The initial shock of the ascender’s rapid acceleration soon wore off, and I peeled my head off the floor to survey my new surroundings. The curved walls of the compact vehicle sloped in towards the elevator cable, which fed through a transparent column. Worn benches were positioned around the column, facing out at a wraparound LED screen encircling the ascender’s inner wall. There were no windows; the screens alternately provided a grainy view of Argus-II shrinking beneath me and helpful messages sponsored by the Frontier Federation.
I tried reading one of them aloud to myself as it scrolled by. My voice shook. “‘When you get hurt on the job, remember to apply first aid immediately to avoid lost productivity.’” I grimaced. “Right. Good idea.”
I carefully shrugged my way out of my pink sweatshirt, trying to move my wrist as little as possible. I took measured, calming breaths, blinking away tears, then gritted my teeth and looked down at the damage the paladin had done. “It’s not supposed to bend that way.” I tried to make myself laugh, but pain shot through my side. I probed my ribcage with my good hand, and cried out when I found the problem. “Yup! Broken. Ow. How do you even do first aid on broken ribs?”
A fresh new message scrolled across the walls, as if in answer to my question. “‘Work twice as hard for twice as long and the progress grows exponentially.’ I... guess that makes sense? Maybe next time it’ll say something like, ‘All Federation vehicles are equipped with state of the art medkits under...’ hm... it’s worth a try.” Clutching my damaged hand close to my chest, I crawled over to one of the benches, and soon found a latch to raise the seat. They were indeed hollow; the first was stuffed with faded parachute packs, the next with an assortment of hand tools, and luckily the third held a green box stamped with Xenolife’s cross-and-snake logo beneath its embossed Federation insignia.
Triumphantly, I placed the plastic box before me and opened it up. “Okay, so maybe it’s not the best stocked medkit...” I mumbled. Within the box was a single roll of cloth bandages, an adreno-spike, an opened bottle of antiseptic, and an expired bottle of “Hangover Friends”, sub labeled: “ultimate strength pain, swelling, and stress reliever”.
“Does expired mean no good or less good in your case?” I asked tiredly. The bleary-eyed mascot on the bottle seemed too tired to reply. “I guess I’ll just take a double dose then,” I conceded, and tried to dump a few tablets out into my palm one-handed. “I was going for four, but six should be even better, right?” They were horrifically bitter without a glass of water to take them with.
I tossed the pill bottle aside while I waited for them to kick in, and turned my attention begrudgingly to my wrist. “Still pointing the wrong way, huh buddy?” I asked gently. “Can you maybe not for me?” A couple gentle pokes told me that the lower quarters of my radius and ulna were, to put it technically, all screwed up. I could feel fragments of bone swimming around in the swollen tissue of my wrist. “Guess you’re gonna stay like this until we can find a hospital then. I think I’ll just...” I took my sweatshirt and awkwardly wrapped it around my wrist a few times, having to pause every so often to wait for the pain to subside. Then, clutching one sleeve in my teeth, I tied it as well as I could. “There,” I panted, “a bit of padding for you, at least. And I no longer have to think about it because I can no longer see it!”
The throbbing, burning pain disagreed.
“Oh look, another tip!” I announced, to little fanfare. “‘Corporate moles destabilize wormholes. Report any suspicious coworkers to your supervisor immediately.’ What’s a mole?”
Rather than answering my question, the screen switched back to showing how far I was from home. I could just make out the fuzzy blob of Goldmeadow at the edge of the display, a greyish blob surrounded by a sea of green.
“Maybe...” I began, voice trembling. “Maybe I should have just stayed home? Would it really be so bad to follow in Mommy and Daddy’s footsteps?” I laid back on one of the benches to rest while my imagination worked the scenario over. “If I had signed the contract, I would be protected by Belivita. There would be no mercenaries after me, my medical bills would be covered in perpetuity, and I’d have guaranteed housing. Maybe they’d even transfer me off-planet if I asked? I bet they have loads more residential colonies!” I pictured a mansion built into a cliff overlooking a bustling city, staffed with the best help money could buy.
I tried not to think about what I’d have to give in return, but reality crept into my fantasy as it always did. “I’d have a stylist to choose my outfits, and an artist to do my makeup. I’d be watched constantly by camera drones, graded and critiqued on my performance every day. Then, at night...” I shuddered, unable to say the rest aloud. “No. I made the right choice. I’m not going to do that. I may look like my parents, but at least I have some self-respect.”
