“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

Mahatma Ghandi, (1922)

The mind is a confounding city, its winding streets and elusive pathways full of subtle angles and quiet ways.

To a native of that city, the progression from one point to another is as natural as your name and you need no intimate knowledge to navigate a well-trod path to almost any destination that you are familiar with.

To a stranger, those ways are far less knowable and they must rely upon inference or supposition to chart your course in this foreign metropolis. The populus speak a dialect similar to the language of your birth, but one inflected with nuance or colloquialism that is sometimes intended to keep the outsider at a safe remove.

The degree to which you are welcomed by the inhabitants of that city largely depends upon the approach and intent of that engagement, as well as how you conduct yourself whilst a guest in their community.

Those that come with an open mind and in friendship can typically expect a warm welcome and the reasonable expectation of assistance from the locals should they become lost.

Those that enter the city with malign intent and seek to take that which is not theirs to take can expect suspicion and hostility as those resident come together to protect home and castle.

All of these things were fair and reasonable points and none of which worried Major Silak overly much at all.

The Torturer cared not for the sovereignty of the mind. In fact, her profession was dedicated to penetrating that city in order to wrest whatever prize that circumstance or her superiors required her to obtain.

Most people, when planning to take a city will naturally resort to strategies that favour more unsubtle and kinetic tactics such as direct assault or siege, seeking to batter the population with superior force and aggression or to deny the people the very things that they need to live and be vital.

Major Silak was not most people and, as one of the preeminent interrogators of the Tal Shiar, she knew that by far the most effective course of action to dominate the mind was to slip unnoticed through those foreign streets, moving unseen amongst her people, learning what you will and then using those subtle angles and quiet ways against  them to paralyze the function of the city until it was entirely under your control.

As she viewed Sub-commander Thecal on the monitor, as the Captain of the destroyed Romulan Republic research vessel Selquar sat as he had for days, restrained completely to a chair in the ominous interrogation chamber aboard the RFSV Rihanhansu, to look at him you would hardly think that the man had been tortured at all.

Silak smiled thinly to herself. That was ultimately testament to her skill as an interrogator.

A less capable (nay less imaginative) torturer would have typically resorted to brutality to wear the subject down first. A series of random and sudden beatings to inflict trauma and place the subject in a state of perpetual apprehension, never knowing when the pain would resume anew.

This would be followed by sleep deprivation and placing the subject in ‘stress positions’, designed to wear down both their mental resolve and physical endurance, leaving the subject exhausted and more susceptible to the regimen of questioning that would follow.

Whilst the latter was admittedly effective, the Major eschewed these techniques as those employed by the amateur, as she did of any contemporary who opted to traumatize the psyche through the employment of PysOps – seeking to undermine the morale of the mind through a never-ending assault on the senses by audiological and optical trauma.

Such techniques were undoubtedly successful of weaking the resolve of the victim, but Silak knew that the drooling wreckage that these boorish techniques produced seldom yielded a state of mind that was actually capable to imparting salient information of any real utility.

She regarded her captive dispassionately. She knew that not so much as a fingernail on the man’s hand had been violated, yet the man had undergone a regime of torture that was almost irresistible to endure and went far beyond the limits of any such coercion that she might be able to press from his mortal flesh.

Major Silak had entered the place where Thecal lived, where he felt most secure and inviolate and she had made her presence known as she trespassed his mind.. She knew what he loved. She knew what he feared. She knew the secrets of his childhood. She knew the places that he would try to flee to, when he became aware of her approach.

It was as she had told Commander Navain as she departed the bridge to return once more to slip unwanted like an eviscerating razor into the yielding tissue of his psyche, ‘Mind is the great lever of all things’.

As she took a moment to centre herself, gathering the resolve to do that which must be done, the Major reflected on what a contrasting experience it was to torture a person from your own species. There was a considerable remove that was ‘natural’, when applying the torturers ‘art’ to those who were not as yourself. A degree of personal detachment is of course necessary for those in her profession and it was admittedly easier to inflict controlled suffering upon one who you had less in common with and hence less reasonable empathy.

