Shooting Pain; Ch. 1 "Everyone Gets Hurt"
Everyone Gets Hurt
The bluish haze in the air couldn't possibly be healthy, the sun slowly made it ascent into the sky, casting an eerie cyanotic luster on the skin of every soldier in the formation. Nivik couldn't quite determine whether the cold, acidic glaze covering his skin was his own sweat or more of the chemical fog. The commander made his way down the line, a gray ventilator mask of almost comic proportions strapped to his face. Shard like strands of red hair shooting out in all directions under the rubber webbing and his dark eyes obscured by the even darker, reflective lenses of his new found headgear.
The fog wasn't harmful, at least not immediately. But as Nivik stood at attention, he couldn't help but feel more and more panicked as the coughing of the men behind him increased. None of them had yet been ordered to don their ventilators, only the commander was wearing his. And though he couldn't see his face, he was positive that the officer was grinning. The man was a true sadist, he seemed to illicit a strange sense of joy from watching his personnel hack and wheeze and struggle for every breath whenever the north winds blew in the acid fog. Still, no one dared put on the masks until instructed to do so. For putting on the ventilators would mean they were no longer in proper uniform while on active duty, and being in improper uniform while on active duty was criminally punishable offense.
The fluid in Nivik's lungs was rapidly growing like floor waters and ever breath he took felt like razor blades running down the back of his throat. Mucus streamed from his nose and down his face and he was panting with an audible hiss. The gagging and wheezing of everyone around him was becoming more intense, and he wondered who would be the first to start coughing blood of lose consciousness. It was like this every few months, whenever a bad wind storm would come in. He just hoped with all of his heart that he wouldn't lose consciousness again, because losing consciousness in formation without direct authorization was a criminally punishable offense.
A second man came running toward the formation, ventilator attached and arms waving about wildly like a drowning victim. Nivik could tell from the wild, kinky hair sprouting from under the ventilator straps that it was none other than Dr. Reik, the chief of surgery and the head of fine military hospital where Nivik and his comrades were stationed, on this fine and lovely, desolate, isolated, scaldingly hot, swamp covered moon. A moon so lovely in fact that they affectionately referred to it as "Outpost Bloodbog, home of the lingering stench".
The doctor started yelling orders through his mask, his voice was mutilated and transmitted through a small square speaker at the front. It had the excellent sound quality of grinding glass and radio static and as a result was mostly unintelligible. That is until Nivik and the others focused hard enough over their own wheezing to hear.
"Damn it! Put on your masks!" the doctor rasped through his speaker, “I'm giving all of you an order! Commander Dross, are you trying to kill my medics or are you just mentally deficient?"
An instant wave of relief hit the formation as everyone scrambled for their leg packs en mass. Nivik found his and fastened the thing to his skull. He sucked air through the mouth piece and didn't care that it tasted like antiseptic and dust, he could breathe again. He could almost feel his individual blood cells reoxygenate, he could feel the color returning to his skin. The sheer joy of being able to breathe again was tangible in the air, and though he couldn't see it behind their masks, he was sure all twenty nine of the other medics were grinning and beaming with delight like he was- though a small part of him had to admit, the new found euphoria was probably just a result of brain cells being destroyed by hypoxia.
"You're going to scrub healthy muscle off, right down to the bone if you aren't careful."
Nivik looked down at the wire-bristled brush in his hand and then back up at the nurse in front of him, making snide, backhanded, and completely accurate remarks. The patient was in a chemically induced coma, over half of her body had been seared off in a training accident involving a food ration heater and several gallons of aircraft fuel. She had once been an excellent pilot, one with beautiful skin and full, plump lips and a voice like satin- or so the young medic liked to imagine at least. Now she was covered in necrotizing burn tissue. Where there once had been supple flesh was now marred with granulated scabs and layer upon layer of dead, gray skin just sloughing away in sheets. She had been admitted the evening before, and since the burn nurse charged with caring for the most gruesome and horrifically injured patients was in the hospital herself as a patient (being treated after that morning's toxic gas incident) Nivik was awarded the responsibility of helping to care for the patients in the burn unit.
With a sense of dread and a metal brush and soap in hand he had set forth to take care of the slightly revolting task of scrubbing away all of her dead flesh and charred debris. He had a few moments before injected her with a powerful anesthetic known as tethramine, just in case the chemically induced coma wasn't quite as coma-like as initially intended. But, even the sensation of dead skin being sheared away with a scrub brush wasn't enough to keep him interested. His mind was distracted by other things, mostly the intense, sharp pain in the center of his head and what was going to be served for lunch later. That was until he was rudely interrupted by nurse Keit.
She snapped on a set of gloves and grabbed the brush from his hand. The slender dark features of her face scrunched and contorted into a grimace as she stared Nivik down.
"I'll be taking over, medic." she sneered, "I don't know who decided it would be a good idea to let a body-bagger take care of her. We're supposed to save patients here, not kill them."
