3. Ruinous Oaths
3
Ruinous Oaths
Ki’REMI
T he Perseus Prime was the crown jewel of the United Planets’ medical fleet.
The floating colossus of steel and precision was outfitted with the galaxy’s foremost advanced surgical, diagnostic, and emergency care units.
It was the most sizable and technologically state-of-the-art relief dreadnought in Pegasi; its sleek layout and cutting-edge amenities set a new standard for interstellar healthcare.
Every corridor and patient wing was crafted to foster impressions of well-being and healing.
From the bio-philic design that mimicked planetary landscapes to the ambient lighting that adjusted to circadian rhythms.
However, Ki’Remi didn’t give a damn about the aesthetics.
He was not one to be distracted by the sophisticated surgical suites, sleek trauma bays, and the best disease research facilities in the cosmos.
He also had no time for its chic, ready rooms and breakout spaces, nor for the officer’s quarters with their general sense of dissolute luxury.
The fact was he was most at home in a spare environment.
He’d worked in derelict hospitals on the edge of the globe, where he got acclimatized to the grubby, malodorous whiff of frustration and professional disappointment.
To him, the perfection of the Perseus Prime felt as authentic as any over-the-top cosmetic intervention.
The only things that mattered were the dreadnought’s reach as a hyperspace-ready fortress of science and medicine, the ever-changing challenge of new missions, and the caliber of care he now had the power to share.
Which he did with the utmost gravity and commitment.
As Head of Surgery, his standards were exacting, his expectations unrelenting, and he planned to run his department with meticulous perfection.
Today was his first weekly multidisciplinary case meeting, where teams of practitioners from various departments convened to discuss complex cases.
Every branch of healthcare converged to save lives.
Ki’Remi strode into the amphitheater chamber and found a seat in the far rear of the room’s tiered seating.
Sliding into the shadows, he crossed his arms over his massive chest, silent and watchful.
Eyes on each individual who filed in.
From doctors and specialists to surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, specialist nurses, and hematologists. Each with expert insight into all the varied races and species of the galaxy.
Also scattered among the group were social workers, physiotherapists, and dietitians.
They all filtered in, finding their places in the gallery setting.
Some faces were familiar, others new.
His penetrating gaze missed nothing.
He studied them, noting their demeanor, presence, confidence, or lack thereof, because a leader was only as strong as his team.
If he wanted his surgical department to run the way he envisioned, he had to understand the caliber of whom he was working with.
Just then, a figure slipped into the amphitheater, and he knifed up, sucking his teeth.
Flashing celestial eyes, golden curls pulled back in a loose bun, with a few defiant tendrils framing her high cheekbones.
Her white medic coat was open over a dark-fitted jumpsuit.
Her gait was effortless, exuding an easy, unbothered ease.
She slid into her seat with casual authority, nodding at her colleagues while setting up her case file.
Ki’Remi’s eyes narrowed.
She glanced around, then twisted in his direction as if sensing his scrutiny.
He sent out a meta-shield, and she relaxed and turned away, not seeing him.
Sawa .
He wanted to keep monitoring, unseen, from the shadows.
He flicked a command to his neural node, which lit up a data file uploaded into his neuro-vision.
His eyes swept across the interface, flipping through a growing catalog of case history records.
Each bore the same name stamped at the top in a tidy font: Dr . Issa Elaris .
He narrowed his eyes.
Her recovery stats were immaculate. Not just impressive, impossible.
He parsed over lists of patients listed as terminal, their cases complicated and beyond hope. Yet still, somehow, every single one was discharged within days.
Renal shutdowns reversed.
Massive internal hemorrhages stabilized.
Tumors that seemed to evaporate between scans.
He tapped a knuckle against his lip, jaw ticking.
It didn’t add up. Not by a long shot.
Her medical notes were pristine, too sterile. Her surgical logs provided only what was necessary.
The summaries were careful, polished, and efficient.
There was nothing to accuse, only a gnawing, gut-deep feeling that something wasn’t right.
Buried in the attached nurse notes and patient testimonials, he began recognizing a pattern. One centered on mentions of Dr. Elaris administering unusual treatment during post-op care.
None of it made sense, for much of it was incomprehensible.
Rapid changes in vitals following moments of her holding a hand.
Eyes glowing, just for a heartbeat.
The drone of energy that no one could explain.
He moved into the ship’s social accounts.
Tis where rumors swirled among nursing, junior doctors, orderlies, and mid-tier staff.
He found more casual references to phenomena ascribed to Dr. Elaris that some called her ‘miracle touch.’
Whispers of an aura.
Of patients claiming they saw visions when she leaned in to whisper to them.
A handful of medics even hinted, half-earnest, that she was out of this universe.
