The Five-Fingers, Pirate Salvage Vessel, Far Reaches
Keffa’s crush was on her bed.
Keffa’s crush was on her bed, and she was leaning over him, tending to his wounded face, and his burned eyes. It was horrifying what a stun gun could do to them, and upon seeing it she had resolved to avoid ever getting into that state. He was certainly blind, there were no two ways about it, but he seemed to be taking it as though it were almost some sort of cosmic joke being played on him.
It was possible that her crush might have cracked.
He was tough, too. Tougher by far than anyone else she’d ever met. Water poured from his tear ducts, trying to moisten eyes that would inevitably need to be replaced. It had to be agony, and yet when she’d offered him pain killers he’d gently refused them.
“There’s no point,” he said. He was just that amazing.
It was a pity that this was not the sort of circumstance that led to the wild sex in her dreams, but with the right bit of Corti medical treatment surely he’d be good as new and then who knew? He’d feel indebted to her, he’d invite her out for a nice meal, and then…
She was really glad that he was too blind to see the complete redness in her cheeks; pale skin did not do a very good job of disguising her more embarrassing emotions.
“I’m done with your dressings,” she said softly, so gently that she surprised herself. “You can just rest or sit or do whatever you like.”
Or do me, whatever you like.
“Thanks Kefani,” he said. He was as husky voiced as she had imagined, although the accent was sharp and took a little getting used to.
“Call me Keffa,” she offered. “Everybody else does.”
“Then thank you, Keffa,” he revised.
She almost melted. “You’re welcome. Sorry about the eyes… I mean it wasn’t me, but sorry anyway…”
Keffa had heard of babbling. This appeared to be it.
“Don’t worry about it, love,” he said, with all the world-weariness expected of someone who turned the galaxy upside down just by surviving. Calling her ‘love’ was certainly turning Keffa’s galaxy upside down. “Just the end of a very long day. I do intend to punch Darragh in the face when I feel better, though. I’d like him to know that.”
She giggled. That was also pretty new; Keffa was not normally the sort of girl who went into things like ‘giggling’ or ‘melting’ or ‘gushing’ or getting all flustered over a man. She hadn’t gotten all flustered over Darragh for example, but he was far more of a ‘boy’ than a man like Adrian.
“I’ll be sure to tell him,” she promised. Hell, she’d punch Darragh in the face for him if he wanted her to. She wondered if she should ask if he wanted her to, then decided it was much more likely that he wanted to feel the satisfaction of doing it himself. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
Adrian seemed to think for a while, tilting his rugged head to the side as he pondered. “Yeah, is my mate alright?”
“The Corti?” she asked, a little surprised that anybody would call a Corti his friend, but that particular Corti did seem unusual compared to the rest of them so maybe there had been something to it. “He’s getting treated by Darragh in the other room.”
His face shifted subtly but she knew that did not please him. After the stun gun incident she couldn’t blame him, but the Corti had needed medical attention and she was giving all her efforts to Adrian Saunders; Darragh could deal with everything fucking else while she had this moment.
“Sorry,” she said, “I’ll go make sure that he’s alright.”
“Thanks Keffa,” he said, relaxing. “It’s good to see that someone has their head screwed on right.”
+++++
There were three humans aboard this ship, which meant that Askit found that there was at least one more than there actually needed to be, and he was absolutely certain that that one was Darragh.
Askit did not like Darragh; aside from the fact that he had shot Adrian in the face and seemed to have no idea what he was doing when it came to rendering basic medical assistance, he also tended to moan a lot about how bad his life was.
“If it’s so terrible, why don’t you just leave it?” Askit had suggested, referring to Darragh’s life more than the spaceship, but Darragh seemed to take it as the latter.
“It’s not all bad,” Darragh conceded. “Even if Keffa does work me like a dog at times.”
“This dog is some sort of useless shit of a beast?” Askit asked, unable to help himself. Darragh could kill him with a single strike, but Askit wasn’t afraid of Darragh as long as Darragh was afraid of Adrian, and Askit had never seen someone more generally terrified of what Adrian might do to them.
