Memories: Part eight: the many names of Rocket Racoon.
There was a jolt that sent pain shooting up though Quill's body and knocked the air from his lungs as he looked up.
The woman was straddling him, and while of itself that wasn't unwelcome, there was a time and a place for everything, and the fact she was about to kill him wasn't as welcome.
Though sadly not that unusual given my past run of luck. He thought.
"You should have learned." She sneered, about to kill him, her dark hair silhouetted against the Xandarian sun.
"I don't learn." he heard himself mutter, clipping the rocket-booster onto her belt. "One of my issues."
"Quill!"
The memory ended with a jolt, and Peter Jason Quill lost his balance and dropped to the ground.
Groaning, Quill looked over to Gamora lying next to him: it had cost him five paces and more mildly embarrassing memories that he wanted to part with to get over to her, and then as he just got within reach, the damn Collector-bot had just stuck a force field between the two of them. He recalled reaching out to her and recognising the distinctive humming just a little too late to stop him grabbing it in his attempt to reach her.
Jesus, I feel like I just stuck my tongue in a live light- fitting. And this time, I don't even have the justification that it was to win a huge drunken bet with Kraglin…
Quill shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and then stood up: it had been about an hour since Gamora had got sucked into whatever set of bad memories the Collector-bot had hit her with, and in that time he'd spent a good twenty minutes swearing, pleading and complaining, the same again arguing with Rocket about whether or not to focus getting out of there of trying to reach and help Gamora, and the rest of the time very stupidly trying to walk to her and getting the living shit beaten out of him by having what seemed like the memory of every time he'd got his ass handed to him replayed to him.
"Yeah… might not have been the best of ideas." He admitted.
"Told you so." muttered Rocket, eyes still fixed on the exit. "So, done playing around and ready to focus on getting out of here?"
Quill looked to Gamora, and sighed. "Yeah, Yeah I Guess."
"Well, I for one thought it was touching." Added the Collector Bot. "Ultimately futile, but touching the same: like trying to save a mayfly from drowning in a puddle."
"Yeah… I'm ignoring you from now on." Muttered Quill.
"Really? Sorry, was that addressed to me or to the rest of your crew? I notice Gamora was the only one you made an effort to try to physically interact with… unless you count shooting Drax in the leg, that is. At this point I have to wonder if your interest in her is purely professional. Do I detect favouritism? Perhaps even a romantic subplot. 89P13, what do you think? Feeling like the third wheel?"
Rocket snorted.
"He's a terran male Robo: they're primitive frickin' race driven mostly by instinct, I don't take it personally and don't you even try that divide and conquer shit on me Tivan, or whoever you are. No offence Quill, but you know that, aw hell, that I run to Groot when he's hurting, and you don't chew me out on it, so I can't blame you do the same. People can't help who they care for. You're just… just under-evolved compared to us folk. I know it's not meant as a personal slight on me: I guess if you're into weird furless giants, she's not bad. She certainly seems to attract more interest from other bald-bodies than the rest of us do. "
"Are you insinuating Quill would make more of an effort to save you, Drax and Groot if you had breasts 89P13?" asked the Tivan Bot. "An intriguing prospect."
"That's… that's so wrong a mental image I can't even process it Dude." Said Quill, clenching his fists. "And I don't like the way you're talking about her Robo! If Jem and the Holograms taught me anything, it's that sentient super-computers shouldn't be sexist and should support independent women! That, and maybe animators sometimes do drugs. I may have got all my morals from cartoons, but that doesn't mean they're wrong."
"Oh, sorry: I thought you were ignoring me."
"Quill, he's trying to mess with our frickin' minds." Muttered Rocket, glancing between Quill and the exit: Quills little side-journey to try and check on Gamora had brought him sideways, away from the door, and even watching it, Rocket wasn't sure how that was possible. Gamora had been almost at the door…
"Huh." He muttered, spotting an area in the far corner of the room that fuzzed and distorted weirdly. "The room skipped."
"Huh?" asked Quill.
"The room frickin' skipped, Like a bad hololith, when the data-file is corrupted. The geometry shifted while we were in that last memory. Or maybe it's shifted all the time, but not enough to notice before."
"You sure?"
"Positive, my spatial skills are pretty good..."
89P13 sat on a hard metal stool in front of the polished steel table, the base of it shaped into a strange cup to fit his tail and curious, semi-bipedal hips.
Quill looked around, the room was very clean, and white and star-trek-ish, or a bit Logan's run-esque: like how people in the 70's thought the future was going to be; A lot of white walls and bare metal and sliding metal doors.
"Again." Asked the researcher sitting behind the table, re-setting the timer.
There was a buzz, and the timer clicked on as 89P13 reached out to the two hololithic displays to either side of him, manipulating one with each paw, the right one was a three dimensional sliding block puzzle that instantly reminded Quill of some mad Tetris, flat grey blocks sliding and moving in projected space, each with their own speed and direction and Rocket tapping to rotate them or slide them over, trying to get them to mesh into a 3D shape, as with this other paw he completed some sort of Atari Loco-Motion type game where you had to build a set of pipes through a maze to your goal before the slowly moving water flooded out: one game was clearly timed, the pipe game, and needed finishing quickly, while the other required constant attention so stop pieces flying of the screen and getting lost forever, so you couldn't do one then the other, you had to do the both of them at the same time.
As this was going on, in the corner of the room behind the researcher watching young Rocket, two guys in an unlovely orange uniform that had KLS Maintenance Division stenciled on it had taken one of the blank, sterile white wall-panels off, and were playing around with the mess of pipes and wires inside, while a female Xandarian complained at them.
"I was just trying to make toast and the halide system came on! I nearly suffocated! The fire-detection is still shot to hell!"
"Look Ishi, were on it okay? The halide shouldn't even come on for minor smoke events, it must be over-pressured somewhere and venting each time it detects smoke. I'll have a go, but Dr K has got this down as low priority after the biocontainment system. I'll take a look but no promises. If it keeps doing it all I can recommend is using the master-override to switch it off while you cook. Go to the medi-suite if you've breathed in halide: go sit in the atmospheric chambers and have soem oxygen with the offworlderes, and in case you need to switch the fire suppression system off I'll pin a diagram to the wall for you.…" he said, poking at it, unable to find the flaw.
Second isolator valve. Thought 89P13 to himself. You'll never notice looking at the system right way up, but if you invert the feed system in your mind there can't be anything else doing it he thought.
But he kept it to himself, speaking out of turn was malcompliant.
There was an increasingly urgent countdown from the two games, pinging away, and just as it looked like he was about to run out of time…
"Done." said 89P13, as the pipework connected itself up and the blocks finally slid into place, locking into the shape of a stylised Keyhole logo. He looked at the man behind the desk, expectantly, tail wagging slightly.
The man looked at the completion time briefly, and then reached over, towards a large bag of food-pellets on the desk-top, and then reached past it to the pack of death-sticks on the desk. 89P13's ears sagged with disappointment, as the man drew out one and pulled a book of matches from the pocket of his lab coat, and struggled to light it, breaking two of the flimsy sticks and tossing them away in the ash-tray bolted to the desk, before lighting it with the final match and throwing the burnt match and the empty book down in the tray, on top of the broken matches. He looked dispassionately at 89P13 as he drew in foul smoke, before blowing it out into 89P13's face, sending him coughing. He then pressed a red button on his side of the desk, and the young racoon yelped with pain as an electric shock ran up his body and earthed itself through his chair.
"Too slow." Said the man, leaning back on his chair and staring at the celling as he took a big drag on his death-stick, blowing out with bored resignation, before leaning down to tap off a little ash on the side of the empty ash tray.
"Too slow, P13. Again."
89P13, wiped his sweating palms nervously on his medical smock, and then nodded, and reached out to start the game again.
He did not look at the maintenance crew this time.
Rocket flinched a little at the memory. "Yeah, pretty good. The room definitely moved. Look, it has again, a little."
"So Robo is messing with us. What's new? " Asked Quill.
Rocket paused, and then shrugged. "Don't know. The new room alignment brings you farther from the door, but me closer, so I don't see how it benefits him, unless he's trying to goad me into moving again. And a thought occurs… Hey, circuit-boards! Why are you doing all this again?"
"To hold you until my true self can add you to his collection, dearest 89P13-"
"Bullshit." Muttered Rocket. "The rooms full of monomolecular razors, you've got Gamora locked in a force field, and you stole my plasma-cutter with a tractor beam. You can kill us, contain us and move us around at will. If you wanted to detain us, you could have done that in an instant, without the memories, why the games?"
"Well, this may come as a surprise Roc', but I think he might have a teensy –tiny flare for the theatrical…." Said Quill. Rocket shrugged.
"Or he's not interested in keeping us here, and he's got some other reason for forcing us to delve through our own frickin' memories –"
The noise of the sea was deafening, and even from here he could feel the spray on his whiskers, taste the salt even over the stench of smoke in the air, plasticy and rank.
89P13 sobbed with fear. It was dark, and cold, the floor felt soft and wet, and that was just wrong, floors were always hard, and the smells were unfamiliar: with his restricted, medicated, low sodium diet he'd never even tasted salt before. He couldn't even register that the grey heaving mass before him was water: water was colourless, and came from a spout in the wall when you pressed your tongue to the ball-bearing in it, a bowl if you were lucky. He didn't know what it was he was looking at, and he couldn't take it in.
Then again, he had other things on his mind.
"Oh please, please keep walking!" he pleaded, helping the other as he staggered along, shifting the shock-prod to his other paw and trying his best to support the other thing with his shoulder and ignore the accusatory stench of smoke trapped in its fur.
He had no point of reference for the other thing, either. It didn't smell like one of them, one of the lab-coats, but it didn't smell like him either. It smelt of bran and alfalfa and the sawdust in its grey-brown fur. It was a little shorter than him, but taller too. It's ears long and pointed, not short and round like his, its tail little more than a bob of white fur: he wondered if it was meant to be like that, or it had lost it somehow. Its arms were week, it's back legs seems stronger than his, but didn't seem to work properly for moving on two feet: he could tell by its gait that they'd not finished with it yet. He still remembered how they'd had to re-shape his legs, the whirring drill and the pins and staples and the snap snap snap of bones being broken and re-set.
That and the fact that it didn't have a top to its skull, just a protruding mess of circuitry. That was a good sign that they weren't done with it yet.
There was another loud crack from the burning building, five hundred steps behind them, and the flickering shadows they were casting leapt and jumped, and 89P13 flinched. There had been a lot of noises from the burning lab, a fair few of them cracks or pops: joists cracking and crashing down, gas bottles exploding, ammo cooking off. But that one sounded worryingly like weapons fire, a sound he had only just learnt, and hoped never to hear up close again.
"Oh please, please keep going! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know, I Didn't know! "
The creature staggered along, its long head flopping and lolloping from side to side stupidly. Its eyes were on the side of its head, and unfocused, the pupils dilated to seas.
"There needs to be five." It said, quite clearly. "five, hunting six, five."
89P13 glanced quickly at its ID tattoo, in its ear, same spot as his. ESP20_X5. The five was repeated on its neck just above the v-neck of the surgical smock, a brand.
"Five, is that you? Are you five? I'm Ju-" he stopped himself just in time. "I'm P13." He corrected.
"Not a number, person, not a number! Step left. Hole in the sky. Pain. Six: blue, yellow, red, purple, green, orange. Orange, when, not where. Can't put six together, need five to stop it. Thief, assassin, berserker, monster..." its eyes focused on 89P13, just for a moment. "Murderer. Five. Lovechild, orphan, widower, brother, child. Leader, guide, avenger, heart, sacrifice. Archetypes. Patterns. Orange. Change the pattern. Step left." It muttered, and 89P13 reached the edge of the Grey Water, and groaned. He didn't know what a cliff was, but he knew a long drop when he saw one. There was no way down, and he didn't want to turn around and walk back towards the fire. He looked around, desperate, pleading.
"Please, I don't understand! Just, just keep waking. I think, I think I heard shooting." He stuttered. "There, there has to be a way down, a way away from here. We can go somewhere else!" said 89P13, trying not to look at the mess they'd made of the inside of its skull. There was something attached to its pineal gland, pulsing darkly, that hurt to look at.
"No! Not, where! Orange, orange! This has happened before! The war in the heavens, the glove, the son of light, all happened before. Change the pattern, step left!"
"Please!" Yowled 89P13, tears streaming down his face as the ocean roared and spat spray. "I don't understand you! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry! I didn't know! I didn't know! You can talk later, I promise, but now we need to run!"
"Run? Not yet. For years, yes, but not yet. No talk. No later. Step left."
"Why do you keep saying that, please!"
"Step left!" Shouted the creature, just as the searchlight flicked on, and it lurched forwards, shoving 89P13 hard to his left and staggering into the spot the racoon had occupied a second before.
There was the distinctive crack of ionising air, and a streak of light shot out of one of the windows of the burning lab, fast as a thought, and the plasma-bolt punched a self-cauterising wound the size of a fist in the creature's narrow chest spraying P13 with vaporised metal and blood. It mingled with the salt: that was another thing he'd never tasted before.
An expression of shock and relief flickered over the things face for a moment, before it's wild eyes finally rolled back in its skull and it fell forward into 89P13, bearing him to the ground under it's dead weight.
Or it would have, if there had been ground.
89P13 screamed helplessly as its body pitched him over the side of the cliff towards the iron water, flailing and spinning as the plasma-bolts lit up that air and he plunged into the dark.
Rocket flinched a little, but then just scowled.