Super-freakin-natural.
Twas preposterous. Freakin’ mind-blowing.
Ki’Remi reclined back in his chair, crossing his arms, eyes still locked on the records.
‘She’s running some kind of juju ,’ he muttered. ‘Some unauthorized shit she hasn’t disclosed. The question is, why?’
He didn’t believe in miracles. He believed in medicine, complex data, anatomy, discipline, blood, and steel.
Above all, in non-maleficence, the oath to ‘do no harm’ and to avoid actions that could cause harm to a patient.
Whatever Issa Elaris was doing in the dark wasn’t in the handbook, and his duty was to get to the bottom of it.
Just then, his 2IC, Darin Trevayne, a Dunian surgeon with great experience and a man he respected, cleared his throat and kicked off the session.
After a few dull case presentations came the one that made Ki’Remi sit up and take notice.
‘Next: Dr. Issa Elaris, Neuro-Oncology. Presenting a patient diagnosed with advanced-stage glioblastoma intertwined within critical cerebral tracts. Dr. Elaris?’
Issa nodded to Trevayne and rose to take her place at the front of the room, standing before the massive translucent screen flickering with the ship’s logo.
She tapped her wrist holo, bringing up a 3D scan of her patient’s brain.
The display detailed glowing neural connections and the ominous dark masses cutting through them like shadows.
She introduced herself, her voice measured and crisp, before launching into her presentation.
‘The tumor has spread across vital neurological regions, making it inoperable by conventional means,’ she stated. ‘However, I propose an unmediated neuro-link procedure where I interface with the patient’s neural network in real-time. Allowing me to observe the pathways as they function and excise the mass with enhanced precision. There’s also growing evidence that direct-cerebral surgery helps with faster healing of the body, mind, and soul.’
A ripple of murmurs passed through the team.
Ki’Remi stilled, limbs freezing.
He waited for someone, anyone, to challenge her.
To call her reckless.
To demand an alternative approach.
No one did.
So he spoke from the shadows at the back of the gallery.
‘ Nada . There is no way this procedure will go ahead.’
The murmuring died at once.
Heads turned, startled at the sudden timbred utterance from the darkness.
Issa froze, her shoulders tensing before she tilted her head toward the sound.
Her eyes landed on him.
She arched a brow as a flicker of surprise went through them.
Followed by a dance of amusement.
‘Commander Sable,’ she greeted, the curve of a smile tugging at her lips. ‘Didn’t realize you’d graced us with your presence.’
‘Dr Elaris,’ he acknowledged, his rasp clipped, as he pushed out of his seat.
He strode into the light, remaining at the top of the gallery, dominating the room, arms crossed over his massive chest. ‘Interesting concept, but I won’t allow it.’
Both her brows now rose in bewilderment and curiosity. ‘Why is that?’
‘You want to link your brain to a patient’s live neural pathways while performing a high-risk excision,’ he growled, his timbre edged with steel. ‘Do you grasp the potential catastrophic failures that could occur?’
‘I understand them intimately,’ she intoned, eyes narrowing.
‘Then you appreciate why this isn’t happening.’
Her jaw ticked.
‘The neural interface would permit me to make meticulous adjustments in real-time,’ she argued. ‘No delay, no second-guessing. I would discern with precision what the organ needs before I even make the cut.’
‘What if something goes wrong?’
‘It won’t.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
She exhaled, frustration sparking in her gaze.
‘If a mistake happens, an autobot won’t be able to correct it in time either,’ she pointed out. ‘However, I will because I’ll have a direct consciousness and spirit connection. An awareness of the patient’s pain and pinpointing the exact location to alleviate their suffering.’
He jolted. The fokk was this mind and soul mumbo jumbo?
‘ Nada ,’ he bit out. ‘The universe’s most sophisticated drone does the cutting. You guide it.’
A tense silence stretched between them.
He sensed all eyes on them, swinging from one to the other, waiting to witness who would blink first in this battle of wills.
Issa’s fingers drummed against the dais, those astral-wild eyes of hers penetrating through him, heating him, scorching him all over.
She smiled, not with anger, condescension, or even disdain, just a slight upturn of those lush lips.
Then she shrugged like she let him win.
That pissed him off more than if she kept arguing.
‘Tis your call as Head of Surgery,’ she demurred, shutting down her holo presentation. ‘I’ll work with the surgical autobot.’
Ki’Remi clenched his jaw and sucked his teeth, eyes on her as she resumed her seat, that damn knowing smile still on her lips.
Issa eased into her chair and flipped a golden curl over her shoulder.
He lifted a chin to the administrator to continue the meeting and returned to his rear position, haunted by a gut-wrenching suspicion.
Twas surreal.
Hell, he couldn’t describe what she was making him feel.
