He stayed there, perched on a stool by Kim’s bedside, for two hours before Jones woke up. He rubbed his eyes and sighed.
“Any change?”
“She isn’t hot,” Ben said.
“Yes, her fever broke while you were sleeping. It’s a good sign.”
“When will she wake up?” Ben asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” Jones said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What?” Ben asked, clearly alarmed.
“Her body has been through a lot of trauma,” Jones explained. “It’s resting and repairing itself. The human body is a fascinating, self-sustaining system, really. She could sleep for hours, or years. In some cases, not that I’m an expert on comas, but I’ve read about them, the patients never wake up. I don’t have the equipment here to test her brain function.”
“Oh God,” Ben said, bending over the bed and fighting back tears again. “Come on, Kim. You’ve got to wake up. We need you… I need you.”
“That’s good,” Professor Jones said. “Keep talking to her. Coma survivors often claim to have heard their loved ones talking to them while still unconscious. If you don’t mind, I’ll take a break. Perhaps clean up a bit. It’s been a while since I used the facilities.”
Ben didn’t even look up as Jones left the sick bay. He was trying to wrap his mind around the fact that the most vivacious and confident person he’d ever met was somehow too weak to wake up again. She was alive, and there was hope, he told himself. But still, he felt trapped between his failures.
Before long, his mind was thinking about the gravity shield. He hadn’t even gone down to the engineering bay to see what had happened to his modifications. He shook his head so he could focus on what was most important.
“Kim,” he said, feeling self-conscious. “I want you to know how glad I am that you’re here. I should have fought for you to stay. Sometimes I just get so overwhelmed by the differences in how we see things. But I miss you so much.”
He cried after that. The tears felt good, as if he were releasing all the tension built up inside him. When he finished, he felt a little better and was hungry.
“You should wake up so we can eat,” Ben said. “We’ll need to restock on a few things before long. You won’t want to miss that. I know you enjoy visiting new places.”
That thought brought a fresh wave of guilt. How many times had she asked him to let someone else work on the ship so he could spend time with her in the Genovisi Shipyards?
“We’re still in hyperspace,” Ben said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to find an unregistered planet? Someplace where we could just lie low for a while. I can’t help but think about the island on Brigton. It was hot there, but walking on the beach at night, listening to the waves was so nice. I want to do that with yo—”
Kim’s finger moved. It wasn’t much, just a tiny reflex, but Ben felt it.
“Can you hear me? Kim? Please wake up. Kim?”
There was no movement, no sign that she heard him, but Ben felt certain she could. He leaned in close to her ear.
“I know you could hear me,” he said, his voice a whisper. “And I know you want to come back to me, so do it. You’re the strongest person I know. Just wake up and I swear I’d do whatever you want. We can ditch the Echo and go someplace the Imperium will never find us. I’ll build you a new ship. Whatever you want, please, just wake up.”
Her finger twitched again. Ben held his breath, willing Kim to move. She took a deep, shuddering breath, then sighed a long, almost vocal, exhale.
Ben waited but nothing else happened. He spent another hour talking to Kim, but she didn’t respond again. He wasn’t sure what any of it meant. Perhaps it was all just reflexes, he had no way of knowing for sure, but he felt as if she was responding to him.
Nance came in after that. She had gotten some rest and looked refreshed. She moved quietly to the other side of the bed from Ben.
“How is she?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “The professor says she’s healing.”
“That’s good,” Nance said. “Why don’t I take a turn with her? You can get up and get something to eat. You must be hungry.”
Ben was hungry. And he was tired of just sitting, but he didn’t want to leave Kim. He wanted to be by her side when she woke up.
“I should stay,” he said.
“No,” Nance said. “You have work to do.”
“Nothing is as important as being here, with Kim.”
“Kim is safe. You aren’t leaving her,” Nance said. “But odds are, the Imperium Fleet is going to find us again.”
Ben looked at her with a frown.
“You know I’m right,” Nance said. “Magnum agrees with me too. They won’t give up.”
“They can’t find us.”
“Of course they can,” Nance replied as if he had lost his mind. “We can’t stay hidden forever. In fact, I did an inventory—we’ve got about two weeks’ worth of food left. Then we’ll have to make port somewhere to restock.”
“So what’s your point?” Ben asked.
“My point is that the shield needs to be fixed. It’s the only thing that will keep us alive if the Imperium attacks again. You want Kim to live, not to mention the rest of us? Then fix the shield.”
“It’s not broken,” Ben said.
“If we can’t turn it on from the bridge, it’s not ready,” Nance said. “And what if it gets overloaded again? We need a reliable shield that we can control, with sensors so that we don’t get destroyed by it.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “I see your point.”
“You do? Excellent. I wasn’t sure if I was getting through to you.”
“You’re staying with her?”
“Someone will be here at all times. We can take turns. Magnum and I have nothing else to do.”
“How long until we break out of hyperspace?”
Nance glanced at her wrist chrono. “Over eighteen hours. It was a long jump.”
“Good,” Ben said. “Sometimes it feels like hyperspace is the only place that’s safe anymore.”
