The Spear Head

"I never signed up for this," thought the man, standing stiffly among a packed crowd inside a sterile, well-lit room.

He had joined the pirate crew barely three months ago, hoping for a fresh start after giving up on finding peace on his home planet. Now, he found himself waiting in line, waiting for a torture session dedicated to victims he had never even met.

He hadn’t done anything yet. When he joined, the pirates were in a quiet period between raids, gathering intelligence, waiting for vigilance to die down after their last attack. He had never participated in any crimes. Never killed. Never even boarded a ship.

Yet none of that mattered now.

As an enhanced interrogation specialist once said, the most painful part of torture wasn’t the torture itself, it was the waiting. The anxiety. The knowledge that pain was coming, but not knowing exactly when.