To torture a member of your own race presented no such remove. In fact, whilst some may find this familiarity more of a challenge, Major Silak actually preferred to work with fellow Romulans.

To inflict pain upon your fellow is to inflict pain upon oneself, existentially-speaking and Silak appreciated the subtly that such duality could bring to her work. It is said that torturers must be either psychopaths, sociopaths or something event worse to do what they do to another living being.

Major Silak did not shy away from the grisly practicalities of her work, as much as she did not deny the moral turpitude that such actions represented. To her mind, the effective interrogator must not blind themselves to any aspect of their work or its outcomes. An open mind was essential if one was to successfully defeat the will of another and  self – denial effectively blunted ones tools, as it were.

In the judicious and deft application of their art, the torturer must be able to embrace those parts of their own psyche that tend towards masochism.

To deny this meant to the interrogator would pass up the opportunity to definitively uncover the subjects deepest, most visceral fears and hence pass up the opportunity to identify and use such a lever to manipulate their subject and uncover the truth that was sought.

One of the advantages of torturing your own, is that inevitably you share some common frame of reference, the same ‘levers’ and once you understood what those were, the way to the truth was open.

So, as Major Silak entered the chamber, she was pleased to see Sub-commander Thecal physically flinch as he registered her presence. This was good because she knew that there was probably now not one subtle angles or quiet ways left in the city of his mind where her presence did not haunt.

This would make what was about to come so much easier.

“Hello again, Sub-commander.” Silak smiled as she stalked the chamber, stepping behind the bound prisoner and noting how he tried to crane his head to see her as she moved from his peripheral vision. This told her that every part of his being was terrified of her and what she might do next.

Thecal said nothing, not because of defiance (she had systematically purged him of that illusion) but out of abject fear. The Major was more than familiar with this state of mind, it was all part of the subtle dance between torturer and victim and one she would be able to exploit at her leisure, had she the time.

But time was currently her enemy.

On the dead planet below, whilst away team after away team from the Rihanhansu exhausted all attempts to open the command bunker that stubbornly resisted them in the planet’s frozen north, whittled down by the extreme cold, the toxic environment and the automated defenses that still stood their guardian watch after 10,000 years, and Major Silak knew that it was only a matter of time until the Federation and its allies came looking for the Starfleet vessel they had destroyed along with the Selquar.

The Bunker.

If what Silak had learned as the D’deridex had loitered unseen like a vulture come to pick at the Republic vessel’s own carrion feast, the summed knowledge accumulated by the victors who destroyed this world might lay locked behind those impenetrable blast doors.

As with the critical work being conducted at the Borg Reclamation project, the Romulan Free State were painfully aware of the fact that, if they were ever to ascend to the heights of power once enjoyed by the Star Empire, technology was the key to the return to dominance.

And on this dead planet, the secrets to War-without-end  might lie just beyond the tantalizing reach of her questing fingertips.

“I thought we’d try something a little different today?” The Major said, employing the kind of sing-song carefree tone with which your partner might use to suggest that you take the children to the park as its such a lovely day.

Thecal whimpered at this news and tried to squirm away from her voice, but his restrain was absolute and the action ultimately in vain.

Pretending that she did not notice, Major Silak approached the circular wall of the sound-proofed chamber and keyed an unseen control that caused a concealed hatch to hiss back into its recessed alcove and she took out what was hidden inside.

“Now, as a man of science, I’m sure that you will be as fascinated as I was by this particular specimen, professionally-speaking of course?” The torturer smiled pleasantly as she turned and approached holding a clear, plasteen cylinder carefully in both hands.

Inside the tube, a fluid sloshed gently against the confines of the cylinder and contained what appeared to be some sort of pale-mauve jellyfish-like creature with truncated tentacles that trailed below it as it floated within.

Sub-commander Thecal’s bloodshot eyes went wide in panic and a terrible, high-pitched keening noise escaped the man’s throat and told of animal terror.

