"The doc in da house!" Some prisoners cheered Garan like welcoming war hero.
"Yo doc!"
I could hear the friendly greetings, slaps and pats of the incoming person heading towards our cell. Whoever Garan was, he must have fixed them before.
"The newcomers?" A soft-spoken voice asked on approach.
"Yeah, newcomers." That was the voice of Zhiva.
They spoke in hushed tones outside the cell, hoping that I couldn't hear what they said, which is unfortunate for them because I could hear them clearly with my cochlear implants amplifying their conversation.
"We can't touch the Kamuy, so I need to be sure which is which or else the guards will think I'm trying a suicide run. I ain't going to those damn sewers. That is, if I am not in pieces by then."
"Do what you need to… Hey Kappa come here, need you to keep watch," Zhiva issued the order to someone.
The sound of boots dragging on the metal floor followed. I stayed by Trey's side, deliberating what to do if Garan can't fix him.
The droids hidden in my mouth can perform minor repairs on the Iktomin implants. Anything major will require open surgery on a sterile work bench. The Ultramax will never allow me to use their facilities.
Zhiva and another Perunian, Garan, came strolling into our cell. I noticed both Zhiva's and Garan's bulging trouser pockets. Tips of medical tools peeped out of them.
Garan looked more like a pretty boy salesman than a doctor, with his small face, a straight nose, and heart-shaped lips. His long blonde hair is in a high ponytail and he has long bangs that swoop to the left side of his face. He stood slightly taller than Zhiva.
However, his eyes were cold, like a calculative predator who sees through every move.
"Garan, Te…," Zhiva paused halfway and asked me. "What do I actually call you now?"
"Genja," I replied.
"There you go, Garan," Zhiva slapped him on the back, earning a stare from the now irate Perunian.
Garan pointed at the tossing and turning Trey, and at me. "Who is what?"
"I am the Kamuy. This is a human with Iktomin implants." I pointed to Trey.
"Human? Non space faring species, I suppose," Garan mused as he rubbed his chin thinking of something.
"Good guess." I wondered if he came across more of Trey's species. "How did you know?"
"Iktomins' pastime," he replied and approached Trey to give him a once over. "We usually raid their ships."
"I thought you were a doctor?"
"He is a space pirate doctor, better at fixing than raiding," Zhiva interrupted, causing Garan to side eye him.
I didn't understand the space pirate culture of the Perunians, but I didn't care.
Garan crouched down beside me and pointed to Trey's head. "May I?"
I got up and moved away to give him more space. He stretched out his hand and asked, "Zhiva, the luminator, please?"
Zhiva fumbled into his pocket, pulled out a palm sized metal cylinder with a special lighting node at its top and passed it to Garan.
Garan twisted the top and a wide beam of light appeared. Then he shone that light on his palm to test it out. Under the light, I could see Garan's blood vessels, nerves, phalanx bones, and ligaments. "Device uses a special frequency beam to show most of what's hidden behind the skin. Wanna try?"
I shook my head. Garan appeared a little disappointed, but he shrugged and continued to examine Trey.
"Now your little pal here…," Garan trailed off as he shined the light onto the top of Trey's head, running it through and then at the sides as meticulously as he could. "I can see traces of those cybernetic implants, or rather the parts."
He stopped for a moment, cringing. "Iktomins really suck at surgery."
"Anything wrong?"
"Messy surgical wound closures."
He came to the same conclusion I did when I first examined Trey's cybernetic implants. Despite his youthful look, Garan appeared to know more than he should have.
"Don't stare at me too much or I think you're in love with me…" he said.
I turned my face away.
"I met Genja first," Zhiva said, and I rolled my eyes, much to his amusement.
"Really, brother…"
I perked up and asked, "You two are brothers?"
"Yeah," they both answered in unison.
That explained how familiar with us.
"Half brother from another mother," Zhiva added.
"And he's adopted," Garan shot back as he continued checking Trey.
The way Garan's fingers worked nimbly showed a lot of experience with treating injuries. He looked only a few years older than Zhiva.
I watched the eerie illumination of Trey's skull covered by muscle, fat, blood vessels and those cybernetic relays.