“No!” said Darragh angrily. “A dog is a cute and lovable animal, they’re used on farms to help with the animals.”
“Sorry,” Askit said, faking an apology. “I must have misunderstood.”
“Yeah, well,” Darragh replied, mellowing immediately, “it’s better than working on the docks, which isn’t saying much.”
“I can see your point,” said Askit, and it was true; dock work was increasingly performed by robots as stevedoring became a thing for machines to do. Any place that used actual manual labour was not going to stay that way for long, and everybody with any kind of sense would find a new vocation.
“You know,” Darragh began, and Askit could see he was about to launch into a self-pity monologue, “when I left the dock work the first time, I thought I was going to be helping Earth found a new colony. That’s when I met Jen-“
Askit stopped paying attention. Absolutely everything else had become more interesting than this moping idiot, especially the woman who was now entering the room and cutting Mister Sob-Story off in the middle of what he was saying.
“A sight for sore eyes,” he said cheerfully. “Can she be as charming as she is timely?”
She stared at him, the usual reaction that people had when they were meeting Askit for the first time. He left an impression on people, although the largest one was inevitably on their bank accounts. He’d be stealing everything Darragh owned at the first chance he got, although he guessed it wouldn’t be much.
“You’re a weird one, Corti,” she mused. “Darragh, go fly the ship.”
Darragh looked confused. “But it’s on auto-pilot…”
“Then go watch the ship fly itself, it’s not that difficult,” she said more severely, and stood aside so that he could scramble out.
She turned back to Askit. “The best part is that this is his room.”
“I like you,” he decided. Her bank account just received a temporary reprieve. “How may this injured, yet still marvellously talented Corti be of service?”
“Adrian wanted me to check in with you,” she said, “he was slightly concerned about you being looked after by Darragh. Is everything… alright?”
“I told him how to fix me,” Askit informed her. “He was… adequately helpful, even if he does mope.”
“Well, he might have good reason for that,” she admitted. “He was involved in a fairly serious skirmish on some little world the pirates held before they arrived in Carltopia.”
Askit stared at her a moment, then he blinked. “There are several aspects to that story that will require further explanation.”
“As I understand it, some heavy military came in and hit them hard, and Darragh was amongst those few who managed to claim victory,” she said, although she didn’t sound as though she believed it much. Askit had no trouble believing any of it with the exception of Darragh fighting back, namely because people with serious fighting experience shouldn’t accidentally shoot a man in the face.
“And Carltopia?” Askit asked.
“An old asteroid base that a bunch of losers made their home. Apparently one of the commanders took control of it by killing ‘King Carl’, a human who… well, he abused his position,” she said, her distaste making itself very suggestive. “They took over the base, and the name has yet to be changed. I joined with them about two months ago.”
“And that’s where we’re going now?” Askit asked. “To this… Carltopia?”
“Eventually,” she said, smiling at something Askit undoubtedly had no idea about. “But we’ve got a salvage run ahead of us first, so there’s plenty of time to get to know each other.”
Askit thought about that. This human woman wasn’t so bad, but then there was Darragh. He didn’t particularly want to experience the joy of getting to know Darragh, he’d stolen a spaceship from him once, and later Darragh had shot Adrian in the face, and that was about all Askit needed to know. “How much do you normally earn on a run like this?”
“I’ve earned up to four thousand creds in profit on some of them,” she said, clearly pleased with herself. “Better than most.”
Askit locked eyes with her, and adopted a no-nonsense expression that allowed for no interpretation other than complete seriousness. “I will give you twenty thousand credits to take us directly to Carltopia,” he said, deciding that money was an excellent motivator in her case.
As it turned out it was.
+++++
Carltopia, the Outer Cluster
“Another fine haul!” Zripob exclaimed as he made his triumphant return. The Hodgepodge had been further crewed with the addition of Carltopian soldiers, which brought it up to about half of its full complement. “Seven ships in total!”
Chir looked up from the maps he’d been going over, a two dimensional projection of the nearest five hundred light years. It was marked with a number of yellow-green lines that indicated Celzi Alliance trade routes, as well as red dots that showed where Hunters had been encountered. The brightness of either showed how recently the pirates had been to each one.
