Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

of course, with no time to think until much later. I take an instinctive step back, but they’re faster than I am. The nearer one stabs at me with a shock stick; I foolishly try to deflect it, and take the full discharge through my hands.
    “Freya Nakamichi-47, our brother Stone sends you his regards,” the second intruder recites formally, as I topple slowly backward, chromatophores flaring and motor groups twitching. “We are committing this delightful reunion to memory, so that he may honor you with his personal attention. In fact, he has arranged a festive party for you, and we shall be on our way there just as soon as we have prepared you for a trip through the sewers. Regrettably, he cannot be here in person, but we assure you that he will savor this encounter.” My skin crawls uncontrollably as if a thousand tiny spiderbots are running across it.
    "C’mon, Flint, stop poncing around and help me splice the cunt before she gets ’er fuckin’ legs back.” The gravel-voiced shadow with the shock stick has me by the ankles and is wrapping something around them.
    Flint sighs. “As you will, Slate.” I try to move my arms, but he’s too fast, and the two of them flip me over on my face and pinion me. Some reflex I don’t remember makes me try to tense my shoulders, but it’s too little, too late: My servos aren’t responding yet. “I think she’s coming round,” Flint observes. “Deal with it.”
    I manage to open my mouth, ready to call for help, but Slate stings me in the back of the head with fifty kilovolts, and I stop noticing things for a while.
    IT’S DARK.
    It’s dark because my eyes are shut down. Duh. And I’m lying across something uncomfortable and hard. It’s sticking in my back, and it’s hot .
    I try to open my eyes, and they respond sluggishly, burning in their sockets. All I get is a faint impression of brightness—I’m temporarily blind, my retinas overloaded. My skin itches, every ’phore burnished to its smoothest shining finish: I must look a sight; I’m positively chromed. How gauche, I think vaguely. When I try to move, nothing happens. Then I realize that I’m not breathing. Gas exchange with my environment has ceased. How odd, I puzzle. That must mean —
    Panic!
    I try to scream, but there’s no air, and I’m not equipped for vacuum: My electrosense is weak, designed for controlling home appliances rather than shouting across a noisy factory floor. But I am beginning to work out where I am. They’ve tied me across a hard beam—it’s under the small of my back, and my arms are immobilized beneath it. I try to pull my legs up but they’re tied to something else. I turn my face away from the heat and I’m rewarded by a flickering shadow against the burning brightness in one eye. The light level seems to be dropping. For a moment I was afraid they’d taken me out of the city and staked me out on the surface to fry, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. A festive party, they said. I listen, hard, hoping to hear some buzz or chatter of monitoring traffic, but there’s nothing. On the other hand, I can feel a faint, grinding vibration through the small of my back. As if there’s someone else on the beam— Pole? Rail? —I’m lying across. And there’s something else to cushion my head, something hard and flat.
    The white-hot glare is flickering faster now, as my overloaded eye responds to the slight dimming. I blink, trying to reduce the amount of light entering my pupils, and I’m rewarded by a hazy eyelash-obscured view. I’m lying on a metal rail, one of a group of bars lying parallel to one another. My head casts a long shadow across the nearest one. I must be on the surface, and my head is turned away from the setting sun. The craggy edge of a crater looms to the left of the rails. To the right, there’s a boulder-strewn plain. I tense and strain, testing my bonds. I know what they’ve done to me now, and it’s not funny, not in the slightest. I’m well