"If they're not yours, then who are they?"
It was mid-morning of the following day, and they were lying side by side on the hillside overlooking the beach. A fine haze of light rain swept over the area and drifted out to sea on the constant breeze that blew down the streambed to the beach. To their right a heavy stretch of forest obscured the ruins of the small seaside hamlet that had once lined the watercourse. The old slipway to the beach, once an asphalt drive through a small park, was now a crumbled mess of rocks and trees, and a small stream tumbled through the wreckage down jumbled rocks to the beach. It was a good spot for a beachhead camp, almost inaccessible for ravagers except through the broken wreckage of the old buildings or the stream. If you assumed this land was just the quick and the dead, you could make an easy camp here.
Which was what the interlopers below them had done. A ship lay at rest in the cove, a huge stern loading door open and folded down onto the beach, and two large gun-metal grey vehicles were parked on the beach above the tideline. A long wire fence had been hastily constructed between those vehicles and the forested edge of the watercourse, running roughly from the sharp incline of the slope below where Healey and his team hid to the precipitous cliffs on the northern side of the cove. A machine gun nest had been set at each end of the fence, and an open machine gun emplacement overlooked the slope down to the beach from the roof of each of the vehicles. The machine gun crews were the only people visible in the encampment, but there must be many more down there, hiding in the grey amphibious vehicles or below decks on the ship.
O'Connor had told him that the ship was a 'littoral combat vessel', which meant it was a ship designed for coming close to the shore and staying there, and it obviously belonged to some national military. A small gun turret on the stern overlooked the beach, it had two more similar small turrets at its bow, and the hulking grey mess of superstructure in the middle of the ship was festooned with the kind of radio towers and signaling devices one associated with military vessels. It flew no flag, however, and it and the soldiers and vehicles on the beach had no visible identifying markers of any kind.
"That's our radio then," O'Connor had said, "And I guess I know why we had a complete signal failure on our ship." When he saw Healey's questioning expression he elaborated. "This ship did some electronic warfare, I guess. So it could slip through the blockade. They must have hacked us, shut down all our signals, and we got lost in the dark."
Hence Healey's question, to which O'Connor had no answer. There were no insignia, and from up here they could not hear anyone speaking. Because of this Healey had decided they would not reveal themselves to the people below, and so here they remained as the minutes passed, crouched in the heavy brush that lined the old coastal path, watching the camp below and waiting for answers. Shell hung back in the deeper trees slightly downslope from them, keeping a careful watch for ravagers and now also for soldiers.
"Why would they do that?" Gazza asked in a taut whisper. He pointed at the strange cage-like structure in the middle of the beach as he said this, expressing the incredulity they all felt. A double-chambered, steel-floored cage sat in the middle of the beach, about equidistant between the two grey vehicles, a ravager chained tight to the floor in one of the chambers. It was an old one, the scarred, emaciated body and heavily-matted shell of hair suggesting it had been quickened decades ago. Its arms were chained to the sides of the cage and its feet manacled to the floor, only its head free to snap and turn. The cage was a strange shape, open without a door on the rear and facing another, similar cage through a shared grid of bars. The ravager was chained with its back to the open rearward door, facing the other cage.
"Research, I guess." Healey had been in communities who took ravagers prisoner, in the early years after the Quickening. They did it because they wanted to see how they behaved, or figure out how long it took them to die, or experiment with killing them, or use them as weapons. Whatever their reason, it never worked out. At some point somebody slipped up, got bitten or got a fleck of spit in their eye, and the community fell apart in a maelstrom of violence and panic. Tintagel had a long-standing rule that no living ravager was allowed inside the Battle Wall, and all bodies were disposed of immediately. Even Lily's wards were kept outside the Wall of Silence as soon as they were old enough to crawl, held in the beast pens near her hut. "Did UNIQA authorize this?" He asked O'Connor.
"No chance," the soldier replied. "We have orders to shoot and board any ship that tries to enter the zone, and to sink any ships that leave, no exceptions. Even humanitarian ships get the same treatment. To get a research ship in here would take years of debate, a UN resolution, security council agreement." He spared Healey a rueful glance. "Maybe you don't remember, but getting anything done internationally takes so long. And the UNIQA force would have to know, so we didn't sink it."
