Moon Struck

by Heather Guerre

  The ship looped, sending corpses and equipment sliding back the other way. The contents of her medical kit sprayed into the air as the warbird cut hard to the side, too fast for the artificial gravity to compensate. Hadiza lifted briefly from the deck, then slammed back down on her hands and knees.

  “Doc!” somebody called behind her, frantic.

  She was just an enlisted corpsman, but all her marines called her Doc.

  “Doc, come quick!”

  Hadiza turned and scrambled across the tilting, shaking deck to Private Sanderson. He held Corporal Lee’s head in his lap. Blood bubbled from Lee’s mouth, luridly red against the ashen paleness of his parted lips.

  “Lay him down,” Hadiza ordered. She tilted his head back and swept her finger into his mouth, checking for obstructions. Nothing. The injury was deeper inside. He dragged in a wet, gurgling breath, half choking. He was going to drown in his own blood.

  She twisted around, trying to see where the contents of her medical kit had scattered to. “I need a scalpel and a trach tube,” she said to Sanderson. “Search the deck.”

  Sanderson leapt to his feet as Hadiza bent and pressed her lips to Lee’s, breathing for him.

  “Doc!” Somebody else called.

  She sat up. Lee’s blood was smeared on her lips. She twisted to see Sokolov holding down Patel’s convulsing body. She’d only just treated the gunner for what had seemed a routine removal of shrapnel from the shoulder. She must have missed something.

  She leapt to her feet. Beneath her, Lee coughed, spraying his chest with blood—too much blood. She didn’t know where to go, where to turn.

  A sudden blow slammed the warbird, sending everyone flying. Hadiza’s harness snapped tight around her chest, catching her just before she crashed face-first into the bulkhead. Screams filled the control deck. The ship’s lights blinked on and off.

  “Prepare for atmospheric entry!” the pilot shouted over the intercom. “Strap down what you can—it’s going to be ugly!”

  Hadiza scrambled up onto her hands and knees. She crawled to Lee, grabbed the edge of his armored vest. She grunted as she strained to drag him towards the edge of the deck where she could strap him to the cargo net.

  “Doc, what about Patel?” Sokolov called.

  She turned towards him. Patel had stopped seizing, and now lay disturbingly still.

  “Doc, my leg!”

  She twisted to see Silva slumped against the forward bulkhead. Her calf was twisted at a right angle to her thigh.

  “Grab onto something!” she ordered. Silva’s leg would have to wait. First she had to get to Patel. She scrambled across the deck.

  “Doc!” Another voice. A new emergency.

  “Doc!”

  They kept coming, from all sides—a constant barrage. She was helpless to answer them all, helpless to fight the rising tide of death and pain and violence. It just kept coming and coming and—

  “Hadiza!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Leo Cluster, NGC 3842

  Scaevos Multi-body System, Tranar Moon

  IG Standard Calendar 236.46.20

  Hadiza came back to herself with a snap. “What!”

  She was still strapped into her seat. The ship was unmoving, its nose buried under a wave of black mud. The hull ticked and creaked as the tiles—superheated from atmospheric entry—cooled down. The interior of the ship had caved in, as if the whole shuttle had been squeezed by a giant fist. A ceiling panel hung down beside Hadiza’s head, exposing frayed biocircuitry in a melting gel matrix.

  The windshield was completely blown out, littering the deck with thick cubes of shattered space glass. One razor-edged cube sat in her lap. She lifted her thigh, gently rolling it off. It hit the deck with a crystalline chime. Through the open windshield, the sound of soft wind shushed through the close-growing branches of a dense jungle. A profusion of teal-colored, star-shaped leaves thrust over the nose of the shuttle. Twisting, purple vines dangled down over the windshield. Warm, amber light filtered through the foliage, casting long shadows through the interior of the shuttle.

  “What happened?” Hadiza rasped. “Where are we?”

  “Are you injured?” Errol asked.

  She tested her limbs, ran her hands over the vulnerable points of her body. “I don’t think so.” Her voice came out as a croak.

