Nobody Left Behind 16

Sorry so slow lately. I've... I don't really know what I've been doing with my time. Ky's been slowly recovering, and that weighs heavy on my mind, but I'd be lying to say that's been the problem. I guess I'm just overwhelmed.

Oh well, I'll get on top of it eventually.

So, where did we leave off? Oh yeah, Sarsuk dated Nyakkat and didn't realize that Kanti was in his apartment!

Nobody Left Behind 1
Nobody Left Behind 2
Nobody Left Behind 3
Nobody Left Behind 4
Nobody Left Behind 5
Nobody Left Behind 6
Nobody Left Behind 7
Nobody Left Behind 8
Nobody Left Behind 9
Nobody Left Behind 10
Nobody Left Behind 11
Nobody Left Behind 12
Nobody Left Behind 13
Nobody Left Behind 14
Nobody Left Behind 15

———

Siki counted the details off on her fingers. “So, had you only asked Ashiok out like Dennydr instructed, then you wouldn’t have gone out with Nyakkat. If you hadn’t dated Nyakkat, she wouldn’t have used you to steal secrets.” On the third finger, she asked, “If she hadn’t stolen secrets from you, then you’d never have been tried for treason?”

Sarsuk’s head nodded. “Essentially, yes. If only I had talked to him, I wouldn’t be here now.”

She unwrapped her sandwich and stared at the cross-section where the sandwich shop had cut it in two—too much meat and not enough veggies. She took a bite and chewed. Eventually, with her mouth full, she said, “I don’t know, Sarsuk.”

The krakun blinked. “You don’t?”

Siki shook her head. When she finished her bite, she wiped her muzzle and washed it down with a gulp of fizzy soda. “No,” said the geroo. “It sounds like she was very crafty and determined. I really doubt that a chance encounter at the elevator was going to be her one and only attempt to use you.”

She sighed. “Yeah, it sucks that you didn’t pursue Ashiok or Dennydr when you had the chance for a real relationship, but I bet Nyakkat would have used you one way or another—whether it was by pretending to date you or some other means.”

Sarsuk’s face slowly rotted into a frown. In a word far smaller than the krakun, he said, “Oh.”

She shrugged at him, her ears held somewhere between apologetic and supportive. She took another bite before explaining, “She chose you because you were an easy mark. If you were dating someone, she might have changed tactics, but she probably would have gotten you one way or another.”

# # #

Sarsuk fell so fast and so hard that he had difficulty comprehending it. “I guess Nyakkat must have planted a recording device on me,” he explained for what seemed like the millionth time. “She drugged my wine afterwards, and when I woke up, she was gone. She must have recovered it and the recording then.”

“My recommendation,” the lawyer said, “is to negotiate. The empire—and your former employer, certainly—don’t want to make a big public spectacle of this. We tell them that you’re willing to plead guilty—”

“But I’m not guilty!” Sarsuk protested, banging his manacled fists against the badly scratched and dented steel table. The jangling noise echoed about the dirty, foul-smelling cinder block holding cell. “I got used! I’m the victim. You need to find Nyakkat and try her, not me.”

“Mr. Sarsuk,” the lawyer said in a calm but fraying voice, “I’m in no position to find anyone. My job is only to minimize the harm that comes to you. If we save the empire the trouble of going to trial, then I think I can talk them down to life in prison without parole.”

“I-I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison!” sputtered the yellow krakun. “I didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no way I’m pleading guilty.”

“Would you prefer execution?”

“What I’d prefer,” Sarsuk growled, straining the chain that anchored his wrists to the table in front of him, “is to go back to my old job, my old life. I didn’t commit treason. If Nyakkat got the deployments by planting a bug on me, then she’s the one who broke the law, not me.”

The lawyer set his tablet computer down on the desk, finally looking away from Sarsuk’s case files and meeting the mustard-yellow krakun’s solid green eyes. The attorney’s scales were an appealing shade of teal, and his build beneath them muscular and lean. “Mr. Sarsuk, if you don’t plead, then this case will go to trial, and if you let that happen, then I strongly recommend that you take all the money you’ve saved, any golds your family can loan you, and hire as expensive an attorney as you can afford to defend you.”

Sarsuk blinked in shock. “But you’re my attorney!”

“Yes, I am,” he agreed. “And if I bring this case to court, I will defend you, and I’ll dedicate as much time to your case as I do any of my other pro-bono cases—”

“This is about money?” gasped the former commissioner. “You want me to spend life in prison because I’m not paying you enough?”

“You’re not paying me anything,” he reminded the former commissioner. “And yes, at the end of the day, it’s always about money.”