A body-bagger, an insult often given to combat medics such as himself due to the low survival rates on the battlefield and in field hospitals. It was an apt description during war time; he knew the medics spent more time collecting the dead than actually saving lives- especially in the wake of the newest Maxian anti-personnel weapons. Clear, odorless, tasteless nerve gases that could easily kill everyone within a ten mile radius. There really wasn't any to save people from that sort of decimation.
But, Nivik wasn't in a combat zone, aside from the occasional morning formation hazing incident no one had been exposed to nerve gas, bombs, or deadly radiation. Just freak training accident victims like what created the charred, human form laying in the bed in front of him. He pushed his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat; he never had been especially great at confrontation, especially with women who were easily a head taller than him.
"Are you questioning my patient care abilities, Comrade Keit?” was all he managed to squeak out. He sounded like an idiot and he knew it.
"Yes, Medic Nivik, I am. I've seen your proficiency reports. Your patients die so much I have to wonder if you're not just a covert operative here to kill enemy spies" she laughed "I kid of course, you're just inept. Look at what you did!" she said, motioning toward the patient's chest with a gloved finger "You're destroying healthy tissue. You aren't here to help, you seem to just be here to mutilate people! I need you to leave my burn unit now. You're relieved, go back to your designation before you do any more damage."
"Comrade Keit, I spent three months of my training on-"
"Save it Medic and leave this unit before I have you removed by force. Disobeying a direct order from a superior is a criminally punishable offense."
With a sigh, the medic nodded and turned for the door, removing his gloves and slamming them into a wastebasket with a wet "plop" on his way out. He had spent his first three months of training at a burn unit on Tregnoria Alpha Base, twelve hours a day of washing and scrubbing victims of every kind of burn imaginable. Yet somehow Nurse Blah was right, he was almost wearing a hole into the patient's sternum, he had been distracted. On the bright side, he was thrown out just in time for the mess hall to start serving its mid-day meal.
The hospital was a massive complex. An ugly monstrosity towering above the ground in shades of mold and gray, below the ground snaked literal miles of corridors and catacombs, research laboratories and patient wards. Like all of the buildings in the Zorkari Base complex, the walls of the facility were thick composite steel, bubble-like red glass windows bolted to the sides made sure the prevalent flood waters of the moon never leaked through inside. Lined with borrowed force field technology, the windows also made sure that no one or thing escaped the premises without the proper clearance.
Zorkari Base was a vital outpost for all Inkirin operations in the war against the Maxian scum. With a population of some two thousand military personnel and one of the largest friendly hospitals in Inkirin space. Just some fifteen years before it was a much avoided, swamp covered moon. But on this day it was the epicenter of the Inkirin war effort.
Nivik walked through one of the many gray, winding corridors of the hospital. His hands buried in his equally drab gray medic's jumpsuit, he quietly observed the staff passing by. There was a great deal of diversity among them. Inkirins from all corners of the world, a tall, dark skinned doctor with a long, pointed nose and curly hair piled on his head in a bun, another medic with an almost bluish pallor and brown hair, presumably from the Trinik region where the levels of silver in the water supply are so high it tints the skin of all of the residents. Consequently, they never have particularly long life spans.
Then there was Nivik, his short blond hair pushed back and always standing straight on end. He had all of the physically imposing presece of a preteen girl. He couldn't have been much larger than a meter and a half in height and had spindly, long limbs, covered in a thin fuzz of blond hair that gave him the appearance of some small, strange, tree dwelling primate. He always assumed that his small stature was the reason he was chosen to become a medic in spite of his aversion to blood. That and his awful vision, he never would have been chosen to become an aircraft gunner and certainly not a pilot. Thanks to his heterochromia, his left eye was had virtually no pigment, a pale, ghastly blue to the right eye's hazel. This resulted in him spending most of his time outdoors either wearing goggles with nearly black lenses or walking around with his left eye clamped shut. Sunlight was always quite painful, even on overcast days. It was also in thanks to this defect that he was one of few Inkirins still wearig eyeglasses, with a few exceptions, most common visual disabilities could be cured with simple surgery. He wore a sleek, clear plastic frame to avoid drawing too much attention to his defect, but try as he might, it was always noticed.
But one thing he had in common with his comrades in the corridor and in fact all Inkirins was the complex array of leopard-spot like freckles covering his scalp, temples, shoulders, and streaking down his back and the sides of his body. Different lineages have different patterns and colors and arrangements of spots, but barring some freak incidence of albinism, they were present on all Inkirin people. His own were light tan, barely noticeable in some lighting. He was one of the fair haired, pale citizens of the northernmost continent on Inkirins, with half the year spent in darkness and brutal cold, the inhabitants rarely spent enough time outside to even need darker skin. Most of the cities on that continent were built underground, Nivik rarely saw daylight until he was twenty two and drafted into military service.
