Ch 4
Ashen and Rocket return back to their makeshift headquarters at Nidnene's Inn at daybreak of the following morning. Rocket seems absent and closed up, barely even noticing Nidnene or the new people milling about, walking straight up to the bar to get a stiff drink while Ashen is subtly nursing a notable bruise in his left cheek.
"Rock-"Nidnene starts but Ashen blocks her though not too unkindly. "Let the man have his drink."
"Why, what's happened?" She asks growing slightly alarmed now.
"We saw those- ehh what was the name that Chief Ranger uses? Baboon, Bedoo -ahh Badoon, yeah Badoon. Anyway, we saw them using the captives to build some kind of fenced enclosures with some kind of facility at the center and a start for larger walls at the eastside of the city. He then wanted to get a closer look on one of those odd structures they had erected on the north-side of town and told me to wait until he would get back... So, when he got back there was this big explosion a few minutes later. And well, he was kind of like his now the whole way back, and when I tried to pry in on what he'd seen or done in there; he punched me on the face and told me to 'shut the flark up'. So, I dunno, I mean I-" Ashen rambles disjointedly until Nidnene cuts him off with a sharp gesture. "Alright let me handle Rocket. Go make sure we're all set for the daytime lockdown and sort a team to continue digging."
"Yes ma'am." Ashen mutters watching Nidnene disappear into saloon to find her mate.
"It's already begun Nidnene... I can't stop them. I can slow this but not stop it, not with what I have. In five days, maybe sooner, it's going to be all over for us. You, me, the kits, this city, everyone! We're all going to die. This, Everything I've done so far. It's nothing but a losing strategy." Rocket admits with a ragged sigh settling an empty glass of liquor down on the desk when Nidnene comes to stand behind him by the bar desk and starts to rub his shoulders in comforting manner.
"That bad, huh? I'm sure there's a silver lining still on the clouds." She comments urging Rocket to continue.
"Ye don't understand. None of ye do, ye don't know the Badoon like I do. Ye are just, just -Look, ye just don't get it. This planet is too primitive." Rocket protests shaking his head in disgust.
"Well I'm no off-worlder and have never met 'a Baddon' before yesterday but what I do know- Is that the man I fell in love with doesn't give up this easily." Nidnene retorts sternly, turning Rocket around to face her in the swivel bar stool his sitting on, to look him in the eyes. Rocket snorts indignantly and turns back to his drinking, but before he can refill Nidnene clamps her paw on top of the glass. "Look at me Rocket. I'm serious. Ya can't drink them away, not now, not ever. There's not enough booze in the world to wash yer past and present pains away."
"Doesn't change the past or the facts, true-but it makes them more bearable. Might as well have a good buzz before the inevitable." Rocket grumbles, showing her lightly and violently yanks the glass back from under Nidnene's paw, failing to notice her darkening gaze.
"Ya want facts? Well I'll give ya some facts -Right now the survival of about two hundred people is directly depending on ye, including me and our kits and every one of those two hundred are willing to follow yer lead. Those two hundred who are here, lurking in my basement, attic space and every which were because they had heard rumors that this 'robot dude's been keeping me lodging parlor as his resistance base and could keep 'em safe from the invaders." She retorts shaking a finger in front of his face.
"Two hundred already? No wonder it felt oddly crowded when I got back with Ash..."
"Yes! And ye're allegedly the Chief Ranger of Halfworld, Custodian of the Keystone quadrant and The Guardian of the galaxy. So, put the booze down and act like The Ranger guardian ya claim to be, for Makers sake! If ya still think that boozing is the most important thing in your life since giving ye best shot to fight those invaders and saving yer family is too much for ye stomach... Well by all means, and don't let the cork hit the bottle and the door to your ass on the way out." Nidnene continues to heatedly berate Rocket and stalks out like an angry cat without waiting for a reply.
"Well, frakk me..." Rocket mopes looking at the bottle and glass in front of him before pushing them aside, having suddenly lost his desire to drink. However, it didn't prevent him from snatching the bottle with him when he left the bar.
He was tired and his cybernetics felt sore, all the more reasons to go find a place to crash but first... Rocket sighs deeply and takes a good swig from the bottle his carrying at the crook of his arm before descending down into basement.
He stood by the mouth of the room at the darkened basement, observing, saying nothing. He almost expected Nidnene's low but angry hiss to warn him not to enter while intoxicated, she often slept with the kits, but it wasn't her voice in the dark that Rocket heard. Trey's quiet whimper was no surprise. They had been very lucky to find a doctor for Trey - especially a surgeon at that. Even most of the retired ones had been called in to help when the Badoon had attacked. Those broken legs would cause a lot of pain for a long while. Rocket was in truth more worried about Uno and Duo, tossing and turning in their fit of sleep. They had been very subdued ever since and it worried him. Worried him a great deal. Part of him ached to whisper in their ears how everything would be all right while rocking them at his arms until they would fall asleep.