# # #

The trial went quickly and—as the public defender had predicted—poorly. And though transferring to death row was horrifying, Sarsuk felt better there than he had in jail. He had hated being kept in a cell with other prisoners, going to the cafeteria with other prisoners, working out with other prisoners. The other inmates were the most terrifying people that Sarsuk had ever encountered, and it seemed like they all wanted to hurt him in horrible ways. As much as it sucked to be locked up in a tiny cage without even a chance to get out and stretch his legs, at least no one here stared at him, no one threatened him, no one made crude gestures and promises to “get him” in the shower.

Plus, the guards here left him alone. They didn’t feel the need to threaten nor even interact with the condemned. They just patrolled by every now and then to make sure the inmates were still alive and in their cells. The empire, apparently, didn’t want him cheating his way out of execution with a suicide nor heart attack.

Surprisingly, there were only three cages on death row. A tubby krakun with mottled green and blue mail was at one end, Sarsuk was in the middle, and the remaining cage sat empty.

At first, there being only three cells on death row made him feel a little better. Sure, the system screwed him over, but perhaps it was fairer to most, and that was why they needed so few cells—few death sentences, few death row cells. But later, he wondered if the prison only needed a few cells was because the death row inmates wouldn’t be occupying them long.

“Hey neighbor,” grunted the green and blue krakun from his bunk, “you asleep?”

Sarsuk rested his chin on the backs of his claws. “No,” he grunted, “I can’t sleep here.”

“Yeah, me neither,” said the other.

The prison fell to silence once more, and the former commissioner wondered if the other krakun had given up on being sociable. But after several minutes, he said, “Did you know that you’re directly beneath the emperor right now?”

Sarsuk looked up at the stone ceiling above them before turning toward the other inmate. “We are?”

“Yup,” he said.

Sarsuk scrunched his brow. Couldn’t the emperor have ordered the justice department to build the prison elsewhere? When Sarsuk gave up finding the logic in it, he asked, “Isn’t that kind of risky?”

“How so?”

“Well, I haven’t seen daylight since they arrested me. For all I knew, we were on some colony world, a thousand light years away from the emperor,” Sarsuk explained. “I wouldn’t think he’d want criminals kept so close to his home. What if one of us escaped—?”

His neighbor shook his head. “I think there’s only one corridor that connects this complex to the palace—an elevator that leads from death row up to the emperor’s courtyard.”

The yellow krakun gulped, and he turned his head to the end of a short hallway that ran past their cages to the darkened elevator at its end—a literal dead end. Someday soon, he knew he’d take his final walk down that corridor, and the elevator would transport him to his doom.

“Anyhow, I heard that the prison used to be far away from the palace,” said his neighbor, breaking the hallowed silence, “but the emperor moved it here thousands of years ago.”

He studied the green and blue krakun for a moment. “He did? Why?”

His neighbor sat up on his bunk and gestured with a finger between the bars and into Sarsuk’s cell. “They say if you draw a line through the emperor’s tailhole, down through his golden commode, and just keep going down into the ground, that line would go directly through the middle of your cell. That way, the emperor could keep his most hated enemies right where he wanted them before…”—he gestured with a finger across his own neck while making a squelching sound in the back of his mouth—“you know.”

Sarsuk closed his eyes. He put his claws to his throat and shook in fear. Eventually, he managed, “Yeah, I know.” When he opened his eyes once more, Sarsuk whispered, “Well, if you see the emperor, tell him I’m honored. I don’t think I deserve it, but I’m honored.”

His neighbor opened his mouth to laugh, but put no air behind it. “I’ll be sure to let him know.”

The former commissioner hesitated, afraid of the unknown, but then decided “to be a geroo”. After all, he was going to die tomorrow—or whenever. He stepped over to the edge of his cage and stuck his claw between the bars. “I’m… Uh… I’m Sarsuk.”

“Bokdrull,” said his neighbor. He touched Sarsuk’s palm gently, didn’t grab him, didn’t try to rip his arm out, nor some other movie cliché.

Sarsuk sat back on the edge of his bunk. He asked, “So, where did you hear that—about the emperor’s tailhole?”

Bokdrull gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. “I used to work in this repair shop here in the capital, just down the way from the emperor’s palace,” he explained. “And my boss, you see, was one of those people who always thought he was smarter than everyone else.”

He put his face in his palms and groaned. “Every day, he’d point at something, say, ‘You know what that is, Bokdrull?’ or ‘You know how that works, Bokdrull?’ or ‘You know why death row is beneath the emperor’s castle, Bokdrull?’ And I’d always say, ‘No,’ and he’d get such pleasure out of explaining it to me. He loved feeling smarter than me.”

