The Rush's Edge

by Ginger Smith

  Vivi worked with Beryl to secure Tyce on the antigrav backboard, bracing his neck. They carried him aboard as Hal followed.

  As soon as Beryl and Vivi were through the inner door and on their way to the medbay, Hal closed and secured the ramp. He turned, then fell to his knees, a wave of weakness overwhelming him. The ACAS had to be on their way by now. It was time to trust their new crewmember.

  “Hey, Eira?” Hal said. “You need to get us outta here, beautiful. File a flight plan for anywhere… It doesn’t matter – just get us gone!”

  “Of course. I will handle it, Hal. Your life signs are unstable; you need medical attention.”

  “Yeah?” Hal’s laugh was more like a groan. “I’ll look into that.” Hal turned to place his cheek against the cool metal of the cargo bay, taking deep breaths. The right side of his chest hurt every time he tried to inhale, so he pressed his hand against the worst of the cuts. One of the punctures had most likely collapsed part of his lung. “I hope… hope you’re telling the truth about helping us.”

  “I am, Hal,” she replied.

  He passed out for a while, slumped against the wall until he felt a cool hand on his forehead.

  “Hal. You with me?” It was Vivi.

  “Yeah… resting a minute.” He opened his eyes to see her green gaze. She was heartbreakingly beautiful. “Spring…” he slurred.

  She looked confused with a hint of terrified. “What?”

  “Your eyes. They’re the color of spring-gems,” he smiled as he spoke, feeling lightheaded. The good thing about being this far gone was that the pain was moving farther and farther away, out of his orbit. “They’re green…” he tried to explain.

  “Let’s get you on your feet. I need to get you to the medbay.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed, trying to pull himself up. It was hard and slow, but finally he was upright.

  They staggered toward the medbay as the Loshad lifted off. “She did it,” Hal said, leaning more heavily against Vivi. “I told her to file a flight plan to anywhere and get us the fuck… off… this… spinning… top. And she did. She did it. We escaped.”

  “So far. Keep moving, Hal. Can’t have you bleeding out in the cargo bay.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Veevs. Crew’s safe.” Hal passed out and his full weight fell into her. They both slumped to the floor. She pulled herself out from under him and tried to keep him awake.

  “Hal,” she shook him. “Hal, please. Please stay with me.”

  His eyes opened a fraction, and his voice was far-away, almost speaking by rote. “Primary function is to achieve the mission. Then protect. Protect the unit’s nats, then vats.” There was a cool hand on his forehead, and it brought him back to the worried face above him. Vivi was the nat he had to protect, he remembered. Vivi and Ty and Beryl. He gritted his teeth and got to his feet.

  “OK, Hal. That’s good. Come on.”

  Her words kept him focused as they staggered toward the medbay.

  “He can’t be dead, Veevs.”

  “Ty’s in the medbay, Hal. Just a little further.”

  Hal fixed his eyes on the end of the hallway and gave it everything he had.

  A minute later, Vivi practically dragged Hal into the medbay.

  “Beryl. Hal’s in and out… not making a whole lot of sense. I think he’s lost too much blood.” He almost slipped out of her arms, but she managed to keep him upright until she and Beryl could move him onto a bed.

  Hal closed his eyes as he laid back. His breath came in strange shallow gasps. Beryl checked his fingernails, before she grabbed a medscanner. “His lung’s partially collapsed,” she said, not even looking at Vivi. “He’s going into hypovolemic shock.” She set the machine aside and began to rummage in the drawers and bins. “Oxygen first, then coagulant. Seal the wounds and blood stim,” she said to herself as she began to gather supplies.

  Vivi smoothed her hand over Hal’s close-cropped blonde hair. His skin was on fire and was wet to the touch. “It’s OK, Hal,” she whispered. “You’re going to be OK.”

  Beryl cut his T-shirt away. Blood had pooled on his skin, a wet crimson blanket that covered his chest.

  “Vivi, get some gloves and clean this blood off of him so I can see where it’s coming from.”