"Yeah buddy, if you interrupt me mid-way through saying I think you've got an ulterior motive, it really makes look like you haven't got an ulterior motive. Not suspicious at all. Ya' totally convinced me. Hey Quill?"
"Yeah, starting to think you might be right Ranger Rick." Muttered Quill, still a little shocked by how young and vulnerable Rocket looked without the scars on his body and the gleam in his eyes "And what the fuck was with that memory Rocket?" he added. "Jesus, what was with that rabbit? The stuff he said, it sounded almost like he was talking about-"
"Quill, the fucker had a shard of alien tech embedded in his brain. Old tech, Dark elf or Asgardian or some shit. He could have been smelling fucking colours for all we know. I'm not going to read too much into it."
"Yeah but it sounded almost like he was talking about-"
"I know what he sounded like, and fuck him. He's dead. I don't believe in foresight or prophesy or whatever. The… the people who made me were into some weird shit, but nothing from their ESP division ever worked out." Rocket paused. "The fact I killed their entire ESP division might have something to do with that, but I'm not accepting they were right. You want to believe that shit exists, you go for it, but I make my own decisions, no-one's seen what I'm going to do ahead of time. My future ain't written for me."
"Then how'd he know to step left?" asked Quill sarcastically.
Rocket didn't answered right away, but just grunted.
"I'm closer to the door than you now, and I think we both know by now that Tivan-bot is picking on one of us at a time. Looks like it's my go. Right, Robo?"
"I'm not at liberty to divulge my plan." Said Tivan-bot, smugly.
Rocket glanced back at Groot, and set his jaw squarely, standing up to his full height and puffing out his pigeon chest.
"Fine. That's the way you want to play it? You guilt-tripped Gamora and Drax, you gave Groot a crisis of conscience about his morals. You want to try that on me? Good fucking luck." He said, taking a step forwards. "I ain't got no finer feelings to play on."
"Humm? Perhaps not." muttered the Collector-bot, "But you did once…"
The cold cut through him like a blade.
89P13 jerked and spasmed awake, panicking that he was in hydro-testing again as the water hit him, flensing through the layers of newsfilmy and fur and robbing him of all protection against the biting cold.
"Gettout ya' bums!" Yelled a voice as the men in the doorway around 89P13 woke up kicking and swearing as the fire-hose swept over them. "Wahdid I tell Ya! No tramps! Sling Ya' hook!" yelled the shopkeeper, a huge blue whale of a man with a hosepipe, grubby apron and a flattened nose that had to be the result of blow to the face some point in the past. "I've called the Cops!" he yelled, and then the others sleeping rough in that doorway really started to shift: the cops here didn't mess about when it came to applying the nightstick. 89P13 struggled to rise, and then the jet of water hit him in the face again, and knocked him down, and he yelped in fear and pain and held out an arm to try and shield his face. "Please!" he yelled out. "Please, stop!" he cried out, before he could check himself.
The urinal-sound of the hose pattering and splashing on the concrete was the only sound for a long time, and 89P13 felt the tension and hostility from the men behind him.
He'd been cold. So very, very cold. He'd been cold since he'd pulled himself shivering and weak from the slime of the docks. He had been sleeping in a heating duck behind a café, the heat sink from their walk-in refrigerator. There had been food there too, sometimes. In the trash.
Then they noticed he was there, and had got a dog. He only found out when they drove him out by banging on the vent with sticks while he slept, and when he bolted in a panic, they'd let the dog after him. He was grateful: he'd been worried that they would call them.
He'd been so very cold, but too afraid to approach the other rough sleepers in the doorways. They were too big, too aggressive, too unpredictable, and their shape too like the men in … in the place before. The lab coats. And they stank: of chemical that they put in their bodies. He could smell that it was killing them. He wondered if they knew, and if so why they did it.
But he had been so cold, and they were warm, and he'd figured if he waited until after they were asleep, who would know? He'd just have to wake up before they did and be careful not to get…
Caught.
89P13 turned, nervously. All four of the men from the doorway were staring at him, mouths open and horrified, as was the shopkeeper, the deathstick he was smoking dropping from his lips forgotten. He reached towards one of the men to apologise, and the man scurried away from him spider like on all fours, the worn—down heals of his broken books skittering on the concrete of the alleyway as he retreated out of his reach.
"What the fuck is that Thing?!" he screamed, realising that 89P13 had been pushed right up against him, sharing his body heat. The man leapt up, and despite the cold began to fight his way out of his sodden clothes and throw them away, as if contaminated.
There was a smack of water against the side of 89P13's face, almost like a solid object, and he was knocked to the ground by the fire-hose, tasting blood. He panicked and scrambled up, just as the shopkeeper hit him again, water knocking him sideways and his soft, weak claws skittered on the concrete and the pads of his feet bled: he'd never had to walk outside before, and it was taking its toll. The first homeless man threw his shirt at him, narrowly missing, and then the rest begun to throw things, rocks, trash, bottles, shouting and jeering along with the shopkeeper, now made allies by circumstance as they drove him away.
89P13 didn't stop running until three blocks after he'd lost them. By then the cold and fear and pain in his feet was making him cry, but he hid in an alleyway and choked it down until the tears stopped; appearing week made you more of a target. He'd learnt that already.
He didn't know what time it was, but he guessed it was close to the point they put the big light in the sky on. He didn't understand why the light and temperature in this place fluctuated so drastically. The lack of walls and ceiling he'd prepared himself for before he'd escaped. He'd know that much about 'outside' from the training manuals and what he'd been able to eavesdrop, but it was so big, and so much seemed random and disorganised and dangerous, and he didn't understand it. It frightened him.
But he couldn't go back. Couldn't. He knew that.
Rooting around in the detritus of the alleyway, he found some dry newsfilmy, and dried himself of the best he could before fluffing up his fur as far as it would go, and draping the filmy across his shoulders: his smock from the place before was starting to fall apart, and held next to no warmth. He'd tried not wearing it, to see if he could fluff his fur out more and stay warm, but not wearing clothes provoked more hostility.
Nakedness was something animals did, he'd learned, and he'd decided then and there that the clothes stayed on until they rotted off him.
The other people, the big people, were less active before the big light appeared. He decided to go and try and find food and someplace to hide before that happened.
He spent about an hour wandering the city's sleet-slicked streets before his nose caught the scent of fruit, something he recognised as good from his time at the place before, at the bad place.
A man on the outskirts of the city was taking big boxes of fruit out of another even bigger box on wheels, and stacking them on an intermediate sized box covered by an awning on the street corner. 89P13 couldn't see the point, but the fruit looked and smelt good, so he walked over. He'd decided on Vitis, and was about to take a double handful of the berries when the man spotted him.
"Hey!" he yelled, dropping his box and scooting over, grabbing a broom and waving at him aggressively. "Git out! Dammed critters!"
89P13 panicked: cold and hunger had made him stupid and the man was between him and his escape route. Heart hammering in his narrow chest, he flattened himself defensively against the wall and raised a paw to shield his face. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, please don't hit me!"
The man startled, and peered at him, seeming to notice 89P13's clothes for the first time.
"You can talk?" he asked, suspiciously. 89P13 hesitated, wondering if he should deny in, and if so how, but in the end he just nodded. He didn't want to get hit again.
The man squinted, and gestured at the fruit. "What are you up to? The stall ain't set up yet. Are you trying to rob me?"
"I… I don't understand." Said 89P13 honestly. Back in the place before, the dispensers had provided food pellets and water: food was pretty much the only think you could get whenever you wanted. Unless they were running a test where it was a variable, or you were in pre-op, or you were malcompliant. P13 shivered.
"The fruit! You want it, you have to pay for it! Two units a bushel!"
"I… I don't understand." He said, frightened. The only thing he'd ever heard measured out in units was blood for transfusions, and he started shaking, paws on his chest subconsciously clenching and unclenching on his most recent surgical scars. He whimpered, remembering all too clearly the masked faces leaning over him as he'd struggled against the drugs, but it was never enough. Always just enough to keep him quiet, never enough for him to not-be while the pain was there.
"I… you want my blood?" he asked, horrified.
The man with the broom frowned, disgusted, and then poked at him with the broom. "What the actual fuck?! Get lost buddy! I've got a stall to run! I see you sneaking around here again I'm calling immigration: ain't enough jobs here as it is without freaky-aliens tanking 'em! Common market my arse!" he said, stepping to one side and gesturing angrily.
89P13 hurried away, obscenely grateful to the man for not hitting him, and he scurried around the nearest corner trying to put as much space between him and the man as possible, paws clenched defensively to his breast to hold his newsfilmy blanket in place. He waited until he was fully around the corner before he dared stop and unclench them, revealing the single berry he'd managed to conceal throughout the confrontation.
Sighing with relief, he was about to put it into his mouth when the world exploded.
89P13 dropped the berry, food forgotten, as he clenched both paws over his ears and screwed his eyes shut as the sound and light hit him like a wall. He staggered and fell, his brain shutting down and his mouth resorting to a half-forgotten bird-like chittering in his blind panic. He was under attack, that was the only possible explanation. They had come for him. They had found him. And they were going to take him back and there was nothing he could do about it, he realised. The light was so bright, the sound so loud, it had to be a weapon, and as it washed over him in waves along with the fear it physically and mentally shook him, and he curled up in a quivering ball of fur and waited for it to stop.
I got so far. I got so far! He thought to himself, crying. He didn't want to think about what they'd do to him when they got him back. He didn't have to. He knew.
And then after the longest time, when the boot didn't hit his healing ribs, when hands didn't grab him roughly and drag him to his fate, he cautiously opened one eye, and pulled himself into a sitting position, filed with fear and wonder.
The sky was on fire.
The light was too bright to look at directly, and even the long scar of burnt air it left cutting across the grey morning sky was painfully bright, and the noise was so loud you could feel it in your chest, but it wasn't them. And it wasn't a weapon, so far as he could tell. It was just so big and it was cutting its way into the sky so swiftly and so gracefully and so powerfully, that in his short sad life 89P13 didn't have any frame of reference for it.
And it was beautiful.
He gasped as the wave of hot air washed over him, the wind of its passage resplendent and redolent of dead hydrocarbons, and although it scared him more than nearly anything and although it stank appallingly and hurt his eyes to look and hurt his ears to hear, he stood, and he looked, and he heard.
And as the furnace blast of its exhaust dried his fur and made him feel warm for the first time in days, 89P13 realised that there were tears in his eyes. The image blurred and it swam, but he didn't look away. He couldn't. And there was a feeling in his chest that for once didn't have anything to do with the metal stuffed in there. And as it shook his implants and gave him mild tinnitus and covered his face in wind-blown grime, 89P13 felt, for the first time in his life, a feeling he didn't have a name for. Like as it climbed into the sky it was taking part of him soaring with it.
It felt good.
He turned and ran back to the man in the street, with the broom, who was swearing and trying to clean up as it's exhaust blew newsfilmy and fast-food wrappers around and made his awning heave and snap.
His fear of the man forgotten, his fear of pain forgotten, everything forgotten, he ran back to the man: he just had to know.
"Sir? Sir? That… that thing! What is it?"
The man stared suspiciously, suspecting a trick.
"What?"
89P13 didn't understand. How could he not see it? It was the biggest thing in the world!
"That thing there!" he yelled excitedly, pointing. "What is it?"
The man glanced up from his sweeping, squinting suspiciously at the rising pillar of flame.
"That heap of junk? Old cargo hauler. Lampyridae class maybe. It's just a solid-fuel, low-orbit job. Routine com-sat launch I think, replacing an older sat where it's cheaper to let it burn up and replace it that fix the orbital decay maybe."
"I… I didn't understand any of what you just said." Said 89P13, starting at the thing, transfixed by the noise and the light. The man glared.
"What turnip cart did you fall off of pal? It a spacecraft, dummy. A super-orbital. A frickin' Rocket."
"I… I don't understand." Said 89P13. "What is it? What does it do? What's it for?"
"Do? For? It's a fricking Rocket. It goes places."
"Where?" asked 89P13, staring.
The man snorted.
"Where? Anyplace that's not this shithole. It goes wherever the fuck it wants. That's what a rocket does . That's what a Rocket is." He said, shooting the small furry creature standing by his stall a weird glance, and he turned his back on it and started stacking fruit again.
89P13 started for a long time after it was out of sight.
"Rocket." he muttered under his breath.
Awesome Mix tape Vol 2: Leslie Fish, Hope Eyrie.
Rocket paused, the expression on his face more annoyed than anything else.
"Oh, sorry, is showing me my young innocent, bright eyed and bushy-tailed self meant to give me some sort of sudden, overwhelming regret about the evil-minded fuck I turned into?" he asked, after a moment.
"You got me by showing me my mother, I'll give you that, I wasn't expecting that one, but I know what I'm like, better than you do: if there's one person I don't have sympathy for, it's younger me. Younger me fucked up. Younger me is why my leg still hurts when the weather changes. Younger me is why I have frickin' night terrors. Younger me was an idiot. Hell, I don't even like current me that much."
"Oh, in that case you'll have no objection if I keep on with this." said the voice, now slightly noticeably synthesised, which Quill found odd, as it hadn't been before. "I mean, I'm sure the fact that your heart-rate just doubled and you're excreting more stress hormones in your exhaled breath is just a coincidence?"
"Bite me, bolt-bag." Said Rocket, making a rude gesture and stepping forwards.
Quill looked around. Prison. He thought, even before he got a good look at his surroundings: there was a smell to prison you just didn't forget: disinfectant and piss and sweat and home-brewed alcohol. Quill had been in enough county jails and short term lock-ups to know it, and frankly the Kyln wasn't a weekend he was going to forget anytime soon.
