Chapter Text
When a man points a gun at you and tells you to get in the shuttle, you get in the shuttle.
It wasn’t the first time Hana had a gun pointed at her, but years of training had taught her the difference between someone playing with a new toy and knowing how to use it. The most obvious plainclothes MP ever held the gun, and judging from his relaxed shoulders and casual lean against the shuttle, he both knew how to use it and wouldn’t hesitate.
Hana climbed in, and he followed. The door pressurized with a hiss, and the MP bodied her further into the shuttle. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience, even with the soft red upholstery and fancy cushioning to soften the impact. She kept her hands away from the panic button on her comm; if the Nation wanted to talk, you talked.
An acrid smell assaulted her nose, and she broke down into a coughing fit. The MP behind her took the opportunity to pat her down, extracting her comm, wallet, and a half-full prescription bottle from the pockets of her scrubs. He left the ID badge clipped to her breast pocket and put the rest of the items in a vacuum-sealed box.
“Captain Areiya. Or, I hear it’s Doctor Areiya these days.”
Through the hazy interior, Hana spotted a burly man hunched over on the opposite side of the shuttle. A cigarette spewed smoke in one hand, while a comm listed out her file in the other. Her clothes would reek after this. She eyed the shiny insignia on his uniform jacket.
“Colonel—”
He waved his hand and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the cabin. Hana coughed again and tried to catch her breath, but just ended up inhaling more smoke. With a flip of a switch, fans in the ceiling whirred to life and extracted the worst of the smoke.
“Apologies, Doctor Areiya. It’s apparent your constitution isn’t what it used to be.”
“Wonder why,” she said, voice flat and jaw tense. There was a bitter taste in her mouth, and it wasn’t from the smoke.
“The outcome of the Ascelepis Incident was regrettable, I understand. Although, I assume the Tribunal adequately compensated you?”
“You could read all this in the report.”
The Colonel looked down at the comm and back to her, squinting. “File says green eyes. You get ‘em modded? You know you need to update your documentation when you do that.”
“PATS is no joke.”
His eyebrows jumped up, briefly obscured by the brim of his black leather hat. “I wasn’t aware of that symptom.”
“It’s in the file.”
He looked down again, eyes sweeping back and forth across the text scrolling down the transparent display. “I understand you’ve avoided personal mods since the Incident, yet you happily provide them to others. Augmentation surgery is an interesting field to enter for someone so mod-averse, wouldn’t you think?”
“I can assure you, my personal feelings do not interfere with my work.” If this was a psychological suitability inquiry, it was an unusual one.
The seat creaked under the Colonel as he crossed one leg over the under and leaned back to take another drag of his cigarette. Luckily, the vents sucked the smoke out the end of it before Hana could be subjected to it again.
“This isn’t an inquiry, if that’s what you’re wondering. At least, not one for the books.”
“Then what is this?”
“Consider it…” the Colonel paused and tapped his chin with the end of the comm, “a job interview.”
“I’m not looking for alternative employment.”
He held up a hand. “Hear me out.”
Hana brushed a stray hair behind her ear and crossed her arms. It was starting to get hot in the shuttle cabin. “I’m not flying again. I can’t get any more mods. Scar tissue and all that. You understand.”
“This job requires the applicant to be entirely augment-free.”
Her entire body went tense, she grinded her teeth together. “What?” She’d been half tuned-out before, but the Colonel knew how to pique her curiosity. Barely anyone went without mods these days. Especially those working for the military.
The corner of the Colonel’s mouth twitched up in a smile. “That’s right. It’s highly classified, I’m afraid. Wrapped all the way up to the top in red tape.”
“You’re going to have to give me something to go off here. If you want me badly enough to come find me after all these years. Is your ass on the line again? Need me to pull you out of a hole you’ve dug yourself into?”
He smiled with his nicotine-stained teeth and leaned forward. The vents above could barely chase the smoke away before it reached her nose.
“This isn’t a hole, Doctor Areiya. This is an opportunity. One I’m prepared to offer you. One I assured my superiors you would be perfect for.”
“So what is this opportunity? You better give me something, or I walk.”
“Walk where?”
She looked to the MP behind her and to the sealed shuttle door next to him. They were in the air, she could feel it in her stomach and in the subtle shake of the cabin.
