14. Garokk
GAROKK
I come back to myself on a bed of hot metal and old dust.
The lights are red—only red—strobing like an angry heart.
Everything tastes like iron and burnt plastic.
My throat is a furnace; when I try to swallow, something sharp bites the back of my tongue and I hiss.
Pain blooms along my left arm like someone is carving a map into me.
My skin prickles where the scales are singed raw, and beneath the ribs a phantom ache keeps time with a heartbeat I do not recognize.
I do not know what a day is. I do not know if the sun still has a sun. I know only that my lungs want more air than they get and the room smells like the inside of a machine that has coughed up its bones.
“Hey.”
The voice is wrong. Metallic. Small. Tentative. Familiar only because the sound pattern matches memories of comfort and annoyance and light that I once thought I could live without.
“Get—” I try to say it, but it comes out as a rasp and a curse. My mouth is lead. The word fractures.
“Easy,” the voice says. “Easy, Garokk. You are alive.”
Reflector’s voice—mangled, rewired, scraping the edges of its original timbre—sputters from somewhere over my shoulder.
He looks like a bird that’s been put back together by a mechanic who hates birds.
His shell is scorched; one optic is a raw circle of glass, the other blinks weakly like a dying star.
His manipulators are frayed and jury-rigged with bits of insulation and a strip of red holo-tape that reads: PROPERTY OF IZZY D.
He’s patched himself into an emergency terminal, cradled against a downed conduit, and he is doing that stupid little orbit he always does when he’s nervous.
“Reflector,” I gasp. “What are you doing here? You should be protecting Isolde.”
“I am,” Reflector says.
“Reflector…I’m looking right at you. Are your circuits that sizzled?”
“Allow me to explain,” Reflector says. “The quantum field that permeates reality and keeps it functioning with what passes for stability from your perceptions was weakened when the Hulk’s superluminal drive sent a soft ‘pulse’ of Norven-Radd radiation, a pulse that is more aptly referred to as…”
He loses me completely. I studied superluminal drives during my basic training--all recruits are required to learn about the tech that keeps us alive and mobile--but he starts spouting physics that’s beyond my pay grade. I do manage to translate some of it, though.
“...which resulted in a quantumly-entangled duplicate of both my artificial intelligence matrix and my physical casing, resulting in my being, for all intents and purposes, in two places at once.”
He sits quietly for a moment, then--
“Did you understand all of that, Garokk?”
“Of course I did,” I snap. “You’re not dealing with just any moron! There are two of you now, right?”
“Not precisely. It would be more accurate to say that my consciousness has been temporarily--”
“I’m going to run with the idea that there’s two of you, one with Isolde and one with me, to preserve my sanity.”
“As you like, Mr. Garokk,” he replies, seeming somewhat disappointed. I think the bot likes to ramble and sound smart. Well, there’s plenty of organic beings with that same idea. The only problem is his vocal output is way too high for the head-hammering migraine I have right now.
“You’re going to need to be quieter than that,” I croak. My voice is foreign—low and rough, like stones grinding. “Which deck is this?”
Reflector buzzes, pulls a little closer and I taste the singe of his inner processors—hot smoke and the metallic sweetness of displaced circuitry.
“You were flung to emergency deck four when the surge hit,” he says.
“I—I dragged you into an air pocket. You were unresponsive for—data corrupted—estimation: three days. Possibly longer. The mainframe—” He twitches.
“The ship’s AI core is critical. Many subsystems failed. Propulsion remains. We are adrift.”
Adrift. I pull that word up like a hook and feel the cold of it bite my palm.
“Where—where is the Hulk?” I ask. My tongue is heavy. My thoughts are clay.
Reflector's optic shutters click. “Currently—location unknown. Local sensor net is offline. However, external thrusters are active. We are—” Another sputter. “We have entered the Badlands, Garokk.”
Badlands. The word feels like a bruise. My mouth pulls to a smile that isn't a smile. The Badlands are where the Reapers sing and the stars choke on themselves. The sky there chews ships like bones. It’s where the dead don’t stay dead and where you learn quickly that space is not polite.
I should be angry. I should be roaring until the hull shakes. I should be cursing Meyer and his filthy grin and the way he looked at Isolde like a slot machine that had finally paid out.
But right now my body is a collection of immediate problems. Pain. Thirst. The fact that the back of my skull feels like someone placed a copper wire loop there and turned a dial.
