WHAT REMAINS, Chapter 9: Chorus of Shame
Sora paced the hallway, pushing hair out of her eyes, cold-limbed and sick to her stomach, her one fleshy hand shaking. Her cyber hand never shook; somehow that aggravated her further.
“Damn it,” she whispered out loud, like letting whisps of steam out of a pressurized system. “Get your shit together, Kuromoto.”
Dad used to say those same words to himself. Sora had heard him a million times… especially after he came back from six months in hyperspace, holding tight to one leg with his teeth clenched in a hospital bed, trying with all his might not to scream. He’d terrified Sora; worse still, she’d wanted to kick him and lash at him for refusing to cut off his legs, get cybernetics, and rejoin the fight against the Praezorians. Just get your ass together for real and get back into space, you fucking bastard. Now she said it to herself, brutally, giving no quarter… because the enemy never did.
Who knew what would happen in the next four weeks? Would Hayden go on an away mission and get sniped by something she could have stopped, because Indoc had locked her up here as a crazy person?
Fuck, fuck. Sora paced faster, mind spinning out like a ground car on black ice.
Now seeing Novak, who had the exact cybernetics Dad would have gotten, gave Sora pause. That much replacement, all the way up to the lower spine, the strain on the pelvis and hips. The weight and the constant pain in the remaining joints, the phantom agony, the way it clearly aged a man not even thirty…. No easy fix. Novak had lost his legs; he didn’t have a choice about it, unlike Dad. Sora could nearly see, through a tiny crack in the heavy door between them, why Dad refused.
Then the howling rage came flooding back. We were dying and getting fucked over and blown up in space by the Praezorians, getting blasted half-crazy by mind weapons, trying desperately to protect Earth from an existential threat, and Dad laid in a bed and refused to cut his fucking legs off. He was an experienced captain and wouldn’t get off his ass to help. He gave up his damn ship, and sat around snarling at Mom and rolling Teli’s fucking life out flat for years. Fuck him.
“Kuromoto?” a woman’s voice interrupted her. Sora stopped pacing.
They’d sent Sei out to get her. Oh crap, don’t even look at me. Sora fixed on the ceiling for help. You’re too fucking beautiful.
“Right. Been longer than a minute,” Sora said, embarrassed. “Sorry. Be right in.”
“It’s okay. They paused everything while you cooled down—except a sharp reprimand for Remy.” Sei kept a bracing tone, face smooth with reserve. “You alright?”
“Just need to get back to the Fenris, that’s all.” Sora kept her eyes averted. “Wish I could just have them regen my goddamn brain, give it back to me less broken.”
Sei laughed once in a quick, burbling explosion. “I asked our ship’s doctor if she could do that. Not so simple, I guess.” She watched Sora for a minute. “Think one of your buddies or teammates is gonna die if you’re not there?”
Sora thought about Hayden and the Fenris marines, the whole Wolfpack running around on some shitstorm planet or on an upstart colonial base. Goddamn Stevens and Kimani always running a little too far ahead, pretending they didn’t hear Hayden until he barked at them, or until Sora slammed one of their heads into the dirt… stopping them before they got their hotdogging asses shot.
“Whole bunch of them,” she confessed. “I know it’s arrogant. Our XO knows what he’s doing, and the Wolfpack’s a well-oiled machine. My arm’s expensive for a reason, you know? And I’m part of that machine.” The whole machine, the whole of Fenris—I’m part of it, I steer it and protect it. Now it’s out there without me, with Perkins on helm, goddamn it.
“Yeah. I get it.” Sei paused, and Sora saw her cock her head out of the corner of one eye. “It’s not arrogant, Kuromoto. It’s normal. My team’s out at Kapstar right now without me, and I want to smash a window with a chair and break out of here. Not like I’d get very far, but still.”
Sora flashed her a quick grin, finally meeting her pretty eyes, augh. “I’ll drive the getaway car, if you can get us to the ground alive. It’s a long way down.”
Sei reflected her smile—big and white and radiant and…. Fuck, don’t look at me. Sora swallowed and dashed her eyes away a little desperately, knowing she got like this—frenetic, observant, hyper-sexual—when stressed, and boy-fucking-howdy was she stressed.