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Tingles began to spread through my nerve endings, and the pain diminished gradually until I could sit up. I reached for my foot, but was distracted by the state of my manicure. I inspected my nails, always kept neatly filed to points and protected by a clear lacquer. Now they had blood and black fur stuck under them, and their points were chipped and dull. Their glossy coating was rendered matte by the scuffing they’d endured. “Damn... my file was in my bag.” I folded my arms, and yelped as my wrist barked in protest. “Right. Forgot. Ow.”
I turned my attention back to the screens for more inspiration. “‘Remember to thank your local paladins...’ yeah, no.” I rolled my eyes, and continued on in a corporate-spokesman voice. “‘...provided by our partners at Crusader Interplanetary Defence Force to safeguard our vital work!’” I scoffed. “I guess stopping child trafficking doesn’t count as ‘vital work’.” My anger flared and fizzled as if burning off the last traces of my body’s adrenaline. “The media makes them seem like heroes, bound by their code of honor to protect the righteous from the machinations of the anarchist and the infidel. I don’t really know what an infidel is... maybe I did something to deserve this?”
That cold, sadistic laughter echoed in my ears like the grating of metal.
“Right... I’m not done yet,” I reminded myself. I carefully folded my right leg over my left. My stretch pants were torn at the knee, and bits of gravel stuck to my abraded skin. The fur around the area was matted with blood and dirt. “Dang it!” I grumbled, poking at the ragged fabric. “I really liked these pants!”
I took the antiseptic from the first aid kit and twisted off the cap with my teeth, then splashed a generous amount over my knee. The liquid bubbled and fizzed, turning first white, then pink, then brown as it scoured the wound. “Well, at least that part wasn’t so bad,” I said as I wiped it away with the dangling sleeve of my sweatshirt.
I worked my way down my digitigrade leg from my knee to my ankle joint, and felt nothing wrong aside from the soreness of overuse. Lower, however, was another story. “Oh! Yep. That’s not correct.” Even with the Hangover Friends dulling the sensation, my gentle probing felt more like someone was beating me across the backs of my ankles with a pipe. I took the bandage from the medical kit and struggled to one-handedly wind it around my damaged ankle. I gritted my teeth and ignored the spots swimming at the edges of my vision. When the bandage was sloppily tied off, the pain slowly receded, returning from agony a dull throbbing. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Probably should have saved some bandage for the other leg, but it doesn’t hurt as much anyway.”
I tried to be as gentle as possible when inspecting my foot, for fear of triggering my ankle again. My once soft paw pads were scraped and scuffed, red instead of their usual pink, and my claws, like my nails, were split and caked with dried blood. “Maybe I should have brought shoes,” I considered aloud. “But they’re so uncomfortable, even the ones made for basts. Oh well, too late now.”
I haphazardly poured some antiseptic over my toes, then recrossed my legs left-over-right and finished off the antiseptic. As I waited for the fizzing to stop, I distracted myself with the next loading screen tip. “‘There are over twenty million warp gates currently in service shipping people, goods, and information to every corner of the Human Empire,’” I read aloud. “Let’s see, if they constructed one new gate every day, which Frontier probably could with their resources, that would take... twenty thousand revolutions? That can’t be right, that’s way too long. Maybe they build a whole bunch at a time, and shoot them out into unexplored sectors?”As my imagination continued to wander, my eyelids grew heavy, and my head felt light and fluffy.
My thoughts faded into background noise until I found myself drifting lazily through space. I saw supernovae and quasars dancing hand in hand with nebulae around distant void stars, all surrounded by the hulking hexagonal shadows of gates. I stepped towards the dancing figures, but the closer I got the harder it was to see them for how brightly they were shining. Everywhere I turned the blinding light pierced my retinas like a storm of metal shrapnel, except for the void star, which mercifully drank away the light. I stumbled into its cold embrace, my arms reaching eternally into its maw, ribbons of pale fur interwoven with the flesh of stars. The gates watched on as the darkness grew at their hearts, larger and larger until it consumed its hosts, and then the remaining stars, and then all was silent, still, cold, and dark.
I waited. It was hard to think. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were moving. My screams couldn’t reach my ears. Each heartbeat I counted felt slower than the last, until I lost count around seven hundred.
Suddenly, in the stillness, I felt something. Weightlessness. It was brief. I slammed back down onto the barely padded bench. The pain was such a relief.
I groaned as I sat up, and soothingly stroked the raised fur on my tail. “Why that dream again, after so long?” I wondered aloud. “Hangover friends, did you betray me?”
The lights went red, and the wall screens powered down. A sharp hiss came from the ascender’s hatch, and my ears popped as the air pressure changed.
The cylindrical adreno-spike rolled to a stop against my foot. Surely this wasn’t expired too? I barely felt the sting of the injector in my thigh, and moments later a surge of energy rushed through my body. I was as ready as I could be to run for my life; I stood at the door, and waited.