“Any cloaking emitters?” he asked. The project to conceal the entire asteroid had come to a standstill without them, and it was no good just turning most of it invisible.
Zripob croaked irritably. “No, no cloaking emitters. The Hunters seem to have withdrawn from our hunting grounds. I do bring reactors, kinetics and supplies. You might remember we also need those?”
Chir felt his ears threaten to flatten as they had when he’d been chastised as a cub, but he made a conscious effort to avoid such a display now.
“I apologize,” he said. “There are many demands on my patience these days, and I should not have directed my lack of it at you.”
Zripob grunted as he sat down heavily into one of the war room’s many oversized chairs; this had once been King Carl’s chamber of ‘delights’, a place that only proved how far beyond redemption the oaf king had been, and it had quickly been scrubbed clean and put to better purpose. “You are forgiven,” he replied. “I’m well aware of what I handed over to you in this place and I know that I couldn’t have done the job half as well.”
Chir bowed his head gratefully. “Have you heard any news about… anything?”
“None,” Zripob reported. “But the humans continue their enterprise on Cimbrean. As you know, I like to make my return through that area and it looks as though they’ve made significant progress.”
“Do you think Darragh would be better off with them?” Chir asked. The human had served well on Cimbrean during the resistance, but it seemed the experience had cost him part of his mind. The arrival of Kefani Keil had seemed like fate, and Chir had packed him off with her in the hope she’d know what to do with him, because nobody else seemed to have any idea.
“I don’t know what will make him better off,” Zripob said hopelessly. “But he might be happier if we release him amongst his own kind. He can frolic through forests or whatever it is humans do when they’re not killing everything.”
Chir rebuked him on that. “You’re being unkind, Jen at least was never so violent, and quite frankly I doubt Darragh is all that inclined towards violence. He certainly got along well enough when he was working amongst all those other species.”
“Fair point, Chir,” Zripob conceded. “Not that I wouldn’t like to see Adrian again, if he’s even still alive-“
“Assuming anything’s been able to kill him,” Chir interjected.
“But it certainly makes things more straightforward when there aren’t humans making a mess of everything,” Zripob finished, looking only slightly annoyed at the interruption. “And yes, assuming anything’s been able to kill him.”
Chir stepped over to the window. This room was amongst the higher in the tower, and looked out towards a cavernous wall which provided absolutely no kind of view. But he was looking beyond that wall, beyond it and to the stars, knowing that somewhere out there were his human friends.
“I wonder if we will ever see them again,” he said, more to himself than Zripob, although the Chehnasho soldier gave an acknowledging grunt.
“It’s a big galaxy,” Zripob replied. “But I suppose anything is possible.”
+++++
The Five-Fingers, Pirate Salvage Vessel, Far Reaches
There was a certain amount of helplessness in being blind that Adrian did not enjoy. Also on his list of things that he did not enjoy was the inability to see, coupled with the continual stinging pain and itching. It had been two days and his sight showed no sign of coming back, and Adrian found himself becoming a little bit worried.
“You’re looking well,” Askit told him as he came for his first visit of the day. Adrian doubted that an hour went by without the little Corti coming to see how he was doing, and he was even more routine in that respect than the eager-to-please Keffa.
“I wouldn’t fucking know,” Adrian replied bitterly. “All I’ve got is pain and itching, although as of this morning there’s also a little light mixed in with it.”
“That can’t be a bad sign,” Askit said, “and the burns on your skin are gone, surely you can feel that? Oh, and I’m mending well, thank you for your interest.”
“Sorry, mate,” Adrian apologised. “The pain… it just makes it hard to think straight. How far out from ‘Carltopia’ are we?”
He’d been filled in on all the details of what had been occurring while he and Askit put life on pause, and a lot of it had been quite surprising. His old companions had secured an asteroid base from which their pirating operation had recommenced, and apparently this had involved killing somebody named King Carl. From what he’d learned from Keffa, this King Carl had been what Adrian would usually have like to have called ‘fucked in the head’, but Kaffa seemed like a nice sort of girl and he had settled with ‘total nutcase’.
