her between her long sessions of torture, but she looked particularly splendid now, her naked body stretched taut, the cold sweat of pain running down her bare skin. He was never going to tire of making her suffer.

As he watched his three soldiers continue to work on her, enjoying the heavy thud of Major Popov’s fist in her ribs, the sharp crackle of the cattle prod in her cunt, and the hiss of the hot iron on her back, he contemplated all the Adani he had tortured as part of his work within state security. There had been thousands within the walls of this prison alone: fugitives from the camps, domestic slaves who had turned against their owners, and, of course, terrorists from the ASB who had killed innumerable friends and colleagues. Those traitorous whores were always tortured for information, usually breaking within a few days or weeks, and then they were tortured for punishment. Most ended up at the end of a noose, but some remained in the dark corners of Kharzak Prison, locked in tiny, freezing cells and taken out for torture or rape whenever the guards felt like it.

But this bitch hanging by her wrists in front of him, this bitch was special. She was not destined for the hangman; that would be far too easy. She was going to be tortured until every single one of the Adani whores she had trained was either dead or imprisoned here alongside her; and after that, she was going to be tortured as punishment for all the loyal, hardworking servants of Moravia she had murdered in cold blood. This bitch was going to suffer the agonies of hell.

A sharp crack and a choking cry brought Colonel Sidorov’s attention back to the present. He saw that Popov had swapped his fists for a truncheon which he was driving into the girl’s ribs. The crack was from another bone snapping in two, the choking from blood erupting from April’s throat as her insides were ruptured. There was no fear of the girl dying under torture. She had been given an injection of nanobots to keep her vital organs operating. If her injuries became life-threatening, she would be healed so that the torture could continue.

The colonel stood up as the beating continued. The sight of April’s plump breasts heaving as she gasped for breath through her broken ribs had aroused him. He reached over to a large table of instruments and picked up a blowtorch, turning on the blue-hot flame with a hiss. Seeing his boss’s intention, Popov stepped inside, his eyes glistening with cruelty as he watched the colonel slowly bring the torch toward the girl’s body. April could feel the heat from several feet away and hear the angry hiss of the flame. She tried to brace herself for the explosion of agony to come, steeling herself not to scream.

But when the pain came, it was more than she could bear. The man held the torch a few inches from her breasts, just close enough for it to burn her skin. The girl threw herself backwards from her hanging arms, instinctively trying to escape the flame. But when she swung back, she was even closer to it. It touched her nipple with a crackle of blistering skin. Sidorov smiled thinly and nodded to Private Mozorov and Corporal Lenkov, who pressed their soldering irons and cattle prods into her back and private parts respectively. April screamed behind her gag, unable to hold herself in, and a thin trickle of piss ran down the inside of her thigh.

Sidorov was tempted to laugh at her but he resisted. Silently, he continued to brush the flame lightly over her breasts back and forth, enjoying the mewls of agony that escaped from the young woman’s lips.

“I don’t expect you to begin giving us the information we want from you for many days yet, April. But I can promise you more pain than you ever imagined in your life. Our scientists have been developing a stimulant that will increase the sensitivity of your nerves just for the eventuality of your capture. They say it should be ready in a few weeks so perhaps that would be a good time to begin your interrogation. In the meantime, this is all for fun.”

He moved the blowtorch to the top of her breasts and then along to her armpits, where he touched the flame to her skin. April screamed despite herself before Sidorov used his other fist to drive a punch into her solar plexus, knocking the air from her lungs. Lenkov gave her another blast of the cattle prod while Morozov slowly traced another line of fire across her lacerated back with the soldering iron.

“You are going to regret every crime you committed against my people, bitch,” Sidorov continued, moving the blowtorch to her other armpit. “There are 120 million Moravians who want to see you suffer, men and women alike. They’re all celebrating your capture right now, drinking a toast to your punishment. Tomorrow, there’s going to be a national festival in which every Adani slave is going to be strung up and whipped, every single one, 50 million whores all screaming under the lash. There’s also going to be a mass execution of your terrorists, a hundred traitors beaten and hung in the main square of Voskova. It’s going to be televised. We might let you watch it if we’re feeling generous.”

April let out a screech of fury that the gag turned into little more than a pathetic mewl. Sidorov pulled the blowtorch away at least but only to lower it toward her navel. He pulled her dangling legs apart and held the flame a few inches from each inner thigh, gently burning the skin. The pain was excruciating but there was nothing April could do to stop it. She shook herself in the man’s grip, wincing as the tight metal cuffs bit further into her wrists, but then Major Popov drove the butt of his truncheon up into her ribs and took the energy from her body. He followed it up with a blow from his fists to both her breasts and then a punch to her face that broke her nose. Sidorov, meanwhile, continued to brush the blue-hot flame along the inside of her thighs, occasionally raising it to burn away her pubic hair.

“You’ll only hurt yourself more if you struggle, April,” the colonel said. “This is the punishment you deserve and it’s not going to stop.”