  She looked over, and could see only his legs. A ceiling panel hung down between them, blocking his upper body from view. His restraints were still fastened. Though she could only see his lower half, her medical acuity detected the the rigid brace of his legs. One of his massive hands was curled into a fist, the skin stretched pale silver over his knuckles.

  “Are you okay?” Hadiza asked.

  “I need your help.”

  Even beneath the deep growl of his voice, there was a subdued tension in his words that she understood like another language. She reached for the fastenings of her harness and released herself. As she slid from the chair, she glanced at the rear of the ship. It’d been utterly destroyed in the jump—an impassible collision of dropped ceiling panels, tipped computronic columns, busted hatches, and crumpled bulkheads.

  She turned away from the ruins, shoving aside the panic, and crept beneath the hanging panel. Kneeling beside Errol’s seat, she looked up. Only years of battlefield experience kept her from gasping aloud. A massive tree branch jutted through the broken windshield, impaling Errol through the chest. He was pinned to his seat, face taut with pain, heaving jaggedly for breath.

  A sharp pulse of fear ran down Hadiza’s spine. Treating a chest wound in the field was difficult, even with a medical kit. They were always fatal if the victim wasn’t immediately transported to an equipped surgery center. And here she was without so much as an adhesive bandage in her pocket.

  Expression perfectly serene, she stood up. Even when he was seated, Errol was still slightly taller than her.

  His gaze, glassy and dilated, flicked to her face, and then away. “I need you to cut away the branch so that I can get out of my restraints.”

  “I’m going to take a look at it first,” Hadiza said calmly. She unfastened his restraints, gently pushing the straps aside so that she could examine the injury.

  The branch was as thick as her wrist. It’d punched through his upper chest, below his right clavicle. It wasn’t through-and-through, which was at least something to be grateful for. His right arm hung limply beside his body. His left arm was trapped between his seat and the crumpled-in bulkhead. It was the least of his worries. Hadiza catalogued the most urgent injuries—broken ribs, intercostal trauma, and a punctured lung. She was looking at a guaranteed tension pneumothorax, a potential flail segment, and a possible hemothorax.

  “Just break the branch off,” Errol gritted out. His amber-gold eyes stared past her, his pupils dilated to narrow elliptical slits. His breaths came fast and shallow. Sweat beaded his brow, glistening against his silvery-gray skin.

  “I’m not going to touch it until I know exactly how extensive the damage is. Don’t move!” she barked as he reached to grasp the branch. His arm fell weakly to the side. It wasn’t because he’d chosen to listen to her—it was clearly because he didn’t have the strength to continue. Nerve damage? A severed muscle?

  “Can you feel your toes and fingers?”

  “Yes. Now break it off.”

  “Can you take a deep breath for me?”

  “No,” he snarled, baring long, sharp canines. “Just break off the shraffthik verrith raasnif!” His descent into his native language—native cursing, in all likelihood—trailed off into a breathless wheeze. His lips paled to moon-bright silver. Pain made his hard, angular face look gaunt and hollow.

  “Be patient,” Hadiza said calmly. “I’m going to help you.”

  She examined Errol’s injury, at a loss. There was no way they were going to make it to a medical facility any time soon. If she removed the branch, she had to deal with a sucking chest wound. Outside of a hospital setting, it was almost cer
tainly a death sentence. If she left it in, the consequences were the same—a punctured lung, fluid build-up, infection, necrotization, all right next to his heart.

  That old helplessness welled up inside of her. She’d left the military. She’d taken her discharge and never looked back. She wasn’t supposed to deal with this anymore. She wasn’t supposed to have to stand by and watch her friends die—lacking the tools to save them, but ripe with the knowledge of exactly how painful and unnecessary their deaths were.

  He’d saved her. He’d saved her life, over and over. And she was failing him.

  “Hadiza…” Errol said weakly.

  Hadiza looked up from his injury, found his gaze boring into hers. “Let me work,” she told him with the same brisk efficiency she’d used on dying infantry kids. Hear how no-nonsense my voice is, soldier? That means everything’s fine. All this blood? Pah. We’ll just mop it up. But first…

  First she had to make a decision. Both paths guaranteed death. If he survived either, it’d be a miracle. So she just had to choose one.

