A/N: To make a long story short, I was completely unhappy with the first three iterations of this chapter, to the point where I actually, at one time, had three versions of this chapter sitting on my computer. So instead of deleting everything and starting over, I took a long hard look at all three versions, then grafted the parts I really liked together and tied them to one another into a coherant (I hope) narrative. It's been a long, busy series of months since my last update, and the muse has struck, occasionally, just not for this story. Well, it's past time I finally updated this damn thing, so that's what I'm doing. If it doesn't seem long enough, I apologize.
Anyway, enjoy everyone.
"Taste the poison, feel that this is life. Hallowed be the game. Of life and innocence, god's waiting for you. Join us in the road to fate. There are no two paths. Feel the pain, that steps into his life. Agony, getting crucified. Death awaits, knocking at his door. For everyone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The lifeclock strikes and you obey, like a candle on a grave. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The lifeclock strikes and you obey, life isn't here to stay." -Blind Guardian, Ashes to Ashes
Time has passed.
I am unaware of how much, exactly. It is difficult in the dark confines of this storeroom to determine if I have been here merely an hour or perhaps four.
I have nothing to do but think.
It is an odd situation for me. Back on the ship, even between missions, there was always something to do, some gripe that my teammates had with this piece of equipment or that weapon. Fixing, fixing, endless fixing, but still not even doing a quarter of what I am truely capable of. My warrior brethren were very paranoid about their bodies being tampered with or maintained, which always struck me as odd.
I do daily maintenance on equipment that could vaporize them instantly just because they turned it on, if it were not properly calibrated, but perscribe someone a mild painkiller and they look at you as though you are trying to poison them.
Excuse me... I did daily maintenance on equipment. I do not know what fate my alien jailor has planned for me, but somehow I cannot forsee being allowed to work on any equipment for some time.
Which of course, makes me even more useless.
Yet in a way, I feel grateful to this strange being who has captured me. He has thus far treated me quite well, certainly better than he would have been treated had our positions been reversed.
Irkens do not often take prisoners.
How did he come to be here, I wonder? Certainly this is not his home planet, I know this because of the report I read during the mission, written by a disgraced Invader Cadet Tak. What ever she did that caused her to fail the Invader course, it does not change the fact that to even be considered for advancement to Invader one has to pass rigerous tests. I somehow doubt a detail like dangerous, intelligent indigenous life would have been missing from her report. No, from what I was able to gather from her musings, this planet is long dead... its life scoured from it centuries ago.
Long dead, but perhaps not yet aware of the fact.
I find that I am no longer afraid. My terror was irrational, and I take comfort in the fact that through all of this madness, my Pak has continued to monitor and relay information to me in a cold, concise whisper of numbers and symbols, as it always has. Rational and precise, it does not lie or give its own opinion.
It has no opinions to give. Only facts.
I have not been abandoned by the Irken empire, for I carry its most prominant symbol as a part of my own flesh, as we all do.
Once again, however, I try to imagine what it must be like for this lone, lonely human, as he calls his race. To be disconnected from his people, indeed, to have never been connected at all. Forced to store all of his information in the fleshy, fallible confines of his own skull.
How can one not think of such a being as inferior? As weak? An Irken never forgets. We cannot.
And yet...
This lone human has single-handedly wiped out a veteran encounter team, without the technological edge that we Irken have lived with so long it is seen as a given.
What manner of force drives this sad remnant of a dead race to continue living, when all hope of seeing a friendly face has vanished?
What drives him to show... this weakness... to an enemy?
I will explain. Mercy and compassion. These are terms which the humans use. I know them only because I now know their language. We Irkens have no such words. It would be almost impossible to translate the meaning of such a word, and so the Pak strives to give it context, an equivalent in Irken. We have such a word, and it means "to leave a valuable enemy alive when he is beaten, in hopes of greater compensation afterwards."
Somehow, I do not think this is what this word, "mercy" means to him. There is a nuance, an important one, that is missing.
Indeed, the Irken equivalent for compassion is also... decidedly lacking. The closest the Irken race comes to this... compassion is "an emotional attachment to a valued property, slave, or other Irken, despite this things inferiority".
It is seen as a neurological disorder. There are treatments for it.
Perhaps this Dib human is mad, but I do not think so. He is too steady, too... focused to be insane.
