Spears of Uu'kata

Chapter 29 - Treason

Vasquez unclipped his bed restraints, sat up, and kicked off his blanket, frowning into the darkness. His head wouldn't shut the fuck up. He kept seeing that dead Uu'k'asht on the table, restraints still in place, body opened up, organs plucked out like playthings. 

He was a soldier. He'd killed plenty of Uu'k'asht. He'd seen so many fellow soldiers fall that he could honestly say he hated them. But... What that doctor was doing was horrific. A soldier kills because he has to. He doesn't take joy in suffering. And if he does, there's something wrong with him and he shouldn't be a soldier. Well, maybe he should be a Marine. Those guys were nuts.

What that Uu'k'asht must have experienced before he died...

Vasquez shuddered.

The poor bastard.

You had to be a special kind of fucked up to do that to a living being. Didn't matter if it was an enemy. There were some things you just didn't do. But he couldn't stop the curious voice in his head from asking why? Why were they vivisecting the Uu'k'asht? What were they looking for?

And Ben... What the fuck was he thinking? Was he really okay with destroying an alien home world? Was he actually okay with killing Char?

Really, you think you freaking know a guy.

Vasquez pulled up his terminal, masked his IP with a little program he wrote himself, and tapped into the cameras on the Artemis. He focused on the cameras that overlooked the holding cells.

One of the prisoners was asleep. Mouth agape, arms and legs akimbo. The other two were awake and looked to be talking to each other. Most likely, none of them had seen a human. The doctors would be interacting with them through the use of robots... right up until they strapped them to that horrific table.

"What are they looking for?" he asked aloud. Leaning his back against the wall as he considered the prisoners. He'd only ever seen their savagery, until that last battle. It was easy to see something as monstrous when it were coming at with a massive fucking axe. But now, looking down at them in their white, medical-grade pants, they looked different. They looked frightened.

He sighed and tapped into the computers in the research lab where he found hundreds of files. Inventory of drugs, chemicals and medical supplies, which they looked to be getting low on. There were lists of experimental results on celular levels, but nothing specifically about the Uu'k'asht.

Tapping his fingers on his knee, he wondered how much trouble he was willing to get into. He only wondered for a few seconds before his curiosity won out—which was always the case—and he searched the Artemis for Dr. Tophan's personal terminal.

The terminal was easy enough to find, but the level of security on it made Vasquez whistle. "What the fuck you hiding behind all this Dr, Death?" he asked the empty, filtered air.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to wiggle his way past the firewalls. Once he was in, he tiptoed through file after file, growing sick to his stomach as he did. This man was a monster. He'd been experimenting on Uu'k'asht for over twenty years and the things he'd done were just sick...

He'd starved them, dehydrated them, exposed them to radiation, and watched while they melted from the inside out. He'd dissected them and made their friends watch just to measure their reactions. He'd even had some of them mechanically raped. There were countless files, all categorized into quadrants. Quadrants... that was an odd way to categorize something.

He sat back and narrowed his eyes at the information on his display.

"Location," he mumbled. "You are categorizing based on the location of your experiments."