“They say about two days, if that means anything to you,” Askit replied. “I’ve been thinking about other names for the place.”
“They’re not calling it Askitania,” Adrian told him directly, “and they’re not going to name it after you.”
“You don’t know that,” Askit replied defensively, although he didn’t sound like he really meant it, “and I was thinking Askitoria sounded much better.”
Adrian began to laugh. That was something that Askit persistently seemed to be attempting to get him to do. It hurt like hell when his body shook with laughter, but he was glad for the feel of it in spite of the pain, and he was getting good at ignoring it. Lately life had seemed intent on bringing his pain tolerance to an all-time high.
“You know, it’s possible they won’t grow back,” Askit said, far more seriously now. This had been a possibility in Adrian’s mind for some time, but Askit had not broached the subject before now and Adrian hadn’t wanted to think about it. “But the Corti have been abducting your kind for a long time. There’ll be prosthetics out there, and we could find some.”
“Fucking robo-eyes,” Adrian said in way of reply. He didn’t like the idea of it, and thought it had been bad enough to get the implants he already had. “That’s a bit fucking creepy, mate.”
“A man with burned out eyeballs has just told me that prosthetics are creepy,” Askit stated to the universe in general. “If only there was a prosthetic sense of perspective, perhaps we could give him that as well!”
“I’m good at healing,” said Adrian. “Fucking awesome at it, actually, and I’m hoping that that will be enough.”
“And if it’s not?” Askit asked more directly.
Adrian grimaced. “If it’s not… if they don’t heal, we’ll look into robo-eyes.”
“I’ve spoken with Keffa about this already,” Askit told him, “and-“
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Adrian rebuked. “This is my decision, and-“
“And we’re on her ship, going to her base, to deal with her people,” Askit replied sharply. “Askitoria has stolen some very good medical facilities, and Askitoria even has its very own Corti doctor servicing its needs. Apparently he came to Askitoria with the pirates, and has been with them for some time.”
“Stop saying Askitoria,” Adrian told him, although he was beginning to find it slightly hilarious to hear. “If you think that name is happening, you’re in for a disappointment.”
“Well, I’m hoping that the fine citizens of Askitoria disagree,” Askit said, delivering one last use of the name. “But that’s enough conversation for now, because it looks like somebody needs his rest.”
That was the beginning of a familiar script by now, one that had started the first time Askit had come to see him and had been revisited so many times that it had gone so far past being amusing that it had become a little bit hilarious again.
Adrian delivered his line. “But I’m already resting.”
“I was talking about me,” Askit finished, and left the room in his usual manner. That was probably the hundredth time they’d had that exchange, but it seemed like a thing fixed in place between them.
That was usually how it got with the people who’d gone through ten rivers of shit with you and made it out alive. You built little routines and traditions that kept everyone playing along, and maybe it let people remember all of the silver linings rather than the fucked up clouds. With the exception of Jen, it’d been a long time since Adrian had seen a silver lining in much of anything.
He was seeing one now, and he had to admit… it felt kind of good.
+++++
“I need to talk to you both about something,” Askit said as he re-entered the main deck area, although he primarily meant Keffa as she was the one in charge around here.
Keffa swivelled around on her chair to look at him. “You should be in bed, but if you’re worried about how far out of Carltopia we are it should only be-“
“You can’t tell them who we are,” he interrupted, delivering the statement with such certainty that it now had their full attention. “For our sake, and for yours, everybody must continue to believe we’re dead.”
“But Adrian has friends there,” replied Darragh in confusion. “They’ll want to know he’s alive, and I’m not sure how we can avoid that knowledge getting around.”
“We’ve used false-names before,” Askit said, taking a seat to get more comfortable, and giving himself an armrest to rest his broken arm. “We’ll use them again. I will be blunt, there are people who probably want us dead, and they’re willing to take great measures to make that happen. An entire Celzi Fleet was destroyed in the attempt, just because we were aboard one of the ships.”
