Page 6 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded (Rogue Bonds #2)

Zeke

One Year Earlier…

I clung to the side of the pilot’s chair as I peered at the console of the exploration frigate. On the screen – cracked now, and streaked with blood – the Ixralian wormhole loomed large in front of us. “The board is green,” I recited, though I was sure no one was listening. But that was protocol; before jumping through a wormhole, make damn sure nothing was coming the other way.

“Into the ripple in five… four… three… Oh fuck…” I lurched sideways, not from the jarring pull of the wormhole, but from the fact that my right leg had just given out beneath me. Maybe I should have been sitting in the chair. But I’d tried that, and the intense stinging in my right thigh had got me back on my feet in a hurry. As it was, I wasn’t sure if the venom was going to kill me or not, but I was currently maintaining enough presence of mind to try and get my three surviving crewmates back into Alliance space while they were still alive.

A moment later, the wormhole sucked us in, and I was thrown across the ship’s cabin. I hit the wall, then simply rode out the waves of pain and nausea until the ride evened out.

“Captain?” a thready voice called. “Captain? Zeke! Don’t you fucking die on me.”

That was Ru. Lieutenant Ru Dolve. Bravest woman I’d ever met in my life.

“Zeke!”

I forced myself to roll over, though the siren call of unconsciousness was beckoning. I wanted to answer it. Anything to escape from this nightmare of a reality. But I had to get the others back home. I couldn’t abandon them to this hell.

“Alive,” I croaked, managing to get my knees under me and push myself off the floor a little way. “Matchi?”

“Unconscious,” Ru reported. “But the bleeding’s under control. He should make it to the station if we don’t have any delays.” A delay, in this case, would be one of two things; our damaged ship giving out before we could make contact with the Delaville Space Station, or one of those things following us through the wormhole. That thought alone was enough to get me onto my feet, and I staggered back towards the console. No way in hell was I going to stick around to see if we’d been followed.

“What about Gasrin?” I asked, as I struggled to focus well enough to plot a course for Delaville. Last I’d seen, he’d been relatively unharmed, though looking a little green. I meant that literally, and given that as a Wasop, his skin was naturally a bright yellow colour, that had been cause for concern. It could have just been fatigue, or fear, or it could have meant something far more serious.

“I… uh… We’ve got a problem,” Gasrin’s tremulous voice answered me. I glanced back at him and found him staring down at his own leg. It didn’t seem to be bleeding, though there was a tear in the fabric of his pants over his left thigh. But given where we’d just been, the absence of an obvious wound didn’t mean much.

“Let me get us pointed in the right direction, then I’ll give you a hand,” I told him. I forced myself to work slowly, to press each button on the controls carefully and deliberately. Given how much my hands were shaking, trying to rush through it would just enter the coordinates wrong, and I’d have to start again. So in this case, going slowly was actually the quickest way to get us out of here.

Once that was done, I glanced at the screens that showed the view from the rear of the ship, relieved to see that both displays were empty. If our luck held, then we hadn’t been followed.

With the autopilot engaged, I made my careful way across the room towards Gasrin. It was getting harder to walk, with the sting in my leg and the burning sensation in my side. But like hell was I going to give up. “What’s the situation?” I asked him, as I slumped against the wall next to his chair.

Eyes wide with fear, he pulled the flaps of fabric aside, revealing a wide section of his leg, yellow skin with black stripes. That part, at least, was normal for a Wasop. But as I leaned closer, I saw the cause for his concern. A row of raised ridges sat under the skin, each lump about half the size of my thumb.

“Oh, fuck,” I blurted out, before I could think better of it. I probably shouldn’t scare him any more than he already was. “How long have they been there?”

“I think it was just before we crossed the bridge,” he replied. “I got caught by one of the vines. But I couldn’t say for sure.”

I didn’t bother asking any more questions. Our hellish escape from Ixralia had involved more than one battle, and in this case, the end result was the same.

“Lie down on the floor,” I told Gasrin. “I’m going to cut them out. Hold him down,” I instructed Ru.

She looked affronted for a moment and held up the bloody, bandage-wrapped stump where her left hand used to be. “How the fuck do you-?”

