Trezza, Eron 13, 5531 – Third Shift

Veshrin mentally prepared for yet another endless shift as he climbed the questionable stairwell in the back of the Dragon’s Lair. The not-so-faint whiffs of cycles-stale urine reminded him there was a limit to how much sanitization chems could do. His legs sighed in relief when he stepped onto the third level’s narrow landing.

He pulled his thermal coat open as he entered the hallway, the magnetic seal parting with a firm yank. The hum of the internal heating coils faded rapidly. He pulled off his gloves and stuffed them into the coat’s pockets as he strode into the worker common room.

It was lined with rows of hooks holding the other workers’ thermal gear—hats, scarves, and coats, both powered and unpowered—of varying sizes and colors. The one point they all had in common was the logo emblazoned on the back or otherwise incorporated into their designs. An ornate forged blade set against a burning sun symbol. The Circle must have a contract with one of the mega-corps. One that apparently got richer whenever a Father-forsaken fool ran afoul of either the Elysannati government or the Circle it served, and got dumped on Lustrathīr.

The walls were made of hardened ultra-steel plates, though the bolts that secured them had started to give way, leaving some hanging askew. The hooks jutted like rust-covered spikes from the panels, much of the finish having worn away cycles ago. Up close, bright red lines of electrical wiring showed in the gaps left by the panels’ misalignments.

Veshrin’s assigned hook was the last one at the far left corner. He noted with dismay that the scuff-patterns and pockmarks in the faded yellow paint had already become familiar. Six lunars in the colony and he was, despite his best efforts, settling in.

His coat hung up, he was left with what had become his uniform—a threadbare and formerly white synth-fab shirt, a pair of well-maintained red overalls held up by thick suspenders, and a pair of heavy black boots with metal plates protecting the soles and toes.

He flexed his fingers, gauging their stiffness. The joints ached no worse than normal, their complaints having grown familiar over long cycles. Still, he dug around in the overall’s large chest pocket and pulled out a finger-width metallic container.

He pressed one end and it popped open, a lid folding out and backwards. He tipped it over his cupped palm and small white tablets poured out. He put all but two back in the container and slid it back into his pocket. With a grimace, he popped the tablets into his mouth and threw his head back, swallowing with a painful click. When Tendakeo had given him the anti-inflammatory painkillers, he’d recommended taking them with water, but dry worked well enough.

“Prescription or pleasure,” asked a feminine voice in accented Germaine behind Veshrin.

He spun. Taelina Zvezhan stood watching him, arms crossed, head cocked. Her stance in the doorway was clearly designed to entice. Her long, artificially blonde curls spilled over the generous chest she was not-so-subtly heaving in his direction atop her crossed arms.

“Oh! Ah, prescription.” Feeling as if that weren’t enough, he added, “They’re just painkillers. The non-recreational type.”

She sighed. “Booo-ring. If you want to get rid of pain, we make the perfect solution right here in this building, lisibei. All you have to do is ask. I bet I can talk Lyulian into letting you share ours after you finish your shift.”

“I can’t take dragon’s blood,” Veshrin said, thinking quickly. “My doctor told me that my system wouldn’t be able to handle it. Unfortunately. I appreciate the offer, however, Sīda Zvezhan.”

She laughed. While the sound wasn’t exactly kind, the amusement in it seemed genuine enough. “Well said! That makes you a much safer person to employ, Sīdus Orlason. And so polite! What a lucky find for us, after our last disappointment.”

Veshrin shuddered. He smiled weakly. “Yes, I won’t be making that mistake.”

Her smile turned predatory. “Fine, none of the blood, but if there’s something else of ours you want to share, come by. I’m sure after a hard solar’s work, one must work up an appetite.”

She turned and retreated down the hall, her bare footsteps light on the floorplates. Veshrin sagged internally. When he could no longer hear her, he shook his head and made his way to the sanitation closet next to the common room.

He found the janitorial cart waiting for him as expected. He checked the supplies—chems, towels, plasma scrubbers, bolt-drivers, pest-deterrents. All stocked well enough to get through the shift. He glanced at the shelves bolted to the closet walls just above eye-level. They were getting low in some areas, but that was a problem for another solar. His job was to clean, do some maintenance, and get out before Taelina of Lyulian could corner him for more propositioning.