“That was six months ago,” Keffa said, the disbelief in her eyes giving way to surprise. “You’ve been in stasis for that long, there’s no way you could know about that.”
“Unless they were there,” Darragh added, and proceeded to look very concerned. “How did you survive something like that?! I heard there was debris everywhere!”
Telling them that it was mostly a mixture of dumb luck and dumber luck was probably not going to be the sort of response that Askit needed them to hear. He decided to go with something a touch more impressive. “We’re just that good.”
“I don’t see a problem with people thinking you’re dead,” Keffa decided. “Only a problem in making sure nobody recognises either of you.”
“My face isn’t on a statue,” Askit replied dryly. “I doubt you’ll have problems with me, and fortunately Darragh has injured Adrian’s face so badly that nobody will recognise him if we cover his body with a sheet.”
“You want us to put him in a dress?” Darragh asked, sounding almost affronted by the idea. “A dress?!”
“What’s the problem with that?” Keffa asked. “I like dresses, but they’re not that useful when you’re working with hardware.”
Darragh looked at her as if she were completely mad. “Men aren’t supposed to wear dresses! They should wear trousers, or shorts on a day where the weather is quite warm.”
Askit cleared his throat loudly, neatly interrupting the pointless disagreement. “Earth clothing aside, you now understand the stakes. When you contact the base, use another set of names for us.”
“You were using pig-latin last time we found you,” Darragh recalled, surprising Askit with the sharpness of his mind. “Perhaps you could use the same ones?”
“No,” Askit said. “They’ll know to look like that. I was thinking of reversing the process, making me ‘Taski’, and Adrian ‘Nadria’.”
They both stared at him, and shared a glance with each other that was somewhat unsettling.
“You realise,” Darragh said slowly, “that those are both female sounding names?”
“But if we put you both in dresses,” Keffa said with a mad kind of grin Askit had normally only seen in Adrian, “then this terrible plan might even work.”
+++++
Carltopia, the Outer Cluster
“You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re a blind man dressing up as a woman so that people you’ve never met in a place you’ve never been don’t realise who you are,” Adrian remarked as he was led from the Five-Fingers. Keffa was guiding him along, holding his hand and staying by his side to keep him from going in the wrong direction, or from falling off the gangway that connected ship and base, but aside from that he was not in any kind of a good way.
“Try being a Corti in a dress,” Askit quietly replied, sounding as though he was loathing every second of it. “People are staring at me just for that. I told you all that Corti don’t wear clothes.”
“Yeah, but see how well it matches your eyes,” Darragh observed, failing to suppress his amusement. “And look at it this way, you’re probably the galaxy’s first cross-dressing alien.”
That didn’t seem to do much to placate the little Corti. “I look like an idiot.”
“You look fine,” Keffa said wearily; she seemed to have a low tolerance for whining, and that explained why she got along so poorly with Darragh. The boy seemed to take every chance he got to complain about one thing or another, but the last time Adrian had met him he hadn’t been anywhere near as bad. He supposed it might be that he’d come out from Cimbrean with a piece of his soul missing, and if that was the case there wasn’t much that could be done for him besides hoping it would heal over.
Adrian couldn’t help but join in, payback for all the sarcastic jibes the little Corti had sent his way. “I bet you look beautiful.”
“Yes,” Askit replied dryly, “truly I am the pinnacle of human attractiveness. Would you like some pointers? My first tip is-“
“Wear plenty of makeup?” Darragh suggested, rather wittily cutting him off. Adrian and Keffa both laughed, which gained the Irishman a few points in his favour; if he kept it up, Adrian might even pull the punch he owed him.
“I see you’re already well informed,” Askit shot back. “Perhaps you should have worn a dress as well? We could have all worn dresses!”
“I don’t like wearing dresses,” Keffa replied. “When I have to wear clothes it’s usually for protection.”
“When you have to wear clothes?” repeated Adrian and Darragh as one. Adrian didn’t know what Keffa looked like but from the strangled tone in Darragh’s voice it probably wasn’t half bad.