“Sit on him,” I ordered, tugging her toward Gasrin’s chest. He made no protest to the plan. He’d seen the result of this exact situation in half a dozen of his crewmates, and the brutality that I was about to inflict upon him was by far the lesser of two evils.

Ru sprawled herself across Gasrin’s torso as best she could, her purple skin pale and blotchy, and shimmering with sweat, while I pulled my knife out of its sheath and gave it a cursory wipe. But honestly, infection was going to be the least of Gasrin’s problems for a while.

Without waiting for Gasrin to brace himself, without giving myself the chance to second-guess my decision, I cut a long line down his leg, adjacent to the oval lumps. Gasrin screamed and thrashed, and I straddled his legs, holding them as still as possible.

I had a space wrench in my pocket – a far more advanced version of a nifty little tool I’d once seen in a museum. That one had been called a ‘Swiss Army Knife’, and I’d marvelled at how imaginative it must have been for someone to envision the first one. Now, hundreds of years later, the tool contained as many electronic devices as manual ones, and I briefly wondered whether it was ironic that I was going to attempt to save the life of my crewmate with two of the simplest tools I possessed; the knife I’d already used, and the plier attachment on the space wrench.

Once more avoiding giving myself time to think about what I was doing, I jammed the pliers into the wound I’d created, twisting them this way and that until I managed to grab onto one of the small lumps. I pulled it out and dropped it on the floor, stomping on the thing with a heavy boot.

The unassuming little packages were eggs, laid into living hosts by some grotesque, spider-like creature. After about half an hour, they hatched, then the larvae began eating the host from the inside out. According to my best estimates, these had been implanted into Gasrin’s leg about that long ago.

I extracted the second one the same way, and then the third, each of them pulverised against the floor of the cabin. Had there been a fourth? I felt along the side of the wound, determined to get them all. Gasrin was wailing now, and I could scarcely imagine the pain I must be causing him, deliberately aggravating a wound like I was. But if I left even a single egg behind, he would die a much more painful death as the larva fed on his flesh.

I couldn’t find the fourth one, but I was fairly certain I’d seen four lumps the first time around, not three… And yes, there it was! I jammed the pliers back in, grabbing onto the lump and pulling it out… just in time to see a worm-like head with serrated teeth start poking out the end of it.

With a curse, I hurled it to the floor and smashed it under my boot. I had another cursory feel of his leg, but I was pretty sure I’d got them all now.

“Don’t move. I’ll bandage your leg,” I said to Gasrin… right at the same time as a proximity alarm began to blare from the front console.

“Jesus Christ, what now?” I staggered back to the console, leaving Ru to deal with a bleeding and whimpering Gasrin. I punched the warning alert, squinting as data began scrolling across the screen. It was a cargo vessel, not the sort of thing that would normally cause a problem, but the readout confirmed that it was equipped with laser cannons, and more to the point, it was on an intercept trajectory with our ship. I switched to visuals and let out a string of curses as I recognised the insignia emblazoned on the side of the ship.

“Eumadians,” I barked at Ru. “Just what we fucking need.” As a general rule, the Eumadians weren’t murderers. They were just thieves. Their favourite tactic was to disable a ship’s engines, bust open their cargo hold with their lasers, collect the stray cargo in a big net, and then carry on their merry way while the victim scrambled to repair their ship, or at the very least, launch a distress beacon.

With Matchi slowly bleeding out on the floor, and myself, as the only qualified pilot, very likely to pass out in the near future from an unknown venom, that was a situation we absolutely could not afford to get caught up in.

“Firing on the Eumadian vessel,” I announced, activating our own cannons. Only two of the four were still working, and if it came down to a proper fire fight, we would certainly lose. But I wasn’t going to give the Eumadians the chance. In any other circumstances, I might have fired a warning shot at them. The Alliance built good ships, and at full strength, we would have been more than a match for a cargo ship.

But not today. I lined up the shot, making absolutely no move to change our course or to give away the slightest hint of our intentions. And then I fired directly at the engine casing. The laser cut through the plasma tank, and then the oxygen tank beside it. The two fluids burst out of their containers, vaporised in the vacuum of space, and then a second shot from the laser canon ignited the mixture, causing the entire port side of the ship to explode. It split open in a long line, almost in slow motion, it seemed, and I watched as bodies, bits of metal, and cargo crates spilled out of the gap.