Veshrin wheeled the cart a short distance down the hall to the harvest room, humming as he went. It was an old song, something he’d heard growing up though he couldn’t remember its name. It played in his head, heavy beats and horn blasts echoing from deep in his memory as clearly as if he had been listening to it on his comm. He put his worker code into the access panel next to the harvest room’s door, tapping the keys to the rhythm of music in his mind.

It sprang open, receding into the wall with a hiss and revealing the depressingly familiar sights and smells within. He pushed his cart through the doorway, rocking it up and over the raised lip. The cart rattled as he followed it into the harvest room. The floor plates in the room where mismatched and uneven due to partial repairs and replacements. Many bore unusual pitted scars and buckling. All due to the constant exposure to dragon’s blood over many cycles.

Dragon’s blood was, perhaps unsurprisingly for any fan of fantasy holos, an unbelievably powerful elixir. It was also extremely caustic before filtration and refinement. Every third lunar or so, the tubes that carried extracted blood would burst, and if the leak wasn’t caught in time the dragon would die. Saturated with anti-coagulants and plasma production chems, the dragons only had minutes if the leak was bad enough. Then there was the loss of product in the form of wasted blood.

Dragon’s blood was the most elite of Elysannati mind-wipers. Ambrosia, made from fruits native to the system’s Capital world, Hortánna Qudsa, could make you feel like a god; Fairy-dust—the spores from a truly disgusting-smelling fungus found on agriculturally rich Fuscān—gave you disorienting out of body experiences; but Dragon’s Blood, made from the Hortánnan creatures in the tanks, took you to an entirely new world. It showed you impossible things—living cities, dragons that soared over storm-infested plains, deep-sea creatures that had tentacles where faces should be and who hunted those foolish enough to wander near the shore.

He had never touched it himself—he took half a pharmacy to stay alive, the last thing he needed was yet another chem in the mix—but he’d been told that after you come down from your first trip, the world never felt as solid and real as it did before you went up. The woman who’d shared that particular tidbit had been seemingly half-way to climax merely recalling her last trip. To be honest, it sounded terrifying.

Tendakeo, as a doctor, felt—reasonably, in Veshrin’s opinion—that putting a drug made from a Hortánnan organism in your body was insanity beyond any reasonable measure. Everything from the planet, from the smallest bacteria to the hill-sized titans roaming the plains, wanted to bring death to all non-native lifeforms. No matter how you filtered or sterilized it, if a single intact cell ended up in your body, it meant death. The Lair even had a dedicated role to test how pure each batch was, and the astronomical mortality rate among the ‘Tasters’ only served to underline the point.

Still, despite the inherent danger surrounding it, dragon’s blood remained not just popular, it was more sought after in the colony than hard credits were on the other Elysannati worlds. Because of its extremely valuable nature, any loss was a serious issue.

Veshrin looked around the harvesting room. There weren’t any overhead lights, but the steady magenta glow of the collection vat made up for it. It was enough to see just about everything he needed. It didn’t look too bad, in his opinion, but he was still going to clean. When the Lair’s owner, Malice, had allowed him to take the job, she’d told him and Tendakeo a story about his predecessor.

The last guy, an asshole named Alevgeni, had chosen to spend his shifts fucking the blood-addicts he’d snuck into the Lair rather than actually doing his job. During one such vigorous occasion, the tubes for the dragons had burst, and the twins only managed to save the breeding pair and their weirdly-colored runt.

Alevgeni and the girl had unfortunately been ‘hard at work’ on one of the lounge tables when the twins caught them.

They handed Alevgeni and the girl right over to Malice. Then she’d made them regret their lapse in judgement. They had been carved into pieces while still very much alive. What remained had been dumped in the colony’s central plaza only a lunar before Veshrin and Tendakeo stepped off the transport in the same spot.

By the time she’d finished recounting Alevgeni’s fate, the unspoken message in her tone flashed in bright, neon letters in the forefront of his mind—do your tarnished job if you like breathing.