Having a surprising lack of emergencies on the base that morning, the medic decided to go to one of the food dispensaries in the hospital. The serving line was abysmally long, but he quietly took his place. On the menu was a choice between green nutrient paste with bread, brown nutrient paste with bread and gray nutrient paste with crackers. The three nurses in front of him all eagerly grinned as the elderly human server behind the counter plopped down huge scoops of gray nutrient past on their trays. Apparently the gray paste was the favorite of the day, but Nivik was never one to trust gray food and politely opted for the green paste instead.
"Ya sure you wanna do dat?" the human female asked, exposing a brown, hole riddled smile. "Da cook cut 'imself and bled tha green t'day. Bled all over tha place too, looked like he cut one of them there arteries or somethin,”
The blond medic swallowed in disgust, peering into the vat of gray paste.
"You didn't throw it out and make more?"
"Nope!" said the server, "Ya'lls government's cuttin' nutrition funds again, we's gotta make these here supplies last until tha next shipment comes in in thirty days so we's gots orders not to throw nothin' away. B'sides, some of tha folks are eatin' it anyways."
"I see." Nivik said with a disappointed frown. "I'll have the brown then."
He walked away with his tray in hand, feeling quite sad about his meal. Green paste had always been his favorite; they rarely seemed to serve it in the cafeterias though. There was always gray paste available, it was well loved and well stocked due to its popularity. But Nivik had always found gray to be rather suspicious. It had a vague meat like flavor to it that he couldn't trust, he couldn't even think of any gray meats in the naturally occurring world. Brown always seemed mud like, its flavor was very band and understated and was mostly like eating solidified river water. The green however was unique in its rich and robust flavor. He could tell it was plant based yet strangely sweet. It had an almost addictive quality and he gobbled down a huge plate of it every opportunity he got. Or at least when it wasn't contaminated with human blood.
The humans, in his opinion, should not be trusted to prepare food. How they were ever trusted with such an important and potentially dangerous task was beyond him. The humans looked a great deal like Inkirins externally. A similar range of voices and skin colors were present among them. But internally there were key differences, the most notable being that Inkirin blood contained high concentrations of nickel in addition to iron, making it nearly impossible for humans and Inkirin to breed together. But then, why would they want to? Humans scored far below average on standardized intelligence tests. Having a conversation with one was much like speaking to a small child or animal. It was a sad realization to Nivik that he had more genetically in common with the enemy, the alien and strange Maxian, than he did the humans. The human race was mentally stunted to be sure but they were at least harmless.
He was told in school, of course, that the humans were not always so backward and stupid. That long time ago they had been even more technologically advanced than the Inkiri. They had weapons of immense power and were just beginning their ventures into space travel when things began to go wrong. Instead of finding global unity and forming a single, great nation as the Inkirins did, they squabbled amongst themselves. There were many nations and each had complaints about the others. As these things always end, they managed to destroy most of their population with biological weapons. The survivors were left defective to say the least.
When the Inkiri people made contact with the Earthlings, their world had a population of about two hundred thousand. The land had been raped by radiation fallout and the remnants of many wars. Thanks to the ever kind and benevolent leaders of the Great Inkirin Nation, a deal was made. The remaining humans had been brought to one of the small inhabitable worlds of the Inkira solar system. For a clean, safe place to live with free supplies of food and medical care, the humans agreed to spend their able bodied adulthood working, without pay, to provide the Inkiri people with food and manufactured goods. This was an agreement that was vital to the war effort. It freed up many young Inkirin citizens to serve in the military and protect their world from the Maxian scourge.
As he glanced across the dining area, Nivik noticed a familiar gray pilot’s hat with familiar pink stitching repairing a tear in the back. It belonged to none other than Comrade Novi, one of several rescue-tran pilots stationed at the hospital. He had run field training mission with her some months back and they became quite close friends. He approached her table quietly in hopes of surprising her, as he got closer he couldn't help but grimace as he saw her shovel a huge spoonful of green nutrient paste into her mouth. She seemed to relish every moment of it, blood and all.
In a fleeting moment of childish playfulness, Nivik decided it would be quite amusing to jokingly steal the pilot's hat. He managed to get within arm’s length when he decided to snatch it by the earpiece and hold it up in the air like some prized hunting trophy, still balancing his tray of food in his other hand. It was almost as time itself had slowed when Novi began to spin out of her seat, her light, freckled skin flushed red, her pale green eyes darkened and had sunken into a scower, her choppy brown hair wafting through the air as she raised her fist. Nivik tried to force himself to duck as he saw her knuckles nearing his face, aimed with great precision for his nose. He was close, to getting away, but she managed to clip his eye socket with great force. She was a very tall, stately woman who spent a great deal of her time lifting weights and grunting. So it came as little surprise to the meek medic when he found himself falling backward, his food and glasses and his friend's hat all in flight in the air above him. At the point of contact between her fist and his face there was a huge explosion of purple lightning across his field of vision, it was quite beautiful. But it quickly faded to black, and he could barely feel it at all when the back of his head struck the cement floor.
