2. Infection

“A man of war sleeps fitfully, his reveries ablaze.” - Irulid

His black-tattooed eyelids flicking almost imperceptibly, the exhausted young Matari tossed and turned in his bed. The dim light in his suite buzzed and blinked intermittently. The flight from Khanid space back to familiar territory was exhausting – quite wisely, Hamish had chartered a speedy Gallente shuttle for the journey to meet the old man; this conveyance afforded him some discretion until the return trip, when the shuttle was interdicted and searched by Khanid naval patrols. Having to hide from them in the shuttle's waste bin left a bitter taste in the young man's mouth.

Now he slept, having crossed back into the Republic borders after a day and a half of travel. The familiar smells of home had an instant sedative effect on him; those scents of rust and foundry were a welcome change from that wretched stink of smoked meat and human sweat he first encountered in Agil, that stink which permeated his every pore and clung to every part of him like an oily rag.

In his mind, a battle played out, a hazy memory stimulated by the flickering of the light in his suite; a flickering which reminded him of the chattering report of auto-cannons – the fateful final skirmish of the Kelkis campaign against the somewhat famous Ammatar admiral of the same name, which cemented his opinion of life in the navy. Being a lowly gunner on an insignificant rust-bucket of a patrol skiff simply wasn’t cutting it. The precise moment of this epiphany came as the young gunner’s headset filled with whoops and cheers – distracted with peppering an irksome drone with auto-cannon fire, he had missed witnessing the blinding death-bloom of Kelkis’ formidable flagship. While his brothers fought and died in the great melee some hundred klicks away, here he was trying to swat a drone on a distant and ignored flank of the battle. The stinging feeling of being on the sidelines while greater men did greater things remained with him to this day.

His eyes slowly opened, still heavy with sleep, and he rolled to his side. Almost as though to greet him, there it lay – the tiny piece of burnished metal and plastic handed to him by his peculiar Caldari acquaintance. Naturally he knew what was on it; the moment he boarded the shuttle, he couldn’t resist cramming it into his palm-reader with the unbridled excitement of a child eager to try out a new video game. It contained the usual – a treasure trove of information relevant to individuals who lay on his path to advancement, a selection of recommended skill packs to install, and this time around, something new; something that troubled Hamish and left him with a nagging sense of un-ease.

The card-drive also held appointment information – the time of the appointment being in two days; the location, Sovicou of all places. It was farther into the Gallente Federation than he had cared to venture in the past. More troubling however was the address; he was to meet the Caldari businessman at some sort of underground nightclub, the exact nature of which was omitted. The old bastard liked his surprises.

The contents of his pocket began to ring and vibrate, and Hamish kicked out of bed to get at the palm-link. At least ten years old and close to falling apart, the archaic piece of mass manufactured personal-ware had served him well – a familiar face flickered into view on the low-resolution touch-screen.

The voice came through distorted and heavy with static. “What’s shaking, eagle eye?”

Ormazd was the auto-loader operator on the same barge where Hamish served; during their years in the service they had grown to become close friends, bonded by blood and hardship. As his other close friends were reassigned to other posts or simply drifted away from him, Ormazd had remained loyal – vowing to stay by his side.

Hamish rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Same shit, different day. Got an appointment”, he muttered matter-of-factly.

The joy drained from the face of Ormazd, replaced with a distant grimness. “The Caldari again? You’ve been taking more and more off-duty days to chase that suit… haven’t you heard the stories about him?” Now his friend was almost sputtering. “He’s got a lot of blood on his hands… by what I hear, some of it ours!”

“We all have blood on our hands, brother”, retorted Hamish with the slightest hint of impatience in his voice. “What we do is a never-ending attempt to balance the scales, to offset the weight of atrocity with murder and justice so that the world does not fall off its axis. I’m fucking tired of balancing those scales one shell, one ship, one life at a time, Ormazd – the old man shows me ways to help our people which hadn’t even crossed our minds. What good is one shell fired at the damned Amarr when our war-factories run below capacity and our fleets are starved of ammunition? If I want to help the cause, I need to support our people where I best can… I need to fight my war on the economic battlefield.”

A brief and uncomfortable silence came between them, until Ormazd, seeking to lighten the mood with mischievous grin in place, spoke up. “You’re starting to talk like a suit.”

