Swinging the rod like a club, I swatted the drone out of the air and cracked it against the neck of the third Ygnaza who'd hauled me up. The fourth, piloting the platform, triggered the shock collar, sending spasms wracking my frame. Fighting the pain and the loss of muscular control, I flung my body around, swinging the telescoping rods at the pilot. They rang off of the transparent walls of its protected cubicle. The two still loose on the platform, despite warbling pained sounds, took hold of the rods nearest them and forced me against the floor of the craft. The restraints locked into place against the surface, holding me in place. My neck was bent at an awkward and painful angle.
The one I'd knocked into my cell warbled for aid as the two made sure all my restraints were locked down. Satisfied I wasn't going to get free, they lowered the poles into the cell to help their comrade out. The Ygnaza recapped the cell, leaving me pinned to their craft. The one I'd punched in the eye leaned in again and warbled something. I had no idea what it was, but wouldn't have been surprised if it was a one-liner, or the alien equivalent. Well, I was out of my cell. My situation hadn't improved, but I was out of my cell.
From my uncomfortable position, I could see that the hold was indeed laid out much like a commercial beehive, only horizontally. Sheets of hexagonal cells filled the space between the outer bulkheads. Camera drones buzzed about over the cells, keeping an eye on things, and a handful of overseer platforms waited to respond to incidents. The platform I was on glided to the edge, where a contingent of Ygnaza met us. After a brief exchange of warbles, I was picked up by at least two poles per restraint and attached to a smaller metal panel. This time, I was facing away from the surface, so my neck wasn't as badly strained. It wasn't much of a consolation, as I now had a dozen guards instead of four. This metal platform rolled on some sort of coasters, following the guards of its own accord.
We passed through a large hexagonal door into a small, blank room. The slight twinge of motion as it started up told me it was a lift. I couldn't tell if we'd gone up or down, as the artificial gravity had compensated for the feeling of acceleration. All I did know was that this ship was huge. But then again, making an interstellar run required enough cargo capacity to make it worthwhile. For most cargoes that was simply uneconomical. Of course, I was making assumptions. Maybe their faster than light drive worked so well that interstellar shipping was cheap and having a big ship was a status symbol.
The lift stopped and I was wheeled down a hallway which was a light red shade, just this side of being pink. While it unnerved me, Ygnaza responded to color differently. Their warning lights had been the same pus-shade as their blood. We paused for a door in the side of the hall to open, then I was wheeled inside. The platform was wheeled under an assembly of spindly robotic arms ending in a variety of attachments I couldn't begin to identify. Four gem-eyed cameras looked down at me from around an off-blue light.
The head end of my platform was raised so that I was facing a new alien. Dressed in a white singlet and bright orange gloves, this Ygnaza was a darker shade of green than I'd seen before. He ambled about on his back hooves, leaving all of his arms free. He warbled something and pointed at my nose. Jamming two fingers from his smaller hands up my nostrils, he straightened out the broken cartilage. He applied a strip of something across my face, which hardened into shape. A small torrent of fresh blood poured down the lower half of my face.
The guards warbled something back at the white-clad Ygnaza. He didn't respond, and they marched out. "Pardon," the Ygnaza said, "I forgot to introduce myself." He shared the greater control over his vocal sacs that Zsh-ya did, lacking the glug sound the others made when they collapsed. "I am Uth-sk, I am what you call a cutter. No, that's not it, a surgeon."
"That's nice," I said, sarcastically. Evidently tone of voice wasn't something they cued to very well, as Uth-sk just kept talking.
"I am conducting a study on certain aberrations among the human population," he said. "I am curious about the development of what you call powers."
"I haven't got any."
"That's all right, every study needs a control. Your disruptive behavior has volunteered you for the viewing, sampling and cutting." Uth-sk paused. "No that's not the words. Scanning, biopsy and vivisection."
Part 26
Uth-sk's words made me test the restraints in earnest. He just stared dispassionately and took notes. His assistant, a diminutive Ygnaza of light blue hue, brought forth a small glass tube. Uth-sk took the glassware and attached it to one of the hovering mechanical arms. The arm sank a plunger in it and spun it around, affixing it into a syringe. The needle point moved towards me and sank into my pectoral with neither finesse nor empathy. The plunger pulled back, extracting an ampule of blood from somewhere in my chest. The needle withdrew and the robotic arm offered up the ampule to Uth-sk. The surgeon detached it and handed it off to his assistant.
"You were thrashing a bit," Uth-sk said. "I will have to restrain you more." As he ambled over to a supply closet in the back of the room, I took a better look around the space I was in. It was a laboratory of some sort, medical or xenobiological I guess. The multiple layers of workbenches and testing equipment spoke to an alien ergonomics and mental order. But it still contained a raft of medical implements and testing equipment. The functions of some of it was obvious. Other parts, less so. Most of it looked to be stainless steel and the bone-polymer my cell had been made from. As Uth-sk approached with yellow bars, I started to wish I was still in my cell.
