Perdition's Child

Chapter 6

A steady beeping woke Mehk up. He reached out to turn off that stupid alarm but his dashboard wasn't where it was supposed to be.

Dashboards didn't move though. A mystery...

"Is he awake, or is that just twitching like earlier?"

...The hell? Mehk went still and waited for his memory to fill him in. After a moment, it hit him like a hovercar. He was supposedly infected with the digital apocalypse and had gotten dragged into the atmosphere by a crazy group of mercenaries and then he'd died.

Also, he seemed to be naked. That was just the kind of day this was.

I'm going to kill Darkrei, Mehk decided rather unfairly. Well, he couldn't take on an entire mercenary ship so Darkrei would have to take the blame as the marginally easier target.

He opened his eyes and sat up before anyone mentioned cutting off digits to a white tiled room full of cabinets and an unmistakable antiseptic smell. Monitors covered one wall and he was sitting on some kind of mobile cot. As he'd suspected, he was indeed naked, but at least there was a sheet covering him. Quara was there; the skithtiri caught his eye apparently to make sure he was all there, then spoke into her com. "He's okay." Faintly he heard Irika's acerbic tone on the other end of the line saying she'd be back in a minute.

He ought to have some say in that. "No, I'm pretty sure he's not okay. What happened?" Mehk directed this towards a professional looking alien of some new species.

Avian, apparently. It stood on two legs but held itself horizontally balanced with a stiff tail. It had scaly skin and long quills on its arms, tail, and neck. The horizontal-pupiled eyes faced more to the sides than forward, and there was an extra eye in the center of its forehead as well as one at the end of its tail. His immediate and instinctual classification was prey, and he strongly suspected he could win a fight with these two and bolt before the much tougher human arrived.

Unfortunately, pants were a vital ingredient to daring escape plans. It was very hard to feel daring while naked on a cot in space.

Anyway, this new alien was wearing a lab coat so it must be someone who knew what they were doing, like a doctor. The terminator wasn't fancy enough for this sort of thing, but movies and serials had made it clear that people in pristine lab coats would do everything they could to save your life whilst juggling weird foreign romance tropes in their personal life.

This particular alien certainly had an air of competence and professionalism that eased away his initial predatory assessment. "You'll be fine now, you just had a reaction to the air mixture on the ship, probably the chlorine. You've never gotten a nano-shot?" She seemed a bit surprised and disapproving, fixing him with a sidewards look like an annoyed terrak. Probably her eyes were spaced too far apart to look at him head-on, though with that third eye she should have been able to manage it.

He knew it was common throughout the galaxy to get biological boosters in the form of nano-machines, the most common being the strain that set up shop in your lungs(or other breathing apparatus), and filtered the molecules you breathed. This was mostly the fault of the skithtiri, who preferred their air to contain trace amounts of horrible poisons. The nanos also filtered out mundane toxins and virtually never went wild and turned you into a glob of gray goo these days... "I never planned to leave Lequin, so there was no reason to get the shot. I assume I have it now, but..." He gestured vaguely downwards, but the doctor didn't seem to understand.