Five times, the guards changed shifts.
Nothing to do other than eat, sleep and pace around like a trapped animal.
Are we still in the Eden planetary system? Arabaki better be on his way to the Narakan system by now.
It almost felt like the Great Swirl Council processed those without cybernetic implants faster than Trey and I.
"I swear that there's bed bugs around here," Trey grumbled loudly. "Did you get bitten?"
"What's a bedbug?"
"Um… right, it's a tiny type of insect on Earth that hides in your bed and sucks your blood," he replied. "Maybe it's my imagination."
His home world, where tiny insects sucking blood and leaving welts, sounded horrible, like those primitive settlements. Parasites and every known disease existed on them. How the primitives lived on the planet didn't appeal to me.
"Really?"
Troy stood up and turned his back to me while pointing to a raised reddish welt on his neck behind his ear that I recognised too well. "Last night, felt a stinging itch here. Do you see anything?"
The droid performed a micro-puncture earlier to add a tracking program. That site must be where the droid penetrated.
"A bump, but it may have come from a scratch," I replied. "Just one there and everywhere on your neck looks clear. Do you need a doctor?"
"Nah, I can handle bug bites. Hasn't killed me yet," Trey muttered as he sat back down on his bed under mine.
I glanced at the new faces of prisoners who just arrived. A bruised face on the newcomer told me about his stupidity, like Trey's, to attack a guard. For a moment, I turned my face to the wall for a nap.
"But what's going on there?" Trey suddenly asked.
I turned my head only to see a group of elite soldiers escorting two male Haoleans in a white uniform with a logo of the Great Swirl Council emblazoned on the front, through the entrance. They held tablets in their hands.
Definitely not prisoners. Both pairs of eyes turned to our cell, giving me a bad feeling about their presence.
I jumped off my bed and landed on my feet, only to see the gawking face of Trey on his lower bunk.
"I've never seen such a cool move. If I tried that, I probably fall flat on my face."
"Huh?"
What the hell was Trey spouting out of his mouth? I ignored his dumbass gushing and glanced at the two male Haoleans.
They wore a cold, emotionless expression on their faces, and one's eyes met mine for a moment before he turned away.
The predatory glint in those eyes reminded me of the crazy look on Kamuy scientists when they were about to perform an experiment.
Were those the cyberneticists whom the previous guards spoke about?
They approached our cell while the soldiers stood guard at the entrance, raising the interest of the other bored prisoners, and stopped in front of our cell. Their fingers ran over their personal tablet and a few red beams of light started running across our cell.
"What the heck is that?" Trey leaned away from one reddish beam without success.
I replied, "they are scanning us."
Both looked at their tablets and then at us intermittently in front of our cell. The other prisoners watched out of curiosity from the sidelines of their respective cells, as though waiting for drama to unfurl.
More than the usual number of soldiers stood guard at the brig.
Trey frowned at my words and wrapped his blanket around tightly on the bed as the temperature in the cell dropped drastically. I could see the icicles forming around his drink bottle at the side of his bed.
Those cyberneticists intend to test our resistance to hibernation, treating Trey and me as their laboratory test creatures.
"Fuc-k-k, it's c-cold…," Trey muttered while his teeth chattered, with the warm whitish vapor wafting from his mouth.
I threw a side glance at a shivering Trey, who wrapped himself in the blanket tightly before slowly nodding off to the side until his body flopped on the bed.
Did the Iktomin cybernetic technology offered Trey some defence against extreme cold temperature?
[Warning: Attached Target entering hypothermic shock] my optical implants reported from the backdoor loophole left as a backup.
[Alert: Countermeasures for Cryogenic stasis activated in Attached Target]
To my relief, the Iktomins provided Trey's cybernetic implants with some defence against extreme cold temperature.
However, Kamuy cybernetic technology offered me a stronger defence against the shit those two scientists wanted to pull. Heck, the optical implants haven't even issued a warning on my body yet.
After all, my species used to mine minerals in the harshest environments which went beyond Great Swirl Council's toughest mining tech because of our cybernetics.
Nothing like playing along with their game.
