B23 Krakun Hide (Patreon)

Uh oh. Things are worse than we expected in Executioner's Gambit.

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Tori, the captain, and the engineering chief stared silently at the airlock. There was a radiation leak here on Level 10, but where?

“You don’t—” Tori whispered, and the other two jumped in surprise. She swallowed hard. “Sorry. You don’t suppose that the commissioner’s been exposed?” she asked.

The captain’s eyes were wide and tragic, the insides of his ears were quickly draining pale and bloodless, and Tori could imagine why. If he was worried about one more thing going wrong, this wasn’t the news he needed!

Gutassi fumbled with his strand, wasting no more time before calling the bridge back. “New orders, Lieutenant,” he huffed quietly, “tag everything about this plumbing problem as need-to-know. Keep doing what you’re doing, but make no general alerts. Make it clear to everyone involved that they’re not to discuss this with anyone unless they have to.”

“Captain?” meeped the gal on the other end of the connection.

Onaha looked surprised as well. Though she said nothing, her expression spoke volumes.

Captain Gutassi ignored his engineering chief. He growled into his strand, “Lock. This. Shit. Down.”

“Yes, sir! Of course, sir!” squeaked the lieutenant.

Tori covered her mouth with both paws.

“I need a tablet down here with an integrated full-spectrum radiation scanner, and… Who’s the best doctor we’ve got?”

“Doctor Amhela,” Tori peeped from behind her fingers.

“Fine,” grunted Gutassi. “I want Doctor Amhela outside the commissioner’s stateroom in five minutes. I don’t care if he’s in the middle of surgery. Get him here, now!”

He hung up without waiting for questions, but Onaha continued to glare at him. “What in the hells are you doing? This is an emergency! We have to warn the crew.”

“No! No! No!” said Gutassi, clutching his strand protectively to his chest. “Until we know how bad is bad, we’re not telling anyone we don’t have to.”

“You’re putting lives at risk,” insisted the engineer. “You’re liable to get someone killed—”

“I’m trying to save a life!” he hissed. “Mine, frankly.”

“Captain…” she growled. “I’m protesting this officially.”

Tori chewed on her claws, watching helplessly.

“Noted,” he said with finality in his voice, “but it’s my call, and I say that the commissioner doesn’t need to catch wind of this unless we determine his health is in jeopardy.”

A couple agonizingly slow minutes passed until a junior officer arrived with the tablet that Gutassi had requested. The captain dismissed him immediately and used the computer to perform slow sweeps of the corridor and the airlock that led to the commissioner’s stateroom.

Tori walked beside him, trying to peek at the screen while staying out of the way. When he said nothing, she offered, “In the action videos, radiation scanners just click and hiss.”

“A radiation counter,” grunted Gutassi. “Yeah, that’s a different sort of beast. Scanners take a photograph. It’s a bit like having a radiation counter for each pixel in the picture.”

When Tori looked over to Onaha, the chief engineer explained, “We use these scanners for inspecting welds. You put a powerful radioactive source on one side of the weld and the scanner on the other.” She looked toward the airlock for a moment. “A good weld is nice and smooth. It blocks out as much radiation as whatever you were welding. A bad weld looks lumpy. Thin spots that block less radiation and thick spots that block more.”

“Well, I don’t see anything,” said Gutassi. “Just background levels.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Tori with an un-reassured voice.

“There’s no drains in this corridor, no wastewater plumbing,” said the chief. “We’d be in serious shit if you could see anything here.”

Despite Onaha’s skepticism, Tori breathed a sigh of relief. She pulled the strand from her shoulder, but when the captain spotted her, he glared and pointed an angry finger at her face. He shook his head slowly.

“Sorry. Habit,” she whispered as she slipped the communicator back in its shoulder holster. She’d have to check on Druka after the commissioner left.

Minutes later, Doctor Amhela rushed up with a medkit in paw, short of breath. Tori waved, excited to see him again, but when he noticed her, he stopped short. His ears drooped, and his eyes opened wide with worry. “Captain?” he said. “I was very clear to Investigator Tori that I wouldn’t break any rules—”

“Doctor, how familiar are you with krakun physiology?” asked Gutassi, his ears far forward.

“Uh … moderately?” said the doctor, a mix of emotions on his ears: relief, worry, confusion. “Why? Has the commissioner been injured?”

“Are the krakun sensitive to ionizing radiation?” asked the engineer.

Amhela’s eyes darted between the two. “What … type of radiation?”

Gutassi grunted. Gesturing with the scanner/tablet, he explained to Onaha, “I’m going in there, and I’ll update Commissioner Troykintrassa about his shuttle. If I pretend the details are on the tablet, I should be able to record a scan of his room surreptitiously, and then we can review the data when I return.”

He took a deep breath and released it slowly. “If his room is clear and he isn’t interested in a tour of the ship, then we can just wait him out.” Gutassi tapped at the tablet’s face and configured the scanner to record scans repeatedly. “Once he’s safely back in Krakuntec space, we can figure out what in the hells went wrong and deal with it … quietly.”

“All right,” whispered the chief. “I don’t like it, but so long as we’re not putting anyone in danger intentionally…”

“What’s going on here?” begged Doctor Amhela, looking more confused, sounding more concerned.

