Inside a dimly-lit tent, the padded insulation of its walls smothering the noises of the battle raging outside, two figures sat on cushions on opposing sides of a coffee table. Between them had been spread a platter of snacks and two cooling coffees, none of which had been touched, although they did give some needed colour to the space and dampened the harshness of the interrogation.

  One of the figures was a man of hulking proportions in his early forties. He had a uniquely toad-like face, the bulbous, lumpy geometry having been only slightly beautified out of some prior moral commitment to aesthetic integrity. Across the table from him sat one of the stranger oddballs of The Empire: a Count with an androgynous twink build, wearing silken Japanese (or Chinese?) robes, his formerly arrogant, aristocratic features flattened from a recent traumatic encounter with that prowler outside hunting for his loot.

  Ash, the older and toadier of the two, had draped his arms across the table between the spread of food, his fingers clasping his interrogation subject’s girl-soft fingers while motes of Peopleworker energy flowed between them as part of his lie-detection magic. As an array of biometrics—heart rate, sweat rate, muscular tensions of the face—streamed through a sensory overlay, he’d been simultaneously reviewing a violent, shaky projection from the Count’s POV. Some prostitute, a deformed anime monstrosity, was haemorrhaging in the pervert’s arms while he wept obscenely. The footage seemed to disturb his subject, the Count craning his neck away, his eyes sealed as he distracted himself with the administrative closures commanded earlier in the footage by the prostitute’s killer. It disturbed Ash, too, for reasons obscure to himself, even though it was a far-sight more ‘hygienic’ than the gang hits he’d been used to dealing with.

  Ash, confused by the subject’s overreaction, entered his Mental Library and re-skimmed his profile. The story of the man’s devolution: a washed-up gamer turned investor turned pimp. Absent was how he’d come to style himself like one of the leads in a boylove anime – Ash, in his capacity as a Baron, had met the Count at various meetings, before the man adopted this avatar and the effeminate mannerisms. The tears, likewise, found no answer in the profile or this past.

  Maybe it was a case of a dealer getting hooked on his own supply, going insane after too much bingeing.

  Ash closed the perplexing footage and commenced his questioning, working from a schema he’d hastily drafted - they’d pulled him last minute for these interrogations from his real work.

  He put on a friendly but authoritative tone. "Well, Count, who do you think leaked the staff?"

  For today’s job, he would be interrogating the miscellaneous doofuses who’d lost their Legendaries before the battle even started, scavenging through their lies, omissions, and finger-pointing to determine how Crusadingintheshadows was identifying them amongst the mass of decoys. This pervert was by no means the only bungler. Ash, studying the current roster—three down already—extrapolated an exponential wash.

  “Could have been any of the people I paraded it to," the Count admitted without shame or enthusiasm.

  Ash’s expressional biometrics—the magical spiderwebs spasming between the man’s dainty nose and girl-plump lips—returned an inconclusive result. His personal judgment returned the same, this human side of intelligence outside of his forte. His talents were really, really being wasted in this assignment - he would’ve been more effective triangulating the reports.

  “Repeat the statement,” he said with a tone of misplaced frustration, “and please maintain ocular contact this time. For the improvement of the read.”

  The Count—rather than complying—withdrew a hand and held it palmwards to Ash’s face in a gesture of delay as he continued to message his subordinates. This movement, for all its rudeness, was suffused with an odd delicacy and refinement.

  Ash bristled. “I’d remind you, Count, that these interviews take priority over all other responsibilities. You have so far damaged the cause, but, maybe, through compliance, you might find some way to assist it.”

  The Count, snorting at both the reprimand and the exaggeration of this chit-chat’s significance, turned sharply to Ash and fixed on him a tired, intensely hostile stare. “I don’t know. I showed it off to multiple lackeys, and it could have been any of them. Are you confirming this? Now, hurry through the rest of your questions.”

  Ash studied as the magical spiderwebs mapping the Count’s features locked into a fifty-pointed polygon and pulsed a fluorescent green, confirming the honesty of the statement. He accepted this answer with a grunt and proceeded to have the subject list precisely who he’d flaunted the treasure to, along with any potential motives of each to sell them out – greed, insults, etc.