Sarsuk frowned. “What a jerk.” Bad bosses? Was that the universal constant that tied everyone together?

“Yeah. And then, every night,” Bokdrull explained, “I’d go home and look up each of these things he asked me and see if he was right—night after night, year after year, for centuries.”

Sarsuk hung on his neighbor’s every word. This … chit-chat was the most pleasant conversation he’d had since before he realized that Nyakkat had set him up to take a fall. He asked, “Was he?”

“Oh, yeah, my boss knew his stuff. If he said that electrons moved along magnetic field lines, then that’s what they did. If he said the ministers were going to cut corporate taxes, then they would,” said Bokdrull, nodding. Then, his expression turned darker. “I didn’t hate that he was right. I just hated how much joy he took in being smarter than me.”

Sarsuk laid back against the bars, resting his yellow horns against the metal. “Oh, sure. I can see that.” He looked about and lowered his voice, “I hated my boss too. Still do. Even more now, honestly.”

The yellow krakun sighed, then asked his neighbor, “So, if your boss was always right, then why did you keep checking? Were you hoping to catch a mistake and rub it in his face?”

“Because after I looked them up, I’d keep reading, learn a little more,” Bokdrull explained with a wink. “Then, I wouldn’t feel quite so bad because I did know.”

Sarsuk opened his mouth to say, “Oh,” but no sound came out. Instead, the two sat in silence awhile.

Bokdrull looked slightly self-conscious, as if he wondered whether he had overshared. Krakun tended to be very guarded, hesitant to give away anything that could be used against them. He asked, “You ever do that?”

Sarsuk, no longer worried about what anyone could do to him, nodded. “Yeah, once.”

He rested his horns against the bars and smiled, thinking back. “Back in college … it was the night before the big exam, and this gal came over to my dorm room to study with me.”

Bokdrull perked up and leaned closer. “Was she pretty?”

“Are you kidding?” sighed Sarsuk. He ran his palms down his face, then explained, “She was gorgeous. Her name was Nokevti, and she had me so distracted that I couldn’t even concentrate.”

The green and blue krakun tilted his head. “Nokevti? Like the blues singer?”

Sarsuk nodded. “Yeah.” He drew a breath and let it out into a sigh. “So, we’re studying, and she asks what I’m stuck on, and I told her, and then she tried to explain it to me, and then…”

Bokdrull leaned forward from the edge of his cot, his eyes wide as he waited. “And then?”

Sarsuk grinned. “And then, we made love.”

“Shut up!”

“No, I’m serious!” laughed the former commissioner. “She thought I was a total dumbshit, but we had sex before she left, and then our final exam was in the morning … and then I never saw her again.”

Bokdrull licked his lips. “How was it?”

Sarsuk groaned. “Terrible. I didn’t know any of the answers and flunked out.”

Bokdrull threw his pillow and it hit the bars with a soft thump. “No, the sex, Sarsuk! How was the sex?”

Sarsuk grinned. He reached between the bars and tossed the pillow back. Then, he took a moment to reminisce about his last study session in college. Sex had been fun, but those stupid slaves had ruined it. He hated how they had laughed and jeered, how they had made fun of Noke and him, watching their coupling as if the krakun were their own private pornographic movie. “It was…” he eventually sighed and answered honestly, “entertaining. Certainly, the best I’ve ever had.”

He laid back down and put his claws behind his head, feeling as if he were a patient telling his life’s story to a psychiatrist. “Anyhow, I beat myself up over that for years—decades, really,” he explained. “I kept thinking about that thing I’d been stuck on in class, and I wondered if maybe I had just understood that one thing, if I hadn’t come off as such a dumbshit, I wondered if she would have stuck around after we screwed. I wonder if we could have still been together now. I never would have fallen for Nyakkat if I had Noke. I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now.”

The prison fell to silence. Bokdrull laid on his side, facing Sarsuk with his head resting on his palm. “Yeah?”

Sarsuk shrugged. “And so, I studied it—not the whole class we were taking,” he admitted, “just that one thing I’d been stuck on. I don’t know if I ever really got it, but I read so much about it that eventually, I just sort of accepted it as true—sort of like breathing, you know? Whether or not you understand the chemistry of air moving in and out of your cells, you accept that you need to breathe.”

In a quiet voice, his neighbor asked, “Did it make you feel better?”

“I don’t know,” Sarsuk conceded, “but at least I know what an amphipentauxparietal tesserachora is now.”

Bokdrull sat up straight. He stared at the yellow krakun. “What?”

“An amphipentauxparietal tesserachora.”

A silence stretched before Bokdrull said, “You’re fucking with me, right, Sarsuk?”