“Finally a voice of reason,” Askit approved. “There’s absolutely no need for clothing unless you’re somewhere dangerous or unpleasant. Just because your planet fits both of those criteria doesn’t mean that you need to go forcing your sensitivities on the rest of the galaxy, or on me in particular!”
“What about…” Adrian started, trailing off. He really wasn’t sure where he was going with that, he’d just wanted to say something to try to distract himself from the fact that an apparently attractive nudist was holding his hand and pressing her body now uncomfortably close to his.
He really didn’t have any kind of social compass for this situation, so he floundered. Fortunately he was saved by the sudden arrival at their destination, alerted to the transition from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ – who could really define which was which inside an asteroid? – by the change in what was underneath his feet. Where it had previously been smooth stone, it now felt like metal tiles.
“Here we are at last,” Keffa announced, slowing Adrian to a stop stepping away from him. “Doctor Gruznik is the only real doctor on the base, but he’s a Corti and he’s pretty good at what he does, aren’t you, Doc-“
She stopped as a sound of clattering equipment informed Adrian that something had fallen, but his sense of problems on an impending collision with his life told him that somebody had dropped something in surprise.
“Adrian Saunders…” said a voice that seemed halfway familiar, and that was enough to tell him that his pessimism had been correct. “Why is it always Adrian Saunders?”
+++++
Doctor Grznk was not having a very good day. It was true that he had gone along with his orders to keep an eye on the pirates, but everyone important knew that and as a result he was excluded from doing anything important or particularly difficult.
Unimportant and easy; that was how he liked it.
Adrian Saunders was not amongst those things that were unimportant. He was alive for starters, a surprising turn of events that was set against the prevailing opinion held by everyone who knew the name. He was alive, apparently blind, and accompanied by an injured Corti wearing a black sheet and looking about as displeased by this fact as it was possible to get.
Somehow the day had only gotten worse from there.
Grznk knew humans pretty well, or at least he thought he did after having put through all manner of unfortunate experiences just to keep an eye on some of them. He had come to know them as cunning, powerful, and often unpredictable, and all that lack of stability had made him long for another member of his own kind.
This Corti had made that feeling go away. Forever.
“Don’t bother with me,” the Corti had said. He was named Askit from what Grznk had divined, as he’d certainly not bothered with an introduction, and had proceeded to individually threaten every one of Grznk’s orifices with a sharp stick if he did anything other than fix the human.
Keffa and Darragh, on the other hand, had immediately closed his clinic without consulting him, and had then proceeded to give him a rushed explanation about lightning guns and eyeballs, and Grznk had quietly listened to everything they had to say because that was the sort of thing you did when you thought you were being held hostage.
“You’re Grizzles,” Adrian surmised from the chatter, and crouched down near where Grznk was. “I’m surprised you’re still with the group here. No additional orders yet?”
“Nothing but an order to observe,” Grznk replied, somewhat confused by the fact that the man who had previously abducted him was behaving with the most civility of them all. “I get the feeling that today’s report is going to cause a considerable fuss.”
“What are you talking about?” Askit asked. “What orders?”
“Grizzles here was ordered by the Corti Directorate to report back on everything he sees,” Adrian explained, turning to face the direction he inaccurately thought the other Corti was in. “He told everybody that much so that he would never be in a position where I’d have to kill him.”
“Then why have we come to see him?” Askit demanded angrily. “He’ll report we’re still alive!”
Adrian turned back to face in Grznk’s direction again. “He’s right that we can’t afford that, Doc. You can’t either. You can’t tell them anything about us.”
Grznk hesitated, but he was already willing to at least listen, even if he chose not to do as they said. He sighed in resignation. “I will need a very satisfactory explanation before I go against the orders of the Directorate.”
“Because if you don’t, it’s very likely that an army will come here and try to kill absolutely everybody,” Adrian explained. “They want me and Askit dead, but they think they’ve managed it. And if case that’s not enough, well… I’d like you to get me seeing again, Doc, but if you don’t agree to this I’m going to have to kill you.”
There was something cold in his calm words that made Grznk believe that whether he wanted to or not, or whether he felt gratitude or not, Adrian would kill him in a heartbeat.
It was a rather terrifying understanding.