  The organisation as described turned out an absurd mix of investor syndicate, swingers’ circle, and personality cult, the Count encouraging his sycophants to leverage their real-life assets as they bought harder and harder into his crazy schemes. Having all gone broke when The Empire’s economy cratered, any one of them could have sold the intelligence. Ash mapped all these figures in his UI, constructing a sprawling, illuminated constellation of the group’s moral descent into high-stakes gambling and bizarre sex parties.

  "And where precisely were you when you showed off the staff? Is there any chance somebody outside your sphere might’ve seen it?”

  “Not likely. It was during an orgy.”

  Ash went wordless, his toad-face blushing at the image.

  “That is to say, a private setting,” the Count explained.

  “And…and…and the prostitutes couldn’t have leaked it?”

  The Count didn’t laugh at the tasteless joke but continued with some information prompted by an earlier interrogator on this topic. “There is, however, a chance that none of the crew are directly the informants. They could have bragged to anybody, just like I had. The intoxications of the boudoir stoke a…a tendency to indiscretion."

  Ash, at once perceiving the potential leaks expanding to infinite across this web of sex maniacs, felt a sudden crescendo of doom. The Count mirrored his negative expression – or so Ash thought, until his Peopleworker overlay pulsed an angry crimson and zapped him with a prickle of empathic irritation.

  "I do apologise for any redundancy.” Ash smiled placatingly. "Transcripts from earlier interviews were not provided to me. They want each of us to approach these incidents with fresh, unbiased eyes. Or with differently biased eyes. The theory is that the story may change across retellings depending on which of the particulars resonate with each of us, and maybe some of those particulars will lead to the informants.”

  He was paraphrasing the rationale of his director there, not his own. His boss, for reasons irrational to himself, had placed multiple investigators on each of these cases, each feeding up their reports for a comparative analysis. That task would normally have been assigned to Ash himself, more specialised in data than people. However, the present circumstances had somewhat lowered the agency’s trust in him – understandably.

  “That’s a waste of resources,” the Count observed.

  Ash felt an urge to argue back, but he was stopped by a sudden recollection from a module in his trainee days, when a female instructor had berated the class to never argue with a perp over the minor details, calling anyone who did a ‘rhythm killer’. An interview according to her should unfold like a joyful game of improv, a seamless series of ‘Yes, ands’ gradually leading the perp to talk themselves right into a noose.

  He rolled his eyes ridiculously. "Beats me too, comrade. Who knows what they’re truly thinking? There’s a lot of paranoia about. Maybe they suspect one of the agents would be a mole and cover any traces”

  The Count, recollecting a society function where their paths had crossed and he’d heard some gossip about the interrogator, replied matter-of-factly. “If that would be anyone, that would be you, right? Turncoat Keegan.”

  "I'm not a mole," Ash replied defensively, his prior training forgotten. "I haven’t given shit up to the enemy. This is the first I’m even learning about who holds what items - or held them. Plus, I think my being entrusted with this job is a sign of—"

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “I don’t care,” the Count interrupted flatly. "This ship is already sinking, whether or not there are rats gnawing in the hull. Next question."

  Ash—whose Peopleworker interface blared a high-pitched, tooth-aching whine to stop antagonising the subject—forcefully recomposed himself. He pulled up his interrogation schema and tried to read the next question, although the words didn’t immediately register. Thoughts clouded over them of anger at this hypocritical, weeb pervert. It was rich being accused of treachery by this scumbag, who’d bowed instantly to the enemy and was even now attempting to obey his orders to end the flesh trade.

  Tightening his grip on his subject’s grotesquely-soft hands, Ash stared unflinchingly, resisting his usual aversion to any form of direct confrontation. "Have you been in contact with any members of The Company, directly or indirectly?"

  “I just was…” the Count blanked out for a moment. “…with their leader.”

  Ash’s Peopleworker interface failed to assess this answer, the lines on the man’s face disintegrating in a grey tangle.

  He frowned. “Prior to that?”

  “No.”

  Up Ash’s wrists ran an electric jolt, which shot in milliseconds to his chest. He heard in his ears the phantom thumping of the Count’s heartbeat. The pace, starting from a spike, was descending at an irregular lurch, like a thief bounding down a staircase skipping several steps – the trace of a possible self-calming technique.

  Ash, his own heart leaping at that notification, grinned beatifically.