A Nova Corp Prison. He thought, after a moment. It wasn't as high tech as the Kyln and it looked a little cleaner, and smaller, but it was built to the same basic pattern, but with what looked like two-person cells rather than the cram-'em-in pattern of the Kyln. He'd spent enough time on ships to recognise the distinctive variations in artificial gravity, and he wasn't picking any up, so they were planeside. Some force felids, some armed guards in Nova uniforms, but no Security drones and less in the way of scanners and observation devices than he expected. Some medium-security or minimum security prison, on some unimportant world. He glanced around looking for more clues, and then stopped.
"Oh Jesus Rocket!" he said, recoiling slightly. Present Rocket snorted, sounding mildly disgusted.
"Yeah, well, like I said, Younger me was kind of bad at this whole survival thing…" he muttered.
Standing in a line for de-lousing and uniforms with the other prisoners, so short compared to them that it a first looked like there was a gap in the line, was Rocket. He didn't quite come up to people's waists, in fact he was noticeably shorter than present Rocket, and while Rocket couldn't be said to be anything but tiny, at least normally you couldn't count his ribs through his clothes. He was wearing what might once have been a surgical smock, a sack, and not much else, and looking around with huge, frightened eyes. One of his legs seemed to be twitching compulsively, and he was visibly crawling with lice. Pig-pen from Peanuts would be shocked by this. Quill thought. It's Snoopy's famine relief poster. Call the American Humane association: animal AND child divisions.
There was the blare of an air-horn, and the line of prisoners shuffled forwards one pace, with much cursing and grumbling. Young Rocket, who had been steeling sideways glances at the convicts eating in the refectory on the other side of a metal mesh wall but trying to look away each time one glanced his way, was caught out, distracted by the smell of the food and his fear of the people eating it. So when the guy behind him stepped forwards, a huge one-eyed yellow dude of a species that Quill didn't recognise but who was wearing oil-stained bib-overalls that said mechanic or trucker in every language under the stars, he trod on Rocket's tail. So as Rocket yelped and jumped up, mechanic boy tripped and almost fell on him.
"Watch it, you G'narfing little shit!" one-eye roared.
"Sorry! I'm so-"
Rocket's apologies were cut short when the guy's huge crab-claw clamped shut on his threadbare rags and dragged him up to eye height.
"What the fuck are you doing, trying to trip me up like that you stinking little squirt of piss! I orrta tear you a new smelting-cloaca!"
"Hey!" yelled a guard in the distance. "Keep that line moving!" no one paid him any attention.
A Xandarian-looking human-ish alien who could have passed for normal on any small town American street leaned in, and opened his mouth way too wide for Quill's liking revealing a second internal mouth, three jawed, covered with eyes and squamous. He'd never actually thought he'd get a valid chance to use the word squamous, but if ever there was one, there it was.
The orthodontists wet-dream let out an incomprehensible stream of screeching squeals, that his friend space-trucker helpfully translated.
"He's doesn't like you." Said old one eye, squinting.
"I'm sorry!" squealed Rocket, trying to look away from a mouth that could comfortably swallow him whole and that smelt like fermented afterbirth as not-human leered and Mr overalls leaned in and growled in his face.
"I don't like you either!"
"I'm sorry I tripped you! I'll be careful!"
"You'll be dead!" said the yellow alien, lifting up a crab claw and wrapping it around Rocket's tiny little chicken-arm as if about to tear himself of a drumstick, when there was the faint humming of a capacitor charging up, and a gentle tap-tap noise, very close.
One-eye looked sideways.
There was a Nova-issue shock-prod resting about an inch from big yellow's single eye, Tap-tapping on his shoulder carapace gently.
"Take it you don't have great peripheral vison there big guy? Obb, isn't it? Put the newbie down and get back in line, on the double! Ancestors help me, you're on a two year stretch with a guaranteed job to go back to at Funtzel's, and you're gonna start a brawl on day one? You hurt that kid you're looking at an extra seven to fifteen, twenty-five to life if he dies. Be smart, put him down."
Obb tried and failed to focus on the weapon floating in front of his eyes, and then grunted and dropped Rocket on his narrow rump and then he and his friend pushed past, reclaiming their spot in the snagged-up line.
The Nova officer watched him go, holding the shock prod casually and tapping it against his boot like a riding crop while he watched Obb and his friend get back in line, before waving away the two other guards who had appeared with rifles shouldered. Only once he was absolutely sure that no-one else was going to start a disturbance, did he glace down at Rocket.
"Are you injured, prisoner?" he said, clearly a little uncomfortable taking to Rocket.
He thinks I'm wrong. He released, feeling cold. Like those men in the alleyway. Like everyone. He sees I'm a freak.
"No." said Rocket, instinctively: he couldn't let others know if he was hurt. He'd look even weaker. Besides, they might take him to see doctors. He wasn't sure he could face that.
To his surprise, the man lent down, and offered him a hand getting up.
Rocket hesitated, paw cautiously half held out, before reaching out and letting the corpsman envelop the tiny hand in his.
"Oh ancestors…" muttered the Guard, feeling the bones and Rocket's hammering heart and animal heat thought the thin fur. "Didn't they feed you wherever you were before?" he asked, not unkindly.
Rocket hesitated, and then shook his head. It was malcompliance to lie, at least if you were caught. "I… there were lizard rats on the ship I came here on. Sometimes I could catch them. After that there was food in dumpsters, sometimes…"
The Corpsman looked down at him in shock, registering his high, child-like voice.
"How old are you son?"
"I'm sorry?" asked Rocket. The corpsman asked again, and they went over it several times before the corpsman realised that Rocket didn't have any abstract conceptualisation of age, before and after, yes, but no idea that how long you'd been in existence was significant. Rocket noted it as an interesting new concept, and filed it away for later in the part of his brain not pissing itself with fear.
The corpsman looked at Rocket with mounting horror, and then pulled out a holo-state and quickly pulled up his file.
After a while and some sub-vocalised swearing, the corpsman looked down.
"Prisoner, step out of line for a moment, please. Follow me, stay to the green demarcated floor areas, okay? Walk where I tell you, when I tell you, and when I tell you to stand, you don't move until I tell you otherwise, okay?"
Rocket glanced around him, nervously; all the other prisoners were staring at him. Obb and his friend looking particularly smug, until a jet of de-lousing goo hit him square in the face. "Understood sir." Rocket muttered quietly, old habits of obedience and avoiding malcompliance coming to the surface as if they had never left.
The corpsman nodded, and then marched him thought a short series of corridors and doorways. Rocket stood and waited for the doors to open when instructed to do so, and kept to the marked area on the floor at all times, and tried to hide the urge to break down whimpering. He knows who I am! He knows! He's taking me back to them!
Eventually they halted outside an office of some sort, with a frosted glass wall and heavy sliding door, and Rocket let out a completely involuntary fine, thin mewling noise. The air smelt of phenol: somewhere, nearby, there was a surgical suite.
"Wait here." said the Guard, pointing to a checked green area on the floor as he nodded to the other corpsperson standing on-guard outside the large metal door, and walked in.
"Warden, could I have a word with you Sir?" he heard him say, before the door slid back.
Rocket glanced around nervously. He felt the other guard's stare boring into him, and he was too frightened to meet it so his eyes darted and skittered, looking for an escape route. The door he's just came from said "intake" in large Xandarian letters, several others lead away, neatly labelled: mess-room, restrooms, staff infirmary, prisoner infirmary. He didn't understand what they all meant, but he took it all in anyway. He didn't have a choice.
He didn't consider just running back the way he had come: the doors had locked behind him as they'd walked along, and while the locking mechanism looked similar to the ones back at the lab, there were differences he didn't yet understand. He was so frightened, his mouth felt dry, so he tried to distract himself by counting, by assessing things, like he did. By rotating the shapes of that locking mechanism in his mind, until he could understand how it fitted together.
He'd almost got it fixed, almost got it to click in his mind, when there was a loud thump from behind the frosted glass of the office which made him jump, everything except his hands shaking. He could see shapes behind the glass, and one of them had just thumped the table in anger. He found that even through the glass, he could hear parts of their conversation now: the corpsman who had led him there had raised his voice.
"-so we just assumed it was legally adult because we've got no metric to compare it to? It should be in Juvie, it won't survive two days in here!"
A reply he couldn't hear.
"I don't care what it's preliminary medical says, sir, biological sexual maturity be dammed, if it looks like an unaccompanied minor, and it smells like an unaccompanied minor, it's a-"
"-what do you mean we don't even know it's immigration status? Someone out there must recognise what species it is even if it's a stowaway-"
"Bullshit, it'd have to breach the Galaxian wall to be from there, quarantine alone would have picked it up-"
"Classified? How can it's file be sealed if no-one even knows what it-"
"-not what I signed on for-"
"...understood."
There was a long pause, and then the door slid back open and the corpsman game out, looking dejected. He took a moment to straighten up his uniform, and then marched Rocket back to the de-lousing line again. This time he was careful not to look directly at Rocket, and that frightened him.
Even as a spectator to the memory, Quill could tell that that blankness frightened Rocket more than anything else so far, and while he could taste that fear, he didn't know where it was coming from. He glanced a present Rocket, who shrugged.
"Generally, when people stop wanting to see you, it's because they're giving themselves permission to stop thinking of you as a person. Unless you're as fucked up as me, it's hard to enjoy hurting people. Things don't count."
The guard finished marching Rocket back to the line, and then apologised to Rocket for wasting his time, before gesturing to the guard overseeing the line and turning away sharply. Rocket shivered, unsure what had just happened but glad it was over. As the guard overseeing the line trotted over to the other corpsman, shooting Rocket a curious glance, Rocket got back in line, and shuffled along meekly enough, and unless you were paying very careful attention, you wouldn't have even noticed his ears swivel slightly to track the two guards as they held a whispered conversation.
"What was that about?" rumbled the new guard, a hulking Kakarantharaian.
"No idea Fraktur, but it's messed up. The little alien with the fur: assign him a voided prisoner number."
"What? Is this a joke?"
"No joke. Re-use a number from a dead inmate, and log the dead guys ID shot and biometrics to the new prisoner's file. "
"But why?"
"Don't ask, I just tried to bring it up with the warden and I just got threatened with permeant re-assignment to guard duty at the Kyln. You ever want to get a field posting, you'll not rock the boat either, that was made clear. Someone outside wants that poor little sod, someone wants him bad, and it looks like they tried looking for him in our computer logs with an expired Nova access code. Someone seriously bad, and the corps doesn't what them to find him. Don't chance putting his details in the system in case they try again with a better code and locate him. Plausible deniability, he was never here."
"That's messed up, he's just a kid. Who'd be looking for him. The Kree?"
"Don't ask me girl, this comes from way above the warden. Simple instructions: to keep him safe, we need to lose him in the system. He doesn't exist. You doctor his file, I'll do the rest. One more thing, It's vital that we-"
"Clothes off."
Said a voice next to Rocket, making him jump.
He'd reached the front of the line. The automated washing station beeped and hissed at him, and the bored looking Kylarian at the control lectern running it didn't even look up from his porno-slate and he reached for another doughnut with a lemon-yellow hand.
"Clothes off." He repeated, leaning back in his chair before droning away by rote. "Welcome to the super-san limited complete vermin control system, we are here for your safety and convenience: please place your garb into the laundry slash fumigator slash incinerator vessel, clothing passing minimum biohazard standards will be laundered and returned on completion of sentence. Place your hands on the demarcated points, facing away from the nozzles, and then when the air-horn sounds, turn and face the nozzles for frontal de-lousing…"
Rocket looked at the hand grips in the cage, about six feet up, and then at the rack of nozzles aimed at him.
"Ummm, Sir? Sir? I can't reach the hand grips."
The Guard frowned, and swiveled his chair around and glanced down over the splash-shield to get a better look at Rocket.
Rocket faltered, unsure what to do, but the man had said that he was there for his safety and convenience.
"Ummm… hello?" he said, imitating a gesture he'd seen at the lab, and smiling as wide as he could and holding out a paw for the man to shake.
The man's expression didn't even change as a flea the size of a woodlouse pinged out of the halo of dirt orbiting Rocket like an Oort cloud, and ran along the edge of his holo-slate for a moment before jumping off again and getting stuck on its back in the glaze on his doughnut, legs wiggling helplessly.
Rocket realised it wasn't working, and tired smiling harder.
The guard looked back to Rocket, his expression never changing as he put down the doughnut and reached for the communicator on his desk. "Carrol? Yeah, we've got a 23-19 right here, yeah, that's right, code 23-19. Give me the full works."
"Works?" asked Rocket, nervously.
The guard reached under his desk behind the splash-shield, and still with no change to his uniformly glum expression pulled out an agricultural-grade electric sheering device. It was just as it buzzed on that Rocket noticed the beep-beep of a reversing heavy robot, and glanced up to see what looked like a small cement mixer labelled "pest-away gel" appear hovering over the cage.
"The Works" happened.
Present Rocket turned to Quill, and shot him a smile that didn't even contain one trace of friendliness or joy. "One word about that…" he said, as evil-smelling pesticide foam and clumps of fur started flying as the cubicle descended into a whole series of strange yelping, scrabbling and clanging noises.
"One fucking word…" he muttered, as his younger-self managed to burst out of the side of the cage for just a moment before the guard and Carrol, a worryingly burly Aaskvarian matriarch with breasts Artemis of Ephesus could drown in, dragged him back in my his tail leaving a small but perfectly neat set of claw-marks on the floor.
