by David Adams
“You can open them now,” said Saeed, checking the medical console. “Your heart rate is elevated.”
“That’s probably because I feel like I’m in a giant toilet about to flush. I didn’t anticipate everything suddenly being dark.”
“I understand. My apologies.” Saeed’s console chirped. “Okay, the various sensors are disconnecting. You might feel a slight stinging sensation.”
“Got it,” she said. Plugs fell away from her body, leaving discoloured, pale skin beneath. She had expected pain but instead felt a vague tickling sensation all over and barely resisted the urge to squirm around. “I think the Toralii only say that because they have fur and the current pulls at it.”
“Noted,” said Saeed.
“What’s next?”
Another movement in the fluid answered the question. The green began to drain away from the top, air from the outside slowly creeping down toward her hair. It passed over her face and upper body, and she felt the crushing weight of gravity again.
“Turn down the grip, please,” she said between clenched teeth as the fluid level dropped lower and lower, past her waist. She couldn’t lift her arm—it drooped by her side, her one remaining hand floating in the water.
“It’s already down,” said Saeed, but he adjusted it further. Liao felt a familiar sick feeling rise in her stomach as gravity loosened its grip and her limbs became lighter.
The fluid passed by her knees, and then she was standing surrounded by air for the first time in so long. Her whole body was pruned up except where the plugs had touched her skin, and even in the significantly reduced gravity, she was weak and barely able to stand.
The front of the tank lifted out and away, a cocoon opening to the medical bay, the grub within still tethered to the system and unable to leave just yet.
With a faint snap-hiss, the mask fell away from her face, and the breathing tube began worming its way out. She nearly gagged—it twitched and writhed inside her throat, strangely violating and sickening, a slick, metallic snake fighting to escape.
It slid free with a sickening wet splut, slapping against the ground like an angry, writhing snake. It died as Saeed cut the power.
“Well,” he said, handing her a towel. “How does it feel to be out?”
“Cold and awful.” She ran her hand through the remainder of her hair, surprised at how long it had gotten. She had shaved off all her hair before being injured—now she had a half pixie cut, wet and slicked down against her head. The other half of her scalp was scar tissue.
Not ideal but it would do. A rub of the towel soaked most of the fluid from her hair.
An interesting fashion statement.
She tried to take a wobbly step forward, her legs rubbery and put off by the low gravity. Instinct caused her to reach out with her missing arm, and she nearly tumbled over.
“Careful,” said Saeed. “Slowly. Easy.”
“How about that prosthetic?”
“Soon,” said Saeed. “We can get you fitted later today—or tomorrow if you want a bit more time to rest.”
“I’ve been doing enough resting.” She took another step and another, making her way out of the tank completely. “Let’s go do this thing.”
“You’ll need surgery to attach the limb, so it won’t be something we can do right away. That said, we can at least take a measurement.”
Liao nodded her approval. Saeed guided her to a chair. It had been built for Toralii—too large, and with a significant gap in the back for a tail, which seemed, to her, almost precariously easy to fall through—but with a bit of careful positioning, she sat.
“Your recovery will take some time,” he said. “In a few hours, the urge to defecate will return, and you’ll be in for a big one. Other biological processes will return as well. Don’t be alarmed.”
Liao eyed him suspiciously. “Without putting too fine a point on it, I didn’t have one of those things plugged into my butt. What exactly have I been doing in regard to that for the last few months?”
“It’s complicated,” said Saeed. “A significant portion of faeces is e. coli—one of the treatments we gave you killed most of it. Another portion is cells from the intestinal wall, and the liquid promotes cellular regeneration and prevents a great deal of cell decay. We fed you through IV, so there’s no food matter, as such. None of these treatments produce no waste, of course, and if you had been in there much longer, we might well have needed a rectal catheter, but so far so good.”
“I will be sure to give you all the details,” she said. “What about urine?”
“Expelled into the liquid and filtered away.”
