Chapter 13
Raymond Ginyit was feeling satisfied. His plans were working out. As long as he followed two basic rules, he believed his plans would always work out. His experiences supported this belief.
He reviewed the two rules briefly. One- Always have plans within plans. Two- Never tell people the truth unless it is to your advantage.
He had overcome the primary problem with continuous deception. People who lied regularly began having difficulty in separating fact from fiction. Ginyit had solved this problem by creating two worlds: The world of reality, which was cold, hard, and impersonal; and the world he presented, which was an array of twisted facts and misdirection. Because of his superior memory, he could easily remember what lies he had told and who he had told them to. His superior intellect allowed him to create seamless fabrications which did not conflict with each other.
The world of reality needed review periodically. He allowed himself to feel omnipotent when not making plans, but he knew intellectually he was still only human. It was time to make plans, and a hard, cold look at reality was necessary.
He knew he was a sadistic killer, a schizophrenic, and a genius. These facts did not bother him.
His parents had been small-minded, unloving, and cruel. They had taunted and mistreated him until the day they died. They had deserved to die. He had been called worthless by his father, weak and pathetic by his mother. When his mother was angry with him, she would lie to his father, and he would be beaten. He had learned early in life not to make his mother angry, which was difficult because she looked for reasons to be angry. His father was her weapon.
His parents had built their lives around anger and victimization. His father had lost countless landscaping contracts, not because of his alcohol abuse, but because his customers expected too much from him. They had been forced to flee Terra, not because of misspent deposit monies, but because the sinners of Terra were corrupting the family and were jealous of their religious strength. They hated the Terrans for forcing them to seek a life on a foreign planet and were certain Mars was the home of Satan, as did all members of the religious colony. Anger was a familiar and comfortable feeling in his home. Until his mother’s accident.
While feeding their three cows, she had fallen from the hay loft in the barn and her head had landed on a spike extending from the bailer. The spike had gone through her cranium, entering just above the ear, and out the other side, breaking at its base. Without losing consciousness, she had hitched up the horse and buggy and gone to the village doctor. He had done what he could, but medical supplies were almost nonexistent in the colony.
Ginyit had been in the colony’s school learning to fear God, and his father had been with friends drinking moonshine. Neither of them found out about the accident until they returned home that evening.
The wound became infected and she became sick. She was unconscious for days. Everyone was certain she was going to die and prayed for her. Miraculously, she survived, and, after four days, regained consciousness. Everyone said his mother had been touched by God, but Ginyit was certain it had been the devil who had raised her from the dead.
In retrospect, he knew intellectually the wound had damaged a section of her brain controlling inhibitions. Her behavior became completely unpredictable. She ate food at the market without paying for it and attacked people she disliked. She flirted with men on the street, and even in church. His father was advised to keep her home and Ginyit was taken out of school to help care for her.
Within a week of being taken out of school, his father began leaving him alone with her and would go out drinking with his friends. He left Ginyit with his mother for longer and longer periods of time. She was much larger and stronger than the seven-year old boy, and soon the torture began. She tied him in a chair and would not let him go to the toilet. When he finally soiled his pants she untied him and beat him, screaming he was an undisciplined sinner.
One morning, soon after his tenth birthday, he awoke to find he was now a different person. A shift had taken place while he had slept, sparked by the previous night’s beating. The young boy had been replaced. He was no longer afraid of his mother, and he was certainly not afraid of the occasional beating from his father. He no longer felt pain. When his mother had attempted to punish him for some imaginary crime, he frightened her with the look in his eyes. She never touched him again.
He killed a small cat a few weeks after his personality transformation. He hadn’t planned it, something inside of him had taken over. He felt powerful afterwards. Intellectually he thought he should feel guilty, but emotionally he didn’t. To hide the evidence, he had cut the cat up into small pieces and buried the parts in differant locations. A few months later he dug up the skull and took it home as a trophy, which he hid in his room. When he was twelve, he had started becoming sexually aroused at the cries of agony from his small animal victims.
Shelby Evans, the community father, the holy man of their small little colony (and one sick fuck himself) took a liking to Ginyit and taught him the art of Charisma. Evans was unable to have children and needed an heir, someone to continue leading the community. He recognized Ginyit as an exceptionally bright child and chose him, saying it was God’s will. Ginyit’s mother told him he could never lead the colony and would have to rely on her help. Ginyit recognized it for the manipulation it was.