He’d won the argument, hadn’t he?
So why the fokk didn’t it appear like a victory?
Ki’Remi was starting to think the universe had it out for him.
Every corner he turned on the Perseus Prime, all the hallways he crossed, each damned sector of this floating hospital, Issa Elaris was present.
Not in the subtle, pass-by-you kind of way.
Nada, twas in his face, or so it appeared.
She was everywhere.
In his estimation, what was worse was that she was infuriatingly appealing while driving him up the proverbial wall on so many levels.
Take, for example, patient-doctor relations.
Ki’Remi believed he was better focused when less emotional with his patients.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t polite, gentle, and assuaging of their fears.
He even made jokes.
What he didn’t do was play cards with them, sit around shooting the breeze, or challenge them to wheelchair races down corridors.
Issa Elaris did all of this and more.
He caught glimpses of her in the wards.
Once, crouched beside a wide-eyed child with bandages enveloping their small form, speaking in a hushed, honeyed tone that had them giggling through the pain.
The child lifted the tiny hand to Issa’s face and lobes, where she played with the doctor’s earrings. The woman in his purview beamed at her patient with such an open and warm smile that Ki’Remi felt a foreign tightness in his chest.
He sliced his gaze and strode away before she spotted him.
In another instance, he glimpsed her in the crew lounge, half-draped over one oversized chair. Bare feet tucked under her, sipping on some atrocious sugary concoction. At the same time, trading playful barbs with a table of nurses and medics.
She made people laugh with zero effort.
Not the polite, obligatory chuckles that passed for professional conversation.
Nada . Twas the kind that had heads flung back, eyes crinkling at the edges, and caused people to lean into it as if she carried the gravitational pull of a star.
Fokk , maybe she did.
Because people flocked to her like moths to a flame because she was ethereal, she moved with unearthly grace, and when she chuckled, twas whiskey-warm, rich, and fokkin ’ enticing.
She was so present and connected to the world around her that the Rider felt like he had been moving in slow, clinical detachment for far too long.
He also had a reason to keep a hawkish eye on her. Her casework was suss as hell.
So, despite himself, he shadowed Issa from afar under the guise of command duties.
Always hoping to catch her in the act of whatever celestial sleight-of-hand she was hiding.
However, all he seemed to observe was a woman in her full, maddening glory.
From her kindness when treating patients to her eyes, which seemed to hold the illuminance of endless galaxies in them.
He told himself he was hunting for answers, data, and proof of unauthorized practice.
However, he still jolted every time he bumped into her. Each freakin’ time he turned a corner, and there she was, leaning over a bed or stroking a patient’s hand in reassurance.
Sidling past him in the cafeteria, the corridors, and the surgical break room.
Hell, she was everywhere on this freakin’ capital ship that was almost half a city long.
Yet she never acted on their proximity.
No matter how often they bumped into each other in passing, how their eyes locked across a briefing room, and how thick the tension coiled between them in quiet moments, she never indulged it.
She just freakin’ smiled at him.
Beatifically.
Like a serene, untouchable goddess.
It drove him fokkin’ mad.
He hid it behind his cold, glacial mask, keeping it at hand length.
Never letting on, she was getting under his skin.
Then, there was the encounter in the lift.
He hadn’t even planned on using that particular elevator, but after another grueling surgical rotation, it was the fastest way to his quarters.
He stepped inside, expecting solitude.
Instead, he found her.
Issa was already leaning against the back wall, arms crossed, eyes closed in a rare moment of stillness.
The soft overhead glow highlighted the golden undertones of her complexion, the curve of her mouth, and the loose tendrils of riotous curls escaping her ponytail.
Her long lashes fluttered, and a brow arched when she sensed him, and their gazes locked.
Neither of them spoke.
A heartbeat. Two.
He dipped his chin in acknowledgment.
She lifted one corner of her lips with a crooked smile.
He clenched his jaw to stop from reaching for her chin and ravishing that mouth.
They stood in charged silence, the air crackling like an electric storm, until the lift hissed open again.
In walked Dr. Elias Rhoane, a cardiologist Ki’Remi had once worked with.
The intruder didn’t even glance at Ki’Remi.
His focus was all on the woman he found inside.
‘Issa!’ The doctor’s voice was all smooth familiarity.
Ki’Remi canted his gaze to the doors, but his ears were on fire.
Before he could even process the irrational surge of irritation burning through his chest, Rhoane attempted to wrap his arms around Issa from behind.
The cardiologist’s mitts splayed across her mid-spine as he attempted a lingering hug.
Oh, hell no.
Ki’Remi’s vision went dark at the edges.
He’d no reason to care. He was a man of logic. He didn’t do jealousy.
