Interview with a Dirtbag
Chapter 22 - Staff Sergeant Remington (And the Gold-Toothed Bastards)
“Remy, we need you over here!”
It seemed to Private Remy that his fellow soldiers needed more than him in this particular instance, but he was all that was left. They were nothing more than a waystation in Shil’vati airspace that no one actually wanted to go to at any point in their travels; however, politics paved the way. Think of it like the Shil’vati equivalent of Cracker Barrel: it was a place one could stop at the edge of any city and feel like they were home again before they went into the “big city”. If you wanted to refuel, the station orbited a gas giant, so ships could if they needed to; here or at many of the other waystations that had just as much relevance as any other. They seemed to Remy that they were mostly there to show off the Shil’vati’s presence anywhere that was anywhere of note, including the middle of nowhere.
The waystation looked like a cubist ice cream cone with one larger end that bricked out with two bay doors on each side which could accommodate smaller to medium sized frigates. In an emergency situation, a larger space-faring vessel could attach to the point of the other end so that passengers could embark and disembark and fuel cells could be attached and recharged. All together though, it was of distinctly Shil’vati design, seeing that all of it was covered in metallic purple. Most of the operant systems were aligned at the core of the station. Between the bay doors of the wider section and the pointed cone were several sections reserved for habitable spaces like dining and sleeping accommodations.
Word of rebellion on Shil was common, but that was not something that Remy had to worry about at work or at home. He spent more time on the waystation than he did at home, though off of the station, “home” was the barracks of a Shil’vati base.
He barely remembered his homeworld. He remembered it being cold. He remembered smelling smoked meat. He remembered being in the snow for a long time and then being in the warmth of a fire in a cave. He knew, at the time, that Fala was important to him—important to them all—her face was the face of freedom, of independence and of hope. That was a long time ago though. Freedom and independence were relative states now in comparison to the planet where he was born.
Freedom had meant the ability to do what one wanted. To Remy’s parents, it meant to be a hunter, or to learn a craft. Though most importantly, to fill a niche that the pack needed.
Independence meant having first dibs on the prey you caught for the pack. No one went hungry because food was always shared; unfortunately the heart, the liver, and the delicacies of the hunt went to the hunter.
Now, after the Shil’vati Imperium had taken control of their world and ultimately Remy’s life, freedom came to mean freedom to join the marines and serve the Empress. Independence meant the hours between duty were his to indulge in distinctly not Rakiri pleasures.
Which was…fine…there was freedom in space travel. There was independence in a wider variety in the Imperium diet. He didn’t have to eat the leaner, gamier meat of his homeworld though it would have been his preference. There was value in crab meat and butter. Naturally saltier, seafood satisfied more savory notes than what he’d grown up with; it scratched an itch he didn’t know he had.
A sense of true independence was gone now in the Imperium. Everyone depended on someone else for something. Right now, what was left of his pod mates on the waystation were depending on him.
Typically his day on the waystation consisted of making sure that seals were sealed, that life support systems were up to spec, and what needed cleaned got cleaned, along with some auxiliary weapons checks and the like. Some Imperial travelers were better than others. The most recent visitors had seemed a bit more fastidious than most. T’s were crossed and I’s were also crossed on the top and the bottom. That said, they had seemed anxious to leave as soon as they got there.
These visitors had come from all-too-ordinary duties and could, understandably, be all-too-ready to go home. He didn’t think much of it. A half a dozen Shil’vati marines going through the motions.
Remy had just finished morning duty when he felt the vibration. It was subtle at first. Then the entire station shifted. Thank the Empress it isn’t life support, but if I don’t check it out, we’ll be spinning like a top toward the planet they were previously in orbit with, Remy thought before things got too out of hand. His pelt was already somewhat slick from the Shil’vati-centric heat preferences, but the rush of adrenaline from this fight or flight emergency made him even hotter. The checklist in his brain ticked off what it couldn’t be, life support, main controls, backup systems…Still not enough to wait for someone else to check it out. This was an all hands situation if there ever was one.