From the cell next door there suddenly came a high-pitched scream, dampened only slightly by the wall of concrete separating it. April’s head turned instinctively toward the piercing sound, a desperate wail of agony that continued on and on.

“That will be one of your terrorists,” said Colonel Sidorov. “She has already told us everything she knows, I think, but it’s as well to be sure.”

He took the blowtorch away at last, letting April concentrate for a few seconds on the agony of her comrade.

“You’ll be screaming like that too, April, once we take your gag away. You’ll scream and scream for hours on end even when you barely even have the strength to open your mouth. You won’t be able to help yourself. You’ll be a pathetic, broken, mewling little bitch, begging for just five minutes respite from agony.” He paused to drive a fist into her guts, motioning for Major Popov to smash his truncheon against her tits at the same time. “But you won’t get five minutes’ respite, cunt, not until you’ve told us everything we need to know to smash your rebellion into the dust. Not until you’ve paid for your crimes in full.”

[corncobby]

Chapter 2: The Hole

Major Popov looked down at the metal lid in the floor of the chamber and listened to the muffled but desperate screams of the young woman hidden beneath. He turned to his superior Colonel Sidorov and offered him a cigarette.

“How long do we keep in there for this time?”

“Twelve hours, I think,” replied the colonel. “Then she goes back on the rack.”

Popov nodded. Twelve hours was an appropriate length of time to bring the prisoner’s condition to a peak of physical and psychological torment. Beneath the heavy metal lid, the young leader of the ASB was folded up inside a tiny circular box, her arms and legs twisted together and her head pressed down between her knees. The temperature inside the metal hole, controlled from a box in the chamber above, was currently forty degrees Celsius, but it could be turned as high as sixty degrees and as low as minus thirty. Colonel Sidorov would vary it over the next twelve hours, depending on what he felt would be most distressing to the young woman trapped inside. He had dislocated her elbows, shoulders, knees and ankles before placing her in the hole and left her with livid burns, cuts and bruises all over her body, the pain surely excruciating. He had also activated the electric shock function and the white noise speakers, meaning that he could deliver 200-volt shocks through the metal walls of the box at any time and blast the girl’s ears with deafening metallic screeching.

All of this was more or less standard for what Kharzak Prison referred to as the Hole, a fundamental aspect of the inmates’ punishment and interrogation. But there was another aspect to April’s torture that the colonel had added just for her, one of a number of innovations the veteran interrogator had developed to break surely the toughest captive the prison had ever dealt with, the woman who held the key to the entire Adani resistance movement. This was, simply enough, a plant. But not just any plant, a rare and little known species called the needle skote, which grew in the remote, jungle regions in the far south of Zekov. The needle skote, as those few naturalists interested in such things had discovered, delivered the most agonizing and long-lasting sting of any plant on the planet. It looked innocent enough, a small green nettle with tiny hairs across the surface of its heart-shaped leaves. But what these hairs contained was a virulent neurotoxin that was said to feel as though you were being burned with acid and electrocuted at the same time.

Only a few people had ever been stung by the plant, a handful of unlucky jungle explorers and scientists, but at least one of them had been driven so mad by the pain, he had committed suicide two weeks later. For unlike a normal nettle, the pain of the needle skote, whose tiny venomous hairs disappeared beneath the surface of the skin, making them impossible to remove, persisted for weeks, even months and caused constant, excruciating agony that never seemed to lessen. The scientist who had committed suicide was stung only on the palm of his hand as he innocently reached out to pick a leaf. The young woman trapped inside the tiny metal box, on the other hand, had three dozen leaves in there with her, and in the thirty minutes she had been inside, they had already stung her on almost every part of her body. It was this, rather than her folded dislocated limbs and the searing burns and cuts that laced her flesh, that was causing the young woman to scream with such desperate anguish.

“Have you ever touched the plant yourself, colonel?” asked the major, who was still skeptical that such an innocent-looking organism could prove such a deadly weapon.

“Only the tip of my finger,” replied Sidorov, holding up his fourth finger which, Popov could see, was noticeably red and inflamed.

“Does it hurt?”

Sidorov let out a mirthless chuckle. “As if a red-hot spike was being driven through my finger,” he replied. “I screamed like an Adani whore when I touched it. The doctors have been giving me anesthetic but it still hurts like bloody hell. I’ve been thinking about amputating it.”

Popov stared at his boss in shock, not sure if he was joking. “Surely, you are…”

“I’m joking but I don’t think that bitch will be laughing.” This time Sidorov’s mirth was genuine. “And I have had enough specimens collected to torture her for the rest of her miserable fucking life.” He banged on the metal lid below his eyeline. “You hear that, you terrorist bitch? I have enough of this plant to torture you for the rest of your fucking life if I choose. Think about that, you murdering cunt.”