“Come on. Let’s get back in there.” Sei jerked her head at the door, and Sora followed her in… trying not to focus on Sei’s legs, muscular and powerful and beautifully shaped, obvious even in the boxy, baggy scrubs, capped off by slipper socks. She even looked good in slipper socks. How?
“Welcome back, Sora,” Dr. Wang said. Crane grabbed Sora’s chair for her and repositioned it. His steady gaze looked understanding rather than fearful. Dr. Wang continued. “We have a policy here. Before returning to the circle, we stand by our chairs, apologize to the group for losing our cool and resorting to violence, and we explain why we did it.”
Fuck me, Sora thought, wincing as she returned to her chair, standing beside it. The technical types regarded her with fear, alarm… disgust, disdain… and she couldn’t look Novak in the face.
“You’re asking me why? Isn’t that obvious?” Sora fixed her eyes on the floor.
“It’s not as obvious as you think,” Dr. Wang explained. “There’s a large difference between feeling understandable anger in the face of insults on the one hand, and having such a physical reaction on the other. You’re very comfortable with using your body, your physicality, to solve problems. Is that a fair assessment?”
Sora swallowed, turning burning eyes on Dr. Wang. “I wanted to do something else. I wanted to pick Remy up by the throat and ask him how the fuck he thinks I ended up with this arm, but I didn’t want to hurt him. So I kicked the chair.”
“What arm?” Dr. Wang asked neutrally. “The one you keep hiding with your sweater and the way you’ve been sitting?”
Sora looked away angrily.
“You want to have it out with me, Kuromoto?” Remy snarled, his arms folded. “Come on over. Try it. Let’s see a commissioned officer choke out a fucking engineer. You’ve already got your boot on my throat—might as well go the whole hog, right?”
“Man, shut the fuck up.” Sei leaned suddenly toward Remy. “Doing this group therapy shit is bad enough, without your fake revolutionary bullcrap. We’re all in the same service here.”
Remy’s jaw worked, but he said nothing this time, just sat back in his chair stewing. Dr. Wang raised an eyebrow at Sora.
“Fine,” Sora said abruptly. “Sorry for losing my cool and taking it out on the chair, everyone. Next time I’ll just kick the shit out the engineer, and you can all watch, like the heavens intended.”
Dr. Wang waved Sora into her chair, as if she had to by some holy technicality, and Sora flumped onto her ass… before she remembered it was Novak’s turn still, and she’d wanted to be absent for this.
“Jaesan? I’m sure you’ve had lots of time to consider your answer by this point.” Dr. Kalgari sounded richly satisfied by this turn of events.
Some evil gravity yanked Sora’s eyes to Novak’s, and she found him looking back grimly. For Novak, admitting to what he’d done in front of a fellow officer gave it a kind of power, made it real in a way she definitely recognized. He kept her gaze, steady and respectful.
“This shithead lieutenant transferred to my ship recently. Twenty-three years old. Kept making comments about my cane, how slow I was getting around the bridge to turn off alerts, offering to ‘help’… just to point it out to everyone, wherever we were. Made complaints that I couldn’t get to the controls in time, wrote up official reports questioning my fitness, aired ‘concerns’ in the mess to all the ensigns, until it felt like a fucking movement. Everyone was talking about it. He wouldn’t fucking drop it, no matter how much I asked him, talked to him quietly, asked the third officer to have conversations with him about it…”
He trailed off, looking a little bit like a man falling, face pale and pinched.
“Jaesan,” Kalgari prompted from the back of the room. “Go on. You’re almost there.” To the juicy part, Sora could imagine the guy saying. That might not have been fair; he looked and sounded very serious.
Novak blew out his breath. “Fine, Kalgari. You wanna tell the story? You’ve obviously got my jacket.” He shook his head, eyes flinty, before he went on. “One day I just fucking broke. This LT tripped over my cane and made some shitty comment on the floor, but he was down there already, with his underbelly exposed, and it’s like… like someone chummed the fucking waters. I just… I jumped the little bastard and snapped his arm, one of his femurs, kicked his skull in… kept going and going, and I don’t even know how long it went or what I was shouting, until someone dragged me off him and yelled some sense into me. Little shit’s still in the hospital. Alive, thankfully.”
