by Ron Collins
Enlisted and officers alike worked to clear the way for stretchers and medical carts. Doctors and nurses huffed it down the corridor, yelling orders and checking readings from instruments attached to their mangled patients.
He saw everything, but his brain wasn’t really working.
So mostly he saw blood, skin, and meat that had been charred black. Refuse from sterile bandages littered the area. He saw medical equipment, magnetic-drive gurneys, empty packets of pain meds, and broken utensils.
These were the things that confirmed for him that this whole thing had really happened.
That it had not been merely a never-ending nightmare.
He was on Aldrin, though.
Finally.
For the first time in what seemed like forever no one was looking at him to tell them what to do. It was almost quiet. He was almost alone.
“Holy effin’ God,” he muttered, flashing on Malloy as he said it.
“Are you all right, Lieutenant Commander?” the medic said.
Torrance scanned the tube behind him.
“Do you have any word on my team?”
“You’ll have to be more specific, sir,”
“Lieutenant Marisa Harthing?” he said. “Or Thomas Kitchell?”
He had been asking everyone he saw, but things were confused and no one knew anything concrete. All he knew for sure was that Kitchell was still breathing when he was taken off in the first wave, and that Harthing had not returned directly—and that Rearward Deck had been badly damaged.
“I don’t know any specifics,” the medic said. “Let me work on that wrist.”
Torrance grimaced.
“I’ve been asking everyone,” he said, mostly to himself, mostly just to keep talking. For some reason that seemed important. Keep talking. Keep his brain moving. “No one seems to know anything.”
“I hope they’re fine,” the medic said as he touched Torrance’s hand. A spike of pain ran up his arm. The wrist was bruised and swollen. “I think it’s broken,” the medic said. He placed a pain patch on the back of Torrance’s hand, and things got a little better.
“I don’t need you to tell me it’s probably broken,” Torrance said. “What I need is some goddamned help finding out about my team.”
“I wish I could do that for you, sir.”
The medic gave Torrance a firm stare.
“Do you understand me, sir? I would love to do that, but as you might be able to tell it’s kind of a mess around here. When you get through triage you’ll get to see Medical Sergeant Boreaux. She should have the full roster, and so she should be able to help you.”
Torrance leaned back against the padded wall and gave a defeated nod.
“I’m sorry to be such a pain in the ass,” he said as he held out his damaged arm. He wanted to go to sleep.
A voice came out of his dreamy mind.
“Harthing got hit fighting fires on Rearward, sir.”
He opened his eyes and looked around, feeling more than a bit strange. The corridor around him lost some focus. Pain meds, probably.
Ensign Whalen sat on a gurney and held a crimson-stained rag to her head. She had gone with Marisa’s group.
“It’s not as bad as it looks, LC,” she said. Her white teeth glowed against her dark skin. “Just a cut.”
“Lieutenant Harthing?” he asked.
“She was magic, sir. Got several families out of sealed quarters before she got caught in a collapse. Hope it’s not bad, but I can’t say anything for sure.”
“Thank you,” Torrance replied. At least it was something.
Smythe waved a portable X-ray over his wrist.
“It’s definitely broken.”
“Good call,” Torrance replied. His voice sounded distant, but even he could still make out the sarcasm that rode on it.
“I’ll get the bone guys over here.” He looked at the nametag still pasted to Torrance’s uniform and spoke into a communicator. “Abke, I need a nanoknit admin here for Lieutenant Commander Black, Torrance. X87-329. Triage sector green.”
“Don’t suppose Abke ever gets hurt,” he said.
Smythe flashed a grin and holstered the scanner. “No, sir. I don’t suppose she does.”
The medic wrapped a soft plastic sheath around Torrance’s wrist. The wrapping immediately grew rigid and pressed painfully against the back of Torrance’s hand, causing him to groan.
“That should do until they get to you. Don’t bend it.”
“Fat goddamned chance,” Torrance said. His hand tingled like he was getting an electric shock, and the intense pain went away. “When can I see the medic you mentioned?”
“Abke, please give Medical Sergeant Boreaux a message that Lieutenant Commander Black would like to see her at her earliest convenience. Use my priority code number two.”
He looked at Torrance, then scanned the triage area.
“It might be a while.”
“I understand,” Torrance said. “Thanks.”
Smythe pointed down the hallway.
“Can I get you to stay under the green banner over there so the bone guys know where to find you?”
“Sure.”
The medic bustled to the next patient.
Torrance walked to the green banner and took a seat on the floor.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the soft wall.
Torrance would not want to be in Smythe’s shoes. He would lose his mind if he had to deal with this kind of thing every day. Medical folks were either true gifts or bat-shit crazy.
Ensign Whalen’s story fit with a few others he had heard: Marisa had made it to Rearward, assessed the situation, and worked to vent several compartments to vacuum in order to block off the spread of fire. But she apparently timed one step incorrectly, or maybe the fire surprised her, and no one had any information on what happened next.
Fire is like that, he thought, as his consciousness faded in and out.
Fire was a perfect microcosm of life.
