Chapter 45
Moral Code
Your brain is liquid. Can a brain do that? Pretty sure anything can liquefy with enough jostling. Maybe you can reconstitute it, like when you shake a jar of milk to turn it into butter. Oh God, please don’t even imagine shaking your head right now.
The sirens wailing overhead were not the most sensory-jarring thing Davik had to endure in the medic bay. The incredibly loud voices bickering nearby were far worse. There was some sort of disagreement between two rather important-looking individuals in Federation gold-and-blues.
While the pair were squabbling, all the medics in the room were frantically tending to other patients. Not the prisoners, but the Feds. There were at least a dozen uniformed bastards in various states of blood loss and visible viscera in the other beds.
Hah. Feds in beds.
Davik blinked slowly. He was loopy, but lucid enough to know that he was impaired.
Not lucid enough to understand why there were bleeding soldiers to his left and right, though.
It was unfair. They were not cuffed down to the beds like he was.
That seemed rude. He couldn’t itch his nose, and it was killing him.
He was tempted to ask one medic to itch it for him, but the nearest two had their hands full making sure the insides of the man they were working on stayed inside. And they were failing at that task.
Don’t think about noodles. Don’t think about noodles.
The impromptu anatomy lesson cut through the foggy haze he was experiencing. That, or his pain medication was waning. He slowly realized the situation unfolding around him was not routine medic bay goings-on at all. Something big, something violent or catastrophic, must have happened.
Enviro containment failure? Explosions? No, the alarms going off were different.
They were lockdown warnings. A prisoner escaped, maybe?
Was that him? No, he was squarely locked down and very far from escaping.
Were there any prisoners on the ship who could do that to the guy lying next to him, though? It looked as if he had been gutted.
His image in the mirror after having his face sliced open by Vek flared into his memory. The injury was not unlike the claw wounds he had. That realization made his limbs go cold.
For the sake of his rapidly churning stomach, he chose not to examine the man who was partially spilling onto the floor beside him. Instead, he closed his eyes and did his best to recall the interrogation from the night before.
The specifics were hazy, but the images and sensations were sharp. He could see in his mind the tray of implements the general had wheeled out. The cool dampness of antiseptic on his brow. The glint of that terrifying mnemograph. The feel of that needle as it invaded his body.
So many fitful, fruitless hours the bastard spent flashing images and searching for the right words to trigger the memory of a name, a location, or whatever he was seeking.
All in an attempt to pull truths about the Sovereign Fleet from Davik.
And Davik had no useful truths to give, so the general dug deep before realizing his search was fruitless.
Revisiting that moment was a stupid idea. The thought made his stomach turn again, and he battled back a severe wave of nausea that almost made him heave.
He did his best to shift his attention to something that wouldn’t make him ill: eavesdropping. The shouting pair had started to yell expletives at each other, so clearly, Davik was missing something interesting.
“—leaving them with no chance of survival, but no, you would rather save your own ass!”
“You shut your fucking insubordinate mouth, Leevon, and get them moving to the escape pods!”
The irate man, whom Davik now assumed was Leevon, gestured bitterly as he replied.
“The blood of every single soldier who dies on this ship because we fled with the medics will be on your hands, Colonel!”
The colonel squared his shoulders and set to priming his assault rifle. It was plasma-based, brutal-looking, and had few details in the matte black exterior other than the gas venting cutouts along the barrel.
“There’s no ‘we’. I’m holding the line, alone. Get them out of here, Leevon.”
Leevon paused, reaching forward to stroke the colonel along his cheek with the tips of his trembling fingers. There was a moment of tense understanding between the two, and then the colonel said something quiet, whispered, and forceful.
Tears fell, and then the two met in a passionate kiss that ended just as soon as it began. Davik wished he could make out their words so badly. He craned his neck off the bed and felt the pain pang along his skull.
It sent him reeling long enough that by the time his focus returned, it was just him and the colonel in the room.
The colonel was pulling the now-empty medical beds towards the door, making some sort of makeshift blockade. Davik groaned as a pang of pain lanced through his head, and the colonel jerked around to face the noise, the rifle aimed squarely at his head.
“Whoa!” Davik shouted. “I’m literally cuffed to the bed, calm down!”
The colonel took a moment to look him over, his eyes pausing on the very prominent shackles, and his shoulders sagged in relief.
“Apologies, you’re catching me at a touchy moment, kid.”
“Why does every Fed call me a kid? I’m halfway to the grave.”
“Because it was that, or prisoner. ‘Kid’ felt a touch less impersonal.”
Davik attempted to shrug. “Alright, fair. So, what are you doing here? Everything’s fuzzy, but it seemed like people were evacuating.”
The colonel finished pushing one of the med beds square against the door and let out a brusque laugh. “Someone had to hold the line while they made a run for it. So, I get to spend my last few hours here with the traitor. ”
“So, prisoner is impersonal, but you’ll just wheel out traitor all willy-nilly, eh?” Davik retorted with a dry laugh of his own.
The man shrugged. “It’s how my brain works. There’s those who are, and are not, traitors to humanity. Makes it easier to know who to shoot.”
“Should I be flattered that I remain un-shot, then?”
“You’re not really worth wasting a charge on right now. You look adequately neutralized.”
