Ekatya caught up with Cox at the last plant rack before the Resilere environment. They peered through the profusion of hairy red leaves but saw nothing. Their position was well behind the rear corner of the nearest tank, and their view of Rahel was blocked.
But some part of Helkenn should have been visible if he were still standing, or even kneeling.
“My people are working the security feeds,” Cox said. “They haven’t found him yet.”
“He just ran,” Dr. Wells said. “He said something to her and ran toward the starboard side. I need to get to her, she’s bleeding out!”
“He’s not the only danger.” Cox pointed up the row between racks, which paralleled the side of the tank. The plants would give them cover until they got past the front corner and could see Rahel’s situation. Ekatya nodded and took off at a run, Cox hard on her heels.
“Six of the Resilere have left the tanks.” Lhyn had reverted to a clinical tone that meant she was truly frightened. “Four went in the same direction as Helkenn. The other two . . . one of them is on Rahel. The other is right next to her.”
Ekatya hardly heard the last sentence, her mind stuck on a horrifying image.
That image became reality when she passed the front edge of the tank. Even through the foliage obscuring her view, the sight of a Resilere sitting on Rahel seared itself into her retinas. A second one sat nearby, apparently waiting its turn—just as they had with Murray.
But it made no sense. They were fed; they weren’t desperate.
“That’s where she was stabbed,” Cox hissed. He lifted his phaser and sighted in.
“No!” Ekatya shoved his weapon down and prayed that she was right. She was betting Rahel’s life on it.
“Captain! They’ll suck her dry!”
“Do not fire without my order!”
“Don’t shoot!” Dr. Wells shouted. “It’s not attacking!”
“Yes it is!” Cox was incredulous. “I’m looking right at it!”
“Doctor, how do you know?”
“She’s still conscious. I saw her hand move. Captain, listen to me. They break down their food with acid, but if that were happening while she’s conscious, she wouldn’t be lying there quietly. I’m telling you, it’s not attacking and I need to be there!”
Ekatya hoped her relief didn’t show. “She’s right. If it was secreting acid, she’d be—”
A howl of the purest agony rang through the cavernous bay, going on and on until she thought it couldn’t be Gaian. At last it died away, only to ring out again at the same volume but with twice as much pain.
“She’d be sounding like that,” Cox finished, his eyes wide.
“Helkenn.” Ekatya stood up, looking toward the starboard side of the bay, but saw nothing. Another scream pierced the air.
“Sounds like he’s getting what he deserves,” Cox said grimly.
“If four of them are distracted with him, that gives us time to deal with these two.” The screaming was getting worse.
“It gives you time. I’ll check—” He held up a finger and listened, then narrowed his eyes. “We’ve found him. By that tree, but he’s in a blind spot. I’ll go and warn you when the others come your direction.”
“Observation only,” she ordered. “Keep your distance.”
“Understood.” He sprinted down the row as another scream curdled her blood.
Ekatya raced behind him, turning at the cross row and slowing to a walk when she hit the open area. She was ten meters from Rahel and had a clear view of both Resilere. One still sat on her abdomen; the other crouched on her opposite side. A quick glance at the tanks showed that the four Resilere hanging inside the crates hadn’t moved, and two others remained at the base of the ramps. The river of hatchlings was still in motion, but there were fewer of them.
She wondered if they could hear the high-frequency pitch of Helkenn’s screams.
When she was five meters away, the Resilere beside Rahel climbed over her legs and advanced toward her.
She stopped.
It stopped as well, but made itself tall and spread out its arms, red bioluminescence rippling over its skin.
“It’s guarding her.” Lhyn’s voice was awed.
“That’s just wonderful, Lhyn, now tell me how to get past it!” Dr. Wells snapped.
“Rahel.” Ekatya spoke as loudly as she dared. “It’s Captain Serrado. Can you hear me?”
Rahel’s head turned slowly, her eyes still closed. She murmured something, but Ekatya couldn’t hear it over the hiss of rain hitting water.
“Dr. Wells, did you pick that up?”
