Chapter 43
Gilded Husk
“Good morning, sunshine.”
The guard’s voice was grating, but sleeping in this cell was not so restful that Davik was all that opposed to getting up. With a grunt, he rose from the hard, plasticized cot that stuck out from the wall of his narrow accommodations. Though not narrower than he was used to.
Can’t believe this cage is bigger than my cabin on The Argent.
The lights in the cell never turned off, so he wasn’t sure how many days had passed. This was at least the seventh time he had been given a smarmy morning greeting, so perhaps it had been a week since his capture.
“I know I’ve said this a few times already, but I do really think I am entitled to legal counsel and a bath,” Davik grumbled as he hauled himself upright, shuffling the scant five steps it took to get to the door of his cell.
He complied with the expected routine. His hands went to the alcove in the door, the guard placed the manacles, and he shuffled to whatever room he was destined for.
“Well, you’ll be welcome to tell General Eklea all about that entitlement when you talk to him today,” the guard crooned in a singsong tone.
“I’m meeting with the general?”
Davik felt a swell of surprise and fear. Meeting with the general seemed odd. He had no context for what any of this meant. Maybe it was a regular occurrence, just another interrogation. More red tape he had to step through before he was shoved into a cryo pod for a small eternity.
The guard didn’t offer any other follow-up insights. He ushered Davik down the white tile hallways, gold signage guiding them towards the upper floors of the ship.
Something about that name … why does it seem so familiar?
The sound of his own cranium clanging onto the aluminum table was startlingly loud. Maybe all the jabs and jokes about him being thick-skulled were accurate. He was surprised he hadn’t left a dent in the metal.
The pain didn’t come immediately. It was just the shock of the sound at first that rattled him. All Davik had done was ask one question, and then suddenly there was a thunderclap from his own skull colliding against the table. A simple question, one that hardly seemed worth all the fanfare.
He just wanted to know if the general’s mother knew that she would give birth to such an ugly son of a bitch.
Oh, there is the pain.
Davik groaned as the flare of ringing agony began. First along a newly formed split in the skin of his forehead, then it echoed in the back of his skull where his brain had recoiled. It was nauseating. Bright sharpness followed by dull, deep soreness.
Davik lolled his spinning head back to face the man. He had a surprisingly svelte frame, considering his deep rumbling voice and uncanny ability to throw Davik around like he was a sack of potatoes.
It was less of a shock once he noticed the golden lines contouring the general’s pale and sharp-angled face.
It was the sort of augmentation that was a rung above the military grade in efficacy and potency, tech that only those in the upper echelons had access to.
There was no way of knowing how much circuitry and power lived beneath that gilded husk.
“You are severely misjudging your position here, son,” the general said with a chastising lilt to his voice.
“I’m kind of old to be your kid,” Davik grumbled. “I’m thirty, but, okay, maybe you’re just trying to flirt. If so, you’re doing a terrible job. I won’t call you daddy unless you buy me at least two drinks and—”
The lights in the room flared brightly, and it made him halt mid-snark. He wasn’t usually sensitive to light, but these were unusual circumstances, and he had a thoroughly tenderized brain at present.
Even the general seemed irritated by the interruption. He tapped his ear and spoke some fast, harsh words to a poor technician somewhere on the comms. It was hard to make out, but Davik picked up the phrase “useless shit” at least twice in the barrage.
“Where were we?” General Eklea drawled. “Ah, yes. We were discussing your significant lack of self-preservation.” He kicked his boots up on the table, the aurate accents on the lace rivets glinting in the now-tamed light.
“You have little attachment to your own life. It’s obvious in your behavior.
And that memento around your throat speaks volumes. ”
“Don’t pretend you plucked that from instinct and insight,” Davik said with a hoarse laugh. “You just read that off my medical history, you waxy psycho.”
Another loud clatter forced Davik to recoil before he could even register the source of the cacophony.
Thankfully, this time, it was not from his skull.
It was the sound of Eklea’s fist pounding into the table, leaving a dent the size of a frying pan.
Davik’s own skull didn’t make a dent, but Mister Anger Issues made one just by punching the damn thing.
Definitely augmented to high heaven. Holy shit.
“You are testing my patience,” the general hissed, a tiny blood vessel visibly pulsing in his temple near a hexagonal golden aug, likely a neural link or some fancy connector Davik was too low-class to recognize.
“Freeing a prisoner of war is an act of aggression against the Federation itself,” he continued.
“I am attempting to give you the benefit of the doubt to assume you are just a petty criminal, but that requires you to do what petty criminals do best: roll over, cut your losses, and shirk your loyalties.”
Davik rolled his eyes, a gesture that did not feel great inside his aching skull. “I already told you, I got hired by some TCIP die-hards to pull someone out. Didn’t ask a lot of questions. I just shut up and went where I was pointed.” Which was close enough to the truth, if lacking in specificity.
The general’s nostrils flared as he took a measured breath.
“We are the last thing keeping the settled worlds from being undone, entrusted with protecting the last safe harbors for humanity. And you freed a leader of unbound, militant non-humans. The ones who want to infest our planets and oust us from our homeworld.”
With a smug grin, the general pulled out a palm-sized datapad, summoning an audio file.
“Let’s drop the charade. You didn’t just break into some backworlds station to smash and grab.
You know this as well as I. This was precise, impressive work,” he said, a smile playing at the corner of his lips.
“We scoured every repeater, every junction, every inch of that station and every file from that night. There wasn’t much left.
But we caught an inbound stream. Just an echo. ”
The general pressed the play button with his middle finger.
“They are blind. Run fast and true, my little ghost.”
Fia’s voice. Clear as day.
That was what she had whispered into his comm right before he broke into the research sector. Her voice. He hadn’t heard it in so long, and every attempt he had made to suppress the memory of her — her touch, her kiss, her scent — it all unraveled.
“So, you had a friend. A sultry friend, it seems.”
The way the general said “sultry” made his skin crawl. He wanted to sink back into lingering on that moment, but the bastard just kept talking.
“We can drop the lone wolf farce. I will accept that maybe you were working for TCIP, but they’ve never pulled off something this elaborate,” General Eklea murmured, pulling back the datapad as he spoke.
Davik felt a cold hollow forming in his rib cage. Her voice was on that little rectangle of circuitry the general held in his hand. Even if it was just those few words, he wanted to hear her again, just one more time.
One last time.
“There was an interesting pattern to the data loss,” Eklea continued. “So, we analyzed the attack on our systems that night. It was almost organic. It was so odd. We had to bring in several specialists to figure out how it worked. You know who ended up figuring it out?”
“I have a feeling you are about to tell me,” Davik grumbled.
“It was a historical archivist. Some little bookish thing. Looked over the logs — or our significant lack thereof — and said it was, and I quote: ‘reminiscent of Sentu attacks from the Icthian Incursion’. Isn’t that just marvelous?
So, once you were turned in, the pieces fell into place,” the general hummed cheerfully as he pulled up another file on his datapad, making a pointed swish of his middle finger. “And what a beautiful picture it is.”
On the screen was a grainy image of Fia and Davik walking out of the bath house on Driska Station.
The night he had confessed to her his weakest moment. The night she held him until the world felt safe to return to again.
“So, little ghost, where is this guardian of yours?” the general asked as he opened a drawer beneath the table. “I have always wanted to analyze a Sentu. Perhaps you will be the key to finally getting my hands on one.”
The general’s grin was beaming, glinting in the light almost as bright as the point of the mnemograph in his hand.