It seemed as if only seconds had passed before Nivik was once more opening his eyes. Or at least trying to open them, it appeared that one of his eyes, the right, was sealed shut by some strange and sticky force he did not recognize. His hand wandered toward his face, groping drunkenly when he felt a bandage over his eye. More importantly, he quickly realized he was lying in a bed, staring at a mold spotted, tile ceiling. It was quite curious to him, being in bed. He remembered just moments before he was in the food dispensary playing a practical joke on his good friend, but how he ended up in one of the many hospital beds was beyond him. With excellent timing, Specialist Novi leaned over him, grinning nervously. It was a look he had seen before, a look that brought back memories from their time training together. She had the exact same expression after watching Comrade Jyn, a member of their squad from back then fall to his death down a one hundred meter deep ravine. It was a grin of impending doom and Nivik could only think to ask one thing.
"What happened comrade? Who died?"
"You always were a dramatic one, Comrade Nivik" the pilot replied, her grin faded, quickly replaced by a stern, emotionless expression. "I really am sorry about your eye, though. Dr. Reik said it should be alright in a few days, your cornea was scratched by your glasses when I hit you... And there's a slight concussion"
"You hit me?" Nivik asked with a shaken quality to his already uneasy voice. He couldn't fathom what he could possibly have done to incite violence from such a normally calm and even tempered woman.
"Yeah, you stole my hat" she explained, "I didn't realize it was you- you scared me so I just reacted. Nivik, I really a sorry but you can't just sneak up on people like that without expecting to get hurt. There's a war going out there, everyone is more than a little tense."
Finally he was beginning to remember what happened. He was trying to play an innocent joke, he hadn't seen her in over a month and just wanted to say hello. His vision was very blurry without his glasses, but he looked down and found himself in a hospital gown, an intravenous drip was attached to his hand, as well as a patient identification tag. He could tell he was in one of the main wards as he could see several rows of beds in the room, some blocked off from view of the other patients by teal plastic curtains.
"Oh, sorry" the pilot said as she reached into her pocket, "I grabbed your glasses for you; they were broken so I fixed them while I was waiting for you to wake up. I'll tell you, this has been a hell of a way to spend my day off."
Blinking his one usable eye, Nivik slide his eyeglasses onto his face, they fit quite awkwardly over the bandage, but at least he could see again. He still felt somewhat out of it, but in a pleasant way that caused him to wonder just what was in the IV.
"How long was I unconscious?"
"For about three hours only." she said in a chipper tone. "But the tethramine probably contributed to that. I made sure they took good care of you and gave you the good drugs."
"Great" he mused aloud, "On top of the eye wound and concussion I also get to be strung out on highly addictive pain killers."
"Well what are friends for, medic?" Novi said, playfully slapping him on the shoulder.
"So tell me something, Novi, you've been gone for over a month, where have you been? You said you had the day off, no one gets a day off unless they've just returned from a combat mission."
"Well the infantry forces needed some assistance. I can't say where I went but I can say this much, do your best not to get permanently attached to any frontline combat units if you value your limbs or your life. It's amazing that those Maxian bastards can use outdated weapons like landmines so effectively. "
Nivik frowned, "That bad, huh?"
"Yeah," she said, sucking in a deep breath, "They needed pilots to fly some simple personnel transports, but I ended up spending most of my mission using my pod as medic-trans. We were under pretty heavy fire most of the time, sleep was rarely an option, then the third week there those little green bastards broke out the Nrivine-gas. I would have been dead if I hadn't been in my pod at the time. I was just lucky, a lot of others weren't...."
She seemed to lose her train of thought and started to stare past Nivik as some unknown object in the distance. It quickly became clear to him why she had reacted to a playful gesture with brute physical force. It also explained why she was eagerly gulping down the green nutrient paste in the food dispensary earlier. Combat missions leave anyone starving for real food, no matter how unsanitary. He could also remember with great clarity how he felt when he came back from his last combat mission. There were several weeks spent with virtually no sleep, and though the memory had become a faint haze, he could remember feeling immense paranoia, and an almost disembodied hyper vigilance of his surroundings. Though he never gave anyone a concussion, there had been a very unfortunate incident involving a tranquilizer syringe and a nurse who seemed to have it out for him. He was convinced that she was actually a Maxian spy, but thankfully his attempt to stab her with it was interrupted. Assaulting a fellow soldier with a weapon was a criminally punishable offense.
"It's ok, Novi. This doesn't really matter," he said, pointing at his bandage, "don't worry about my eye, I'm sure it will heal just fine. If you need to talk you know where to find me. Just for the love of our Great Leader, don't talk to the base counselor about any of this."
