Sarsuk 6.1 (Patreon)

Hope you guys are enjoying the snow! We're snowed in, but that's fine. We've got nowhere to be, had time to prepare, and I'm sure it will melt off by Sunday. Besides, it's a lovely view outside my window.

Anyhow, I've been going back over the new Sarsuk manuscript and poking at the spots that will need changes to add more conflict between Sarsuk and Siki. This new scene is super short and will go in right after Sarsuk's first day on Liotec. To recap, he's been executed and had his encounter with Kanti and the note from Suni. He then woke up as a head-on-the-wall, but hasn't accepted his situation just yet. He met Siki briefly, but they haven't gotten to know each other just yet.

Sarsuk 1
Sarsuk 1.1
Sarsuk 1.2
Sarsuk 2
Sarsuk 3
Sarsuk 4
Sarsuk 5
Sarsuk 6

———

They left Sarsuk alone for the night, with only the darkness, a few LEDs, and his thoughts for company. Unfortunately, his thoughts were the worst company possible as they focused on the message that Suni had left for him after the empire had beheaded him.

Her note had told him to think on all the people he had hurt, and now he couldn’t help himself. But why? Yes, the geroo lived crappy little lives, and they occasionally got hurt. Why should he care? Why was his brain anthropomorphizing them? That was like feeling bad for the table if he banged his fist on it.

“Oh, I’m sorry, table! I was just upset that our team lost the game. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Rubbish!

But even though it made no sense to, he thought about his cleaning crew and Dekka, the slave he’d punished for sneaking out at night. He thought about the ringel crew who’d come before the geroo and how he’d lost them when he was away for an extended period, tending to his newly cloned arm.

Out in space, the ships he managed had their own courts, and they punished most of their criminals without his intervention. But he thought about the various times when he’d felt the need to make an example of a prisoner—geroo like Kanti who represented the breach of a major law, and officers like Captain Ateri who had abused his position of power.

And as Sarsuk’s solitude in the dark dragged on, he thought of compromise air, of all things. The geroo were native to a sulfur-free world, while the krakun came from one that was sulfur-rich. And though the Krakuntec atmosphere was deadly poisonous to geroo, the krakun could endure breathing geroo air for an extended period. But Sarsuk really hated doing that. Their oxygen atmosphere smelled dreadful, and it brought tears to his eyes.

So, he insisted they use compromise air—an oxygen atmosphere with just a little sulfur added—when he met with a geroo face to face. He didn’t find this much more pleasant than breathing sulfur-free air, but the geroo really hated it.

Why? He wasn’t certain. The geroo ships had good medical care, and the doctors working there were capable of flushing sulfur from geroo patients before it did much damage.

Except… There was this one time that a crewman—not an officer, just some random female without any credentials whatsoever—came into his stateroom to discuss a serial killer that had been stalking the ship. She’d stayed far longer than the geroo typically did when he met with them, breathed a lot more of the compromise air than they typically did.

Also, it might not have been the usual mix, come to think of it.

Regardless, she didn’t look well by the time she left. In fact, she looked pretty bad long before then. He hadn’t said anything at the time, hadn’t ordered her to leave and check with a doctor, but once again, why would he? He was there to do a job and couldn’t be bothered to play nanny for some geroo who was too foolish to look out for her own well-being.

But here’s the thing… It was bothering him. Wasn’t it? He didn’t think it was, but here he was laying back on his couch in the dark—or at least what seemed like his couch—and thinking about it.

If it truly wasn’t bothering him, then what was the deal with that weird fantasy? Why had he imagined a helmetless Kanti and the cruelest of goodbye notes? That couldn’t have really happened, so it had to be a facet of his unconscious mind trying to send him a message.

But what?

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g2VvillEeRxvmktbnhpSJJJDNVaSe7Bmr-OXweQWajo/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?