He pushed the cart against the wall next to the door, and got on with it.

First, he cleaned the terminal on the far side of the room. He started by wiping up partially dried splotches of potential food from the graying surface of the ultra-plastic desk. Then he dusted the holofield projector cube, wiped down the terminal’s processor tower, and cleared its vents. He resisted the urge to throw all of the nearly two dozen tag-it notes stuck all over the desk into the atomizer bin. He’d told the blood-tech that it made his job harder, and she’d just laughed at him. The next day he’d come in to nearly twice as many.

When he was finally finished with the terminal, he moved on to cleaning the floors. His back popped as he bent over to sweep under the two empty tanks next to the terminal, and he groaned. Each tank was a mitra and a half long, and he worked his way from one end to the other in rhythmic movements.

“Hundreds of cycles in space,” he grunted, “and we can’t figure out a new way to clean dust?”

Balls of old tag-it notes came out with each stroke of the broom, along with some rations wrappers. He groaned. How did one person produce so much garbage in two solars? He retrieved the bin from the cart and set it on the floor next to the empty tanks. He lowered himself to his knees and began picking up the balls of paper, bending over further to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

He saw one of the Father-forgotten tag-its, tucked in the back against the wall, trapped under a power cable, its red convolutions taunting him from the shadows. He strained forward to reach it. His fingers had just brushed it when a low hollow ‘thwack’ came from behind him. He jumped, his head cracking against the bottom of the tank. The pain made him see stars and he knelt with his hands clutched to the spot at the back of his skull, squeezing the pain until the sound came again.

He looked around, blinking rapidly. He rotated slowly on his hands and knees, eyes wide, and finally laid eyes on the occupied dragon tanks.

Veshrin crawled towards them, heart thudding wildly against his ribs. He didn’t think to stand, despite his knees protesting. The pale yellow light spilling from the tanks grew brighter. The nearest of the dragons was apparently stable according to the display projected in the poly-glass. It lay in its typical half submerged state, tail forming a spiral on top of the sand. Then he noticed the center tank.

Something had changed with this one.

It had always been different—bright blue scales interspersed with turquoise versus an emerald green, livid purple fur instead of black—but now the last few spans came into focus. The sour-faced blood-tech, Adozi, and her constant muttering to herself about how troublesome ‘that little mutant’ was. Lamenting how she’d had to work twice as hard to keep it down, and even switch to different drugs entirely.

Just above the display, there was another tag-it note, with a clear message written on it. In sharp, aggravated script, Adozi told anyone reading it to find her if anything changed with the dragon. Emphasis, anything. The dragon’s vitals and med-feeds were displayed right on the poly-glass, and the one on the central tank was twice that of the first tank he’d passed. Veshrin noticed one of the three bars in the infograph flashing red. Specifically, the sedatives line. Was it too high? Was it going into shock?

No. Instead of slipping into a fatal coma, it had begun to move. It pulled its legs out of the sand and lay stretched out, scales gleaming brightly. Its uncoiled tail swished back and forth. Each movement carved grooves in the sand, causing a spray of the white grains. It looked as if it was just waking up from a restorative nap.

As Veshrin watched, the whip-thin tail bounced off the tank’s poly-glass, a flash of exaggerated movement that made him jump. It was the exact same hollow sound. Veshrin reared back, and found himself on his feet. There was the briefest moment where he questioned whether or not he was overreacting.

Then, it moved its head.

Veshrin’s heart stuttered to a stop. The suddenly intensified ache in his knees was pushed out of his mind.

It was looking at him.

It didn’t have eyes or anything like a face, just a conical knob that stuck out of a short, scraggly-furred neck, but it was pointed directly at him. Veshrin could actually feel its attention, he was sure of it. Without that knob wavering, it began a much larger series of movements. Somewhere, in another room, another world, someone began whispering the word ‘run’ over and over.

It started to twitch and move each of its six limbs individually, as if testing their strength and function. Each limb ended in a many-jointed claw with three toes nearly half as long as his index finger. As he watched—frozen in place despite that increasingly insistent voice now shrieking in his mind—it set each one on the sand drew itself to its full height. It stood about a third of a mitra high, and its limbs twitched beneath it in a hypnotic series of adjustments, releasing a muffled series of clicks.