  Vivi nodded and sprang into action. Beryl gave Hal two medjets while Vivi began to work at Hal’s chest with sterile wipes; one after the other came back sodden. She wrung them out like towels. As the pink skin started to show through, Vivi could see it was much worse than she thought. Slashes, slices, and punctures were everywhere. It seemed as if he barely had any skin left.

  “Who was that bastard?” Beryl said as she began to seal the larger wounds.

  “I don’t know, but he was definitely a vat. I could see his tattoo, just before I shot him,” She paused. “I… I shot him. I killed him, Beryl. I’ve never… never killed anyone before.”

  Beryl stopped what she was doing briefly to glance at Vivi. “I’m sorry, love. When it’s you or them, you have to do what you have to do. To survive. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  Vivi bit her bottom lip, then looked down as Hal groaned. His eyes were black holes as he blinked at her. “Did Ty make it?” He struggled to sit up, “Did he make it?”

  “He’s alive.” Vivi put a restraining hand on his chest. “Rest, Hal.”

  Hal fell back, relieved, and he passed out again. Beryl started an IV. “They both need fluids, but Ty definitely needs the most. I’ve put him on synthplas for now… Eira, where are we headed?”

  “Where would you like to be headed, Beryl?”

  Vivi looked at Beryl. “Al-Kimia,” the younger woman said.

  Beryl nodded. “Yeah, Al-Kimia. They’ll have facilities for Ty and Hal. We need to move at top speed, Eira.”

  “What is their current status?” Eira asked.

  “Ty needs surgery for the injury to his spinal cord, treatment for a brain injury and real plasma or he might die. I can’t do that on the Loshad. Hal should make it.”

  “I am making adjustments to the engines. We are now forty-eight hours from Al-Kimia at top speed.”

  “I’ll keep them alive,” Beryl said, refocusing on the job in front of them. “Just get us there, Eira.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Max looked up from his microscope to see his assistant, Carole, enter the clean room. “Dr Parsen. Got a new job for you from upstairs. It should be in your queue.”

  He scanned the file. “Who sent this?”

  “Dr Balen. They said they need a hundred embryos by next week, to those specs.”

  “But this… it says to suppress all the FXG and JDA genes? They also want an inhibitor for LMM2. If we do that they’re going to end up with… with a bunch of blanks. They’ll just–”

  “Do everything they’re told to? Yeah, I think that’s the idea, hotshot.” Carole was a resentful, envious researcher at their facility. She’d worked on Chamn-Alpha for a while; she was a good researcher with shitty people skills, and so had never moved up the ranks. Max idly wondered what her genome looked like and realized her JDA genes were possibly just as inactive as the blanks’.

  “Carole, don’t you understand? This is setting us back sixty years! They won’t be much better than Ivor Nash. Steljin found that increased personality markers make the vats more stable.” He felt the same knot in his stomach that had been there all week, ever since that dead rook’s eyes stared up at him from the floor. What are you going to do? they seemed to ask.

  “Whatever. I think the new idea is that with no personality markers, no FXGs or JDAs, they might be able to keep them in service longer. Johnson’s been working on this the last ten or fifteen years, and he still hasn’t figured the damn thing out. They think you might be able to give it a new look. When you seal ’em up, be sure you double the accelerator strength. They want these quick.” She raised an eyebrow disapprovingly and turned on her heel to go.

  “Fine,” Max said, sagging on his stool. He hesitated before focusing on
the strands of DNA below him. There was only one option, only one road in front of him.

  That weekend, Max made his way to Beruga City, one of the largest metroplexes on Chamn-Alpha. He tugged his knitted cap down over his ears, to protect them from the almost zero degree weather. The winters on Chamn-Alpha could be brutal. He had traveled to the city with one thing in mind: to purchase an untraceable pre-paid shredder comm, and he had plenty of scrill to do it.

  He didn’t want any trail back to him so he hoped that buying a pre-paid shredder comm at a store far from him would put anyone off the scent. It wasn’t as if such devices were hard to find – anyone arriving from one of the outlying stations, such as Jaleeth and Omicron, needed to get one to use local comms efficiently.

  The transaction was easier than he’d anticipated – he’d had fantasies of having to seek out a dive bar and find some lowlife who would drive a hard bargain. Instead five minutes after entering the store, Max had his shredder. In the doorway of a closed shop, he keyed in the number of the comm he wanted to reach and then typed a short message.