Inside her black hole, April was weeping in agony and despair. She had spent almost all her life being tortured and abused but had never imagined it was possible to experience the pain she was in now. The needle skote made her feel as though her entire body was being stabbed over and over, white-hot nails driving in and out of her flesh a thousand times a minute. She kept waiting for it to subside, for it seemed too great to be real, but instead of lessening, it simply increased, the fire growing hotter, the stabbing deeper and faster. Every time she twitched even a fraction, she touched a leaf again and felt as though she was being held against a white-hot piece of metal, the fire searing into her flesh and burning her on and on.

The needle skote was the most overpowering of the torments she felt inside her tiny prison. But it was far from being the only one, and the powerful stimulants the men had given her forced her nerves to experience each type of agony separately. There was the torture of her limbs, racked and dislocated repeatedly over the long days of torture, bent and folded beneath her. There were the burns, cuts and lacerations that covered every part of her body, the fierce heat that drained her energy and desiccated her parched throat and mouth, the electric shocks that came regularly but unpredictably, and the screeching white noise that made her feel as though her head were about to explode.

“We’re going to leave you now, bitch,” came Colonel Sidorov’s harsh voice from above the metal lid pressing down on her head. “Enjoy your day.”

April let out a groan of torment behind her gag before her world exploded once more with electric shocks and white noise. The temperature changed too, turning cold all of a sudden and then beyond cold, to freezing, as icy as the mine tunnels she had spent her childhood in.

“Set everything to the maximum,” Sidorov told Popov as he prepared to leave the chamber for a well-earned rest. “Let the bitch spend the day in hell.”

Inside the Hole, April’s screams were lost in the blast of white noise that rattled her skull and ruptured her ear drums. She could barely move a single inch, the metal walls of the box, now crackling with 200 volts of electricity, pressing against her. Breathing was an excruciating torment, not only because many of her ribs were cracked and broken but because it seemed like there was no air inside the minute space, just a suffocating oppression, alternately freezing cold and boiling hot. Her dislocated legs, cramped beyond all reason, spasmed suddenly with the electric shocks and a fresh inch of bare thigh touched one of the stinging leaves, bringing an explosion of agony that was like spikes driving through her flesh. More screams came from behind the girl’s gagged mouth, the effort sending more arrows of pain shooting through her chest. April felt a kind of madness pass through her frazzled mind as the agony hit a new peak.

The 24-year-old had spent eighteen years of her life being tortured without mercy. Both the Backya and the mining camp had had a hole such as this and she had spent many hours folded up inside the darkness, wounds leaking blood in the unbearable heat or cold. But they did not have the innovations that Kharzak Prison added, the electric shocks and white noise, not to mention the needle skote. This was a new level of torture, one the young freedom fighter had never endured before. She did not know how she could possibly take it, along with the many tortures that would inevitably come once she was taken out. The soldiers hadn’t even begun interrogating her yet, but sooner or later they would, and then her strength, her courage and her spirit would be tested as never before.

Colonel Sidorov and Major Popov walked off together down the block that housed the Kharzak Prison inmates currently under interrogation. There were 500 cells on one side of the wing and a hundred torture chambers on the other, and at any given time it was usual to hear screams from at least half the prisoners, who were either hung by cuffs in their cells being beaten, whipped and electrocuted or held in one of the devices in the more spacious torture chambers. Many of the women had alleged ties to the AFB but others were slaves who had appeared to organize resistance in the camps or who had attempted to escape from captivity with suspected help. They were tortured every day for information or confessions, most spending a few weeks or months here before they satisfied their interrogators that they had divulged every last drop of knowledge they possessed.

The rest of the prison, the largest in the country, contained the remaining 9500 inmates, who were all held in terrible conditions, subject to arbitrary torture, abuse and rape from the Moravian guards. Moravian men and women were genetically predisposed toward racial hatred of the Adani, whose women had long been kidnapped for slavery (the men being too warlike to be subdued). The Adani, almost as populous as the Moravians but less technologically advanced, had endured this state of affairs for centuries until, with weapons stolen from the enemy, they launched the War of the Republics a hundred years ago and plunged the planet of Zekov into a terrible ten-year civil war. It had ended with Adani defeat and the total extermination of their menfolk to prevent any recurrence in the future. All fifty million surviving Adani women were enslaved, scattered across the planet to wherever there were resources that could be mined and exploited.

What this meant was that the desperate, high-pitched screams of the women in the interrogation block had no effect upon the two army officers, eliciting no sympathy whatsoever. While many Adani men, and some women, were genuine sadists, gaining sexual pleasure from the pain of their slaves, most were just indifferent to the fate of their inferior neighbors, as unfeeling about the women’s lives as they would be to a cockroach or a rat. To the ruling race, Adani women were no more than pack animals to be used and exploited for the benefit of their masters and to be punished if they failed to do their work.

The women in Kharzak Prison had all rebelled against the master race to one degree or another, and they could expect no mercy. They were all serving long sentences that would end either in execution or in dispatch to the harshest camps on the planet, like the cobalt mine April had grown up in, where death would likely come sooner rather than later. While the capital’s jail was the largest on Zekov, there were a hundred others in both Moravia and Adani, holding as many as 100,000 inmates in total at any one time.