Davik tilted his head back and let out a light wheeze of air, not quite a laugh, but a rough sigh.
“Feels like it. Your general is really, really fond of needles. Pretty sure he took out the part of my brain that lets me do long division and took at least one of my rowdy teen years with him as a memento. I am thoroughly neutralized.”
The colonel took a few steps closer to Davik. His rifle wasn’t aimed at him, but he kept it at the ready.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Davik lolled his head up to stare straight at the man.
He looked eerily similar to Drey. The colonel was clearly older, though his hair was more of a coppery brass than the salt and pepper Drey had.
But they both had a square jaw and broad frame, with the same deadly inlay of black lines across their skin.
Maybe that was just what happened when you sold your soul to Sol. You just assumed the same vaguely scary shape.
“I mean, your general? General Eklea, or whatever? He has a whole little kit, likes to poke people in their noggin, scrape out what’s in there.
They call it a nee-mo-graph, or something.
” Davik attempted to pronounce the grandiose word as best he could, but his tongue felt a bit too heavy to do it right.
“Don’t know how useful it was, pretty sure I told him everything I had before he started, and he was just skewering for fun.
Added on some other cruel shit just for kicks, I guess.
Creepy prick, indulging in his own sick little—”
The colonel shook his head as he interrupted. “No, you’re confused. We don’t … We don’t do that. Not to our own kind, even traitors. We don’t cross that line. There are strictures we adhere to. You’re zonked.”
Davik snorted and spoke, his words slurred from the resurgence of pain.
“Oh, don’t even pretend you don’t know. I’ve got—” He looked down at his hands, wincing as he counted the bandaged digits.
“Let’s see. Three less fingernails than I did yesterday, and a new hole in my head.
You do do that. Maybe not you-you, but the capital-y You.
And based on the state of the other inmates, it wasn’t just with me. ”
The colonel stepped forward and looked at him. Truly, really looked. His eyes lingered on the bruises blooming on his face, the bloodied gauze against his brow, the tips of his fingers coated in wound closure gel.
“No … We don’t,” he said as he shook his head again, still incredulous. “That’s not—”
“Don’t act like you’re surprised,” Davik said with a weak laugh. “There’s a reason everyone calls the Fed a necessary evil. The evil part isn’t secret.”
“So, Eklea is a twisted bastard. If I live through this, I’ll gut him myself. We’re better than that,” he murmured, his eyes fixated on Davik’s fingers. Despite the confidence in his tone, he looked shaken.
He was so focused on studying the bandages that he didn’t see the small white bead of light appearing on the door behind them. An arc cutter, boring a hole no larger than a fist.
The colonel didn’t notice until the searing bright flash of a plasma charge flared in the room.
Davik’s entire world went a screamingly neon shade of blue for the faintest moment, and by the time his eyes had re-adjusted to the light, all he could make out was the silhouette of the colonel. He had his hands up, kneeling as someone in a silver-trimmed uniform cuffed him.
Then everything turned, twisted, and returned to blissful quiet.
Whatever the nice, blue Icthian lady in the silver mask gave him felt good. Real good. He was still in agonizing pain, but he also felt toasty, warm, and comfortable. And he was moving so fast, the doorways they were passing seemed to fly by.
Well, he was not moving fast. He was on a gurney, and the gurney was absolutely zooming. It wasn’t dissimilar to the one that he had found Vek strapped to when he had sprung him loose all those months ago.
“Oh my God, that is so ironic,” he groaned to himself. “Wait, no … irony is when it’s different, but wrong. This is the same. It rhymes. It’s … coincidental? That doesn’t sound nearly as cool,” he grumbled, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask.
His chauffeur seemed disinterested in his dilemma.
They just kept wheeling him through hallways and whispering something into their comm about a “Rescue Beta”.
He really hoped this was not a beta run of rescuing him, because that implied that this was not the real rescue, and he really would like to be rescued.
They rounded a corner hard, and Davik protested the lurch with a groan as his head lolled to the side. It made everything swim in the wrong direction, and bright flashing lights bloomed behind his eyelids.
“Sorry!” the very, very nice lady in the silver mask said.
She had bright cyan scales, but other than that, Davik couldn’t make out much other than her voice.
“That should help. We’re almost there, just try to keep your neck still.”
It was a request he didn’t have an option to comply with. He couldn’t move if he tried. His head was strapped to the gurney.
There was another hissing noise of an injection. He flexed his fingers and reveled in the sensation of sinking into hot, silky sand as whatever cocktail they gave him found purchase in his bloodstream.
Every time he opened his eyes, there was something new in his limited field of vision.
First, it was an elevator ceiling. Then, it was a walkway, as if they were going under a gantry in some large industrial space. Then, he was on a shuttle. An airlock. There was the telltale feeling of air pressure shifting, and it whined against his ears through his drugged glow.
Everything got terribly oily and hazy around the edges.
He swore he could hear his name being said a few times.
His eyes were so heavy. Someone wanted to talk to him, but they had chosen a terrible time to strike up a conversation.
He used up the last of his strength to raise his eyelids once more, and he could make out the shape of wide eyes looking down at him.
The same eyes he had first seen peering out of a cryopod in his cargo bay a year ago.