The room fell so goddamn silent that Sora could hear her own heart beating, a drum inside her throat. She’d felt the power of Novak’s twin cybernetic legs and his spine, just for a couple seconds when she’d stopped him from jumping Crane, and she could imagine them cracking a guy’s skull, like a mallet over a watermelon. She couldn’t imagine Novak in the act, though—that same man who had rested his hand on her shoulder and urged her to go back to sleep, reassured her, provided a solid presence in their dark hell of a bunkroom, keeping her shitstorm of a brain safe.
Novak held her eyes for another three seconds past the end of his story, before looking down suddenly at his hands. She had no idea what the guy had seen, or even what her own face looked like.
“Fuck,” he whispered to himself, though everyone could hear him. Kalgari pounced
“Why do you say that, Jaesan?”
“None of your goddamn business, Doc.”
Wang interjected calmly. “Thank you for telling us that part of your story.” She made a quick note on her tablet. “Chana?”
The woman next to Novak shook herself, still leaning away from him slightly. “Uh. I kept stealing UltraMorph from the first aid kits and shooting up secretly in the nurses’ bunks, until an attending found me passed out in the head.”
This was so anticlimactic after Novak that several people laughed, just letting the tension out of the room and their bodies—but much as Sora would normally join in, she couldn’t.
She kept herself small and tight and confined, holding onto the sides of her chair, and she could hear the hard material starting to crack and bend under the pressure of her cybernetic grip. It had been a long, long time since she’d been in close proximity, especially at vulnerable moments, with someone who could overpower her—but she was now, and her body knew it too. She couldn’t convince it not to react. Crane glanced over at her, hearing the creaking-cracking sounds, and again she noted a softness in his eyes.
“Viorel?” Dr. Wang asked, punctuating Sora’s cyclone of alarm.
The stringy, technical, long-haired scientist guy hadn’t reacted much to anything; he had a boring, monotone sort of voice, dead-sounding and hollow.
“I had a girlfriend from… from before.” Some pain leached into his voice. “It started a few weeks after I came back to the ship… with the positronic replacement neuro-architecture… these strange, unaccountable feelings and daydreams. I thought I was just letting my mind wander at first… but the thoughts kept getting worse and worse. I kept thinking about her eyes—how much I wanted to see the backs of them… how I would extract them… what they would feel like in my hands.”
Everyone stared at him, the circle of patients totally still and silent.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Crane muttered in an undertone, maneuvering a little to put his body between Viorel on his right side and Sei and Sora on his left.
“So what did you do?” Jaqi asked—totally unafraid, bless her. Leave it to the suicidal lady to give minus three fucks about the sociopathic freak with the eyeball fetish.
“One day I gave her a sedative and took them out,” Viorel explained calmly, shrugging. “Very carefully, of course. When my colleagues in Med Bay reinserted them, the eyes were still very usable. She had to be awake for the procedure, I’m afraid. I’ve been informed she’s traumatized by the experience. An unfortunate side effect.”
“Thank you, Viorel,” Dr. Wang said tightly. A little nausea leaked into her voice. Sora felt weirdly grateful for that. “Crane?”
“Do our doors lock?” Crane asked immediately. Sora couldn’t have seconded him harder if she’d kissed him and offered to help him fight a damn duel.
“Your doors are magnetized closed at 2100 every night,” Dr. Wang informed him in a trim voice. “Would you mind sharing, Crane?”
“Yeah… okay.” Crane shook a beefy leg in his scrubs, drawing Sora’s eyes to his delts. “We picked up a bunch of fucking Murder Tuna smuggling a couple of their mutant Murder Sharks out of Phoenix Alpha, trying to get them into hiding at Mu Arae. The Cetians came along, with their kumbaya ‘why-can’t-we-be-friends’ bullshit, trying to take them off our hands safely, but… those fucking tuna, the shit they did to us....” He paused, glaring into the middle distance, before going on. “Before the Cetians boarded, me and the rest of the Assault team took the prisoners down to the hangar, tied ‘em up behind an Apex, and flared the jets for a few seconds.” He flashed a joyless smile. “We gave the Cetians what was left of them.”