"Should we ask them?" One of the team asked, a young wildling spearwoman called Boots. "Maybe they can give us some stuff." He had noticed his team staring at the ship, which was the biggest thing most of them had seen that wasn't a ruined church, and almost salivating over the gear on display down there.
Healey shook his head, motioned for them to stay in cover. "Something's wrong here," he declared. "I want to see what they're doing with that thing before we move. And we don't want them to shoot us."
So they waited.
#
Not for long. Soon enough someone emerged from one of the grey vehicles, a person of indeterminate gender wearing heavy leather and Kevlar clothes and a helmet with a full face mask. They approached the ravager's cage from behind, set a case on the ground next to the cage, and stuck the ravager with a needle on a short steel pole, standing well back from it. Then they did something with small tubes that they took from the case, carefully checking each one and placing it inside the case.
"Blood samples," O'Connor told Healey, passing him a set of binoculars. Looking through them, Healey could see the person's gloved hands deftly plugging small vials into the end of the metal pole, draining heavy red blood into them, then capping them, wiping them and placing them in the case. Once they had collected a third vial the person messed around with the pole, swapping the needle at the end for a heavier, spike-like object, which they stuck directly into the ravager's spine. It screamed and snarled in rage, and a grotesque white-clear fluid began to drip into another vial. Healey handed the binoculars to Lily, who declined them. She could not touch anything others would use to her eyes, and stuck to their rules even when he, stupidly, forgot them.
The person snapped the case shut and walked down to the shore, washed their hands thoroughly in the breaking waves before returning to the cage. Two more people emerged from the grey vehicle, a man and a woman in normal soldier's fatigues, and crossed to the other vehicle, where they were briefly obscured from Healey's sight. After a minute or two they returned, dragging a thin, dark-skinned man wearing just his underwear. He screamed and yelled, although the wind carried his voice away from the beach over the open sea so that Healey and his team could see but not hear his protestations. He seemed to be limping, and had injuries on his face and back. The two soldiers dragged him to the second cage, confused and yelling, and even as they pushed him into it he did not seem to register the presence of the ravager, or to properly understand what he was being faced with. It was only as they expertly snapped the manacles shut on his left arm that he faced off properly with the ravager across from him, and understood what he was looking at. He tried kicking and fighting but one of his captors punched him hard in the stomach, and as he doubled over they rapidly chained his legs to the floor. Now he was facing the ravager, gasping and crouching in pain, and the soldiers shoved his free arm through the bars into the ravager's cage, one of them holding it firm above the elbow while the other sealed a manacle right above the elbow joint, chaining it tight to the cage so he could not pull it back. Then they stepped back out of the cage and stood watching as the ravager realized it had prey, and began snapping and biting at the arm. Healey thought they laughed and talked, nudging each other and chuckling, as their prisoner desperately tried to keep his arm away from the beast's face. He struggled for several minutes, flinging his arm around to stave off the inevitable, but the shackle held his arm tight to the cage, and he could only move it around in flailing circles. Eventually the ravager caught it with its mouth and began biting furiously.
The person who had been taking samples came to join the other two, the movement of their body suggesting that they, too were laughing, as the three of them watched the transformation take hold. The man collapsed in his shackles, his body wracked with tremors and shaking, and then with vomiting – first bile and then blood, his arms spasming and twitching as he lost control of himself. Healey closed his eyes, refusing to watch the too-familiar pangs of quickening, but O'Connor kept watching, staring horrified as the experiment took its course. In less than a minute the tortured man was gone, replaced with a screaming, freshly-quickened ravager, which surged to its feet and began hammering at the cage bars, desperate for fresh blood.
Satisfied, one of the soldiers walked to the side of the cage, drew a pistol from his belt and shot the old ravager in the head. It collapsed instantly, and once the soldiers were sure it was dead they set about unchaining it and dragging it away. The soldier in the full body gear picked up their case, walked behind the fresh new ravager, and began taking blood samples again.
"What are they doing?" Gazza asked in horror. "Why would anyone…?" He could not finish his sentence, instead looked over at Boots, whose eyes were shining with tears. She shook her head, unable to speak.
"Are they going to look for a cure?" someone asked.
"I don't think so," O'Connor replied. "Nobody would sanction this kind of research. I think they're looking for a weapon."