Remy’s omnipad pinged with multiple alerts. Some were system alerts that he hadn’t eliminated in his head, some were variations of “oh shit” from members of his pod; buried within them was a single unfinished and barely sent message that said, “Help! They’re in th–”. He headed in the most logical direction, where the station was leaning, which was exactly where gravity was taking him anyway. He’d been on this station long enough to know that he was on what was going to become the highest point as it tipped; he had a long way to go before he found the source of the disturbance.
Had he thought about possible sabotage being the reason for the disturbance, he might’ve checked the corners as he went.
After passing through a few airlocks that his omnipad confirmed were passable, Remy came to chambers that were not. He took a detour through some adjacent rooms that led him to a corner room. There were rooms that connected to it from each side, but not to each other, like a V formed by blocks on one corner of the waystation. A door slid open and he smelled before he saw the burnt flesh of some of his podmates. The “ordinary” visitors had already subdued two of them. This was when Remy took the time to actually assess the visitors. Complacency is a bitch.
The two waystation employees were laid in a heap to one side of a table on its side. Remy could see them from the angle of the door he’d entered. His sense of smell warned him with enough time to align himself with the frame of the door. The visitor whose laser was trained on Remy’s door knew that she didn’t have a shot on him, despite the door opening for someone on the other side. However, the same could not be said for the podmate who entered from the adjacent door. The visitor guarding that door shot as soon as the door swooshed open. Remy heard a shrill scream as a body fell to the floor; behind them, he heard another set of feet shuffling out of sight of the open door. They tapped their omnipad and yelled, “Remy, we need you over here!”
Remy heard in a unique delayed stereo, from his own omnipad as well as from echo of the room connecting where he was and where the interjection was stated. At that moment, new vibrations took over the ship. Redundancies are righting the tipping of the ship, Remy thought while he gripped the doorframe. “It’s alright.” He yelled at no one in particular. “Whatever damage can be fixed, there’s no need to panic. We can talk this out.” He’d directed that statement at the visitors. He should have, instead, been listening for the woosh of the door behind him opening.
“Thanks but no thanks.” Remy heard a voice behind him say. He turned to see a visitor holding a laser pistol toward him. She smiled revealing a row of gold-covered teeth between her tusks. Remy reached for his taser in vain. The visitor pulled the trigger. Remy felt then smelt his own burning fur; his chest shrieked in pain. The shock to his system forced his body to involuntarily keel over to the floor. He winced, hearing booted footsteps approach him then fill his vision with a swift kick to his face before completely replacing his vision with the blackness of unconsciousness.
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Remy’s world swirled for a while when he awoke, he couldn’t discern what he was looking at when his eyes could open. He could trust his nose and his ears though. His podmates were all present. They were in the chow hall. He could feel his hands cuffed behind his back. Wiring of some kind attached the cuffs to the bench he was sitting on, he tried to pull his head up from the table. It was a battle he wasn’t winning yet. He accidentally let out a high pitched whine.
The whine caught the attention of the visitors to the station.
“Oh, welcome to the new cycle!” Remy didn’t have a handle on his surroundings yet, but he tried to focus on the voice that spoke to him. “Thank you for being,” Remy twisted to see the silhouette of the speaker roll the laser pistol in their hand as they searched for the word they wanted, eventually they stuck both shoulders in the air to shrug. They were smiling sardonically. “...Predictable.” They stepped forward, revealing golden incisors.
Remy looked at her quizzically. He felt restraints pull at his wrists. He couldn’t reach up to rub his eyes but he could move his feet.
“Oh, don’t give me that look!” The Shil’vati woman rolled her eyes at him. “Manage the emergency,” she continued with her hands clutching her pearls mockingly, “but surely sabotage couldn’t happen on your Imperial ship!”
Remy licked his lips, keeping a keen eye on her, “What do you want? What makes you think this is worth it? The whole Imperium will be on you soon.”
