by Diann Read
He tore his vision from the scope to scan space.
The swollen glow of Issel I filled half the canopy, almost over his head. As he stared, the space between moon and shuttle seemed to ripple. He blinked, straining to make his eyes focus.
A ship materialized out of nowhere, massive and black and bristled with weapons.
Twenty-One
Tristan sat paralyzed for a moment, staring at it, watching its bulk gradually block out Issel’s moon. His hand moved on the thruster switches, willing them to respond, to push the shuttle out of its way.
A pair of guns at the ship’s bow swung around like fingers pointing out its next victim.
Tristan swallowed dryness. “So finish me off!” he whispered.
Red energy belched from the muzzles.
He locked his teeth, braced himself.
A blossom of light at the edge of his vision made him twist in his seat.
The fireball swelled for a moment, then dissipated, leaving behind a shower of debris that had been a fighter a moment before.
The ship held its collision course.
Tristan leaned on the switches. “Go!” he urged his craft. “Go!”
One thruster fired, then another, feebly. The cargo shuttle began to slide backward, away from the ship. He didn’t even have enough power to change course.
Tristan watched the guns swing around again.
“Jou!” he tried to shout at the ship, but it came out as a croak.
Energy arced over his shuttle, sweeping the dark with tracers until it touched its quarry. On Tristan’s traffic scope, the blip that marked the last fleeing fighter flared and vanished.
The comm set buzzed for his attention. It had been doing so for some time, he realized. Scanning the damage lights, he wondered what had shorted out to make it do that.
The traffic scope’s warning beep rose to a trill. The ship loomed almost on top of him.
He reached across the console, shutting down everything he could, routing all the power he had left to life support and thrusters.
It wasn’t enough. The ship slid over his shuttle like a hawk seeking its prey, blocking out the moonlight. Its hull panels parted like jaws, and a bank of search lights washed over his craft. Tristan grimaced, half blinded even through the tinted canopy, and blinked at a flash like rockets being launched.
He heard a thunk against the overhead. Then another. The craft lurched as if it had been brought up short at the end of a line, and something began to whine.
On his console, the comm set continued to buzz.
The shuttle began to haul toward the larger ship.
“No!” Tristan threw the thrust switches against its pull. “No!”
Thrusters flared; the canopy reflected their fire. Something metallic moaned and shrieked at the strain. Lights from the ship’s hold cast shadows of quivering hawsers across the cockpit.
Tristan held the switches down until their ZERO FUEL and OVERHEAT lights began to flash, until the red lights in the cockpit dimmed and he had no more strength. Then he lapsed back in his seat, panting, shaking. “They’ve got us, Pulou,” he whispered, and watched as the ship’s hull enveloped them.
Pulou didn’t answer.
Tristan turned his head.
The gan sagged in his straps.
“Pulou?” Tristan said.
He struggled free of his harness, tried to rise from his seat.
His legs gave way. He hit the deck on his knees, and the shock blacked him out.
He came to with his head lying against Pulou’s leg. He pushed himself back, slowly.
Pulou’s eyes were open but unblinking, unseeing. Blood stained his fangs, his tongue, and the hand that had been pressed to his body.
“No!” Tristan gulped it, shook his head. “No, Pulou!”
He fumbled with the buckles. When they opened, Pulou crumpled forward on top of him.
Tristan caught him, pulled him from the seat, lowered him to the deck.
From outside the shuttle came a clatter, the squeal and bang of heavy equipment, the ring of bootfalls and voices. They echoed in the hollow of the ship’s hold.
Catching his lower lip in his teeth, Tristan began to stroke the gan’s mane.
He had been here before, waiting in the close dark, years ago.
An outer hatch slammed open. Voices reached him, two or three of them, only yards away, but he couldn’t understand their words.
Boots rang in the outer compartment. Over the pulse in his ears, he heard an oscillating hum.
The hum shot to a sharp whine; the boots stopped outside the sealed door. Tristan heard an order, and then banging. Metal clashed on metal until he thought his head would split. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out.