Nance nodded. “So change that, will you?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Ben left the sick bay. He looked back when he reached the door, but Kim was still unconscious. His hope that she might wake up, open her eyes, and acknowledge him were far-fetched, he told himself as he slowly climbed the stairwell that led up to the galley. But he couldn’t help it.
He fixed a protein shake and saw that Jones had left his research on the dining table. It was all stuffed into his satchel. The older man hadn’t taken the time to spread it back out again. Ben made a mental note to thank the older man. He didn’t think he had done that yet, and Kim would have probably died without Jones’s knowledge of medicine.
The climb down to the lower level of the ship was taxing. Ben found that he could stand on his wounded leg without too much pain, but flexing his calf muscle, which happened whenever he moved his foot at the ankle, was still excruciating. In the engineering bay, he found that his wave projector had gone flying when the power to the artificial gravity generator was cut.
After finding the component on the far side of the bay, he set about creating a more stable system. What he needed was something to catch and hold the gravity wave projector when it wasn’t in use. Further, he needed something to kick it into motion, so that the system would activate faster.
Soon he was lost in his work. There were bits of machinery and computer parts spread across his workbench. Magnum brought down some lunch and the two men ate together. Neither felt much like talking, and soon Magnum went to sit with Kim while Ben continued his work.
Eight hours later, Ben finished his project. He was tired, and his leg was throbbing with pain, but he felt good. The flux shield could be controlled by the artificial gravity generator, which in turn was controlled by the ship’s computer system.
“You got it working?” Nance asked.
“The shield will wo
rk,” Ben said. “But we’ll have to add external sensors to keep tabs on it.”
“I’ll start working on a program to collect the data and project the dangers,” Nance said. “We’ve got nine hours left in hyperspace. Plenty of time for you to get some rest. The professor is in with Kim.”
“Thanks,” Ben replied.
He hobbled over to the sick bay. Jones was inside, using a data pad to work through some issues with his research. Ben looked at Kim, but there was no change. His heart felt a little stab of disappointment. His excitement from earlier was fading with every minute Kim didn’t wake up.
“Thought I would take a turn,” Ben said, moving to the bedside.
“She continues to grow stronger,” Jones said. “I have high hopes.”
“Me too,” Ben said, giving Kim’s hand a little squeeze and hoping for some movement in return. Unfortunately, there was no response.
“Were you planning to stay for a while?” the professor asked. “I could give the two of you some privacy.”
“Sure, that would be fine,” Ben said.
“The chair in the corner is very comfortable,” Jones said.
Ben stayed by Kim’s bed. And when Jones was gone, he leaned down and kissed her cheek. It felt a bit strange to kiss Kim without some sort of response from her. She was not the type to let his affection go without encouragement or a bit of teasing. He ran his fingers across his cheek.
“You know, I missed you when you left. It felt like a part of me had…” he didn’t want to say die to her, so he changed his train of thought. “But if anything, I miss you more now. I just wish you would open your eyes and say something no matter how crude or embarrassing.”
Kim didn’t move or make any kind of response. Ben down and kissed her hand, then moved over to the reclining seat.
“I’m just going to rest here a while. You don’t mind, do you?”
The sick bay was silent. “Good,” Ben said. “Then I’ll just close my eyes for a second.”
The chair was more comfortable than Ben expected, or perhaps it was because he was so tired. The seat reclined back, with a footrest that he could elevate. With his legs up, the pain in his calf wound seemed to hurt less, and his body sank into the cushions of the chair. Soon he felt the sweet caress of sleep drawing him toward a dark abyss. He let himself drift away, hoping that when he woke up, things on board the Modulus Echo would be different.
Chapter 35
“Download is nearly complete, General,” Captain Derringer said from her place on the bridge of the Deception. “Will we be staying in the system long?”
“No,” Pershing said. “Once the shuttle returns from delivering Major Le Croix, you can set a course back to the Celeste system.”
For a long moment, the bridge was quiet. Pershing had copied all the video from the ambush above Torrent Four to her division’s private servers on Yelsin Prime. Le Croix had orders to gather as many operators to their home base as possible. The transport vessel Wind Sweeper was in orbit, and if Pershing was right, they would soon have a new enemy to fight. The Wind Sweeper would be loaded with Special Forces units, weapons, and gear. When the time came, it would join the Deception in theater under General Pershing’s command.
The more she thought about what happened above Torrent Four, the more convinced she became that two things were abundantly clear. First, Admiral General Volgate didn’t have a clue on how to lead a military operation. He had entrusted a political hack with good connections on Gershwin, the home planet of the royal family, with an armada of capital ships. Each of those vessels was likewise helmed by officers chosen for their political connections, while more capable leaders were shunned by the admiral general. Volgate had built a hierarchy of fools to benefit his career, with no real thought to the safety or security of the Imperium.
Volgate would have to be removed, but that was probably already in the works. Pershing had no ambitions to be a staff officer. Instead, she wanted to be the commander in charge of the war that was coming. She had no real reason to think that any sort of conflict was in the making, but her gut was usually reliable. She wanted to be in a position to act if a conflict did materialize.