She made a disgusted face. “So I’ve been swimming in my own pee for months, and now I am completely, literally, full of shit.”
He smiled a comforting smile. “Isn’t science great?”
They ran a battery of tests. Saeed gave her handfuls of pills to swallow, to counteract the various treatments she had been under when they had put her in the tank. Saeed explained that, as she was the first Human patient to use the system, they had been overly cautious, and future patients would not need anywhere near as many drugs and treatments.
Small comfort. She took the pills. Saeed performed a few rudimentary measurements of her stump and fed them into the computer. A digital representation of the arm was produced—she could see a vague outline on Saeed’s tablet—but he kept it to himself, and Liao did not care enough to pester him for a look.
“It will take a day to fabricate,” he said. “So for now, let’s put you in a proper bed.”
Her stomach rumbled. “Food?” she asked.
“Probably want to tend to the other thing first,” Saeed warned, indicating the bathroom.
Liao felt as if she was giving birth all over again. Runny liquid, absolutely reeking worse than any other smell she had ever experienced, almost made her gag, the wretched stench invading her nostrils and seeming to permeate every centimetre of the med-bay’s bathroom.
When it was done—and it was a long, drawn-out process that Liao was half certain would never actually end—she cleaned up the place as best she could and stumbled back out, her head spinning.
“Well, that was horrible.”
Saeed seemed to take it with good humour. “I’m sure it’s much more horrible for the nurses who’ll have to scrub the thing later tonight.”
“I think I owe them a bottle of scotch,” she said, sitting in the oversized Toralii chair once more. The gravity seemed to have been increased. Saeed was clearly trying to get her more used to walking in normal conditions once more. “I did the best I could to clean it, but wow. It went everywhere.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Saeed, “but not to medical facility standards. Don’t worry, the constructs will do most of the work.”
Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like the strange Toralii-built robots even cleaning her toilets. “There are constructs here? On the Rubens?”
“There have been since Williams took the ship. They destroyed one during the process, but the others have served us quite well.” Saeed folded his hands in front of him. “I know you won’t like it, given what happened with Ben, but the constructs are a critical part of maintaining the ship’s integrity. It’s what’s allowed them to operate so long independent of any kind of maintenance by Humans who would have no idea how to fix any problems even if they had the tools, resources, and time to do so.”
She chewed on the inside of a cheek. “But do we really need them?”
“Properly controlled, as these ones seem to be, the constructs are a powerful ally and resource. They let the Toralii ships operate with significantly fewer crew than ours do, per tonne, because every kilogram of life support that’s not needed—food, water, oxygen production systems—means more room for weapons, armour, defensive systems, radar… everything. The Rubens packs a hell of a punch for a ship her size, even if we discount the fact her weapons are more advanced than ours.”
“Didn’t this use to be a fr
eighter?”
“Yes,” said Saeed. “And systems are less advanced than the military versions, but for the Toralii, there isn’t much difference. They’ve had to live with Kel-Voran raids for a long time. The previous crew of this ship were no strangers to combat. It’s more correct to say it’s part of the Toralii equivalent of the Merchant Marine.”
She leaned back in her chair, strangely saddened by that. Liao had been relieved of her command during the time the Rubens was captured. In truth, she knew little about it, except that before the settlement of Eden, the ship had often been tasked with privateering operations against the Toralii and that they had participated in the battle in which she was wounded. The idea that, eventually, the Rubens could be returned to civilian duty—hauling cargo and serving as a civilian vessel—suited her much better than the idea of it being permanently repurposed into a warship.
Desperate times, though. With the loss of the Sydney and the destruction of Earth, humanity needed everything it could get.
“Maybe one day,” she said, “we’ll have freighters of our own.”
“Hopefully not ones borrowed from the Toralii.”
She nodded her agreement. “Indigenous designs. When our population has recovered enough and our industry improves, we can start designing and building our own merchant ships.”
“Who would we trade with?”