Colonel Sidorov stopped a few meters from one of the cells along the wide hallway where a young inmate’s face and hands protruded through holes in the metal door. They were at waist height, the girl, no more than twenty years old, forced to bend over painfully inside the cell. Her eyes were open in terror, skewed toward the noise of footsteps coming toward her. Every guard who passed down the hall had the right to punish the pretty young prisoner in some way, electrocuting her, burning her, peeling the nails from her hands, breaking or dislocating her fingers, spraying chemicals into her eyes, crushing her tongue, punching her nose, pulling out her teeth, anything that took their fancy.

“Good evening, Liyang, anything you want to tell us today?” Sidorov asked, bending down to the girl’s eye level.

The young Adani looked at the grizzled officer with terror and desperation in her blue eyes.

“I’ve told you everything. I didn’t have any help escaping the camp. I just saw a chance and ran. Please, please believe me.”

Sidorov shook his head sadly. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it up, and then slowly pressed it into the girl’s tongue. Liyang screamed in agony, tears falling from her eyes as the officer held the cigarette in place.

“I’m afraid I don’t believe you, Liyang. You knew the guards would be distracted because somebody distracted them. Tell me who else was involved, girl, or I will start to make your life very unpleasant indeed. I have lost patience with you.”

Liyang shook her head miserably. She was telling the truth but after an entire week of torture and interrogation, the guards still refused to believe her. Sidorov stubbed out his cigarette, burning her tongue in two more places. Then he pinched open her eyes with his fingers and gave her a long dose of hot pepper spray, which burned into her eyeballs like needles. Liyang let out another desperate cry before the colonel drew back his fist and smashed it into her face, breaking her nose with a splatter of blood.

“I am going to order my men to torture you much more severely from now on,” he told the mewling young girl. “You are going to regret your lies, you worthless slut.”

He punched her again and gave her broken fingers a hard rap with his truncheon before walking away. Whether the girl was telling the truth or not didn’t really matter. He would get some names from her, co-conspirators who would soon be tortured into a confession, real or imagined. His superiors were always happy to hear of a conspiracy broken and, as for Sidorov himself, all that mattered was that as many Adani bitches ended up screaming in this prison as possible. He walked off down the hall, leaving the screams of Block A behind for the night. He had an Adani whore in his living quarters who would suck his cock as he lay down to sleep. It was a good life, the colonel reflected, a very good life indeed.

[corncobby]

Chapter 3: The Resistance

Six months earlier, April had been peering down through her binoculars at a long trail of bedraggled women slowly making their way down a rough mountain path. Their wrists and ankles were clinking in heavy chains as they shuffled forward, while from the sides, a line of Moravian guards were urging them on with whips and batons. Dressed in thin, long-sleeved dresses, their legs and feet bare, the women shivered as a freezing wind whipped down from the mountain. The terrible cold was painful even for April, dressed in warm military fatigues, and she knew exactly how unendurable it was for the half-naked slaves. They trudged on feet cut to pieces by the sharp rocks beneath, their mouths gagged to prevent speech, their heads bowed in exhaustion after yet another punishing day of labor.

“Come on, you lazy whores! Move it!”

The shouts of the guards were audible from April’s hidden position and the young freedom fighter had to physically restrain herself from screaming in fury as the guards’ whips cracked through the air. When they reached the camp, she watched the women being given their usual meal of cold gruel, a nutritious but tasteless gray sludge that served as breakfast, lunch and dinner for Adani slavegirls in every camp on Zekov. The women ate it quickly in total silence, not permitted to speak or leave a single drop uneaten.

After an exhausting and freezing day, rest was the only thing on the women's minds. But there was one more daily ritual they had to perform before that was granted: witnessing the punishment of slaves who had committed an infraction during the long day’s work. Fifty wooden stakes were lined up in a row and, as the women stood to attention with their manacled hands on top of their heads, gagged now as usual, the same number of slaves were pulled out from the ranks and dragged forward. Their arms were fastened into a loop at the top of the stakes, leaving their legs dangling and their toes barely scraping the floor. Their dresses were pulled down to bare their backs as guards stepped forward with five-thonged knouts.

“One hundred lashes for laziness,” a captain announced in a loud voice from the side. “Begin.”

Immediately, there was the sickening crack of fifty hard whips striking the women’s naked flesh at the same time, a wicked thump that echoed through the empty mountains like a gunshot. A gaggle of muffled cries followed the sound before another lash rang out in unison. From her vantage point, April could see the reaction of the women as the second stroke hit home. The impact of the blow smashed their bodies into the rough wooden post, leaving them gasping with pain. As the seconds ticked by to the inevitable next lash, the women closed their eyes as if to block it from their minds. But when it came, it was worse than before, the vicious knotted thongs of the knout biting into their skin as it sent them smashing into the posts once more.