"I wasn't going to say a thing." Said Quill. "I was just, you know, going to think it really, really hard and bust out laughing at random once this is all behind us maybe." He added, as eventually the Loony-toons short ended and a shivering and confused racoon, his fur shaved down to a short fuzz everywhere but his head and tail, which made his body look even skinner by comparison, like a bobble-head, was unceremoniously stuffed into a uniform and shoved out the other side of the cage, to make room for the next supplicant at the altar of hygiene, and joined the other prisoners handed bedding and assigned a bunk number. The female Kakarantharaian guard from before, Fraktur, came over and interjected briefly with the corpsperson supervising this, and Rocket got taken to one side, and without a second glance assigned a ID number that didn't fit in the sequence that was being used that day. Quill was struck by the contrast to when he'd first encountered Rocket in the Kyln, with his swagger and his scowl and with so many dangerous prisoner and escape-risk warnings on the legs of his uniform that they were running out of room, and this fuzzball looking around in too-big hand me downs. Weirdly, once he was in, he no longer seemed as frightened, but the fact they sat him down and fed him might have had a lot to do with it. Engulf was a better word than eat. A medic had to take a plate away at one point, when it was clear if they didn't Rocket would eat until he barfed.
"Huh, well, I hate to say it, but you seem a lot cooler your first night in the lock up than I was. I was about to shit bricks, but then again, I knew I had Yondu kicking my ass once he bailed me to look forwards too…"
Present Rocket scowled, "Yeah well, too dumb to know better: it wasn't all peaches and cream…"
The memory flickered, not so much a cut as an extreme fast-forward.
Rocket found his assigned bunk number, in a two-bunk cell at the end of the block. He checked the number was correct, unrolled his bedroll, and sat on the bunk. The cell as empty, most prisoners still on work detachments, but he could tell a lot about his cellmate already from the things left about the place and the residual scent: male Xandarian, early middle age. Worked in the metal-shop. Ate pretty well, which given the fact there seemed to be free food in this place didn't surprise him, but the traces of toxins did. He'd seen posters stating the alcohol and other recreational drugs were forbidden, and deathsticks heavily rationed, but this guy clearly consumed a lot. That was strange. He glanced at the empty bunk, and then paused, and cocked his head sideways.
There was a shard of sharp metal in his bed, just visible where the bedroll had slid forward as his cellmate got out of bed that morning. Rocket automatically went to remove it: he didn't want his new friend to cut himself in his sleep. It was only when he lifted the bed-roll up and saw the string wrapped around it like a handle, that he realised it was a weapon, and let the bedroll fall back, shocked. Without thinking, he quickly sniffed at the area, whiskers twitching. He could smell blood, faint, old, but definitely there. Then he remembered what the guard had said about reassigning a dead prisoner's ID number to him, and he suddenly released he no idea what had happened to the last person to be given this identity.
"What the fuck are you doing?" growled a voice behind him.
Rocket leapt up startled, cursing himself for getting so distracted.
His cellmate was standing in the doorway to the cell, blocking his escape. Tall compered to Rocket, short compared to Quill, pale, dark-hared, with the unhealthy completion and build of an average sized man who got too much rich food and too much booze. Rocket grinned nervously at him.
"Sorry, I-"
"What the fuck were you sniffing my bed for, fucking pervert."
Rocket didn't know what either of those words meant, and logged them for later research. If nothing else, he could take the opportunity to improve his vocabulary while in prison.
"Managed that at least." Present Rocket muttered, not taking his eyes of his cellmate, Quill noticed.
Young Rocket looked from the bedroll, to the other prisoner. "I… I just arrived. I'm-"
"I know who you are" Muttered the prisoner, as the sirens blared, and he stepped out of the way as the door begun to automatically lock behind him as the guards made their rounds and started calling lights-out.
Rocket held his breath no no no! No one knows who I am! He can't know! He can't be working for them, I don't want to go back….
The man sat heavily on the bedroll, not noticing it had been moved, and begun to shrug off his shoes.
"You're the little fuckstain who's stolen my spare bunk. Two months I've had that, got used to having the extra place to store my shit. Used it to hide a good batch of Sligo, and other stuff, and now what've I got?" he asked, before suddenly and vehemently throwing his shoe at Rocket, who filched back and covered his head with both hands.
"No! I've got some freaky little talking-rat-shit vermin mother-fucker who sniffs people bedding! What use is that to me, eh? The spare bunk at least made me some extra unit's commissary because I could hide shit under it, and in the tubular steel, dress it up like an empty bunk. Now, every time they toss the cell, the guards will treat it like any other bunk and search it properly! I had to move all of my shit back to my bunk because they came and fucking cleaned it before you got here!" snarled the man, moving over, and grabbing the bed-roll of Rocket's bunk and throwing it to the floor. He gave Rocket a sharp look, but Rocket was so shocked he just stood there paralysed with fear: he'd assumed that it was prisoner's vs guards, like it was lab-coats wanting to hurt him before. But so far the only people who hadn't tried to hurt him were the guards. He was frightened. I'm not safe here. He realised, with a small moan.
His new cellmate looked over approvingly at the noise, and gave what Quill recognised as the grin of a grade A shit-eater who's just realised he's going to get away with whatever he's doing. He pulled back his own bedroll, and snatched up his shank.
Rocket, already backed into the corner of the cell to get away from him, flattened his body out, squeezing out every last inch of space and he begun to make the high, panicked raccoon-ish twittering that Quill had only ever heard his Rocket make in his sleep, and only then on a seriously bad night.
The guy turned on Rocket for a moment with the knife, grinning, before he used it to leaver off one of the welded-solid ends of the tubular steel the bed was made off, prying open a hidden cut where the metal had been sawn through. Taking the shank, and producing a few bags of a yellow-ish white power that looked like raw Zydrate to Quill, he threaded the bags together on a string, and then lowed them down the hollow tube, followed by the shank, on its own string, and hammed the cap of the tube back in with the flat off his hand, artfully trapping just a little string in the join so the goodies didn't slip all the way down inside the bed and get lost. As he did so, he spoke to Rocket.
"What's your name, spare-bunk?"
"Urrm, It's Ro-"
"No, wait, I just remembered I don't care. Okay, listen here, Spare Bunk, this is how it's gonna go: I'm going to keep my stuff in your bunk, and if it gets found when they toss the cell, then you say it's your stuff. Because if you don't, then when I get outta solitary, I'm going to fucking skin you alive. Understood?"
"I… I don't understand. Is it malcompliant to have the knife and the powder if-"
Quill flinched as the guy turned and backhanded Rocket halfway across the room. "You don't understand? You don't fucking understand? That was the wrong answer, Little Spare Bunk! Don't you play smart with me!" the guy looked at Rocket, scared and confused, and then suddenly seemed to sag. "Gods, you really don't do ya? You ain't trying to be smart, you genuinely don't… great, my new cell mate: a retard as well as a freak pervert. Gods, I'm sorry. I ain't ever beat on no retard before. Here." he said, patting the bunk next to him. "Here, Spare Bunk, here come sit with me and I'll explain."
"My name is Rocket." He muttered, cautiously standing up again.
"Rocket." said the guy, testing he word out. "Okay, Rocket, you come sit with me, and I'll try to explain how all this works to you. Prison is dangerous, and you gotta understand a few things if you're going to survive…"
Rocket, cautiously, still frightened and unsure of the man, hoped up onto the bunk next to him, it was a little too tall for him, and he had to use both hands and swivel awkwardly to pull himself up to sit next to the guy.
"There." Said the guy, smiling. He had very clean white tenth, Rocket noticed. "There, now, are you sitting comfortably?" asked the guy. Rocket nodded.
"Good." he said, looking down at his new furry cellmate. "Then we'll begin."
The first blow knocked Rocket flat on his back, and the guy quickly grabbed the bedroll and rolled him in it, wrapping him tight as a straight-jacket. Rocket kicked, and hissed and wiggled, but with a rising panic he realised that was all he was able to do. He tried to scream, but the guy grabbed him by the back of his head, and bundled his face into the pillow, choking and stifling Rocket and making him taste cheap hair gel. Rocket saw a Nova guard walking a patrol, checking cells on the opposite side of the corridor as the lights finally started to go out, and tried to scream again, but the guy punched him hard, winding him. Rocket writhed and gasped for air as the cell light went out, but with his face trapped in the pillow he couldn't breathe couldn't lash out, could barely even wiggle. The Nova guard was closer now, right by the cell. Rocket's cellmate punched Rocket again, right in the kidney, and the pain and waves of nausea ripped thought him. He'd felt worse back the lab, far, far worse, but it was the surprise that got him, bringing tears to his eyes and he desperately willed the guard to look as he walked past, but the light in his cell had gone out, and all the guard saw was a shape lying flat on top of a bunk, and he heard nothing, and he walked on.
"Shush, shush now…" muttered his cellmate in his ear, waiting for the guard to pass, before, when he was sure he was gone, he sat upright on the bunk, resting a knee on Rocket's chest to keep him pined. He slicked back his hair in the half-light, and stared at Rocket like a disappointed teacher with a slow pupil.
"What you need to understand, Spare bunk, is that this is my cell. All the stuff in it is my stuff, and everything in here is my personal property, and as of right now, that includes you. The second you walked in here, you graduated from less than the shit on my shoe to my personal flunky. Congrats. Your bedroll is mine, I want an extra one, I'm keeping it. The bunk? Well the bunk has always been mine, it was never yours to start with, you can sleep on the floor. If you snore i'll kick you, and you block my way if I need a piss in the night I'll stick your head in the bowl and make you drink it. You make the bunk up each day for inspections so the guards don't get wise that I've taken your bedroll, but that's the closest you get to it. The shitter? The shitter is mine, I don't want some mangy animal stinking up my cell, you wait until morning, and go in the communal latrines before breakfast. Your commissary account? Definitely mine, I want to buy shit, and they cap how much you can have in any one account, meant to prevent extortion, and ain't that the joke of the season. Your food? Any of it I want, it's mine. Certainly desserts. And most importantly, you are mine. I run a very nice little business out of this cell, and you're gonna help me at it, because if you fuck this up for me, I'll find the worst fuckers in the prison, and there are plenty worse than me, trust me, and I'll fucking feed you to them." he said, smiling, and as he did, the memory begun to flicker to others, like a movie montage, the Collector-bot adding an extra dramatic twist no doubt.
It cut to a bruised and frightened Rocket, flinching each time he had to walk past a guard, heart in mouth, the feel of the bags Velcroed to his fur under his uniform sharp as glass and bitter as gall in his mind, his cellmate calmly walking just a few paces behind him.
"You carry my product, so if we get searched, I don't take the rap. I'm cutting a deal, you walk into the room first. I'm taking a piss in the communal latrines, you walk in first, in fact, any place where I might get ambushed for my gear, you walk in first Spare Bunk."
The memory cut back to Rocket sushi-rolled on the bunk, as his cell-mate slapped him, hard, and then it faded to Rocket, shivering and spasming in the corner of the cell, feverish and burning up, his chemical warfare system fighting full whack against a massive dose of gods-knows what.
"I cut any deals with any other pushers, you carry their stuff too. I want to test out a new shipment of Zydrate or make a new batch of hooch, you try it first in case it's cut with something bad or it's gonna turn folk blind. I don't want my customers dying, they mean shit to me, so you're my fucking lab-rat, Spare Bunk."
Slap, another change of scene, the cell mate and some other goons haggling with what looked like some serious Kree gangsters in the prison refectory, drugs being passed around under the table. They seemed to be reaching a price, counting out cash and deathsticks and weighing bags, but no one seemed to have quite what they needed to complete the deal. An argument started as how the cell-mate would make up the amount owed for his latest shipment of drugs.
"And if I ever get desperate enough to want to, I'll fuck you, Spare Bunk, although frankly I can afford much better ass that your scrawny behind, but if I ever think I can get something by letting someone else fuck you, you'll get fucked ridgid, Spare Bunk, right here on your name sake…"
The cell-mate made his offer to the Kree, physically pushing Rocket over to his side of the table, and the Kree laughed in his face, and took his drugs back, and walked away. The cell mate scowled and took Rocket back, giving him a sharp kick in the behind as they walked away from the deal as well.
"… although frankly, I doubt I'll even be able to get many offers there. The guards turn a blind eye to a lot of hanky-panky, but paedophiles get beat on pretty bad by the general prison population, and the guards come down on that hard too, so until anyone works out how fucking old you are, you're not even worth jack shit to me there, but something for you to look forwards to one day if you don't die first, eh?"
Slap.
"Now…" said the man, massaging some feeling back into his aching hand. "Are we absolutely, one-hundred percent clear on the situation, Spare Bunk?" he asked pulling his greasy pillow up enough for Rocket to be able to talk
"I understand! I understand, please, please just stop hitting me!"
Slap.
"No, no, you don't get to tell me what to do. You don't even get to beg. I wasn't asking you if you understood the situation, I was telling you, understood? I want to hit you: I hit you. I do what I want to you, and that's all there is, and you understand why?"
Rocket nodded, sobbing into the bedroll. "You're bigger than me! You're stronger! I can't stop you!"
The guy looked at him, and then laughed, and laughed and laughed until a guard shouted at him to keep it down; it sounded like a fake laugh to Rocket, but then again he hadn't heard enough laughter in his short life to be sure.
"Me ? Okay sure, yeah I'm bigger than you, sure, but there are guys in this prison the size of small planetoids, and when I walk past, they give me space. Guys who know me by name even if I've never spoken to them, and who know what I'm good for, what I can get for them, and what friends I have on the outside that can fuck them up if they cross me. By any physical standard other than you, I'm a small guy, and they still let me get my way, more often than not. That's the power of reputation. You can't buy that shit, and you can't get that from physical strength alone, not without smarts and moxie. You know why I'm sitting here on your chest and you're crying like a little bitch, you know why I have all your stuff?"