“She pulled out her com after Helkenn stabbed her.” Wells sounded half frantic and half furious.
Cox spoke softly. “I’m in visual contact with Helkenn. He’s no threat.”
“Are the Resilere reacting to you?”
“No.”
If they weren’t reacting to Cox, with his high level of distrust, they wouldn’t react to the rest of them. “Dr. Wells, get moving. Lhyn, we’ll need your translation skills.”
“On our way.” The main doors opened before Wells finished speaking.
Ekatya crouched down to present less of a perceived danger and was heartened when the Resilere retracted its arms. But it didn’t move back, and its red bioluminescence did not abate.
The screams were growing weaker and more hoarse. She tried not to think of what was causing them and concentrated on these Resilere, which were not threatening her with an agonizing death.
“We’re trying to help,” she said. “Can’t you feel it? We need to get to her.” When the Resilere did not react, she spoke in a louder tone. “Rahel. Tell them we’re your friends.”
Rahel lay unmoving on the deck.
“Dr. Wells, I think she’s unconscious.”
“Of course she is by now,” Wells growled. “Since you kept me waiting!”
She and Lhyn skidded around the corner of the last plant rack and hurtled toward the tank at a dead run. Wells was operating the gurney, a large medkit sitting atop it, while Lhyn carried a pad in one hand and a speaker in the other.
Ekatya held out her arm and made a downward motion, urging them to slow down. They continued their sprint to the tank, then slowed to a fast walk before turning the front corner.
At the sight of the gurney, the Resilere on guard duty flashed a faster pattern of red and extended its arms to what had to be their full length. The tips twitched wildly.
Lhyn fell to her knees beside Ekatya. “I’ve been playing the sounds for friend and help since we came through the doors. Why aren’t they responding?”
“They are,” Ekatya said. “Just not the way we want.”
“I don’t understand!” With an impatient motion, Lhyn brushed back the hair that had escaped her braid. “Did I get the translation wrong? Oh, stars, maybe the sound patterns aren’t enough. Maybe they need the empathic component, too. How are we going to do that without Rahel?”
“That might not be the problem,” Commander Jalta said. “If Rahel was right and they don’t distinguish between Gaians, then we lost their trust when Helkenn stabbed her. To their eyes, she’s been responsible for their salvation, while our species has done nothing but hurt them—and now her.”
That made more sense than anything else. “So they’re peaceable enough to not attack us, but that doesn’t mean they’ll allow us to hurt her any more.” Ekatya wanted to break something. All that work, all that bridge-building, and Helkenn had destroyed it in the space of one second. How could they rebuild before Rahel died?
It was only then that she realized the screams had stopped.
“Dammit!” Dr. Wells spat. “I’ve had enough. Lhyn, come here.”
Lhyn scrambled up and moved to the gurney. Dr. Wells held a vehement whispered conversation with her, then lowered the gurney until it was barely off the deck and dropped into a crouch beside it. She looked at Lhyn, who tapped her pad and nodded.
Wells pushed the gurney forward, moving
in an awkward, shuffling waddle as she stayed in her low crouch.
The guarding Resilere stopped flashing its red bioluminescence and retracted its arms.
“I am responsible for her,” Wells said firmly. “Let me take care of her. She is mine to care for.”
Ekatya’s jaw dropped when the Resilere rippled over Rahel’s legs and took up a new post on her other side. She watched Wells shuffle forward, then turned to Lhyn. “What did you do?”
“Um.” Lhyn looked uncomfortable. “I promised not to say anything. She said she’ll tell you when it’s all over. But my stars, look at that. It’s working.”
Dr. Wells had reached Rahel, set the medkit on the deck, and was already clicking a diagnostic band around her wrist. The Resilere atop Rahel slid off, taking a position next to its companion.
“Captain, the Resilere have left Helkenn’s body. They’re coming back.”
“Acknowledged. Dr. Wells?”
Wells shook her head, which Ekatya took to mean I heard and I don’t care. She unfastened Rahel’s jacket and rapidly sliced open her shirt, then traded the edged tool for an injector while checking the diagnostic band.