April understood the women’s agony completely. She did not know how many times she had been whipped during her eighteen years of captivity, but it would have been hundreds, probably thousands. Though she had tasted the vicious knout on her bare back too many times to recall, the pain was still fresh in her memory, as was the terrible effect of the freezing cold that seemed to increase the agony tenfold.

Again and again, the fifty whips lashed down. April saw the faces of the guards as they swung their bodies into the blows, their eyes gleaming with a mixture of hate and sadistic glee. They loved their work, reveling in the blood that spattered from the women’s backs as the whip bit deeper and deeper into their flesh. As the flogging went on, the victims grew more and more desperate, their screams audible behind the gags, their faces wet with tears that froze on their faces like icicles.

It seemed to take an age for the hundred strokes to be completed. When they were, the captain ordered their wounds to be cauterized, another horror April had experienced too many times to count. Braziers full of hot irons were already burning around the camp, warming the guards but not the semi-naked prisoners. The soldiers pressed them into the bloody backs of the fifty women, searing each wound in turn until the blood had sizzled away. The desperate victims screamed like animals into their gags. They continued weeping as their arms were finally unhooked from the posts and they were dragged back to the lines of slaves who had been forced to watch.

“Bring the next group forward,” ordered the captain in his strong, clear voice. “Two hundred lashes for disobedience.”

The next fifty women were already crying with terror as they were led out of the lines. Two hundred strokes of the knout was a fearsome punishment. April had no idea what the women had done to anger the guards. Disobedience was a catch-all term that could be used to punish a real offense or simply to victimize a slave the guards had taken a dislike to. April lowered her head as the flogging began, hearing the knout strike the prisoners’ bare backs with yet another fearsome crack.

“Whip them hard, men,” the captain said. “Let these slaves understand the price of disobedience.”

Again and again, the knouts cracked against the women’s backs, blood splattering as the five knotted thongs bit deeper and deeper. After a hundred lashes, the red-hot irons replaced the whip, the hiss and stench of burning flesh filling the camp as each woman suffered twenty separate brands to her back and bottom. As soon as the last burn had been laid down, the whipping resumed, the pain growing inexorably with each fresh crack of the knout. After two hundred strokes, the wounds were cauterized again and then the women were taken down from the posts. Too weak to walk, they were dragged back to the line by their heels, quietly mewling into their gags. They would not be healed with lasers that night unless the soldiers judged their lives were in danger. Healing would only come in the morning to ensure they were fit enough for work.

More than an hour had passed since the first round of whippings had begun, but April knew the punishment was not over yet. She and her team had been watching the camp for a week, learning every aspect of its operation and security, and they had seen this same scene played out every single night. Ten women were taken out of the line, their faces ashen as they were led forward and stripped of their thin dresses. The guards hooked them in place on the posts and looked toward the captain for the order to begin.

“Four hundred lashes for gross insubordination. Begin.”

April shook her head in fury as the savage whips fell on the women’s bare backs once more. She recognized several of the ten from previous nights. One long-haired girl had been whipped every night for the past seven days and who knows how long before that. April did not know her offense – she guessed either an attempted escape or a deliberate refusal to work – but she was paying for it dearly. She could see the girl's face as the whip struck her again and again, her eyes screwed up in agony, her head thrown back each time the heavy thongs crashed into her body. Behind her gag she was screaming, but the sounds were lost behind the relentless thwack of the whip.

Four hundred lashes was an utterly inhuman amount, but it was perfectly common on Zekov. Stimulants kept the slave conscious throughout the ordeal; cauterization stopped her from bleeding to death; and laser healing prevented unnecessary death. April herself had once suffered over a thousand lashes, the punishment inflicted over the course of a whole night interspersed with electric shocks and other tortures. She survived it and, after some healing, was strong enough to carry out a full day’s work the following morning.

A hundred strokes and the first cauterization was carried out. Two hundred and the second cauterization. Three hundred and the third. The ten women were beyond desperate now, their heads hanging down in exhaustion as the whip struck them in a relentless rhythm. From their necks down to their thighs, their bodies were a mess of torn flesh. Whole chunks were ripped away with each stroke, blood flying through the air and wetting the ground.

“Whip those bitches harder!” exhorted the captain. “Teach them what it means to obey!”

By the time the four hundredth lash landed across their bare bodies, the ten women seemed barely alive, their muffled cries too weak to be audible. Hot irons were pressed into them for the fourth time and then, at last, their manacles were unhooked from the posts and they were dragged along the ground back to the lines. All except the long-haired girl whose whipping had been repeated day after day.

“Another hundred lashes for her and burn her tits as well,” the captain ordered. “I don’t think she’s learned her lesson yet.”

The girl made no visible reaction as the whipping resumed, but April could see the other slaves looking down in misery as the knout continued its steady thump against her ravaged back. She looked almost unconscious now, her body limp as it struck the wooden post again and again. But April saw her eyes open just a fraction when the pain hit a new extreme. The guards had gone beyond the captain’s order and were burning the front of the girl’s body over and over again, pressing red-hot pokers into her breasts, armpits, stomach and inner thighs. Smoke rose from her flesh from dozens of separate burns and still the whip fell against her back, now nothing but shreds of ragged flesh open to the bone.