In strictly legal terms, I had just committed an act of terrorism against the Eumadians. But given their reputation for sabotage and theft, I told myself they deserved it. Just this once, they could get a taste of their own medicine.

A low grunt beside me got my attention, and I turned to see Ru standing there, peering down at the screen. “Reckon they had any medical supplies on board?” she asked, her face so pale that her purple skin was almost blue.

“I’ll send out the net,” I told her, with no particular enthusiasm. God only knew what the Eumadians had been transporting, but it would only take us about ten minutes to deploy the net and drag in whatever it could catch. And if there were medical supplies, that could significantly increase our chances of surviving long enough to get to Delaville. I paused the autopilot and deployed the net, watching via the rear screen as the wide mesh magnetically captured anything it touched.

“What about Gasrin?” I asked, checking over my shoulder. I’d thought Ru was going to bandage his leg for him.

She had done, in a sense. Gasrin’s shirt was now wrapped around his leg and secured with his belt. “We’re out of bandages,” she said simply, gesturing to where Matchi was lying on the floor, a wide swath of the things wrapped around his middle, and another one around his head. He was a Denzogal, and his eight-foot frame had suffered far more damage than the rest of us. He looked like a ragged mess, with clumps of his thick fur having been ripped away in places.

I glanced back at Gasrin’s makeshift bandage and shrugged. I didn’t have the energy to be either surprised or worried about the lack of appropriate medical supplies. Though I was just about lucid enough to realise that my own lack of concern was problematic.

By the time I activated the reels to haul the net back in again, it had caught six small crates, and one much larger one. Once the cargo bay doors had closed, I reactivated the autopilot. “You okay here for a minute?” I asked Gasrin. “Ru and I are going to go see what we’ve landed.”

“I’m fine,” he said, pale but determined. “Anything’s better than being eaten alive by worms.”

I nodded, then limped out the door and down the hall. My right leg was nearly numb now, and I was starting to feel lightheaded.

Inside the cargo bay, the magnets on the net had deactivated themselves, dumping the cargo haphazardly on the floor. One of the crates had the galactic symbol for ‘medical aid’ stamped on the side, so I wasted no time in deactivating the pressure seals and opening it. “Oh, hallelujah,” I muttered, as I pulled out vials of local anaesthetic, antiseptic ointment, bandages and a variety of other wound dressings. I shoved an armful of the supplies at Ru, who caught them awkwardly, wincing as her stump of an arm caught the brunt of one particular package.

“Sorry,” I apologised, more because I remembered that that was what I was supposed to do, than because I actually felt bad about hurting her. And that wasn’t right, was it? I was fairly sure my brain wasn’t working properly, but damned if I knew what it was supposed to be doing right now.

“Take that up to Gasrin,” I told her. “He’ll need some pain relief. And you, too. I’ll see if there’s anything else useful here, then come back up.”

Ru nodded. If she noticed anything odd about my behaviour, she didn’t say so. Instead, she headed for the door, while I poked around at the other crates. One was food. Two were farm equipment of some sort. I didn’t bother opening them, once my comm had read the shipping manifest printed on the side. Another one was more medical equipment, though the crate was lying on its side, and I didn’t have the strength to stand it up. Instead, I just popped the lid where it was, and a small avalanche of packets spilled out onto the floor. More local anaesthetic. Adrenaline. Antibiotics. Enough to keep us alive until we got to Delaville.

I was all set to return to the pilot’s cabin, but the larger crate caught my attention. It was huge, about two metres long on all sides, lying on its side. There was a control panel on the front, but it looked like the explosion on the ship had cracked the screen. Tapping it repeatedly had no effect. But if the pressure seals had held, then whatever was inside was likely still intact. I tried the release handle, but it held firm. Hmm. I tapped the screen again, then, when nothing happened, I took out my knife and slammed the handle into the screen. I figured that breaking it more wouldn’t do any real harm. It must have triggered something, though, because there was a pop and a hiss, signalling the release of the seals.

In a crate this size, it was likely to be some kind of machinery. A ship engine? A mechanical drill for terraforming? Not likely anything that would be useful to us now, but curiosity was getting the better of me, while at the same time, I had a lingering awareness that I really should be getting back to the cabin. I grasped the handle, feeling it start to turn, but the exertion pulled at the wound in my side. I let out a cry and dropped to my knees, aware that something new was hurting, but not able to focus enough to work out what it was.