“I have a surgery next week. Ninety percent chance they die if you black-bag me.”
“You know we take those odds.”
Hana sighed and uncrossed her arms to wipe her sweaty palms on her thighs. “Enough posturing. Give me the pitch. I’m tired.”
The Colonel finished off his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray jutting out from the shuttle wall. It slid into the wall, taking the cigarette butt and ash with it. He steepled his hands in front of him and gestured to the MP. A click, and a low-frequency hum filled the air. The familiar sensation of a jammer tugged at her stomach, a little less unpleasant with no mods to interfere with.
“The Perdition project,” he said, almost whispering as if they were in a public place and not thousands of feet in the air in a completely sealed, signal-jammed shuttle cabin.
“The starfighter?”
“So you have been keeping up with recent developments after all.”
She shrugged. “Kind of hard not to with the billboards plastered all over the city and the media crowing about it nonstop.”
He smiled. “That’s the Captain Areiya I remember. I assume you know about the neural core?”
“Only about as much as the public knows. Which is that it exists. And cost trillions.”
The colonel held up two fingers. “Only two trillion.”
“You could buy a whole fleet of Sabers with that kind of money.”
“The game has changed since you last flew. The Nation needs stuff like this to stay ahead now.”
Hana scoffed. “Damn loyalists.”
The Colonel nodded. “Indeed.” He reached for another cigarette from the box in his lap, but when Hana scowled at his hand, he pulled back and laid it on the seat cushion. “But that’s all I can tell you. The rest is above your paygrade.” Another yellow smile. “At least, your current paygrade.”
“You’re saying… the Perdition project isn’t finished?”
“I didn’t say that. The interviews didn’t lie. It is very much ready for action.”
She lifted her head and clasped her hands in front of her. “Don’t I need mods for something like this?”
“Would you even want them back? I hear you’ve taken quite the anti-augmentation stance these days.”
“I would kill to get them back.” She made sure her face conveyed the veracity of her statement.
The Colonel’s smile fell, and he shifted in his seat. The lid of his pack of cigarettes flicked open and shut, over and over.
“Like I said, this opportunity requires the prospect to be completely augmentation-free.”
If he noticed her obvious disappointment, he didn’t show it.
“I fail to see how that is in any way an incentive.”
The Colonel handed her a contact chip. She took it like it was a piece of rotten fruit, pinched between two fingers.
“Just consider it. You can reach me with this when you decide you’re ready.”
When. Not if.
“Can I have my stuff back?”
The MP handed the box to the Colonel, and he unsealed it and reached inside. With a click, the uncomfortable humming sound thankfully ceased. But the nausea returned when the Colonel pulled the prescription bottle out of the box.
“Still reaching for the sun, are we? You know this won’t come close to the mods.”
She grinded her teeth again. “It’s the closest I can get. If you knew anything about PATS, you would understand.”
The Colonel handed her the contents of the box, sans the bottle. “Alas, I cannot, in good conscience, give illicit substances to an unauthorized citizen without the proper paperwork. I’m afraid I will have to confiscate this.”
Her hands tightened into fists. “Fuck you.”
“Is that how you talk to your superior officer?”
“I’m discharged. That doesn’t matter anymore.”
He looked down at the contact chip in her hand. “We’ll see how long that lasts.”
It was far from her first time waking up in someone else’s bed, but it didn’t stop the resentment from seeping in with the first rays of consciousness. Like the sunlight filtering through the plastic blinds, it streamed into her through the familiar pounding in her head and the relatively new ache in her wrists.
She rubbed at the rope burns and stood to collect her clothes from the floor. A boring nude bra and underwear, and an even more dreary set of teal scrubs. She checked to make sure her badge was still affixed to the front, and shot a haphazard glance at the figure still wrapped in the sheet.
Doctor Melinda Celores, anesthesiologist. Efficient, cold, and susceptible to bribes. Just the way Hana liked it. Although this time, the bribe had resulted in much more visible marks than she would have preferred. Doctor Celores shifted and rolled onto her back, flinging an arm into the space Hana had once occupied.
