“I believe I will simply order her to come with us. Less complicated that way.”
“It’s your show,” Ocampo said, and clapped the Rraey on the shoulder, dismissing it. Tvann went to direct the herding of the Chandler crew. Then Ocampo turned his attention to me.
“Well, Mr. Daquin,” Ocampo said. “Today is your lucky day. You will survive this day, after a fashion.”
“There’s no emergency drone, is there?” I asked.
“You mean, to let the Colonial Union know about the Chandler’s crew,” Ocampo said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Ocampo shook his head. “No. No, there is not.”
“So you’re going to let everyone on the Chandler suffocate in their lifepods.”
“That’s the most likely scenario, yes,” Ocampo said. “This isn’t a populated system. No one else is likely to come by in the next week. Or year.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“You’re asking why I’ve apparently become a traitor?”
“For starters,” I said.
“The full answer is too long for the time we have now,” Ocampo said. “So I’ll just say that the real question is where one’s loyalties should be: with the Colonial Union, or with humanity. The two are not the same thing, you know. And I’ve come to realize that my loyalties are with humanity first. The Colonial Union’s time is coming to an end, Mr. Daquin. I’m just trying to make sure that when it ends, it doesn’t take the human race with it.”
“If your loyalty is to humanity, then prove it,” I said. I gestured back to the crew of the Chandler. “They’re humans, Secretary Ocampo. Save these people. Send a skip drone back to Phoenix Station letting them know where they are. Don’t let them die in the lifepods.”
“It’s noble of you to try to save them,” Ocampo said. “I wish I could grant your wish, Mr. Daquin. I truly and sincerely wish I could. But for now the Colonial Union can’t know that I’ve abandoned them. They need to think I’m dead. That only happens if there’s no one to report otherwise. I’m sorry.”
“You said you needed me as a pilot,” I said. “I won’t help you unless you save them.”
“I think you’ll change your mind,” Ocampo said, and nodded to one of the Rraey.
My feet were knocked out from under me and I was pushed down hard to the floor of the cargo hold.
Something was pressed to the back of my head. It felt like a gun.
I felt the vibration of the gun firing at the same time I felt something hit the back of my skull.
I don’t remember anything after that.
PART TWO
So now we’re at the part where I actually become a brain in a box.
I don’t remember the first part of it at all. I was shot in the back of the head point-blank with some sort of electrical stun gun; I was out. After I got zapped, I was taken to the Rraey’s ship, where a doctor of some sort (at least I hope it was a doctor) put me into a medically induced coma; the first step of the process. I was unconscious through the skip, three days later. I was unconscious when we arrived at our destination.
I was, thankfully, unconscious for the part that came next.
And then there was the recovery period, which is substantial, because, and I think this may be obvious when you think about it, removing someone’s brain from their head and keeping the brain alive in a box creates a considerable amount of trauma for the brain.
All told, I was out for eighteen days.
And when I say I was out, I mean that I was out. I didn’t dream. I didn’t dream because I don’t think that technically I was sleeping. There’s a difference between sleeping and what was happening to me. Sleep is an actual thing your brain does to rest itself and tidy up after a day of stimulation. What was going on with me was something else entirely. If sleep was going for an easy swim in a calm pond, what I was doing was fighting to surface in the middle of an ocean storm, far from any land at all.
I didn’t dream. I think it’s probably better that I didn’t.
During all this time I surfaced only once—well, once that I remember. I remember feeling like my consciousness was being dragged hard through sludge, and thinking, I can’t feel my legs.
And then: I can’t feel my anything. And then falling back down into the sludge.
I did feel something the next time I regained consciousness.
I had, bluntly, the worst fucking headache I had ever had in my life.
I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Try this. Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick.
Times six.
That was the good part of my headache.
It was the sort of headache where the best possible course of action is to lie there motionless and quiet, eyes closed, and pray for death. Which is why I think it took me longer than it should have to figure out a few things.
The first thing was that it was dark in the sort of way that shouldn’t be possible.