A bead of sweat rolled down the Doc's temple as he sat there, knees pulled in to his chest, head tilted back, the barrel of his gun - still hot from sustained fire - pressed painfully against the underside of his chin. He swallowed hard, trying to push down his nausea, and felt the metal grind against his throat. He was running out of time. Soon the choice between life and death would be taken away from him, along with his freedom, his dignity, and his hope. The kind of interrogators they used on him would not be deliberately cruel. They would be
efficient.
Somehow, that seemed worse. He would be just another asset to them, one they would ruthlessly exploit.
Fate closed around him like a suffocating cloak as he contemplated his potential futures. Both paths led to the same destination. If he gave up, or if they took him alive against his will because he hesitated too long, he would end up in a CorpSec black site. They would cleave open his mind and flense his thoughts until they had squeezed out everything of value, and then they would make sure he could never be any kind of threat to them again. All his roads led into that fearful
blankness beyond, but one of them took a very unpleasant detour.
A detour that could put other people Doc Painless cared about in the same situation he was in right now.
So, what was it going to be? Months of torture and an unmarked grave - or more likely cremation, to ensure his remains could never be found - or one last act of spiteful defiance? The Doc smiled tightly, humorlessly, as durasteel-hard certainty set in. He knew what he had to do; he just had to find the strength to do it. He new things about too many people - Daiya, Cartri, Brie, Yula, Cassus, Shenn, and others - that could get them hurt or killed. He wasn't about to let that happen. He'd given up his clinic, his nonviolence, his
identity, all to fight for
them.
Like a gambler who didn't know when to quit, he'd already put everything else in the pot and lost it. Why stop when it came to his
life?
Because he wasn't ready to go. Because he hadn't done enough. All his mistakes, all the people he'd hurt, hung over him like a cloud of shades from some Corellian hell. What if the street preachers were right, and death was no escape? What if there
was an afterlife even for people like him, people without that Force mumbo-jumbo, and it was a place of punishment for those who'd done more wrong than right? He needed more time. He needed more chances to balance the scales, to do enough good that it finally outweighed all the harm he had caused.
His life flashed before his eyes, all the things he'd done wrong, all the choices he'd made. Trying to do right. Always trying.
----------------------------------------------------------
"I'm scared, dad. I'm scared I won't come back."
Andy Dunmoore didn't look at his father. The admission was as much as he could muster. He and his dad hadn't been close in a long time. Lotho still thought Andy ought to have been a
lawyer, that he was wasting his potential as a teacher. They agreed on almost nothing politically. Their views on life, and what a person should get out of it, were incompatible. But at the end of the day, Andy didn't have anyone else he could make his admission to. He needed to say it to
someone, to speak the truth about what he wasn't supposed to be feeling.
Not that the truth would change anything. The draft office had spoken. He was going to war. He could try to run, try to dodge the order to muster, but he knew they would catch him. Nothing escaped the notice of the regime. If he ran, if he tried to hide, they would just send him to the same warfront, only with a thorough lashing and a set of manacles as a reminder of his stupid, futile act. All his roads led to enlistment, to helping unleash carnage on some planet on the far side of the galaxy, but one of them took a very unpleasant detour.
Lotho put down the spade he was holding and turned to his son, who still wasn't looking at him. They were in the back garden behind the house, Mom's favorite place when she'd been alive. It was a place they had decided was neutral ground, a place they didn't have to talk. The arguments stopped, and they just
flowed, worked side by side to weed and plant and water. Now, though, Andy had started talking. His dad would tell him to keep a stiff upper lip, to suck it up and do his civic duty. He braced himself for that, for the rejection.
"Those trees you're planting," Lotho said, his voice low and level and uncharacteristically gentle.
"It takes them five years to grow large enough to bloom." He walked over and sat beside his son, just plopping down in the dirt.
"You're in for eight. You won't see that first bloom. But they're going to bloom, Andy. They're going to bloom because you planted them. And wherever you are, whether you see them or not, you can know that you did a good thing. You brought some beauty into the world, made it a little brighter."
Lotho put a hand on Andy's shoulder. His father didn't pull him close, didn't hug him, just let him feel the solidity of that weathered hand, a connection to someone else when he felt so alone. They sat like that a long time, not speaking, not moving, just feeling close in the stillness. Eventually, they both just picked up their trowels, falling back into that quiet pattern of working beside each other. Neither wanted to think about the fact that Andy would be gone in a week, a gun pushed into his hands, maybe never to return from the far-flung war.
It was almost an hour before Lotho spoke again, but he picked up where he'd left off.
"You know what they look like, when they bloom?"
"They look like starlight."