With the touch of some kind of wand-shaped implement, he was able to bend the bars to shape. When it separated, they became rigid again. They clamped to the platform I was on as readily as the restraints built into my singlet. The two shorter bars went over my shoulder joints. The longer one pinned both my hips below the waist. "That should do for now," Uth-sk said, "By the time I need to move them, you won't be thrashing so much."
"Why are you doing it this way?" I asked. "You know we're sentient, you already have the baseline information you'd get from me."
"You're only human. Your imperfect science will have collected all of the wrong information. Besides, medical data is very slow to translate. This will be much faster, and more accurate." Uth-sk stood by a control panel and fiddled with something. Most of the smaller arms on the contraption overhead folded in close to the light as a larger arm swung out from above it. This arm held a scanner bar. Positioning itself at the proper distance from the platform it ran down my body, a soft blue light marking where it passed. Then it climbed back up at a slower rate. It made two more passes, each time moving slower, to pick up a tighter resolution probably.
As the arm folded back in its original position, Uth-sk pulled up a miniature hologram of me. Ygnaza holograms were better than ours. While clearly just as insubstantial, they were not translucent, and had neither flicker nor scan lines. With a few gestures, Uth-sk pulled away layers to look at the internal structure. It was disconcerting to look at a skinless duplicate, then watch as the musculature peeled away to reveal the internal organs. What was even worse was Uth-sk's stated intent to enact that scenario for real. He made notes on the hologram, plotting paths, and generally ignoring the actual me. From the way his lines avoided vital organs, I guessed he was planning the biopsies.
I tested the restraints again, trying to force any of them free. "That's quite useless," Uth-sk said, "Unless you can lift..." he trailed off. "I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with human units of measure."
"That's okay, I'll forgive you if you just hand me that little wand thing." Uth-sk gave a warble of the sort I'd established to be an Ygnaza laugh.
"And they say human humor is incomprehensible."
"I'm glad you're amused, but I don't really see the point in carving me up when you have scanners like that."
"Of course you don't," Uth-sk said.
"Then explain it to me." Uth-sk didn't try, he simply moved to a differ
ent supply cabinet and extracted a collection of probes. He switched out several attachments on the overhead contraption for these, and went back to the cabinet. He returned with a hand tool whose head had a function I could only guess at.
"Shall we begin?" Uth-sk asked.
"Let's not," I said. Uth-sk applied the tool to my right shoulder and drew it across to the left. It split the material of the singlet quite cleanly. He drew another line across my waist, then connected the two up the center. The surgeon folded back the material and pinned it to the platform with small yellow ringlets. Once my torso was exposed, he sprayed it down with a chemical wash whose foul stench made me choke. As the wash drained and evaporated, Uth-sk leveled out the platform.
"This step is going to hurt," Uth-sk said. "But not as bad as later on." He drew down one of the probes, checked his notes and drove it into my side. I couldn't help but scream as it bored its way into my innards and began worming around. "Try to move less, that only makes it worse."
I lost track of how many times Uth-sk plunged a laparoscopic probe into my body to take tissue samples. I couldn't even begin to say where he'd taken half the samples from. He simply put them in neatly-categorized storage cubes, ignoring my cries of pain and failing to close the holes he made with each probing. Copious amounts of blood were already running off the platform and onto the floor, and I had no way of knowing how badly I was bleeding inside. At some point, I'd passed out from the pain, but Uth-sk shook me awake.
"It's rather rude to fall asleep while the surgeon is working," he said. I stared at him in disbelief. "How am I supposed to gauge your vital responses if you're unconscious?" I made a remark that would normally be unlike me, but the agony was overcoming my inhibitions.
"What a disturbing proposition," Uth-sk said. "We're biologically incompatible, and both male." The surgeon went back to his workstation and checked his notes. Before I could tell what he was going to do, I passed out again.
"This is an inappropriate reaction!" Uth-sk said, holding my eyelids open and waving a scalpel in front of my face. "You are supposed to remain conscious for the procedure." I tried to say something, but all I could focus on was the pain. The sounds came out as mere blubbering. "We're going to have to do something about this," Uth-sk said as the darkness overtook me again.
I jolted awake to the sight of Uth-sk standing on the platform, his hooves squishing in congealed blood. His larger hands held my head still while his smaller hands worked a probe buried deep in my forehead. "If you move," Uth-sk said, "You will lobotomize yourself." Uth-sk stared intently into a display off to the side as his gracile, nimble fingers worked the controls of the probe. There was an insane pressure in my sinuses, and my brain was on fire. There were no pain receptors among the neurons, but the increased pressure against the membrane more than made up for it. Though his powerful hands clutched my skull in a death-grip, that grip was the only thing keeping my panic from getting me killed.