And now the handle was out of my reach. Brilliant. “Oh, just fucking open, would you?” I muttered, trying to summon the energy to stand up again. My vision was going blurry at the edges, and I had the ludicrous thought that I would be so disappointed if I died before finding out what was inside the crate.

In the next moment, I decided that I had, in fact, lost my mind, because as I stared at the handle halfway up the crate, it started to turn by itself. I slid backwards, not sure whether I should be scared or pleased. Maybe I was just hallucinating. Or maybe one of those things from Ixralia was inside, about to slither out and kill us. Or maybe…

The lower half of the wall of the crate fell open with a loud clang, and a… Fuck me sideways, a blue man crawled out of the crate, looking around warily. His gaze landed on me, and an expression a lot like joy lit his face. He spoke a word, and the translator embedded behind my right ear whirred for a moment as it sorted through the myriad of languages available to it, before it finally beeped softly and spat out the word, “Master.”

The word meant nothing to me. All I could think was that I was glad he wasn’t one of those hellspawn from Ixralia.

But then the man’s happiness vanished, as he stood up straight and got a better look at the state of me. “You’re injured,” he said, taking a tentative step forward. “I can help you-”

“No,” I stopped him, holding up a hand. “There’s… we need…” Fuck, could my brain just work for one bleeding moment? Words should not be this difficult to find. “There are medical supplies there,” I said, gesturing in the general direction of the crate. “My crewmates are in the cabin. We need to go back there. They need help.”

The man glanced around, then dashed back over to the large crate, climbing inside. He returned a moment later with a small backpack. He dumped out the contents onto the floor – a couple of items of clothing, a water flask and a few packets of food – and proceeded to fill the bag with the medication. Job done, he stood up and looked at me hesitantly.

“Do you need help?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m… Oh fuck.” The room tilted sideways, and I found myself plastered to the floor again. “Okay, shit, yeah, I probably do.”

He was at my side in an instant, gently lifting me, supporting my weight by getting his shoulder under my arm. “Which way?” he asked, once I was more or less upright. My vision was jumping, the room seeming to do a slow spin northwards.

“That way,” I said, pointing towards what I hoped was the right door. The only other door out of this room was through the airlock, and I hoped the man would have enough sense not to dump us both into space.

We stumbled up the hallway and I managed to pick the right door into the pilot’s cabin. Ru startled when she looked up and saw the man with me. “He was in the crate,” I said dumbly. “He’s got medicine.”

I honestly couldn’t have said much about what happened over the next few minutes. The man set me on the floor, propped up against one wall, and went about helping Ru treat the others’ wounds. Matchi came to at one point and muttered something about a Vangravian slave. But that was about all the details I could process. The stinging pain in my right thigh was migrating north, and the burning in my left side was dripping south, and a headache was blossoming in the back of my head. I heard a muttered conversation, but nothing in it made much sense to me, until I felt a hand on my arm, and managed to prise my eyes open. The blue man was crouched in front of me, with a syringe in his hand.

“It’s a broad spectrum anti-venom,” he said. “Ru said she thinks you got stung by something.”

“Fucking alien shit,” I muttered, my words slurring badly. “This stuff won’t work.”

I felt the man moving my arm about, then a strong pressure near my elbow, followed by a sharp prick. But I was too out of it to protest. I was going to die soon, and someone would have to figure out how to dock the ship at the space station.

In the next moment, my heart rate suddenly doubled, my eyes snapped open, and a wave of mental clarity hit me like a freight train. “Jesus Christ,” I yelped, snatching my arm away from the man, who was currently injecting a second vial of something into my vein. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Injecting you with anti-venom and adrenaline,” he said calmly. “Ru was concerned you were going to die.”

A thin trail of blood trickled from the injection site, where I’d so rudely caused him to rip the needle out of me. “Where are we?” I asked urgently.

“On the AEV Defender, en route to Delaville,” Ru informed me, no doubt attempting to be helpful.