What then, is this strange nuance that the Irken species so obviously lacks, and why does this human display it towards me?
Perhaps it is a weak emotion, and yet this human is so obviously capable of great strength. One need only ask Tig, or Gif about this.
If one can find them.
The Irken race is no stranger to madness, as... Nis readily demonstrated. Nis... there is another disturbing puzzle without an answer. Something in him must have broken, for him to act so irrationally in his last moments. Remembering him threatens to invoke that same quivering, miserable terror in me. Irrational, as I do not even know what it was that he wanted from me.
The human understood that madness as well, it seems. He killed my attacker and yet spared me, even when I could have raised a hand against him.
Still, this begs the question... why does the human understand reactions that I, indeed, likely not even Nis understood?
What dark secret lurks in the meat of our existence, hidden from us by the cold, rational voice of the machine?
My curiousity at this question... frightens me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Waking up is an exercise in agony.
I crack my gummy eyelids open, wince and groan. It is hot... unmercifully hot, and I am covered in a cold sweat. I sit up, the world wheeling about dizzily, and take a moment to focus as nausea cramps my stomach hard, like a knot tied around a lump of coal.
I think... I'm sick.
Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I've certainly abused my body enough for it to happen now. A sudden, sick realization hits me and horror reverberates in its wake like the ripples spreading back from the edges of a pool after the stone has been cast. I begin scrabbling at the dried greenstuff crusted bandages, unmindful of the screaming agony that this evokes in my haste to get them off...
I stand up shakily and find a reflective surface to examine my wounds for what I KNOW will be there, but what I pray will not...
Angry red lines are beginning to radiate from my injury.
Burns cauterize instantly, but deep burns like this are prone to one very unpleasant fact of life.
A fact that I have no way to combat... or treat.
Infection.
Blood poisoning.
So Dib, ol' buddy, ol' pal... what does it feel like to be a walking dead man.
Not so good. Not so good a'tall.
I sigh, grab one of my jugs and drink some water, then catch a glimpse at myself again in the highly polished metal for a moment.
I look... really look, for a little while.
Actually, I'm transfixed.
It's been a long time since I've really looked at myself. I mean, I keep pretty busy, not so much because there's anything really time sensative that I need to get done, but more because being busy means not having to think too hard. I'm not exactly the most vain person in the world, I dressed for comfort or utility, which I guess was part of what got me ridiculed so much as a kid. Still, that gawky young form is not the one that greets me now.
I am looking at a stranger. A complete stranger.
I had gotten taller, a fact I was perfectly aware of, due to the necessity of coming up with new clothing that fit. However, it had never really registered... the baby fatish look to my head is gone, replaced with a rawboned form with just a hint of malnutrition visable in the slight hollow of the cheeks, the extreme thinness of the chest. For some reason I never grew any facial hair, of course, Dad was never really able to either, so I suppose it's no big surprise that I'd follow suit. The hair is longer, of course, due to the lack of grooming appliances, and wild, barely contained by the crude thong I had used to tie it back.
Still, there are aspects of it that have not changed. The glasses... that one crazy spike of hair that refuses to stay down no matter how often I pick at it... don't get me wrong, I RECOGNIZE myself. It just takes a while.
How old am I?
It's a valid question, you know. I have no way of knowing how much longer the days and nights are here, though I use them to reckon time. This hardly does me any good if the days are 26 hours long... or 29, or whatever.
I guess it really doesn't matter anymore, since I have no antibiotics. That means when those lines reach down my arm and across my chest to my heart, it's all she wrote.
You know, I don't want to die, but I'm not really scared. Maybe it's just that I'm not able to feel the sands of time running out quite yet, or maybe I've become a little fatalistic in my old age. Maybe I want to die, just a little. Subconsciously, I mean. I don't know.
It's kinda out of my hands, now.
Well in any case, it's time to take a look at my prisoner. I feel kinda bad leaving her in the dark all night, probably contemplating the possibility that I might just stick her in there and forget about her, until she becomes a little mummy-like corpse just like her brethren were all over the ship. Well, at least she won't stumble across one of those poor bastards. I'd long since removed what I needed from them (paks and eyes) and buried them.
Why bury them? Well... let's just say I felt kinda bad about dismembering them for spare parts like I did, so I figured it was the least I could do. Besides, it's not like I'm collecting them or something.
