Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  I looked at the Ygnaza on the floor, then I turned it against my restraints. It carved through my collar and the rings about my left wrist and ankles. Grabbing a rather more vicious probe from the table, I staggered to the door and hammered a control. It opened onto the same red hallway I'd been wheeled through. From the way I wobbled, I knew I was anemic already. I also had no idea where I was going. I turned away from the lift to the hold and headed down the hall, dripping blood as I went. The door that ended the hallway had two controls. I pushed one and it lit up. Nothing else seemed to happen. All of the labels were in Ygnaza sigils, making them useless to me.

  I was about to move away when the door opened. It was another lift. Stepping inside, I looked at the hexagonal array of controls. I drew a blank. As I wobbled there, I was certain the only thing keeping me from passing out was the little Uth-sk running around my brain. Letting our a groan, I picked a button at random. The door closed, and the lift started moving. It opened to another hallway. I had no idea if I was better or worse off than before, but this hall was white instead of red. Stumbling down the hall, I found the right-hand wall turned into a bank of windows not far down. Through them, I saw a boggy, wet, spore-laden field of fungal growths, some as large as trees. Curving, off-white bone polymer paths wound through the thicket of ooze, converging on a distant structure not unlike a gazebo. It was a park.

  I shook my head and kept going down the hall. I barely noticed the Ygnaza staring at me from the other side of the glass. I wish I knew how to read Ygnaza expressions. Their gaze followed me as I shambled past the park. As I came to the end of the hall, I knew this was going to be the lift I'd ridden from the hold. It didn't seem to make much of a difference, I had to find someplace useful. I knew if I stopped I'd never be able to motivate my limbs to get going again. I'd leaked too much blood already. Part of me wondered how Uth-sk hoped to keep me conscious into the vivisection phase when his haphazard biopsy process had let so much blood out. There had to be a limit to how far the work he'd done inside my brain would keep me going.

  I called the lift, and it brought a load of Ygnaza to me. They backed away as I stepped on board. I was reminded of the behavior of the aliens in the power plant. It wasn't their job to stop me, so they weren't going to try. Looking at the already-illuminated buttons, I pressed another. The door closed and the lift started moving. I glared back at the Ygnaza, and they took another step away from me. If any of them could communicate with me, none seemed willing. The lift stopped again. I didn't know if it was the floor I'd picked, or someone else's, but I shambled off anyway. Did I even have a clue where I wanted to go? I knew nothing about the layout of this ship, nor did I have a plan for getting off of it.

  To my left was another window wall, looking out at what might have been a hanger bay. Only the smoking ruins of a crashed platform and the splattering of pus-yellow smears on the deck plates told me something had gone down. The spent shell casings still rolling around told me what it was. The Ygnaza who'd gotten off after me paused at the same windows. Seeing the devastation, it fumbled for a device on a harness about its middle. I decked it before it could report the incursion. Being of the smaller breed, it went down easily. Which was fortunate, because I don't think I had the strength for a prolonged fight.

  As I moved along the bank of windows, I spied more signs of human activity. Dropped magazines, blood stains, crates of supplies under the eye of a handful of sentries. Slumping against the windows, I banged the blunt end of the probe against the panes, trying to get the soldiers' attention. Whatever the window was made from, my efforts didn't carry into the hanger bay. I looked for an entrance, but the hanger proper was three decks tall, and I was on the topmost. Any door looked to be lower down. I could risk the lift again, but there was no assurance that I could find the right deck with the layout of those controls.

  My train of thought derailed as I narrowly avoided being bisected by a beam of energy. Particulates in the air burned a bright white along its path. The Ygnaza soldier who fired it had approached from my blind side, moving bipedally. It held the bulk of the weapon with its larger hands as the smaller two aimed the focusing lens. Another stream of light and flash-vaporizing particles sliced through the air.

  Part 27

  I cried out as the shock of catching my fall passed through the broken bone in my hand. I rolled to the side, leaving a blood splotch where the trailing flaps of my battered singlet touched the floor. The Ygnaza soldier came from a side hall opposite the hanger. The corner of the intersection offered only momentary cover as it stepped into the open to get another shot. It was too far away for me to lunge in this state. With few options left, I threw the probe. I'd been aiming for the focusing lens, but it flew too high and stabbed into the Ygnaza's midsection. Lacking coherent instruction, the probe thrashed about, spraying pus-yellow ichor as it did. The Ygnaza dropped its weapon and pulled the probe from its body.

  If I needed any more proof that humans were naturally stronger than Ygnaza, I got it when I picked up the weapon. It was light enough that even in my state, I was able to slip my arm through the carry handle and lift it with my forearm. Taking hold of the aiming handles, I accidentally tripped the trigger and scored a line up the wall. "Do you speak English?" I asked. The wounded soldier warbled something. I chanced a look down the side corridor, which was still on my blind side. There were a lot of doors off it on both sides.

