'Firefly meets Battlestar Galactica'.
A merchant's daughter is captured and sold into slavery.
A genetically modified survivor of an alien attack scours the galaxy for her taken brother before he is 'disassembled'.
An alien scientist u...
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"Try it now," said a voice from his hip. Miles carefully bent his knee, while he used his right arm to steady himself against the work table. He didn't trust his left arm, or anything on the numb half of his body. He had good reason to. His mechanical knee popped, and sent a jolt straight through his spine. Sparks shot the kneeling Nisseri woman in the face, while his left eye cut to static. He staggered, his right arm strained to keep his much heavier frame upright. He didn't want to crush his incompetent bio mechanic.
"Vostros Rings, woman, what are you trying to do to me?" Mismatched eyes glared up at him as the woman in question shoved a smoking hank of hair out of her face.
"You know, connecting your nervous system to all this hardware isn't easy. Why can't I render you unconscious again?" She squinted at his hip joint, giving it a whack he didn't feel. He resisted the urge to throttle her, and inhaled for patience.
"Being conscious for this procedure allows me to give you constant feedback-"
She snorted at that, and glanced up, her expression full of sardonic judgement until she the eye. She crawled up his body to peer in his face, too close, far too close. Half his body might be numb, but each careless brush of her fingers was a flash fire through his functioning nerve endings and he didn't like that one bit. She's your captor, idiot. There was nothing but clinical attention in her every move. Her finger tapped against his malfunctioning eye.
"You didn't tell me your eye shorted. Your feedback is terrible. This would go much faster if you let me put you under. The pain when I connect your live nerves to the micro-wiring is going to be excruciating-"
"No!" Miles snapped, his remaining muscles tensed up. A wave of dizziness threatened to make good on the mechanic's suggestion. He gripped the table, knuckles white. His breaths came faster, shorter, the organ like twin lumps of metal in his chest. Did he still have his own lungs or did she replace those too?
The stories told about the Nisseri flesh shops were shallow half-truths. Harvesters came in a variety of personalities. They put you under and you never wake up. Ha, no one knew, they couldn't know. The sadistic ones, with their leering misshapen faces, gave no such mercy. They numbed out their extractions if they grew tired of the screams, but never put them under, not until they began removing vital parts. The worst were the vacant ones, dead gazes, nothing but a body that went through the motions. They took no notice of screams, or gurgling cries. They kept cutting away, not a twitch of pleasure or disgust in their blank faces. He lay back on the slab, strapped down, unwilling to turn his head, listening to the shrieks and unanswered prayers of the other Jamestown extractions. Voices he knew all his life. His listened to their final choking curses and dying sobs, waiting to see the face of his personal reaper. A Nisseri loomed over him, observing his wild terrified expression. His harvester smiled...
"Miles." The hand on his cheek was warm. The smell of machine grease banished the memory of blood and death, loosening the fist of panic holding him tight. He wrapped his fingers over hers, flesh against flesh, his life line. He was alive because of these nimble dirty fingers. He opened his good eye, stared at her smudged face, the female who plucked him from Death's doorway, and restored him piece by piece. Whatever she saw in his expression made her worry her bottom lip. Such a human gesture, had his lady mechanic studied the facial tics of his species? Or were some expressions more universal than others? Did she realize what she looked like when she did that? Did she notice?
"You're safe here, Miles," she said, as she gently tugged her fingers free. "Remember what I told you."
"No one in Ratch's lab but Ratch," he replied as she fiddled with the hardware on his face.
"Precisely," she beamed at him. His vision restored with a soft metallic click. She knelt back down at his hip. "Now, tell me in detail, what you feel when I cross these currents."
