The floor was cold. Cold like the ocean. She recalled a memory. Floating in a great blue ocean. The sun falling beneath the horizon. the sky lit deep orange reflecting on the water. Serenity. Like her ship. Serenity. Like her mind. Serenity. Her nerves told her she was in a furnace, that she was being cooked alive, that her skin was burning off, but those nerves were lying to her. She knew that. She focused on the coldness of the floor to stay sane. This was all in her head. 

A lanky, disheveled man walked into the room. She recognized him. He was the enemy’s version of Dr. Hall, a mastermind of pharmacological misery. He’d visited her a few times since she’d come to be in this place. How long had she been in this place? She had no idea.

“My, my, aren’t you stubborn,” the scientist shook his head as he looked at her. “You could have just given us what we wanted. But no, now it gets far worse.” He knew what came next. Next the tortures of the mind would meet the tortures of the flesh. He leaned over with a hypospray. This would exponentiate her nerve receptors. He didn’t want her to miss the experience.

Ayala Shafir wanted to grab his arm. If she had the strength, any strength at all, she would have trapped it, pulled guard, rolled him, transitioned to mount, and unloaded fists until her knuckles bled. But she couldn’t do that. A neuromuscular blockade limited the action potential of her motor impulses. Her arms could do little more than flop around.

She heard the hiss of the hypospray. 

What awaited her next? Nothing. It would all just be in her mind. Or she thought.

Another man walked into the room. He was huge, seven feet tall and two fifty in pure muscle, the shooter from Piazza della Scala. But men like this didn’t bother her. They were just brutes. What would he do? Beat her? So what? They’d all just be stardust someday anyway.

“She’s all yours,” the scientist smiled sadistically.

The shooter pulled a pliers from his belt as he approached her and lowered himself to her level.

“What’s going on in that brain of yours, little girl?” he asked. He looked her in the eyes, and he placed the jaws of the pliers around the pointer finger on her right hand. 

Chief Petty Officer Shafir tried to pull away, but he grabbed her by the wrist. Her muscular function was so sedated by the cocktail in her bloodstream that she couldn’t resist. 

“All we want to know is why you were poking around in Milan? What were you looking for?”

Shafir just stared at him blankly.

“You don’t have to go through this, you know,” he said as the pliers began to compress on the metacarpal bone of her index finger. She had a pretty face and a lithe frame, and he was about to start ripping it into pieces. What a shame. “You’re just a pawn for Admiral Reyes. You don’t have to pay the price while she sits pretty up there. Just tell us what we need to know.”

Still she said nothing.

So be it, he thought to himself. With one burly hand holding her wrist, he squeezed down with the other. The fulcrum rotated and the jaws compressed. Her captor twisted and ripped and pulled. Ligaments tore. Bone cracked. Skin stretched.

The pressure, the tearing, the pain, she bit down and closed her eyes. As he just kept on torquing the pliers, she accepted what was coming. She knew how it would end. Her finger fell to the floor, and blood flowed from the empty metacarpal socket.

And yet still Ayala Shafir sat silent.

The man picked the bloody finger up off the ground. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” he scowled as he shoved the detached finger in her face. How the hell did he not get a peep out of her?

She just smiled smugly at him. Did it hurt? Oh god yes! It hurt like bloody murder. Was she on the edge of passing out from the pain? Absolutely. But she would not give him the satisfaction. So she just kept on smiling.

“You’re a fucking nutcase!” he screamed as he chucked her finger at her.

Feeling it collide with her chest, it made it so much more real. That was a piece of her. Or it was a piece of her. How many little pieces would he carve her up into before this was all over? It made her want to vomit. But no, she would not give them such satisfaction. In the end, they would all just be a million little pieces of stardust anyways.

“You say I’m a pawn,” Shafir asked, drawing herself into a duel of words to distract from her corporeal reality. “But are you any better?” 

The brute looked shocked. All this time not saying a thing, and now, after all that, her first words were will fighting words? How was she still fighting? Didn’t she know it was futile?

“All this and you’re nothing but a tool for someone else’s game,” Shafir pressed bitingly. She had no idea who her captors were, but she could deduce some basic facts from what she’d observed of them. “You’ll just be used until the day you are no longer convenient.”

“Isn’t that true for us all, Miss Shafir?” the scientist asked.

The use of her name caught her off guard. She had not shared it. In fact, she had not given them anything at all. Not even a scream. They had dropped Admiral Reyes’ name earlier too. How did they know those details? Had Lieutenant Morgan cracked? Or did they have another source of information?

“You suffer on others’ behalf,” the scientist continued. “But you don’t have to, Ayala. There is an easy solution. Just answer our questions, and all the suffering will be over.”

“Suffering? You call this suffering? This is but child’s play,” she scoffed as she raised her hand in the air to showcase the missing index finger. “Wait until the roles are reversed, until my people find you. And trust me, they will. And when they do, this will look like nothing. You will beg for mercy and tell us that you were just following orders, but we won’t care.” She knew Jake Lewis well enough to know that, whether or not she survived, there would be no happy ending for these guys, no comfy little bed in a six by eight cell. At least that gave her some comfort.

“You almost sound like one of us, Chief,” the brute observed. Her dossier had been a juicy read, especially the redacted bits, but even it hadn’t suggested just how truly psychotic she was now demonstrating herself to be. “You sure you don’t want to join our new world order? I think you’d fit in quite well, and it’s just days…”

“Now, now, my friend,” the scientist interrupted, stopping his colleague from oversharing. “Do you really want a shooter without a trigger finger? I’d call her damaged goods.” He started to laugh maniacally, all part of his attempt to get under her skin.

“I’m better without any of my fingers than you are with all of them,” she retorted angrily. “So you want to go for another?” She raised her hand with just her middle finger extended, and then she spat at the brute. A thick glob of saliva hit him in the face.

He was over it. His fist came fast. It struck her square across the jaw, jostling her brainstem, instantly turning out her lights. She crumpled over on the floor, unconscious once more. “Insufferable bitch. I’m over it. You sure we can’t just kill her?”

The scientist shook his head, and the shooter stormed out of the room.

Great shooter but such a temper, the scientist thought to himself. He approached the girl. She was actually pretty impressive. She’d hung on longer than he’d ever expected. Typically, only the Klingons lasted this long. He pulled out a dermal regenerator and sealed the stub where once her finger had been. He didn’t need her bleeding out. He’d have to kill her eventually for she already knew too much, but for now, he needed her alive.

As the scientist walked back out of the room, he wondered how things were going down the hall. Hopefully Commander Drake was getting further with Lieutenant Morgan than they had gotten with Chief Shafir.