by Selina Rosen
When Jessit returned he carefully laid out several different leaves and twig-looking things, and a dead lizard as thick as a pencil and long as his palm. He did the same with the medical tools.
Then he stuck his hands on the spear, grunted loudly and shoved it through.
"What the hell!" Jackson started to rush forward, and Bradley grabbed him.
"The heads are lashed and grooved in such a manner that if you pull on them they come off in the body cavity, or pull his insides out with them. Neither is very good," Jessit explained. He rolled the injured man on his side, grabbed the head of the spear with forceps and pulled it out. Then he untied the spearhead and removed it from the shaft. Only then did he pull the shaft out. He slapped one of the leaves on the wound in Decker's back and applied direct pressure. It quit bleeding almost at once. He then rolled Decker back onto his back. After moving the clothing out of the way, he took a scalpel from the tools and made the incision bigger. Then he stuck his hand in the opening and started feeling around. "The heart is fine, but it is as I feared, his lung has been nicked and is collapsed." He withdrew his hand, picked up one of three hollow reeds he had laid out on the table and carefully inserted it into the hole he had found in Decker's lung. Then he stuck the lizard into the reed tube and blew.
"What the fuck are you doing!" Jackson screamed.
"The lizard will repair the damage in the lung," Jessit explained.
"A dead lizard! Come on, Sergeant, he's killing him for sure."
"The lizard is not dead. He is sleeping. At night when the temperature drops the roseau lizard falls into a deep sleep like a coma. Your friend's body temperature will awaken him. In trying to escape from the prison he finds himself in, he will run around finding holes. They will not be big enough for him to exit, and he will become frightened. When he becomes frightened his skin emits a medicine that seals lung tissue, and he will leave this medicine behind him, sealing the punctures. Eventually he will find the natural air entrance to the lung and come out in either your friend's nose or his mouth. You must tell your friend to bring him up and not to swallow him or in any way damage a creature which has done him nothing but good, for if he injures it bad luck will fall on him like a poorly made tent."
"That's crazy. Lieutenant . . . You can't actually think that. . . that. . . lizard is going to save Decker."
Stratton shrugged. "Our own medicines have come from sources just as strange. We have used maggots to help cure gang green and leeches to help remove clotting around reattachments. We know nothing of this planet. None of us know any more than basic first aid. This man obviously believes in this treatment. As primitive as his medical techniques may seem to be, he still knows more than we do. He's Decker's only shot."
Jessit, who had stopped working on Decker, looked at Bradley. Bradley nodded and Jessit went back to work. He removed the reed from the chest cavity, wrung one of the plants out over the incision and the wound started to foam. When it stopped foaming he wiped it clean and then stuck another of the leaves over the entrance wound and again all bleeding stopped. Jessit rose to his full height and wiped the sweat off his brow.
"Now we wait," he said.
Stratton gave Decker a shot of antibiotics with the pocket medic, thinking that it couldn't hurt.
"We need to move," Bradley said.
"Where to?" Stratton asked.
"Anywhere away from here. Before either the Reliance or the natives can find us," Bradley answered
Stratton nodded. That made sense. "We could go to the village where the transmat was sabotaged. If it was the New Alliance . . . Well, then maybe we could hook up with them. If not and the Reliance finds us it will at least look like we're trying to do our job."
"And if it wasn't the New Alliance, which is just as likely, then we will be walking into a village full of angry natives who will no doubt see us as the same sort of scum they have driven from their land and attack us, too," Bradley said.
"We could get close to the village, do a reconnaissance, and find out just exactly what did happen," Jackson suggested.
"That sounds good," Bradley said looking at Stratton. She nodded. "Have we severed all communication links with the station?"
"Yes, and the pulses should make it difficult if not impossible to trace the skiff's ozone trail. However with all communications shut down they will assume we've been killed, and it will only be a matter of time before they send a full military away team including one or more GSH's to see what's happened to us. No doubt they won't be in a skiff, but a fully operational battle cruiser," Stratton assured him.
Bradley looked troubled for a minute, then he smiled as he suddenly had a brilliant idea. "We're doing this all wrong. Restore the link with the ship."
"Why . . . Are you nuts."
"No, actually. I just started thinking clearly," Bradley said excitedly. "Don't you see? If there is no form of communication from the planet to the station, then they can't know anything that we have done. We can tell Briggs whatever we think he wants to hear."
"How do we explain that we have been out of touch ever since our arrival?" Stratton asked.
"Tell him there was trouble with the ship on entry," Bradley said. "That I was just now able to repair the damage done to the communications system. Hell, blame it on the pulses. God knows we've been blaming everything that's gone wrong on them ever since we got here."
"What if he doesn't buy our bullshit and sends someone to check it out?" Jackson asked.
Suddenly Bradley started laughing.
"What's so funny?" Jackson asked.