Finally, it was over. The captain ordered hot salt to be poured into the wounds, cauterizing them in the most brutal way for the final time. Another man stepped forward when it was done, fingering the girl’s dreadful injuries without emotion and then holding a stethoscope to her chest. The camp doctor’s job was to keep the women alive through all the horrors they endured. After examining the young woman for a few minutes, he nodded to the captain, seemingly satisfied she did not require any immediate healing. The soldiers who had dealt her the whipping took her manacled wrists from the post and dragged her back to the line of slaves.

“Slaves, return to your quarters!” a sergeant’s voice rang out. “Complete silence!”

From her hiding place, April watched the slaves shuffle toward the windowless cement block buildings that served as the sleeping quarters for most Adani slaves in the country. The two thousand women were crammed into ten buildings, where they would lay on the bare earth, pressed together in the confined space, resting their heads on each other’s bellies. There was no room to move and some of the slaves could not even stretch out, but at least the press of bodies provided a semblance of heat as the night temperatures plummeted.

April continued to watch and wait. When the last of the manacled women had shuffled into their huts, the soldiers closed the thick iron doors and locked them with a chain, leaving the slaves in complete darkness. Two men stood guard outside each building, while a dozen others made their way to the perimeter fence, a boundary marked by electrified posts that would activate the shock collars of the slaves if they dared to cross it. There was no security other than this. The camp was designed to keep the women inside, not to stop others entering. In this remote mountain, there was no one around for five hundred miles.

Or so the Moravian soldiers assumed.

Raindrops were the signal for the attack to begin. It was two o’clock in the morning, a black night without moon or stars. As the rain began to pelt down, April saw the torches of the camp guards bobbing away as they ran for shelter. A crack of lightning over the mountains lit up the camp for a tiny second before all was black once more. The young freedom fighter signaled her comrades and heard a quick patter of boots along the rocky ground. The twelve women made their way down the slope toward the camp, staying hidden from the few lights around the soldiers’ barracks. Within a couple of minutes, they had crossed over the perimeter and split into two groups. April led one group toward the barracks while the other followed the path where the bobbing torches had disappeared. Knives out, they prepared for murder.

The Moravian guards never heard a thing. With the crash of the raging storm, the dying gurgle of a slit throat made no noise and one by one the soldiers fell. When the women opened the doors of the barracks, where row upon row of men were sleeping soundly, they were able to savor the feeling of revenge before they tossed the unpinned grenades inside. If any of the soldiers survived the series of massive explosions, they were cut down by the hail of bullets the women sent in afterwards. Two hundred men dead in an instant.

Not all the two thousand women liberated from the camp decided to join the Adani resistance. Some preferred to accept the organization’s help in escaping to the uninhabited regions of the far west, where the long arm of the Moravian forces could not reach. But a sizable number stayed, seeking their own revenge. One young woman caught April's eyes as she staggered from the barracks, delaying her run to freedom by kicking the two dead guards over and over with her bloodied bare feet.

“My name is Faye,” she told April when the resistance leader sought her out later. “Let me join your fight.”

The cuts on her back from the five hundred lashes were still livid.

[corncobby]

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Chapter 4: Interrogation

April groaned as another baseball bat slammed into her belly, sending her body swinging back and forth from her impaled breasts. Corporal Lenkov looked at the black-haired woman without emotion and swung the bat into her stomach once more, a drop of sweat dripping from his forehead in the sweltering heat of the cell. From a table just to the left, Major Popov flicked a switch and sent a surge of current shooting through the thick skewer pierced through the young woman’s breasts, the copper rod heating in an instant and burning her with searing metal. A scream erupted from the girl’s lips as her naked body jackknifed in midair. Her spine arched backwards away from her smoking breasts and her wrists, held tightly behind her neck, strained against the biting cuffs. Lenkov smashed the bat into her again and left her gasping and choking for air. Another flick of a switch and the two metal rods jammed inside her vagina and anus also burst to life, sparks flying from between her legs.

April was in her cell, having spent most of the previous five days in the torture chamber across the hall. The soldiers had tortured her in a hundred ways but they had not got her to talk. They were impatient now, determined to make some kind of progress on breaking the terrorist before their superior, Colonel Sidorov, returned. Sidorov was visiting the Kharzak Prison laboratories where he was trying to speed along the development of a stimulant that would increase the sensitivity of the ASB leader’s nerves. It was a complex process involving a deep analysis of the girl’s unique genetic patterns, and the prison researchers had been working on it around the clock for more than three weeks since her arrival at the jail. They were getting closer, but for Sidorov it was still too slow.