Using his hand to move Trey's head from side to side, he shined through quickly, stopping at one spot to double check. "He's lucky. No fractures, probably bone bruising, just small little burst vessels leaking fluid above his skull, below the skin. But as he stays longer here, he will be prone to fracture if someone has a tussle."
"Why here?" Zhiva asked.
I already knew the answer.
"They didn't evolve to adapt to space. Non. Spacefaring. Species. Their bone loses structure faster in space like ours ancestors did. Only by generation after generation, their bone structure mutates to adapt," Garan explained more patiently than I could, while leaving the luminator by Trey's side.
"So that's why the Iktomins keep picking them? Easy to die?"
"No, dumbass. Iktomins pick them because they can do sweet fuck all," Garan retorted. "No space ship tech. No galactic satellites. What can their species do? Build a wooden boat and hope to sail off the edges into space to look for their lost pal?
Garan started feeling up Trey's limbs, flexing and extending them with both hands. Every movement of his palm and fingers positioned to feel the joint movements. Trey yelped when he touched the small patches of raw wound.
"A few lacerations and a heck lot of bruises."
He pulled up Trey's prison shirt and examined the abdomen by pressing around, causing him to curl up.
"Relax dude, I'm the best in prison."
"It h-hurts," Trey mumbled with his eyes squeezing shut.
"Yeah well, you got slammed by a flesh tank HARD."
Garan continued palpating the chest before laying his ear to each side of the chest.
He took the luminator and switched to a brighter light. Then he shined the light on Trey's abdomen, revealing a translucent gastrointestinal system moving like a gigantic worm.
"Looks fine, just muscle, ligament and blood vessel damage. Probably teeth. The fight earlier was with a Thorian?"
"Fight with a Hamazan," I replied.
Garan snapped his fingers and shook his head. "Damn, I missed out on the fun."
Only for Zhiva to push the temple of Garan hard with his finger, only to get smacked.
"He's just lucky. If it's the Thorian, all the equipment I have here won't be adequate," Garan commented as he stopped to look at something on Trey's body. "A Hamazan bashes with half their strength to make an example… Gimme the seratin syringe."
Zhiva pulled out the loaded syringes filled with odd, pre-prepared liquids from his pockets. "Which one?"
The shortcoming of being a Kamuy is our lack of knowledge in the medicating other species. What we mostly solve with cybernetic technology, they still solve some medical issues with bio-synthetic chemicals like the liquid in those syringes.
My people once kept the old books on the usage of herbs around the galactic quadrant. I am more well acquainted with poisons affecting a Kamuy or basic pharmaceutical knowledge of components to make an antidote to a toxin at a beginner's level.
Garan took a syringe with a whitish fluid inside. "Gimme half a bottle of moonshine, too."
"Why do you need it?" Zhiva asked.
They can get moonshine in the Ultramax? Sounds like corruption is also rampant in the Ultramax.
"To drown my sorrows while talking to you?"
"Really now." Zhiva narrowed his eyes.
Garan pointed to the raw skinned wounds on Trey and said, "he needs a good cleaning. The surroundings here are not clean."
Without hesitation, Zhiva popped his head out and called, "Swig a bottle."
"Coming!" another voice replied from the other end.
How the heck did Zhiva create a cooperative network in an Ultramax with relative ease? The time when I left Eden to the time I entered the Ultramax felt too short to establish such a group within any prison.
Unless the Eden authorities caught his group and sent him here. If so, this action didn't bode well.
"What's that?" I caught hold of the syringe with the suspicious white substance before Garan could shoot it up into Trey.
Even my optical implant failed to identify the liquid in the syringe, but it reminded me of dimmers.
Dimmers is a slang for a group of highly addictive drugs that knock an individual out cold depending on the dosage.
In high dosages, dimmers cause death through an overdose. In low sustained dosages, dimmers create a certain high feeling, an induced state of euphoria, in its user starting their journey into addiction. The user would crave more and more for the dimmer.
"Relax, it's seratin. We use it to stabilise bone density loss."
"Have you tested it before?" I asked.
Garan smiled with a creepy confidence I didn't like. "It's an Iktomin formula they used on humanoids like him. They call his kind… clever monkeys."