Sora sorted through that for a second. “Murder Sharks” wasn’t in her repertoire, but she felt pretty sure Crane meant the Sistal, a species of shark-like aliens created by the Z to fight for them. The Sistal were extremely aggressive and probably responsible for the Howl; after the Z had surrendered in April, they gave up the Sistal as war criminals to the Earth Republic, as one of the conditions of their surrender. Hiding some Sistal and smuggling them to Mu Arae several months later guaranteed a shitstorm—the Z were lucky they hadn’t sparked another war.
“Takshaka,” Novak said suddenly, looking at Crane like he could see through him.
“Huh? Yeah,” Crane said, sounding numb and surprised. “Been there since I got out of basic training.”
Novak nodded to him silently. The ERS Takshaka escaped Delta Pavonis, one of the two ships to do so. Sora realized Novak must have heard about this incident in the briefing chains, and he now knew that Crane had been at the Battle of Delta Pavonis and seen the fleet destroyed, along with himself on the Titan.
“Thank you, Crane,” Dr. Wang said. “Sora?”
“Uh,” Sora began, at a total loss. What was she even doing here? She was so goddamn ashamed about the thing with Wyn, but she felt stupid saying it out loud, like some vulnerable, wigged-out teenaged girl with too much power in one arm. Next to Crane and Novak, who had fought at Delta Pavonis? Next to suicidal engineers and drug-addicted Med Techs? A positronic sociopath? Pathetic.
“Come on.” Crane elbowed her bracingly. “Whatever it is, can’t be worse than Viorel here, am I right?”
“Yeah… I guess.” Sora took a couple small breaths, pausing to collect her thoughts. “I was seeing one of the Fenris marines for a few months. I got off shift after a long away mission and a lot of hand-to-hand, trying to get my head straight again. I thought I was alone in the bunkroom… when he came up behind me and put his arms around me… took me totally by surprise.”
Amazingly, like a goddamn miracle, she heard a chorus of little sympathetic groans and winces around the circle, like they knew what was coming and understood. Sora went on.
“I completely freaked out, threw him clear across the goddamn room, before I even recognized him. Broke three of his ribs, gave him a concussion, dislocated his shoulder. Scared the guy shitless. And he still… he was still glad to see me when I visited him in Med Bay, and that just… just fucking killed me.” She paused, trying to control the prickling in her eyes, refusing to look like she might cry in front of these people. Her voice had warbled out of control.
“Take a breath,” Dr. Wang told her softly. Sora wanted to punch Wang for pointing out her distress, and she went on, eyes fixed on the floor so she could get through this.
“I waited until he was on the mend to break things off, because like… I could tell he’s afraid of me now, and things wouldn’t be the same, and a bunch of the other marines were pissed at me. Like, really pissed—attack-me-in-my-sleep pissed, if I didn’t start hiding in different spots on the ship. At least… I think so. I guess I don’t know.”
Sora brought a shaking hand up to push hair out of her face, thinking back to sleeping in weird spots all over the ship. After the dozens of hours she’d spent drinking on the floor of the marines’ bunkroom with a raucous card game going, the shouts of wild laughter, Wyn’s arm around her… how he would kiss her suddenly and passionately in front of his friends. How proud he was to be with her, the way he could blot out the shadow of her shame and self-hatred, the fact that he showed her off, hungrily tore off her clothes, loved her fucked-up new body… even when she hated it with a will.
Sei punched her in the arm, taking Sora by surprise. She met Sei’s gorgeous honey eyes, trying to shut her brain up long enough to hear.
“Star Navy Marine Corps knows a thing or two about trauma and fucking up,” she said. “They’ll forgive you. Your guy might not get over it, because that’s a hell of a thing to go through, but I can promise they don’t hate you. And they’d never attack you in your sleep. If they haven’t dealt with the same shit already, they will someday.”
Sora nodded a little numbly, almost relieved, taking a minute to think. One of the shitty things about the end of things Wyn was the knock-on effect of fucking up her relationship with the entire Wolfpack; she hadn’t realized how much she’d liked them and enjoyed being one of them, until the circle closed against her to shield Wyn.