Secondly, and even more importantly, she was convinced that the Kestrel class vessel that had escaped the Royal Imperium Fleet again in the Torrent system, had tech that was outside of the military. It was something different, something incredibly powerful, especially for a little ship. She had watched the footage filmed from a variety of angles. She had zoomed in on the Modulus Echo and enhanced the resolution until she was sure that what she was seeing actually happened. It was still possible that the ship hadn’t been in orbit at all. In theory, it might have been possible for the ship to simply be a projection, a hologram of such detail that it looked real even on the recordings.
What made Brigadier General Alicia Pershing doubt the theory of the ship being a decoy, was the fact that it actually bent laser beams. If it had simply been a projection, the lasers would have passed right through it. Not to mention the fact that missiles had been locked onto the Kestrel class ship’s heat signature. Which meant that the ship had advanced technology, the likes of which she hadn’t even heard rumors about.
If Pershing knew one thing about the Royal Imperium military, it was that nothing was truly a secret. There were always rumors, from who was getting promoted to what was being developed by the research and development firms contracted to invent and build new tech for the Fleet. Those rumors didn’t always pan out, but nothing had happened that hadn’t been talked about far in advance. Which meant that whatever tech the Modulus Echo was using wasn’t made by or for the military. Yet it was incredibly effective.
Pershing didn’t approve of Minsk’s tactics, but his stubborn refusal to deal with the reality of the situation had provided her with a flood of data. The little ship had shrugged off laser bombardments that should have vaporized the Kestrel class vessel. And it was more than just powerful deflectors, which didn’t work against physical weapons such as missiles. Yet the Modulus Echo had sent the warheads fired from several different ships flying away as if they had been swatted by an invisible hand.
The recordings didn’t lie, although they were hard to believe. Pershing had slowed the footage and watched as the missiles were turned away from the little ship, despite coming in from different angles. She had techs studying the footage to give her a more detailed analysis, but it seemed to her that there was an equal distant barrier around the ship that kept all weapons from harming the little vessel.
The question was, where did such tech come from? Was it an invention by the rebels? Would they soon find themselves facing ships they couldn’t harm in battle? That was a disturbing thought, though she had already given the idea of how to combat such an enemy a great amount of thought. It was also possible that the tech came from somewhere else. Her deductive reasoning told her that if she removed the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, had to be true.
That left two options. The most likely, yet hardest to believe, is that the crew of the ship built the tech themselves. She had information on two of the crew, neither of them appeared in any Royal Imperium files she had access to. But they returned to the ship for a reason, and her spies told her they were salvaging materials. That meant it was possible that the crew built a shield so advanced that an Imperium battle cruiser and hosts of fast attack craft couldn’t harm it. Her mind simply rejected the idea completely, which left the other option.
Was it possible that an advanced intelligence was operating in the galaxy? Humanity had spread through the stars without finding intelligent life anywhere, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. There were still uncharted systems in the galaxy, not to mention other galaxies. The technology to travel between galaxies had not yet been invented, but it was still theoretically possible. Perhaps an advanced intelligence had made contact with the Kestrel class ship and shared the technology. That was perhaps even more far-fetched, but much easier to believe. Wh
at’s more, it fit her own feelings that something, somewhere, was a threat. She would know soon enough.
Le Croix insisted his operators had gotten a tracking device onto the hull of the ship. Once the vessel drops out of hyperspace, it would wait one hour, then send a coded message to the Navigational Network, which had uplink buoys through the galaxy. Once the ship appeared on the network, she would know exactly where to find them.
“General, I have an incoming message from High Command,” the communications officer announced.
“Put it through,” Pershing said, although she was certain she already knew what it would be.
She listened for a moment through her headset, then looked over to Captain Derringer. The captain was waiting expectantly for her orders.
“Is the download complete?” Pershing asked.
“It will be in a few more seconds,” the information officer replied.
“When it is, send the message beacon,” Pershing explained. “The admiral general is looking for a scapegoat. I think it best if we stay here until we have information that can be put to use.”
“How will we get that information?” Captain Derringer asked.
“By being patient,” Pershing asked. “And letting our enemy make a mistake.”
“You’re sure they will?” Derringer asked.
“We all do, Captain. It’s only a matter of time.”
Chapter 36
Ben felt the stretch as the Echo broke out of hyperspace. He rubbed his eyes and stretched as he remembered where he was. The sick bay was still dark, with only the lights from a few rudimentary medical devices showing. Ben sat up in the reclining chair and got slowly to his feet.
His leg felt better. It was sore, but the residual pain had ceased, and the flesh glue was starting to itch. After making sure he was steady on his feet, he moved over to where Kim lay. She looked peaceful there in the dim light. Her skin looked almost luminous, and Ben reached out to stroke her cheek.
“Hey! What gives?” Kim snapped at him. “Don’t go touching my face while I’m asleep. You’re lucky I didn’t break your fingers.”
Gravity Flux: Kestrel Class Saga Book 3 Page 16