  His eyelids were drifting shut, his head lolling back against the seat. “We heal quickly,” he said breathlessly, still holding her gaze. “Just get me free.”

  “Will you heal within a few hours?” She’d seen sucking chest wounds kill in less time than that.

  “No. A day, maybe.”

  Not enough time. But he’d asked her to do something—and it made the decision for her. The branch was coming out.

  But first, she needed to gather what tools she could. “I’m not leaving you,” she said. “I’m going into the back of the shuttle to scavenge some supplies.”

  Errol’s eyes closed. He didn’t answer her.

  Adrenaline hummed through Hadiza’s veins, making her tremble as she dropped back down to hands and knees and slipped carefully into the rear of the shuttle. She’d noticed a series of cabinets beneath the sleeping berth when they’d first boarded. If there was a medical kit onboard, odds were good it’d be there.

  Even with her diminutive size, weaving through the collapsed interior was a struggle. She had to lay on her stomach to squirm beneath a bank of fallen computronic columns. Standing, she held her breath as she slid between a leaning metal cabinet and heavy panel hanging down from the overhead. Moving slowly, listening for the telltale sound of shifting metal, Hadiza worked her way to the stern.

  But when she reached the berth, she found the cabinets trapped shut by the nearby lav door—which was pinned open by the crushed-down ceiling.

  She didn’t have the strength to pull anything free, and even if she did, doing so could bring the entire shuttle down on her head. She crouched in front of the cabinets for a second, trying to think a way around the blockage. She couldn’t come up with anything.

  She clenched her fists, then clenched her whole body against the enraged scream that wanted to boil out of her throat. Thwarted. At every possible fucking avenue, she couldn’t catch a single fucking break. She’d escaped her captors, only to be marooned on an unknown moon where she was condemned to watch her savior slowly die.

  No.

  No. No.

  “NO!”

  “Hadiza?” Errol called weakly from the front. His voice was a faint growl—she wasn’t sure she’d even heard him.

  “I’m fine,” she said raggedly. She turned around and began the slow, arduous process of worming her way back towards the front of the shuttle. She stopped midship, at the narrow space where she had to squeeze like a cat between two tipped utility cabinets. They likely housed circuitry junctions and computronic components, but she couldn’t leave any stone unturned. With the utmost care, she eased one of the doors open. Tipped against the portside bulkhead, it could only open by a few inches, but it was enough to slip her arm inside and grope around blindly.

  Instead of circuitry and computronics, she felt shelves. Her hand closed on the rough fabric of what felt like a basic shipboard toolkit. Hope flared bright and hot inside her chest. Toolkits were last resorts—filled with low-tech hand tools in cases where tech was destroyed or useless. There’d be, at the very least, a knife and some adhesive in the kit. There’d be biocircuitry inhibitor, which wasn’t as good as hydrogen peroxide or isopropyl alcohol, but in a pinch, it was a suitable antiseptic. A hollow needle was too much to ask for, but—

  —but she couldn’t get the bag out. It was wider than the cabinet door could open. Biting back another frustrated outburst, she fisted her fingers in the rough weave of the tool bag, and gently, methodically, slowly, manipulated the bag and its contents until she had eased the entire thing through the narrow opening. By the time she pulled the bag free, she was sweaty and aggravated, but her hands were steady and her pulse was even.

  Not helpless. Not this time.

  She tucked the bag against her body, and dropped to the deck, easing beneath the tipped computronic columns and squirming between the pilot’s chairs to land on her knees at Errol’s feet. His right arm hung limply alongside the chair. His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in shallow bursts. Even though he was still breathing, he was not doing it well.

  Hadiza pushed away the fear, and let herself fall into the cold, detached part of her mind. She set the tool bag on the deck, and opened it up. She pulled out objects that, no matter how advanced a species was, hadn’t changed much from one end of the universe to the other. Some things just couldn’t be improved upon. They looked slightly different from the human equivalents Hadiza was used to—different grips, different materials—but they were still recognizable. She set aside a scissors, a small hacksaw, a large pliers, a roll of computronic adhesive, a utility knife, and a bottle of biocircuitry inhibitor.