----------------------------------------------------------
"It's war, Corporal. Get the feth used to it."
Corporal Anders Dunmoore - his squad called him Doc, though he'd never been to medical school and had learned most of his healing craft on the "job" - didn't look up at his sergeant. He was hunched over on all fours, dry heaving, trying to vomit again even though his stomach was empty. A few meters up the street, strewn around a blast crater, were the still forms of two dozen civilians. They'd been tossed around like rag dolls, their limbs and necks contorted at angles that should have been impossible, their skin charred and blackened.
They were
people, or they had been until the squad had called in that airstrike five minutes ago. Just ordinary people who had been going about their ordinary lives, who had nothing to do with this pointless, grinding war. Some distant bureaucrat had decided their planet would look good in his color on the galactic map, and they had died for it. Dunmoore wanted to blame that politician for this atrocity, but in that moment, he blamed only
himself. He was the one who'd reported on this position, on all the life signs and frantic movement in the alley.
It had looked like an ambush to him. What did he know? It was his first deployment. He was scared.
He hadn't called in the airstrike, hadn't dropped the bombs, but without his mistaken report, none of that would've happened.
He wanted the others to be
disgusted with him, as disgusted as he was with himself. It was
worse that they took it in stride, that they shrugged and said
it happens, that they couldn't understand why he was vomiting his guts out on the sidewalk, sobbing. They picked him up and dusted him off, and they kept going through that city, street by street. When it was over, when they got leave, they all drank to forget... but for Doc, it never seemed to take. Forgetting came with a time limit. The faces were only gone for a little while before they came back.
The others eventually stopped trying to keep him company, because he was miserable company. He was silent and stone-faced when out on deployment, and he was either blacked out or on his way toward it when back at base. He was getting sloppy, slovenly, his uniform a mess and his face unshaven. They court-martialed him. He didn't care. In the cell where they'd thrown him, a day in the hole to dry out and think on his drunken misconduct, he lay unmoving on his cot. He stared up through the small, high window in the wall, out at the stars.
There were two roads ahead of him, he knew. He could try to keep going, try to clean up his act. He would fail. He didn't have it in him to keep fighting this war; in fact, he'd
never had it in him. Or he could desert, find a way to escape this pointless conflict, run away to those twinkling stars. Deserter, or dishonorably discharged. All his roads led to disgrace, to being left haunted and alone, his old life in tatters behind him, but one of them took a possibility-filled detour. If he got out, maybe he could do something
better. Use his skills only to
help.
Maybe there was no redemption, and he'd forever be stuck choosing between haunted and soused.
But maybe he could find some kind of peace in doing
right instead of repeating wrongs.
He looked through that window, and he hatched a plan.
The sky was distant, cold, but full of promise.
Full of starlight.
----------------------------------------------------------
Click-reeeeeet. The sound of a stun grenade being primed, audible to Doc Painless even over the firefight thanks to his augmented senses, jerked him from his reverie. No more time to reminisce, to avoid deciding, to put off going through with what he knew he needed to do. They were about to take him alive, and the only good thing he could still do with his fleeting life was to end it before they did. He couldn't help anyone anymore, but he could keep from hurting them. That would have to be enough, because it was all he had left.
Outnumbered, outgunned, he would go down fighting the totalitarian state he had advocated so hard for Darkwire to overthrow.
This whole thing had always been a long shot - him and a ragtag bunch of criminals, half of them not even adults yet, against a corporate regime that stripped entire star systems bare. What were any of them, just a few mortal specs of flesh and blood, compared to the monstrous size and complexity of The System? Maybe the game had been rigged from the start, and the only winning move had been
not to play. Maybe he should've kept his head down and run his little clinic, treated the symptoms instead of attacking the unbeatable disease.
But Doc Painless chose not to believe that. He chose to believe that everything they had done was leading to
something.
He chose to believe that, after far too many mistakes, he'd finally done something right.
The new generation, the kids he'd tried to help guide in this fight, were going to have to finish it without him. And that was okay. They were a little rough around the edges, sure. They had a lot of growing up to do. There was always the chance that this whole revolution would fail, or that it would go down the dark, violent path of revenge he so feared, leaving Denon in ashes when all was said and done. But that wasn't up to him anymore. He'd planted the saplings, but he wasn't going to see them bloom. He would just have to trust that they would.
"I trust you," Doc Painless said, though none of them were there to hear it.
He slowly tightened his grip. Gently pulled the trigger.
A blue bolt, right through his skull.
Like starlight.
Daiya
Cartri Keswoll
Cassus Akovin
Valery Noble
AMCO
Under Foot
Das