“That’s very supportive,” Dr. Wang said. “Thank you, Sei. I believe it’s your turn.”
“Oh.” Sei blinked, though she didn’t seem worried or freaked out. “I had a positronic skull insert with a bunch of replaced brain architecture. I started to hear voices and shit, so I shot myself in the head.”
Sora jolted so hard that her chair jumped. She wasn’t the only one; Ruoxian stood abruptly, head in her hands, walked around her chair, and sat back down again, eyes wide. Novak stayed stock still, white in the face, almost gray. Remy’s mouth went slack; he was the first one to speak.
“What? Fuck! What?!”
That about summed it up, but Sora had questions.
“Um. Okay. So, like… what happened to it? You don’t need it anymore?” Her voice swung up in pitch, unacceptably high.
Sei seemed completely unbothered by people’s reactions. “They were going to just build me another one, but there’s a Cetian on my ship from the Astral Directorate, and she apparently got a message out to Tau Ceti. I guess an Explorer showed up and offered to take me back to a Cetian hospital for an intense course of their Regen therapy. I’ve got deficits now, especially in my memory, but I feel mostly normal again.”
Novak stared at her, frowning. “So… no offense, but why are you here?”
Sei pulled down the front of her scrub shirt to show him an armored chest plate. Both her breasts were gone, replaced with the vague shape of them made by the chest plate. Sora had one of those too, which she completely hated, but at least she still had one tit to work with.
“I was impaled in an explosion,” Sei explained. “My memory of the last few years is pretty jumbled up now, and my roommates say I jump around in my own timeline, scream in my sleep and all that. Think I fit in now, Jase? Am I chrome enough for you?”
Novak looked down, maybe a little ashamed, but he didn’t answer.
“Very good,” Dr. Wang said. “Last but not least: Aki.”
Aki shifted uncomfortably. He had very dark eyes, making the fiber-optic sensors in his scanner vision painfully obvious and creepy.
“I don’t belong in this program. I like my cybernetics…. I’d never purposefully destroy them, and I have no issue with them. I have no idea why I’m here.”
“Think harder.” Kalgari sounded bland, unimpressed.
Aki frowned. “That has nothing to do with my cybernetics… or the incident that led to them. I adjusted well…. Ask the staff at this very facility, if you don’t believe me.”
“The staff at Murphy-Meilin didn’t know you before your cybernetics,” Dr. Wang noted gently. “Are you still denying that your personality’s changed?”
“I’ve experienced no break in my continuity of self, but I do feel differently about things.” Aki shrugged. “But my skills are intact, and I feel… good. Or at least, not bad. Everyone else in this room… they’re all suffering. I’m not suffering, not a bit.”
“You lost a patient two weeks ago—a colleague and compatriot, by all accounts, someone you’ve known for years,” Kalgari said. “That didn’t bother you at all?”
“I’m a professional doctor with the Star Navy Medical Corps, with a Med D…. Am I expected to break down weeping whenever a soldier dies?” Aki asked, voice soft… hiding an edge.
“Apparently you used to take these things very personally, yes.” Dr. Wang maintained her gentleness while she stood her ground. “Your crewmates admired your empathy and care, and they valued your bedside manner. It’s one reason they took such extraordinary measures to save your life.”
“Well… I’m sorry if they’re dissatisfied with the outcome.” Aki shrugged once more. “Maybe the proper solution is to move me to a different team… where the apparent change in my personality won’t bother anyone.”
“To be clear, Aki,” Kalgari said, leaning forward and projecting his voice more forcefully, “this therapy is your last chance. Your CO thinks the change in your personality has made you callous, inattentive, and less effective in your duties. If you don’t make real improvements with us, your neural architecture will have to be replaced, and you’ll go back to square one.”
Aki paused. Then, another shrug. “I suppose you’ll do what you have to do then.”
Dr. Wang let out a breath as if bracing herself, making a final note on her tablet. “Good work, everyone. I think we’ll take a break. Feel free to return to your rooms, have a breather, and we’ll see each other again in the ward caf for lunch at 1200.”