“No, you dimwit,” I muttered, lurching to my feet. “I mean how close to Delaville are we?” I headed for the console, needing to figure out how much time had passed while I’d been off with the fairies. The blue man shadowed me, catching my elbow when I stumbled. Either the adrenaline or the anti-venom – or more likely, both – had had a fine effect at getting my brain to function, but my right leg was still out of action.

“Shit, we’re… two hours out,” I said, after checking a few of the screens. “Could be worse, I suppose.”

“Master, you’re bleeding,” the blue man said, eyeing me with concern.

“It’s just a scratch,” I dismissed him, brushing at the blood on my arm irritably. “Ru, did you get some of that anaesthetic into you? How’s the arm?”

“No, Master, you’re bleeding,” the blue man insisted. I would have ignored him, except that at that point, Ru let out a string of curses.

“Holy fuck, he’s right.” She grabbed up a handful of bandages and gauze from the pile on the floor, cradling them in her injured arm, and dashed over to us. I followed her gaze down to my mid torso, and realised that the trickling sensation I’d been feeling from the wound on my abdomen was not, in fact, just the pain spreading. It was blood. A wide, dark stain had spread from my waist to mid-thigh.

Ru grabbed my shirt and yanked it upwards. “Mother-fucking son of a bitch, not you as well.”

No, Matchi hadn’t been the only one to have been opened up to have his organs harvested. The aliens had closed the wound with a few clumsy stitches – enough to stop the rest of my organs from spilling out, but in a way that would presumably provide easy access again later, when they wanted to go back in.

“We need to stop the bleeding or you’ll never make it to the station.”

“I’m fine,” I said, pushing her away. I didn’t want to think about it. And admitting that there was a wound there would mean admitting that they’d…

“Dressing the wound is the wiser course of action, Master,” the blue man said, taking a step forward and reaching out a hand. He had a thick dressing in his hand, but as he closed in, I shoved him back.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I snarled at him. I could already feel waves of panic climbing me, as I desperately tried to block out the sensation of hands – or tentacles, maybe? – reaching into my body and removing the parts they wanted. Yeah, maybe I would bleed all over the floor if I didn’t wrap the wound, but if that meant I didn’t have to think about what they’d done, then I was fine with that.

“You need the wound dressed,” Ru insisted, stepping forward again, though I evaded her hands. “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

“I’m fine.”

“None of us are fine. And we’re going to be a whole lot worse if we don’t have you to dock the fucking ship for us!”

I stared at her, breathing fast, knowing that she was absolutely right. Their lives were depending on me. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier. Ru darted forward again, snagging my shirt and ripping a hole in it when I pulled away. She tried to press a gauze pad onto the wound, but with only one arm, she had no hope of succeeding.

“Help me!” Ru begged the blue man. But he stood stiffly, stark desperation on his face.

“Master told me not to,” he murmured, looking horrified at his own refusal.

Ru cursed again. “For fuck’s sake, Zeke, would you tell your fucking slave to help me stop you dying on us?”

“Tell my slave to…?” Okay, so maybe my brain wasn’t working quite as well as I’d thought it was. My gaze landed on the blue man again, and for the first time, the pieces of his sudden arrival and his manner of addressing me clicked into place. “You’re a Vangravian, aren’t you?” I asked him, as the truth dawned cold and terrible. “A dimari?”

“Yes, Master,” he said, still holding out the wound dressing in a pathetically hopeful gesture.

Fucking hell. That meant he’d bonded with me. I didn’t know much about the dimari, but I knew that they imprinted irreversibly on the first person they laid eyes on, after emerging from their crates. And that had been me, albeit a half-conscious and highly intoxicated me.

And that also meant that unless I gave him permission to touch me, he would very literally just stand there and watch me die. The dimari were compelled to obey their master’s commands, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, somewhat aggrieved that I hadn’t asked him earlier. It must have been a rude shock to come out of his crate and be thrust right into the centre of this shitshow.

“Dax,” the man said.

“Heavens preserve us, priorities here!” Ru shouted. “We can do the fucking introductions later.”

I rolled my eyes, purely to use the pretence at irritation to maintain a grip on my own sanity. “Fine. Dax, you can help Ru bandage me.”

He darted forward, presumably relieved at the instruction, and I stared at the ceiling, pretending I was waiting for them to tie my shoelaces or some shit. Once they were finished, Ru grabbed my hand and pressed it to the outside of the dressing. “Put pressure on it,” she instructed. “And sit the fuck down before you fall over again.”