“Well,” Grznk replied uncomfortably. “You certainly make a compelling argument.”
“Sorry, Grizzles,” Adrian Saunders apologised, an act that Grznk had not even be sure the human had been capable of, “but I can’t let everybody on this asteroid die just because you wanted to follow orders.”
“Well then,” Grnzk said, “you can stop calling me ‘Grizzles’ and get onto the examination table, and I won’t do anything that will get everybody – including myself – killed.”
He turned to Keffa and Darragh. “Make yourselves useful and help this man find the examination table while I prepare.”
He looked towards the other Corti, who had seemed to have taken up position in the waiting area. He was sitting on a seat and was lost in whatever he was doing on his datapad; Grznk decided to simply leave him be.
There wasn’t much that he actually required to perform a standard examination – the examination table was equipped with medical systems capable of doing most of the diagnosis – but Grznk was a professional and ensured he maintained a clean area. His patient may be a human and therefore capable of annihilating every bacteria in the galactic catalogue with his singularity engine of an immune system, but Grznk couldn’t consider himself a doctor if he wasn’t going to follow accepted procedures.
“This is not going to hurt,” he informed his patient as he took up position by Adrian’s head. “I’m running a scanner sweep of the damaged areas, and you may feel a slight pressure. Tell me if it begins to hurt.”
He doubted the human would even really feel it, but Grznk was not going to put himself into a position where he was accused of not warning somebody of certain risks. Especially not when his accusers would be more than capable of ripping off all of his limbs and inserting them in new and interesting places.
The medical scanner display filled with output, most of it completely incomprehensible jargon to anybody who hadn’t spent years training in medicine. It was Grznk’s job to interpret that jargon so that anyone, even humans, could understand it.
“I’m detecting high levels of your… condition,” he said, not willing to go into too much detail if the other humans did not know the story. “Tissue layers are heavily suffused and appear to be recently healed. Have you suffered any trauma recently?”
“I was blasted out of a spaceship in an explosive decompression,” Adrian replied. “And a black hole nearly ate me.”
Grznk sighed, looking up at the rather surprised and confused expressions of the humans standing nearby. He almost smiled at their apparent ignorance. “That would potentially account for it.”
There wasn’t much point questioning that sort of thing on the grounds of it being too unlikely to be true. This was the man who had blown a hole in a military starship, parked a ship inside of it, and abducted him while the crew completely failed to respond. That he’d survived the things he’d just mentioned was merely something interesting.
“I’m focusing on your eyes now,” Grznk said, adjusting the scanners. High levels of Cruezzir again appeared, this time mixed in with significant amounts of a mucus secretion. “Strange…”
“What is it?” Keffa asked, stepping closer but retreating as Grznk gave her a warning look. It amused him that in here their roles seemed so very reversed, but right now he wasn’t in a mood to toy with her.
“It’s strange,” he repeated. “I’ll need to pull away the cloth, Adrian.”
“I understand,” Adrian replied, gritting his teeth as if he expected some dreadful pain. Maybe he was right to do so, but when Grznk pulled away the gauze it didn’t appear to cause the human any more distress than he was already in.
The eyes beneath them were off-white, covered by a thick membrane slick with the mucus-Cruezzir secretion. “Very strange,” he said, and took a small sample into the micro-probe he kept ready for taking organic samples for deep analysis. It only returned information stating what he already knew it to be.
“I doubt this is natural,” he murmured so that only Adrian could hear. “Your body has raised a protective membrane across both of your eyes. Can you see anything if I shine a light?”
He used a small light that changed colours and passed it in front of Adrian’s eyes. Thus far he was keeping the others from seeing what he’d found, but this might raise some questions. “I’m testing for light perception,” he told them as explanation. It wasn’t exactly untrue, after all.
“Red, blue, yellow, green, white, red again,” Adrian said as the light flashed through red, blue, yellow, green, white and infrared.
“Good,” said Grznk, putting the small tool away. “There’s a good chance your eyes are healing.”
That seemed to relieve the human, but Grznk hadn’t yet given a full diagnosis. “Don’t feel too relieved,” he said, “I did not say that they are healing properly. To know that I would need to run more tests.”