Both men laughed. The disparaging term for the Caldari seemed all too well timed. “Promise you’ll shoot me if I ever actually wear one”, said Hamish before turning off the palm-link.

His cheek pressed against the cold view-port of the passenger transport as it made planet-fall, the Matari peered out at the grey clouds which seemed to enshroud the entire world. The haze parted to reveal a sea of loud animated advertising holograms and vibrant city lights below, and the cabin PA spoke in a Gallente-accented universal tongue.

“Passengers, we are three minutes from arrival in Mendre city, planet Sovicou. Please follow disembarking procedures as outlined on your ticket stub, and thank you for flying with Interbus.”

Some time later, as he pressed through the crush of bodies in the packed Mendre star-port, Hamish made a promise to himself to visit more worlds outside the Republic. The onslaught of commercialism here was alien and dizzying – where back home most advertising was done by word-of-mouth, here in the Gallente Federation it appeared to have gone completely out of control. The air above his head swarmed with tiny drones, each flashing advertisements directly into his eyes with a sharp burst of light, the laser beam leaving a lingering, clearly legible light-echo on his retina. He found this annoying and intrusive, his entire visual field soon occupied with corporate logos and slogans, and shielded his eyes; but the relentless little drones flew low between the crowds around him to get a clear shot at him – finally, infuriated, he swatted one to the ground where it broke into a dozen pieces and was quickly crushed by a stampede of travellers. He wondered how the people around him could possibly have grown to tolerate and largely ignore the damned little things.

When he finally squeezed into a narrow customs booth, the gaudily uniformed Gallente woman smiled a pre-packaged smile and greeted him. “Welcome to Sovicou, blood brother!” He handed her his Interbus ticket stub.

As the customs body-scan traced the outline of his body with more blinding beams, Hamish eyed the rictus-grinning woman. He had heard stories of these people, these armchair activists who protested against slavery louder than anyone but – in the end – did nothing about it. As she returned his ticket stub, he shot her a withering look that wiped the smile from her face in an instant.

A light and refreshing drizzle greeted his face as he stepped through the sliding plastic gates of the star-port terminal, and Hamish looked up at the sky. Thousands upon thousands of small craft arranged in criss-crossing lanes flitted to-and-fro through the grey clouds above. Immense beams of light cast holographic projections of corporate logos into the heavens, and in the small breaks in the cloud layer, he glimpsed a starry sky filled with stations and satellites. Lining the street beside him, tiny automated cabs landed and took off into the sky – those on the ground beckoned him with more irritating flashes of light. Ignoring them, Hamish elected to travel to his appointment on foot; the address was not far from the star-port, and it would give him an opportunity to see the local wildlife.

Apparently, he realized after walking two blocks, the local wildlife entailed a bounty of prostitutes. Never before had he seen flesh plied so freely, and he marvelled as he passed two seasoned-looking women of the street; one with her chest bared and her nipples replaced by flashing LEDs, and another wearing a coat studded with lights which flashed prices for various depraved acts. As he approached the address indicated to him as the location of his meeting, he spotted the well-dressed Caldari outside the building, amiably conversing with the unfortunate animal-minder tasked with holding onto his pet Slaver.

The businessman spotted and turned to face the approaching Matari, throwing his arms open in a jovial gesture of greeting. “Welcome to Sovicou, planet of whores!” he shouted, turning at least two hundred heads. Gesturing to the largely un-marked building, a shocking contrast to the orgy of neon surrounding it, he continued – “You’re early, I like that. Shall we go in?”

Fraught with uncertainty, Hamish nodded, and the two of them made for the doorway. A towering bouncer, clearly implanted with some form of outwardly visible lifting enhancements, stared menacingly at him and Hamish wondered if he would get through the night without violence – the old man stepped in front of him however, and nodded wordlessly to the goliath whose furrowed brow gave way to an expression of grudging respect.

“Welcome back to the Caduceus, Mr. Shogaatsu.”

Hearing the bouncer utter his companion’s name triggered a flood of memories in the Matari. Shogaatsu. Istvaan… Shogaatsu. From the day he became acquainted with the enigmatic Caldari, it seemed he had started losing old friends and gaining new ones.

