Extras

Posted on Fri 1st Feb, 2019 @ 12:32am by

826 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Oblivion
Location: Somewhere in Oblivion

Holly Day woke up with a burning need to cough. Her right side, however, was pinned under someone soft, and she herself was naked. She couldn't remember where she'd left her waistcoat, or the stash of handkercheifs inside it. She groped frantically, found the pillowcase under her head and pulled it to her face, finally giving in to the urge to cough. It was a bad one, she thought. She'd been out of her chamber for too long. The cough went on and on, bits of lung coming out along with the blood. Finally, she finished.

The girl she was with had woken up somewhere in there, and had pulled back -- either in disgust or to give her room, Holly wasn't sure which. Young woman Holly corrected herself. Not a girl. The gi... young woman had extras. An extra eye, an extra mouth, an extra pair of arms, an extra pair of breasts, and so on. One mouth spoke with a spinto soprano voice; the other with a coloratura contralto. She sang the most amazing duets with herself; after a performance, Holly'd bought her a drink, and one thing led to another, and now they were both naked and looking at each other across a bloody pillowcase.

"You're really her," the young woman said. "Holly Ng." She mispronounced it, making the g hard.

"I was," Holly admitted, carefully pulling the pillowcase off the pillow. "Then I got married. Now I'm Holly Day."

"The Butcher of Clarvis?" the girl asked.

Holly sighed and sat up, swinging her feet off the bed to sit on the edge, her back to the girl. She wondered who she worked for -- Federation Intel? The Tal Shiar? Did the Klingons even have an intel service? Or was she just curious? "Yes," she said, "though the story you've probably heard isn't the whole story."

"I heard you killed an entire world."

Holly shook her head. "Only marginally true." She wadded up the pillowcase, putting the blood and sputum on the inside of several layers. "It was the war." She got up from the bed and walked to the recycler, dropped the pillowcase in. This wasn't her home; she never took a hook-up back to the shuttle at the center of Rose's web. It was one of the nicer temporary rooming complexes, near the beer garden.

"The war?" the girl asked. She arranged the blankets over her lap, but left her torso bare.

"I was a fresh young biomedicist. Holly Ng, MD, PhD. I was recruited right out of school to work for what turned out to be a pretty shady bunch. We were losing the war; losing it badly. They asked for a weapon which would put down Jem'Hadar troops without the need for our boys to come in contact with them. So I made it. A delightful little virus that used the body's own immune system to rip apart soft organ tissues. So that our kids wouldn't be exposed, I made sure it wasn't... couldn't be... airborne. Droplets only. I stressed that to the bosses. Droplets." Holly stopped, looking off into the distance.

The girl was quiet, watching her. Eventually, Holly started again, "They were going to do a trial run. A planet called Clarvis, a nowhere little agrarian colony, was being overrun by Dominion troops. They put me and a vat of the virus on a starship with a couple of others. Flew us out there. And then... the bastards dumped the aerosol indiscriminately. On the Dominon troops, on the civilians, on our ground forces.

"When I realized what I'd done, Emma and I stole a shuttle and flew down to the surface. We tried to save as many as we could. Instead... I lost Emma." Holly closed her eyes, but went on talking, "And contracted the virus myself. A very mild case. You can't catch it from me, unless you come in contact with my blood. But every day, it rips apart my lungs; every night, I put them back together."

"Isn't there a cure?" the girl asked.

"I don't deserve a cure," Holly said, her voice bleak. "And I'm the only one left alive who was affected."

"Come back to bed?" the girl asked, turning the blankets back.

Holly smiled, found her waistcoat, pulled her inhaler out of one of the pockets. She took a deep breath of the medicine within, then took a handkerchief and the inhaler and put them within reach of the bed.

"What do you think of this Federation Wonder-Weapon?" the girl asked. "I heard some of the raiders talking about it. They said they never saw anything coming, just... boom, three of the ships in their group were clouds of plasma."

Holly shrugged, sliding in between the blankets. "I'm not a physicist," she answered, "and not in the business of making weapons, anymore." Then she brushed her lips over the girl's, and let her hands speak for her.

 

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