[Moosh da Outlaw]

Thanks for the comments, peoples. The wait's over, so here you go. ^^



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The life support system beeped faintly. The slog strapped to the stainless steel table shuddered in its sleep as Helix opened its chest with a scalpel, humming. Surgery was oh so soothing; it just melted his stress away. Smiling, Helix lifted the slog’s wobbly heart from its chest and turned it over. The heart felt unnaturally hard, and was just barely pulsing; it was expected, though. The slog’s gluey tongue rolled out from its cream-colored mouth. Helix’s grip tightened around the scalpel and his face paled, expecting the infected slog to jump out and attack. It slumped back down instead.

Helix enjoyed cutting apart his cylonite-injected subjects; it was like playing with fire. He would have messed with the slog all day if Vhern hadn’t barged in his room uninvited.

Helix swung around, glaring. “What do you want?”

Vhern strolled over cooly, eyes shifting as he examined the room. The heavy thunk of metal against metal followed as his slig bodyguards lumbered behind. They were expressionless.
“I just thought I’d pay a visit,” Vhern said, scrawling on his clipboard. He squinted at the ceiling. “How long has that crack been there?”

Helix looked up. There was a small crack in the ceiling’s plaster; it had always been there. “A week?”

“A week,” Vhern repeated, scrawling more furiously on his clipboard. “Well get it fixed, or I’ll have to write you a bad inspection notice.”

Helix wasn’t listening. He was too busy watching Vhern’s bodyguards, who were staring at him. Just staring. He didn’t trust them, but how could he? They didn’t even have names. Vhern just called them One and Two.
‘Numbers,’ Helix thought bitterly, ‘aren’t names.’

“Are you even listening?” Vhern’s voice pulled Helix’s attention away from the two sligs. Vhern’s eyes shifted sneakily. “I asked how your, ah, research was going.”

Helix frowned. Why did his cylonite tests have to be so secretive? Practically the entire ship knew about them! “Fine, I guess.” He said eventually.

“I guess?” Vhern asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Its going fine,” Helix corrected, grumbling. Vhern flashed a grin.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” he said pleasantly, stepping closer to the slog Helix was dissecting. Helix hastily tossed him a wadded up ball of cloth; a lab coat.

“Its not safe to go near it without some sort of protection,” Helix explained as Vhern pulled it on. “Cylonite is dangerous stuff, you know.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

The two vykkers leaned over the slog, so close that their breath nearly fogged up the table. Vhern jabbed it with a claw. “How is this thing supposed to help us?”

Helix cleaned his bloody claws on his lab coat before picking up a fresh scalpel. “Well, I’ve done some calculations,” he said, merrily slicing the slog’s arteries. The heart disconnected from the rest of its body, and the slog’s life support system shut down. “And I’ve discovered something odd.”

“Yes? What’s odd?” Vhern asked eagerly. His two body guards glanced at one another; it was the first time Helix had actually seen them interact.

“The slog’s body works pretty much like an intern’s body. Then again, it acts like anything’s body; it has a heart, lungs, a stomach, a brain...” he snipped the last blood vessel with a pair of tiny scissors. The slog died instantly. “...what we’ve discovered from our cylonite tests is that the average slog can live about two months on cylonite, the longest we’ve seen live having been three-and-a-half months. But, while its still living, its not actually alive. Its brain starts deleting memories, its animal instincts start to fade...”

Vhern rested his elbows on the metal table. “It loses its mind, you’re saying.”

“Exactly.”

Helix then began the messy task of disassembling the heart. He took a small knife, about the size of a nail file, and removed the last strands of veins from around the bleeding object. Then, with slow, deliberate patience, he created a clean cut all the way across the heart and pulled the skin aside. A puff of reddish-brown steam wafted from the organ as it collapsed on itself, spilling blood. Vhern gagged, eyes clamped shut. Helix sighed contentedly. He was perfectly used to messy operations.

Helix flipped the heart inside-out with one quick motion. The inner wall of the object was laced with what looked like solid black blood vessels, crosshatching over one another intricately.
“Cylonite,” he explained as he measured one of the black strands. He wrote down the size of the cylonite growth on his own clipboard before tossing the heart in a metal bin and locking it shut, to prevent any of the virus from escaping.

“That was disgusting.” Vhern said, leaning closer in fascination.

“I know.”

Vhern rubbed his claws together worriedly. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Measuring the cylonite levels,” Helix said with a shrug, rummaging in his doctor’s bag. Out of the bag he produced a rubber mallet and a chisel.

“Now what?” Vhern asked weakly.

“I’ll measure the cylonite levels of the brain.”

“Look,” Vhern growled, rapping his claws against the table, “I didn’t come here to watch you mutilate a slog corpse. Are you gonna tell me what you’ve discovered, or not?”

“Well you didn’t exactly come at a great time,” Helix scowled as he placed the chisel against the slog’s head. “If your gonna bother me now, then you’ll have to at least let me do my work.”

“Just tell me what you’ve learned!”

Helix picked up the mallet, pulled it back, and struck the end of the chisel. The slog’s head split like a melon. Vhern let out a squeak of surprise.
“As I was saying,” Helix continued, clearing away some blood with a rag, “the slog loses its mind, usually within a week of infection. When this happens, the slog is left with just one instinct; to kill, and to eat, and survive the only way it thinks it can. I did some calculations and I found that the body mass of an intern is almost twice that of the average slog.” He dug his scalpel into the exposed brain, squeezing out thin, dark-red blood. “The same can’t be said for brain mass,” he chuckled, “but I’m not surprised. So, scientifically, an intern infected with cylonite should lose all traces of sanity about a week or so after infection.”

Vhern looked thoughtful. He licked his lips, and finally said, “but that cylonite intern hasn’t.”

“His name’s Nedd,” Helix said, trying to sound helpful.

Vhern shrugged. “Whatever.”

“You’re right. He hasn’t lost his sanity. In fact, he seems perfectly capable of thought, seeing as he screamed curses at me after I chopped his hand off. I had it burned, by the way, so don’t ask.” he spread the slog brain apart. Vhern finally settled with just looking away, though he couldn’t avoid the horrible smell of steaming entrails. “So thats where I’m confused. He shouldn’t be able to think clearly, but it appears he can. He shouldn’t have enough brain mass left to produce speech, but he can.”

“What are you suggesting?” Vhern asked in awe.

Helix looked up from his work. “I don’t know.” He admitted. “It could be a mutant gene, or even mutant cylonite. He’s been infected to a load of diseases before, so his remaining antibodies could be stalling the cylonite’s affects... or he might just have a high resistance to it. Everybody’s different. Unfortunately, Nedd’s different in the way that he likes to kill people and can survive a cylonite infection.”

“So you’re saying?”

“It doesn’t look like Nedd’s gonna die any time soon.”

There was a pause.

“Good work.” Vhern said, sounding sick. He shed his lab coat and stepped back from the slog carcass. “I’ll just leave you to it then. And, oh,” he glanced at Helix darkly, “don’t tell anybody about this, all right?”

Helix smiled and nodded. “Understood.”

“Good.”

Vhern marched out of the room, his slig bodyguards flanking either of his sides. Helix cleaned his claws slowly on his lab coat, eyes distant. When he was sure that Vhern was gone, Helix walked over to a phone on a nearby desk, picked it up, and quickly dialed Durc’s number.