I pretended to enter deep hibernation mode at the coldest temperature by slowly shutting my eyes to fool them, and my body flopped beside Trey.
My cochlear implant targeted any available sound waves and the infra-red sensors in my optical implant beyond my eyelid zoomed onto their lips, for the neural implant in my brain to extrapolate their speech.
I heard the forcefield drop and the footsteps of the two entering the cell.
"This one has Iktomin tech," one spoke up. "The other Kamuy… I've never seen such cybernetic relays… It's too extensive for identification. I don't even know where to document…"
"Lymph nodes, brain and all the major organs… I mean… from the last few data we had on the dead Kamuy, they didn't have such extensive cybernetics implants," said the second.
Ah, those dead Kamuy they picked up are probably the cannon fodder civilian class Kamuy. Not the military class Kamuy.
My curiosity grew about where and when they picked those corpses.
"How long ago was that data?"
"Six hundred cycles ago or longer. Took me a while to find those archived records."
Bah. Too old. They probably referred to data collected during the existence of the former Kamuy system.
"Wow, be nice to see a fossil."
Wait, is he calling me prehistoric?
"We can't take him or her apart too… the records have a prohibition warning attached to invasive procedures on Kamuy bodies."
This scientist sounded stern when he spoke.
I could imagine why - he probably read about those legendary exploding Kamuy corpses, a result of our past encounters with the Iktomin and other species which sought to kidnap live or dead Kamuy to study our cybernetic technology.
"What's the prohibition?"
Must be a rookie on his first off world investigation if he hadn't heard.
"If you want to see how the battle fortress blows up… but let me get off this ship first and land on the nearest planet before you open and dig around that Kamuy's body.
"You are kidding…"
"Look at your damn tablet. Those photographs are the aftermath when they tried to autopsy a Kamuy…"
"Yikes. What about this guy with the Iktomin implants?"
"Nothing special except the neural mapping is like the corpse we recovered from the attempt on General Perkuna."
"What charges are they both on?"
Yeah, I want to know mine.
"The one with the Iktomin implants… False identity, obstruction of security personnel, assault on three officers… suspicion of murder, but no solid proof yet."
Go Trey. You are in a lot of trouble if they find out about your game missions.
"What about the Kamuy?"
"Just false identity. Stated in the notes here - to find out the identity."
"Yeah, from who? I thought an extinction level event blew all of them out of space from that catastrophe like the Inti."
"Inti survivors still exist. Besides, the registered merchant ship entered Eden with a trace origin from Nuwan space. The Nuwans might know something because the Kamuy used to ally with them."
I doubt Rong or Zhuyin will acknowledge my existence.
"Dr Askhen, we can't hold them for long in the brig," a gruff voice said. "With false identity charges, these two will take too long to verify and those cybernetic freaks need special interrogation measures… where are you going to send them?"
"Commander, clear your prisoners and transfer these two to the Ultra-Max Security Space Station in Shoah system, as per our issued protocols. Keep them at this temperature before transfer."
Interesting, they will ship both Trey and I to the notorious Shoah Ultra-max Security Space Station at the darkest and most desolate corner of their territory.
"Shoah? For false identity charges?"
I can sense the incredulous tone of the commander. Even he sensed something was wrong, given the light nature of our offences. False identity often came with some jail time and/or a slap on the wrist fine.
"Orders from the top," one of the cyberneticist replied monotonously.
The reply meant the Great Swirl Council may use the environment of Shoah to kill us.
No one returned to tell the harrowing tale of their stay in the ultra-max prison.
Only rumor running about the space station was of a one way death trap. Probably spread by returning prisoner guards to enhance the horrifying state of its already rotten, horrible reputation.
That's where the worst criminals stayed in the Great Swirl Council's territory.
Great, I will meet the scum of the universe. Maybe compare the scum standards between the ones roaming freely in Narakan and the ones stuck in Shoah.
No inhabitable planets except for three gas giants revolved around the brown dwarf star in the Shoah planetary system. The brown dwarf star emitted low light, camouflaging the planetary system against the darkness of the galactic space.
Escape was close to impossible because of its distance to civilization. No one heard of anyone escaping the Shoah planetary system for a reason.