  Whatever this weapon was, from the way it only scored the walls and windows, it was designed not to breach the hull. I had little doubt that it would do a number on flesh, though. It would be awfully hard to not kill anybody, especially since my aim with it was atrocious. I staggered down the side hall, leaving the wounded Ygnaza in the intersection. I almost made it to the first door when the klaxon started. A warble over the public address system made some dire pronouncement. Probably indicating that humans were attacking the ship.

  I looked to the hall, expecting every door to pop open and Ygnaza soldiery to spill out. This did not materialize. I approached the first door and pressed the control. It did not light up, and the door stayed closed. "Lockdown?" I asked myself. None of the doors cooperated, neither did the lifts. I was stuck in a T-shaped span of hallway with two Ygnaza, one of which was badly wounded. The other just seemed to be waiting it out. I looked through the window again at the sentries guarding the supply dump. They were more alert, the muzzles of their rifles raised for the anticipated counterattack. I leaned against the windows, exasperated.

  I was so close, but I couldn't get there from here.

  Wait. If the ship was on lockdown, the Ygnaza soldiers would have to have some way to move about. I went back to the wounded soldier and began checking through the devices on its harness. It tried to fight me off, but a threatening gesture with the beam gun made it compliant again. I ended up taking the whole harness, looping it over my shoulder. This time when I approached the lift, the controls responded. I still had no idea how to read the lift controls, but at least I was moving again.

  Then the lift doors opened, and I took a fist to the jaw. As I crashed to the floor, I accidentally triggered the beam gun again. My assailant jumped out of the way before it came close to him. I relaxed my grip on the handles as I realized that the fist that hit me had been human. I never thought I'd be happy to see Agent Six's face mask. But when he peered into the lift, I almost cracked a smile. I hurt too much to actually do it.

  "Truce," I called, "I'm escaping, not fighting you."

  "Dear God, they ripped out your eye," Agent Six said.

  "I sort of noticed," I said, pulling myself to my feet. I fell against the door frame, woozy.

  "How did you get the lift to respond?"

  I tugged at the harness over my shoulder. "Took it from an Ygnaza soldier."

  "You did good work, citizen," Agent Six said, reaching for the harness. "I'll take it from here." I took hold of his wrist, wincing as I pu
t pressure on the broken bone again.

  "It's not 'citizen', Agent Six, it's Shadowdemon."

  "What? How did you end up--?"

  "It's a long story. I'd rather tell it when I'm not standing in the open."

  "I still need to get to the number-three mass driver before they can fire it. That means I need that harness."

  "Call someone to pick me up," I said, relinquishing the white belt. He leaned me against the wall outside the lift and raised a hand to his earpiece.

  "Agent Six to Command, we have a code red on deck--" his voice was cut off as the door to the lift closed between us. I gasped for breath, my last reserves of strength going into staying alive. I was sure that if not for the little Uth-sk running around my brain I'd have passed out. Instead, I looked at the pale green walls of some sort of storage bay. The cargo here wasn't alive and it sat in hexagonal crates. It seemed to be their default structure.

  I listened to the klaxon and prayed that it didn't mark my death knell. I couldn't tell how much time had passed before a pair of medics found me. I looked up at them with my remaining eye and tried to speak, but it came out as a moan. I was shifted onto a stretcher and carried through the bowels of Zsh-ya's ship.

  The damned alien surgeon had made it so that not even chemical anesthetic could knock me out. They were able to dull the pain, but I still felt every tug and stitch as they patched up the mess Uth-sk had made of my insides. I don't know who was more unnerved, me or the doctors. I tried not to comment on their progress even as they drained unit after unit of donor blood into me. Once I was no longer leaking, they patched up my sides and turned their attention to my eye.

  "The nerve looks relatively intact. You should be able to get a bionic replacement," she said.

  "That's good news," I said, the breath mask misting up as I spoke. "But what about the brain damage?"

  "As far as we can tell, it's some sort of implant, but we're not sure if we can remove it without doing more damage. I've never seen keyhole brain surgery like that before. We'll have to save it for an earth-side institution."

  "We're not on Earth?"

  "This is a field hospital in one of the secondary cargo holds."

  "Doctor Hendricks," a nurse said. "If this patient's stable, do you want the next one?"

  "We'd better," Hendricks said. "Give him another unit of blood just to be safe." I'd been looking forward to some rest, but consciousness stayed with me as I was shifted out to a recovery ward.

  "You look a little young to be a soldier," the nurse said as she hooked me up to another blood bag.

  "I'm not, I escaped Ygnaza custody." She frowned, the expression all but hidden behind her surgical mask. It was hard to shock a trauma nurse. She hurried back to see to the other wounded. Even if I couldn't fall asleep, I was determined to get some rest. The analytical part of my brain was locked in a staring contest with the mini-Uth-sk for any dose of sleep. This let my fear creep to the fore and whisper that we were in a metal bubble surrounded by hard vacuum while people were engaged in a shooting war on the decks above. Also, the ship had gone into lockdown before all of the mass drivers had been secured. Had Zsh-ya been able to fire on Earth?