It grows in places you think it shouldn’t be able to, and it can lie in wait while you forget about it, then come back meaner and angrier than ever.
The memory of bodies floating in micro-g made his stomach do flip-flops.
All these people, he thought.
Kitchell. The kid was only twenty-two.
Was he alive?
He thought the rest of his team. He didn’t know where they all were, and that made him mad.
And Marisa, of course.
He had ordered Marisa to Rearward, just as he had taken Kitchell into the hallways. The explosion may have killed the rest, but he had ordered these two into danger, and he had given Malloy the lives of three of his crew. He wondered where Yarrow was and what happened to the guy she was trying to save. Ensign Yarrow had been planning to leave the service to be a VP at a construction conglomerate.
The muscles around his neck constricted into a cramp. He used his good hand to rub it down.
Another shuttle arrived from Everguard then.
The door to the triage corridor opened, and a column of people stepped into the gate.
“Hey, LC!” a thick voice pulled him from his cloud.
Silvio Nivead walked with a group of crew members.
Torrance waved. “Are you okay?” he said.
“Not a scratch, LC,” Silvio said with his plump arms wide out. His smile was like a crescent moon. “I’m glad to see you alive, my friend! You’re a hero! A true hero!”
“Sure, I am, Silvio. I’m a real hero.”
He smirked and put his head back on the padding.
A moment later, he was asleep.
Aftermath
.
CHAPTER 35
Aldrin Station
Local Date: December 26, 2214
The story came out quickly enough. Lieutenant Commander Torrance Black had stopped Malloy, and in doing so, stopped U3 from destroying the rest of Everguard. Four hundred and fifty-three people owed their lives to him and his bravery.
&nb
sp; The media pool loved it.
Torrance pointed out that without Kitchell, nothing he did would have made a difference, but only a few reporters cared for that kind of nuance and with the war with Universe Three in a new heating cycle, the UG was looking for a hero everyone could relate to right now.
Interstellar Command was not blind to his value.
Torrance was awarded a Presidential Citation for bravery under fire in record time, and a Purple Star for his injury, which meant he got to add a red and gold icon and a purple badge to the mortarboard he wore to each of the funerals he attended over the next two weeks. It also meant that an additional stipend was appended to his paycheck, and that his discharge was placed under review until he could have an interview with Admiral Umaro, the command’s top ranking military officer.
It also meant reporters from the pool stuck their microphones in his face everywhere he went, and that the newsfeeds were filled with hatchet jobs that got everything it was possible to get wrong, wrong.
Everyone wanted to know what he thought.
They wanted to hear him call for blood.
“I don’t know what to think,” Torrance said whenever he could. “I’m just trying to make sense of it all right now.”
CHAPTER 36
Aldrin Station
Local Dates: December 28, 2214
“She was burned over nearly eighty percent of her body.”
Torrance was in his quarters, speaking through video projector to the doctor who had finally been made available to brief him. The doctor was in her office, seated behind a desk. The wall behind her held the clichéd images of certifications, diplomas, and other bric-a-brac that Torrance could care less about.
“Can I see her?”
“No.” The doctor’s face grew lined in the screen. “Nothing personal, Lieutenant Commander, but burn victims need to be isolated to protect them from infection and disease. No one can see her now except the medical staff.”
Torrance pressed his lips, unable to make words come.
“She should make it, though. The fact is that we’re not really properly staffed or equipped to handle her case here. So we’ve got a specialist en route from Luna to transport her back there. It’s the best medical center in the segment.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“She’ll have to grow new skin—which takes time. The base elements will grow rapidly, but full recovery from burns like this can take weeks of therapy to create new nerve endings, and long spans of physical therapy to retrain her nervous system on how to process her new senses. Even then, one hand will probably always be difficult for her to use unless she decides to do a regen procedure.”
“I see.”
“She’s also going to lose some function of her right leg.”
They had already told Torrance that the leg had been shattered when a collapsing bulkhead caught her unaware.
He struggled with guilt. He should have sent someone in her place, that’s what he thought. But, then, maybe that person wouldn’t have built the fire block Marisa had built, and maybe that person wouldn’t have saved the lives Marisa had saved. And the truth was that Marisa was true military, and true military runs to trouble, not from it. It was why she had come to Systems Command to begin with. She understood the risks, and she had taken them. She had sacrificed herself to save the rest.
In the end, maybe this was the difference between them.
“And Thomas?” he finally said.
“He’s in better shape. Whoever patched him up on the ship saved his life. It’ll take a few days for regen to replace his right kidney, and we’re doing some work to deal with infection.”
“Can I see him?”
The doctor looked almost relieved to say yes.
Aldrin did not include a full hospital, just a basic emergency medical center, so the makeshift hospital ward was a repurposed construct of temporary walls and drapes that had been rolled into an open chamber that was more often used as a dance hall or a conference center. The place had been cobbled together so rapidly that the soft walls were still standing at skewed angles.