Snorting back tears, Rocket shook his head.
His cell-mate leaned in, grinning. "Because I want it more. And that's all it ever is." He said.
And then he started hitting Rocket again, because he felt like it.
Quill looked away, this was just awful. He then froze up.
Rocket, present Rocket, was watching this with what could best be described as mild annoyance.
"Dude! How are you so calm? You're cell mate is a psycho!"
"What? Him? Pesh Tommy? Low-level Wiseguy, in the sort of outfit I'd fuck over before breakfast now-a-days. He wished he was a psycho, but he'd need lessons in insanity to even be interesting. Had one personally trait, and that was pettiness. Glorified delivery boy, caught with a kilo of Zydrate up his ass, but to his credit didn't squeal, so his boss used him as a pusher on the inside. Now, that right there, that kidney punch on me? That was by far the most interesting moment of his fucking life right there, the all-time high of his criminal carrier, beating up a frightened kid. I pissed blood the next day and he was so happy he wouldn't let me flush, made people come look like a proud parent. That blood stained shank? Wasn't even his. Fucker was holding it for a higher ranking member of his gang in case the guards tossed the cells, just like how he made me keep it for him after that. He could talk the talk, alright, but walk the walk? I doubt the fucker could walk and chew gum." Said Rocket, watching him lay into his younger self like a drunken navvy.
"I hated and feared that man at the time, right enough. But now? I can't even find the energy to pity him. I mean look at him, he's pathetic. But he had his uses, so I can't begrudge him that."
"Had his uses! Rocket, the guy beat on you and threatened to rape you!"
"Ture." said Rocket, calmly "Would have as well, if it wasn't for the fact the last guy in this prison to fuck a minor found his junk floating in the toilet the next morning: one thing holo-dramas always get wrong about prison, ya generally only get raped if people think you're a child-molester or undercover cop. Too much effort: cohesion to get people into bed, bribery and threats, sure. But ninety per cent of the time you see two prisoners fucking it's either consensual or for drug-money. Yeah, he was a sleezy scumbag, sure, but he also taught me a lot. Oh, he didn't know that was what he was doing most of the time, but he did. How to hide stuff, really, really well, how to make a shank, how to turn literally anything into alcohol, the street-value of the top ten narcotics in the Kree and Nova empires, how to run a crooked craps game, how to count cards, collaborate at poker, tell a successful from a failed pimp. He was too paranoid to answer his own messages with the guards there, so he got me to go to the Com for him and talk to his guys on the outside, so I learnt names, and faces and dates, and mob hangouts and the cant."
"Second most important thing I learnt, I learnt prison. How it works, what the rules are, how to spot the power players and the real psychos and the griffters and the victims, and that which one of those you were was decided on the first second you walk thought that gate. How to spot the good guards and bad, the smart and stupid, the ones you can deal with or scrounge sympathy from or just avoid like hell, and that nearly everything a guard says gets heard by one prisoner or another, and if you put it all together, you can make plans."
"Second? And the most important thing you learned?" Quill asked.
Rocket grinned evilly. "That you should never take everything from someone. Not unless you're gonna kill them right away. Take their food, sure, their freedom, sure, why not, their money, their health, their dignity, their safety, their frickin' bunk… Take what you need or want, but leave them something to hold on to 'cause if you take the last thing away from them, or make them think you're gonna, then they have nothing else to lose, and you've got no power over them anymore. And if you are frickin' stupid enough to take everything from someone you've screwed over again and again and given every reason to hate you, don't be stupid enough for that person to be the guy who shares your cell while you sleep. That's a really bad call."
"Huh. I'm guessing he came to regret storing his shank in your bunk and not keeping it on him." Said Quill.
"Among other things." said Rocket, grinning, and Quill was suddenly reminded that Rocket had an awful lot of very small but very sharp teeth.
"Oh, and how quickly the abused becomes the abuser, the victim takes on the attributes of the-"
" Oh Shuuuuuut up Tivan-Bot!" said Rocket. "Yeah, I became an asshole. Better than becoming a corpse, don't try that lost-innocence shit on me. The only thing I really regret about all this, is that that stupid kid let it go on for as long as he did." Said Rocket, a note of his old sneer creeping back into his voice.
"Rocket, that stupid kid is you."
Rocket shook his head. "Not yet. No, he took my name, and he has my body, but that long streak of nothing ain't me yet, not by a long shot. Not until after his second prison break. Not until after he started to learn how the world really works. Not until after the toy-war."
"The what?" Asked Quill.
"Ah… Funny you should ask…" said Tivan-bot, cheerfully.
The Rak n'Ruin kept low in the vanguard of the fleet, moving fast and hedge-hoping to avoid sensor sweeps, and Rocket adjusted his info glass and scanned thought the tactical data fighting down the knot of tension in his stomach. It had been hard before they'd set out. Now it was teak. He put out a paw to steady himself on the bulkhead as a combination of turbulence and anti-air fire rocked the craft like a ship in a gale. Quill looked around: he was in an old light cargo freighter, converted for combat by the looks of the door-guns by the ramp and the medivac suite, but that wasn't what surprised him. What surprised him was the crew.
Jesus, Rocket's captain of the 'Get-along Gang' he thought. Every single creature on that ship was an animal, and Quill wasn't exaggerating, an animal he recognised from earth. Small wild mammals, every one. They were all within a head the same height as Rocket, they were all wearing a similar orange armoured body-glove, and they were all armed. The ship was old, and battered, worse than the Milano, and it stank: a heavy animal musk that underpinned everything, but far worse than that was the familiar coppery taint of blood and the acrid tang of acute fear. He looked sideways to the medivac suite: they were almost out of painkillers, but someone had taken the trouble to pack extra bodybags, and that told him pretty much how this memory was going to go down.
If they're fighting toads, I'm out. That's show was always way too intense for me as a kid. Quill thought.
"Two minutes people!" called Rocket, one arm gripping the bulkhead "Situation is bad, LZ is hot, so let's keep this tight and by the numbers! Wally, keep us throttled up and use the Reaction control to hold us steady, the first sight of trouble and we get out of there, understood?"
There was moment's pause, and then a crackle over the com "But captain, our guys-"
Rocket snarled. "Any trouble and we're out of there Wally. We haul!" He glared around the crew, and with the possible exception of a nervous looking Possum, and a Fox who avoided his gaze, the rest all gave him the stink-eye for that. If Quill was handing out prizes, he would be split between the Skunk with a red bandana and disturbingly hard eyes, and the otter with a med-pack who spoke up. Quill was startled: he realised that unless they spoke he couldn't tell their sex. She's a chick!
"Rocket, these guys have taken a battering, if we don't get them out of there-"
"-Then they're dead, all of them. Massacred. A full third of our forces. Hell, a full third of us. You think I don't see that Lylla?" Snarled Rocket, stepping forwards. "But without these ships, the rebellion is over. All of it. Any hope goes up in smoke, and we're back to the factory, you understand that? Split up! Sold off in lots, unit by unit, and that's the ones they don't decide to rework or give to the jaegers! Without these ships, this is over: no rebellion, no victory, no migration. We all live or die by these ships." He said, turning to his crew, and with the exception of the skunk, none had the balls to look him in the eye as he roared and spat defiance. "This is halfworld! Ya'all want to die here, or are we getting off of this rock? That was the point wasn't it? Correct me if I'm frickin' wrong, but ain't that what we're fighting for?"
The com's crackled "Comin' in on target Rocket."
"View-panels!" he yelled, and the Fox moved to some wall and pressed a paw to it. The ceramic wall blurred and warped, and then went transparent, and Quill saw why they'd flown in with the view-panels switched off. If I wanted to maintain my crew's moral, I'd not let them see that either he thought.
Quill remembered seeing videos in school, in history class. Mostly they were okay, but sometimes he saw ones that frightened him, or sometimes his grandpa would meet up with some of his old buddies from the veterans association, and watch old recordings of documentaries or old news broadcast or whatever on mom's Betamax, about army stuff. They just sat there, not talking, and drank beer, and stared dead eyed like they didn't want to see what was on TV, but like they had to. He didn't understand at the time.
He couldn't remember if it was at school or his grandpa that had first showed him the pictures of Dunkirk, but he was pretty sure it was grandpa that had put on the video of the Helicopter trying to get out of the US embassy in Saigon.
This was worse.
The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead station, and heaved like boiling lead, and perhaps the land had been good once and perhaps it hadn't, but there wasn't a scrap of grass or a living tree left from horizon to horizon. The valley was low and broad and flaccid, like a fold in dead flesh, and the columns of figures trudging over it like ants, thousands of them, would have been mercifully small if it weren't for the view-ports tactical display tracking your eye-movement and automatically magnifying wherever you happened to look, leaving no horror obscured, no private indignity hidden. Even as a memory, without his gaze activating the panels he could still see the thin line of figures at the far end of the valley, retreating down from the high ground, a continual line of laser and plasma fire lighting up a bright kilometres-long ribbon between them and another mass of advancing figures, too small to see but thick as mayflies, who hung on the high ground like a menacing cloudbank.
He could, unfortunately, see whatever Rockets crew chose to look at, and they scanned the area like good soldiers, missing little. The Mortar rounds starting to burst on the stragglers feeling the hills. The Ocelot stretcher-bearer stepping on what looked like a land mine, the clusters of wet, frightened creatures hugging spent lazer rifles or hugging each other or hugging their tails just waiting for evacuation as that bright ribbon cut ever closer. It was like watching a carpet bombing in Fraggle Rock. And the puddles. The puddles were worse.
The artillery fire must have messed up the water-table, because ditches were overflowing, and even though there was no rain at the moment, the water was still rising. With the enemy on the high ground, there was no-where to go. It wasn't high yet, the water, it would be fine if you could stand.
If you could stand.
Rocket and his crew watched for a long time.
"Rocket to fleet command: the van' is going in. Circle until we can ascertain the situation and scout an LZ: do not engage until we have a secured landing zone. If you don't hear from us, withdraw ASAP, that's an order."
"Rocket!" snarled the otter, tears flying as she spun, teeth bared. "There are people drowning in that mud!" she stood low, shoulders and legs tensed like she was about to leap at him. The Skunk looked half-tempted to join in.
"I know Lylla." Said Rocket, staring dull-eyed. "But out fleet's not joining them. Wally, circle once and bring us in. Reynard, Sit-rep, get me life signs: how many of ours, how many of theirs, what make and model, Stella, Oscar, get the ramp prepped and ready door-guns". Rocket turned to the otter. "We go in, me and your med-team, the ships circle until we assess the situation. If it's okay, if, then the vanguard goes in to support an evacuation." The otter glared at him, teeth still bared and tears cutting channels though her fur, before she leapt, hugging him briefly and kissing him fiercely, biting into his lip hard enough to draw blood, before springing off to the med suite to stuff robo-tourniquets and clotting kits into her uniform pouches as a Badger and Marten booted up the surgical suite.
"Hey Stella, where's my kiss?" yelled the possum nervously to the skunk as they moved rappel lines and winches out of the way and begun to lower the back-ramp, letting the stink of the atmosphere, the two armies and the ozone of weapons fire into the ship.
"I'll give it to you when we're out of here and I've got you tied to a cot where you fuckin' belong. Until then you can kill my ass honey!" yelled the skunk, grabbing an overhead railing and swinging into the door-gunner's chair with abhuman grace. She had a surprisingly husky, smoky voice at odds with her corded muscle and killers eyes.
"Boss, it's bad. I'm reading signals all around our guys, looks like they broke the rear-guard at tranquillity ridge and are encircling, fast." Murmured the fox, reading off an info-glass. "And I'm not picking up any com's chatter from south of our position."
"Impossible!" yelled Stella, as they banked hard and came in on their final landing approach "We had two companies there, four-hundred people don't just disappear Reynard!"
But Reynard had bigger problems. The already busy air took on the scent of nervous fox, as he swallowed, and turned to Rocket. "Life sign conformation… hostiles have us surrounded completely, three kilometres back on every direction…. Jaegers. They… they've unleashed the entire Jaegerkorp."
"Bullshit!" yelled the skunk, Stella. "They've never risked more than a company at a time before! They can't control that many!"
"Hey, you wanna go down and ask? The life-signs are off the charts, it's Jaegers, for sure. Holding positions, three klicks out, they've got us surrounded. It's loyalists and mercs' advancing up the valley, but they're backed by Jaegers."
"Three klicks" called Lylla, helping the marten with its medi-packs "We can still make a limited rescue run if they're held on the other side of that high ground."
"It's too risky!" yelled the Possum. Stella sneered.
Quill looked to Rocket. His face wasn't showing much, but he could guess that he was in hell he has to make the call…
"If… our guys can hold them beyond the high ground on the west, we might make it…One run, one." he yelled, gesturing to the possum. He swallowed nervously, but dropped the ramp fully as they came in.
"I'm telling you they're not being held, they're just not advancing!" yelled Reynard, showing Rocket the Glass.
"What? That ain't frickin' right! They're Jaegers, they press the advantage. The attack, they hunt. That's what they do. That's all they do!" Rocket yelled, taking the glass from Reynard. "Something's wrong… abort the run. Wally, get us up, circle again I need to work out what's going on before we put down."
"Our guys might not last that long!" snarled Stella.
"Shut up!" snarled the fox, and as they bickered, Quill saw Rocket focus in on the information before him, zooming in on the tactical displays, getting to the root of it, doing his thing, working it spatially, working it out, as the rest argued.