“We’ll see about that. Word would have to get off of the station about an emergency.” A voice rang from behind the woman with the golden incisors. It was the woman whose entire bottom row of teeth were golden. “And we’ll see how they react when they see their own manning the station.”
“Not to state the obvious,” Remy squinted at them, “but won’t the gold teeth be a dead giveaway?”
With a grin, the terrorist with the bottom row of gold teeth holstered her laser pistol and popped out the gold with her now free hand. “Got it covered.”
“Yeah, got it covered,” said the one with the gold incisors. She, too, popped out one of them easily. When she tried to pull the other out, it didn’t pop. She pulled and pulled and it wouldn’t come out.
Behind her, the Shil’vati terrorist with the gold row in her hand frowned. Her eyes rolled and she palmed her face in her hand.
Struggling Incisor turned away from Remy to give her superior an imploring look.
Remy saw his chance. He launched himself away from the chow table and rammed Struggling Incisor into Bottom Row. No one had eyes on him for this instant. He made a mad dash to a control panel at the exit end of the chow line. There was a line that could go to the main panel. With enough muscle memory, someone who knew the systems of the station could get out an emergency signal via that panel. Not that Remy had the muscle memory in his snout to go through the layers of systems to send an emergency signal out as well as set the waystation to emergency power, but he’d done it enough that even with his hands tied behind his back and a lick of his nose, he could produce enough capacitive contact that he could peck his way to a means to their eventual escape.
With that done, what could one do next? Run?
Not much of anywhere to run on a space station. Power was shut down to an emergency level, so the station itself couldn’t do anything properly until someone higher up in the food chain sent word that they could start it up again. No one wanted that. The wheels of the Imperium had to turn and correction would come swiftly. In a true emergency, this would be a lifesaver; if someone were to call wolf, however, the penalty would be punishing.
Remy watched the lights grow dimmer when he snouted the last keystroke. He looked up smugly at his captors. They did not reciprocate.
“You’re coming with me,” Gold Row growled as she grabbed Remy by the throat and walked him from the eating section to the kitchen part of the chow. She rifled through drawers, finding cutting implements to be lacking. “What gives?”
Startled by all the action, the waystation’s cook, who was also bound and on the floor under the guns of Gold Row’s compatriots called, “Power’s off. Most of our cooking is automated or requires some form of power to operate.” She chuckled ruefully, “And now our power’s out. We’re dead in the water, including chow.”
“‘Most’, eh?” Gold Row squinted, searching the counters left unrifled. She forced Remy forward while tripping him from behind; he just missed hitting the back of his head on the table. Remy grinned at his luck. The grin was short lived, however, “But not all…” Gold Row drew from the table an instrument that, to Humans, would look like a pizza cutter. Remy screwed his face up in innocent confusion. Gold Row pulled Remy’s left ear taut against the floor and rolled the pizza cutter across it. Remy writhed in agony. He turned his head violently away from Gold Row; he smelt copper and felt hotness cross his face. His ear hung loosely from its spine of helix. Remy growled viciously at Gold Row and would have gotten a muzzle full of her hands if she hadn’t lifted herself up and away from him preemptively.
“C’mere and hold him down!” Gold Row yelled at no one in particular and kicked Remy back down to the ground. Struggling Incisor and another yet to identify themselves terrorist came to Gold Row’s side; one held Remy’s snout and chest down while the other laid on top of his legs. When she came back up, Gold Row held both of Remy’s detached pinna together between the pinch of her pointer and thumb. “Think you’re clever now?” She spat into the ragged slices of Remy’s ears in her hand mockingly.
Struggling Incisor lifted herself off of Remy, who stayed down, crying into the pool of blood his ears were making and sneered, “Hey boss, you used a pizza cutter there, you gonna share a slice with us?” Gold Row flipped her wrist; a sliced ear smacked Struggling Incisor’s face and stayed there for a minute before falling limply from her face to the floor like a slice of cheese. Remy stared heartbrokenly at his removed ear on the floor.
