A thousand stinging bites like lying on a bed of fire ants. An uncomfortable formication, the feeling of those ants crawling under his skin. Crawling and biting. Lighting his nerves ablaze. He screamed in agony. It was unbearable. He dug his nails into his skin. Make it stop! Make it STOP! No amount of digging and scratching would stop it though. Because there were no fire ants.  It was all in his head.

“You can make this all stop. You can make this all go away.”

He heard the words, but he couldn’t see the speaker. In fact, he couldn’t see at all. The pain was too much. It completely overwhelmed his senses.

“All you need to do is answer my question.”

He couldn’t do that. He knew his duty, his responsibility. 

“I am a prisoner. My name is Jace Morgan. I am a commissioned officer in the United Federation of Planets’ Starfleet. My service number is…” 

But then the pain surged forward, even worse this time than the last.

It no longer felt like ants. Now it felt like a smelting pot had been poured over him, superheated molten ore running down his chest and back. But it didn’t melt his insides. It didn’t kill him. If it had, it would have at least ended this misery. Instead, it only felt like that way. In reality, there was no smelting pot. It was all in his head.

Is this what it had felt like for the Vorta when they pumped him full of psychoactives on Nasera? Was this the pain he had brought upon another living creature? At least that Vorta had at least been put out of its misery eventually. Maybe someone would do that to him now? To end it. To make it stop.

No! He was a Starfleet officer. He would resist. He would endure. He would escape.

But the excruciating, unbearable pain, it just kept coming, wave after wave. His parasympathetic nervous system began to overheat, and he started to hyperventilate as neurogenic shock overtook him. 

And then he blacked out. 

The room was silent.

Two men walked in. One of them was the massive hulk of a man from Piazza della Scala who had shot those two innocent officers that had tried to play hero. He carried a large metal table. The other was a lanky pale-faced scientist with disheveled hair. He carried two metal chairs.

“You really outdid yourself this time,” the shooter laughed as they arranged the table and chairs in the middle of the room. “That was quite a show.”

“This is the fun stuff,” the scrawny scientist replied. He walked over to the unconscious Starfleet officer, pulled a hypospray from his utility belt, and pressed it to the man’s carotid. With a hiss, a new cocktail entered Lieutenant Morgan’s bloodstream. For the next round of his ordeal. “They all break eventually. How’s Shafir doing?”

“Honestly, she’s just sitting there as if nothing is happening,” the shooter explained as he lifted Lieutenant Morgan’s limp frame up into one of the chairs they’d brought into the room. “Are you sure you didn’t go easy on her because she’s a cute little girl?” he asked as he shackled Morgan’s hands to the chair. “Maybe you should up her dose… double or triple it just to be safe?”

“My friend, if I dumped that much shit into your bloodstream, you’d be crying like a bitch just like Mister Morgan here,” the scientist laughed. “If I go any harder on Miss Shafir, it’ll likely kill her.”

“Do we really care?”

“Yes, we do. The instructions were clear. We are to get what we can from Reyes’ people, but under no circumstance are we to kill them.” The scientist had no problem with murder, but disobedience was a no go. He understood the logic too. Killing Morgan and Shafir would limit their options later, and so they had to be kept alive. For now.

“Their little investigation won’t accomplish anything. Honestly, this all just seems a bit silly,” the shooter insisted as the pair left the holding cell and began walking back down the hallway. “The die has already been cast. There’s nothing they can do to stop us at this point.”

“Mind your words and remember yourself,” said a pompous, self-assured male voice from the shadows. “The only reason we are at this point is because we take no chances and remain ever-vigilant. Is Lieutenant Morgan ready to see me?”

“He’ll be waking up in a bit, and he should be appropriately loosened up for you,” the lanky scientist replied with a smile. The counteragents in that cocktail would numb the pain to levels that would not send him back into neurogenic shock, and the psychoactives he’d layered in would cause disinhibition, dissociation and derealization. “Enjoy.”

“Oh I will,” said Commander Robert Drake, the Staff Judge Advocate for the USS Polaris, as he stepped out of the shadows.