It was in the deepest bowels of Amarr space; Hamish was one of a number of fighters flying escort for a prominent humanitarian politician of the Sebiestor tribe, negotiating for the release of hundreds of slaves. While the politics ran their course, Hamish and the other pilots decided to make a showing at a nearby Amarr tavern – in all honesty, they were seeking to do violence that day; they sat at the bar and began loud discourse on topics such as emancipation and the rebellion, hoping to start a fight – and there he was, sitting among the Amarr Holders; both out of place and fitting in perfectly.

The Caldari engaged them in discussion, or more accurately him – for among the rowdy Minmatar pilots and crewmen, only Hamish had the gift of argument, the ability to converse at an intellectual level. Soon they all listened, both Holders and fighters, as the two exchanged verbal fire and probed each other for weakness. Finally the Caldari asked the question that challenged the young Minmatar’s preconceptions and intrigued him to no end.

“How far would you go to save your people?”

As the Minmatar pilots left the bar and walked slowly to their quarters, they were largely silent, save for Hamish. He couldn’t stop talking about the concepts and ideas thrown at him by the businessman. Already his mind swam with visions of great deeds, and the rose-coloured vision would have been perfect – had one of the other pilots in his wing not recognized the Caldari for whom he was.

“You even realize who you just spent two hours getting chatty with, right?” barked Garam Mbutu, a frightfully tattooed beast of a Brutor, clearly irritated with the young warrior’s chatter. Hamish shook his head.

“That, little one, was the monster Istvaan Shogaatsu. I’m surprised you have not heard the name, seeing as it was all over the news-nets a few short years ago. He is a butcher, a devil and friend of the Amarr – at his heading, a Caldari company helped those damned mummies invent slave tech the likes of which you’ve never dreamed of. They had our people running drugged out of their wits into enemy fire, no more than cannon fodder. The only reason I did not kill him with my hands right there is the fact that those fucking Holders would have jumped to his aid.”

The young warrior lowered his gaze, his face flush with embarrassment. The Brutor continued; his words peppered with curses. “The fucking Amarr kill us with over-work and starvation… beasts like him kill us with a smile and a Kredit. You’d do well not to trust him or talk to him again.” He then spat into the street, as if to underscore his opinion of the Caldari.

Remembering clearly the events of that day so long ago, Hamish wondered if the shame he felt was for associating with such a man, or rather for agreeing with so much of what he said.

The acrid smell of disinfectant and medicine snapped the Matari out of his stroll down memory lane. Following behind the Caldari into the building, he began to wonder just what sort of place this was – pulsing electronic music already greeted his ears, and as he walked, he passed an assortment of obviously drugged people. He dug his hands into his pockets and entered the darkened club foyer, always two steps behind his host. Scattered about were a good twenty people, hugging and kissing and examining fresh surgical scars. Biomimetic implants with bright LEDs pierced the darkness. He shook his head in disbelief, walking past a nearly nude woman who appeared completely fascinated by her eight new nipples. The doorway to the interior of the Caduceus club was just ahead.

“Where the hell have you brought me?” he hollered over the increasingly deafening music.

The Caldari turned to the bewildered Hamish, grinning bemusedly. “You’re in the Caduceus; it’s a surgery fetishists’ nightclub, and the best place this side of the known universe to get some unregistered implant work done. Isn’t it marvellous, the depth of deviance and perversion a culture can descend to when given sufficient freedom?”

Hamish reeled, feeling bile rise in his throat at the side of a man splayed open on a bench, clearly conscious and playing with his sub-dermal layer as though it were an item of clothing. Severely intoxicated, he looked positively pleased with himself as he licked his fingers clean of his own blood.

“This is –“

“Repulsive? I know. Let’s head inside.”

The air in the fetish club was filled with smoke, heavy with the stench of antiseptics and sedative gases. Pounding techno-industrial noise blasted from towering speakers, reverberating roughly against the interior walls. At the centre of the bizarre nightclub, a throng of bodies undulated in a profane, over-sexualized rhythm. Drugged into a blissful stupor, the masses of people filtered between haphazardly assembled surgical suites lining the walls, each waiting their turn at the butcher’s table. The two men continued to press through the frantic amphetamine-mad crowd.

Almost losing his host in the mess of bodies, Hamish screamed. “Why are we here?” – Istvaan didn’t hear him, and the Matari fought to keep up. Arriving at the opposite side of the main hall, Istvaan approached an anaesthetic bar, and nodded a silent sign of recognition to the hermaphrodite behind the counter. It gestured for the two men to follow, and led them to a brushed steel door. They stepped through.