Adrian Saunders stopped being relieved, swapping the peaceful expression for an unsettled frown. Grznk couldn’t blame him for that, there was still every chance that the human would need replacement eyes – something even Corti science had not yet fully developed for humans – and as he had almost certainly been abducted by Corti researchers any further tests would undoubtedly stir up unpleasant memories.
“What kind of tests?” Adrian asked warily, a slight edge of fear in his voice.
“The sort where you should be anaesthetised,” Grznk replied, knowing full well that this was effectively impossible in this particular patient’s case.
“Those sorts of drugs don’t work on me anymore,” Adrian replied, sounding every bit as worried as he should be. He knew just as Grznk did that what was coming wasn’t going to be pleasant.
“I know,” Grznk said. “They will hurt. Do you want to proceed?”
Adrian was quiet for a while, and for a moment Grznk began to think that he’d make the sane decision and decline. It might be a matter of days before he’d find out anyway, but it could also be much much longer.
“Seems I’m in a fucking hurry to find out,” Adrian said, his jaw set in a fierce determination. “Let’s do this.”
+++++
Askit focused on the work and not the screams of pain coming from the operating theater. The doctor was either very helpful, or he was very dead, and the two humans currently tasked with restraining the patient would see that justice was served. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t worried or disturbed, but he had detached himself from his emotions in order to make good use of his time there.
The doctor doctored and the hacker hacked.
Askit had recalled what Hrbrd had told him before his… misadventure. There had been an agent of his amongst the pirates, and now that he’d met with Grznk he simply had to make sure that that was the entirety of what was happening here. He didn’t trust his luck enough to go on assumptions or hope.
It had been brilliant in a way for Grznk to have told everyone what he was doing. It had initially prevented his masters from using him in a way that could get him killed by ensuring that nobody would ever put him in a position where he could be that useful.
It was a small act of rebellion and marked the doctor as an unwilling participant in the venture, but that would do no good if the master was truly the Directorate.
A particularly loud scream startled him, and he glanced up to hear Darragh’s lamentation about his broken nose. Keffa was unsympathetic and criticized him for not holding on properly.
Askit turned back to his work. At first glance from his received messages – unexpectedly unencrypted in another small rebellion – the Directorate had had nothing to do with his orders. It was almost completely certain that the one giving the orders had been Hrbrd, and both the style and tone of the messages had matched those in the few regarding himself that Askit had lifted from the dead Councilor’s account when he’d first been brought into the group on Cavaras.
That was the style of all of the messages from Grznk’s master, but the messages had not stopped when Hrbrd had been forced to flee.
And they hadn’t stopped when he was dead!
Now he was interrupted by a roar of agony louder than anything Askit had ever heard; so loud that he wondered whether a crowd would be gathering outside. It was followed by a weak wailing that he thought must be Keffa until he heard her – with unusual tenderness – suggest that Darragh ‘keep his junk out of punching distance.’
Askit couldn’t imagine why punching garbage would be so undesirable, or elicit such sympathy, except that maybe it was very unhygienic in an operating theater.
Once again he returned to his work. The messages from Grznk’s masters had not grown any bolder however, and so it appeared that the doctor was merely filling the role of an observer. Askit thought that was almost entirely certain to change if the Doctor was to let anyone know that he and Adrian were still alive.
It would be wise to ensure that that did not happen. If that happened there would be every chance of another Hierarchy member taking revenge – Thirteen himself was probably still out there somewhere – and it wasn’t possible to get lucky every time. Not when they’d barely been lucky enough twice already.
Regardless of what Adrian did, Askit would have to stay on the base until he was could be sure that they weren’t going to be sold out. Programs would need to be broken, and to be rewritten, before he could be satisfied enough to leave Grznk unsupervised.
“Askit!” came Keffa’s call, getting his attention for a final time. “I think you should come in here…”
That made him sigh. He already knew it was just going to be more trouble, just more bad news heaped on top of an already full plate of shit, and yet he was still going to go.
“Well,” he said to himself, “what are friends for?”