  Errol watched her. He panted shallowly, pupils dilated to narrow slits.

  She continued her methodical search of the bag. If only there were something she could use in the place of a hollow needle. His lung was definitely punctured, and she’d need to relieve the building air pocket if he was going to have any hope of surviving. If worse came to worst, she’d just have to cut into him with the utility knife and hope for the best, but if she could find a needle…

  She got to the bottom of the bag and found nothing. Not even a pipette that she could pull the bulb off of.

  It’d been too much to hope for. She knew that. She gazed around the ruined ship, searching for anything that could be fashioned into a—there. Beneath the instrument panel, rigid tubing protected the biocircuits. She’d have to sever the circuits to take the tube, but the ship was a lost cause anyway.

  She tested the hacksaw against the narrowest tube. The sharp metal teeth sank in with little effort. Satisfied, she sawed through one end, then another, giving herself six inches of hollow tubing. She plucked at the frayed circuits, pulling them out, and then blew on the tube to clear it of remaining debris. It was a wider gauge than she’d like, but it was the only option available.

  She gathered the tools she’d assembled and rose to her feet, setting them on the instrument panel in front of Errol. He watched her through heavily lidded eyes, his gaze glassy and distant.

  Hadiza squeezed a gob of the biocircuitry stabilizing gel into her palm and rubbed it into both hands. She ripped off four lengths of computronic adhesive and tagged them to the edge of the instrument panel, ready and waiting. She picked up the pliers and sanitized them as best she could with more of the biocircuitry gel. She sanitized the knife and the tube as well. When her hands and tools were all dry to the touch, she picked up the scissors and turned to Errol.

  “I have to cut your shirt away,” she said. She plucked the hem away from his body, and cut through the soft, thin material in one clean swipe, all the way up to the point where the impaling branch had punched it into his flesh. She cut around the injury, leaving a bloom of bloody fabric. The remains of the shirt fell away to either side of his broad chest. His chest hair was matted with clotted blood, which looked all the more luridly red against the pale gray of his skin.

  Setting the scissors down,
she picked up the hacksaw.

  “This is going to be uncomfortable. But I need you to hold as still as you possibly can.”

  He didn’t respond, only watched her. Taking it for assent, she picked up the handsaw, grasped the branch, and began sawing through it. She tried to jostle as little as possible, but speed was more important than gentleness. Errol groaned and arched against his restraints. If it weren’t for the arm trapped by the bulkhead, he’d have bucked himself right off of the seat, and injured himself far worse.

  “Hold still,” Hadiza commanded. This wasn’t the time for compassion and kindness. That would kill him. She retreated into the cold, clear part of her mind, and did what had to be done.

  Errol subdued, but continued to grit out rasping, breathless groans.

  The branch was a dense hardwood, and sawing through it was slow going. By the time she was halfway through, the saw had noticeably dulled. Her arm burned from the continuous, repetitive effort of forcing it through the wood. Her neck hurt. Her shoulder knotted. Sweat beaded on her face and chest.

  She kept going.

  At long last, the dulled teeth slipped through the bottom of the branch. Hadiza shoved hard against the detached limb, forcing it out of the shuttle. It dragged leaves and bracken with it—disturbing a flurry of tiny, winged creatures into the air.

  The remaining stump protruded from Errol’s chest by a good six inches. Grasping onto it, Hadiza gave a gentle, testing pull. It was wedged tightly between ribs and intercostal muscles.

  “Just rip it out,” Errol wheezed.

  That was her plan. She’d hesitated, only because she debated whether to warn him about the pain or not. If he was lucky, if his species was capable of it, he’d pass out.

  “You need to hold as still as possible,” Hadiza said. She took a firm grasp of the stump with one hand, and braced the flat of her other hand against his shoulder. “If you move, you will make the damage much worse.”

  Gripping hard, she gave the stump a swift, sharp yank. It jerked free, dragging a mess of blood and tissue with it. Errol let out a harsh, barking cry of pain. Air aspirated from the wound, spattering blood across Hadiza’s face. She wiped the back of her hand over her eyes, dropped the chunk of wood to the deck, and picked up the pliers to go back in for the remainders.