  It’s your friend from the university. Need to take you up on your offer. Have information about terminal potential that will greatly interest your partners but need immediate transportation off of C-A. Contact at this number.

  Max sent the message to a former colleague before stowing the comm in the hidden pocket of his coat. A frigid wind had begun to blow from the north, and he wrapped his coat closer around him, grimacing at how the cold matched his mood.

  By the time they reached Al-Kimian space, Hal was up and about, a function of his increased healing ability. He’d not moved from Ty’s side until they passed the Border, when he reluctantly left the medbay in order to change out of his bloodstained clothes and take the captain’s place on the bridge.

  He’d tried several times to reach Captain Seren but received nothing back. Now he sat in Ty’s chair for the approach to Al-Kimia.

  “Hal, two Al-Kimian gunships are converging on our position,” Eira said.

  “OK, hold position, maneuvering thrusters only.”

  “They’re sending a message.”

  “Open the channel.”

  “Unknown ship. You have breached the borders of Al-Kimian space. You will be escorted to the coordinates we are transmitting now. Do not deviate from the flight vector or we will blow you out of our sky.”

  “Great way to make a guy feel welcome, flight control,” Hal replied. “We will follow your directives, no problem, but we have a medical emergency on board–”

  “They have severed the connection,” Eira said.

  “Damn it,” Hal swore. “Try to raise them again.”

  “No answer.”

  “Keep to their vector, Eira. Let’s see how this goes.”

  Once the Loshad had set down, Hal got to his feet, wincing from the pain in his stab wounds.

  “Are you alright?” Vivi asked. She’d joined him on the bridge as they descended towards the planet.

  “Yep,” he nodded and followed Vivi down to the cargo area. He’d ordered Beryl to stay with Ty, promising to send medical assistance to her.

  “Guess we’re gonna see how good these new friends of ours are, Veevs.”

  In response, she grasped his hand and squeezed it tightly as they waited for the ramp to open.

  When it did, they saw that over twenty soldiers had taken position in the hangar they had landed in front of, weapons ready.

  “Come off the ramp,” a soldier called. Vivi and Hal put their hands up and approached. Two soldiers went to Hal and patted him down, one went to Vivi and the fourth, a tall, thick-necked, muscled man, kept them under a gun. The rest of the soldiers stood ready.

  “Look, we’re clean,” Hal said. “We’re not looking for a fight.”

  “How many are on the ship?” the muscled man asked.

  “Just the four of us,” Vivi replied. “Our captain, Tyce Bernon, is injured and needs immediate medical attention. Our medic is with him now.”

  The tall man gestured, and five more soldiers ran into the Loshad. “Cuff these two and take them to the brig.”

  “Yes sir, LT.”

  Vivi turned to the tall man who was obviously in charge. “Wait – no! We are friends of Captain Jacent Seren. He told us to come here if we needed–”

  “Hands off, asshole,” Hal said as he shoved one of the soldiers who tried to cuff him, then laid him out with a punch. Five more took his place.

  “Hal – don’t!” Vivi called, as she allowed herself to be cuffed. She watched with a sinking heart as Hal took out another Al-Kimian with a kick to the face. With that, they all piled in and wrestled him to the ground. One soldier – an Al-Kimian by the flag on his uniform – raised a rifle butt and slammed it down on Hal’s head. He went limp and the soldiers picked him up. “Got him, Lieutenant Jenkins,” one of them said.

  “We’re not your enemies!” Vivi cried as she, too, began to be dragged away.

  “That remains to be seen,” the tall man named Jenkins said, watching her impassively. Vivi looked down to see a vat tattoo on his wrist and pips on his shirt, detailing his rank. “Bring both of them,” he said to his troops.

  “Please! At least get our captain medical care–” she pleaded.

  He turned on his heels and began walking. “Bring them,” he said, “the medic and captain, as well.”

  Leo Jenkins watched the security feed as the two women and the vat were thrown into separate cells in the brig. The vat was down in a heap on the floor where they’d dumped him. The younger woman was up, face pressed against the plasglass, trying to see. The older woman was across the way, standing quietly by the front of her cell.

