Executioner's Gambit: Climax 1 (Patreon)

After so many short scenes, this one was so long I'll have to break it in two over today and tomorrow.

———

Despite her fear of bone collectors on the lower decks, Tori led Sutzir to the down wells. He’d never used a gravity well before and was delighted by the experience, squealing with joy the entire way. They hopped level after level, all the way down to Deck 25, then the little ringel winced at the smell. “Stinks down here.”

“Yeah, we’re getting close to the recycler bay,” explained Tori as she exited the well. “I couldn’t smell it now, but I’ll never forget how badly that stunk. If you’re lucky, no one will open the hatch while we’re down here.”

They reached the main corridor—an enormous hallway almost as vast as the corridor where Tori had told Engineering Chief Onaha to wreck a scissor lift—and turned right. The rusty red geroo focused only on the path ahead of her. She struggled to push the invasive thoughts of bone collectors, krakun investigators, and ship-wide purges from her mind.

Down the corridor, then they walked slowly past the gigantic hatch to the recycler bay, Sutzir eying it warily the entire time. No one went in or out, so the hatch stayed shut, but the ringel’s expression looked like he’d tasted javea again, so she suspected that he could smell it just fine. Then, the corridor split and narrowed. Various geroo-sized hallways led this way or that, but the main corridor remained more or less of krakun scale.

Tori hobbled along as quickly as she could manage, and Sutzir walked beside her, fiddling with the end of his tail, clearly worried. Not exactly missable, they found Daskatoma near the end of the corridor, just a short way from the airlock that led to his ship. He didn’t appear to be stuck in the narrow corridor, but his sides touched both of the walls, his back brushed the ceiling, and his chest rested against the deck. He looked like he had grown tired of crawling through the corridor and decided to wait for Tori rather than meet her part way.

“Tori? Oh, I’m so glad you found her, Sutzir!” the black krakun sighed.

Tori frowned. “This is not a good look for you, Dask,” she said. “What are you doing down here?”

Daskatoma’s lip trembled. “Everything’s gone wrong, Tori!” he admitted with a sad shake of his head. “I think I’ve killed my uncle.”

“You’ve done no such thing!” she said angrily, pointing her cane at his snout for emphasis. “You were just helping out. Everything was your uncle’s responsibility. If he let shuttle maintenance slip between the cracks, then that was on him.”

Sutzir raised and spread his palms, appealing to the giant that nearly blocked the hallway before them. “You said you couldn’t bring the shuttle in for service, Dask, that only your uncle had the account, right?”

The krakun tilted his head, conceding, “Well, yeah…”

Tori banged the tip of her cane against the deck. “And I bet you told him that he needed to take care of it.”

“Yeah, sure…” said Daskatoma.

“Then there’s nothing more you could have done about it,” she said. “Your uncle was a grown-up who should have been acting like one. If anything, you should be angry at him!”

The krakun’s eyes opened wide. “What?”

“You’ve been flying that shuttle around for years—maybe decades” she reminded him, “—and taking all those risks yourself, just because he’d been too lazy to deal with it.”

Sutzir nodded, but the gigantic lizard frowned. “Tori, that’s not very—”

“It’s very honest, that’s what it is, Dask.” She sighed. “Respect for the dead is one thing, but that shouldn’t give you license to beat yourself up.”

“But—”

Tori’s ruined ears frowned. “I know you’re probably hurting too much right now to appreciate this. You need to give yourself time.”

“She’s right, Dask,” said Sutzir, quieter now. “Loss takes time to process.”

The krakun rested his jaw on the deck. Sutzir spread his arms and fingers wide, and pressed his fuzzy body against one side of his best friend’s snout, doing his best to hug the mighty creature. On the other side of his muzzle, Tori leaned the side of her face against his and patted a palm against his scales.

“You shouldn’t be at work. Go home,” said Tori. “Surround yourself with friends and family until you’re ready to look at this objectively.”

“Come on, buddy,” said Sutzir, gesturing toward the airlock. “Let’s go home. There’s nothing more you can do here.”

Tori nodded. “Take some time off. You’re not going to have healed in two weeks, but let’s talk after your next inspection—”

“No!” groaned Daskatoma. “There’s not going to be a next inspection. At least, there might not be.”

Tori stepped back. “What?”

He frowned. “I’m not a Planetary Acquisitions employee—only my uncle was.” He rested the tip of his chin against the deck for a moment in thought. “The only reason I was able to check out a shuttle today was because nobody at the company had marked Uncle Troykintrassa down as ‘deceased’ just yet.”

“Well, sure,” said Tori, sounding optimistic, “but you’re the logical replacement for him. You’ve been doing the job for him all this time. You know it, and—”

“Logical doesn’t matter!” hrmphed the krakun. “Do you think my uncle was the only one who has an out-of-work relative? The only one who thought of using his job to train a family member? What about my uncle’s boss? His boss’s boss? What about the CEO himself?”

Tori glanced over to Sutzir and then back at the giant. “I… I don’t…”

Daskatoma looked as if he might cry. “This might be the last time I ever see you, Tori,” he said. “And I couldn’t just let the opportunity pass by without getting a chance to say, ‘Goodbye.’”

“Oh, Dask,” she sighed, falling against his cheek, “that’s so sweet of you. I really appreciate it.”