  I imagined the eastern seaboard reduced to a line of smoking craters by hyper-accellerated slugs of inert matter. I hadn't lived there, but it was the biggest concentration of people I'd visited. Though some parts of it might see an improvement from a start-over. I drove that thought from my mind. There were still millions in the firing line. I opened my eye at the sound of footsteps down the aisle. They were just moving another patient out of surgery. I closed my eye again. I couldn't hold back the tears as it really sank in that the other eye was gone. As in, just a useless hole in my head, almost as bad as the one Uth-sk had drilled in my forehead when he'd stolen my ability to dream.

  I held back from sobbing, but the tears fell to the pillow unabated. The last time I'd given in to emotion was when Mom died. I choked on the first sob, but its companions forced their way past my lips. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair.

  I strangled that analytical part of me when he tried to say that life wasn't fair.

  Some things just shouldn't happen.

  I was exhausted. Too worn out to look up, too tired to cry. I lay there, staring at the seam in the corner of the tent thinking of how odd it was to erect tents inside a spaceship. I didn't notice the orderly until he unhooked my blood bag from its IV stand. I shifted my gaze to the man's face. He wore a surgical mask, and wasn't paying any attention to me. He was just disposing of the spent bag. I needed to get out of here, I needed to do something, but the inability to sleep was already driving me mad. I lay there, surrounded by snoozing soldiers, unable to partake of that simple facet of human existence.

  As the only person awake when the chaplain stopped in, he sat down next to my bunk first. Looking over his uniform, I noted he was Jewish. "I'm afraid I'm Catholic," I said.

  "That's all right," Chaplain Friedman said. "I'm still a good listener."

  "And if I don't want to talk about anything?"

  "That's okay too, I have to wait somewhere." Friedman leaned back in his seat. "But you'd be missing an opportunity to let someone help carry your burden."

  "I'm sure you have people who actually want to talk to you."

  "But none who need to as much as you do." I shifted to face away from the chaplain. "I hear you managed to get yourself out of your cell," Friedman said.

  "From who?"

  "You were found wandering the halls. Tell me about your escape."

  "Go bother someone else." Friedman remained quiet, but he didn't leave. "I'm trying to sleep, stop bothering me."

  "I am just sitting here."

  "But you're trying to get me to talk."

  "My job is to listen."

  I turned back towards Friedman. "Do you really want to listen?" I asked. Friedman nodded. "You do really? Do you really want to hear the story about the son of a bitch surgeon who stole my dreams just before he stole my eye!" I pointed to the bandage covering half my face.

  "Yes," Friedman said, calmly. "I want to hear your story." The dam broke. I began rambling about everything that happened, sometimes incoherently. I was too exhausted to hold back, but not so tired that I breached the masquerade. It didn't matter what I did back on Earth. Here I was just an abductee who'd been brutalized. Friedman was a good listener; he didn't interrupt my sometimes only mildly-coherent babbling, but never seemed to ignore me. I spent my last reserves of energy recounting the horror without trying to shield myself from it. There were scant few violations I could imagine suffering which would have topped what Uth-sk had managed to do. I didn't really want to think about those, as it put into context what had happened to me.

  Friedman didn't try to speak hollow words of consolation. There was little that could be said. If I could sleep, I would have passed out rambling. Instead, I just petered out and lay there, my brain unable to shut down but my body screaming for sleep.

  Despite how it felt when Uth-sk was operating on me without anesthetic, he'd actually been working with surgical precision. The main damage from his biopsies was the fact that I'd been allowed to bleed for so long. Once they'd sutured the damaged vessels, closed the entry points, and replenished the lost blood, I was well on the road to recovery from that part of his ministrations. My hand got a cast to allow my metacarpal to heal, but there was little the army doctors could do for my head. Laying generally still proved sufficient rest for my limbs, but mentally I still hadn't adjusted to the inability to sleep. I got rotated out of the recovery ward to the camp where they were processing freed prisoners.

  The weirdest part of all was going through the portal to Minnesota. It was a hexagonal doorway set into a wall. When it was off, it just showed a honeycomb-patterned wall. When they turned it on, I could see the concrete walls of the sl
aver base as if it were the next room. A thin film resisted the actual transition, but once you pushed through that, you appeared on the other side with an audible pop. The sound was probably the suddenly-displaced air. We were sent to the surface where the feds waited to take our statements and figure out where we needed to be sent. I was pulled aside when my biometrics flagged a BHA record.

  "Are we allowed to ask him his codename?" the blond agent asked the bald black guy.

  "We're supposed to sit on him until a BHA rep shows up."

  "Isn't there one in this camp?"

  "Went into town on a snack run apparently."