Page 53 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

Behind us, I could hear muttering and stomping, and when we were about halfway across the field, I dared a glance back over my shoulder. To my surprise, Goroz and his people were obeying my orders, getting to work carrying the rest of the stretchers in our direction.

When we finally reached the edge of the field, we set the woman down. She was stiff and breathing fast, clutching a sizable wound on her arm. “We’ll have ambulances here soon,” I assured her. “You’re safe now. We’re going to take good care of you.”

Dax and I headed back over to the ship, moving at a jog. My limp was more noticeable this way, but I could see more Halagal patients being brought out of the ship, and I didn’t have time to dilly-dally about with trying to preserve my pride. And if theRanzors didn’t like the fact that I was injured, they were just going to have to deal with it.

As we arrived back at the ship, Goroz watched me walk with a quizzical tilt to his head. “How many more are there?” I asked him, ignoring his scrutiny.

“Another fifteen in the ship. And four more ships enroute.”

“Fifteen!” I glanced across the field, where nine stretchers were already laid out. “You can’t bring four more ships here. We don’t have the facilities to treat that many people. There are other camps across the city. They’ll have to find somewhere else to land.”

“You are limping,” Goroz said, apparently ignoring what I’d just told him.

“Yeah, and I have work to do,” I replied, bending down to pick up the next stretcher, while Dax hurried around to the other end. But just before we picked it up, I realised that this one contained a child. “Oh fuck,” I muttered. The Halagal child was clutching a toy of some sort, though I couldn’t quite make out what it was, and he had an expression on his face of frozen panic, like he was so terrified he couldn’t even move anymore.

“Hey, sweetie, you’re going to be okay,” I told him, crouching down beside him. “Is your mum here with you? Or your dad?”

The boy shook his head, a tiny gesture, then buried his face in his toy.

“Do you know where his parents are?” I asked Goroz.

Goroz was still standing there watching me. “We were not able to locate them before we were forced to leave. Large parts of their city are being bombed. In the end, we chose to save the people we could, even if they were unfortunately separated from their families in the process.”

I was a little surprised by the reply – not because of the Ranzors’ actions, but because of the sentiment behind it. That they’d chosen the pragmatic path of saving lives was notunexpected. But Goroz apparently understood the emotional toll this was going to cause. And that was not something I had expected from the harsh and war-like species.

“We gave him the toy droag to try to comfort him,” Goroz added, sounding thoroughly awkward about it as he gestured to the battered yellow toy.

TheRanzorshad given him that? A species that expected their own offspring to begin picking up weapons at the age of five? “Okay, well… Thank you,” I said, not quite knowing what to make of that. Goroz was not behaving like any of the Ranzors I’d met before. And he seemed almost diffident when addressing me. That was odd. But I had bigger problems to deal with right now, so I put the issue out of my head and got on with the job in front of me.

Fifteen minutes later, we had all the patients lined up at the edge of the field, and the first of the ambulances had arrived. I spent a few minutes briefing the paramedics on the situation, but all through the conversation, I was aware of Goroz, standing off to the side, watching me intently. Finally, I figured I’d done as much as I usefully could, so I stepped back, letting Soll and Nichols organise the rest of the patients as the ambulances began to ferry them away.

“Is something bothering you?” I asked Goroz, standing up straight and looking him in the eye. The Ranzors had a blunt and direct way of speaking, and I made a conscious choice to match their mannerisms. From what I’d seen in the past, any attempt to fawn or placate them only made them angrier.

Goroz glanced down at my leg. “You have been limping all morning,” he stated.

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “What of it?” I asked, not sure whether I was going to regret this.

“Are you… retired?” he asked, still seeming hesitant about the conversation.

“Semi-retired,” I said. “I can’t fly ships anymore, but I can still organise our rescue efforts on the ground.” And why the fuck is it any of your business? I wanted to ask. But there was a fine line between being direct with the Ranzors, and pissing them off, and I wanted to stay firmly on the right side of that line. Honestly, staring up into Goroz’s yellow eyes, I’d expected to be feeling more fear. I’d faced monsters in the past, and if only half the rumours were true, the Ranzors loved to pick a fight.

But oddly enough, I felt only a mild apprehension. Unlike the other monsters I’d faced, the Ranzors could be reasoned with. They understood pain, and were cognizant of the fact that their actions had consequences. There hadn’t been any evidence at all that that was the case in Ixralia.

I expected Goroz to say something mocking or dismissive about my admission that I couldn’t be a pilot anymore. Ranzors were not known for tolerating weakness. But instead, he did the most unexpected thing. He swung his large tail towards me, slowly and deliberately, so as to make it clear that the gesture wasn’t a threat. And a quick glance revealed what he was trying to show me. A large chunk had been taken out of the side of his tail, the wound old enough to have long ago scarred over. And whatever had caused the injury had also taken with it the row of barbs along the side of his tail. On closer inspection, there was also what appeared to be a large burn mark on the back of his right leg.

“I cannot fight anymore either,” he said, with a sigh. He looked over at the rest of his crew, helping to load the injured patients into the ambulances. “We are all in the same situation. Borl has only one eye. Gatik lost his foot.” My eyes opened wider as I realised that it was true; the Ranzor in question was walking around on a prosthetic boot that filled in the gap where his foot should have been. I’d been so absorbed with sorting out the injured Halagals that I hadn’t even noticed. “It is good to see thatthe humans are still able to make use of their injured fighters. We had worried that you just went home to sit in a comfortable seat for the rest of your lives.”

There were a multitude of answers to that statement, half a dozen of them sitting right on the tip of my tongue, and more than one of them likely to smash what little good will we had going on here into dust. The pure arrogance of the assumption was galling. Plus the insinuation that anyone who couldn’t fight was useless. Just because someone couldn’t go into battle didn’t mean their brain stopped working, and in many cases, that was more valuable than their ability to point a gun in the right direction and pull the trigger. And finally, there was the ironic fact that until about a week ago, I had, in fact, been ‘sitting in a comfortable seat’ for most of my time. Goroz had just happened to come upon me when I was doing something useful. If this war had started two weeks earlier, he would have made an entirely different judgement about me.

“I guess you’ve learned something new today, then,” I said. It was as polite as I was able to get, gritting my teeth to keep what I really wanted to say locked inside.

“How were you injured?” Goroz asked next.

Oh god, here it was. We were about to have a pissing contest about who had been in the biggest, baddest fight. And given everything else I was having to deal with at the moment, I just wasn’t in the mood.

“I fought space-demons in the Voxel Sector by jumping through the Ixralian wormhole,” I said flatly. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it.” The wormhole sat just outside Alliance space, on the far side of the local sector. Any species that didn’t have a reason to travel through that part of the galaxy likely didn’t know it existed. “What about you?” I officially didn’t give a shit where he’d got his injury, but if part of his day needed to include boasting about it to an ‘inferior’ species, then I was willing to lethim get his rocks off. So long as it didn’t take up too much of my time.

But instead of replying, Goroz looked absolutely shocked. His shoulders seemed to puff up, his tail lifted, and his mouth opened slightly, displaying the rows of sharp teeth inside. “You have travelled to Ixralia?” he said, in a hushed voice.