Hard Luck Hermit

“Tooley!”

“It’s better than it looks,” Tooley assured them. “Most of the blood is the other guy’s. Speaking of-”

Farsus stepped up and removed the corpse from Tooley’s lap, flipping it over to examine the body more closely. Whoever it had once been was a Gentanian, just like Kamak, but visibly younger. They had a few scratches and bruises, and also, notably, a large, jaw-shaped chunk of flesh missing from their neck. Corey recalled the earlier lecture about how hard Tooley’s species could bite, and shivered a little.

“How the hell did they get in here?”

“I don’t know,” Tooley said. “I will happily recap what I do know, but I also have a knife sticking out of me. Do something about that, please and thank you, and then talkies.”

Tooley was a little tipsy right now, which was probably a good thing considering aforementioned knife. Doprel extended his arm flat, and Farsus carefully laid her on top of it like a makeshift pallet.

“Alright, Doprel, you carry her,” Kamak said. “Farsus, Corey, shove the corpse in a box and bring it with.”

“What?”

“I want Theddis to take a look at it before cops get involved,” Kamak said. “I trust him more than some random uniform.”

“Do you want to deal with the knife or the autopsy first?”

“Autopsy,” Kamak said.

“Knife,” said everyone else.

“As a medical practitioner I’m obligated to listen to the bleeding woman above all else,” Dr. Theddis said. “Lie her down over there, and then take the body over there.”

“Can’t you just put it on the next table over?”

“I am not putting a corpse next to a patient,” Theddis protested. “I’m still an actual doctor, you know.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Kamak said. “Come on, help me haul this corpse.”

Farsus and Corey helped move the dead body to a table on the far side of the examination room while Theddis scanned Tooley. A handheld x-ray gave him a good view of how deeply the knife had penetrated, while his sense of smell gave him some other important information.

“What have you been drinking?”

“Fateen.”

“That doesn’t play well with painkillers, you know,” Theddis said.

“Wasn’t really expecting to get stabbed today, doc,” Tooley said.

“Just giving you fair warning,” Theddis said. “This is going to hurt more than either of us are happy with. I’d give you something to bite down on, but you’d just bite through it.”

“Alright, just give me a heads up when-”

Following his usual philosophy of “get it over with”, Theddis pulled the knife out of Tooley’s shoulder with no warning. A spurt of blood and a spurt of shouted curses filled the air at the same time.

“You absolute motherfucker, if you ever do that again I’ll bite your hand off, you god damn son of a bitch,” Tooley screamed. The curses continued as Theddis took a few steps to manually close the gap in the flesh and then slapped a medicinal salve over the wound to do the rest. Tooley’s cursing faded along with the pain, and she fell silent about the time Theddis started sizing her up for a sling to keep her arm in place.

“You done?”

“Yeah, sorry doc,” Tooley said. “Thanks for the help.”

“Any time,” Theddis said. “And don’t worry about the swearing. I’ve heard worse.”

“I have to step up my game, then.”

“Try ‘geffekus’,” the doctor suggested. “It’s a felony to even say it in thirteen systems.”

“Neat!”

Theddis fed a blood sample into a nearby machine, made sure it was calibrated correctly, and then placed the small device atop Tooley’s wound. It would start 3D-printing organic tissue to replace some of the flesh Tooley had lost, and keep Theddis’ hands free to start the autopsy. He did a quick sanitary routine before putting gloves on and getting a scalpel. He liked autopsies better than medicine anyway. Dead people didn’t squirm.

“Alright, cause of death, big fucking bite out of the neck, so we can skip that part,” Theddis said. “I assume you guys already went through his pockets?”

Kamak held up a loose datapad -utterly bricked by some kind of automatic failsafe-, an electronic slicing tool he’d presumably used to access the ship, and a second knife, identical to the one that had been in Tooley’s shoulder. Not much to go on. Corey would end up keeping the knife, though. No point wasting a perfectly good knife.

“Let’s see if we can find out anything about where you’re from,” Theddis said. He cut out four cubes of flesh from the corpse and dropped them into nearby vials, then used a more specialized tool to extract a sample from the bone marrow. A few nanobots, a centrifuge, and a scanner later, he had a field of data to draw possible conclusions from.

“Lot of background radiation,” Theddis said. “Oxygen degradation on the cells implies a lot of recycled air...probably a spacer, like yourself. Spent time on ships.”

Kamak nodded along with the explanation. They were having some bad luck with spacers nowadays, apparently.

“Any drugs in his system? What about gene editing?”

“Mild to moderate alcohol damage to the liver, but no hard drugs,” Theddis said. “No gene mods either.”

“Not some random criminal, then,” Kamak said. Gangbangers and thieves rarely stayed sober. “But no one in an expensive syndicate either.”

“Here’s something,” Theddis said. “Take a closer look at that radiation damage on the cells. Know what that’s a sign of?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I figured, just reminding me why you pay me,” Theddis said. “It’s indicative of a recent exposure to short but intense bursts of gamma and x-ray radiation.”

“Like you’d find near a set of binary neutron stars,” Kamak said.

“Indeed. Before he came here to kill Tooley, this guy’s last stop was Paga For,” Theddis said.

“Whoo!” Tooley shouted. “Let’s go kill a bitch on Paga For!”

“You want to go towards the people who tried to kill you?”

“Well when you put it like that...”