***
“Remy, er, Ssgt Remington! Do you want to stop? We can totally take a break if you want.” Michael held out a tissue for Ssgt Remington.
Ssgt Remington’s chin quivered. “Please, just a moment.” he said and accepted the tissue. He wiped his eyes dry, cleared his throat, “I want to finish this.”
Michael hadn’t known what exactly to expect from his official meeting with Ssgt Remington. He wanted to know how and why, but he did not expect this emotional story from the Rakiri. “Dude, i-if I may be so personal…I’m not sure what to say.”
“I’m not sure why I’m telling you this either, but,” Ssgt Remington caught his breath haltingly, “no one has asked me about my ears and it,” he blinked a tear out and took a deep breath, clarity seeming to come over him; “It feels good to get this out of me. When all of this was all done I had given my report, but no one had asked me how I’d felt about it.” He sniffled a bit more before he wiped his nose with the tissue Michael had offered. “You’re good at this!” He exclaimed as he looked Michael directly in the eyes.
Michael started to say that he hadn’t done anything, he was just curious, but decided to accept the praise whether he’d earned it or not. He smiled and gave Remy’s arm a squeeze, “Thank you.” This guy needs some real professional help. I’ll see what I can do. He thought as he made a mental note to look into services that might be available on base.
Ssgt Remington blew his nose loudly into another tissue. The honk and subsequent slump was followed by a renewed strength that grew within him, his head and shoulders lifted up stridently. “So…I try to stick to the book now and not try to play the hero. There’s a kind of confidence one can have when they do things by the book. When you go out of your way, do too much or know too much, you can get put into a position where you can get hurt.” The pads of his fingertips involuntarily traced the cartilaginous ridge left of his right ear.
“There was no need for my heroics,” Ssgt Remington recalled. “Not long after my unfortunate antics, a real hero appeared. Her name was Elinsys.” He smiled at her memory and took back what he’d just said, “Maybe my tampering with the system gave her enough of a window to get through the range of our radar unseen for long enough for her to dock with the base and sneak on and rescue us.”
Michael chided, “Surely someone saw the value of your actions, I don’t think they’re just handing out the rank of Staff Sergeant.”
“That’s thanks to Fala.” Ssgt Remington smiled wistfully. “She doesn’t have much clout in the Imperium as a whole, but she did what she could to lift our ranks and keep us together. She is a Princess in our culture but that isn’t really recognized by the Shil’vati. They threw her a bone and kept us together, but they made her go through medical training so that she could be of service to them.” He rolled his eyes a bit, “Making our Princess clean bedpans and wipe noses, they thought it might put her in her place.” He chuckled quietly, “She took to it though. She’s a damn fine medic.”
He leaned in toward Michael. “Fala has done more to protect me and the rest of us, really, than anyone. I would die for her, the Imperium be damned.”
Michael nodded slightly, it was a subtle acknowledgment of the danger of what Ssgt Remington had said. “I want you to know that what is said here is said in confidence. I have no mandate to report anything to anyone unless there is a direct threat to yourself or the wellbeing of others.”
Ssgt Remington straightened up again. “Elinsys saved us on the waystation, then she took me and some of the rest of the gals to go after the rebels. I reckon she was going to let the hounds hunt. And maybe provide me a little bit of revenge.” He winked at Michael. “The rebels were the only ones who we threatened directly.” He yawned deeply, “Though, hopefully someone else in the pack can tell you more about that. I think I’m done for the time being.”
“Sure thing, Remy,” Michael looked Ssgt Remington in the eye. “Is it alright for me to call you Remy?”
“Only amongst the Pack.”
“You got it, Remy.” Michael beamed, “Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I hope you have a great rest of your day.”
Remy stood up, “You too, Mikey.”
Michael smile-frowned in a way that said, ‘You got me’ and got up. He walked around his desk and gave Ssgt Remington a hug. They smiled at each other and they parted ways.
Michael sat down, thinking, I hope the rest of this job is as rewarding as this has been.