Before her supplier could wake and force an exceedingly awkward conversation out of her, Hana stumbled out into the cruel blue light of the kitchen. Among the collection of take out boxes and empty wine bottles was a slip of paper bearing the expectedly messy signature of Doctor Celores. A note sat on top of it.
See you in a month.
No signature, no valediction, no expressions of emotion, either disdain or affection. Hana tossed the note in the trash and pulled her coat off the hook near the door. Rain pounded against the thick glass window above the kitchen sink as she scrubbed the smell of shame from her face and fingers. The hot water barely registered against her skin until it nearly scalded her; it took a second to pull away too, like her body moved in slow motion. Black spots swam before her eyes, she shook the water off her hands as if it was still burning her and wrenched the front door open.
A cold wind blasted the hood of her coat back, and she reached back to pull it back into place. Most people would sell their souls to live somewhere with naturally occurring precipitation, or even just somewhere capable of sparing such a vast quantity of water. But Hana didn’t have the energy to stop and appreciate her position in life, the headache pulsing behind her eyes and the burning nerve pain all along her spine kept her thoughts plenty occupied.
The squeal of the tram did nothing to soothe her battered body, and the frigid white lights of the tram interior soured her already pitch-black mood. The talkative couple in the seat in front of her laughed loudly in unison, and it took every bit of self restraint available to her to resist the urge to scream at them to quiet down. But their laughter inevitably led to them kissing instead, and Hana tucked her head down low and tried not to think about the previous night. But those thoughts came to mind unbidden nonetheless, and she busied herself with smoothing out imperceptible wrinkles in the prescription Doctor Celores wrote her in an effort to distract herself.
The tram sent her pitching forward when it finally screeched to a stop in front of the medical plaza. She flung an arm out to steady herself, but it was like she moved through concrete. Her forehead hit the seat in front of her with an audible smack, and her survivable headache became absolutely intolerable. She swore at the seat like it had just insulted her mother, and stalked out of the tram car, leaving the couple staring after her, bewildered.
The inside of the bottom floor suite was nothing but a ceiling bracket bristling with cameras and a plexiglass window bearing a speaker and small drawer at the bottom. Normally, there would be a line out the door at this time of day. At this time… She checked her comm, and nearly hurled it against the wall. An entire fucking hour until the pharmacy was due to open. She clenched her fists hard, lest she throw one through the window. Or, at least, at the window. She wasn’t likely to break it any time soon.
With a long sigh, she sank to the floor against the far wall and closed her eyes against the buzzing overhead lights. All her work in the tram had been undone in an instant; the prescription was a tight, crumpled ball in her hand. She coaxed her fingers to open, and extracted the abused paper. She could just barely make out the words at the top, along with the signature.
Dextroamphetamine.
Just one more hour, and she would be human again.
She spent the time flipping through newsfeeds on her comm with one hand while idling tracing one of the long, thin scars along the underside of her arm. She must have looked quite the picture of an addict: cross-legged on the floor, wearing yesterday’s clothes and her hair a rat’s nest. If it wasn’t for the badge hanging from the front of her scrubs declaring her Doctor Hana Areiya, security would have escorted her from the premises with a few kicks to the ribs for good measure.
Not that she wouldn’t deserve it. The Nation’s resources were precious, and its stimulants had much better uses than washed-up cybernetic surgeons.
Fifteen blessed minutes before the hour, the shutter over the pharmacy window rattled open, and a tired voice squeaked out of the speaker.
“Doctor Areiya?”
She struggled to hear feet and plodded over to the window.
“Hey, Alex,” she rasped.
“Punctual as ever,” the man on the other side of the glass said, raising an eyebrow as he eyed the deep purple mark on her neck. “I see you’ve received another prescription.”
She placed the ragged paper in the drawer and slammed it shut. The speaker crackled as the man reached for a pen in the pocket of his white labcoat.
“I don’t wanna hear it,” she grumbled, shoving her hands in her coat pockets and staring at her feet.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
The drawer popped open in front of her, and she eagerly yanked the small plastic bottle out and stuffed it in her pocket.
“Give Dr. Celores my regards,” Alex said, before switching off the speaker and disappearing into the rows of shelves at the back of the pharmacy.
“Fuck off,” Hana muttered under her breath as she spun on her heel and stalked outside. She didn’t make it three steps into the rain before she twisted the cap off the bottle and popped two of the pills into her mouth.