I mean, you seen one long dead Irken body, you've seen 'em all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The storeroom door cracks open again and a line of illumination marred by the shadows of my captor moving outside intrude into my solitude like daybreak.
The human hesitates, cautious and wary. I do not move, for fear of setting him off. A fluttery, "is he going to mistake some involuntary reaction on my part as aggression and hurt me" tension hits me.
I do not know what he thinks or feels of it.
"Vic... get back against the wall. I'm opening the door."
His voice is authoritative and brooks no argument. I do as he says. Light shines into the confines of my cell, drowning me in its luminescence for a moment before my eyes adjust. The human stands tall, sillouetted by this radiance, one of the captured laser rifles held ready in one hand.
I watch him, careful not to move, not even to blink.
Internally I wince in shame at my cowardice, but the wince is less than yesterday, and I have feeling it will be even less than tomorrow.
You can get used to anything.
The human comes in and collects me, and then we walk around the ship. He asks questions... what does this symbol mean, how does this work. I answer truthfully, but as briefly as possible. We start a strange cycle, him and I. I think he does this more for an opportunity to speak to someone than for any tactical information he might gather. There is a desperation in him that I cannot explain. A quiet futility, coupled with frustration and perhaps a hint of anger. Despite that, he is a brilliant being... for an inferior species. Without knowledge of Irken science, indeed, without even a rudimentry understanding of our language, he has somehow managed to piece together a life here from the castoff remnants of an empire.
To be honest, I find myself enjoying this talk as well. It breaks the monotony of my own thoughts. At times during our walk it is sometimes easy to forget that he is the jailor and I the prisoner... but always at some point in our conversation, we reach the stumbling block of our respective species... he human, and I Irken, and he blinks, realization suddenly dawning on him, as though he had started to forget that we are enemies.
Strangely... I find myself doing the same.
After some time the human stops and leans against the wall, watching me warily. I stop, confused at his strange behavior. He is shaking, and his skin is pale... well, paler than it was earlier. The arm he has favored since I first knew him obviously pains him greatly, he does not move it at all. There is a sadness about him that I cannot explain. I search his face for some answer, fear beginning to rise in me, but his alien countenance is unreadable. I find that his frustration has become resignation, a weary, tired sort of acceptance.
I wonder what has changed. This sudden shift in his personality unsettles me.
"We're going for a walk outside, you and me. No funny stuff, and you won't get hurt." He cautions.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask, tense with fear of reprisal.
"Just start moving, Irken. It'll all make sense in a little bit."
The human sounds tired, dull. Again, I wonder what prompted this change.
Outside. I had considered this topic many times in my long hours of solitude. Irkens require very little in the way of sleep, though we do rest. I know that none of my team is still alive... my internal biometric sensors were attuned to them, and they have all long since flatlined. However, the shuttle should still be there. I had not given it much thought as an escape route... I do not know how to pilot it, only how to fix it, and the human, though resourceful, lacks the Irken signature required to bypass its security mechanism. Still, I had wondered what happened to it, any shuttlecraft that is left unattended for more than 72 hours sends an immediate distress signal towards the Irken Armada, as well as Devastis.
I had been hoping, despite what I know of the Irken mindset towards any Irken who allows themselves to be captured, that help would arrive as a result.
I stared at the mess forlornly. There would be no rescue ship coming for me.
The burnt out shell of the shuttle no longer rested on its gangly supports, the left and back supports having been blasted away, leaving the lopsided wreckage cocked at a drunken angle. One or more of my companions had taken the route I was too cowardly to take, apparently. A blast crater the size and relative dimensions comparable to a fusion battery meltdown could be seen about fifty or so meters from the mangled craft. The craft itself looked as though a similar blast had gone off inside it.
The exterior of a Voot Assault shuttle is designed to absorb and deflect many forms of destructive energy, kinetic, electrical, gravetic, even plasmic, but it was never designed to do so from the inside out. Even so, the blast had not completely reduced the shuttle to ruin, since a majority of the blast had been channeled out of the weaker portions of the hull.
Unfortunately, the weaker portions in question were the control capsule and the engine room.
"So... what do you think?" The human said gruffly. His tone was strangely uninterested, as though the answer was already apparent to him.
"Completely obliterated. You did your job well." I said, not without some bitterness, I might add.