A swirl of violent movement, and the businessman found himself thrust against a wall, with a mohawked Sebiestor punk pressing a rather uncomfortable surgical blade against his neck. Hamish saw the commotion, and was about to throw himself at the man, when Istvaan stayed his hand. “It seems not everyone has been informed of our appointment”, he stated with unsettling calm.

"Oo' the fuck are you, fuck-lung?!" The punk spat drunkenly in his face, the scalpel digging painfully into the well-dressed businessman’s throat. He stank of foul liquor and acetone, and eyed Hamish hatefully, almost daring the warrior to make a move.

"That's not your business", Istvaan muttered calmly in reply, trying to avoid moving his neck as he spoke. "And if I get some kind of disease from that knife, it's your ass, do we understand each other?"

“That won’t be necessary, Harmur!” – the voice came from somewhere in the darkened smaller room, and all three men turned to look in that direction. The punk relented, his grip on the Caldari easing – as he lowered the blade; Istvaan touched his neck tenderly and examined his fingertips disdainfully, now stained with a speck of red.

“Now look what you’ve done.”

In the blink of an eye, the tiny surgical blade had changed hands and carved a crimson gouge across the punk’s neck; he fell, going wide-eyed and vomiting dark ichors, his pants soaking through with an involuntary discharge of urine. Hamish blinked, not entirely sure of what had just transpired, unaware of the razor-thin spatter of blood now marking his own face. He didn’t know whether to be impressed by the unassuming old man’s prowess in close quarters, or disturbed by the casual regard with which he had just grievously – and unnecessarily - wounded another Sebiestor.

Istvaan wiped his hands gingerly on his suit, and shook his head in disapproval. “I thought you kept your thralls aware of my comings and goings, Farrad; for a moment there I was feeling unwelcome”, he shouted into the darkness and beckoned Hamish to keep up.

Their contact turned out to be quite a sight. At first glance, the shirtless Mr. Farrad appeared to be missing sections of skin - only upon closer inspection did one discover that it was not missing, but merely replaced with a shiny transparent polymer. Hamish mused that with the strategic positioning of the bizarre body-modifications, Farrad could pass for a normal human being as long as he wore a long-sleeved shirt.

“Will he be all right?” asked Hamish of no-one in particular, watching the thrashing punk being carted away by two men in surgical bodysuits, his mangled neck still sputtering blood in tune with his frantic heartbeat.

“Oh yes, quite all right”, Farrad replied, glancing over Hamish lasciviously. “He’ll be patched up in no time, this club is the best place in the city to get your throat cut!”

His sense of un-ease growing at the prospect of being admired by this deviant Gallente, Hamish turned to Istvaan, leaning close to speak. “You said this was a good place for getting implants; who exactly is getting an implant?”

The businessman smiled in that most disarming of ways. “You are, my boy. You are.” Leaving Hamish standing there with an open-mouthed expression of protest, Istvaan snatched a bottle of alcohol from a table and dabbed some on his suit-sleeve, then applied it to the tiny cut on his neck – Farrad winked at him and the two men made for the door to the main hall, making sure to step wide around the puddle of blood and piss near the doorway.

“The hell am I getting myself into”, muttered the Matari once again before sprinting after them.

Clearly, Farrad was a key figure in this community of self-mutilators and deviants; Hamish observed the way the crowd of dancers parted before him and smiled lovingly as he and the Caldari made their way to a sterile surgical suite separated by a flimsy plastic curtain from the main hall. The suite, while clearly cobbled together on short notice, contained surgical equipment so advanced that the Matari couldn’t recognize a single instrument – even with his frequent visits to sickbays and infirmaries back home. Perhaps most intimidating was the mod-bed; an angled table with articulating arms projecting from its foot, and an instrument-studded cranial halo at the other end.

Farrad gestured to the mod-bed with a flourish. “Hop on!”

“No.” Hamish stood immobile. There was only so much trust he was willing to invest in the old man. “Not until you tell me what the hell you intend to put in me.”

“All sorts of naughty things, if it were up to me”, Farrad chuckled. “But don’t worry – in fact, you should be overjoyed! Your friend here swung for quite an expensive little package, even beyond my financing abilities!”