As time passed and he gained Evans’ trust, it had been easy to slip poison into the ritual Sunday communion wine. The wine paralyzed everyone in the church. While they sat watching, Ginyit scientifically set the church on fire. Evans would never again sodomize the young children in the choir and his adoring flock would burn with him.
The church burned to the ground, killing everyone in the colony, except for three children around his own age, and his mother. Ginyit had killed his mother the night before.
He had made sure the three children were being punished and were not at the ceremony. The children were neighbors, two twin sisters and their younger brother. They were the only ones who had ever been nice to him. They had shared their food with him at school when he had none, and had never made fun of his intelligence like the other children. They had been worth saving.
They had also been necessary. Ginyit had started developing plans within plans and he needed someone to corroborate his story. They had taken the only ship the colony owned and left the planet, sending out a distress call on all frequencies.
Flying the ship had been easy, because Ginyit had read the manual and asked the maintenance chief all kinds of questions. With just the right compliments, at just the right times, the maintenance chief had been happy to provide answers.
After they were rescued and taken to Terra for physical and psychological evaluations, he had lied about his home life. The officials and psychiatrists knew nothing of his hatred for his parents, nor of his killing nearly the entire colony. The three other children described what they believed to be true, what Ginyit had set up through misinformation and manipulation. Everyone believed the colony had committed mass suicide and the four children had been expelled because they were “sinners” and “not pure enough” to be received by God.
His intelligence was recognized during the evaluations and he had been trained and educated at a special school for genius-level teens. No one knew of his love for torture.
When he was seventeen he had tortured and killed his first human being. He knew what he was entering into and did so consciously, experimentally, with no sense of guilt. He had studied the texts on serial killers under the pretext of being curious about the field of law enforcement. Torture and rape of humans quickly became his only sexual outlet, being far superior to the simple torture of animals.
They were onto him after his second victim. Though he had underestimated the forensics scientists, he easily eluded capture and discovered he enjoyed the chase. He began deliberately leaving a signature clue at each crime scene, a broken cross.
At age twenty-three schizophrenia had set in. He knew enough about schizophrenia to recognize the symptoms. The first symptoms to appear were instructions from God. Second, he noticed his already limited range of emotions and feeling seemed even further diminished.
The voices from God sometimes warned him of impending danger. At other times they told him to kill and inflict pain on others. The warnings had prevented his capture on five separate occasions and he paid attention to them. The messages to kill and torture were always a pleasure, and he considered them to be his reward for doing God’s work. He was unconcerned by his minimal feeling of emotions because he was no longer human. God had told him so.
He felt fortunate in not having the other classic symptoms of schizophrenia, such as depression, a lack of energy, or problems with concentration. Quite the opposite, at times he felt as though he could see the world with razor-sharp clarity, or focus his attention on a pinhead for several hours at a time. Ginyit was grateful to Evans for one thing: the Charisma training he received had included mental concentration exercises.
Ginyit knew exactly what medications would eliminate the symptoms of his schizophrenia. He was also aware of an operation which had successfully cured a number of schizophrenics. Those methods were not for him. Instead he chose to embrace his schizophrenia as a way of doing God’s work. He listened to the voices, but chose the advice and timing carefully.
Being a chosen one did not make him infallible, he reminded himself. And now was the time for clear thinking.
Three thousand kilograms of corbinite needed to be shipped to the Ek-clar station for transfer to its new owner. It was five days travel at fatal speeds to reach the Belarian rendezvous point. Who should he send, with Frank Meyer was dead? Javis would be an excellent choice. He was an experienced pilot and understood the importance of good security. Javis would need an addiction before leaving to assure his return. Perhaps a cocaine and ecstacy combination. Ginyit would have the doctor mix something up within the next few hours.
He had prisoners to deal with. The young girls were his, to torture slowly and at his leisure. They would make a refreshing change from the Pams who no longer brought him any true pleasure.
Christopher Black was Liechter’s until he completed his experiments and observations. Observations might go on for as long as a year. As much as Ginyit disliked the smell of Black (Ginyit firmly believed he could recognize an enemy by his smell), and wanted him destroyed, he was necessary for the doctor’s experiments. And last, but not least, there was the ambulance pilot. He would save her, change her, use her for a mission. Perhaps she would be difficult and he could enjoy the process of breaking her.