The bluish haze in the air couldn't possibly be healthy, the sun slowly made it ascent into the sky, casting an eerie cyanotic luster on the skin of every soldier in the formation. Nivik couldn't quite determine whether the cold, acidic glaze covering his skin was his own sweat or more of the chemical fog. The commander made his way down the line, a gray ventilator mask of almost comic proportions strapped to his face. Shard like strands of red hair shooting out in all directions under the rubber webbing and his dark eyes obscured by the even darker, reflective lenses of his new found headgear.
The fog wasn't harmful, at least not immediately. But as Nivik stood at attention, he couldn't help but feel more and more panicked as the coughing of the men behind him increased. None of them had yet been ordered to don their ventilators, only the commander was wearing his. And though he couldn't see his face, he was positive that the officer was grinning. The man was a true sadist, he seemed to illicit a strange sense of joy from watching his personnel hack and wheeze and struggle for every breath whenever the north winds blew in the acid fog. Still, no one dared put on the masks until instructed to do so. For putting on the ventilators would mean they were no longer in proper uniform while on active duty, and being in improper uniform while on active duty was criminally punishable offense.
The fluid in Nivik's lungs was rapidly growing like floor waters and ever breath he took felt like razor blades running down the back of his throat. Mucus streamed from his nose and down his face and he was panting with an audible hiss. The gagging and wheezing of everyone around him was becoming more intense, and he wondered who would be the first to start coughing blood of lose consciousness. It was like this every few months, whenever a bad wind storm would come in. He just hoped with all of his heart that he wouldn't lose consciousness again, because losing consciousness in formation without direct authorization was a criminally punishable offense.
A second man came running toward the formation, ventilator attached and arms waving about wildly like a drowning victim. Nivik could tell from the wild, kinky hair sprouting from under the ventilator straps that it was none other than Dr. Reik, the chief of surgery and the head of fine military hospital where Nivik and his comrades were stationed, on this fine and lovely, desolate, isolated, scaldingly hot, swamp covered moon. A moon so lovely in fact that they affectionately referred to it as "Outpost Bloodbog, home of the lingering stench".
The doctor started yelling orders through his mask, his voice was mutilated and transmitted through a small square speaker at the front. It had the excellent sound quality of grinding glass and radio static and as a result was mostly unintelligible. That is until Nivik and the others focused hard enough over their own wheezing to hear.
"Damn it! Put on your masks!" the doctor rasped through his speaker, “I'm giving all of you an order! Commander Dross, are you trying to kill my medics or are you just mentally deficient?"
An instant wave of relief hit the formation as everyone scrambled for their leg packs en mass. Nivik found his and fastened the thing to his skull. He sucked air through the mouth piece and didn't care that it tasted like antiseptic and dust, he could breathe again. He could almost feel his individual blood cells reoxygenate, he could feel the color returning to his skin. The sheer joy of being able to breathe again was tangible in the air, and though he couldn't see it behind their masks, he was sure all twenty nine of the other medics were grinning and beaming with delight like he was- though a small part of him had to admit, the new found euphoria was probably just a result of brain cells being destroyed by hypoxia.
"You're going to scrub healthy muscle off, right down to the bone if you aren't careful."
Nivik looked down at the wire-bristled brush in his hand and then back up at the nurse in front of him, making snide, backhanded, and completely accurate remarks. The patient was in a chemically induced coma, over half of her body had been seared off in a training accident involving a food ration heater and several gallons of aircraft fuel. She had once been an excellent pilot, one with beautiful skin and full, plump lips and a voice like satin- or so the young medic liked to imagine at least. Now she was covered in necrotizing burn tissue. Where there once had been supple flesh was now marred with granulated scabs and layer upon layer of dead, gray skin just sloughing away in sheets. She had been admitted the evening before, and since the burn nurse charged with caring for the most gruesome and horrifically injured patients was in the hospital herself as a patient (being treated after that morning's toxic gas incident) Nivik was awarded the responsibility of helping to care for the patients in the burn unit.
With a sense of dread and a metal brush and soap in hand he had set forth to take care of the slightly revolting task of scrubbing away all of her dead flesh and charred debris. He had a few moments before injected her with a powerful anesthetic known as tethramine, just in case the chemically induced coma wasn't quite as coma-like as initially intended. But, even the sensation of dead skin being sheared away with a scrub brush wasn't enough to keep him interested. His mind was distracted by other things, mostly the intense, sharp pain in the center of his head and what was going to be served for lunch later. That was until he was rudely interrupted by nurse Keit.
She snapped on a set of gloves and grabbed the brush from his hand. The slender dark features of her face scrunched and contorted into a grimace as she stared Nivik down.
"I'll be taking over, medic." she sneered, "I don't know who decided it would be a good idea to let a body-bagger take care of her. We're supposed to save patients here, not kill them."