For a long while, the two friends silently leaned in against one another. Eventually, Tori stepped back so she could get a better view of Daskatoma’s face. She dabbed at her eyes and wondered if he was right. Would this be the last time she saw him?

True, she hadn’t known him all that well or for all that long. He terrified her to no end, but getting to know him had been transformational. Before she’d met him, she’d only thought of krakun as monsters, incapable of any feelings or kindness. But despite the terrible things Daskatoma had done—and no doubt would continue to do—she knew that he didn’t want to, that he didn’t want to be this way. He felt trapped inside krakun society as surely as the geroo were trapped aboard a gateship.

“Sutzir told me you have friends on some of the different ships,” said Tori. She smiled. “I hope you get a chance to visit all of them—just in case.”

Daskatoma nodded but said nothing.

As she thought about the krakun’s friends, Tori’s ears began to droop. Despite the pity she felt for him—and she did—darker emotions bubbled to the surface, eclipsing the other: fear, anger, disappointment.

“And then, there’s Thojy too,” she said with the slightest hint of a growl in her voice. “I’m sure you’ll want a chance to say goodbye to him too.”

Sutzir looked over at her, his muzzle hanging open in shock. “Tori!” he hissed.

But Tori wasn’t so easily hushed. Whether the krakun was hurting or not, that didn’t change the situation that Thojy had put them in. She leaned on her cane. “More than that, right?” she asked. “Since he’s finished his assignment since you saw him last, I’m sure he wants to get paid—especially if he might not see you again.”

Daskatoma stared at her, his expression not so much a mask, but still, something she couldn’t interpret. She doubted that she’d ever grow accustomed to people without ears.

Sutzir, however, looked hurt. Clearly, the poor little guy only wanted to make his best friend feel better, and here was Tori, unwilling to play nice. With palms spread wide, he quietly begged her, “Tori, why would you—?”

She looked away, staring at the krakun’s face instead. “And while we’re talking about Thojy, I’m sure he’s no dummy,” she said. “There’s no way he’d agree to murder people for you without expecting a ticket off this ship, right?”

She waited for a reply that didn’t come, so she added, “Otherwise, he’d be agreeing to spend the rest of his life in fear, worried that someone would eventually connect the dots and realize that he was the Viper…” Tori nodded, growing more certain of her thoughts with each passing moment. “No, part of the agreement had to be that the killer would just vanish into space, and then he’d get a chance to start over with a clean slate somewhere else, without any of this history following him.”

Sutzir tugged at her paw, distressed but yet afraid of touching her. “Please don’t say these things, Tori!”

Her eyes opened wider. “In fact, I bet you didn’t come to visit me at all, did you?” She pulled her paw from Sutzir’s and covered her open mouth. “That’s why you didn’t call my strand directly! You did a ship-wide broadcast so that you’d be sure Thojy would hear it.”

With eyes squeezed tight, she gritted her teeth. “Damn it! This is just a sham,” she growled, “like Esho distracting Boots while her mate snuck up behind him.”

Daskatoma pulled back slightly, not stepping away, but his neck curving as best it could in the confined corridor. “No, wait!”

Tori hrmphed and started walking, angrily smacking the deck with every other step. “Why, let’s go and see what that enormous bulk of yours is concealing.”

Sutzir squeaked, “Tori!” but he followed her regardless.

Daskatoma’s eyes went wide. He tried to twist his neck about so his eyes could follow as the gravely injured geroo as she ducked beneath his arm. “What are you doing?”

“You might wanna hold really still, Daskatoma,” she called from beside his chest, “unless you wish to crush both of us.”

Sutzir looked up as he walked, staring nervously at the close wall of black scales that cast them into dusky shadows. He whined, “Tori, this is a bad idea…”

The two walked around Daskatoma’s chest and then under his belly. Both of the krakun’s knees and legs were pressed to the edges of the corridor, blocking two long rows of apartment doors. The commissioner squirmed slowly, neck curling to peer farther beneath himself. He pressed his back up into the rafters to give the mammals space.

Tori and Sutzir squeezed between the krakun’s leg and tail, then circled around his hind claw until they could finally reach one of the two aluminum walls. Then, they trudged along Daskatoma’s tail until the click of a door opening drew their attention. Sutzir spun about, and Tori turned much slower, but when she did, she grinned at the sight.

The first to emerge was a female geroo, wrapped ears to tail in an orange environment suit. At least, Tori presumed the geroo to be female, judging from her shorter stature and wide hips. She was heavily burdened. Over one arm, she’d slung a canvas bag, stuffed to bursting. The boots of a second environment suit overflowed the bag’s lip. In one arm, she carried a smaller figure, a cub stuffed inside an adult’s environment suit so the arms and legs dangled free. In her other arm, a helmet—presumably one to go with the suit inside her bag.

Behind her, a second geroo followed, a male with pink eyes. He left the door open behind him, one paw pressed hard against his side, the other resting against the wall for support. A streak of crimson stained his white pelt from hip to knee.

“Well, look who it is!” announced Tori. “It’s Thojy, his mate Besho, and is that your son inside that bundle of environment suit?”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HJpjxKXlpE17ISyobWK-wikVYjQvgsIhzEl62FuooNk/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?