Then it hit the side of the tank with its full weight. The lights in the tank flickered but didn’t go out, the whole thing having jumped in place on the platform holding it. Time congealed, the moment stretching out impossibly. The poly-glass couldn’t possibly give way, could it? In response, spiderweb cracks radiated out from the spot the dragon had driven itself against. Their edges danced as they caught the spasming lights inside.

“Run, you idiot!” He’d found the voice to break the grip of fear at last. He started to turn, the word ‘escape’ flashing in the forefront of his mind in big block letters, his legs finally obeying him.

The thought occurred as another eerily powerful slam hit the side of the tank. This time, the glass didn’t merely fracture, it shattered, tiny shards spraying forth. The dragon shot through the air like a bolt of lightning, clamping onto Veshrin’s right leg.

Whatever protection the overalls had been intended to provide evaporated as the dragon shredded them. Eighteen points of pain burst into sharp reality in his thigh, overwhelming his nervous system. His breath escaped in a tortured wheeze as his throat slammed shut on a scream.

He stumbled backwards, beating at the thing with his fists. It clung on and released a series of clicking noises so rapidly they bled into each other. He lost his balance, arms flailing. He crashed into his cart, spilling its content across the metal tiles. He could hear objects scatter, flung into the shadows as he thrashed. A nearby shape caught his eye as it spun, rattling as it rolled across an uneven floorplate half a mitra away.

A bolt driver!

It was a cylinder half as long as his forearm, with a blunt handgrip at one end. The green light on the end of the grip glowed steadily, indicating a full charge. The other end of the cylinder tapered down to a point meant to fit bolt-heads. It’d probably do as a stake in a pinch.

He slapped at it with one outstretched arm, while trying to fend the dragon off with the other. His fingertips whispered against its nearest edge and he heard it spin away, rolling just out of reach.

Using his good leg, he shoved himself backwards towards where he thought the driver might be. The dragon released his leg and started scrabbling up his body, blood flying everywhere as the claws glittered in the magenta light. The pain walking up his abdomen was blinding, but he shoved it aside with gritted teeth and a surge of adrenaline. That could wait until the increasingly unlikely moment he escaped or killed this thing. He let loose a guttural growl and stretched for all his frame would allow.

The dragon took advantage of his split focus, leaping forward. Time slowed. The dragon’s arc carried it straight for his face, razor-sharp claws carving the air between them. He watched, detached, as his hand rose to meet it. A living grinder intending to devour him. He caught the dragon around the throat in mid-air with his left hand just as the fingers of his right snapped shut on the driver’s cool grip. The dragon’s weight rattled all the way to his shoulder.

Undeterred, the dragon’s claws didn’t miss a beat. They slashed at his forearm as easily as they would have his face, drawing blood and shredding the sleeve of his shirt. The dingy fabric instantly turned crimson.

The dragon’s face opened like a bloom from tartajjin itself, revealing long, needle-like teeth. The gleaming spikes lined each of the four fleshy petals, and ran down the spasming ring of muscle that must have been its throat. From within, magenta light spilled forth, the same hue as the collection vat’s.

Strings of hideously foul-smelling saliva flowed steadily from its mouth. It ran down his wrist and forearm, intermingling with his blood as it flowed freely from the deep cuts. Immediately, an uncomfortable heat spread where it touched. Pink, frothy strings of the mixed result danced and flew in the air as he struggled with the creature.

A high, warbling scream erupted from him then, all semblance of control abandoning him. He rolled over and slammed the murderous creature against the floor plates. Seething through clenched teeth, Veshrin braced himself and brought the driver down.

Whether it was the angle, Veshrin’s flagging strength, or simple, evil luck, the driver’s tip stabbed at the fine scales of the dragon’s chest and throat, but skittered off harmlessly. It only succeeded in angering the dragon, which released a shrieking wail. It snapped the petals of its face shut in quick succession, trying in vain to get close enough to tear Veshrin’s face off.

He pressed his thumb against the smooth button along one side of the grip, and the driver’s automatic function engaged, spinning the bit and turning it into a makeshift drill. With gritted teeth, he stabbed at the dragon once more, with dramatically different results.

