by Terry Mixon
At least that had been with a full medical team in attendance and in a real operating theater. Doing this kind of thing in a filthy tunnel on a mostly dead world made him shudder.
Ever since they’d discovered the dead fleet crewmen aboard Courageous all those years ago, he’d seen a lot of implants inside skulls. It was still very much a gruesome sight but a familiar one.
After a few minutes of deft work, Doctor Stone had a small area behind Kelsey’s right ear shaved, cut open, and a small section of bone removed. That exposed the node he needed access to inside his friend’s skull.
He still wasn’t exactly sure how the electromagnetic pulse had been strong enough to knock everything offline. That was supposed to be impossible.
Obviously not.
Unfortunately, that fact introduced a level of uncertainty into the procedure. Would this reset even work? Was the equipment in their heads so damaged that it wasn’t going to come back online no matter what they did? Honestly, there was no way of knowing if he’d be able to make this work or fail miserably.
To make it work, he needed to use a piece of modified equipment to generate a charge on a specific frequency and with an extremely low amperage—a range of power output that the gear he’d recovered and modified had never been designed to generate quite so precisely.
As Doctor Stone had prepped for the surgery, Carl had made the needed modifications to his equipment. To the best of his knowledge, this was going to work, but it was still a gamble.
He had no way of measuring the output. If his modifications didn’t do what they needed to do, there was the possibility that he’d fry Kelsey’s brain and kill her.
Lily turned to him. “Over to you, Carl. What can I do to help?”
Taking a deep breath, Carl held up the probe that he’d use to trigger the charge. “I’m going to need you to immobilize her head. In fact, if we can get everyone else to grab onto her and keep her from moving at all, that would be best.
“I know that the somatic stimulator isn’t supposed to allow her brain to send any commands to move her body, but once I trigger her implants to reset, there’s the potential that her augmentation will move her body without any input from her. Potentially at full strength.
“Even that should be okay, so long as she doesn’t move her head toward me. I’ll pull back as fast as I can, but if she moves too quickly, she could impale her brain directly on my probe. That would be really, really bad.”
The rest of them grabbed onto Kelsey. Four of them had her head wedged as well as they could with their legs and hands. That was going to be as good as he could get.
If this worked, she’d be able to hold the next patient steady while he worked with absolute certainty that they wouldn’t be able to yank their head around until he was clear. This was going to be the most dangerous operation of the group.
He inserted the curved tip of the probe into her brain tissue. He was moving directly adjacent to the implant node with a very thin tip, so it shouldn’t have any adverse effect on her, but it still made him feel exceptionally nervous.
The location where he had to apply the charge was on the far side of the node, something that was easy to do in a modern medical facility but incredibly difficult with makeshift equipment down at the bottom of an ancient tunnel under a destroyed city.
Once he felt that he had the probe tip where it needed to go, he took one last deep breath. “I’m about to trigger the charge. I’ll give you a count down from three and hit the button on zero. As soon as I deliver the charge, I’m going to retract the probe and get clear. Again, it’s possible that she could seize with the full strength of her augmentation, so don’t let her grab you. As soon as I’m clear, get well back.”
If she got ahold of anyone at full strength, there would undoubtedly be broken bones and other serious injuries, so he hoped to avoid that. If his actions killed his friend, he wasn’t sure he could ever get past that.
He took a deep breath and put his finger on the button that would send the charge. He made sure the tip of the probe was in contact with the implant node and looked around at the group one last time.
“Three… two… one… zero.”
With the last word, he sent the charge into her implants and extracted the probe as quickly and carefully as he could. That took less than a second, and everyone else pulled back from Kelsey as he finished.
The only reaction he saw to what he’d done was her eyes twitching. Even that motion ceased a moment later. It looked like the somatic stimulator had kept her under.
She was still breathing, so she was alive. They wouldn’t know the condition of her brain or her implants until she was brought out, though.
He sat back on his heels and watched Doctor Stone clean the exposed area, put the small sliver of bone back in place, and begin sealing it into place with surgical glue. Once that was done, the doctor used a portable regenerator to close the skin over the wound.
“We’ve done the best we can,” Lily said a few minutes later. “I’m going to wake her up.”
Carl watched closely as the doctor turned off the somatic stimulator and put it aside. After a few moments, Kelsey’s eyes fluttered open, and she took a deep breath.
“How are you feeling, Kelsey?” Lily asked softly.
The blonde woman frowned up at the doctor. “Who’s Kelsey? And who are you?”
2
Jared’s heart leapt into his throat. He’d been an idiot to let this happen. He should’ve told her no.
God, how were they going to fix this? Then his eyes narrowed as Kelsey started chuckling.
“You should see your faces,” Kelsey said with a smirk.
“That’s not funny!” Jared snapped. “You scared the hell out of us.”
His sister grinned as she slowly sat up with the assistance of Doctor Stone. “Blame Talbot. I think his sense of humor is rubbing off on me.”