Gutassi turned to him, explaining only, “While I’m in there, you need to refresh your knowledge on krakun susceptibility to radiation. I’ll have your analysis when I return.”

“But I don’t know—!” Amhela began to protest before the captain cut him off.

“Then you’ll take your best damn educated guesses. It’ll surely be better than anything Onaha or I could offer.” He clapped the younger male’s shoulder. “Gotta go,” he said before entering the airlock.

The minutes that followed were as tense as any Tori could remember. The doctor studied his strand without further complaint while Tori prayed. Eventually, Amhela told the gals, “I don’t get what this is about, but this here is probably good news.” He tilted his strand toward Tori as if she was going to read the wall of text it displayed, and he explained, “This article is about how resilient krakun hide is to radiation. They wouldn’t fare well before a nuclear blast, but radiation levels that would be fatal to mammals might only cause blisters to them. Plus, the genetic coding in their scales is surprisingly resistant to replication errors—”

The airlock cycled a second time, and the trio fell silent, waiting for the captain to return. When he did, he looked even more disheveled. “Stinks in there,” the captain groaned.

“Sulfurous compounds,” said the doctor, “they smell like engine exhaust.”

“No, worse than that,” complained Gutassi. “I’ve met with krakun hundreds of times, but this was… It burned my eyes. Maybe the commissioner has gas?”

“Doctor Amhela has good news!” offered Tori. “Krakun skin is radiation-proof.”

“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” said Captain Gutassi as he handed the tablet over.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘radiation-proof’,” said the doctor with a smile, “but radiation-retardant would be fair…” His words trailed off as he reviewed an endless stack of still images.

The corridor grew deathly quiet, and with each passing moment, Amhela’s ears hung lower.

The captain—practically vibrating and unable to contain himself any longer—whispered, “Everything okay, doc?”

Amhela stared at the other three for a moment before turning the tablet about for them to see. Tori squinted. She’d never seen a radiation scan before. Most of the photos were dark and showed almost nothing. In some she imagined she could see a faint outline of a door or a krakun, but she couldn’t be sure.

The doctor advanced through the stack, stopping when he came to a picture with a bright splotch of white near one edge. He tapped the splotch with a claw. “What’s that?”

“Uh, hmm.” The captain scratched his head. “Some sort of fuel rod?”

“No, it’s cylindrical like a rod,” said Onaha, “but it’s too short and squat. Fuel rods are long and skinny.”

Tori tilted her head and squinted. “It’s a soda bottle.”

The other three gasped, and Tori pointed with a claw. “Look, there’s the knobby feet at the bottom, it gets narrower here, and if you look real close, you can almost make out the threads where the cap would screw down.”

Amhela, Onaha, and Gutassi were ignoring her now. They huddled close and spoke in soft tones while the doctor paged furiously through journal articles on his strand. Tori, left holding the tablet, pinch-zoomed on the image. “Yeah, it looks like one of those ‘live worm swimming around inside the drink’ beverages that Daskatoma likes so much.”

She swiped left and right, advancing back and forth through the deck. “Hey, look at this!” said Tori. “You can make out the commissioner’s mouth in these pictures. There’s his teeth and his tongue. Can’t really see his body in all the blackness, but his mouth is pretty visible.”

The three stared at the screen with ears drooped low. Tori had missed what they were discussing, so she started swiping back and forth between the two images. “I guess he was talking. Mouth is more open in this photo than this one. Hey, you can kinda make him talk if you swipe back and forth quickly enough…”

Gutassi was talking. He sounded stressed. “You just said krakun skin was radiation resistant! Inside the mouth, throat, stomach… Isn’t that skin?”

“No!” hissed Amhela. “Krakun hide resists radiation, but if they swallow something radioactive, they’ll roast just as quickly as we will.”

“Wait, what?” asked Tori.

Captain Gutassi addressed the engineering chief. “Shut down the trinity,” he said. “Close the gate.”

“No, Captain!” said Doctor Amhela in a panic. “I can’t treat a krakun. He needs to get back to Krakuntec as quickly as possible. If you close the gate, you’ll be trapping him here.”

“Hang on, what did I miss?” asked Tori.

Doctor Amhela turned toward her. “Someone’s poisoned the commissioner. The Executioner, maybe?” he suggested. “Someone tainted his drink with something radioactive!”

Tori gasped and covered her mouth with both paws.

“We need to get the commissioner back to Krakuntec!” repeated the doctor.

“No,” said Tori, “the captain’s right. We have to shut down the trinity.”

Onaha groaned and crushed her palms against her eyes. “No, damn it!” she growled. “You can’t shut down the trinity! We need that online.”

“No,” repeated Tori. “Don’t you see? If the company finds out that someone has tried to kill the commissioner—”

“Without immediate medical attention, they won’t have tried. Commissioner Troykintrassa will die!”

“If Planetary Acquisitions finds out,” Tori whimpered, “they’ll purge the ship. They’ll kill everyone.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SSStuth0Zw96cSRAaJj_eZI5qoauBwv3dWgc6A42_E8/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?