Major Silak smiled blandly and continued speaking as she approached and set the creature and its enclosure down in front of the struggling prisoner, on a thin shelf that slid out from the opposite wall.

She drew on a pair of long gloves and turned her back to busy herself with the tank.

“As you can no doubt see, this is a member of the subphylum Medusozoan” The Major looked over her shoulder to smile at the gibbering Sub-commander. “It was discovered only recently by one of our own science – vessels delving into the wonders of the Shackleton reach.  Ostensibly it is a jellyfish, on the surface indistinguishable from any other marine creature of the phylum Cnidaria.”

She looked back to concentrate on what she was doing and Thecal was horrified to hear a wet, sucking sound issue, as if something was resisting being drawn from something wet.

“But what makes this particular specimen so uniquely fascinating, is the adaptations that have seen it evolve a particularly singular method of hunting and subduing its prey.”

Thecal made an indistinguishable moan as the Major turned to face him, the awful creating stirring limply in her gloves hands, leaking fluid on to the deck.

The torturers face was terrible in its mundanity.

“Most such creatures use stinging cells to inject nerve toxin into their victims in order to subdue them.” Major Silak smiled and related matter-of-factly, as if she was delivering a zoology lecture to a class of undergraduates, instead of slowly advancing on her victim with awful certainty.

“But our friend here has developed a method far more novel.” Her eyes held only monstrous, cold calculation that was at odds with her friendly smile.

“This creature is a touch empath. Upon contact with the skin of its prey, its tentacles release a nerve agent that acts to pacify its victim as it uses psychic resonance to draw from it’s victim its innermost fears. It then uses those emotions to subdue and hunt similar organisms, perfectly adapting itself into an irresistible predator for every new species it encounters.”

Thecal began to howl incoherently, but the Major ignored him as she advanced with the alien creature held out before her like some macabre-offering.

“In a short while, you and I are going to continue our conversation again, about all that you know about the Northern Command Bunker and see if there’s anything you might have forgotten to tell me about.” Silak smiled evenly, “But first I am going to give you a gift.”

She held up the quivering pyschozoan, so that some of the ichorous fluid that slimed its surface, dropped coldly onto the protesting Republican’s lap.

“I’m not going to take your mind from you, Sub-commander. You’re going to need that for what comes next.”

The torturer’s gaze was irresistible, even as the creature pulsed with awful life, just inches from his face.

“You see, I myself subjected myself to the creature just this morning, in anticipation of our little chat.” Her leaden words still conveyed that disquietingly open, affable quality, but now they conveyed terror. She laughed lightly.

“True, the sensation is a little odd at first as the bond is made, but I let the creature have its way and take from me something that I know that you find precious too, Subcommander.”

She nodded as she raised her nightmarish gift high above Thecal’s head, out of his eyeline. The creature dripped cold fluid down onto the top of his cranium and gaffe of an acidic stench like burnt-ozone.

“I let it feed on my memories of our homeworld as it once was. I gifted it the dream that was once Romulus.”

Sub-commander Thecal twisted and writhed in his seat to no avail, his voice croaked out a hoarse stream of tiny, broken “no,no,no,no,no,no,no’s”

“I’m going to give you my memories of our perfect world as it was before the fall.” The torturer assured the victim in his misery. “You’re going to experience our world as if it were alive and whole once more, it will be as if you are really there.”

She began to lower the pyschozoan, so that the creatures whip-like flagella suddenly quested hungrily for his face and neck.

“No,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no…”

Major Silak’s voice took on an awful aspect as the creature enveloped its victim’s head, completely enshrouding his contorting face and began to invade his memories with irresistible inevitability.

“I’m going to give you back our home and then I am  going to make you re-experience its destruction and the death of your loved ones, over and over and over, again and again until your mind can bear it no more and you come to finally accept the defining weakness & the blinded folly that your pathetic faction has infected our people with.”

“And then you are going to tell me all that I wish to know.”