"Then why don't cha?" Nidnene asks softly from behind him making him almost jump from surprise enough to nearly drop the bottle he was holding. She'd always been scary good at sneaking and reading his moods.
"I- I don't know if I should." He finally admits after a long pause.
"Don't know. What'ca mean? Yer their father. There's nothing wrong in wanting to hold and comfort them." She comments with a raised eyebrow.
"I never had anyone to -to teach me or do those things... to me. I'm not even sure if I've had biological parents at all. We look alike but we're not the same you and I, not quite."
"Well ya certainly couldn't have been borne without at least a mother, that's fer sure and our kits were born fine so we're similar in what really counts. Despite what differences ya might think we have." Nidnene assures with notable certainty.
Rocket just gives her one of his 'honey, you don't even want to know the answer to that' -looks making Nidnene roll her eyes a little and sigh "just go to bed Rocky -but not here. Not tonight anyway, yer drunk and I'm not in the mood fer this kinda talks."
Rocket's mute glowering turns into a pained look of fear and horror from spikes of sudden pain at his lower-back. He drops on his knees panting shallowly, supporting himself against the wall with one hand while squeezing his eyes shut and pushing a fist into his mouth to avoid from screaming it out loud.
"Rocket? What is it. Ya alright?" Nidnene yells rushing to his side, looking mighty concerned.
"Ye- ye shouldn't see me like this. It's... It's nothing, I'm fine." He lies to her between his teeth. He squeezed his eyes shut as even the dim light of the corridor hurt his suddenly super light sensitive eyes. He was not alright and he'd never would be. The bastards at Halfworld had seen to that with their diabolical experiments and he'd rather die than let anyone else to know how they had broken his body and mind again and again. Oh, they'd tried to 'soften' things by offering him nominally prestigious and important duties later on, in hopes of 'buying' his trust back... But he knew better by then.
"The hell ya are! I'm yer mate, damn it! Ya either tell me what's wrong with ya or I'll call the Doc to have a look and then everyone here will know fer sure." Nidnene threatens taking a hold of Rocket and despite her earlier notions against it, part drags part leads him into their sleeping quarter and lies him down on the biggest pallet laid on the floor between their kits. Rocket lies there motionless for a good five minutes just breathing in and out very steadily and very regularly which to Nidnene seemed something which her often needlessly secretive mate had practiced aplenty.
"No more secrets Rocky. How long has this been going on, these -strokes of pain, I mean." She asks when Rocket is finally able to crack his eyes open again.
"All my life, ever since I left Halfworld. There's no 'cure' for it. This pain is a part of me, always has been and always will be."
"Stop being so melodramatic Rock, it doesn't suit ya." Nidnene sighs caressing his cheek.
"I wish, but it's the truth; sometimes days, weeks even months can go by and there's almost no pain at all and sometimes... sometimes it's even worse than now."
"But surely there must be something, I mean ya always tout how advanced everything is out there."
"It's complicated. Ye know how I have all these metal parts sticking through my back and other places?"
"The cibe- cypo- cipher-net wares?" Nidnene nods fumbling with the foreign word.
"They're just the tip of the iceberg. I have a catalogue worth of cybernetics in me. Ya can't even begin to realize the extent... Even I don't know how it all quite works and… when there's as much as I have in a person, there's a price to pay." Rocket admits in pain induced honesty.
"How's that related to pain relief? I mean, ye're clearly not a robot in fur suit. You've convinced me of that quite well over the years... and certain flesh parts seemed to be working quite well, the last time we checked." She responds with slightly mischievous innuendo.
"Would you be offended if I say, 'not tonight honey, I'm having a headache' " Rocket replies coughing up a weak laugh.
"No, but ya skirted me question." She sighs resting her head against Rockets burly chest. Rocket might be large for a raccoonoid but the others; the taller and larger humanoid races, wouldn't describe raccoonoids as nothing but small, thin or even scrawny no matter how much they'd work-out and Rocket despite his impressive build of 55 pounds and 3'4" was no exception.
"I have something called chemical warfare modification-set. It filters out or makes inert most everything that's not designed to pass the filters. I've tried a lot of drugs and pain remedies but the only ones I know to work properly are Kree manufactured combat steroids -illegal in three worlds out of four outside the Kree-empire You saw how strong they are -I gave Trey only tenth of what I'd use myself. Groot bark tea and enough alcohol for a normal guy to pass out are the next best."
"So that's why ye're constantly hitting the bottle! Why didn't ya tell me? Like years ago, already! instead of letting me nag on and on about it while ya suffered."
"Well, I... I guess I was afraid that you'd think less of me if ye knew I was such a weakling." Rocket admits reluctantly which made Nidnene to shake her head in mild disbelief. "After all this time Rocket, ya really think I'd revoke our coupling agreement because of something as trivial as that?"
"All this time... and now time is not something we hav- Ahh" Rocket yelps with grimace as a new wave of muscle spasms hit him.