A body-bagger, an insult often given to combat medics such as himself due to the low survival rates on the battlefield and in field hospitals. It was an apt description during war time; he knew the medics spent more time collecting the dead than actually saving lives- especially in the wake of the newest Maxian anti-personnel weapons. Clear, odorless, tasteless nerve gases that could easily kill everyone within a ten mile radius. There really wasn't any to save people from that sort of decimation.
But, Nivik wasn't in a combat zone, aside from the occasional morning formation hazing incident no one had been exposed to nerve gas, bombs, or deadly radiation. Just freak training accident victims like what created the charred, human form laying in the bed in front of him. He pushed his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat; he never had been especially great at confrontation, especially with women who were easily a head taller than him.
"Are you questioning my patient care abilities, Comrade Keit?” was all he managed to squeak out. He sounded like an idiot and he knew it.
"Yes, Medic Nivik, I am. I've seen your proficiency reports. Your patients die so much I have to wonder if you're not just a covert operative here to kill enemy spies" she laughed "I kid of course, you're just inept. Look at what you did!" she said, motioning toward the patient's chest with a gloved finger "You're destroying healthy tissue. You aren't here to help, you seem to just be here to mutilate people! I need you to leave my burn unit now. You're relieved, go back to your designation before you do any more damage."
"Comrade Keit, I spent three months of my training on-"
"Save it Medic and leave this unit before I have you removed by force. Disobeying a direct order from a superior is a criminally punishable offense."
With a sigh, the medic nodded and turned for the door, removing his gloves and slamming them into a wastebasket with a wet "plop" on his way out. He had spent his first three months of training at a burn unit on Tregnoria Alpha Base, twelve hours a day of washing and scrubbing victims of every kind of burn imaginable. Yet somehow Nurse Blah was right, he was almost wearing a hole into the patient's sternum, he had been distracted. On the bright side, he was thrown out just in time for the mess hall to start serving its mid-day meal.
The hospital was a massive complex. An ugly monstrosity towering above the ground in shades of mold and gray, below the ground snaked literal miles of corridors and catacombs, research laboratories and patient wards. Like all of the buildings in the Zorkari Base complex, the walls of the facility were thick composite steel, bubble-like red glass windows bolted to the sides made sure the prevalent flood waters of the moon never leaked through inside. Lined with borrowed force field technology, the windows also made sure that no one or thing escaped the premises without the proper clearance.
Zorkari Base was a vital outpost for all Inkirin operations in the war against the Maxian scum. With a population of some two thousand military personnel and one of the largest friendly hospitals in Inkirin space. Just some fifteen years before it was a much avoided, swamp covered moon. But on this day it was the epicenter of the Inkirin war effort.
Nivik walked through one of the many gray, winding corridors of the hospital. His hands buried in his equally drab gray medic's jumpsuit, he quietly observed the staff passing by. There was a great deal of diversity among them. Inkirins from all corners of the world, a tall, dark skinned doctor with a long, pointed nose and curly hair piled on his head in a bun, another medic with an almost bluish pallor and brown hair, presumably from the Trinik region where the levels of silver in the water supply are so high it tints the skin of all of the residents. Consequently, they never have particularly long life spans.
Then there was Nivik, his short blond hair pushed back and always standing straight on end. He had all of the physically imposing presece of a preteen girl. He couldn't have been much larger than a meter and a half in height and had spindly, long limbs, covered in a thin fuzz of blond hair that gave him the appearance of some small, strange, tree dwelling primate. He always assumed that his small stature was the reason he was chosen to become a medic in spite of his aversion to blood. That and his awful vision, he never would have been chosen to become an aircraft gunner and certainly not a pilot. Thanks to his heterochromia, his left eye was had virtually no pigment, a pale, ghastly blue to the right eye's hazel. This resulted in him spending most of his time outdoors either wearing goggles with nearly black lenses or walking around with his left eye clamped shut. Sunlight was always quite painful, even on overcast days. It was also in thanks to this defect that he was one of few Inkirins still wearig eyeglasses, with a few exceptions, most common visual disabilities could be cured with simple surgery. He wore a sleek, clear plastic frame to avoid drawing too much attention to his defect, but try as he might, it was always noticed.
But one thing he had in common with his comrades in the corridor and in fact all Inkirins was the complex array of leopard-spot like freckles covering his scalp, temples, shoulders, and streaking down his back and the sides of his body. Different lineages have different patterns and colors and arrangements of spots, but barring some freak incidence of albinism, they were present on all Inkirin people. His own were light tan, barely noticeable in some lighting. He was one of the fair haired, pale citizens of the northernmost continent on Inkirins, with half the year spent in darkness and brutal cold, the inhabitants rarely spent enough time outside to even need darker skin. Most of the cities on that continent were built underground, Nivik rarely saw daylight until he was twenty two and drafted into military service.