His reaction was unexpected. There was no pride in his voice, at least, none that I could detect. Instead he sighed and shook his head. I once again caught the curious sensation of futility oozing from him.
"I... figured as much."
He adjusted the eye device perched on the strange protubant oriface that was set into the center of his face. I knew from the language download that such a thing was called a nose, I knew from my experience as a medical drone who commonly dealt with aliens that it had something to do with respiration, but I could not, for the life of me, see it as anything but a disgusting, oozing hole in the center of his face.
We were, in that moment, worlds apart, even though we were scarcely five feet from one another. I could not begin to understand what he was thinking.
I do not know how much insight he had into the Irken psyche. Certainly he must have some understanding of us, if he was able to so easily defeat one of our teams.
The strength to stand leaves me and I find myself, without consciously meaning to, sitting on a corroded pile of junk and staring numbly at the shuttle. It hits me.
I am stuck here.
The human turns to me and stares for a moment, then nods his head, as though confirming something to himself.
"Look Vic. Like it or not, we're stuck here together." He sighs and, after a moment of hesitation, sits next to me.
He makes me look as small and miserable as I feel.
"What I said earlier stands. I don't have the time to watch you all the time. We are going to have to-"
"Then why not just shoot me?" I ask numbly. A part of me yammers in protest.
I tell it to remain silent.
He stares for a moment, then he looks away. "So you just give up, is that it?"
"You cannot understand what it is like to be seperated-"
I stop, suddenly realizing what I'd just said.
He glares at me, anger filling his face. "Fuck you, Irken. I don't know what it's like? How fucking DARE you!" He grabs me by the throat with his good arm and lifts me up, squeezing the life from me slowly.
I feebly grab at his hand and try to pull them from my neck, my manipulation arms batting at him ineffectually. I can feel the blood pounding in my head and I gasp.
"Please..."
"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ABOUT BEING LONELY!?"
Ple...se..."
"What do you know about wanting to give up?"
"Pl.."
"You want to die? IS THAT IT?"
"I'm... sorry." I choke out at last.
My arms drop and my manipulative legs stop moving.
He slumps to his knees and releases me, and I collapse on my back. Then his head lies on my chest and he sobs, huge gulping gasps of breath between them. He sobs like a broken thing.
He sobs like the last human left to mourn his fate.
I lie there, gasping, trying to regain my strength as an aliens tears run down the front of my uniform.
What in the universe is happening here?
Anyway, enjoy everyone.
"Taste the poison, feel that this is life. Hallowed be the game. Of life and innocence, god's waiting for you. Join us in the road to fate. There are no two paths. Feel the pain, that steps into his life. Agony, getting crucified. Death awaits, knocking at his door. For everyone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The lifeclock strikes and you obey, like a candle on a grave. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The lifeclock strikes and you obey, life isn't here to stay." -Blind Guardian, Ashes to Ashes
Time has passed.
I am unaware of how much, exactly. It is difficult in the dark confines of this storeroom to determine if I have been here merely an hour or perhaps four.
I have nothing to do but think.
It is an odd situation for me. Back on the ship, even between missions, there was always something to do, some gripe that my teammates had with this piece of equipment or that weapon. Fixing, fixing, endless fixing, but still not even doing a quarter of what I am truely capable of. My warrior brethren were very paranoid about their bodies being tampered with or maintained, which always struck me as odd.
I do daily maintenance on equipment that could vaporize them instantly just because they turned it on, if it were not properly calibrated, but perscribe someone a mild painkiller and they look at you as though you are trying to poison them.
Excuse me... I did daily maintenance on equipment. I do not know what fate my alien jailor has planned for me, but somehow I cannot forsee being allowed to work on any equipment for some time.
Which of course, makes me even more useless.
Yet in a way, I feel grateful to this strange being who has captured me. He has thus far treated me quite well, certainly better than he would have been treated had our positions been reversed.
Irkens do not often take prisoners.
How did he come to be here, I wonder? Certainly this is not his home planet, I know this because of the report I read during the mission, written by a disgraced Invader Cadet Tak. What ever she did that caused her to fail the Invader course, it does not change the fact that to even be considered for advancement to Invader one has to pass rigerous tests. I somehow doubt a detail like dangerous, intelligent indigenous life would have been missing from her report. No, from what I was able to gather from her musings, this planet is long dead... its life scoured from it centuries ago.