The tip must have found a weak spot in its short neck, because suddenly the dragon’s glowing blood was spraying in a huge gout. The air filled with drops of blood and the scent of rotting fruit, choking his screams even as he tried to make them, his throat convulsing as he fought with it. His hands, forearms, and even his glasses were spattered with the bioluminescent fluid.

Veshrin didn’t relent. He couldn’t. There was no room for half-measures; if he failed to kill this creature, it was going to break free and kill him. So he ignored the frenzied thrashing of the thing’s deadly claws until the creature’s chattering and hisses weakened and then ultimately fell silent. It shuddered once and went limp beneath his hand.

The room fell silent except for the sizzling of dragon’s blood. He stared at the dead dragon, lying in a spreading mixture of its blood and his own. Clarity settled upon him like a suffocating weight, and with it, the understanding that he was soon to be as dead as the dragon.

Shit. What did I do?

Veshrin’s mind grasped desperately for deflections. It was self-defense. There was no way he could have known that would happen when he entered the room. In fact, it would be crazy to blame him for this, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

He laughed. A grown woman who went by ‘Malice,’ given to casual murder and dismemberment to prove a point. She was plenty crazy.

The air cooled as his future, what little remained of it, flashed before his eyes. Which was when he became aware of the heat eating into his skin, just as it crossed from insistent into agonizing. It roared in his hands and forearm. Across his abdomen. His thigh, where the creature had first clamped onto him, throbbed with it.

Alarm bells rang in his head. He had to go. His first instinct was to get to his feet by bracing himself with his hands. A mistake. The pain was breathtaking in its intensity, like an electric shock that caused the muscles in his forearms to lock as he tried to control the pain and contain his scream.

Veshrin’s hands shook as he held them up in front of his face. They had been covered in the dragon’s blood, which had eaten away the top layers of his skin until raw flesh shone in stark contrast. His breath came in short gasps. He made his way to his overturned cart and, using his elbows, managed to get to his feet.

He needed to get out, right now, before anyone saw this mess. The twins were here, somewhere. If they caught him with a dead dragon…absolutely not. But even if he got out, he needed help, he needed…

Tendakeo.

He had to get to Tendakeo, that was the first thing. Stop the bleeding, disinfect things, he would be fine. He would be fine. Just get moving before it was too late. How much time did he have? Had anyone heard him? He hadn’t exactly been thinking about stealth when he had been fighting for his life.

He had to risk it. Hadn’t Taelina just suggested he head back to her and Lyulian’s room to share a bottle of blood-spiked wine? Blood-wine evaporated around those two, and the blood cut through any tolerance a person might otherwise have for alcohol. They would be asleep for half a solar if they finished it off. Which didn’t solve his problem but it at least gave him a window to escape through.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He stumbled over to the door, trying to ignore the coppery stink of human blood mixed with the overpowering sweetness of raw dragon blood. Using his elbow he pressed the door release.

The hallway was lit by a series of yellowish light strips set near the top of the walls. Through the residue on his glasses and their partially melted lenses, the light took on a visceral blood-orange tint. Across from him were two doors, to the right lay the room used by the ‘security team’ as a lounge—also where they took the tasters while they tripped on their samples of blood.

To the left, the level’s public bathroom, and further down the hall he could see common room, still empty. He didn’t see or hear anyone on the level at all, he realized.

“To whoever in the universe is listening, thank you.” He ducked into the hallway and moved straight to the bathroom door. He stepped to the sink, waving his hands in front of the motion-activated sensors in the sink. He longed for the heat-activation tech he’d had back in Baytūs.

After a handful of increasingly frustrated attempts, he forced himself to move slowly and deliberately, at which point the steaming water began pouring into the scuffed metal basin of the sink.

He gritted his teeth, and forced both hands under the water. He squeezed his eyes shut and held the scream that tried to burst free. When he opened his eyes, blood had splattered on the sink, but his hands were looking much cleaner. Beneath the harsh white lights of the bathroom, the damage was not as bad as he’d thought, the blood hadn’t eaten all the way through to his muscles.

