Recycled Air

This story was written for kisshufan4ever's tragedy contest, which runs until the end of November. Zarmina, the planet used here as the aliens' homeworld, is (probably) an actual, earthlike planet, though whether or not there is or could be life there in reality is unknown. But the actual name of their planet is never stated, so mine is as good a guess as any.

One of the challenges of this story for me was that I wrote it without using any scene breaks. Scene breaks are my bread and butter as a writer, and I'm not sure how well I did using no transitions. The other challenge was to write an even glancingly science-related story about something so entirely unscientific. Also, unsurprisingly, I wrote this in kind of a hurry, given that I'm doing NaNo this year. So if you notice mistakes, please point them out, okay? :)

It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

– The Baghavad Gita

"Kish, can I see that Mew Aqua?"

Kish looked up from the ship's controls, and one of his hands flew protectively to the little vial around his neck. "What do you want it for?" he asked, his tawny eyes narrowed. Pai held out his hands in a universal calm down gesture.

"I just want to run some tests on it. It's a fascinating substance, and I'm eager to learn more about its properties." As he spoke, his eyes darted to the vial of Mew Aqua, but Kish's hand hadn't loosened its grip. If anything, it was holding on more tightly, its knuckles glowing white in the harsh light of the bridge.

"Pai," he said tiredly, not even bothering to look at the scientist as he spoke, "we've talked about this before. Many times. For one thing, we don't know how much Mew Aqua we need to fix Zarmina, and we've only got the one dose. What if you used enough of it that we couldn't save the world? And for another thing—"

"For another thing, you're a sentimental idiot!" Pai spat.

"For another thing, I trust my kitten. And she must trust me too, or she wouldn't have given me the Mew Aqua to hold onto. Good thing, too, or you would have used it all up in your stupid experiments."

"We don't have any proof that the Earth warriors are honorable!" Pai retorted, choosing to ignore Kish's petty insult.

"Don't we?" Kish growled, his pointed incisors showing. "They could have killed us all, but they didn't. My kitten even brought me back to life, and Deep Blue certainly wouldn't have done the same thing for her. You're just being paranoid."

"What if Taruto agreed with me?"

"He doesn't. I bet he thinks you're crazy."

"What if he does? Then will you at least let me take a sample? I'll be as conservative as possible with the size, I swear it."

Kish rolled his yellow eyes. "Sure, whatever. If you can convince Taruto that you're not crazy—and good luck with that, by the way—then you can have a little Mew Aqua to mess around with. Deal? Great. Now go away and let me fly this thing."

Pai shut the bridge door a little harder than he meant to. He wasn't worried about getting Taruto to agree with him. His position was, after all, perfectly reasonable: If the Mew Aqua was defective, it would be better for them to know now and return to Zarmina as failures than to be hailed as heroes and then let everyone down. Pai just couldn't risk doing that to his people.

Taruto was in the engine room, dozing. "Wake up," Pai snapped. The smaller man nearly fell over as he jerked to attention.

"Why'd you have to do that?" he groused, steadying himself against a wall. "'S not like anything's in bad shape down here. And I'd've woken up if something'd started going screwy."

"First, it's dangerous to sleep on the job, and you know it. Did you even finish your inspection?" Taruto looked down sheepishly. "Mm, I thought so. Actually, though, I came down here to ask you a question: Do you think it's unreasonable for Kish to prevent my accessing the Mew Aqua?"

Taruto stuck a finger in his own ear and twisted it vigorously, as if trying to clean out on the wax. "Can you say that again, but with smaller words this time?" Pai let out a hiss of breath from between clenched teeth.

"I want to run some tests on the Mew Aqua were were given. Kish does not want me to. Who is correct?" The shorter man thought it over for a moment.

"Hmm... That's a tough o—no, wait, obviously it's Kish. You're paranoid. Those Earth girls may have been, like, ancient, but they were pretty nice people when it came down to it."

"Thank you for your opinion," Pai replied flatly, turning to leave the room. When he was at the door, he turned back to Taruto: "And if I catch you sleeping on the job again, so help me, I'll fit you with a shock collar."

In the hallway on the way back to his lab, Pai stewed. So Kish and Taruto both agreed that he was crazy... Though they'd used suspiciously similar terms to dismiss him, now that he thought about it. Had they perhaps been in collusion? Yes, that would explain why they were both so adamantly opposed to his perfectly reasonable concerns. And if that wasn't the reason, well, Taruto had had a crush on an Earth girl too, hadn't he? Yes, Purin. That had been her name. Pai couldn't be sure that Kish and Taruto were teaming up against him, but even in the best case, they were set against him for frivolous reasons.

They couldn't be trusted to know what was best.

He would have to get the Mew Aqua from Kish somehow. There was nothing else for it. The problem was that Kish kept the stuff on his person at all times, even when he slept. Getting it from him would be tricky. Pai paced around his lab, his mind racing with plans. How could he do it without Kish knowing? The easiest way would be to drug him, probably. Pai's long, nimble fingers plucked a collection of chemicals from the shelves that lined his laboratory. It was a simple task to mix them, and only slightly more difficult to get the resulting powder into the vent that led to Kish's chambers. He waited in the darkness for Kish to return.

Once Kish was in the room, Pai wasted no time in adding a few drops of reactant to the powder he'd mixed up. He slipped a bubble-like breather over his mouth and nose and waited for Kish to drop. The gas that now wafted into Kish's chamber was colorless and odorless, and it did its work quickly. Within moments, the green-haired man was unconscious, slumped down against a wall.