She thought about that for a time. “The Telvan, probably. Maybe the Kel-Voran.”
“Trade with the Kel-Voran?” Saeed grimaced. “What could they possibly offer us? I think the Telvan would be a better choice.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Maybe I can talk to Mrs. Rowe about that. She always has pie-in-the-sky ideas for long-term goals. Maybe she has an idea for building our own ships, too.”
Saeed’s face clouded. “Hasn’t anyone told you about Summer?”
“No,” said Liao, raising an eyebrow curiously. “Is there something I should know?”
Saeed said nothing and folded his hands in front of himself.
Summer Rowe. Liao didn’t recognise her at first, save for her long, wild clump of unkempt red hair, which spilled over her pillow like blood. For a moment, Rowe didn’t seem to recognise her either, and then her freckled face lit up.
“He-e-ey, Captain.”
Her voice was slurred and distant, as though she were heavily medicated, but Liao could see nothing indicating she was being cared for in that respect—no IV drips, no bottles of pills or other medications—just a standard bed in a small room near the medical bay.
“Hello, Summer.” Liao smiled cautiously and pulled up a chair. “Doctor Saeed says you’re not well.”
Rowe stared at her blankly. “Mmm?” Then, realisation hit. “Oh. Yeah. The, um…”
Rowe didn’t finish that thought. She slumped back, her eyes rolled back in her head.
Liao touched her shoulder. “Mrs. Rowe? Summer?”
Suddenly she sprang back to life as though nothing had happened. “Mmm? Sorry, I just fell asleep there for a bit. Saeed says my brain was…” She struggled to find the right word. “Not having enough oxygen for a long time, so it got hurt.”
It broke Liao’s heart to see her like that. Rowe’s mind was everything she had—intellectual pursuits were all she treasured. From engineering, science, and chemistry, her every word, thought and deed came from her desire to know and understand. To have that taken away from her must have been tragic.
She seemed happy, though, in a strange way.
“What do you remember?” asked Liao. “About the attack?”
Rowe shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Almost nothing. Just fragments. I was ejecting the bad reactor. I think I made it eject. Asthma got me. Couldn’t breathe. Tried to work through it, bu—”
She slumped again, limp as a doll.
Seconds passed, uncomfortable seconds. Liao had been told to simply wait when those things happened. Just waiting, though, fought against her instincts. She felt as though she had to do something, anything.
“Mmm?” Rowe woke up again. “What was I saying?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Liao. “Has… someone told you what’s happening?”
“Narcolepsy with catalepsy.” Those words she seemed to have no trouble pronouncing. They came out clear and, in a way, almost like her old self. “At least, that’s what Saeed says. There’s damage to lots of different parts of my brain due to oxygen loss. These kind of weird things are normal. Speech is coming back, slowly. Lots of other things won’t come back, and I have to relearn them. How to tie shoes. How to open packages and stuff. It’s hard, but honestly, I feel good.”
“How do you mean?”
“Things are slower now,” said Rowe, a quiet, happy tinge to her voice. “I don’t feel so… busy in the head. There’s no expectations of me. I don’t need to do anything I don’t want to, and if I can manage to do something good in a single day, do something right, then I’ve already won. Before, it didn’t matter what I did—good work, solve problems—I always felt unhappy. Now I feel happy.”
Liao didn’t want to upset her. Rowe said she felt better. Who was she to complain? “I don’t necessarily agree with the implication that a simpler life free of expectations is an improvement,” Liao said, “but it’s good that you’re happy.”
“Thanks, Cap.”
Liao patted Rowe’s leg on the bed. “Well, it’s good to see you again, at any rate. Last I heard, you were missing, along with Commander Iraj.”
“Mmm, Kamal pulled me out of the reactor room, blue as a blueberry. He dragged my arse out of there, gave me a nice little slit in my throat, got some air in there. Saved my life.” She snorted with playful laughter. “Probably just wants to fuck me.”
“I have some bad news for you. He likes boys.”