The skin left behind by the burns was pinkish-white, and nearly glowed next to the natural color of his skin. He couldn’t see his reflection clearly in the mirror above the sink, but he didn’t feel any painful heat there or see any pink spots in the blurry image his face had been transformed into. He didn’t bother taking his glasses off to check; even in their current state they were more helpful than his eyes would have been on their own.

When he’d gotten as much of the blood off of his hands and forearms as he could, and rinsed the sink to minimize the evidence left behind, he left the room and headed straight for his thermal gear. His right boot made an uncomfortably loud scraping sound against the floor as he drug it behind him, not trusting it to carry any weight.

Competing sources of pain fought valiantly to overwhelm his mind. His thigh twitched with every move, his arms and hands roared at him, and every new jolt caused his vision to dim at the edges. He was close to passing out. Everything begged him to stop, to lay down and rest, just for a little while, just until things stopped screaming so loudly.

No. You listen to me, he thought at his body. I’ve been fighting you all my life, and you should have learned by now, I hate being told what I can and can’t do.

Miraculously, the pain backed off slightly, and Veshrin drew in a shaky breath. Okay then. One step, then another. Pushing ahead, he stumbled through the doorway to the common room.

He hobbled towards his thermal gear, crossing the room with clenched teeth and unblinking eyes. He winced as he lifted his coat off its hook, the chemically-scoured pads of his fingers sending stabbing needles of fire shooting through his nerves.

He shrugged into the coat, gingerly sealing it. He managed to pull his thermal gloves from the pocket of the coat. He stared at them, a little embarrassed to realize there were tears in his eyes. He and Tendakeo didn’t live far from the Lair, their apartment complex was in a nearby ring, it just meant some walking along the outer rim of the colony.

There had been many cases of frostbite in unprepared newcomers who didn’t wear the proper gear. Tendakeo had told him as much while researching the medical history of the colony. People assumed distances were shorter, or that they were faster, than they really were, and paid dearly for it. He was looking at twenty minutes at least, maybe more, which made the gloves non-negotiable.

Biting his lip hard enough to distract himself, he began pulling them on, starting with his left hand, whose palm merely felt scalded. When he was finished with that hand, he gathered a fold of the coat, and jammed it between his teeth. Taking deep breaths through his nose, ignoring the smell of stale sweat from the unwashed coats, he forced his right hand into the glove. He screamed into the fabric of the coat, his vision going dim. He didn’t stop until he felt it settle onto his hand, knowing he wouldn’t be able to make a second attempt. He leaned against the wall, his face pressing against the cold metal, as he waited for the wave to pass.

Movement from the hallway behind him. His eyes snapped open and he spun around, hopping over to the doorway just in time to see the edge of a gray, loose-fitting shirt, a pale slender leg and an untamed mass of blonde hair disappear into the bathroom, the door sliding shut behind her with a hiss. Taelina.

Veshrin cursed himself. Why hadn’t he hit the close button? She hadn’t seen him, had she? Would she have said anything? He thought of the blood in the bathroom. Would she notice? What if—

Enough. Go. Now!

He pulled his hood up, grateful that the gloves at least made the gesture less painful, and stepped out of the coat room, heading for the rear stairwell. He ducked through the door to the stairwell just as a disgusted shout of confusion bounced down the hall. Holding onto the railings, his jaw aching from how tightly he clenched it, he made slow progress to the ground level.

Behind him, through two interior doors, he could hear the muffled sound of music playing through the building’s scavenged systems, and voices raised in some kind of celebration. He shuffled over and pressed the exit release with his elbow. The exterior door retracted, and the night’s icy fingers snaked in.

He stepped into the night, letting the door close behind him. The cold tried nipping at him, only to be stymied by the heat boiling from the core of each wound. He looked up, orienting himself to the pulsing light of the nearest repulsor tower, and focused on Tendakeo’s face and the safety of home.

“I’ll be fine,” he said through gritted teeth, taking a step. He repeated it to himself as he took another, and another. “I just need to get to Tendakeo, and everything will be alright.”

The night’s answer was a long mournful howl that stalked out of the forest and chased him through the night.