The bomb would be detonated in approximately three weeks. This was not his concern, but the repercussions would be to his advantage, creating chaos and distracting Terran officials. His ultimate goal was within his grasp. He had been manipulating and placing people for several months to gain control of Intergalactic Mining and eventually all of Earth. He would scour the Earth of sinners and, when the time was right, he would declare war on Mars.
Sharon looked at the unconscious woman lying on the jail cell cot. A lot had occurred in the last three days and it took all of her control to stay calm. She thought about what had happened.
Her father had purchased a new yacht and it had needed to be broken in with gradual acceleration for specified periods of time. The manufacturer had created specific guidelines for breaking it in; failure to do so would be shown by the ship’s data banks and void the warranty. Her father was insistent it be broken in properly, which basically meant no short little hops to Mars or Europa for a month or two. What was the point in having a stellar class yacht if you couldn’t use it? she had wondered at the time.
Her mother had come up with the wonderful idea of using the break-in process to celebrate Sharon’s birthday by going shopping and sunbathing on Valencia. Three of Sharon’s friends were also invited. Her mother had originally planned to go, but had canceled at the last minute because of a business emergency. Ann, one of the three friends, had immediately asked if her younger sister, Tina could go. Tina was fairly cool, for a nine-year old, and Sharon had agreed with a minimum of reluctance.
Sharon knew the captain and knew the rules. When you were on her ship there was no monkey business. You didn’t touch anything related to the ship’s equipment. You didn’t step past the threshold of the control room without specific permission from the captain and you never entered her cabin or, as she put it, she would have you keel hauled.
Sharon had looked the phrase up. It was a form of punishment from the old ocean-faring days and it meant to lower someone by a rope from the front of a moving ship, and then let them be dragged under the ship until they surfaced from the rear.
She had planned to ask Captain Jackson if she would be keel hauled with or without a space suit. It might have been fun if she could wear a space suit.
She would never be able to ask Captain Jackson the question. After they had stopped to assist a stranded vessel, Captain Jackson had been killed by a crazy woman.
Sharon became aware the woman on the cot was starting to stir. She was waking up.
Kelly woke up feeling nauseous and fuzzy. Where am I? she wondered looking around. My mouth tastes like dirt. I’m in some kind of jail cell. There are girls here, too. She could see them on the other side of the cell bars.
“You’re awake. I’m glad. We were beginning to worry about you.”
Kelly turned her head to find there were two girls in her cell. One was about the same age as the three in the cell facing her, about fourteen or fifteen years old. The one who had spoken looked to be about nine or ten years old and had short reddish hair. The older one had shoulder length, dark, curly hair.
“Where are we?” Kelly asked.
“We were hoping you would know,” said the older girl.
Kelly tried to remember what had happened. I was in the ambulance. We were going into deep space, to a station. We were chasing Apela and the corbinite. Javis was with me, and a man named Black. I had just set the controls for Space Station Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh was an outlaw station, outside of Terran jurisdiction.
Her anger with Apela had dissipated. She wasn’t good at holding onto anger. It just didn’t seem to be in her nature.
What had happened to Javis and Chris Black? she wondered.
“There were two men with me. Do you know what happened to them?”
“No,” the girl said. “You were the only one they brought in. I don’t know what happened to them. Do you know what they’re going to do to us?”
The chances were pretty high they would be sold into slavery. Kelly decided to remain silent about how bad the situation was. Five hysterical girls would be a significant distraction and she needed to remain alert, should an opportunity for escape present itself.
“My name is Kelly, Kelly Turner. I’m an ambulance driver from Corbin III. Who are you? And how did you get here?” Kelly asked.
“My name is Sharon,” the dark-haired girl answered. “This is Tina. And over there,” she said pointing to the three girls in the other cell, “is Ann, Gaby, and Juliet. We were on our way to Valencia for a two week vacation. We were traveling in my fatheryacht when we were boarded by a crazy woman. She had sent out a distress signal. When she came aboard she killed Captain Jackson, the pilot, and made us haul over a lot of corbinite containers. Then she locked us up in the rec room. The next thing we knew guards were taking us off the ship and bringing us here. We don’t know why we’re in jail or what we’ve done wrong. They won’t tell us anything and they won’t let us communicate with our parents. We’ve told them our parents will pay a reward for our return but the guards just laugh and ignore us.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong, and we will get out of here,” Kelly said, approaching the cell bars.