When the shield door tore away, Tristan stared up at three fire-suited shapes silhouetted against the dull light.
* *
Motioning the others to wait, Chesney stepped over the wreckage of the shield door into the cockpit. Her palm light swept its interior, picking out the boy, who huddled beside one acceleration seat and cradled a second figure across his lap.
He recoiled from the light in his face, bared his teeth and lifted a hand curled like claws. “Leave us alone!” he cried.
“Oh, boy,” she breathed into her pickup. “Brandt, I think we’re gonna need some assistance in here.”
The ship’s surgeon shouldered past her.
“Get back!” the boy said. “Stay away from my brother!”
“Calm down, son.” The surgeon edged nearer him. “It’s okay now.”
The boy shoved himself to his feet—and buckled.
Brandt caught him under the arms, kept him from falling. “Get a sled in here!” he shouted into his pickup.
Chesney heard a moment’s scramble and moved back to let the medics through, guiding their repulsion sled.
Brandt eased the boy onto it, and paused to pull off his smoke mask and heavy gloves. “Kid feels like a reactor gone critical,” he said with a quick glance up at Chesney as he accepted a medkit from a subordinate. She watched as he knelt by the sled and motioned at one of his techs. “Get his vital signs, Kerin.”
When the youth stirred, gasped, attempted to sit up, Brandt pushed him back down and dodged a swipe at his face. He caught the boy’s hand, and Chesney saw how he had to struggle to keep his grip. “Schey,” he called, “we’re going to need restraints here!”
“No!” Tristan screamed. “Let me go! Leave me alone!”
“Calm down, calm down,” Brandt said, and held onto his wrist while Schey slipped a padded cuff around it and clamped the cuff to the edge of the sled. He repeated the procedure with the other wrist and both ankles as well.
“Let me go!” the boy gasped. His eyes rolled, wild with delirium and fear.
Brandt placed a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, son. It’s all right now. Relax and let us help you.”
Chesney watched as he took an intravenous pump-pack, designed for use in zero-G environments, from the medkit. Normal saline, its label said. Brandt clipped it to his patient’s tunic and reached for his arm.
Crouched across the sled from him, Kerin pressed the boy’s other hand to a sensor screen. She looked up from its readouts. “Sir, temperature is one hundred five degrees Farenheit, pulse is one-twelve, and blood pressure is ninety over fifty-six. Respirations are shallow.”
“Give supplemental oxygen, and apply cold packs and a hypothermic wrap,” Brandt snapped. He let go of the youth’s arm. “Won’t do. Schey, I need a cut-down kit and an extra hand here. We’ll have to put the intracath in the subclavian.” He seized the tunic near Tristan’s neck and ripped it away from his shoulders.
It tore down the shoulder and side seams, revealing the brace and morphesyne infuser.
Brandt raised an eyebrow, glanced up at Chesney. “Somebody’s been taking good care of him,” he said. He touched the memory button. The last infus
ion had been almost three hours earlier. He pressed the pad. “This should help, son.”
Schey unrolled the cut-down kit on Tristan’s chest, smeared his collarbone with antiseptic and local anesthetic, sprayed liquid gloves over Brandt’s hands.
At the hum of the laser scalpel, Tristan jerked at the restraints, trying to wrench away. “No!” The oxygen mask didn’t muffle his voice much. “Leave me alone!”
“Hold him still!” said Brandt.
“I’ll do it.” Chesney pulled off her gloves and crouched near the top of the sled. Taking the boy’s head, cold packs and all, between her hands, she turned his face away from the scalpel and began to smooth back his hair with her fingers. “Settle down, Tris,” she said quietly. “Settle down. You’re going to be all right. Brandt’s the best.”
She felt him stiffen at the incision, saw the fear in his face, and kept smoothing his hair. “You’ll be all right,” she said again.
A few moments later, Brandt said, “Good,” and sat back on his heels, studying the pump-pack as he peeled off the spray-on gloves. “Okay, move him,” he said. “Get him nerve-clipped, catheterized, and onto the hemo system. He’ll only need minimal sedation. I’ll be in to run a ‘scan as soon as I’ve seen to this other one.” He jerked a thumb toward the slumped figure Tristan had been supporting.