  Amazing. Old man Ash had actually just nabbed a spy…

  He leaned back in a posture of relaxed, amicable openness and—

  “Oh,” said the Count, reading Ash’s predatory turn. “Yes - I’ve been in contact with members of The Company, in the past, as part of various business dealings. We all have – you especially, Turncoat. But regarding any matters of the staff, no, I’d made no contact prior to…” He blanked out for another heavy moment, his eyes staring past his interlocutor.

  Ash—in an odd clash—felt the man’s heartbeat spike again, yet the electricity faded from the lie detection, which had only snagged upon a mere technicality.

  An amateur mistake. But, again, in his defence, this menial frontline work was not his speciality.

  He paused to recollect his limited training. The key with high-stakes treason was to focus on the expressional data rather than the electrical component of the lie detection, which was tuned to incongruities between utterances and avatar history. Any competent spy circumvented the latter mechanism by logging off to send their tips. Expression reads, in contrast, were harder for the agent to interpret but also much harder for a spy to falsify. They required continuous acting, and that had its own unique giveaways from regular emotions like delayed reaction times and reductions in verbal complexity.

  Ash tried from a different angle. "What is your opinion of The Company?"

  "Horrifying."

  Ash watched the facial mapping fail, the webs stirring for a second then collapsing back into a grey tangle, the utterance too brief to settle on a stable read.

  “More,” he encouraged.

  “Unstoppable. Inevitable. Ominous. Horrifying.”

  “Try explaining your opinion in full sentences.”

  “My opinion is that they’re going to annihilate us. My opinion is that they are going to annihilate us effortlessly. My opinion is that their annihilating us will render these interrogations meaningless. My opinion is that they are beyond my lowly opinion, like a blackhole or some iron law of the universe. Like gravity. Like death.”

  Ash detected no lies, although the sensory data remained fuzzy and inscrutable, the emotion simply too complex for his level of mastery. “Do you have any positive feelings for The Company?”

  “None.”

  There was no trace of deceit.

  "And what’s your opinion of The Empire?"

  "Doomed."

  Here, Ash’s Peopleworker mapping fixed instantly in an honest shade of green. The linework locked upon the Count’s gaze, staring at him unwavering, unemotionally, the thing said as if a physical fact, one known to every infant from birth in that same pre-knowledge primordiality as hunger and the aversion to the cold.

  This pervert, Ash realised, believed with his entire essence that their cause was lost. In one single encounter, in one act of mercy from Crusadingintheshadows, he’d cast their years of labour to the wind.

  He couldn’t believe that this spineless, disloyal sex-addict had been gifted a treasure so valuable.

  Ash—feeling a surge of anger—went off script to ask that question, which had been gnawing at him from the start. "Why do you think the King entrusted you with the staff?"

  The Count perceived the hostility but had no reaction to it. “At first, I thought it was a grand expression of approval for my business acumen.”

  “But not now, after losing it?”

  “Now…now I think Ramiro saw an easy mark, an opportunity to trade one of the less crucial items for another injection of pesos. You know, I bet my house on this? I’ll be homeless soon.”

  He glanced away to ponder this surprising fact, apparently only registering his material losses now. But, after a few seconds, he’d accepted that what was gone was gone, and he turned back to the interrogator staring at him so detestfully.

  “Do you need some time to calm yourself?” the Count asked without condescension. “I’d like to proceed.”

  Ash, not dignifying the insult with an answer, took a sip of coffee—offputtingly tepid—then had the subject repeat his previous statement for another round of fact-checking.

  He pressed forward with a speedy professionalism through the remainder of the interrogation. The subject confessed to having taken no defensive measures at the enemy’s approach, falsely believing that they would be a low priority relative to other targets. He confessed also to obeying the enemy’s orders against informing anyone of their conversation, putting the blame on a momentary panic and a conviction—which he still clung to—that it would have been pointless anyway, all help nearby slaughtered. The subject also confessed, prior to the attack, to have been misusing his time trying to have sex with his concubines but failing due to impotency; during this admission, the man burst into tears, most likely due to embarrassment. All of these confessions passed the lie detection.

