The captain kept his place until he could hear Luca breathing evenly, then quietly left the treatment room. The moment the door shut, the gazes of three people waiting in the corridor fixed on him.
The face that had been twisted with pain while he watched Luca turned blunt in front of the three of them, like a man incapable of feeling anything. Though his voice carried plenty of easy mischief.
“Grim faces all around. What’s with the mob?”
He’d tried to lighten it with his own brand of humor, but the chilly mood held. Obel, the head of the medical center, let out a short sigh and asked,
“And you seem to be in and out of there a bit too often, Captain. Did you have to raise his dosage again?”
“No, I just sat with him.”
“The patient’s body is rejecting all food. Anything that reaches his stomach comes right back up. Which means even his nutrition has to come from an IV. A person in that state needs absolute rest. You coming and going like this isn’t good for him.”
The captain only shrugged, as if it were tiresome nagging. Watching him refuse to take any of it seriously, Ivelinsia, the first officer standing beside them, spoke up like she couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Captain, it’s been a week already. The Aegis pursuit unit is still on our tail. Leaving the bridge empty and pouring your attention into the treatment room every night isn’t strategically sound. Obel handling him alone would be enough.”
Obel chimed in with a simple, “Yeah, exactly.”
So they came as a group to gang up on me, the captain thought, clicking his tongue.
“Tsk. Ivelinsia, this isn’t a matter of strategy.”
“Then is it a matter of morality?”
“Don’t think in binaries.”
“But I don’t understand this situation. I can’t believe keeping him alive with his limbs severed is truly for that boy’s sake. He cries out to be killed every single day. It might have been better if, back on that planet...”
“Watch your mouth.”
The low, threatening voice froze the air in the corridor instantly. The easy composure he’d shown a moment ago vanished all at once. Ivelinsia clamped her mouth shut mid-word. Even Obel glanced sideways, reading the room. And Kai, who’d been standing in the corner fiddling with a machine part, could only mumble his way into speaking.
“Ah, this atmosphere, seriously... Um, Captain. So, I’ve started the, uh, nano-chrome frame machining. Shaving an adult prosthetic down to the boy’s spec. But there’s a separate problem.”
Kai threw up a hologram in the air. It was a map of the nervous system, showing the inside of Luca’s body.
“Obel did a good job on the nerve repair, but I think Luca’s brain is going to reject the prosthetics.”
At that, the captain’s gaze sank deeper.
“Reject them how?”
“The ‘I don’t want to live’ signal is so strong that the nanobots can’t find their way and are just wandering around. In short, if he himself has no will to have arms and legs, then no matter how incredible a prosthetic I build him, it’s just a lump of metal.”
Obel picked up where Kai left off.
“Kai’s right. What Luca needs right now isn’t nutrients or painkillers, it’s a tomorrow. His stomach rejecting food is psychogenic. He wants to erase himself from the world.”
One glance at the biosignals on Luca’s neural map told the captain they were nothing like those of his healthy crew. The light did no more than flicker weakly.
No will to live, no drive. However fine a prosthetic they attached, it seemed he’d only turn its heavy hand against himself.
Maybe Ivelinsia was right, he thought. Wasn’t it his own selfishness that had saved Luca? But he couldn’t give up now, not after coming this far. It was a life he’d saved out of selfishness, so he would take responsibility for it to the end.
“I’m sure you all have plenty of questions and plenty you’d like to argue about, but for now, focus on Luca’s recovery. I’ll explain everything afterward.”
The captain had never once made a choice without a reason. At the very least, the three of them knew how exceptional a being he was, so even when his decisions made no sense to them, they couldn’t refuse. In the end, aboard the Nautilus, the captain’s word was law.
“Kai. Can you move the prosthetic work up any further?”
“Mm, I’ll try. But rushing the assembly will come with functional side effects, so I’ll set the performance a little lower.”
“Just let him walk. I’ll take responsibility for what comes after.”
Then he turned to Obel.
“Obel, I’ll look after Luca myself for a while. The medical machines and you both, keep some distance from him unless it’s an emergency.”