Long dead, but perhaps not yet aware of the fact.
I find that I am no longer afraid. My terror was irrational, and I take comfort in the fact that through all of this madness, my Pak has continued to monitor and relay information to me in a cold, concise whisper of numbers and symbols, as it always has. Rational and precise, it does not lie or give its own opinion.
It has no opinions to give. Only facts.
I have not been abandoned by the Irken empire, for I carry its most prominant symbol as a part of my own flesh, as we all do.
Once again, however, I try to imagine what it must be like for this lone, lonely human, as he calls his race. To be disconnected from his people, indeed, to have never been connected at all. Forced to store all of his information in the fleshy, fallible confines of his own skull.
How can one not think of such a being as inferior? As weak? An Irken never forgets. We cannot.
And yet...
This lone human has single-handedly wiped out a veteran encounter team, without the technological edge that we Irken have lived with so long it is seen as a given.
What manner of force drives this sad remnant of a dead race to continue living, when all hope of seeing a friendly face has vanished?
What drives him to show... this weakness... to an enemy?
I will explain. Mercy and compassion. These are terms which the humans use. I know them only because I now know their language. We Irkens have no such words. It would be almost impossible to translate the meaning of such a word, and so the Pak strives to give it context, an equivalent in Irken. We have such a word, and it means "to leave a valuable enemy alive when he is beaten, in hopes of greater compensation afterwards."
Somehow, I do not think this is what this word, "mercy" means to him. There is a nuance, an important one, that is missing.
Indeed, the Irken equivalent for compassion is also... decidedly lacking. The closest the Irken race comes to this... compassion is "an emotional attachment to a valued property, slave, or other Irken, despite this things inferiority".
It is seen as a neurological disorder. There are treatments for it.
Perhaps this Dib human is mad, but I do not think so. He is too steady, too... focused to be insane.
What then, is this strange nuance that the Irken species so obviously lacks, and why does this human display it towards me?
Perhaps it is a weak emotion, and yet this human is so obviously capable of great strength. One need only ask Tig, or Gif about this.
If one can find them.
The Irken race is no stranger to madness, as... Nis readily demonstrated. Nis... there is another disturbing puzzle without an answer. Something in him must have broken, for him to act so irrationally in his last moments. Remembering him threatens to invoke that same quivering, miserable terror in me. Irrational, as I do not even know what it was that he wanted from me.
The human understood that madness as well, it seems. He killed my attacker and yet spared me, even when I could have raised a hand against him.
Still, this begs the question... why does the human understand reactions that I, indeed, likely not even Nis understood?
What dark secret lurks in the meat of our existence, hidden from us by the cold, rational voice of the machine?
My curiousity at this question... frightens me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Waking up is an exercise in agony.
I crack my gummy eyelids open, wince and groan. It is hot... unmercifully hot, and I am covered in a cold sweat. I sit up, the world wheeling about dizzily, and take a moment to focus as nausea cramps my stomach hard, like a knot tied around a lump of coal.
I think... I'm sick.
Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I've certainly abused my body enough for it to happen now. A sudden, sick realization hits me and horror reverberates in its wake like the ripples spreading back from the edges of a pool after the stone has been cast. I begin scrabbling at the dried greenstuff crusted bandages, unmindful of the screaming agony that this evokes in my haste to get them off...
I stand up shakily and find a reflective surface to examine my wounds for what I KNOW will be there, but what I pray will not...
Angry red lines are beginning to radiate from my injury.
Burns cauterize instantly, but deep burns like this are prone to one very unpleasant fact of life.
A fact that I have no way to combat... or treat.
Infection.
Blood poisoning.
So Dib, ol' buddy, ol' pal... what does it feel like to be a walking dead man.
Not so good. Not so good a'tall.
I sigh, grab one of my jugs and drink some water, then catch a glimpse at myself again in the highly polished metal for a moment.
I look... really look, for a little while.
Actually, I'm transfixed.
It's been a long time since I've really looked at myself. I mean, I keep pretty busy, not so much because there's anything really time sensative that I need to get done, but more because being busy means not having to think too hard. I'm not exactly the most vain person in the world, I dressed for comfort or utility, which I guess was part of what got me ridiculed so much as a kid. Still, that gawky young form is not the one that greets me now.