The chorus in my head that I used to represent pieces of myself gained a new member. Unlike the others who I envisioned as copies of myself, this one was a little Uth-sk. It ran around prodding the other pieces of me whenever they tried to rest. I already hated it. The real Uth-sk extracted the probe with a sucking sound that did not bode well for coming from my brain cavity. It dripped cerebral fluid on my face as he actually went to the trouble of plugging the hole he'd put in my skull. From the feel of it, he'd drilled right into the proverbial third eye. Setting the brain probe aside, Uth-sk hopped down from the platform. "There," he said, "Now you won't lose consciousness and I can complete my work."
I groaned. The blood was no longer freely flowing, but the platform looked and smelled like a charnel house. Or I could be smelling the clots in my nose, I wasn't sure. What I was sure of was that despite the pain and lethargy, I was fully conscious. The little Uth-sk running around my head wouldn't let me accept the gentle caresses of darkness that beckoned me. Uth-sk's assistant warbled something, kicking off a conversation I couldn't hope to follow.
"You lied to me," Uth-sk said.
"I haven't lied about anything," I said. "We've barely spoken."
"You said you didn't have powers."
"I don't."
"You have all the markers!" Uth-sk held forth a readout which meant nothing to my eyes. "You should be manifesting something spectacular!"
"I have no powers," I said.
"I have been studying this subject since we arrived in this pustule of a backwater," Uth-sk said, "These markers only appear in powered individuals, and you have all of them. What are you hiding from me? Are you some sort of horsian gambit to attack us from inside?"
"You mean a Trojan Horse? Why send someone without powers?" Uth-sk waved the readout emphatically at me. "I have no damn clue what that says!" I said.
"It says you are lying. I will not have my research subverted by untruths!"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Fine, we'll move on." Uth-sk picked up a scalpel and another implement from a tray nearby. His larger hands took hold of my head again. "It's time for an examination of the primitive human eye." His thumbs on this larger hands held open my right eyelid as the prongs of the other implement reached into the socket and clutched my eyeball. Staring at the apex of the claws, I screamed at the sight in my periphery of the scalpel moving in to sever the ocular muscles. I got dizzy as the view of the room shifted dramatically in my right eye and my left got an unwelcome view of the trailing optic nerve. Uth-sk traded the scalpel for a tiny probe as he began disassembling my eye.
Being blinded was the most merciful side effect of his ministrations. I was able to close my left eye and was no longer forced to witness the butchery of my right. I whimpered piteously as Uth-sk worked over the poor semi-gelatinous orb. He walked away, leaving a single wet strand laying across my cheek. I didn't want to know what it was. Uth-sk warbled to his assistant. After a moment, I chanced a look towards the surgeon. He stood at a workstation halfway to the far wall, doing a detailed analysis of the recently extracted tissues. There had to be something I could do, some means of escape. I couldn't be helpless before his brutal ministrations.
My right hand was the only part of me close to anything. The tray of implements sat just past my fingertips. I had no idea what I'd do once I had a hold of something, but it was taking action. Pushing against the shoulder bar and the ring restraint about my wrist, I wormed my arm towards the tray. My fingers shed flakes of dried blood and still-wet clots as I fumbled for the edge of the tray. Brushing it with my fingertips, I strained to stretch those last few millimeters. Getting the pads of my fingers atop the rim, I nudged it towards me.
The tray shifted, giving me a better grip on its edge. I fumbled about on it for something I could use. The only tool I could get my hands on meant nothing to me. I had no idea what the device was for, but it had a superficial resemblance to the probes Uth-sk had been using. It probably was just another type. With a press of a button, the tip started up. I turned it around and prodded the restraint. Nothing happened. Working it past the restraint, I plied it against the material of the singlet. It started cutting, or rather, shredding. Working the bit along the edge of the restraint, I severed the sleeve from the ring. Laying the probe on the blood-slick platform, I squeezed my hand into as tight a shape as I could make it, and pulled into the restraint.
I tried not to cry out as the pressure cracked the first metacarpal. One broken bone was a small price to pay as my hand slipped through the ring. If only it hadn't been part of my thumb. My arm was free to move, but manipulating anything was agony. One thing that was now in reach was the wand-like device Uth-sk had used to control the restraint bars. I bit down on my lip as I fumbled to lift it off the workbench. The labels on the alien controls meant nothing to me, but its tip still released the shoulder bar. For a second, I was terrified that it did nothing for my collar, bu
t that too released from the table. Once I freed my left hand, I swapped it over, the agony subsiding as my right hand went limp. When I dropped from the platform, Uth-sk looked up from his work.
"How--?" Uth-sk started. I stabbed him in the eye with the wand, drawing a gout of pus-yellow ichor. The surgeon stumbled back, clutching the wound, his blood mingling with mine on his orange gloves. As he drew in air to speak, I kicked him in the vocal sac. It burst with a glug. Uth-sk stumbled backwards over his assistant, crashing to the floor. A stomp left them groaning in agony. The rage in me wanted to keep beating him, to slash at him with scalpels until there was nothing left but a pus-yellow paste. The analytical piece of me chimed in and said that wasting time on petty revenge would delay my escape. I left the surgeon wailing on the floor and picked up what had to be a bone saw.
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 30
