BABY VIKTOR MEETS BABY BEE

	An oxygen mask snapped to his face, and the darkness of the world drifted away once again. Not that it wasn’t still dark. All the back up generators had blown- Viktor had heard them go midway through the attack. But the soft red flicker of an emergency flare along the ship’s stark rafters faded into view along with a far away voice. “…. absolute idiot, third goddamn time to happen, too. Where the hell would your dumb ass be if I wasn’t in your sector. Fuckin’ dead is exactly where. And what is this, fourteen goddamn gunshots?” Gentle prodding, dulled by a near-severed central nerve wire, then sharp, familiar pain as flattened bullets were pulled in quick succession from his soft-armor clad torso. A brisk tsk. “Your arm’s fucked. Nothing organic is fucked, though, not this time. Good job, I guess. And don’t take off the oxygen mask, they’re still getting life support back online.” Viktor’s arm, which had crept up to his exposed, visor-less face, was gently pressed back to the metal floor. Rustling, snap of a bag, then a pitter of feet with the echoing, fading, “Don’t even entertain the thought of moving in your lunk-head, or I’ll…”
	He again raised his hand and flicked his visor into place, squashing the mask against his nose, bringing metal struts and metal rivets into deep red contrast with the exposed wiring, then felt for the damaged wire. Jolting, electric spasming- he lay panting as his arm rebelled against him. Not something he could fix. Even so, he had things to do. OE could make another break against the blockade; it’d put them to the eighth time this week. So Viktor clung to his frayed arm and shunted himself into standing position, then shuffled into the guts of the Agamemnon.
*	*	*
	They came later that evening, actually. This time they came with blood in their all six of their eyes and starvation at their heels. They hadn’t come to bypass the blockade; they’d come to destroy it.
	He had just gotten off his shift, and heavy dread settled into his still-bruised chest as the pulsing red of the sirens beat across his closed eyes. There wasn’t even any adrenaline this time, just cold fear that sucked at his newly and poorly repaired limbs. Yet he climbed to a stand, and as he swayed, he pushed away thoughts of flight, of pulling up baseboards and disappearing into the ship’s wiring, of pressing himself into an escape pod, of leaping across the void of space and stealing the OE fighter, of-
	He pushed them away. He took his rifle, and he stepped out from the bunks just as a row of his brothers swept past, so he fell into line as the snap of orders washed over him.
	And then they came. They carved through the walls with blades of plasma, and their horns nearly brushed the ceiling’s tangled wiring as they stood and fired arcs into the line of humans- eh, mostly humans.
	But then. Then one soldier broke away. One single person. Viktor didn’t even see them in their initial panic- had they been panicking? Wide eyes filled with tears? Or solemn with the knowledge that either way they’d be slaughtered. Deadened with the choice to break, to begin a chain reaction which shattered the line as bullets shattered sheet metal. But the motivation didn’t matter, not really. It ended with Viktor on the ground, five bullets lodged in his torso as OE paraded around his soon-to-be-corpse after soldiers fleeing death. His head lolled as darkness once again settled over him, and through the veil he saw someone cowering in a corner, also overlooked by the OE. Someone almost familiar…
*	*	*
	Time passed, and Viktor was swathed in darkness. It wasn’t too bad, really, although something kept on trying to prod him out of the blissful oblivion. It wasn’t until something warm drip-drip-ran onto his face- something warm, salty, metallic across his neck, cheek, lips. Someone else was dying atop him, bleeding out. Strange, that the pressure of a corpse would be the most contact he’s had in- in a while. Maybe that would be appropriate, as far as last sensations went. But maybe not.
	Then gentle swearing arose from a ringing Viktor hadn’t even realized he’d been hearing, and he understood his last sensation wasn’t coming anytime soon.
	As he resurfaced from nothingness, he noticed two things: he was no longer on the floor of Agamemnon and instead strapped to the floor of someplace far more cramped, and that he was in so much pain. He groaned. It seemed like the right thing to do.
	“Oh, thank fuck, Sleeping Beauty has deigned to grace us with his noisy-ass presence.”
	He allowed his head to loll once again- zero-grav made it much more difficult, but Viktor was dedicated if anything, and he found himself looking up at a person, now more familiar than not.
	“Yeah, yeah, don’t look at me like that, don’t worry. I haven’t abducted you for some creepy sex dungeon.” The little alien motioned to the straps. “Your fuckin’ tin tub of an escape pod has exactly zero gravity simulators. Er, no fake gravity, that is.”
	Viktor remained silent, and the alien cocked her head, almost challenging him to question her authority on zero-grav sex dungeons. He worked his mouth- dry as hell with the taste of muddy blood- until he found his voice and croaked, “What happened to the others.”
	She turned the colour of an unclean chalkboard. She clearly hadn’t expected this question, and opted to mumble something he couldn’t quite hear from the floor. The then flushed green, and turned defiant eyes to him. “Even so, you were the only one I could get to, got it? Th-they…. Just look, dumbass, they keep on killing the fucking medics. They target us like lame mmynahm. There’s a reason we aren’t stationed on ships anymore, except for the shit untrained ones. Fuck, even those are in short supply, Panoptic - they’re taking on just anybody.” She made a violent hand gesture, clenched secondary fists, and continued in a voice barely kept from shaking, “We’re spread too goddamn thin for that, so we fucking zoom around and let everyone die trying to fucking be everywhere at once while they learn which faces to shoot at. And we die, then everybody dies.”
	Viktor simply looked at her as she spilled words. Then he nodded.  “You did what you could, little bee.”
	She looks down. “Did you even see the others? They were mowed down. I could’ve… I could’ve… Just, fucking understand, If you can’t die for what you’re doing, then what the fuck are you even good for?”
	Viktor felt his heart break. A little for her, and a little for himself. Because he couldn’t come up with an answer that would convince himself, much less this broken little doctor. And so they floated through space, away from Agamemnon as flotsam from its shattered halves drifted through space mingling with the broken bits of OE spacecraft.
*	*	*
	They met again four times. Each time Bee cursed at him as she dug bullets from his wounds, although the first time she would not meet his eyes. The second and third times she drew obscenities on the floor with his blood, and the fourth time she formally requested to be transferred to his new post as she declared herself “shit enough to squat here with you losers.” And even later, they left together with a small trail of other soldiers to fuck shit up.