“Stop! Don’t touch them,” a girl from the other cell yelled. “There’s a force field covering the bars.”
Kelly stopped. She had no desire to get a force field shock. She would probably be batted back against the steel wall behind her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“At first we thought you might be dead,” said Gaby from the other cell. “I’m glad you’re not.”
Kelly spoke with the girls for about half an hour, asking questions about the guards they had seen. Information was minimal because the girls hadn’t been there very long. They thought they had only been there for about a day. It was difficult to estimate how long they had really been there, but they could tell Kelly they had been there for two meals, a sleep cycle when the lights were dimmed, and another meal. The girls were pretty emphatic about disliking the gruel. Kelly suspected it was high on nutrition and low on flavor.
The main door slid open and Javis walked in, followed by a guard in a gray uniform.
“Javis, what’s going on?” Kelly asked, confused by Javis’ status as a nonprisoner.
“What’s going on?” Javis asked tauntingly. “I’m out here and you’re in there. I’m going to be rich, and you’re going to become some kind of slave, although the specifics haven’t been decided yet. Maybe I’ll buy you and start a harem. Of course, you’d have to learn your place, but I think I would enjoy breaking you.”
“You were in on this,” Kelly said accusingly.
Javis smirked. “Yes, from the very beginning. Before Apela even arrived. You people were all so smug. Well, who’s laughing now?”
“But those were your own people. Your own staff who were killed. How could you?”
“It was easy. I simply selected the people on my staff I hated the most. I have been manipulating the schedule for the last month. Those people who died were the ones who deserved it.”
“Why? What do you mean? Because you didn’t like them you selected them to be murdered?”
“They were insulting. They didn’t show me the proper respect. Those were all the reasons I needed.”
“You’ll never get away with this. You’ll get caught.”
“No, I won’t,” Javis answered confidently. “They’ll think we’re all dead. The carrier pigeon I sent out was a mayday signal, with the wrong coordinates. I told them we had lost the trail and were under attack by pirates. And if they do find the empty pickup, they won’t be able to get any leads. Black, the idiot, let me access the computer. Ten minutes after we left, the force field came on. Ever try getting through a force field? It’s not easy. They have no way of tracing us. By the time they get any kind of search and rescue operation, the thermal trail will have dissipated. A smart move, for an idiot, following the thermal trail. I’m glad he won’t be around much longer. He was an insulting little prick, too.”
“What’s going to happen to Chris?” Kelly asked, suddenly concerned.
“Dr. Liechter is going to use him in some kind of memory transfer experiment. I don’t know what’s involved, but I do know Apela has turned into a raving lunatic, and they did memory transfers on her. They have her locked in a cell in the medical ward right now. She’s pulled out all her hair and won’t let anyone near her. When they arrived yesterday, it took six guards to pin her down. Two of them walked away with broken arms. Chances are pretty good Black will go insane, too.”
“You just came here to gloat, didn’t you, Javis?”
Javis smiled. “That’s exactly why I came here. I’ve got everything I could ask for. Women, respect, and money. On top of the bonus I for bringing in Black, Oliver Sven’s sappy wife paid me 60,000 credits to kill Apela. I won’t need to. She’s going to die anyway. And I’ll keep the money even if she doesn’t.
“Well, I’m done gloating and I have to be on my way. I have to get ready for phase two of this mission.”
“Phase two?” Kelly asked, switching from anger to concern.
“I think I’ll leave the question open. Besides, I might get killed if I told you.”
After Javis left, the girls had a hundred questions. Who was Javis? How was he involved? What was Kelly doing before she had been kidnapped? Who was Apela and who was Chris and who was Black?
Kelly felt emotionally overwhelmed, but she swallowed her frustration with the situation, and her irritability with the girls, answering their questions calmly.
After their curiosity had been satisfied she said, “If an opportunity presents itself and we have a chance for escape, I want you girls to be ready and follow my instructions immediately. If we get one chance and blow it, we’ll never get a second chance. So get it in your heads when I say "go", we go. No standing around looking confused. Okay?”
The girls all agreed.