  “Have we heard anything from Seren?” Jenkins asked.

  “No, sir. It’s four days since Delta Base has heard from his ship, and we can’t raise them on comms,” Baleska replied from behind him. She had served with him in the ACAS and was as steady a vat as he’d ever known.

  “How is their captain?” Jenkins asked.

  “Critical. I’ve had him taken down to the medcenter for spinal surgery; docs said he might not make it.”

  “Captain’s a vat too?”

  “No. We ran the name: Tyce Bernon. Former ACAS. Natural born. What would you like me to do next, sir?” Baleska placed both hands behind her back, waiting.

  Jenkins frowned. A group of natural borns, along with a vat, name-dropping the leader of the vat forces on Al-Kimia? This was strange. They had to be a crew from the ACAS, sent to infiltrate operations. He would need to question them himself. He couldn’t risk the ACAS knowing what was going on behind the scenes.

  “Give me an hour, then bring the younger woman to me in the interrogation room.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hal’s head was throbbing. He sat up and looked around him, trying to put the pieces back together. They’d landed on Al-Kimia and been taken captive. Immediately, he felt his metabolism kick into overdrive at the threat of harm to Vivi, Ty, and Beryl. The pain from his head and all the wounds still healing after the fight with the vat on Jaleeth just faded into the background as he stood up. He began to pace his cell, then the adrenaline-fueled-anger boiled over, and he threw himself at the thick plasglass door. It held solid, but that just made him hit it again. Beryl appeared at the cell door across from him, drawn by the noise.

  “Hey! Come on back you godsdamned sons-of-bitches! Fuck all of you!” He threw himself at the door again. Then he heard a familiar voice from the next cell.

  “Hal!”

  “Veevs?” he called, feeling relief.

  “Yes. Are you OK?”

  “Yeah. What about you?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Beryl?” Hal called.

  “I’m fine, Hal,” she replied. There was movement in the hallway as two guards walked past Hal’s cell. They stopped in front of Vivi’s, and her door slid open.

  “Out,” a female vat said, gesturing with her blasrifle.

  “Where a
re you taking her?” Hal yelled as they walked past again. He struck the door so hard it shuddered as they walked by and out of the narrow hallway. “Godsdamn it! Where are you taking her!”

  “It’s OK, Hal,” Vivi called, keeping her eyes on him as long as he was in view. “I’ll be OK.”

  Hal hit the door again with his shoulder, growling low in his chest and feeling his frustration arc. He drew his hands through his hair and pulled. Not being able to take action made him even more agitated. He paced his cell back and forth before slamming the door once more. The pain was better than the anxiety of wondering what they were going to do with Vivi, so he threw himself at the door again.

  Beryl called across the hallway. “You have to stop, Hal. You’ll reopen your sutures. Focus on something and slow your breathing.”

  Hal slammed his fists into the door one more time with another growl of fury. Blood smeared the glass and dripped down. “Please, Hal,” Beryl continued. “Remember what Ty taught you. Focus your mind on one thing and breathe slowly. Calm yourself. We can think our way out of this, but you have to be calm enough to try.”

  Hal was fully immersed in a rage-fueled rush, but he tried to do what Beryl was asking. He took long slow, deep breaths and focused his eyes on a spot of his blood on the door.

  “That’s good. Just breathe… slow and easy,” Beryl murmured across to him encouragingly. “Just breathe… that’s all you have to do.”

  The thundering blood in Hal’s ears began to fade, as he leaned his forehead against the door. The drop of blood he was focusing on was perfectly round until it began to thicken at the bottom and then drip. He held his breath a moment more, then let out a long sigh.

  “That’s it,” Beryl said.

  “Where’s Ty?” Hal asked, his voice hoarse with strain.

  “They took him. One of the vats told me they were going to the medcenter. I’m sure they’re helping him right now.”

  “OK,” Hal said, finally looking up at her.

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “You’re doing better. Sit down and rest, Hal. Let the rush pass, OK? It’s what Ty would tell you to do. Be ready for whatever happens next.”