Schey and Kerin maneuvered the med sled out of the shuttle, and Chesney followed, pulling off her smoke mask.
She slowed as they entered the trauma unit. Stopped just inside its doorway and watched, hands knotted hard at her sides, as they moved the youth onto the table and attached its tubes and wires. He seemed to have given up struggling. He only groaned once at the handling.
Brandt followed minutes later, looking grim. He didn’t appear to notice Chesney standing inside the door. “How are his vital signs now?” he asked.
Kerin read them off, and he nodded and checked the tubes that ran from the hemomanagement system to the intracath near his patient’s collarbone. “What about blood gases?”
“Stabilizing, sir, and the sedative has taken effect.”
“Good.” Brandt flicked on the holoscanner and studied its display from beneath lowered brows. “Necrosis has set in,” he said, almost to himself, and looked at the med-techs. “Get him prepped for surgery.”
Turning away from the table, he finally spotted Chesney, still standing near the door. As if reading the questions in her face, he crossed to her. “We’ll have to destroy the right kidney,” he said. “It looks like it dropped when the connective tissue tore. That put a kink in the ureter and the kidney’s been backing up. It’s swollen to half again its normal size.” He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head. “It would’ve poisoned him before long.”
Chesney shook her head. “What are his chances?”
“He should pull through,” Brandt said, “but it’s going to be touchy for a while.”
She allowed herself a sigh. Then, recalling the battle she’d watched from the bridge, she asked, “What in great space kept him going?”
“Adrenaline, probably,” said Brandt. “The blood work shows high levels of it. You can’t predict how that will affect people.”
She considered that for a moment, then looked at the surgeon directly. “Has the rescue team found any sign of Nemec or the doctor yet? There were supposed to be four aboard that shuttle.”
“Not a trace,” said Brandt.
She shook her head again and let her vision settle to the deck for a while, pensive, before returning it to the youth on the surgical table. “Maybe he knows what happened.”
“Well, if he does,” Brandt said, “he won’t be up to being debriefed until at least tomorrow. Excuse me, ma’am, I have to go scrub.”
Through a window, Chesney watched him manipulate the surgical robot, using keys like a computer’s cursor and the holoscanner’s display to guide its skipping laser over Tristan’s right side. Watched via the display as the laser gradually vaporized the damaged kidney and ureter and repaired the torn tissues. Watched as Brandt cleaned up and closed the opened lacerations across the boy’s back.
“He should make a complete recovery,” Brandt told her afterward. “I’m putting him on antibiotics and a regen, and we’ll keep a close eye on him for the next few days, but what he needs most now is rest.”
Chesney released a breath in a rush. “Let me know when he wakes up,” she said.
* *
He was in the blue cavern again, running, and soldiers he couldn’t see were shooting at him and Nemec and Weil. He was telling them to hurry when a shield door closed across the tunnel behind him. He tried to reach the door, to stop it, but Nemec disappeared behind it with a startled expression on his face.
He turned around in time to see an energy bolt catch Weil in the shoulder and throw him into the wall. “Weil!” he shouted, and tried to go to him, but he couldn’t move. And then Weil disappeared, too. “Weil, no!” he said. He stood alone, paralyzed, in crossfire that screamed around him.
“Tristan.” A hand closed on his shoulder. “Tristan, wake up.”
The hand, the voice seemed familiar. “Weil?” he gasped, and turned his head with an effort.
He didn’t know the man who stood beside him. He swallowed. “You’re not Weil,” he said.
“No. I’m Commander Brandt, ship’s surgeon,” the man said. “You’re aboard the Spherzah ship Sentinel.”
“Spherzah?” Tristan hesitated. “Is—my father here?”
“No,” Brandt said, “but he sent us. Just relax now. You were dreaming.”