“Oh, wow.” She laughed. “So do I. We have so much in common.”
There was some of the old Summer in there. Liao smirked and shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
“Not as bad as you. I mean, you were like, totally out of it right after what happened on Earth. With everything blown up and all. You wouldn’t talk to anyone, you barely ate, you shaved off all your hair… I was worried, for a while there, that you were going to run away and commit Sudoku.”
“Commit… Sudoku?” Liao scrunched up her face. “You mean seppuku.”
“Yeah. You know. Kill yourself.”
“Seppuku is Japanese.”
“Oh.”
Rowe was right about one thing: Liao had put a pistol to her temple and missed. It said a lot about her marksmanship but also about her desire to live.
“Look, never mind,” said Liao. “I should go. I’ve been meaning to catch up with Kamal. He hasn’t had a chance to visit me since I was injured.”
“That’s okay,” said Rowe. “He’s very busy now, being the handsome and sexy bronze-skinned captain of a ship and everything.”
“It’s my ship,” said Liao, gently but in a way that allowed no compromises. “Iraj is my trusted XO, and when I’m not available, he can run the Beijing as he wishes, but it’s my ship. I’ll be taking it back in due time, thank you very much, especially after I’ll have my arm more or less fixed.”
“Right,” said Rowe. She smiled a wide, somewhat empty smile. “Say hi to him from me.”
“I will,” Liao said, slipping out of her chair and making her way to the door.
She gave Rowe one last look—concern mixed with sympathy—and then left.
Waiting for her in the med-bay was Saeed, with one of the colony’s constructs and a nonspecific but growing feeling of apprehension and nervousness.
“I’ve loaded the construct with the raw materials required to build the prosthetic, according to the instructions. The schematic is just uploading now.” Saeed settled back in his chair. “I thought you might like to watch.”
She glared at the metal cockroach as it looked up at her, its face a steel mask.
“Directive received,” it intoned in a dull,
emotionless drone. It moved to one side of the room, a faint whine coming from within.
That caused some raised eyebrows. “We taught them English?”
“And Mandarin,” said Saeed. “And Farsi. And about a hundred other languages. Basically, whatever we had in the ship’s computer. They’re quick studies although they tend to miss a lot of the nuances of language. Still, it works well enough to receive commands in almost any language and give feedback accordingly.”
“Fascinating.”
The insectoid robot emitted a loud ping. Saeed gestured to it. “Proceed with the build.”
So it did. The construct extruded, much as a spider would, a tiny thread of metal that—save for the faint heat glow emanating from the filament—bore a striking resemblance to a strand of web. It began spinning it as a weaving arachnid would, manipulating the strand with its many legs, positioning it in place with the skill and precision only a computer could muster. It worked with blinding speed, its legs whirring and clicking as, as though from nowhere, a thin metal bar appeared. The metal was smoothed and moulded, shaped, and left to cool to a dull grey as it grew. Its length could only mean it was to be her new radius, or perhaps the ulna. When that was complete, the construct set it down on the floor and began working on another piece—spun from the same molten metal, another bar, a twin to the first.
Fingers, joints, knuckles. The humerus was cut off just where her real limb began; it flared into a thin cup that seemed too small to her, a reminder of just how atrophied her limb had become, how thin it was since the muscle had been removed. The prosthetic ended in thin strands of circuitry, tiny tendrils that would be implanted. Around that was a metal shoulder, designed to fit over her existing one and augment it, along with thin metal sheets to anchor it.
The tips of the fingers were sharp claws housed in a metal sheath.
Slowly, piece by piece, a rough approximation of a Toralii skeleton was laid out, simplified and made of metal, reduced down to Human size. Every component was forged with the patience of an immortal being—errorless and tireless, repetitive, simple actions creating complex devices. Then the construct began to spin a form of skin, layer upon layer of paper-thin sheets of metal, each one covered with circuitry, insulation, and then sprayed with a protective filament that hardened almost instantly.