I am looking at a stranger. A complete stranger.
I had gotten taller, a fact I was perfectly aware of, due to the necessity of coming up with new clothing that fit. However, it had never really registered... the baby fatish look to my head is gone, replaced with a rawboned form with just a hint of malnutrition visable in the slight hollow of the cheeks, the extreme thinness of the chest. For some reason I never grew any facial hair, of course, Dad was never really able to either, so I suppose it's no big surprise that I'd follow suit. The hair is longer, of course, due to the lack of grooming appliances, and wild, barely contained by the crude thong I had used to tie it back.
Still, there are aspects of it that have not changed. The glasses... that one crazy spike of hair that refuses to stay down no matter how often I pick at it... don't get me wrong, I RECOGNIZE myself. It just takes a while.
How old am I?
It's a valid question, you know. I have no way of knowing how much longer the days and nights are here, though I use them to reckon time. This hardly does me any good if the days are 26 hours long... or 29, or whatever.
I guess it really doesn't matter anymore, since I have no antibiotics. That means when those lines reach down my arm and across my chest to my heart, it's all she wrote.
You know, I don't want to die, but I'm not really scared. Maybe it's just that I'm not able to feel the sands of time running out quite yet, or maybe I've become a little fatalistic in my old age. Maybe I want to die, just a little. Subconsciously, I mean. I don't know.
It's kinda out of my hands, now.
Well in any case, it's time to take a look at my prisoner. I feel kinda bad leaving her in the dark all night, probably contemplating the possibility that I might just stick her in there and forget about her, until she becomes a little mummy-like corpse just like her brethren were all over the ship. Well, at least she won't stumble across one of those poor bastards. I'd long since removed what I needed from them (paks and eyes) and buried them.
Why bury them? Well... let's just say I felt kinda bad about dismembering them for spare parts like I did, so I figured it was the least I could do. Besides, it's not like I'm collecting them or something.
I mean, you seen one long dead Irken body, you've seen 'em all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The storeroom door cracks open again and a line of illumination marred by the shadows of my captor moving outside intrude into my solitude like daybreak.
The human hesitates, cautious and wary. I do not move, for fear of setting him off. A fluttery, "is he going to mistake some involuntary reaction on my part as aggression and hurt me" tension hits me.
I do not know what he thinks or feels of it.
"Vic... get back against the wall. I'm opening the door."
His voice is authoritative and brooks no argument. I do as he says. Light shines into the confines of my cell, drowning me in its luminescence for a moment before my eyes adjust. The human stands tall, sillouetted by this radiance, one of the captured laser rifles held ready in one hand.
I watch him, careful not to move, not even to blink.
Internally I wince in shame at my cowardice, but the wince is less than yesterday, and I have feeling it will be even less than tomorrow.
You can get used to anything.
The human comes in and collects me, and then we walk around the ship. He asks questions... what does this symbol mean, how does this work. I answer truthfully, but as briefly as possible. We start a strange cycle, him and I. I think he does this more for an opportunity to speak to someone than for any tactical information he might gather. There is a desperation in him that I cannot explain. A quiet futility, coupled with frustration and perhaps a hint of anger. Despite that, he is a brilliant being... for an inferior species. Without knowledge of Irken science, indeed, without even a rudimentry understanding of our language, he has somehow managed to piece together a life here from the castoff remnants of an empire.
To be honest, I find myself enjoying this talk as well. It breaks the monotony of my own thoughts. At times during our walk it is sometimes easy to forget that he is the jailor and I the prisoner... but always at some point in our conversation, we reach the stumbling block of our respective species... he human, and I Irken, and he blinks, realization suddenly dawning on him, as though he had started to forget that we are enemies.
Strangely... I find myself doing the same.
After some time the human stops and leans against the wall, watching me warily. I stop, confused at his strange behavior. He is shaking, and his skin is pale... well, paler than it was earlier. The arm he has favored since I first knew him obviously pains him greatly, he does not move it at all. There is a sadness about him that I cannot explain. I search his face for some answer, fear beginning to rise in me, but his alien countenance is unreadable. I find that his frustration has become resignation, a weary, tired sort of acceptance.
I wonder what has changed. This sudden shift in his personality unsettles me.
"We're going for a walk outside, you and me. No funny stuff, and you won't get hurt." He cautions.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask, tense with fear of reprisal.