He lay a small screen with the outline of a hand on it on the bed and pressed Tristan’s hand to it, like the computer in the academy’s med booth. He scanned the readouts when they appeared and, seeming satisfied, put the screen away. “You’re doing pretty well, considering,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Sore,” Tristan said. “All over.”
“That’s understandable. Can you sit up?”
Tristan turned onto his side, wincing, and let Brandt help him sit up. He sipped at the cup of water Brandt brought him.
“Tristan,” the surgeon said, watching him, “can you tell me who this Weil is that you were dreaming about?”
“He’s the doctor who helped me.” The dream flashed across his memory again, and he stopped, looking away from Brandt. “I think he’s dead,” he said, his voice a bare whisper. “Both of them are. The shield door closed Nemec into the passage.” He shuddered, almost spilling the water.
Brandt took back the cup and studied him briefly, then said, “We need to get you up and walking a little. I think you’ll feel better. Put your feet over the side first. That’s it. Now, hold onto my arm.”
Pushing himself to his feet, Tristan locked his teeth at the rending ache in his muscles. He was surprised that he didn’t feel more pain in his ribs or his right side. He questioned Brandt with a look.
“We applied some neural clips to specific nerves,” the surgeon said, “so they’ll block localized pain without immobilizing you. They can come out in three or four days.”
Tristan still limped a little, walking. Had to lean on the surgeon. But the effort cleared the grogginess and the clinging dream from his mind.
Coming back to his cubicle, he stopped at the door to scan each corner and then the shadowed space under the bed. He felt his chest tighten. “Where’s Pulou?” he asked.
Brandt supported him to the bed before he said anything. Then he looked Tristan in the face. “He didn’t make it,” he said. “It was already too late when we found you. I’m sorry.”
Tristan’s head drooped. His throat constricted so tight it hurt. He couldn’t even whisper.
“I don’t think he suffered much,” Brandt said. “He may not have even known he’d been hit. There was very little external bleeding.”
Tristan shook his head, unable to speak. It made his whole chest ache inside, made it hard to breathe. Suddenly weary, unabl
e to sit any longer, he turned away from the surgeon and lay down on his side with his face to the bulkhead. He waited for sobs to come, but they didn’t. The ache just swelled like a stream behind a logjam until he thought it would stop his heart.
Twenty-Two
The Saede system had no orbital stations. The Bacalli carrier s’Adou The’n and its convoy assumed standard orbit around the planet while the landing parties boarded their shuttles.
When his aide brought word to the bridge that they were ready, b’Anar Id Pa’an gestured to its captain, the human named Mebius. “You will leave this system when I order it,” he said.
His boots rang in the corridor. His battle gear rattled as he walked. The noise of it heightened his pulse, heated his blood. Seeing his glower, others in the corridor pressed themselves to the bulkheads until he passed.
In the lift to the launch bays he asked his aide, “Where is the human woman?”
“She is aboard the shuttle as you asked, sire.”
She sat by herself in a corner at the back of the craft, under guard. She looked weary but not frightened. Even when Pa’an pushed the guard aside and stood staring down at her, she returned his gaze steadily.
He grunted and turned away. “She will stay with me at the Command Post,” he told the guard.
They touched down on one of the shuttle pads serving the Unkai peninsula’s main supply and transshipment depot, in a narrow valley ringed with mountains like a carnivore’s teeth, except they towered green with jungle foliage. The air, when the shuttle hatch opened and it burst inside, felt hot and wet and smelled of vegetation. Pa’an wrinkled his nose at it as he came down the ramp.
Masuk troops stood in loose formation among the trees that hemmed and half concealed the landing pad, waiting to board the shuttle for the flight to their troop ship. As Pa’an and his party touched soil, umedo captains called their troops to attention, their translators carrying electronic words over the rasp of their natural voices. Pa’an disregarded their salutes, strode past with his canines bared at them, and boarded the waiting troop carrier.
It lurched forward, its tracks clawing into the loam. Pa’an saw how it almost threw the woman from her bench. She only braced herself, ignoring his leer, as the vehicle left the clearing and rumbled along its track under a canopy of living green.