Having a surprising lack of emergencies on the base that morning, the medic decided to go to one of the food dispensaries in the hospital. The serving line was abysmally long, but he quietly took his place. On the menu was a choice between green nutrient paste with bread, brown nutrient paste with bread and gray nutrient paste with crackers. The three nurses in front of him all eagerly grinned as the elderly human server behind the counter plopped down huge scoops of gray nutrient past on their trays. Apparently the gray paste was the favorite of the day, but Nivik was never one to trust gray food and politely opted for the green paste instead.
"Ya sure you wanna do dat?" the human female asked, exposing a brown, hole riddled smile. "Da cook cut 'imself and bled tha green t'day. Bled all over tha place too, looked like he cut one of them there arteries or somethin,”
The blond medic swallowed in disgust, peering into the vat of gray paste.
"You didn't throw it out and make more?"
"Nope!" said the server, "Ya'lls government's cuttin' nutrition funds again, we's gotta make these here supplies last until tha next shipment comes in in thirty days so we's gots orders not to throw nothin' away. B'sides, some of tha folks are eatin' it anyways."
"I see." Nivik said with a disappointed frown. "I'll have the brown then."
He walked away with his tray in hand, feeling quite sad about his meal. Green paste had always been his favorite; they rarely seemed to serve it in the cafeterias though. There was always gray paste available, it was well loved and well stocked due to its popularity. But Nivik had always found gray to be rather suspicious. It had a vague meat like flavor to it that he couldn't trust, he couldn't even think of any gray meats in the naturally occurring world. Brown always seemed mud like, its flavor was very band and understated and was mostly like eating solidified river water. The green however was unique in its rich and robust flavor. He could tell it was plant based yet strangely sweet. It had an almost addictive quality and he gobbled down a huge plate of it every opportunity he got. Or at least when it wasn't contaminated with human blood.
The humans, in his opinion, should not be trusted to prepare food. How they were ever trusted with such an important and potentially dangerous task was beyond him. The humans looked a great deal like Inkirins externally. A similar range of voices and skin colors were present among them. But internally there were key differences, the most notable being that Inkirin blood contained high concentrations of nickel in addition to iron, making it nearly impossible for humans and Inkirin to breed together. But then, why would they want to? Humans scored far below average on standardized intelligence tests. Having a conversation with one was much like speaking to a small child or animal. It was a sad realization to Nivik that he had more genetically in common with the enemy, the alien and strange Maxian, than he did the humans. The human race was mentally stunted to be sure but they were at least harmless.
He was told in school, of course, that the humans were not always so backward and stupid. That long time ago they had been even more technologically advanced than the Inkiri. They had weapons of immense power and were just beginning their ventures into space travel when things began to go wrong. Instead of finding global unity and forming a single, great nation as the Inkirins did, they squabbled amongst themselves. There were many nations and each had complaints about the others. As these things always end, they managed to destroy most of their population with biological weapons. The survivors were left defective to say the least.
When the Inkiri people made contact with the Earthlings, their world had a population of about two hundred thousand. The land had been raped by radiation fallout and the remnants of many wars. Thanks to the ever kind and benevolent leaders of the Great Inkirin Nation, a deal was made. The remaining humans had been brought to one of the small inhabitable worlds of the Inkira solar system. For a clean, safe place to live with free supplies of food and medical care, the humans agreed to spend their able bodied adulthood working, without pay, to provide the Inkiri people with food and manufactured goods. This was an agreement that was vital to the war effort. It freed up many young Inkirin citizens to serve in the military and protect their world from the Maxian scourge.
As he glanced across the dining area, Nivik noticed a familiar gray pilot’s hat with familiar pink stitching repairing a tear in the back. It belonged to none other than Comrade Novi, one of several rescue-tran pilots stationed at the hospital. He had run field training mission with her some months back and they became quite close friends. He approached her table quietly in hopes of surprising her, as he got closer he couldn't help but grimace as he saw her shovel a huge spoonful of green nutrient paste into her mouth. She seemed to relish every moment of it, blood and all.
In a fleeting moment of childish playfulness, Nivik decided it would be quite amusing to jokingly steal the pilot's hat. He managed to get within arm’s length when he decided to snatch it by the earpiece and hold it up in the air like some prized hunting trophy, still balancing his tray of food in his other hand. It was almost as time itself had slowed when Novi began to spin out of her seat, her light, freckled skin flushed red, her pale green eyes darkened and had sunken into a scower, her choppy brown hair wafting through the air as she raised her fist. Nivik tried to force himself to duck as he saw her knuckles nearing his face, aimed with great precision for his nose. He was close, to getting away, but she managed to clip his eye socket with great force. She was a very tall, stately woman who spent a great deal of her time lifting weights and grunting. So it came as little surprise to the meek medic when he found himself falling backward, his food and glasses and his friend's hat all in flight in the air above him. At the point of contact between her fist and his face there was a huge explosion of purple lightning across his field of vision, it was quite beautiful. But it quickly faded to black, and he could barely feel it at all when the back of his head struck the cement floor.