"Just start moving, Irken. It'll all make sense in a little bit."
The human sounds tired, dull. Again, I wonder what prompted this change.
Outside. I had considered this topic many times in my long hours of solitude. Irkens require very little in the way of sleep, though we do rest. I know that none of my team is still alive... my internal biometric sensors were attuned to them, and they have all long since flatlined. However, the shuttle should still be there. I had not given it much thought as an escape route... I do not know how to pilot it, only how to fix it, and the human, though resourceful, lacks the Irken signature required to bypass its security mechanism. Still, I had wondered what happened to it, any shuttlecraft that is left unattended for more than 72 hours sends an immediate distress signal towards the Irken Armada, as well as Devastis.
I had been hoping, despite what I know of the Irken mindset towards any Irken who allows themselves to be captured, that help would arrive as a result.
I stared at the mess forlornly. There would be no rescue ship coming for me.
The burnt out shell of the shuttle no longer rested on its gangly supports, the left and back supports having been blasted away, leaving the lopsided wreckage cocked at a drunken angle. One or more of my companions had taken the route I was too cowardly to take, apparently. A blast crater the size and relative dimensions comparable to a fusion battery meltdown could be seen about fifty or so meters from the mangled craft. The craft itself looked as though a similar blast had gone off inside it.
The exterior of a Voot Assault shuttle is designed to absorb and deflect many forms of destructive energy, kinetic, electrical, gravetic, even plasmic, but it was never designed to do so from the inside out. Even so, the blast had not completely reduced the shuttle to ruin, since a majority of the blast had been channeled out of the weaker portions of the hull.
Unfortunately, the weaker portions in question were the control capsule and the engine room.
"So... what do you think?" The human said gruffly. His tone was strangely uninterested, as though the answer was already apparent to him.
"Completely obliterated. You did your job well." I said, not without some bitterness, I might add.
His reaction was unexpected. There was no pride in his voice, at least, none that I could detect. Instead he sighed and shook his head. I once again caught the curious sensation of futility oozing from him.
"I... figured as much."
He adjusted the eye device perched on the strange protubant oriface that was set into the center of his face. I knew from the language download that such a thing was called a nose, I knew from my experience as a medical drone who commonly dealt with aliens that it had something to do with respiration, but I could not, for the life of me, see it as anything but a disgusting, oozing hole in the center of his face.
We were, in that moment, worlds apart, even though we were scarcely five feet from one another. I could not begin to understand what he was thinking.
I do not know how much insight he had into the Irken psyche. Certainly he must have some understanding of us, if he was able to so easily defeat one of our teams.
The strength to stand leaves me and I find myself, without consciously meaning to, sitting on a corroded pile of junk and staring numbly at the shuttle. It hits me.
I am stuck here.
The human turns to me and stares for a moment, then nods his head, as though confirming something to himself.
"Look Vic. Like it or not, we're stuck here together." He sighs and, after a moment of hesitation, sits next to me.
He makes me look as small and miserable as I feel.
"What I said earlier stands. I don't have the time to watch you all the time. We are going to have to-"
"Then why not just shoot me?" I ask numbly. A part of me yammers in protest.
I tell it to remain silent.
He stares for a moment, then he looks away. "So you just give up, is that it?"
"You cannot understand what it is like to be seperated-"
I stop, suddenly realizing what I'd just said.
He glares at me, anger filling his face. "Fuck you, Irken. I don't know what it's like? How fucking DARE you!" He grabs me by the throat with his good arm and lifts me up, squeezing the life from me slowly.
I feebly grab at his hand and try to pull them from my neck, my manipulation arms batting at him ineffectually. I can feel the blood pounding in my head and I gasp.
"Please..."
"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ABOUT BEING LONELY!?"
Ple...se..."
"What do you know about wanting to give up?"
"Pl.."
"You want to die? IS THAT IT?"
"I'm... sorry." I choke out at last.
My arms drop and my manipulative legs stop moving.
He slumps to his knees and releases me, and I collapse on my back. Then his head lies on my chest and he sobs, huge gulping gasps of breath between them. He sobs like a broken thing.
He sobs like the last human left to mourn his fate.
I lie there, gasping, trying to regain my strength as an aliens tears run down the front of my uniform.
What in the universe is happening here?