"You" he said to himself, poking the display. "You stopped pursuing when the enemy broke and ran. You, you stopped in open ground, half a click short of good defilade cover and you, you stopped an entire company at the foot of those hills, when you could advance, get reverse slope defence, dig in and bring your mortars onto our guys… why? Just frickin' why?"
Lylla tried to speak to Rocket "Godsdammit Rocket! Put her down! They're being slaughtered down there, who cares why the Jaegers do anything? Let's go!" Rocket looked to her once, and then went back to his glass, she snorted, and pushed past him. As the crew argued, he begun to zoom the tac display out, way, way out so he could see all the Jaeger positions at once.
They had all stopped surrounding the rebels three kicks out. Exactly three klicks out, in a perfect circle, regardless of the tactical situation. Quill saw Rocket's eyes widen and his ears droop as the pieces fell into place and he worked it out. "no." he whispered.
"No no no… they're not fucking encircling us: they're holding at a minimum safe distance!"
There was the clatter of claws on decking, and too late Rocket turned his attention back to the crew.
"Lylla!" he yelled, reaching out for her, but she'd already jumped as Wally hit the lowest part of his approach less than five meters off the deck, the marten with her. He watched shocked as they hit the mud, rolled, and shook themselves off and begun to wade to the nearest group of wounded.
The urgent beeping of the ships general alarm cut in at that point. Reynard looked at a panel, and called out.
"Launch detection! We have cruise missiles inbound, two minutes out! Assessing signature … Looks like…" he swore, and turned and yelled "Scorchers! Scorchers inbound, two min!"
And that was when Rocket Racoon's hell truly begun.
"Lylla!" he screamed, rushing forwards, until Reynard and the skunk caught him and pulled him back.
"Lylla get you rudder back here ya' here me! They've launched scorchers! Lylla!"
"She's killed her com!" yelled Reynard. "She can't hear you!"
"Lylla!" he yelled, as he reached towards the doors, and got dragged back away from it, before snarling at the skunk "Damnit Stella, you wanted to get down there! We've got two minutes, Let's do it, we can make one run." The possum started shouting something, but no-one paid him any attention, Quill included.
"That was before they decided to flatten the whole valley Honey! I might be crazy but I'm not about to throw my sweet striped ass into a blender. Wally, get the van' out of here, tell the fleet to abort the run."
"What, but our guys…" started the voice on the com.
"-Are about to get embleer scorched! Pull out." Screamed Reynard. "It's a trap!"
"We can make one run!" yelled Rocket. Stella punched him in the head, as the possum screamed and Reynard tried to reason with him. "Those guys down there are desperate Roc, we land they'll swarm up, swamp the ship!"
"There must be something!-"
"There isn't!" yelled Stella, trying to put Rocket in a sleeper hold, when a thrown length of rappelling line hit her in the head, and everyone suddenly begun to hear what the possum was screaming.
"Hey assholes, we can use the door winches!" he yelled, holding out a rescue harness of the type Quill associated with coast-guard rescue 'copters. The three combatants stared stupidly at him for a moment, before scrambling to grab the lines with the scramble of claws on metal, as Reynard dumped a harness over Rocket's head while yelling at Wally to bring the ship around and the possum, Oscar, nervously held up the second harness as Stella practically dived into it, rolling and jumping into the line faster than Quill would have thought possible. Within a second Reynard and Oscar were in the door-gunner seats controlling the winches like big-game fishermen with a Swordfish on the line, and Rocket and Stella had already jumped, Quill feeling a sickening moment of vertigo as his viewpoint changed to follow Rocket as he plunged down, free-falling for almost all of the distance before working the winch break right at the last moment, the friction sending up a burnt-clutch stink from the break-disk as they landed waist-deep in the mud of the valley.
Rocket and Stella surged forwards fast enough to leave a bow-wave in the muddy water, sending floating debits and parting slicks of oil and blood in dark rainbows as they sprinted through the smoke and stinks towards the nearest knot of survivors, continually tripping and slipping on the mud and trailing cables. After an utter age, which couldn't have been more than ten seconds, they reached Lylla and the group just as the group's NCO, a coati, got the launch detection on her com.
"Lylla we-"
"Don't have time to argue, I know." She said, grabbing the harness and lashing it to a stretcher. "But these winch harnesses were designed for a Xandarian bodyweight, not us. We're lighter. They can take four." She said, ducking under the harness and standing breastbone to breastbone with Rocket. The coati threw herself flat over the wounded on the stretcher and hung on, and a stretcher with another two wounded on it was dragged over to Stella's harness by the marten who'd jumped with Lylla.
Rocket, who had been expecting to have to knock Lylla out to get her in the harness without bringing along all the wounded started stupidly for a moment, before she looked back and barked harsh laughter, once.
"What, you think I wanted to go down with the ship? I'm a doctor, dammit Roc', not a martyr." She said, hugging him tight as she flicked her ear-mounted com back on. "Hey Wally, floor it fattso!"
Rocket just had the time to grab on tight as the jets on the rak' responded and suddenly he was aquaplaning over the mud as the stretchers on the end of the rappelling lines shot along like water-skis. There was a moment of utter terror mixed with relief and exhilaration as they pulled away from the carnage, and as he shot along and the winches begun to pull them up and Lylla buried her face in the fur of his shoulder, Rocket Racoon thought that perhaps it was all going to be all right.
They never even saw the wreckage of the personnel carrier, inches below the surface of the mud. The first and only warning they got was the hare in tanker's gear trying to pull his drowned driver out of the cockpit and his almost comical expression of shock before the cable from the winch cut him in half. Then Stella's harness hit the wreck, bursting the plastic stretcher like ripe fruit and scattering the people on it at speeds that would liquefy flesh. Clap. The cable caught on something, the co-axial gun perhaps, and the Rak n 'Ruin lurched sideways spilling smoke from the engine nacelles, snared. An instant later the turret pulled off the ball-run and begun to get dragged, skipping along like a skimmed stone, two tons of ceramic snapping and spinning at their heals, about to run down their stretcher and drag the ship down with it. Stella somehow still hung on, trailing off the turret like a furry pennon as she glanced impassively at the length of femur sticking out of her leg, then up at the floundering ship, and then over to Rocket, just once.
The turret hit the water and sent up a V of muddy spray higher than the rak', drenching half the ships in the van as they moved and milled and tried to abort their approaches without hitting each-other, and then Rocket felt the resistance end and his ship took wing, lifting him and Lylla and their stretcher into the sky and soon outpacing the confused mess of the rest of the van. He wasn't sure, even in this memory, if he saw Stella standing proud on the turret riding it down, but he certainly saw her roll free as it landed. He saw the ceramic combat knife spin from her paw, the neatly cut end of her cable whipping dangerously close to them as he and Lylla were pulled into the ship.
The coati jumped off the stretcher and Lylla wriggled out of the harness, and begun to help the coati swing the stretcher in, as the sound of the winches whirred, filling the ship with the awful Home-movie-reaching-end-of-reel thock-thock-thock of the harnessless end of the other cable spooling around and around and Oscar screamed as he fumbled to get out of his seat straps.
"Turn back! Wally, we need to turn back for her! She fell off, dammit, she fell off!"
"Oscar, come on man-"started Reynard, trying to hold him in his seat as he moved to throw the intact harness after her. "We don't have the time, and besides, she'd never survive that crash."
"Ray'" said Lylla, quietly. The fox turned.
Stella had pulled herself up out the mud, and was wearily leaning on the wrecked turret for support, when she caught sight of the ship. Oscar moved to jump out of the ship, and Reynard and Lylla grabbed him. As they struggled, she looked from the ship, to the approaching con-trails of the missiles. She turned back to Rocket, gave him a hard look, and nodded.
Rocket nodded back, numb, and reached out and hit the door controls. Oscar screamed over the screech and hiss of the servos as the rear ramp folded up, and Wally begun to really pull away from the valley, before Oscar broke free and punched Rocket in the face.
"You got to go back! You got to go back for Lylla!" he snarled, naked hatred in his eyes, before he ran to the window in the ramp and begun beating on the glass, bloodying the snowy fur of his fists.
"Stella! Stellllllaaa!"
There was a brief crackle on the coms.
"Oh hush babe, I was always saving someone's ass. Mostly yours. You're gonna have to stay strong to survive now I'm not there for you honey. I… I love you Oscar." She said, as the roar of the missiles got louder. She then turned to Rocket.
"Take care of him Roc. Keep him safe. Keep him alive through this."
"I will Stella, I promise." Said Rocket, feeling sick.
Stella nodded and went to speak. "Guys you need to know that I-"
Rocket still had eye contact with her when the scorchers lit up the air and ripped her lungs out of her throat.
The memory ended and Quill was briefly and noisily sick.
"Uggg... Don't remember eating carrots…" he muttered, after a while.
Rocket, wrinkled his nose, and shook his head violently as if trying to shake that particular memory out.
"You never seen a thermobaric weapon up-close before? Good for you. Always hated the fucking things, almost no way to deal with them, eh Groot?" said Rocket, before remembering that Groot was huddled in a corner, hugging his knees.
Rocket looked at him for a long moment, and then turned slowly back to the door, his face half-hidden in darkness and the light making his teeth and eyes flash evilly.
"Nice-try, Robo-boy, so far all pretty good shots, I'll give you that, you know the memories that hurt. Shame, humiliation, survivors guilt: all good stuff. But you fucked with the wrong freak of nature here, and one way or another, I am walking out of this sick little game!"
"Rocket, be careful, don't get cocky." Quill muttered, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
"Walking. Out." Repeated Rocket, head high and striding forwards.
"Like you waked out of that lab? 89P13?" said the collector-bot.
The heat was insane, and through the choking smoke Quill couldn't see a damn thing. A strobing red light kept lighting up the clouds of smoke like blood-coloured cotton-candy wrapped around his face. There was a screeching siren, and all around him the snowy-white wall-panels warped and popped out of their frames, falling melted and malformed, showing the bare metal bones of the building beneath. He ducked down to get below the smoke, but it didn't help, he was experiencing Rocket's memory of it all.
His lungs burnt.
89P13 was huddled in the corner of the corridor, trying to stay low too, and hunched over a part-melted door control as he desperately tried to coax enough life out of the touchpad to operate the door. He was crying, and the bare metal of the floor was starting to burn the soles of his feet.
"Come on… come on…." He muttered, putting down the shock-prod and laying on the floor next to a stolen blaster.
There was a buzz of rejection from the door, as it declined his code, and Quill saw him close his eyes for just a second, whimpering, and then when he opened them again, Quill saw for just a second a glimpse of the Rocket he knew.
89P13 screwed up his face in determined snarl, and ignoring the pain, ignoring the way his tears hissed and sizzled on the floor, he focused, did his thing, and punched in the code calmly and deliberately.
There was a thunk as the automatic door slid open perhaps six inches, and then stuck, it's rails warped by heat. It didn't matter, the Rocket Quill knew vanished again and 89P13 was through the door like a shot, chest deflated and thin hips wriggling as he squeezed through, only seeming to remember his weapons as an after-thought and giving a quick about turn before he grabbed them in both paws and begun to skip down the corridor with them, trash-panda style. He whimpered with relief, there was a ground-floor window at the end of the corridor, it's armour-crys intact, but the frame had expanded in the heat, and the glass was lying on the floor beneath it like a frozen puddle. 89P13 smelt sea air and grass and rain and outside for the first time in his life and felt the coolness slap him like a wet flannel, and he ran towards it, all other thought forgotten.
At least, until he passed the part-open door, opening and closing repeatedly on a dead researcher, and he heard the whimper.
Present Rocket groaned. "Walk away, don't want to look in there kid, trust me, walk away…"
89P13, hesitated, hopping from foot to foot with impatience and because the floor was really, really hot, and just as he was about to run for the window again, he heard the second whimper.
Cautiously stepping over the asphyxiated body in the lab coat, and with a tiny snort of amused disgust recognising him as the smoking man from the spatial tests, he squeezed through the door, and then looked around.
There was another dead body in a lab-coat slumped in the chair at the control lectern in the room, and death was clearly feeling particular ironic today because it was the woman who had complained to maintenance about the defects in the halide system, Quill noted.
89P13 gave her only a single horrified glance, before looking up, and his mouth dropped.
Quill turned to focus on what 89P13 was looking at, and his eyes went wide.
"Oh Jesus." He muttered.
One entire wall of the room was built of one meter by one meter cubes of a grey, wipe clean plastic, with transparent front panels fitted with food traps and water bottles, and inside of every single one of them was a part-built humanoid animal gagging and chocking in the smoke. The wall was at least ten meters high, and with the haze of smoke Quill and Rocket couldn't even see how for it extended into the distance. At least fifty columns long, maybe a hundred. Some of the boxes had already started to melt and smoulder in the heat, pale plasticy flames flickering here and there. And that wasn't the worst bit. Arrayed opposite them, in rows arranged at 45 degree angles like those graves at Arlington so that you saw lines forming whatever way you looked at them, were tubes. A meter thick, over three meters tall, internally lit glass tubes, and floating in each and every one was some sort of furless, skinless shape, kicking and twitching as the heat from the floor brought the saline in the tubes up to the boil. There was a white scum on the top of each tube, like when you were making a chicken stock, and there was fur mixed in with it. It was hard to see what they were supposed to be, they'd already started to disintegrate but they were big, and on many a metallic terminator-esque skeleton was already visible, long heads lolling stupidly in the cloudy broth, heavy fangs snapping at nothing.
It looked like they were trying to scream.