Whatever she saw there shocked her. She reared back to stare first at the wound, then the Resilere, before shaking off her surprise and loading the injector with three different vials. It was discharged into Rahel’s throat and tossed back to the kit in a blur of movement. She snapped on gloves with equal efficiency and bent over the wound. The position put her head close to the Resilere, but they didn’t move, and she seemed to have forgotten about them.
After the hurried, purposeful actions up to this point, the examination lasted longer than Ekatya expected. Shouldn’t she be doing . . . something?
At last Dr. Wells pressed a dressing in place and sat back on her heels. “Lhyn,” she called across the intervening space. “Tell them thank you. Then get over here and help me get her on the gurney.”
“Don’t ask,” Lhyn said before Ekatya got a word out. “I don’t know either.” She tapped her pad several times before pocketing it and pushing the speaker into Ekatya’s hands.
The four Resilere returned just as Lhyn was crossing to Rahel. Ekatya was braced for the worst, but they paused only to touch the other two before swarming up the sides of the tanks. Apparently, some conversation had taken place that assured them Rahel was not being threatened.
“Commander Cox, they’ve arrived,” Ekatya said. “They went straight into the tanks.”
“Good to know,” he answered. “Remind me to never get on their wrong side.”
Dr. Wells had her hands under Rahel’s shoulders and was pulling up her torso.
“How bad is he?” Ekatya asked, watching as Lhyn reached for her legs. Wells wrapped her arms around Rahel’s chest, and still the two remaining Resilere did nothing.
“It’ll make for a challenging autopsy.” He made a sound of disgust. “The first challenge will be keeping the body in one piece when they move it.”
Dr. Wells counted to three, and they lifted Rahel onto the gurney. She immediately raised it and began pushing it toward Ekatya, while Lhyn closed the medkit and plucked a bloody pair of pruning shears from the deck.
“Rahel is on the gurney. We’re heading to the medbay.”
“Acknowledged.”
The two Resilere climbed onto the tank walls but did not enter the water. Ekatya had the feeling they would watch until Rahel was out of their sight.
“They sealed it,” Dr. Wells said when she and Lhyn reached her.
Ekatya trotted beside them as they turned the corner and moved down the side of the tank. “What does that mean?”
They rounded the second corner and picked up speed, jogging along the backs of the tanks and platforms and heading toward the lift.
“The one that was sitting on her? It coated the wound with something similar to the cement sealant. It’s like—” She shook her head. “I’ll know more after the surgery. But I can tell you it stopped the bleeding. Almost instantly, judging by her blood pressure and the state of her uniform. All of her vital signs are stable. Shippers, I thought I’d be replacing half her blood volume.”
Lhyn rushed ahead to open the lift doors, and Dr. Wells pushed in the gurney. “Medbay, surgery level.”
“Are you saying she’ll be all right?” Ekatya asked as she and Lhyn stepped in. The doors closed, and the lights tinted blue.
“He used a dirty pair of pruning shears; there’s almost certainly abdominal contamination.” Wells spoke in a clipped, clinical tone. “Fortunately, he was limited by the blade length. Based on the upward angle of the wound, he was targeting her liver. Plenty of blood to attract the Resilere and a good entry point for acid to liquefy her internal organs. But he didn’t take into account the denser musculature of Alseans. Or the fact that they’d help instead of hurting her.” She inhaled sharply and added, “It could have been much worse.”
The tremor in her voice was slight, but for Ekatya, it was a startling shift from her earlier ferocity. She rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Good thing she has the best surgeon in Fleet to knit her back together.”
Dr. Wells did not acknowledge the touch or the sentiment, instead staring fixedly at the doors.
“She has what she needs,” Lhyn said quietly.
At those words, some of the tension seeped from Dr. Wells’s shoulders.
Ekatya had no idea why.