Istvaan nodded, and spoke. “The implant is a high-end neurophilic self-integrating archive. Those quotes of mine which you so appreciate? It’s stocked with roughly a million of them, as well as economic information, flowchart-plotting capacity, and a sub-dermal transceiver wired to pick up market information from the SCC intersystem broadcast server. It will turn you into a walking, talking economic powerhouse. I’ve got one just like it, take a look.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and leaned closer so that Hamish could see the tiny crystalline protrusion hidden in his hairline.

The Matari was now filled with a mixture of worry and excitement – being affluent enough to afford such implants was a far-fetched dream until this moment. His stomach doing cartwheels, he clambered onto the mod-bed.

“Now, a couple of quick questions”, Farrad cooed, tapping keys on a pad on the side of the mod-bed and waving another surgeon over to assist him. “Are you fresh squeezed, or from concentrate?” The fetishist was, of course, referring to Hamish’s clone status – the skeletal structure of clones was quite different from that of trueborn human beings. Hamish had never been cloned.

“Uh… quite fresh.”

“Any other implants I should know about?”

“Just the tattoo.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem. Now: local, general or fun?”

Hamish looked up at the Gallentean. “Excuse me?

Farrad smiled unnervingly. “What kind of anaesthesia you’d like. Local keeps you awake, general knocks you out cold, and fun; well, it’s fun!”

Still vividly remembering the dissected man in the club foyer, sticking fingers into exposed muscle and giggling moronically, Hamish decided that “fun” was probably not a good idea. “Local, please.” He jerked in fright as the cranial halo suddenly snapped and narrowed around his head, locking it in place. He felt the pinprick of a hypodermic needle in his scalp, and saw another swing out of the halo and into his cheek – in seconds, his entire face and head felt completely numb.

“Now, this might feel a little funny, so why don’t you hold on to these”, Farrad murmured into his ear, placing two leather straps attached to the bedsides in the Matari’s hands. Uncertainly he took hold of them and glanced over to the Caldari, who was watching the process with an almost predatory gaze. Hamish thought that this was probably the wrong time to wonder what was in all this for the old man.

He detected an odd new smell, and felt a warm sensation at the peak of his skull – the flickers of light coming from that area made Hamish realize that the smell was that of his own flesh being rent by a surgical beam. This was fancy technology indeed, he realized – bloodless and sterile, it was probably the best medical treatment he had ever received. This comforted him little as even through the anaesthetic he felt the flesh peeled away from his skull by tiny clasping pincers.

The next sensation was simply surreal – much as a grievously wounded man becomes aware of terrifying new internal anatomies and feels no pain due to the surges of adrenaline, so did Hamish feel his body being re-arranged by the meticulous multi-limbed mod-bed. A piece of his skull lifted away, and the lining of his brain was delicately pulled away with a nauseating wet sound he could feel in his bones. A half-dozen excimer lasers went to work on the very core of his being, each barely audible pop signifying a portion of brain matter flash-vaporized, and Hamish wondered if he’d feel the precise moment one of his memories disappeared. He shivered at the mechanical violation and closed his eyes tightly.

Istvaan’s eyes narrowed at the strobe-like flashes of lasers stabbing into the Minmatar’s exposed grey matter. As he watched the mod-bed swing-arm loaded with the implant slowly arcing toward the precise wound, his lips couldn’t help but curl slowly into a razor smile…

+ + +

“How the hell do you expect me to eat this?” Ormazd hissed incredulously at the galley cook, who had just dispensed a dollop of thoroughly un-appealing food onto his breakfast tray. The cook shrugged and motioned him to move along, preparing another ladle full of the filth for the next unfortunate crewman standing behind Ormazd in the serving queue.

He sat alone at a table meant for two, and glanced toward the dining hall door, as though expecting company. Prodding and poking the mass of protein and nutrients with his fork, Ormazd grumbled bitterly and began shoving the substance into his mouth. Military rations were about as far from gourmet cooking as one could get.

A shadow fell on his tray, and he turned, somewhat startled. He recognized his close friend right away, but there was something off about him – something that he took a few seconds to notice.

Ormazd stood from the table, and mustering his most serious expression, drew his crew-issue pistol and levelled it at Hamish Ramatakhlan’s head.

“What the hell are you doing?” cried Hamish, stepping back twice and nervously watching his friend gesture with the pistol toward his own new attire.

Ormazd suddenly grinned. “You made me promise I’d shoot you if you ever put on a suit.”