“What? No, I’m serious.” The yellow krakun rolled over to face his neighbor. With his claws, he gestured, trying to recapture two five-dimensional objects that contain a four-dimensional one. “It’s like a test tube for running experiments—”

Bokdrull pressed his face between the bars so his snout was inside Sarsuk’s cell. “That was the last question my boss ever asked me,” he whispered. “‘You know what an amphipentauxparietal tesserachora is, Bokdrull?’”

Sarsuk sat back up, his legs dangling over the edge of the bunk. “No way. Now you’re fucking with me, Bokdrull.”

“I’m serious!” the other krakun insisted. “That was the last question he asked.”

Sarsuk tried to swallow, but his throat felt dry. His hearts raced at the peculiar synchronicity. He whispered, “Did you know what it was?”

“No, but he said that it generated a liberation field that disrupted the bonds between atoms,” Bokdrull explained, “that any molecules inside the field would break apart and the atoms would drift free.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the many things you can do with them,” said Sarsuk. “On the ships I used to work on, they’d dump all the trash into one of those fields and then recombine the atoms to make air, fuel, metal ingots, and stuff.”

He groaned. “Once, I…”—he winced—“tripped, and my arm went into the field. When I pulled it back out, it was just a bloody stump.”

Bokdrull’s scales blanched. “Ow!”

“Yeah, it hurt like crazy,” admitted the former commissioner, “but the company paid to get me a new one cloned.” He held up his right arm, opening and clenching his claw a few times to show that it still worked.

“Wow,” whispered the second krakun. He sank slowly back to his bed and sat facing Sarsuk. He explained, “Well, my boss asked because one of the wardens here on death row brought a device into the repair shop that generates just that sort of field. Well, it was supposed to, but the thing was busted, so he wanted me to fix it.”

Sarsuk tilted his head. The recycler aboard the gateships were huge, roughly krakun-sized, and not something you’d be likely to “bring in” to a shop—more the sort of thing a technician would visit to repair on-site. “Really?”

“Yeah. I’d never seen such a thing before,” said Bokdrull with a shrug, “but half the job is reading repair manuals and knowing how to use the tools. You isolate which bit’s broken and replace it with a new one.”

“What’s the other half of the job?”

He shrugged. “Not sure. Experience? Instinct? Luck? Something like that.” With a smile, he continued, “Anyhow, the warden left, and my boss came out to lord it over me once again that he knew how these things work, and I didn’t.”

He leaned back and stared off into space, remembering. He gestured with his claws, indicating the shape. “He explained that these collars generated that sort of field across their entire width—the disc is only a millimeter thick and it lasts for just a millisecond. But that’s all it takes. Once those molecules break down and the atoms are drifting free, there’s nothing left connecting a convict’s head onto his neck.”

Sarsuk’s eyes went wide, and he wrapped his claws protectively around his throat. His auxiliary heart slammed against his neck, each terrified beat reverberating in his palms. His body shook with a palsy, and a cold sweat wet his spine. “That’s how they … how they’re going to…?” his voice creaked. “And then your head just … sorta … slides off your shoulders?”

“Nah,” whispered Bokdrull. With his thumbs and index talons, he circled his own neck. “They put the collar around here, just above your auxiliary heart. When it goes, all the pressure in your carotid will send your head off like a rocket.”

Sarsuk covered his mouth, letting only a strangled cry escape.

But this didn’t seem to bother Bokdrull. He was staring off into space once more, remembering. “Anyhow, my boss tells me this, and I… Well, I just snapped,” he said. “I was so done with Mr. Know-It-All.”

He lowered his voice and stared at the yellow krakun with a predator’s gaze, confiding, “There was this motor lying on the shelf, you see, big metal one about the size of my fist. And I grabbed it in one claw and bashed it down on top of my boss’s head.”

Sarsuk’s eyes and mouth opened wide, and he sat in silence for several long moments before whispering, “You… You crushed your boss’s skull?” He trembled, his back pressed against the bars, trying to stay as far from his neighbor as he could.

“Nah, but sure as shit, I knocked him cold,” said Bokdrull. “And when I finished fixing the busted collar, he was still lying there on the shop floor, kinda wheezing.”

Sarsuk sat in silence. One part of him wanted the conversation to stop, but another begged for more. He whispered, “They put you on death row for assault?”

“Nah, I doubt they would have,” said the mottled krakun, laying onto his bunk with his back turned toward Sarsuk, “but after I finished fixing the collar, I had to test it out, didn’t I?”

Bokdrull chuckled, then giggled, then laughed uncontrollably.

Sarsuk stared unblinking the whole time, waiting for it to stop.

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ythztz6nQyF1iCbZ65qryp8XIHBq_XbMoAZ7fI-jyFA/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?