I did, because my right leg was mostly numb now, so sitting on it didn’t hurt nearly as much. I idly wondered if it was going to have to be amputated when we got back, and then muttered a curse, glancing about the room for something else to think about.

“Gasrin, how’s the leg?” I asked, realising that I hadn’t checked up on him since I’d sliced his leg open.

He shuffled about on his chair at the side of the room. “Not so bad, now that it’s numb. The rest is just bruises.” It was a woeful understatement. He still didn’t have a shirt on; he now had a thick swath of bandages around his leg, but the shirt that had been holding him together in the interim was soaked in blood, wadded up in a bundle in the corner. But his yellow skin was stained purple in large patches all up and down his torso, and I shuddered to think of the beating he must have endured. But bruises and cuts would heal in time. The rest of our wounds were going to be a lot harder to resolve.

“Do you think Legge left any booze in his bunk?” I asked no one in particular. Was it bad manners to be referencing our fallen crewmate so soon after his death? Would stealing his alcohol be in poor taste?

“It might not be a good idea to consume anything if you have an abdominal wound,” Dax advised me from his seat by the wall. Now that we were all as patched up as we were going to get, everyone was making themselves as comfortable as possible. “You’ll probably need to have surgery when we arrive, and drinking anything could cause vomiting under a general anaesthetic.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “But if I don’t find a way to take the edge off, I’m going to shoot myself in the face before we get there.” That was probably also true, though I’d have to fight Ru to get the chance to do it. But we had an hour and a half wait, to sit here and do nothing but ruminate on our recent march through Hell.

“If there is any booze, I wouldn’t say no to it,” Ru muttered.

I craned my neck, deciding to make use of the fact that Dax was compelled to obey me. “Dax, go down the hall, second door on the right, and look underneath the mattress on the top bunk on the left. Bring back any sort of bottle you find there.”

Dax frowned at me, but he rose obediently to his feet. “Yes, Master,” he said, with clear censure in his voice. Well, wasn’t he a little spitfire? I got the feeling he wasn’t going to let me get away with much without letting me know his opinion about it. He returned a minute later with a half-empty bottle of vodka in hand. I took it from him and took a long swig, then passed it over to Ru. She took a swallow, coughed, cleared her throat, and then took another gulp from the bottle. Then Gasrin held out his hand, and she passed the bottle over to him.

Half an hour later, Ru dared to break the heavy silence that had fallen. “What did they take from you?” she asked, waving vaguely towards my bandaged torso.

The fact that I was willing to answer her was testament to the alcohol having taken effect. “As far as I know, it was just a kidney and a lobe of my liver.” The creatures, whatever they were, apparently liked their food fresh, so they’d carefully cauterised the wounds from the removed organs, leaving the victim alive to be harvested from again at their convenience. I’d found out later, once we’d reached an Alliance hospital, that my assessment had been correct. Livers, I had been shocked to discover, could grow back if a part of one was removed, and mine had done exactly that in the weeks that followed. The kidney I had simply learned to live without.

???

Back in the present, Aiden was watching me silently as I completed the tale. Dax had waited for me at the hospital for three weeks, until my leg had recovered enough for me to be able to walk, and then he’d come home with me, to begin our slow and mutual slide into depression and despair. A year on, I didn’t really feel any different from the way I had the day I’d left the hospital. The whole of reality had been turned upside down, and I had no idea how I was supposed to pretend to care about the mundanities of everyday life after I’d been forced to watch demons torture and devour my crew.

But none of that was Dax’s fault, and the one thing I could actually care about was making sure I didn’t keep inadvertently torturing him. “So what’s in this magical handbook on how to care for a dimari?” I asked Aiden. He hadn’t run away screaming yet, so I figured we were still on for solving the rest of this problem.

Aiden glanced around, then drained the last of his coffee – most likely cold by now, but he wasn’t complaining. “Here is not the place to talk about it. Some of the things I need to tell you are fairly controversial, so I’d rather we weren’t overheard.” He glanced over to Dax, who now had a mostly empty plate. “Now that you’re both fed and watered, let’s go home and I can explain what we’re going to do from here on in.”