Even after nearly a decade, she still hadn’t gotten used to the bitter taste. Or learned how to relax her throat enough to swallow a pill dry without gagging. But she struggled through it nonetheless, much to the concerned looks of the pharmacy patients passing her by.
She eventually regained her composure and made her way back to the tram, and back to her apartment.
The pills didn’t kick in until she was halfway up the elevator. Feeling flooded back into her arms and legs, her headache eased, and the hunger gnawing at her stomach subsided. As much as she hated it, she was alive again. She flexed her arms and reveled in the immediacy of the muscular response.
The elevator doors slid open, and the holographic display projected scintillating colors into the gap between them. Floor 103. She stepped through the letters, static tugging at the already messy strands of hair hanging in her face. Her steps rang resonant on the polished metal tiles, her access card beeped on the sleek black panel next to her door.
Her coat missed the hook next to the door and collapsed into a heap on the ground. She ignored it, and searched for the cleanest glass in the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Rain continued to drum against the floor-to-ceiling glass window on the other side of the room.
“Welcome home, Doctor Areiya,” a synthetic voice crowed from the speakers hidden in the ceiling.
“Send my schedule to my comm,” she said, throwing herself onto the couch with a grunt and a sigh. The schedule hit her comm with a sharp beep; she ignored it. She was too busy staring at the prescription bottle in her hand, turning it around and around, barely perceiving the label. Back to baseline.
“Unread messages from… Koriko Areiya. Received three days ago. Reply pending.”
“Dismiss,” Hana said, with a wave of her hand.
“Message marked high importance. Are you sure?”
She slammed the pill bottle down on the coffee table and held her head in her hands. At this rate, her headache would be back, and not one borne of stimulant withdrawal.
“Play it.” She wandered into the bathroom and braced herself against the sink as she listened to the message.
“Good morning, Hana-chan. We haven’t heard from you in a while. We know you’re busy, but when you have time, your father and I would love to have you for dinner. Feel free to bring a date as well! You just know how much we’d love to meet a potential future husband!”
“End of message. Reply?”
Hana pressed her forehead against the cold metal of the faucet, a feeble attempt to calm the pain brewing in her head. Her wrists stung, she rubbed at the marks and tried not to think about Doctor Celores.
“No.”
The white-noise hum from the holographic projector bore into her ear, twisting its way inside her brain and behind her eyes. If she stopped thinking for a moment and imagined, she could almost feel the nylon flight suit chafing against her arms as the room pitched to the side. But this projector was just for medical records and diagrams, not IFF or navigation. And she was in her office, head in her hand, waiting for the images to load.
“I was thinking some sort of nerve mod too, like these spine fuses I read about on the way here.”
Hana sighed and reached for the tablet sitting on the desk beside her. The hologram twisted and warped, displaying an x-ray of Halder Crol, construction worker. And her latest patient.
“Now, look. You know what a spinal fuse entails, right?” She swiped on the tablet, and a series of tiny receivers slotted themselves into the vertebrae in the diagram. Micro-filaments snaked their way around the nerve fibers branching off the spine. “I’ll literally graft these electrical accelerators to your bones and weave these filaments,” she pointed at the silvery cables threading through the diagram, “directly into your nerves.”
Mr. Crol looked at her blankly before smiling. “Sounds good to me.”
“Removing them would be catastrophically traumatic. You would never be the same.” She rubbed the scars running up her arms. She could feel the rest of the matching web across her body start to itch.
Another blank stare. “Why would you need to remove them?”
“Because, with the grant you are taking advantage of to fund this operation, your mods belong to the company, not you. If you get fired or violate your contract, they could repossess them. And then I’d have to untangle your nerves from the micro-filaments; I’m good, but not good enough not to break things while I’m rummaging around your spinal column.”
“So… you won’t do it?”
Hana pinched the bridge of her nose and summoned up every ounce of patience she could muster. “I didn’t say that. When did I say that?”
“I dunno.”
With a wave of her hand, she dismissed the diagrams. “Look, I’m just required to give you these disclaimers before we proceed with the surgery.” She handed Mr. Crol the tablet. “Signature at the bottom if you want to proceed. Please.”
