Executioner's Gambit: Daskatoma 2 (Patreon)

Continued from yesterday.

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Tori wiped away a tear. “You’ve just got me all twisted up inside.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“I want to like you,” she sighed, “but you’re a criminal, Dask.”

He insisted, “But I’m not!”

“Well, you are from my frame of reference.” Tori let out a weary sigh. “It doesn’t matter that your society views you as a morally upstanding citizen. To me, you’re a murderer.”

“And you don’t think you could ever forgive me.” A statement, not a question.

Tori stood and hobbled slowly forward. Then, she reached out and placed a warm palm against his scaly lip. “A felony isn’t something you forgive, Dask,” she said quietly. “You don’t apologize and make it go away. Criminals are supposed to go to court, receive judgment, and get punished for their crimes.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t go to court,” he said. “That would completely destroy what I was trying to accomplish. My connection to Thojy must remain secret.”

Tori nodded. She leaned her forehead between his nostrils and petted him gently, whispering, “I know, but that’s why we can’t be friends.”

“Wait, wait, wait!” the krakun said suddenly. He pulled away and Tori caught herself with her cane.

“What, Dask?”

He stared at her. “What if there was a way?”

“A way?” she asked, feeling like she had missed a segue in the conversation. “A way for what?”

His voice sad, almost pleading, “A way for you to forgive me…”

The rusty red geroo shook her head. “I don’t see—”

“What if you were my court, Tori?”

She blinked and stared up at the gigantic creature. “What?”

“What if you were the court judging my crimes?” he asked again.

With her ears back in confusion, she raised a palm only to drop it back down. “Me? But I don’t—”

Daskatoma curled his neck and pressed his snout to the deck. “Tori, I throw myself at your mercy,” he said. “I bribed a geroo to do things that I knew were illegal. I paid him to murder others.”

Then, he tilted his head so he could stare at her with one sad eye. “And worse, I think I corrupted him,” he said, quieter. “Thojy had been a law-abiding citizen, and I think that doing my dirty-work turned him into a monster. I think that getting away with crimes opened up a dark side of him that never would have come out otherwise.”

The geroo raised a fist in frustration, like a hammer preparing to strike a nail. But when she brought it down, she barely touched him, just gently bouncing her paw off the bridge of his nose. “Dask, what do you want from me?” she sighed. “I’m not a judge. I’m barely even a murder investigator—”

“I want you to judge me.”

Tori drew a deep breath and let it slowly out. “Be serious.”

“I am being serious. You have a different perspective than I do. That’s inevitable,” he explained. “I want you to try and take an objective look at what I’ve done, balance out my motivations, and decide my guilt or innocence.”

Her ruined ears drooped in a frown. “Why?”

“Because… Because you’re the only one who can, Tori,” he begged. “I haven’t opened my life up to many people. There’s Sutzir, of course, and a few other geroo on other ships, but you’re the only one here, the only one in your society who really knows the whole story.”

Daskatoma avoided her eyes, staring instead down at the deck. “And frankly, if me evading justice is going to kill our friendship,” he whispered, “then I’d rather face justice … your justice.”

She threw up her paws and walked a small circle in frustration. “And then what, Dask?” she demanded. “You want me to punish you too?”

“Well…” he said, taking a long pause to consider what that might mean, “okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” he repeated with more certainty. “Okay, obviously if you decide that I deserve to die for my crimes… Well, I’m not going to throw myself into the recycler because you said to, but if you thought up some other punishment that you felt was fair … I’d … at least consider it.”

She raised one ear. Did he really mean this? “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

She nodded. “Okay, I find you guilty.”

Daskatoma choked on a small cough, and his eyes went wide. “Wow,” he whispered. “You … didn’t even want to think about this?

Tori put both paws on her cane and leaned some weight into it. “I have, Dask. I’ve thought about this a lot,” she assured him. “You want to know my judgment? Okay, fine. Here it is: You’re guilty of solicitation of theft, nine counts of solicitation of murder, one count of interfering in a felony investigation, and one count of aiding and abetting a fugitive.”

He pulled away, hurt obvious on his face.

“And frankly,” she added, “if I knew of crimes I could pin on you for when Thojy murdered Nija and framed her son, then I’d give you them too.”

Daskatoma’s eyes lowered, and he stared at the deck once more. “Okay,” he said quietly. “And so… How do you sentence me?”

“How can I sentence you?” she shouted. She shoved her palm against his snout and shoved as hard as she could. When he pulled away, she waved her cane at him. “If a geroo did any of this, we’d march him straight off to the recycler, but I can’t do that, can I?”

She turned and walked away, angrily hitting the deck with her cane on every other step. “I can’t fine you,” she said. “You already said that geroo credits are free for you.”

She glared back at him. “I can’t flog you. I can’t take years off your birth token…” Then, she threw up her paws. “What can I do? Give you a community service sentence? Make you scrub the decks or… Your size makes it impractical for you to give anything back to the community you’ve hurt!”

He opened his mouth for a moment as if to apologize or perhaps suggest something, but she continued to walk, shouting as she went, “I could declare that you need to transfer doctors and patients around so that cloning skills become widespread, but is that even a punishment?” She pointed a cane at him. “That’s something you should be doing anyhow just because it’s the right thing to do!”

Her mind screamed at her, Tell him to allow your surgery! But of course, that was not a punishment either.

He whispered, “Is there nothing…” Was he asking her to say it?

Tori froze, then turned slowly back toward him. “Okay, wait, I think I have something.”

He blinked. “You do?”

Her ruined ears grinned, and she nodded slowly. “Yeah.” Hobbling closer, she explained, “Okay, there’s this video I really like, and in it, a father and son get in a fight. The father, the king, declares his son a traitor and banishes him from the kingdom, never to return.”

His brows raised and tilted opposite directions in shock and concern. When he spoke, he could barely manage the words, “You want to banish me … from my own ship?”

She grinned and set a fist into her hip. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

Daskatoma glanced around as if expecting that someone might be laughing at the predicament he’d put himself in. “Well, uh,” he said quietly, “because coming here is my job?”

She pointed at his nose. “But you don’t actually have to come here, do you?” she asked. “You don’t have to sit in your office while you go through the ship’s report. You could sit in your shuttle, just outside the ship, while you read it.”

The black krakun squinted. “And when I need to inspect something?”

Tori yarped a laugh. “How do you inspect things now?” She spread her fingers. “I can count on one paw all the parts of this ship where you fit,”—she wagged her thumb in his face—“and that’s giving you credit for the escape hatch where you nearly got stuck.”

“Cute,” he chuckled. “Well, when I need to see something, I usually send the captain in with his strand so I can watch on video.”

“And you can’t do that from within your shuttle?”

Daskatoma opened his muzzle for a while before closing it. He scowled. “Yeah, okay, you can banish me…” he said, “but not forever. This is still my ship.”

Tori rolled her eyes. “Okay, hrm. How about I banish you for my lifetime?”

He counter-offered, “How about a month?”

“A month?” she laughed. She waved a paw at him, dismissively, and started walking back toward the airlock. “That’s barely any time at all. That’s like missing one whole inspection! Big deal.”

But as she prepared to unlock the hatch, she glanced back over her shoulder one last time. “Six months.”

Daskatoma grinned wide. “Two months,” he said. “I go away for two months, then we’ll talk again and see if you think you can ever forgive me.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VUtp-rjZsCPblZu2ubABdRfuyntK8BHapAC00f5PkQA/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?