Yet, at that moment, a primal, savage part of him, one that he had long kept in check, wanted to rip the other man’s hands away from her.
To make it manifest that there were consequences for touching what did not belong to him.
To her credit, Issa didn’t melt into the heart doctor like Ki’Remi had seen some women do.
Instead, she sidled away from him, raising her palm to keep the cardiologist away as she clipped, ‘Eli, I note your greeting methods haven’t evolved.’
Rhoane fell into an embarrassing mess, covering up his shame with a chuckle, unaware that the atmosphere in the elevator was murderous.
The Sableman gritted his teeth so hard he nigh-on cracked a molar, resisting the urge to send out a cloud of metanoids to choke out the man.
He sliced his eyes to Issa and caught the slight upturn on her lips.
Like she sensed his ire on her behalf.
Which got even more under his skin, even as he churned at the lack of control over his usually tightly-held emotions.
He dreaded that he was starting to bump into her everywhere, anticipate her movements, and note how she moved through the world as it belonged to her.
Most of all, he despised the slow, creeping realization that he wanted her.
Fokk .
That was a massive problem.
Later that night, the Rider tossed and turned in bed.
A hallucinatory dream descended upon him like a rolling storm, folding over him, pulling him into its depths with a prescient, relentless insistence.
He was walking along a mountain precipice that overlooked a mighty rainforest.
The atmosphere was redolent with the scent of earth after rain, dark loam, and deep green canopies swaying with the breath of unseen winds.
Its vastness stretched into infinity, a primeval realm untouched by time.
Before him, the land sloped into a sea of towering trees, their gargantuan trunks wrapped in thick vines, their leaves shimmering.
The calls of concealed creatures echoed in the branches.
Beyond the endless emerald expanse, a sacred mountain rose like a titan, its jagged peaks crowned in mist, its sheer crags reverberating with power.
He soon realized he was not alone.
Three shadowed silhouettes strode beside him, matching his gait.
Their forms shifted like elusive wraiths wrapped in a diaphanous fabric, their shapes flickering between solidity and smoke.
They bore no faces or distinct features, only the substance of a monolithic, timeless, and familiar force.
For years, their presence lurked at the edges of his consciousness, whispering their riddles into the marrow of his bones.
They appeared to be leading him towards a glade at the cliff’s edge, bathed in silver moonlight.
As they approached, he realized a person draped in wild flora lay asleep in the grass.
His soul lurched in recognition.
Issa.
She curled within the embrace of the land itself, flowers bending toward her like devoted acolytes.
Lush vines wove delicate tendrils around her bare limbs as if nature sought to cradle her. The rise and fall of her breath was rhythmic; her distinct hair, a river of gold-dusted curls, spilled over the ground, catching the moon’s silvered glow.
Her skin gleamed like burnished bronze, kissed by starlight.
She appeared ethereal. Untouchable.
His chest clenched with a visceral pull to her, like a tether he couldn’t sever.
He slowed, and the three figures halted, eyes on him as he gazed at her.
One spoke in a rumble as deep as the shifting of tectonic plates.
‘We are your past, your present, your future.’
Another voice, wind through ancient ruins, and laughter beneath a blood moon followed.
‘She is also your destiny.’
Ki’Remi growled, fists clenching.
His patience snapped like a rusted chain.
‘I’ve had enough of your riddles over the years,’ he snarled, turning on them, his body coiled with frustration.
They’d traveled with him from Earth decades ago and never left his side, always urging, stirring, and pressing him.
He had a love-hate relationship with them, for their wisdom and concern carried him through some of his darkest days.
Yet they were an anomaly that his cold logic refused to accept.
‘I’ve had it of your whispers, your laughter, your unsolicited advice. Stay away from me. From her.’
The wraiths chortled, their amusement a ripple through the fabric of the dream.
‘We have always been waiting,’ the tallest one murmured, stepping forward, its form warping, shifting, expanding. ‘For her.’
‘Now she has appeared so that we may help her and indeed this universe at such a time as this.’
His vision fractured. Reality twisted.
The rainforest, the mountain, and the illusion shattered like brittle glass.
Ki’Remi woke with a gasped inhale, his chest heaving, skin damp with cold sweat.
The dim glow of his quarters on Perseus Prime greeted him, the familiar thrum of the ship grounding him.
Still, the hypnotic reverie he’d just experienced pressed on his mind and soul.
He swung his legs over the edge of his bed, running a hand over his face, willing his breath to steady.
His eyes flicked to the chrono, sighing.
He still had hours before his shift.
He fell back to his bedhead, staring at the ceiling, jaw tight, his psyche whirling with thoughts of Issa, his three unwanted acolytes, and their prophecies about her.
Trying his hardest not to decipher what he already grasped was indecipherable.