36
Iceflame
There was a time when Ekatya could pull double shifts and still be alert and ready for her normal shift the next day. As she stood in the lift, slumped against the wall and rubbing her tired eyes, she acknowledged that those days had vanished somewhere along with her commander’s bars.
Not that captains were supposed to be working double shifts; that was why Fleet gave them staff. But on days like today, it was unavoidable.
The lift doors opened onto a silent corridor. She stepped across and through the doors of her quarters, finding them equally silent. After a difficult two hours of waiting through Rahel’s surgery, Lhyn had gone to the labs, where she and Kade Jalta were no doubt hip deep in data and loving every minute of it.
“Phoenix,” she said, stripping off her uniform jacket, “show me the bow view.”
Where a blank wall had stretched from the door to the kitchen, she now saw a brilliant starscape reaching to infinity. The Tutnuken was already far behind them, its ghostly corridors no longer her problem. A repair crew had arrived under armed escort, and she had spent most of her second shift working with them until the destroyer captain waved her off. She suspected he was enjoying the chance to flex his situational authority over her, but if he thought it got under her skin, he didn’t know her at all. She had happily given the command to set course for Enkara, heard her surf engines come online, and felt the knot in her chest unwind.
Phoenix was free and flying once more.
A quick shower rejuvenated her, and she slipped into comfortable clothing that set her as far apart from the captain as she could get while still on her ship. Then she gathered a few supplies, walked into the lift, and stepped out in the medbay.
The last time she had been here, a crowd of medical staff had waited to whisk Rahel into surgery. Now she stood unnoticed in the spacious lobby and marveled at how peaceful it seemed.
Beneath a ceiling that soared two decks high, a ring of treatment rooms was arranged around a central desk. A curved corridor departed from one side of the lobby, ran behind the ring of rooms, and returned to the other side, giving access to a second set of treatment rooms used for long-term cases and those in need of more privacy.
The second-floor offices looked down onto the lobby, the lower halves of their walls flourishing with a hanging garden that removed all antiseptic odors and gave the medbay the same woodsy scent as the corridors. It was the Pulsar scent, and one Ekatya had never smelled on a smaller ship no matter how good their botanists were.
“Good evening, Captain,” a nurse said
as she approached the central desk. “Here to check on First Guard Sayana?”
“Among other people. How is she?”
“Awake and resting comfortably in room nine.” He pointed the way. “Something of a medical miracle, that was. The whole staff is waiting for Dr. Wells’s report on that sealant.”
“Don’t tell me she’s writing that up now.”
He looked up at the brightly lit windows of Wells’s office, directly across from the main entrance. “I’ll be amazed if she isn’t.”
She thanked him and crossed the lobby to Rahel’s treatment room. After giving a light tap for warning, she opened the door and smiled at its occupant. “I hear you’re a medical miracle.”
“Captain!” Rahel tried to push herself into a more upright position. Her auburn hair was loose and her face pale, making her facial ridges more obvious, but otherwise she looked surprisingly normal.
“Oh, no.” Ekatya lifted a hand. “Don’t do anything to mess up Dr. Wells’s handiwork, or we’ll both suffer. How are you feeling?”
“Stupid.” With a disgruntled look, she settled back against the raised head of her bed.
“Not quite what I was expecting.” Ekatya rolled a stool over and sat down. “Why?”
She gestured at her abdomen. “He stabbed me like I was a sack of grain. I should have sensed him the moment he came in range.”
“You were a little occupied at the time. Didn’t Dr. Wells explain the effects of an altered state of consciousness?”
The tiny flinch could have been from her injury, but the speed at which it was erased said otherwise. “I haven’t talked to her yet. But I’ve had two doctors and four nurses in here since I woke up, so I’m not feeling neglected.” She offered a quick smile, remarkable for its insincerity.
“I’m sure she’ll come when she can.” Ekatya didn’t know why Wells would delegate that, but it seemed Rahel did and was eager to excuse it. “I can’t remember the details, but the short version is that you weren’t in control of your senses. Any of them. No one’s holding you accountable for something your brain wasn’t capable of doing.”
Resilience Page 29