He signed without reading the paragraphs of legalese on the consent form. No one ever read it. Or if they pretended to read it, they sure didn’t understand it. If they did, they would never agree to the procedure she was about to perform. Oh well, maybe someday she would be able to convince someone not to ruin their future for a short term advantage.
She proceeded with the rest of the meeting, describing every agonizing detail of one of the most invasive surgeries conceived by modern medicine. Organ transplants were nothing compared to this operation. But Mr. Crol just nodded through the whole thing; Hana wasn’t sure he quite understood what he was getting into. But it wasn’t her place to judge need or want. She was just here to provide her surgical expertise and go back to her empty apartment at the end of the day.
“Now, you can meet with the attendant at the front desk to schedule the operation. Goodbye.” She gave him a curt nod and turned back to her desk. She switched off the holographic projector just to quiet the humming in her head.
“Thanks.”
She heard a chair scrape against the floor, followed by the door opening and closing. After a count of ten, she let out a long sigh and let her head fall to her desk.
“Your bedside manner could use some improvement, you know.”
Hana jolted upright, nearly knocking the contents of her desk off in a mad rush to get to her feet. But even with the stimulants coursing through her bloodstream, she wasn’t as fast as she used to be. Dr. Celores stood at the other side of her desk, shaking her head and smiling.
“You scared the shit out of me,” Hana said, smoothing out the front of her white coat before returning to her seat. Dr. Celores slid into the chair across from her, as graceful and lithe as a cat. Nerve and muscle mods, as well as some perception tweaks here and there for performance. Add in some skin tightening and a hair refresh, and Dr. Celores looked and moved like she was half her age. Or like she was Hana’s age, sans the irrecoverable nerve damage.
“Hyperfocus is a common side effect of dextroamphetamine in most people,” Dr. Celores said with a smug grin as she leaned back in the chair, causing the colorful ID designating her position in the neurosurgery department to flash in the light. “You should pay more attention. Or would that be less?”
“Why are you here, Mel?” Once a month was already too much.
“Am I not allowed to pay my protege a visit?” she asked, masking her satisfaction with feigned indignance.
Hana realized she was rubbing her wrists and clasped her hands together on top of the desk. “Are you in the habit of fucking all of your proteges?”
Dr. Celores gave her a wolfish grin and straightened up. “Only the ones I like.”
Hana’s grip tightened, her jaw ached. “I’ll ask again. Why are you here? Just to flirt?”
The facade dropped. Dr. Celores’ face was stone. “I’m leaving.”
“Leaving?”
“Transferring. Back to Meqina Station.”
“I… see.”
“So you’ll have to find someone else, unfortunately.”
“I gathered.”
With the same ease with which she folded herself into the chair, Dr. Celores stood up and stretched. “Well, it’s been fun, Dr. Areiya, but I do have other places to be. If you’re ever around Meqina, do give me a call.”
“I don’t think I will.”
Dr. Celores shot her one last smile before slipping out the door.
Hana paid attention this time, made certain no one else snuck in behind her. But she was certainly alone now, alone with her thoughts and the mountain of paperwork waiting for her. A surgery next week. More consultations today and the rest of the week. And now her supplier was leaving. She looked down at the bottle in her pocket. If she rationed, she would have enough to get her through the next two months. But after that? She would be useless in the operating room without the meds. Would she be able to find someone else willing to take Dr. Celores’ place? Certainly not someone as cheap as her.
If this kept up, if her suppliers kept disappearing or getting burned, she would have to go to the streets and gamble on purity and authenticity. Too risky in her line of work, especially if the Nation decided to test her once she deviated from her normally strict schedule of work, sleep, work.
What was she really using the meds for anyway? Creating more people like her, all fucked up and full of regret, that’s what. Sure, there was the guise of helping people, everyone thought surgeons were altruistic at their cores. But she knew better. She and Dr. Celores were the same, really. Preying on those who didn’t know any better. Or those who knew better and chose to do it anyway.
She pulled the contact chip out of her other pocket and set it on the desk, spinning the little square of black silicone around and around. Her jaw popped, and she rubbed at her temples and tried to relax before she had to get another enamel repair.
If the withdrawals didn’t kill her, the monotony sure would.
Something, something, opportunity knocks, right?