She stared up at the ceiling and blinked. “My implants are back online. My augmentation is coming up too. It’s going to take a minute for me to do a complete diagnostic and make sure that everything is working, but this is a good start. A really good start.”
Jared walked over to the ancient plascrete wall. His heart was still racing from the prank his sister had played on them. He wasn’t going to snap at her, even though he wanted to tear a long, bloody strip off her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice contrite. “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
He rested his forehead against the cold stone and sighed. “It’s not really that big of a thing, I suppose. I’m sure that I’ll be laughing about this in a couple of months if we make it out of here.”
Jared walked back over to the group. “I’ll agree that Talbot has really been a bad influence on your sense of humor, though. Are you going to try this on him when he comes back? If so, I don’t think he’s going to take it nearly as well as we did.”
She sighed. “No, he wouldn’t. It was a bad idea, and I’m very sorry that I made anybody worry. If it’s any consolation, my implants are fully back online, and my augmentation is as well. Error checking is complete, and it looks as if there are no ill effects. My medical nanites are back in business.”
His sister stood slowly, as if she were still cautious of how her body was going to react. “It feels weird having everything back online. It’s interesting how deeply I’d become used to the changes. I’ve been fully enhanced for several years now and never had to deal with normal human strength or the lack of all the augmentation. Now that it’s been gone for a few days, it feels weird coming back.”
Lily put a hand on Kelsey’s shoulder. “You’re going to want to take it easy for a couple of hours and let yourself get reacquainted with your augmentation. Right now, we’re not in a life-and-death situation, so there’s no need to push the envelope.”
The doctor turned her attention to Jared. “Since Talbot is keeping watch, I suggest we do Julia next. Everyone else’s augmentation is significantly less intrusiv
e than theirs, so I’m not nearly as worried about possible side effects. Based on how long it took to get Kelsey done, I’m anticipating that I can have all of us back in operating order in a couple of hours.”
“If we have that long,” he said. “We took a chance doing this, because the inhabitants of the megacity could come looking for us at any time. Let’s focus on doing as many people as we can, starting with the most critical. Julia next, then Talbot as soon as he gets here.”
Kelsey stretched and then took a moment to put her sword harness back over her shoulders and grabbed her bow and quiver of arrows. “It should only take me a couple of minutes to get him headed your way. I’ll stay at the guard post and keep an eye on things while you work on him.”
Without waiting for a response, she took off at a jog. In moments, she was lost in the darkness of the tunnel. Only after she’d left did Jared realize that she hadn’t taken a torch with her.
“How can she see in the dark?” he asked. “Doesn’t she need at least some light to amplify?”
Carl shook his head. “Her ocular augmentation is capable of seeing in both infrared and ultraviolet. It’s also capable of using a weak scanner signal to generate input for her to see even in something like this. She’s not going to get colors, and it’s not going to work well at any kind of a distance, but she’ll be able to move around without tripping over anything. Marine Raiders are pretty damn capable.”
Jared supposed they were. He’d seen his sister in action numerous times and still hadn’t delved into the full nature of her augmentation.
It had taken her years to get past her resentment about what had been done to her. Now, she’d learned to take it in stride but still didn’t talk about it much.
Lily went to work on Julia while he was thinking. Based on how long it had taken to get Kelsey operational again, it was likely that Talbot would be back just after they finished with his sister from another universe.
There might even be time to activate one other person’s implants before the marine made his way back to the group. Since he was in charge, he vowed that was going to be him. He needed every advantage to figure out how they were going to get out of this mess.
Talbot stood in the darkness at the center of the tunnel, facing in the direction of the city of Frankfort. Or where it would be if they weren’t a hundred meters under it.
The torchlight only went out a short distance, and then everything was lost in the gloom, so he really wasn’t sure what lay beyond what they’d already explored.
The tunnel had several offshoots, small chambers that contained equipment that he wasn’t familiar with that at some point in the distant past had once served the dead city above them.
Perhaps it was for power distribution. He suspected that any kind of long-distance power transmission would need boosting so as not to degrade, but only somebody like Carl could actually determine what the junk had once been used for.
Clarice Beauchamp stood near him, her hand resting on the bow that she held wedged against her boot. How she’d be able to shoot anything in the utter darkness was beyond him. Still, her presence made him feel better. The only weapon he had was a sword that he wasn’t that great using.
Yes, sword work was part of what his wife had taught him of the Art, the martial form used by the Marine Raiders for thousands of years. That didn’t mean that he was any good at it yet. He wouldn’t cut off his own arms or legs, but a skilled swordsman would still have him at a significant disadvantage.
It was his augmentation that would’ve made the real difference in a fight like that. Without it, he was a rank novice. In fact, he suspected that Beauchamp could beat him handily with the sword on her hip. His larger size would do nothing to offset her skill with the blade and her lifetime of training.