A male nurse escorted Torrance through a corridor lit by the domed ceiling lights and a continuous pipe of chemically luminous sticks that ran along the top of wall panels that were thrown together end-to-end. Individual patients’ beds were blocked off by cloth screens that made the quality of the lighting vary from segment to segment. The nurse’s footsteps were nearly silent, but Torrance’s shoes squeaked against the abrasive floor. His hand throbbed as he walked, too. He felt the heat of the bone-bot cells the docs had given him working—mostly along the top of his hand. The sway of his stride made the dull pain well back and forth.
The smell of the makeshift hospital was more neutral than an established medical center, with only a hint of antiseptic here to cover the smell of blood.
A muted whimper came from somewhere.
Someone gave a snorting snore in a nearby compartment.
The nurse whispered as he reached for a corner tab. “He is right here. I think he’s asleep.”
“That’s all right.”
The nurse eased the screen back and they slipped through.
Kitchell’s form was a shadow lying on the slab of his gurney. Torrance stepped to his side. The smell of plastic skin was thick. The machine recording vitals beat a slow rhythm.
“Can I have a moment?” Torrance finally said.
The nurse appraised him.
“I promise I won’t hurt him.”
“I’ll go check on a few other patients,” the nurse said. He pulled back a drape and left them alone.
Torrance listened to Kitchell breathe. Seeing the kid lying in this hospital bed brought him pain that was almost too much to bear.
“Hey, LC,” Kitchell said. His voice was thick with sleep or pain meds, but it was solid, the words not slurred.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” Torrance said, but inside he was happy to be able to talk. “How are you?”
“All shot up, I guess.”
“I can’t believe you jumped a guy who had a gun.”
Kitchell tried to shrug, but cringed.
Torrance put his hand on Kitchell’s shoulder as the young man caught his breath. The contact made Torrance aware of how cold his hand was. He started to pull back, but then left his fingertips touching.
“I’m sorry I got you shot,” Torrance said.
It was the first time he had voiced it, and he realized now that this was the reason he wanted to see Kitchell to begin with. To apologize. To tell him he wished it was the old and washed-up Torrance who was “all shot up,” and not the twenty-two-year-old Kitchell. The realization caught in his throat like a dry chicken bone.
“I’ll let you jump the asshole with the gun next time,” Kitchell replied. “That’ll make us even.”
Torrance laughed and dabbed at the liquid that was forming in his eye.
“Fair enough,” he was finally able to say.
He wanted to ask Kitchell why he had jumped Malloy, but he discovered that he already knew the answer to that question. He had always known it, but he needed to come here and be with Kitchell himself to actually believe it.
“I hope they give you a goddamned medal,” Kitchell said.
Torrance gave a sarcastic huff. Kitchell didn’t know about the rushed Presidential Citation or the Purple Star. And he didn’t know about the Distinguished Medal of Honor Torrance had recommended for Kitchell himself, to hell with whether the kid was official service or not.
“You deserve it, LC. Without you, man …” Kitchell gasped for a breath, then just sighed and closed his eyes against the pain and the drugs. “None of us make it, you know?”
Torrance wished he had something he could reply with, but he couldn’t find a word that was big enough, so he just stood there feeling both jerkish and brilliant, and both smaller and bigger than he ever imagined feeling.
“Do you have the data?” Kitchell said in something that wa
s nearly a whisper.
Torrance put his good hand into his pocket, feeling the sharp edge of the crystal as it pressed into his fingers even after he extracted his hand.
“I’ve got it.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“There’s something there. I can feel it, man.”
The screen rustled.
“We need to leave, Lieutenant Commander.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. “All right.”
Kitchell reached out and grabbed his good hand. “Don’t lose that data, LC. I want to work on it again sometime.”
The nurse led him away.
He felt the pressure of Kitchell’s grip on his wrist and the memory of the data crystal’s hard edge on his fingertips. He thought about the last wormhole pod that might be rusting away on Eden, and he thought how ironic it was that it would wind up being the last remaining piece of the spaceship he had spent eighteen standards on.
But mostly he thought about a young man who had gotten himself all shot up because it was the only right thing he had to do.
The funerals were a morbid blur.
Kip Levitt was one of them.
The captain’s son, Andre Romanov, was another.
In one of those ironic twists of fate that life can throw, Captain Romanov had invited his son to join him on the bridge, otherwise Andre probably would have lived through it all. The captain, though, had been in his briefing room when the explosions came, and that entire chamber had broken from Everguard to tumble through space before impacting the lunar surface. Romanov lived, though he lost his forearm and would have to undergo regenerative procedures or wear a prosthetic for the rest of his life.
About the only person Torrance knew who did not receive a funeral with honors was Karl Malloy.
His pod had blown through the launch door on ignition, flattening itself like a hollow-tipped bullet. There hadn’t been enough of Malloy left to either hang or bury.
Before the string of funerals, Torrance told himself he was going to pay close attention, that life was going to teach him something as he went through them. But he was wrong. There was nothing there for him—nothing he could put into hard words, anyway. For him, the only thing that came through was that there had been people here one moment—people who had traveled four and a half light years and back at more than half the speed of light, people who had lived and loved and done their jobs, people who had worked together to change the world. Then in one moment they were gone.