“Well, if you say you’ve got it handled.”
This time he looked at Ivelinsia. She seemed worn down by the crushing workload of running the bridge in his place. Her usually neat, tidy bob was tousled every which way, and her lips were cracked and dry. Most of all, the uniform she liked to keep pressed knife-sharp was creased and wrinkled all over.
In any case, if every one of the captain’s aims was fixed on keeping Luca alive and getting him walking, then whatever he inevitably let slip had to be handled by Ivelinsia.
“Ivelinsia, report anything you find hard to judge to my private channel. I’ll do as much of my own job as I can from outside the bridge.”
Apparently just cutting down on judgment calls of her own was enough to ease the burden, because her expression lightened.
“In that case, may I contact you during your sleeping hours as well?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.”
The three of them looked rather satisfied, as though ganging up to argue had produced results. Saying they wouldn’t push back against his decision any further, they took their leave with a light farewell.
“Call if you need me.”
“I’ll report as soon as I’ve got progress!”
“I’ll contact your private comms port this evening.”
Only once the three of them had disappeared down the end of the corridor did the captain’s gaze turn to the closed treatment room door.
Beyond this thin metal wall, in the dark, Luca would be fighting the pain alone. He thought about that.
Don’t give up.
It was what he’d said to Luca, but it was also a vow he’d made to himself.
I won’t give up.
He wanted the boy himself to know, without fail, that giving up on Luca would mean the worth of his own life vanishing along with him. Until then the captain would not give up on the smallest part of Luca. Not ever.
The nails on all five of Luca’s fingers had cracked, and medical bandages were wound around them. Blood that never got the chance to dry showed vividly through the wrapping.
“Hnngh...”
One day, as he scraped at the bed rail and suffered the way he always did, the lights in the treatment room came up at a very low setting and the captain walked in. He rolled up his crisp shirtsleeves as though he’d been waiting for nothing but Luca’s distress.
“So it’s started again.”
The captain sat at the head of the bed and pressed Luca’s heaving shoulders down to hold them still. Then he took out a warm damp towel he’d prepared in advance, and an oil with only a faint scent.
“It hurts...”
The captain whispered tenderly to the mumbling boy.
“Your nerves have lost their way, so it feels like pain. Your brain’s being fooled.”
“No, don’t touch me...”
“It’s all right. I’ll make it hurt less, so trust me just a little.”
“Stop it, go away...”
The captain paid Luca’s refusal no mind. He began to stroke the severed face of the right shoulder and the area around his thighs with the warm towel, very gently.
“Ngh, nngh... it hurts, it hurts...”
The stumps had healed and no wound remained on them, yet Luca still suffered terrible pain. Phantom pain, most likely. Simply having no limbs where limbs should be was enough for the brain to collapse under counterfeit agony.
“Hnn, hic...”
The hand caressing his body was unfamiliar enough to make him cry. Even so, he didn’t strike it away. It hurt, but perhaps the pressure gripping the pain firmly in place gave him a sense of stability.
“Haa, haa...”
His ragged breathing seemed to settle a little. The captain looked down into Luca’s tear-soaked face.
An exhausted face showed between strands of fallen black hair. What of it he could glimpse was gaunt, a great deal of weight lost. Dark shadows lay heavy beneath his eyes.
His lips were peeling, pitiful just to look at. When he parted them halfway and wheezed out pained breaths, even the golden eyes watching him quietly wavered with compassion.
It was a cruel thing to say, but Luca had to overcome this by his own will. Otherwise his body and mind would end up in even worse ruin than they were already.
The captain, who usually only kept quiet company and wiped him down with a warm towel, did something a little different. After Obel confirmed for him that simply watching wasn’t the right answer, he’d decided he had to do something.
“This ship is called the Nautilus. I’m its master.”
The weary pale-blue eyes turned slowly toward him. He’d expected to be told the boy had no interest in this sort of talk, to get out at once.
“...”
Today of all days, Luca was quiet. He looked far more at ease that way than when he was convulsively begging to be killed.