He wondered what tips she might be able to offer him and his wife for enhancing their training with weapons. He’d have to look into it if they survived the next few days.
“How far underneath the city do you think we’ll be able to go before they know we’re here?” he asked softly, worried about how far his voice would carry.
“I suspect that they already know we’re here,” she responded matter-of-factly. “They’ll have heard the explosion. It’s possible that they could’ve felt the vibration of our attack on the wall down here. They may not be precisely certain where it came from, but they’re going to be looking around to make certain that they don’t have unwelcome guests.”
She turned toward Talbot and raised an eyebrow. “What do you plan to do when they find us?”
He shrugged slightly. “I suppose that depends on how they engage us. If they attack, we’ll defend ourselves. If they want to talk, we’ll talk. If it’s something in between, we’ll have to see what happens.”
“Hey, you two,” Kelsey said as she stepped out of the dark behind them. “Lily wants you, Talbot. You should both go back, I think. I have this covered.”
His wife wasn’t carrying a torch, so either she’d staggered through the dark, or her augmentation was back online. She’d taken the risk of the surgery.
Of course she had.
He turned to face her. “I assume your implants and augmentation are back online.”
“I’m good, though I should probably be taking it easy today,” she said. “The circumstances aren’t going to cooperate, I’m sure.
“I could overhear you talking from a little way back. You’re right to be worried about how the inhabitants are going to react to us. That’s why we need to get your augmentation online as well.
“Julia should be done by the time you get there, so send her back to join me. Even relatively untrained, she’ll help keep any incursion at bay while you guys prepare.”
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay alone?” he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You just had brain surgery.”
She smiled, pulled him into a hug, and kissed him on the lips. “I’m fine. Time is probably going to be short, so you need to get moving. Get your ass back there and make it happen.”
He grinned at his wife and grabbed one of the torches. “Try not to have all the fun while I’m gone.”
With that, he took off back toward where the rest were waiting at a jog with Clarice Beauchamp at his heels. Kelsey was right in that the clock was ticking. When it reached zero, things would get ugly.
With Julia’s implants back online, she and Kelsey could hold here if the weapons arrayed against them were primitive and the number of enemies low enough. She certainly hoped so, because they were only going to get one shot at surviving what came next.
3
Julia blinked as consciousness returned. It felt as if she’d only gone to sleep a moment ago. She tried to sit up, but Doctor Stone put a hand on her shoulder.
“Just give it a second,” the other woman said. “Everything went fine, but I want to give you time to gather yourself back together.”
That made her frown slightly. Her double hadn’t required any extra time to get herself together. Why was she getting a little extra cushion where Kelsey hadn’t?
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened?”
“Your implant hardware reacted a little bit more than Kelsey’s did. You thrashed around a little, and I want to make sure that everything has settled down before you try to get up.”
Julia blinked a little at that and then looked at the faces around her. Everybody seemed to be okay, so she must not have hurt anyone, but Carl Owlet had a slight bruise on his cheek. Had she struck him? Or perhaps just knocked him back to the ground while he attempted to hold her down?
“Did I hurt anyone?” she asked quietly.
“It’s just a bruise,” Carl said. “I rolled and took up most of the impact. Nobody has anything serious, so don’t worry about it.”
Julia closed her eyes. “I’m sorry about that.”
She had no desire to harm anyone, but specifically, she really didn’t want to hurt the scientist. Though she hadn’t developed feel
ings for him—he was a married man after all—she was fond of him and intended to seek out his duplicate in her universe once she’d returned there. It was growing more likely by the day that his doppelgänger would be her consort if things played out the way she hoped.
After a few more beats, she sat up and began examining her implants and augmentation. As much as she loathed the things, she needed them. Especially now. They’d all need them in the weeks and months ahead if they were to survive this horrible planet.
Her implants were back online, and her augmentation indicated that it was functional as well. She could once again fight if forced to. She wasn’t trained like her doppelgänger or Talbot, but she’d do what needed to be done.
She’d also do whatever she could to bring death and destruction to the horde for killing Scott Roche. They’d slaughtered him even as he’d saved her life after the big battle. His sacrifice would not go unavenged.
The rage sparked by her memory made her clench her fists. She wasn’t a violent person, but for them, she’d make an exception. She’d see them all dead if she could arrange it.
Julia blinked away the red that had formed in her vision and sighed slightly. As much as she wanted to make the horde pay, the smart move would be to escape the area entirely. They had to get away so that they could get the override from the vaults underneath the Imperial Palace. Then they had to escape Terra, rejoin Persephone, and get out of the system.
She waved the others away and got to her feet. If there was another glitch, she didn’t want to be responsible for harming anyone. Her balance was decent enough to get her to her feet.
“I’ll go replace Talbot,” she said. “Everything seems to be working the way it’s supposed to. Since we’re working with makeshift equipment and we’ll be running into things he’ll have to help fix, I suggest you bring Carl’s implants online soon. That can only help us as we go forward.”
