From the BSTS he would be able to send data to aim and fire the weapon with the input of nothing more than a few coordinates, target radius, and photon stream power level. No place on earth would be able to trace where the photon beam had been fired from or by whom. It would become the perfect weapon and General Devin would have control.
He would have only a few more details to take care of once the BlackStar was launched and in orbit. The first would be to take care of the big mouth, Dr. Gimbel. There was no way he could let him get in the spotlight. He would divulge everything in his rush to gain glory.
Of course Devin couldn’t get rid of him immediately in case the BlackStar had a flaw and he needed the good doctor to come up with the solution. Once that was done and the BlackStar was in a stable orbit, the necessity of keeping Doctor Gimbel alive became null. He would become one more body buried out in the desert of Nevada.
Raymond was starting to lose track of the number of days he had been in the cell. He could no longer keep day straight from night and he was becoming more lethargic as the time dragged on. He knew he had to keep fighting it but it became harder with each passing hour.
He was lying on the mattress, trying to calculate how much time it had been when the cell door opened. Three guards came in the room and yanked him out of the bed.
“Now what?” Raymond demanded.
“Just relax and don’t cause any trouble and this will be over with before you know it,” the one he remembered as Jon said.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, but decided struggling would only get him hurt more and his ribs were still sore. It was painful every time he moved.
“Don’t struggle unless you want to get hurt again,” Jon said as the guards tightened their grip on him.
The third guard jammed a needle in his arm and he could feel the sting as the medicine raced through his arm.
“What the hell was that?” he asked but got no reply.
He could feel his head getting dizzy and within seconds he was starting to feel his legs getting rubbery.
“What was that…” he tried to say as the room started to spin.
He could feel himself slipping into unconsciousness. His head slumped forward with his chin resting on his chest. They dragged him over to the bed and laid him down with his arm stretched out to the side.
“Let get this over with. I don’t like this one bit,” Jon said.
“Me either but the general said to do it, so we’ll do it.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Raymond slowly drifted back into consciousness and immediately realized something was terribly wrong. He slowly raised his head off the mattress and felt a bolt of pain run through arm and smash into his brain.
He looked down at his hand and saw that a large ball of gauze was wrapped around his left hand. Now what had happened, he thought, trying to make some sense of what he was looking at? He was aware of pain radiating from his hand but it didn’t register in his brain. He could see that blood had seeped through the bandage in several places.
He shook his head, sending another jolt of pain up his arm. What the hell had they done to him, he wondered? He tried to sit up but the pain was too intense. Suddenly he retched, causing this hand to ache intolerably. He lay back down, spitting the bile from his mouth. What in God’s name had they done? He was afraid to move any part of his body. All he wanted to do was lie still and make this all go away, but it didn’t.
Holding his hand as steady as possible he forced himself to sit up and swing his legs to the floor. Carefully, he undid the little metal clasp that held the dressing in place and started to slowly unravel the gauze. The more he took off the more soaked the bandage became. As much as he didn’t want to know, he knew he had to find out what they had done. As he got near the end of the blood soaked gauze, his worst fears were starting to be realized. He could see that whatever was done to him, it was going to be bad.
He uncovered first one finger then the next, but no more. The last two fingers had been severed. He looked at his hand in disbelief. These people are crazy. What the hell were they going to do, cut him up into pieces a day at a time? Being held in the cell was crazy enough, but this. This was beyond comprehension.
He felt physically sick but fought it off. He carefully tried to place the bandage over the oozing stumps of his last two fingers.
They had been cauterized crudely to stop the majority of the bleeding. He almost threw up when he accidentally bumped one of his remaining fingers and it pushed against the stub of the missing digit. He was drenched in sweat by the time he had the bandage back in place as best as he could.
He lay back on the bed, holding his hand, wondering just how far gone the general was. Or was he the one doing this? Hell yes, he thought. No one else had this kind of power. The goons that had done this were just following his orders, not that it made his hand feel any better.