The colonel doubted he would break April without it, considering what was at stake; and there was also the simple motivation of revenge. April was Enemy No. 1, a terrorist who had almost single-handedly built up the Adani resistance movement, causing tens of thousands of deaths to Moravian leaders, citizens and soldiers and inflicting untold damage to her economy, security and morale. She had to pay for her crimes like no Adani had ever paid before, and the new stimulant was just one of the ways Sidorov and his colleagues intended to take their revenge. He had been intending to break her slowly, keeping her gagged and blindfolded for a month before the stimulant was ready. But the ASB attack on the Merotov garrison, which had left more than four hundred soldiers dead or wounded, had increased the pressure on him to get results quickly. He needed to know which ASB chapter was responsible and to bring them into the clutches of the state as soon as possible.

“Increase the current,” ordered Major Popov as he sent another surge of electricity through the prisoner’s breasts and private parts. “And Morozov, take a kamcha to the bitch’s back.”

April closed her eyes and tried not to let her terror show as the current jumped to 300 volts and dramatically increased the agony in her broken body. The baseball bat thudded into her stomach yet again and then came the first flash of fire across her back as the private lashed the vicious whip of twisted hide against her flesh. Only the lack of air in her lungs stopped the young woman from screaming out loud as the pain lanced through her, excruciating beyond all measure.

The past three weeks had been worse than she ever could have imagined. The 24-year-old knew pain, of course. Like every Adani slave, she had spent her whole life being tortured in one way or another. Pain was all she had ever known. But the torture she had suffered at Kharzak Prison was of a whole new dimension. It had been constant throughout each day and night with barely a few hours’ respite for sleep and it had grown in intensity and cruelty with each passing day. The needle skote she had been stung with repeatedly in the Hole was like a white-hot fire burning beneath her skin, while the endless racking, burning, electrocution, beating and whipping had left wounds all over her body, healed only to the barest extent necessary. It had taken every drop of her resolve not to break over the last five days of interrogation, and it was only the dread of seeing her comrades and friends tortured here beside her that had kept her from giving in to the torturers’ demands for information.

She knew who was behind the attack on the Merotov garrison, of course; and, were it not for her present situation, she would have been celebrating the victory by the side of its main architect, her lover and second-in-command Faye Xiang. She could never betray the girl she had rescued from that brutal camp five years ago, that incredibly courageous and selfless fighter who had been with her through every step of her journey with the ASB. No matter what these Moravian bastards did to her, she had to remain defiant, to prove to them that the Adani Sem Bruni could never be beaten.

“You fucking bitch, you’re going to tell us what we want to know one way or another. We’re just getting started with your pain.”

Major Popov had stood up, leaving the electricity ripping through the searing metal in her breasts and private parts. He fastened a pair of manacles around her dangling legs and hooked a twenty-kilo weight from the center, dramatically increasing the strain on the girl’s impaled breasts. He took out a can of hot pepper and sprayed her in the face, pinching her eyes open with his fingers. Then he drew back his fist and punched her viciously, breaking her nose with a splatter of blood.

“Fucking cunt.”

He took a step back so that Lenkov could swing the baseball bat into her stomach once more, enjoying the low moan of agony it ripped from the young black-haired prisoner. The major’s hatred for April literally knew no bounds. The Adani were an inferior race: shorter in stature than the Moravians, black-haired and slant-eyed, of base intelligence and with an unintelligible, guttural speech. Slavery was their natural condition and any woman who resisted her station in life deserved the harshest treatment. Being no better than animals, the eastern whores required constant discipline to keep them in order. It was well-known that in the War of the Republics, Adani women had fought alongside their menfolk, a despicable and horrifying subversion of the natural order. They had to be taught to know their place and the lash was the only way to do so.

April was in too much pain to answer the major back as he leaned against the wall of the cell, watching the girl being beaten, whipped and fried at the same time. Private Morozov wielded the kamcha with brutal effectiveness, the hard leather cracking against the girl’s bare flesh like the shot of a rifle, the sound reverberating around the concrete walls of the cell. From the front, Lenkov varied the target of his blows, smashing the bat into April’s chest, stomach, waist, thighs and knees, which crunched sickeningly as her already dislocated kneecaps cracked and broke. The girl’s body swung back and forth, even with the extra weights hanging from her ankles, and the red-hot skewer in her breasts tore another few millimeters through her flesh.

From the adjacent cell, a piercing scream cut through the air followed by an angry shout from a guard and a hard thud of a truncheon on bare bone.

“That is from a slavegirl here in Voskova,” Major Popov said, lighting up a cigarette. “She was overheard speaking of the ASB by her master and he reported her to the authorities.”

He paused as another scream reverberated through the walls.

“I suspect she's innocent of any involvement with your group, but better to be safe than sorry. We’ll interrogate her here for a few months and then ship her off to some metal mine in the north where she can languish for the rest of her miserable days.”

He took the cigarette from his mouth and slowly pressed it into April’s armpit just before Corporal Lenkov hammered another blow into her chest.

“This is what you need to understand, April,” the major went on. “Your little rebellion doesn’t help your people at all. It hurts them. The more you annoy us with your antics, the more Adani sluts we round up and interrogate.” Another terrible scream rang out from the next cell. “Listen to her scream and remember who's responsible.”

