Page 1 of Sway’s Peace (Delivery Service #2)

Sway

The gurgled, dampened screams of a male in agony turned slowly into the gurgled, agonal breathing of a male sliding into a slow death.

Harsh and wet, it was a very distinctive sound.

Like the sickly color of death that stained a body before they actually died.

Or the glassy look in their eyes – if they still had their eyes.

Sway was as numb to it all as he was to the sharp scent of blood. It blended into the grease and metal and grime, his nose completely blind to it.

The male under his hands shuddered. He screamed into the dirty cloth gag tied over his mouth.

The desperate look on his face wasn’t one of hope.

It was the primal instinct of any being struggling beyond logic to protect their own life, even knowing the futility of trying.

Desperate. Deranged. Beset by pain the living couldn’t imagine but pushed beyond feeling it.

It was such a common sight, Sway didn’t even pay attention to it anymore. He was focused only on his task. Wanting to finish so he could go rest. It was late and he was tired, his shoulders tense and sore after a long day spent in the lab hunched over the subject.

Sway’s hands were steady and calm, his feathers stained with the dark gray blood of the vir male that was strapped to the table.

He didn’t know his name, and he didn’t care.

The male’s wings had been severed and removed long ago, as had his tail, and his eyes.

The Master wanted to make sure that all the confounding variables could be controlled.

The wings and tail prevented him from lying flat, and the eyes, they had discovered through the experiments, would interfere.

They didn’t know why. Realistically, they shouldn’t. But when the subjects retained their eyes, it made the way subspace interacted with their bodies different. It was, as far as Sway could determine, wholly unknown knowledge.

Because no one would ever think of exposing living bodies to subspace.

It was a death sentence. And not a kind one either.

The subspace might be the foundation of all living things, but it was never meant to actually interact with real space.

The way those in the Coalition manipulated and controlled subspace was an art form in and of itself and messing up was always lethal.

The Master, however, was determined to try. The subspace helped make real space. They were connected. They could not, therefore, be inherently opposed – like matter and anti-matter were. It made no sense, he would say, for subspace to be lethal to the very thing it created.

Today’s experiment was a vicious one. The Master had opened the chest and abdominal cavity of the vir male strapped to the table carefully, so that he wouldn’t die from it.

Exposing his intestines and heart and lungs to the air would invariably be lethal, but not right away.

He’d then used their small, old subspace generator to try to build a subspace entrance right over him.

The device wasn’t one that could be used to transport them out of here. It wasn’t powerful enough to let through anything tangible. It had been cobbled together from an old communication relay that had been non-functioning before Sway had been ordered to fix it.

Which he did. And while it couldn’t open a large entrance into subspace, nor could it for long, it didn’t really matter. For the sake of their experiment, the Master only wanted their subjects exposed for a short moment so he could document the changes.

The most obvious, the freezing chill, similar to that of the vacuum of space, was uncomfortable but not, in and of itself, lethal.

Especially not when it was gone. They’d finished the exposure and now all that was left was to document any changes that would occur long term.

The Master left Sway to try to stitch their subject closed, but Sway knew, from experience, that it was a losing battle.

He wasn’t going to live long enough for them to observe any long-term effects.

Whether it was from his internal organs being directly exposed to the air or subspace, it was impossible to tell.

Sway, unlike the Master, wasn’t trained in healing sciences.

Everything he knew, he’d picked up from lessons the Master taught him through the years, or his own trial and error on the subjects.

Since the Master didn’t care if his subjects died, he had no real incentive to teach Sway proper healing.

He could stitch flesh, and he knew approximately how a body could be patched together, but he was not, by any means, a healer.

Unfortunately, on Rik-Vane, they weren’t able to work with the best equipment either.

The tools weren’t properly sterilized; half of them weren’t cleaned at all.

Sway was in charge of that, but the Master didn’t always care if he hadn’t managed to do it yet before he started in on the next subject.

He’d use whatever was on hand. The results were almost always infections that killed their subjects faster.

Luckily for the male on the table now, it appeared he would die before Sway even had a chance to finishing stitching him up. Sway was trying to work fast, doing his best to stop the bleeding and preserve his life, but he recognized the signs of his impending failure.

Sway might not be a healer, but he’d learned a lot working for the Master. Science and engineering and biology and mathematics. More than anything, though, he knew when death was coming, and he knew when he couldn’t prevent it.

The dimness of the room was broken only by the harsh spotlight over his work field. Blood, gray, rapidly darkening to black, stained Sway’s hands, the male’s belly, the table, and the floor. It was sticky under Sway’s boots as he leaned to the side, reaching for another line of thread.

This male wasn’t the first Sway had under his hands while he actively died.

He wouldn’t be the last. The Master left Sway alone to finish surgeries as the stitching process didn’t actually require much technical skill.

They didn’t have a functioning mediring, so the barbaric old style of medicine was the only thing Sway could do to try to preserve this male’s life.

There had been subjects in the past he was sure would die that lived quite a bit longer than he expected though. People’s will to live, and the body’s ability to heal, was quite an impressive thing sometimes.

Knowing that, he hardly had a choice but to try everything he could to save them.

For all the good it did. This male was definitely not one of those who would survive despite the odds. At this point, Sway had seen enough to read the difference between slim hope and no hope like it was written plainly on their foreheads.

Still, his hands stayed busy. Even when the male stopped moving, he continued sewing up the muscle layers of his abdomen. The master wouldn’t forgive Sway if he stopped early – even once the man was obviously dead. That would ruin the experimental data, apparently.

Sway finished his gruesome work quickly and without comment. The stitches were neat and solid even as the male was quickly cooling in death. He looked him over one last time before nodding, satisfied that it was all done correctly – his part, at least – before turning away.

Sway moved from the lab table towards the now cold bowl of water and rag he set aside before he began working.

They didn't often have running water, so he had to make due with fetching the stuff by hand.

And he needed to do it before operations since, if he tried to do it afterward, he would just get blood everywhere.

He dunked his hands into the water and began the slow process of cleaning them.

The feathers on his hands, luckily, were short and downy compared to the ones on his body.

They also excluded his knuckles, which were as tough as the skin of his legs.

His palms, the same as blue as his feathers, were also skin, so the blood came off easier there.

But it was never easy to clean off his feathers.

He scrubbed to the best of his ability, often breaking the feathers and leaving his skin bald in places.

He wanted it off him. Though he only had water and old soap made from the fat of their victims.

It long ago stopped bothering him that parts of the subjects were reused for practical purposes.

When he first arrived, it made him violently ill, but now, it was just a fact of life.

Rik-Vane didn't get much, if anything, in the way of supplies, and necessities like soap were in high demand.

If they didn't use the fat from their subjects, someone else would.

Honestly, in a way, Sway was lucky. He was a farasie, and farasie were obligate herbivores.

Eating meat, cooked or raw, would make him ill.

And while it used to amuse the Master to force Sway to do it anyway so he could watch and document the subsequent illness, there was only so long that well documented and well-known stomach pains, violent vomiting, and bloody diarrhea could amuse him.

Nutrition powder served its purpose just fine in feeding him.

Even if all he ever did was mix it with water and eat it without synthesizing it into actual food.

It was the only thing on Rik-Vane he could eat, as there weren’t plants on this station.

That was what made him fortunate. Some in Rik-Vane had no choice but to turn to cannibalism. Sway was lucky in that such a choice would never be an option for him. Even if he was starving, he couldn’t sink that far.

But that was just part of living in this void cursed station. No one had the luxury of turning their nose up at food, even if that food had once been their neighbor. One thing Sway never lacked was a source of meat, thanks to their never-ending roster of subjects.