  Ash managed to weasel out a curious point that was, according to the Count, missed by the earlier investigators. One of his confidants had braggingly alluded to the staff in the presence of other employees mere minutes before the attack, and an Arab member of the crew had managed to deduce the meaning before confronting him later. The Count felt that it was unlikely any of these had relayed his ownership for a bounty, given the tiny interval between that incident and the attack. Ash disagreed. From his own experience with The Company, they could transmit information across the chaos of the battlefield with alarming speed, Crusadingintheshadows reacting to it in seconds. The entire war machine was geared around this purpose, designed by the kid himself to identify targets and objectives, to categorise them, to quantify them, to prioritise them, and to funnel them upwards for his supreme attention.

  All throughout this questioning, the Count had maintained his sombre mood, speaking of his allies and The Empire like things already past. This defeatism irritated Ash, who wanted strongly to rebuke the man and make him aware that his personal losses bore no relation to the status of the larger operation. In fact, Ash felt the closure of his smutty business was a net positive. The troops could refocus on the battle, and The Empire could cast aside one of its seedier moral blemishes.

  To not stoke unnecessary resistance, however, Ash refrained from bringing up this point until the very end.

  He spent some UP, getting his Class to formulate the question impersonally, then read from it as if it were simply an addendum to his questionnaire.

  “Previously, your confidence in the West Bank operation was sufficient to invest financially, yet your current statements suggest a moderate decline from this position, a new belief that the reclamation may not play out as smoothly as planned. Could you quantify a…a strategic basis for this reversal of opinion beyond the personal losses? Are there some new dangers that we might flag for the awareness of command?”

  The Count’s flattened features, as he listened to this waft, contorted with a fleeting stir of perplexity. This question—the tone buried behind it—stumped him, for none of the other interrogators had taken the slightest issue with his pessimism. Except for the deluded gamblers like himself, few in the higher strata of their org had bought Ramiro’s insane promises. They’d regathered under his wing for more nihilistic reasons: because they, realistically, had nothing more to lose, because they were tired of hiding unwashed in the savannah, because they wanted to revel in one final, glorious bloodbath before the land they’d come to cherish was choked of its free soul by The Tyrant’s corporatist fist.

  It occurred to the Count that this bureaucrat may have been more of a degenerate than himself, maybe the most demented psycho on this battlefield…

  Bodies, bodies, bodies - the fortress air was thick with the visceral stench of the bodies. Soldiers, stripping the bodies of equipment and putting it back on, rushed around the broken palisades. As they hammered the walls and pikes back into place, they gathered the bodies and the sections of the bodies strewn about—some of the bodies their own—and fixed these about the fortifications for morbid decoration.

  Through their ranks and the bodies, their leader marched, waving a Lone Star flag smeared with gore. "Put’cha spine into, boys! Don’t a one of y’all so much as blink. Look hard upon the worst that boy could do y’all, and recognise how y’all are still standin’. How y’all are still breathin’. How y’all are still unconquered. How y’all are still proud, gun-totin’ citizens of the Lord’s last free state!”

  The soldiers lurched about him with exhaustion, their boots slipping in the mud of gore and dirt. Cleaved torsos and neckless heads with jaws still grimacing in pain were being hammered onto pikes. One naked man ran about giggling with a two-handed hook, which he used to dig through the bellies of the dead and splash their entrails onto the walls like wet confetti.

  “‘Victory or death’?” their leader asked. “No, boys, I want victory AND death! Look hard upon your corpse and know that it is goooood.” He shouted at one slacker. “MORE GUTS, SOLDIER! PASTE MORE GUTS TO THAT THERE WALL! Whatch’a think this is, son, a church? No sirs, this ain’t no church. The Rangers are gonna make contact with the Lord another way: the way of the corpse. Next sundown, boys, I’m tellin ya, we’re gonna have piled so many of these pretty thangs that we can clamber right up to them pearly gates, doff our Stetsons to Saint Peter, and give him a fiiiiiiirm, bloody-fisted Ranger shake!”

  One of the men he passed was squatting, arms wrapped around his knees as he rocked back and forth sobbing. Next to him, another was processing his formerly-discarded body, cleaving off its limbs at the joints with a war-hatchet. With each thumping squelch of the weapon, the weeper glanced over with renewed surprised, gradually made sense of the man butchering himself, and then blanked out to seemingly forget the answer before the next strike restartled him.