89P13 backed away, towards the door, horrified. "I…. I… I…" he seemed to have lost the power of speech. He turned to the boxes along the walls. A gofer the size of a toddler held out a paw to the glass, and screamed at him like a human baby.
"I… I… I…"
The smoke from the smouldering plastic of the boxes already on fire down the far end of the room mixed with the heaver cloud seeping thought the door now that Rocket had opened up the corridor doors to the more intensive fire in other parts of the lab. It hit the smoke detectors on the ceiling, and they gave a warning bleep.
Peep.
89P13 looked up, eyes wide with horror.
"No!" he yelled. "No! Not here! No!"
Peep. Peep. Peeeeeeeeeep!
Click.
The fire-suppression system activated, and 89P13 flung himself flat just in time. The halide jets fired, designed to flood the room with inert Argon and starve any fire out, but somehow something had gone awfully wrong with the system that day, and the pipes had been plumed into the medical suites sterile air supply: specifically the giant tanks of pure oxygen below the ranks of hyperbaric chambers used to adapt offworlders in the scientific staff to Halfworld's thin atmosphere.
There was a dull whump and flash of yellow light as the volatiles and part-burnt particulates in the smoke lit up like a grain silo explosion, and a great rumbling crash as half the ceiling came down on the lab. The wall buckled, and every containment box that had been smouldering before burst in to brilliant flame, the whimpers burst into screams: animal, Xandarian, adult, childlike and everything in between. 89P13 saw a beautiful white vixen looking at him for just moment, and as she opened her mouth to scream the pure oxygen hit her and she blazed like a kitsune for a moment and then crumbled to ash.
Awesome Mix tape vol 2: the Doors, Light my fire.
"I didn't know!" sobbed 89P13, running to the banks of cages, trying to open them up before the oxygen hit them, but the heat and the wall collapsing had warped the doors in the frames sticking them tight.
"I didn't know!" he screamed at the face of the creature in the cage, a pangolin that replied to him in a language he couldn't understand, "I didn't know!" he screamed, looking up and down the rows of cages. In the distance, he saw one where the falling row above it had popped the door part open. The oxygen hose hidden in the wall at that end of the room had burst, and a wall of fire was sweeping down the room towards it. He swallowed his fear, and ran towards it as fast as he could, jimmying his shock prod in the gap between the door and the frame, and using it as a lever to pry the Perspex door off its hinges as behind him there were a series of Champagne-cork pops and breaking glass and a stench he'd never forget as the tubes started to burst in the heat. He didn't' look around, the fire was too close, and he needed to focus on this.
Quite suddenly the door came off, and he fell over backwards on his rump as the occupant, and tall gangly rabbit with a mess of circuits where the top of its head should be tumbled out onto him.
He cradled it's head, and sobbed as he grabbed the shock-prod and used it to lever himself back to his feet as he started to run, trying to ignore the stares and screams from the creatures in the boxes.
"I didn't know." He sobbed, and he let the stolen blaster fall to the floor and picked up the rabbit instead. As it fell, he dropped something else with it: an old empty book of matches and the remains of two broken match-heads, carefully salvaged and lovingly curated for some time while he planned his escape.
"I didn't know there were others!" he screamed, tears boiling on his face. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry! I didn't know there would be others! I didn't know!"
the memory flicked of as sudden as a lamp.
"You know now." Said the collector-bot after some time. "Your actions have consequences. You know now. You know."
And that's when Rocket surprised both Quill and, probably, Tivan-bot too.
He started Laughing. His deep, throaty, totally-fake-sounding laugh. He even had to lean on his knees to stop himself from falling over and he laughed and laughed and not a trace of humour or joy made it to his face. Stood up tall and spread both arms wide and started giving a long, slow mocking clap as his laugh wound down, until he was just spiting the word ha at the corner the Collector-bot was in, mouth lathered with strings of drool and fur standing on end as his eyes flashed red with rage.
"Oh ha. Ha. Frickin. Ha. Full marks for effort." He growled, his body actually shaking with rage. "Full marks for fucking effort. That was a good one. Real frickin' cute." He snarled. "Nice one to inflict on Quill too, I'm sure he'll have no trouble looking at me the same way after that one eh? Not gonna fuck him up at all. No, that one should have worked, I'll give you that. Should have got me on my knees sobbing away about what a bad person I am like everyone else so far, hey Robo? Real shocking. Just one inceey, teensy problem Pal." He said, taking a step towards the Collector-bots corner and dismissing the new memory he tried to summon with the sheer metal force of his rage.
"If you're trying to shock me, maybe try hitting me with something I don't already see each and every time I close my eyes! You think that's anything new to me? Anything unusual? Buddy, any night when that particular memory is the only one I re-live in dreams goes down as a good fucking night. How dumb are you? Your entire plan revolves around using the raw shock value of perfectly reconstructed memories against someone who already has a fucking eidetic memory, you fucking moron" He said, framing his words with a paw to either side of his head, as he took another step forwards.
"Helloooo there! Kinda a dumb plan fucknugget! You think that memory is anything new? You think my frickin' obsessive hand and face washing are just a thing? Just a harmless, in-built quirk from whatever species I was before they went to work on me, do ya? Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong: I've been tryin' to wash the smell of that smoke out of my fur for nearly a decade, and you come along and think you're going to break me all in one night? Any currency that event had to wound me, any damage it could do, it's already been done pal, the ship on that one sailed an age ago buddy. A lot of people died in that fire that day, and the version of me you could hurt with it was one of them!" he said, striding forwards, smashing through the memories the computer threw at him so fast Quill only saw tiny glimpses of them, and all twisted against the Collector by Rocket's rage, glimpses of wet fur and teeth, whiskey and gun-smoke, flashes of pain and snatches of fear: of fire and madness and blood.
"Okay, big boy" snarled Rocket, actually reaching forwards and grasping the door-frame with one outstretched paw, only a pace away. "Sweet as this has been, and I mean that almost truly, I seldom go up against someone who's a bigger prideful, hateful, hubris-weighted twat than myself, I'm going now, and I'm coming back with the Milano to blow a huge, unseemly big hole in the wall and teleport everyone out, so unless you've got an ace in the hole, I think we should call this goodb-"
89P13 stood in the room with the mirror, jiggling from side to side nervously as he waited for whatever was supposed to happen.
Quill flicked his eyes to present Rocket, who had his back to him actually griping the now invisible doorframe with both paws, and he watched as his tail shot up with shock and his fur stood up like a cat. He flicked his eyes back to past Rocket, to 89P13. He was looking around nervously, hands clenched neatly in front of him. The room wasn't entirely stark white wall panels, some were a whitish pastel blue getting bluer as you went down the wall, some throw-cushions scattered about, and the floor was some sort of black rubberised material rather than polished metal, but it was the same place, the same faint medical smell in the air, a single polished metal sliding door, the whir of re-circulated air and no natural light. In many ways the room was identical to all the others here Quill had seen.
Except for the fact one wall was a mirror. Quill had been to enough police interview rooms to know two-way mirrors when he saw them. Juvenile Rocket clearly didn't however, and seemed to be warily watching his own reflection as if he'd never seen it before. Perhaps he hadn't, Quill realised. 89P13 glanced up, and then turned to one side, taking in the security scanners in the two corners of the room not filed with mirror, and Quill mentally advanced this on the partial time-line he now had of Rocket: he was still naive, but was becoming paranoid enough no know he was being watched.
Present Rocket shook himself, not his head, his whole body, like a dog sneezing, and griped the door-frame tighter and pulled himself back from it a little, like a paratrooper about to launch himself out, Quill silently willing him along but not wanting to break his concentration when this was clearly difficult for him, and just when I looked like he was about to take that jump, there was a hiss and a click and the door to the mirror-room slid open and both Rocket's did and started little twitch, caught off guard. A Xandarian in a lab coat had just walked in, and Quill gave him the quick once-over and then did a double take: his clothing was all wrong for a Xandarian, and there was a small shaving cut up high on one cheekbone that showed the tiniest spot of blood, red not blue.
"Holy shit, he's not Xandarian, he's terran!" exclaimed Quill, unable to stop himself as he saw the first terran he had up close in years.
With his mom's long battle with cancer, Quill had spent a lot of time in hospitals as a kid, and to keep him amused his grandfather had made a game for him, when you spotted doctors walking past and tried to separate them into busy doctors And for show doctors. For Show Doctors were the ones you saw on the adverts for the hospital or for a treatment on TV, on book covers, the ones who you say maybe once a day, in a nice suit, doing their rounds with a lot of junior doctors and asking them questions, and who would summon you to a pretty office with lots of identical faux- leather bound books and try to look both solemn and like they gave a shit when someone had to give you bad news, or the bill, or both. His Grandpa had explained that while For Show Doctors were always high up in the hospital seniority and well paid, they certainly weren't the ones in charge. It was like Officers vs Non-Coms, his grandpa, a veteran to the core, had said. Quill hadn't got that at the time, but since then his experiences with various power-structures had given him the same impression: that the highest rungs of any organisation were there to insulate them from the day to day running of the show so the people several ranks down could actually get on with stuff without the boss getting in the way. That was how grandpa had explained the House of Representatives: of course it did an important job; the last thing America needed was those guys wandering around on the street where they could cause real trouble.
This man was not a For Show Doctor, in fact, he had almost all the signs from the checklist of a very busy doctor indeed.
He was a white guy, about Quill's age, Quill would guess, but looked older, bags under his eyes, and wrinkles at his brow and to the sides of his eyes. He was wearing a lab-coat that was neither really dirty nor really clean, but all the stains were small, and to the front, none on his sleeves. Quill noticed that the sleeves were less sun-faded than the rest of the lab-coat, and then spotted the loosened bands around each bicep: ties to hold them back. This was someone who spent most of his time with his sleeves rolled up past the elbow. His watch was a nurse's button-hole job, dangling upside down below his breast pocket, and he wore no rings, nothing below the elbows. Very clean hands, with iodine stains in his knuckles. Surgeon? Under the lab-coat was a herringbone tweed jacket of the sort favoured by people with money but no time to dress, it even had slightly worn leather patches at the elbows, he could see one thought a small tear in the lab-coat. His shirt was seersucker, looked as good un-ironed as it did ironed, a boon to the busy doctor, white with brown and blue stripes, and it's cut was a little 1970's to Quill taste, big pointed collar, and he wore it with the first button open, and no tie: Ties could dangle in things, spread germs, unhygienic . Ties got in the way. The only thing at odds with that was his hair, again very 70's, worn to the shoulder, or a little past it, brownish auburn and naturally falling in wavy rings. He was clearly making the best of it while he could, his hairline had receded half-way up his head, leaving him with a high, intellectual looking forehead, and a slight widows peak with the hair swept back from it like Beethoven. He had quite high cheekbones, a strong nose and finished off the 1970's intellectual look with L shaped sideburns, shaved cheeks and a full, almost Stalin moustache and squared off goatee that made it look like his chin had grown an annexe to house its extra stuff. He wore steel framed oval glasses, and carried a good-old-fashioned clipboard, with the stylised keyhole logo stamped into the metal.
Rocket froze dead, and Quill meant it, he wasn't even breathing. 89P13 meanwhile seemed a little surprised by the door, but from his lack of reaction other than polite cation, Quill guessed this was the first time they'd met.
89P13 flinched slightly, but then rallied, seeming to remember some drilled-in manners from somewhere, and held out a paw.
"89P13, reporting for test Sir." He said automatically, the slight note of fear a constant background buzz in his speech.
To Quill's surprise, after a long moment staring down at him, his expression unreadable, the man dropped into a squat, sitting on his heals so he could be a more similar height to young Rocket, and shook his hand briskly.
"Hello seun," he said, smiling warmly. "You haven't met me before, but I've worked very closely with you in the past, particularly when you were little." He said, before gesturing to a cushion. "My name is Doctor Joseph Kessler, one of the senior researchers on this project. Would you like to sit, 89P13?"He asked.
Quill frowned, the man's accent was maddening. He couldn't place it. it was mostly British, but there were some hard, almost German sounds in there, and at least one of those words was wrong. Seun, pronounced with the vowel sound weirdly stretched, so it was almost like "son."
89P13, looked nervously at the cushion, as if afraid it might bite him.
"Is... is that a required part of the test?"he asked. The man laughed gently, it was a surprisingly sweet, bubbling sound, and his eyes creased slightly. He was good at laughter, a lot better than Rocket.
"No, no we are not running any test protocols today, I just thought you might be more comfortable if you sat. We may be here some time."
89P13 looked form the cushion to the man several times, clearly uncertain if this was part of a test or not, or perhaps simply off-balance by the idea that someone would actually care about his comfort, before gingerly lowering himself onto the thing like it was a land-mine.
The man smiled, like 89P13 had just done a neat trick, and lowered himself down onto the cushion next to him. Most men look ridiculous and undignified stilling on cushions the floor, it's a general rule, but this guy pulled it off. He looked down to 89P13 for another long moment, before pulling out a pen, clicking it once and starting to make notes on his clipboard
"Now, 89P13. Do you have any idea who I am, and why I am here?"
89P13, froze up, clearly mentally re-running its recent past to see what it must have done wrong, before shaking his head.
"Well, in that case, let me explain. Some of the junior researchers, Doctor Kervo and Doctor Gra'al in particular, had come to me to express some concerns. They seem to be worried that you've been acting up of late. Is that true? " he asked, kindly enough.
"I…. they said that I was asking up, but the never actually explained what those words mean, and when I tried to ask they got angry, and stopped my food, so I stopped asking. " he said, works babbling out all in a rush. He never meant to be bad, but no-one ever explained what he was supposed to do, and then got angry at him if he did it wrong.