Pai left the ventilation shaft and, completely nonchalantly, opened the door to Kish's chamber. On silent feet, he padded over to where Kish sat; with infinite care despite the hot blood pounding in his ears, he eased the little vial from its place around the other man's neck. His breath caught in his throat a time or two when he thought Kish was about to awaken, but that was just his nerves, and he got what he came for without being discovered, hit the lights, and left the room.

Back in the lab, Pai unstoppered the vial of Mew Aqua and used a pipette to squirt an infinitesimally small drop of the shining liquid into another container for testing. He'd already set up the rest of the testing apparatus, so he placed the Mew Aqua in a chemical bath of his own devising that would act as a litmus to tell him whether the stuff was genuine, based on the accepted chemical properties of true Mew Aqua. It would take time, though. He went out to put the little vial back in its proper place. With luck, Kish wouldn't even know it had been gone.

Pai slunk back into Kish's room, turned to press the button for the lights, something hard hit him on the back of the head. His head rang as he fell forward onto all fours, the vial of Mew Aqua spinning out of his hands though, thankfully, not breaking against the cold floor. The lights clicked on, and he was hauled roughly to his feet.

"The hell do you think you're doing?" Kish hissed. He held Pai against the wall with one hand. The other hand held one of his swords, poised to strike at his captive. He was obviously irrational—crazed-and though Pai's mind raced, he could think of nothing that would placate the shorter man. Luckily, though, Kish noticed the Mew Aqua on the floor, and in the instant he was distracted, Pai slid out of his grip, drawing his own weapons defensively.

"Go ahead and take it back," he said once he was out of Kish's immediate range. "I've done what I needed to do with it, and in a few minutes, I'll be able to tell you for sure if your precious little Earth girl played you for a fool."

"Don't you dare talk about Mew Ichigo like that!" Kish bellowed, lunging and drawing his second sword. His rage made him clumsy, and Pai was easily able to sidestep his charge, whacking him on the head with the blunt butt of a fan as he passed. Pai felt like time had slowed down; he was in a state of perfect warrior's serenity. Every move Kish made, he could anticipate, and if he'd wanted to really hurt the other man, he could have done so easily.

Then Kish, still snorting with rage like a chimera, threw one of his swords at Pai. It was a stupid move: Kish's weapons were made to slash, not pierce, and they weren't the right shape to be thrown accurately. It was a stupid move. Pai was completely unprepared for it. He twisted out of the way, but the blade lodged in his shoulder.

Through the fog of rage, Kish looked a little surprised that that had worked. But Pai was still the better fighter. In Kish's single moment of wonderment, Pai slashed his throat with a sharp fan. The shorter man fell, twitching and bleeding, to the floor. Pai stared down at him dispassionately for a moment, then strode back to his lab, the sword still sticking out of his shoulder.

He laid out bandages, antiseptics, and sutures before gingerly easing the blade out of him. The wound was curiously numb, but he expected the pain to return in full force once the adrenaline wore off. He was losing a lot of blood, but he calmly stitched himself up and bandaged the area, taking full advantage of his temporary numbness. His arm still moved a little, which was a very good sign. Eventually, he'd probably be fine.

After taking some pain pills, he thought back to what had happened with Kish. He had probably overreacted somewhat, true, but no one could say that Kish hadn't both started the fight and drawn the first blood. Besides, Kish had ben insensible with fury. Pai could hardly be blamed for defending himself.

The chemical bath was still neutral blue, and it seemed to Pai that it was taking an abominably long time. As he waited, pain crept in around the edges of his perception, and he focused hard on the little tube of chemicals, hoping that the painkillers would kick in before the pain became overwhelming.

Someone rapped at his door, and, for one crazy, panicked moment, he was sure it was Kish, come back from the dead to avenge his own murder. But that was ludicrous, and Pai put it out of his head. Sure enough, Taruto was standing outside the lab, his big amber eyes rimmed with red and his teeth bared.

"You killed Kish, didn't you?" the young man half-screamed and half-sobbed.

"He attacked me, Taruto," Pai replied neutrally. "If I had not killed him, he would have killed me." That gave Taruto pause. He came into the lab proper, sniffling.

"What's this?" he asked, pointing to the blue test tube.

"I'm just running a test on the Mew Aqua," he said as if it were the most normal thing in the world, not noticing the dawning horror on Taruto's face. "If it turns green, then the Earth girls were telling the truth. If it turns red, they were lying. It's wonderfully simple and only took a tiny bit of Mew Aqua."

"You took the Mew Aqua from Kish?" Taruto asked. "He didn't attack you at all! You stole from him, and he was just trying to get it back!"

As the smaller man advanced on him, Pai held up his good hand. "It wasn't like that at all," he tried to explain. "I took it, yes, but I was trying to give it back to him and he just went crazy on me—"

"No," Taruto said bleakly. "You don't get to try to pretend that this was all Kish's fault. You started this, and you killed him."

"I had to," Pai pleaded. "I couldn't live not knowing whether we'd been tricked. I couldn't do that to our planet!" His back thudded against the back wall of the lab. He was trapped.

Taruto didn't respond to that, but continued to advance on him, eyes blank and face eerily composed. When they were nearly touching, the smaller man summoned, not his own click-clack toy, but one of Kish's swords.

Pai could have moved to defend himself, probably. He could have done something. But as the dead man's sword bit into his belly and up toward more crucial organs, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction. His last thought was not of saving his homeworld, but of being remembered as a hero.

As Taruto left the lab, he noticed that Pai's little experiment had finally changed color. He stared at the test tube for a long moment, dropped his sword on the floor, and walked out.