It seemed as if only seconds had passed before Nivik was once more opening his eyes. Or at least trying to open them, it appeared that one of his eyes, the right, was sealed shut by some strange and sticky force he did not recognize. His hand wandered toward his face, groping drunkenly when he felt a bandage over his eye. More importantly, he quickly realized he was lying in a bed, staring at a mold spotted, tile ceiling. It was quite curious to him, being in bed. He remembered just moments before he was in the food dispensary playing a practical joke on his good friend, but how he ended up in one of the many hospital beds was beyond him. With excellent timing, Specialist Novi leaned over him, grinning nervously. It was a look he had seen before, a look that brought back memories from their time training together. She had the exact same expression after watching Comrade Jyn, a member of their squad from back then fall to his death down a one hundred meter deep ravine. It was a grin of impending doom and Nivik could only think to ask one thing.
"What happened comrade? Who died?"
"You always were a dramatic one, Comrade Nivik" the pilot replied, her grin faded, quickly replaced by a stern, emotionless expression. "I really am sorry about your eye, though. Dr. Reik said it should be alright in a few days, your cornea was scratched by your glasses when I hit you... And there's a slight concussion"
"You hit me?" Nivik asked with a shaken quality to his already uneasy voice. He couldn't fathom what he could possibly have done to incite violence from such a normally calm and even tempered woman.
"Yeah, you stole my hat" she explained, "I didn't realize it was you- you scared me so I just reacted. Nivik, I really a sorry but you can't just sneak up on people like that without expecting to get hurt. There's a war going out there, everyone is more than a little tense."
Finally he was beginning to remember what happened. He was trying to play an innocent joke, he hadn't seen her in over a month and just wanted to say hello. His vision was very blurry without his glasses, but he looked down and found himself in a hospital gown, an intravenous drip was attached to his hand, as well as a patient identification tag. He could tell he was in one of the main wards as he could see several rows of beds in the room, some blocked off from view of the other patients by teal plastic curtains.
"Oh, sorry" the pilot said as she reached into her pocket, "I grabbed your glasses for you; they were broken so I fixed them while I was waiting for you to wake up. I'll tell you, this has been a hell of a way to spend my day off."
Blinking his one usable eye, Nivik slide his eyeglasses onto his face, they fit quite awkwardly over the bandage, but at least he could see again. He still felt somewhat out of it, but in a pleasant way that caused him to wonder just what was in the IV.
"How long was I unconscious?"
"For about three hours only." she said in a chipper tone. "But the tethramine probably contributed to that. I made sure they took good care of you and gave you the good drugs."
"Great" he mused aloud, "On top of the eye wound and concussion I also get to be strung out on highly addictive pain killers."
"Well what are friends for, medic?" Novi said, playfully slapping him on the shoulder.
"So tell me something, Novi, you've been gone for over a month, where have you been? You said you had the day off, no one gets a day off unless they've just returned from a combat mission."
"Well the infantry forces needed some assistance. I can't say where I went but I can say this much, do your best not to get permanently attached to any frontline combat units if you value your limbs or your life. It's amazing that those Maxian bastards can use outdated weapons like landmines so effectively. "
Nivik frowned, "That bad, huh?"
"Yeah," she said, sucking in a deep breath, "They needed pilots to fly some simple personnel transports, but I ended up spending most of my mission using my pod as medic-trans. We were under pretty heavy fire most of the time, sleep was rarely an option, then the third week there those little green bastards broke out the Nrivine-gas. I would have been dead if I hadn't been in my pod at the time. I was just lucky, a lot of others weren't...."
She seemed to lose her train of thought and started to stare past Nivik as some unknown object in the distance. It quickly became clear to him why she had reacted to a playful gesture with brute physical force. It also explained why she was eagerly gulping down the green nutrient paste in the food dispensary earlier. Combat missions leave anyone starving for real food, no matter how unsanitary. He could also remember with great clarity how he felt when he came back from his last combat mission. There were several weeks spent with virtually no sleep, and though the memory had become a faint haze, he could remember feeling immense paranoia, and an almost disembodied hyper vigilance of his surroundings. Though he never gave anyone a concussion, there had been a very unfortunate incident involving a tranquilizer syringe and a nurse who seemed to have it out for him. He was convinced that she was actually a Maxian spy, but thankfully his attempt to stab her with it was interrupted. Assaulting a fellow soldier with a weapon was a criminally punishable offense.
"It's ok, Novi. This doesn't really matter," he said, pointing at his bandage, "don't worry about my eye, I'm sure it will heal just fine. If you need to talk you know where to find me. Just for the love of our Great Leader, don't talk to the base counselor about any of this."