"Is… is acting up the same as malcompliance, sir?" 89P13 asked, frightened. He didn't want to think he had been malcompliant, and now he had just told the man he had, he thought cursing inwardly. He'd get the pit for this, for sure this time.
The man looked at the ceiling thoughtfully for a moment.
"An interesting philosophical point. No, I think not; malcompliance is a single, directed incident with discreet parameters in time and scope, intentionally aimed at disrupting the activity in which you are currently engaged. Whereas acting up is a vaguely defined, ongoing behaviour or predication to behaviours that are not conducive to the good running of activities. One is acute, the other chronic, yes?"
Yis. He pronounced it, Quill realised, and then it clicked. He remembered his grandpa and his pals form the Veterans Association, rowing and arguing in long, slow arguments the way only old men could every time Apartheid came on the news, with half of them saying it was bad because it was racist, and half saying it was good because they were anti-communist. Now the accent clicked. South African; well educated, faux British, but South African.
89P13 paused, and then nodded slowly, showing that he understood, although it was clear that he didn't.
"So, am I going to be punished sir? For acting up?"
The man lowered his clipboard, and looked the racoon straight in the eye.
"Only if it persists, child. No: I am here to try and make sure it doesn't persist. In many ways this is expected: you have reached the point in your life cycle where certain biological changes are starting to occur, and it is natural that they cause increased agitation and aggression. We could have prevented them, but we made the decision not to as the requisite surgery would have damaged your value for future contributions to the gene-pool for your test-class should it prove needful later on in the project. You … you do not need to concern yourself with that side of things at this point, and I am not going to punish you unless I have to. No." he said, putting the clipboard down on his folded legs and watching 89P13 closely.
"No, I have decided that as we would with any sentient creature, the simplest way to prevent you from acting up is to address the underlying psychological issues. So." he spread his arms wide, in a questioning gesture. "Is there anything you want to talk to me about, 89P13?"
The raccoon froze up. Clearly no-one had ever asked him anything like this before, and a lot of emotions and ideas were struggling below the surface, the instinct to deny it all and claim he was fine near to the top of them, but one pressing thing from an instance earlier that day stuck in his mind, and he blurted it out.
"Why do I only wear the smock when I'm taken for testing?" he asked. "They take it away from me again when I'm in my habitat, and sometimes maintenance staff or junior researchers point at me through the glass. One laughed ." others seemed angry. He remembered, with a shudder of fear. He wasn't sure what it was about his body they found objectionable, but he didn't like the way their attention made him feel. Maybe it was the scars, maybe they didn't like the scars.
"Ah, clothing, yes, I can see that becoming an issue, partially as you enter this age and start to… develop physically. Tell me, does it upset you that all the researchers are fully clothed at all times, and you are not?"
89P13 stopped, stunned. "Yes! I didn't realise it before, but yes! And sometimes they take my blanket away too, and I don't like it I feel… I feel without. Like… like I have no place to hide, like they can see all of me, even when I want to be alone. That, that without it, I'm vulnerable."
Dr Kessler smiled "Yes, the correlation between physical nakedness and feelings of vulnerability is well documented. I'll arrange to get you some proper clothing, and ensure you keep a blanket at all times. Sorry, that is an oversight, we should have fixed that already. I'll even try to get you some underwear."
"Underwear?" asked P13. Kessler looked down, and then realised that his subject had no idea what he was taking about.
"Clothes to go under other clothes." Said the doctor, blankly, and 89P13's brain had to stop for a bit to get such an advanced concept in his mind.
"So Anything else? Surely that cannot be it?" asked Kessler.
"Well…"
"The food is non-negotiable." Added Kessler, cutting off the next question before it formed. "Your diet is strictly controlled as part of test conditions and to ensure your peak health, and any high-value items, such as fruit, juice , eggs or shellfish are there as incentivization." He said, flatly. "I'm sorry seuntjie, but that's a health issue, and therefore not up for discussion. But please, if there is anything else..."
"I… there is something else but… it' sort of…"
"Go on. We're are all friends here, and nothing you say to me will leave this room unless you want it to."
Quill glanced at the two-way mirror, but didn't comment.
"I… it's something I first noticed when they started teaching me numbers Sir…"
"Oh yes? You mathematical skills have always been exemplary, by the way."
"I…. Thank you?" he replied. He had no idea what exemplary meant, but he filed it away for later.
"Go on." The doctor said, encouragingly.
"I… well.. It's…. Why do I have number, when everyone else has a name?" 89P13 asked, spitting it out and long last, and the fear and built up pain and anger over that was so strong that Quill could feel it in his chest as the racoon spoke. "It's only when I learned numbers I realised, no-on else has a number, just… just me. Is that why I have to live in the habitat, sir? And do the tests? Because I don't have a name?" he asked, getting a little teary eyed: this can clearly been weighing on him for some time.
For a long moment Doctor Kessler didn't speak, just looked down coolly at 89P13 , his face half in shadow from the uplighters of the room. When he spoke again, it was in calm and measured tones.
"No, 89P13, it's not that. You do the tests and have a number and they do not because you are special and they are not. Oh, they are remarkable enough people in their own ways, many of them. The best in their fields, but you… you are something unique. There is nothing else in the universe like you, except you. That is what makes you so valuable to us here. That is what makes you important, why we need the tests, and why only you can do them. Do you understand, 89P13?"
"I… the tests hurt."
"For those of us with the most to give, the most is required, trust me. I'm sorry, but the program must continue." 89P13 looked down, dejected, and the man reached out and clasped him gently under his chin, and raised his head back up.
"Here now…" he said, drawing an old-fashioned cotton handkerchief and wiping away a few tears. "Here now… Don't cry. You are very precious to us all here, P13. And you're right, it's time we acknowledged that some more: how would you like a name?"
89P13 jerked his head up, hardly daring to believe it.
"A… a name? An actual name? Really?"
Doctor Kessler smiled.
"Of course! so. What would you like to be called?"
89P13's face took on an expression of pure panic.
"I have to pick for myself?"
Kessler laughed.
"You don't have to do anything of the sort, But I think you should. So few of us get to pick our own names, and if you do, you can make it something that reflects who you truly are. It's only fitting given your specialness. So, P13, what should we call you?"
"I don't know many names… "
"Well, just go for one you do know and feel comfortable with."
89P13. Considered this for some time.
"I… I've picked one."
"And?" asked Doctor Kessler, putting a re-assuring hand on the racoon's shoulder.
"Doctor." Said 89P13, feeling quite proud of himself.
"Doctor?" said Kessler, suddenly cold, and 89P13 felt the hand clamp down for just a moment. Quill saw his eyes flicker, and for just a moment a steeliness was visible that suggested he thought the raccoon's choice of name was a joke at his expense, and Quill got the instant vibe that this was not a dude you mocked. And then it was gone, and he was all smiles again.
"Most of the people I know are named Doctor." Stuttered 89P13, realising that he'd said something wrong but not knowing what.
Doctor Kessler threw back his head and roared with laughter.
"Most of the… oh , boy, that is priceless! No, I see what you've done there, an understandable mistake from your position. I… No." he said, hand still on the shoulder, but now wiping away his own tears.
"No: Doctor is not a name. it's a title" p13 looked blank. Kessler tried again. "A designation, to indicate someone's role in the project and their level of expertise compared to non-doctors. Something that is earnt, after long and hard study, and learning, and examinations."
"Examinations… like tests?" asked p13. Kessler nodded.
"So… could I be a doctor some day?" asked p13 eagerly. He was pretty sure Doctors didn't get shock-prods embedded in them, or at least not that he could notice.
"Huuum, perhaps. Perhaps you will someday." Said Doctor Kessler in that indulgent Pony for Christmas tone of voice that Quill knew meant never but 89P13 apparently didn't. "You certainly have the intellect, and the fine motor skills, although I'm not sure about your temperament."
"Is temperament like acting up?" p13 asked nervously
"Hum, I see your implication, quite right: we can work on that later; I plan for us to have these sessions at least once a week, from now on. So… a name. Any other ideas?"
"I… no I don't know any names. Other that the names of doctors." And idea seemed to strike him.
"If I can't be called Doctor can I be called Joseph? Or Kessler? Or Joseph Kessler?"
The Doctor smiled. "Well, I think it would get a bit confusing if we were both named Joseph Kessler, but you may have hit upon an excellent idea: in many countries on my home planet, it is common for a son to take his father's name, to keep his legacy alive. Now, I am not a father, and you are not my son, but you are in a far more real way my legacy… Why don't we name you junior: Joseph Kessler Junior? That way when the other doctors speak to you, it will remind them to take good care of you and how precious you are to us all. "
89P13 looked up at him with big, dewy eyes. His voice broke a little. "I'm precious to people?"
He asked. The idea had never occurred to him. That he had value was a world breaker.
"I… people care about me?" he asked, crying
Doctor Joseph Kessler senior looked down at Joseph Kessler junior, and then leaned in and gave him a big hug. And it was late, and it was weird, but it was the first hug he'd ever had in his life, and given how long he'd been denied any warm or kind contact with another living thing, his tears lasted only a second before breaking down into big, sobbing gulping cathartic weeping that wracked his tiny body. For the first time in so long he felt safe. For the first time in so long he felt warm, for the first time in forever he felt something approaching hope, the idea that tomorrow wasn't going to be quite as bad as today…
For the first time in his live he felt loved...
The sound of Rocket hitting the force field behind him was so loud Quill nearly had a heart attack.
He'd thrown himself away from the door and taken a running jump at Doctor Kessler's memory, paws out to try and throttle him. He was bleeding in a dozen places, he'd moved so fast the Collector-bot had barely been able to clear a path through the razor-floss and he'd got nicked here and there, and he was screaming.
"Kill Him! Kill him you dumb kid! Sink your teeth into his smug fuckin' face and rip it off! Kill the fucker! Bite his throat out!" he banged on the field, the heat-shock scorching the fur on his knuckles, but he didn't seem to notice, swinging wild, snaring, gaze on Kessler.
"You cunt! How did you live! How did you survive? I came back, you know, before I left the planet for good. I searched through fucking ashes with my bare paws, there were so many bones, so many, and so small and you walked away you fucker! I checked the records, you got away without a single scratch! How! How! Why just you and me, when we're the ones who should have died there!"
He turned his fury back on his younger self, screaming abuse. "Kill him! Don't hug him, kill him! No! Don't let yourself feel! don't let yourself feel anything, not around him, you don't know him! No, not hope! Hope is a poison you fool, hope pulls you back in! Get out! Hope will break you! Don't let yourself feel anything for him! Don't let yourself love him! He can only hurt you physically if you don't let yourself love him!" he screamed, his voice rising and octave. Quill tried shouting to him but he was beyond fury now, beyond panic, into something approaching hysteria.
"Don't let yourself love him! He can only hurt you physically if you don't let yourself love him! Don't let yourself love him! He can only hurt you physically if you don't let yourself love him! Please… no… krrrrriiiiiikkkkttt! Don't! Please, don't! Don't let yourself love him! Don't let yourself feel! He can only hurt you physically if you don't let yourself love him!"
Quill tried shouting again and then took a step closer but Tivan-bot slapped another force-field in front of him and he walked into it. As he yelped in pain, Rocket glanced over for just a second, but he didn't even seem to recognise him. He was past using words now, chittering and screeching like a feral raccoon, and attacking the force field with teeth and claws even as the memory faded bit by bit leaving only Kessler's fatherly smile like a Cheshire cat, and then not even that.
Quill sunk to his knees, trying to ignore the sound of Rocket attacking the shield as he realised he'd lost him too.
There was a twitch from behind him, and Drax started screaming, calling for his daughter over and over again. After a moment Gamora starter sobbing to herself, pleading with Thanos, although he couldn't say for what, and after a minute or two of this, Groot started, big slow mournful booming I am Groots that shoot the ground, as a counterpoint to Rocket's insane chittering.
Peter Quill drooped into the foetal position, and covered his ears with his hands.
After a very long time, the voices dropped down to a low murmur, and maybe the occasional shriek, and it was only then that the collector-bot spoke, voice slower and more synthesised and less human than before, somehow laboured.
"Tough… nuts to crack… that took considerably more CUP cycles than I had predicted." It said, followed by a burst of static that sounded almost like a chesty cough.
Quill didn't reply. He just slowly looked up, tears on his face, and glaring.
"Only ever a temporary back-up for my mind. Never going to be fully stable; Limited CPU cycles before irreversible data degradation. Dammed Nova Corp. ship activated me by mistake. And then you five walk in. Providence. Wouldn't get another chance, needed to act quickly. No-time to generate better plan…"
"So what? You're dying? I don't suppose you do me a favour and hurry the fuck up?" asked Quill. The bot laughed, until another burst of static stopped it.
"Technically never alive. And besides, I have to finish what I've started. "
"And what is that exactly?"
"Bad man, but not a fool. For those with the most to give, the most is required. Giving you additional information would invalidate the exercise. Need to be one hundred per cent sure…"
The voice went dead for a long time, and just as Quill was starting to panic that he'd gone full-on bicycle made for two and left them here to die of thirst like a mouse trapped in a soda bottle, he spoke again
"Look at them. Not pain, not humiliation, not guilt, that's not what breaks people. The sentient mind can endure almost limitless suffering and anguish, so long as it had no choice, and is given nothing else to contrast it to. It's not their worst that breaks them the end, it's their best : Honour, Compassion, Love, Hope." He said, spotlights picking out each felled Guardian in turn. "It's their virtues that fell them."
"Peter Jason Quill… unless I've badly miss-judged you, you're not getting out of this one… Starlord."