"Well, just think about it. If they come to look for us they'll go to the Capital first, and just think what they'll be walking into," Bradley said.
Stratton laughed, too, then. "They'll be too busy dealing with the natives to worry about where we are, or what we're doing."
Chapter Twelve
"Of course you can," RJ said obviously agitated, although Topaz couldn't be sure whether she was mad at him, or if she was mad because she couldn't find something she was looking for on the ship. "It should be easy. Simply take the hands off the robot and put them on the boy."
The others were outside sitting around the campfire roasting yet another lizard. RJ and Topaz had gone into the ship to look for tools with which he might work the magic she was demanding he do.
"Gee! It does sound easy. Whatever was I worried about?" Topaz said rolling his eyes and throwing his hands around in huge arcs. "We simply take the robotic hands that run with hydraulics, fiber optics and a power pack, and hook them up on a human who has blood and veins and a heart for power. Why anyone can see that they are completely compatible, and . . ."
"I wasn't thinking cybernetics, Smart Ass. I was thinking you could make them into a robotic prosthesis. Hook them up so that they open and close by movement command. You know, like the hands open and close when he moves his elbow. Fix them to some sort of harness that could go under his clothing," RJ said.
"Oh . . . Well, that does make sense," Topaz mumbled then screamed, "but it won't be easy! Not on a primitive planet with very few tools . . ."
"Blah, blah blah," RJ said with a crooked grin. "Stop talking, Old Man, and just do it. Poley and Haldeed will help you." RJ sat down at the instrument panel of the skiff and started working at the ship's computer, apparently giving up her search for whatever she'd been previously looking for.
"And just what the hell will you be doing while I'm building hands?" Topaz asked.
"I noticed something while I was looking around in here earlier today. I was trying to get a bead on any Reliance ship that might come into our air space. I was checking different channels, trying to intercept communications between the surface and the station . . ."
"Were there any?" Topaz asked.
"I'm sure there were; I just never keyed into the right sequence. And of course there is always that damned magnetic pulse. However I picked up something else . . . Listen to this," RJ ordered. She pulled up the audio, and a loud hi
gh-pitched whine filled the air for a few seconds and stopped.
Topaz covered his ears. "What the hell is that?"
"I think it's a distress beacon. It sends out a signal every three hours unless interrupted by a magnetic pulse. But it's not Reliance. It's like nothing I've ever heard. Come here," she ordered. Topaz moved to stand behind her looking over her shoulder at the screen as a topographical map created by bouncing sound waves off surfaces came up on the monitor. RJ pointed to a spot on the map. "I've traced the sound to this small mountain range here. Now the skiff's power cells have powered up enough to move us to about here." She made a circle with her finger on the screen and it stayed on the map. "That should move you far enough away from here to keep the Reliance from landing on top of you, and it would put us about fifteen miles from the site – a good one day hike even with the added weight that gravity puts on us."
"All right, but why? I've never known you to give into curiosity," Topaz said.
"It's some sort of ship, Topaz," RJ said in a disbelieving tone.
"So?" Topaz shrugged.
"Are you taking dullness lessons from David?" RJ snapped. "If there's a ship, it might have a viable power supply. It obviously has some sort of power or it couldn't send out a distress beacon. We need a power supply. Go to ship. Get power supply. Bring back. Ugh."
"What about your plan to wait for a Reliance ship to find us and then kill them and take their ship? That sounded like a pretty sound plan to me," Topaz said.
"It was and is, except that a ship should have come by now. Which means one of two things. Either Mickey's message to the ship has led them to the obvious conclusion that there are New Alliance rebels on the planet's surface and they are proceeding with caution. In which case we might have a well armed Elite assault team complete with a squadron of GSH come through the brush at us at any time. Or, we completely destroyed their station in our attack, and there are no ships to come down here."
"Or worse yet – some wildcard has thrown the whole deck off, in which case there is no preparing for what might happen?" Topaz suggested.
"Exactly," RJ said nodding.
* * *
Captain Briggs paced the command deck with both his hands buried in his thinning hair. Everything was going to hell in a hand basket. First there was the missing ship. Then the attack on the transport bay. Then the message from the "President" of the New Alliance claiming responsibility for the attack. He sent an away team comprised of people he despised and considered expendable to the surface to find out what had gone wrong, and while he hardly cared what had happened to them, he really did need the information. He needed to know just exactly what had gone wrong on the planet and why. He had rounded up every single person on the ship who he had suspected of espionage and executed six of them. But apparently he hadn't corralled all the rebels on board, because as he was executing the last of the six someone had released all the others and riots had started all over the ship. He had spent four hours hiding in his quarters until the Elite guard had put an end to the riots and rounded up all those responsible.