"Is it true Rocky? about what the astrophysicists say... about time." Nidnene asks absently while massaging Rocket's back to ease his muscle pains. "Time? What about it. What did they say?" Rocket replies tiredly.
"That it's all relative -like if I'd wait here for ye and when you'd come back ye would be an old man by then or we would be but you'd be young, because of space bending time differently between places or something, it's was kind of confusing -I heard them talk about it in the news before yesterday, some new theory, and now we're not so relatively or figuratively about to run out of time..." She replies voice cracking a little at the end when she realizes that she's babbling. Rocket turns his head to glance backwards at Nidnene kneading his aching back, knowing that she didn't usually talk like this. "Nidnene, ye're the love of me life. I'd rather spend the last seconds of me life with ye than an eternity without but time, space- and time-space continuum in particular doesn't really work quite like that, well unless using the slower-than-light engines to travel between the solar systems but trust me when I say we'll never grow old apart." Rocket promises hugging and kissing her fiercely.
If Rocket though he'd get a nice & quiet rest with his wife after their reconciliation, he was sadly mistaken. Not even three hours had passed before he was vigorously shaken awake by his followers.
"Get yer flarking paws of me you dolts!" Rocket grumbles angrily. The small group of men back away to wait for him to get up and dress in the dark.
"Now what the frakk is so important that I can't have even a moments rest?" He asks pulling a shirt over his head.
"The baduuns are up to something Guardian Ranger Rocket. We figures ye might want to hear this right away." It takes a moment for Rocket to connect the voice with a face. Roork Shade water was one of those people who tended to surprise you. A baker's apprentice with a real knack for military work, but Rocket hadn't been a one to look a gift horse in the mouth and had promptly placed him as the de facto 'home guard' leader.
"Right, let's go and have a look then." Rocket's agreement is accompanied by a wide yawn. The men lead him a short way outside and into a recently abandoned warehouse. Rocket frowns slightly at the locale. He could only hope the people there had fled and not gotten captured.
Rocket grunts a question to Roork when his been led into basement who only nods indicating them to be quiet. At the foot of the stairs, laying in the ground few feet from them was what had once been a Raccoonoid in tattered clothes, only now it was but a twisted mockery of itself. If it hadn't moved but moments ago, Rocket wouldn't have thought it to be living. At least not until it tried biting and grabbing at them and those black eyes rolled over showing the whites. And they heard that terrible high pitched screamin' before it had turned on them in full. Only it was chained to a wall with a thick chain by the waist and ankles. Rocket's guns flew into his hands out of sheer instincts, spitting a hail of photon death on the poor soul. it takes second or two for Rocket to realize that his helmet's visor hadn't registered the creature as living at all. In fact, it had barely registered it at all until it moved to attack. Rocket shivered, recalling those lifeless, empty black eyes, like a doll's eyes.
"Okay that's trouble alright. A glarkin' frackin' heap of trouble. Have you finished with those tunnels yet?" He notes holstering his guns and tries not to look too visibly shaken.
"No, not quite but when a word of... that thing spreads, we're not going to get short on diggers for sure." Roork replies looking at the now truly dead corpse with a visible shudder.
"Where'd ya boys found it, Roork?" Rocket asks examining the cadaver carefully for any signs of typical postmortem Badoon 'tampering'.
"It was wondering outside near here and we first thought it was a crazed citizen... But we figured that mistake real fast and dragged it down here in chains before fetching ye." Roork Explains nonchalantly, trying to hold on to his cool.
"Well it doesn't have the usual Zom-hardware... Could be some kind of nano-machine or techno-viral weapon infection. I've seen both, ya know. Though I was pretty sure the Badoon weren't that far advanced yet. I sure hope ye boys used gloves when manhandling that thing." Rocket contemplates worriedly and made point to not touch anything on the corpse.
"Eww, Ye suppose we lucked on that things then and aren't going to... Ya know 'turn or nothin'?" Roork whistles from between his teeth and some of the men with them look a bit sick at the notion of 'turning'.
"I dunno. We likely won't know unless one of ya keels over all sudden like and we wouldn't want that, now would we?" Rocket notes sarcastically.
"How's this even possible? That's just twisted! The dead are supposed to stay dead" Ashen mutters in disgust.
"Badoon science has made some very nasty discoveries on the nature of life & death, Ash. This and that hulking monster are but some of the ways they have for replenishing their ranks during and after a new conquest. Come on let's get back to Inn. We need to redouble our efforts to find people still hiding and move everybody out into city maintenance network tunnels, by tonight. The Badoon patrols are almost here. I'm sure." Rocket replies with a tone that warns his men not ask too much while they're spying on the lone Monster of Badoon from the crack between the warehouse's double doors, waiting for it to stomp away along the street. Though it was all alone and without a group -it also didn't need it. A single monster could rip a tank apart with ease and their rock-hard skin could withstand astonishing amount of punishment but the monster on the street wasn't what had made his skin crawl.