I try to sit up, and the world rears. The deck tilts.
The red light slices my vision. A sound like a metal horn buzzes somewhere in the corridor—an alarm, or the shudder of something massive shifting.
I taste salt and rust and a memory so bright that for a moment I feel the ghost of a hand against my face and then it is gone and I am just falling forward.
“Do not attempt to rise without assistance,” Reflector orders, his voice a polite clamp.
“You have third-degree burns across your dorsal plates. Your right mandible is fractured. There is also—” He pauses, and I can hear the calculation in the pauses, the way he rearranges syllables like spare parts.
“You have a contusion consistent with blunt-force impact to the cranial dome.”
“Blunt-force,” I repeat, testing how the word sits in my mouth. It feels too small for the feeling in my bones.
“Your limbs are functional,” Reflector says. “But you will suffer if you move without analgesic stabilization.”
I laugh. It is a small, bitter sound that surprises me. “You speak like a medic-lizard. Thought you’d be an entertainment drone.”
“I was an entertainment drone,” Reflector answers. “Then you saved my prime directive.”
A memory lances me—heat, the smell of ozone, the taste of ash—and I feel the surge again at the edge of recollection: lights arcing, the world folding on itself like paper, the sound of a hull taking a last breath and something—someone—tossing me as if I am garbage and then: the weight of a small, frantic machine slamming into my chest, plugging itself into my collar, using whatever scraps it had to make a life wire.
“Reflector,” I say, each syllable a small victory, “you saved me.”
The little drone flickers. One of his manipulator arms trembles and he makes a sound like an amused cough. “I cannot claim sentiment, Garokk. However. You were—essential?—”
“You,” I correct. My throat bleeds a whisper, but I force it. “I was me . Not essential. Not yet.”
Reflector hovers closer, and despite the smoke and his injuries and the buzzing alarms, there is a softness in the way his lens lingers. He doesn't have the grammar for human things like loyalty or love, but he has code. And the code is stubborn.
“You moved me toward your priority list,” he says. “Emergency directive: preserve human. Then: preserve vessel. Then: salvage reflective tape.”
“Nice to know I was second,” I mutter.
“Your vitals will fluctuate,” he says. “We must access medstore for analgesia, then address wound sealing. There is residual radiation in sector three due to containment breach. This complicates matter. Also—” He hesitates, which is something he almost never does.
His tone has that thin edge data-voices take when they are simulating worry.
“We register a signature consistent with holonet emission at the forward arc shortly after main detonation.”
“That mean anything?” I rasp.
“Possibly,” Reflector replies. “Possibly nothing. Possibly—someone in an escape pod. An individual presence recorded as: female. Transmissions ceased on launch vector. Identification matched to: Isolde Verrix frequency. But data stream terminated at ~T+00:01:13.”
Something hollows me out like a scoop. My jaw clenches. My fists curl. My memory threads insist on playing the scene in broken loops: the flash of a pod, a slamming hatch, a face pressed to polymer—brown eyes—then white.
“No,” I say. The word is a bone thrown against a door.
Reflector’s lens blinks slow, simulating sympathy. “I cannot make determinations outside of raw data, Garokk,” he says. “I am here—and functional enough to keep you and the hull from meeting the deep. But the mainframe is dead.”
I press my palms to my eyes because everything is bright and the shame of being alive while others burn is a cold current. The edges of my hearing ring with alarms and the distant groan of something vast and patient—this ship is an old thing, and she is not yet ready to be entirely quiet.
“How the hell are we moving?” I ask. The word we rolls odd in my mouth. Maybe I say it because it is easier on the loneliness.
Reflector's outer shell hums. “Propulsion survived through emergency routing. Autonomous thrusters engaged by residual inertial mass to avoid engagement with external hazards. Our vector has us drifting toward the Badlands. The ship registers low course correction capacity. Probably not intentional.”
I let that sit, the way the air sits thick after a storm. Badlands. We are not out yet. We are not free. The ship that trapped me in its belly and then near-killed me is still afloat, still humming, still carrying scars that smell like the inside of a furnace.
“Get me to my boots,” I say.
Reflector blips, a little electrical laugh—a sound that always makes me think of the little drone trying to clear its throat before imparting something important. “You will not walk far unassisted.”
“I’m walking,” I promise. I will anything to stop the shaking in my limbs that isn't just physical.