April steeled herself to speak as the electricity continued to rip through her body.

“You’re responsible, you bastards. Fuck you.”

Popov’s fist hammered into her mouth before the words had even left. April’s head rocked back and her mouth filled with blood as a tooth came loose. She tried to spit out another curse but the man hit her again. Then Lenkov drove the butt of his baseball bat into her solar plexus and left her choking and gasping for air.

“I’m going to see the colonel,” said Popov to his men. “Keep working and when she’s taken a hundred lashes or so, pour some hot oil down her back before you continue.” He turned to the girl as she choked in helpless agony. “We haven’t even started hurting you yet, bitch. You have no idea how much pain we can make you feel.”

He punched her in the face one last time, barely able to control his anger, and then left the three men to their work. He heard the crack of the kamcha against her back, the thump of the baseball bat against her thighs, and the hiss and buzz of the copper skewers and rods as they fried her from the inside. A cry came from the girl as she recovered her breath followed by a snarl of hate from Corporal Lenkov. He closed the iron door of the cell behind him, and the sounds of April’s interrogation were drowned out by the cries of a hundred other Adani prisoners being tortured. Most of them would spend about a month on Block A being tortured all or most of the time, though they usually broke after a few days or a week at most. Once the Moravian Secret Service, or GKM, were through with them, they would be transferred to the general prison population where torture was frequent but less systematic. Then at some point would come sentencing: death, imprisonment, or hard labor. Of these, death was probably the most welcome.

He passed Liyang’s cell, the twenty-year-old camp escapee they had been interrogating for almost two weeks now. Her cell was empty but Popov found her in the torture chamber opposite, laid out on the tiger bench with her ankles raised high in bricks. Her interrogator was slowly pushing red-hot needles beneath her toenails, flicking each one from side to side as the girl wailed in agony.

“I just want names, Liyang. Give me the names of the women that helped you escape.”

The young woman shook her head from side to side, screaming for the thousandth time that day that she had received no help. She had done it alone and no matter what they did to her, she couldn’t tell them any differently. Popov shook his head with amusement. Some of these Adani sluts really were stupid. It was obvious she was telling the truth but that didn’t matter anymore. The GKM didn’t make mistakes and the girl would have to give them names if they ever wanted her ordeal to end. The longer she refused to cooperate, the more she would anger them. He imagined that once her case finally went to the tribunal, she would find herself with a long sentence in some hellish northern prison where the guards would torture her endlessly for their own amusement. There was a chance they could execute her, of course, but Popov suspected she was too pretty for that. They would prefer to make her suffer.

He left Liyang to her torture, making a mental note to see what happened to her after she finally gave her interrogators what they wanted. He strode off down the long corridor, ignoring the high-pitched screams for mercy that came from the cells and torture chambers on each side. It was a long walk to the research laboratories, which were situated in a separate building all the way across the sprawling prison complex. The mission of the scientists and engineers that worked here was to develop instruments that would make the job of controlling the some 30 million Adani slaves in Moravia as effectively and efficiently as possible. This included enlarging the range of tortures available to punish rebels and deter potential miscreants, finding ways to increase the amount of work they could be made to do each day, and pursuing methods to prolong their productive lives in the labor camps. It was the Kharzak research labs that had developed the shock collars that were a mainstream device for keeping Adani slaves in order and it was there that the stimulants that kept the women conscious for work or torture had been created and refined. The labs had also adapted the laser healing techniques to work more effectively on Adani women’s flesh, skin and bones so that more severe punishments might be inflicted.

When Major Popov reached the labs, he found the men and women hard at work on producing the pain serum for April. It was the first time the scientists had focused their efforts on one particular individual and they had had to develop techniques for analyzing the young woman’s specific genetic patterns and nervous system. Although they were getting closer, they had not yet made the breakthrough they hoped for.

“It will take longer than we thought,” Colonel Sidorov told his subordinate regretfully. “A few more weeks perhaps.”

“We need to break the whore faster than that if we hope to get the cell responsible for the attack on Merotov,” Popov replied.

Sidorov gave him an impatient look. “I am aware of that, major. Our only option for now will be to increase the pressure. Dr Kurganova suggests we flay her. She is confident the new generation of stimulants will keep her quite alert through the process and has volunteered to carry out the procedure.”

Popov nodded in appreciation. “I saw an Adani whore flayed once in a camp in Shilka. It was an execution so she did not survive, but her screams were certainly impressive while she lived.”

There was no more reason for them to remain in the labs, so the two men left the scientists to their work, promising all the resources they might need to finish the project more quickly. They returned to the interrogation block where they found April still hung by her breasts in her cell. There was an electric heater beneath her dangling feet and a tooth-crusher gag in her mouth that the men were periodically tightening to smash the enamel in her teeth.

“She showed no signs of speaking, sir,” Lenkov explained, referring to the gag.

“You did right, corporal,” Sidorov acknowledged. “Give the bitch another hour here and then we’ll move her back to the chamber. We're going to flay her.”