Resists

AFTER FOUR HOURS of questioning the prisoner, Nyriss ordered Scourge to take a break. They left him in his cell, tied to his chair, neither of them speaking until they were outside in the hall and the door to his cell had closed behind them.

“How much longer will it take to break him?” Nyriss asked.

Scourge considered the question carefully before answering. Early in his training, he had shown a knack for torture and interrogation, skills the instructors had encouraged during his years at the Academy. He was an expert in the field; he knew that wringing information out of an unwilling source was about far more than just inflicting pain.

Apply enough punishment and everyone would talk, but most of what they said would be desperately babbled lies, evasions, and half truths. Without any way to verify accuracy, information gathered through torture was often unreliable and even worthless.

Effective interrogation was an art, and Scourge had an innate ability to parse fact from fiction. He knew what questions to ask and in what order; he understood when to ratchet up the intensity and when to pull back. He knew how to use the threat of pain and the reward of mercy to control his subjects.

His advanced techniques, combined with his ability to draw upon the dark side, allowed him to quickly dominate weak minds. Strong-willed subjects were more of a challenge, yet in the end he always got results. Until now.

Interrogating the Jedi had resulted in nothing but frustration and dead ends. His will was strong, as was his command of the Force. Even drugged to the edge of unconsciousness he was able to draw on it to help him endure the pain and the relentless barrage of questions. But there was something else, as well.

Nyriss wanted to know how he had escaped the dungeons of the citadel. She wanted to know about his relationship with the Emperor. She wanted to know why he had come to Nathema. On all those counts, Scourge had come up empty. Revan was resisting him, true, but at some times it almost seemed as if Revan himself didn’t know—as if the information had been wiped from his mind.

“We might be wasting our time,” he finally admitted. “His pain threshold is high, but we’re already at the limits of what a human can endure. If I press any harder, we risk killing him.” Scourge had seen it happen many times. Unskilled or overeager interrogators could easily push their subjects too far. In his mind this was the ultimate failure: you couldn’t get answers from a corpse.

***

Revan, Chapter 16