The man who had replaced Bradley in overseeing the very real problem of the hole that had been blown in the side of the station had been one of the first arrested in the riots. With no real supervisor and with the rest of the maintenance staff making up roughly half of those also responsible and subsequently imprisoned for the riots, work to repair the damage done in the explosion had been slowed to a crawl. As if that weren't bad enough, the maintenance staff had sabotaged still other areas of the station so that absolutely nothing was running as it should be. Toilets were backing up and water was running down the halls. The garbage disposal had stopped working and garbage was building up in the halls as well. Vending machines weren't vending. In short, everything was a mess.
Now the crew from Stashes that had been brought in to fix the breach in the hull was orbiting the station refusing to dock or to consider even unloading necessary materials until Briggs could prove to them that the station was completely under his control, and that there was no chance of yet another riot. Which of course he couldn't actually do because that little freak from the New Alliance was taking over his screens every hour on the hour, giving his personnel a message to revolt. Crew moral since he had ordered the execution of the "spies" was at an all time low, and it was obvious that many of his crew would rather take their chances fighting the system than just letting it kill them.
He stopped pacing and went back to his command chair. He removed his hands from his hair and tried to straighten it. He took a deep breath, let it out and sat down. Ready, he nodded to his communications officer, implying that he was ready to try to talk to the idiot from Stashes again. The communications officer just stood there scratching his balls, apparently oblivious to the unspoken command.
Briggs could feel himself starting to lose control, so he took another deep cleansing breath. "Hail the Kryptonite . . ."
"Sir, I've got a message from Lieutenant Stratton!" he yelled out excitedly.
"Well, don't just stand there like a moron. Patch her through . . ." This could be just what he needed to convince those moron Stashes maintenance men that he was back in control.
"Stratton calling Pam Station. Come in Pam Station," the Lieutenant's voice was breaking up pretty badly, but was still recognizable.
"Transmission is bad, but we read."
"Thank God!" Stratton said. "Entry did something to our ship's communications system. Bradley has been working on it most of the day. Between the damage and the pulses we've been unable to make contact." The transmission was starting to get clearer.
"Have you been able to find anything out?" Briggs asked.
"The King claimed to know nothing about what had happened. Not too hard to believe since the incident took place several hundred miles from the Capital. He gave us his permission to investigate the matter thoroughly. We are currently stationed just outside the village where the sabotage occurred. We are planning to go in under cover of night and do a reconnaissance mission. If the natives are fully responsible I think it would be foolhardy to trip in there and expect them to just give us the information we need. All that would do is get us killed. Since so far our data shows no signs of a second ship, I have to assume that it was the natives with the help of one or more of our people who came down to do the mission that sabotaged the transporter. No matter how they brag about it, there is no sign that it was the New Alliance. From what we have observed these natives are very fast learners. I imagine we are looking at a simple case of some disgruntled personnel somehow convincing the primitives to help them to sabotage the transporter."
"Great," Briggs said breathing a sigh of relief. "Get back to me as soon as you know for sure. Leave half your people at the ship and call immediately if you think you may need reinforcements. We'll hit that village with everything we've got."
"We're right on it, Captain. Over," Stratton said.
"Keep up the good work, Stratton. There's a promotion in this for you. Over and out."
Briggs leaned his head back so that his neck was resting on the back of his chair and laughed. "All right. Now hail that glorified toilet cleaner in the Kryptonite for me."
* * *
They were dawning night camouflage. "Is there really no trace of a second ship? No lingering ozone trail?" Bradley asked, zipping up the front of the coveralls.
"Who knows? On this planet none of our locating or communications equipment operates at 100 percent," Stratton said. "Frankly I doubt it. I imagine what I told Briggs is more or less the truth."
"It's hard to believe that someone from the station would attack it," Bradley said thoughtfully.
"I agree," Jackson said from where he sat watching Decker. "An attack like that could have taken out the whole station if any of the safety systems had failed. Such a person would have to have no one they cared about on the station. They'd have to be a fanatic."
"I think there must be a second ship here. That spies told the New Allian
ce what was going on, and that they are here in their own ship," Bradley speculated.
"Well, on this planet, even with all this fancy equipment, there is only one way that we're going to know whether there is another ship here or not," Stratton said.
"How's that," Jackson asked.
"See it," Stratton answered.
* * *
All geared up, Stratton, Bradley and Jessit left for the village. Jackson would stay behind to guard the ship and watch Decker.
The brush was thick here, and the mud was deep. Recent rains had left a small stream running through the middle of what might have at one time been a trail.
Their plan was a simple one. Jessit had told them that most of the people would be asleep. He would go to the Temple claiming to be a traveling priest and find out all that he could about the attack. Bradley and Stratton would search the village, paying particular attention to the area where the transmat station had been located and look for evidence of another ship. If they found evidence of a ship they would know what kind of ship by the landing pattern it would have left in the dirt.