Augment

by C R MacFarlane

  “What?” squeaked Rayne.

  Gal grumbled, having retaken his chair, the flask coming down from his lips. “We have to do something, she’s an Augment. She can’t just be running around the ship. It should be guarded at least.”

  “I’m sure that’s not necessary.” Hoepe fixed Gal with a stern look. “She helped your first officer, now be quiet.”

  “Rayne didn’t do anything,” he argued.

  Hoepe sighed, and turned away. “I know.”

  “What?” Halud leaned forward over the table. “How?”

  The doctor blinked back at him.

  “Boss,” said Vasquez, “you said yourself the Augment was dangerous. She took a laz-rifle out of my hand in the blink of an eye.”

  “There’s no use in tying her down, but for the time being I want two men with her at all times.”

  “I could use Sarrin’s help in Engineering,” said Kieran. “The Kepheus Drive has been acting up, and that last jump was the last straw. I need to see if it’s fixable.”

  Hoepe raised a single eyebrow. “Very well,” nodded Hoepe. “But I do think an extra set of eyes is a good idea for the time being.” He pulled two auto-syringes from his pocket, passing them out. “I need a detail on the first officer too.”

  “What?” Rayne said.

  “You said yourself she didn’t do anything,” said Gal.

  “There’s nowhere for me to go.”

  “Be grateful. I was ready to push you out an airlock ten minutes ago.”

  Rayne gulped.

  “Boss,” asked one of the men, “what’s going to happen to us now?”

  Hoepe shook his head, “Contyna is destroyed. I didn’t have time to erase the compound’s hard drive fully, which means our hideouts at Perim and Nastalia could be compromised as well. We’ll need to find a new place.”

  Gal took another drink, leaning back in his chair. “The deep Deep is the only place you’ve got to hide. I hope you like the cold, you fools.”

  Halud’s chest grew tight — no where to hide, no one to call. With a pang, he longed for his apartments with his warm bed and his real-oak steady desk. But those were nothing but faraway dreams now; they were adrift in space.

  * * *

  “You okay?” Kieran rasped quietly from across the workbench in the main engineering bay, his bruised larynx still peppering his already unusual speech. Green eyes peered at her over the broken Kepheus Drive. “The one hit ya pretty hard, it looked like.”

  She turned her attention to the machinery, stripping it apart to see its insides.

  “But really, are y’okay?” The second time he’d asked.

  She frowned — how could she respond? How did normal people respond? She gave him a quick nod.

  “D’ya need anything? Like t’eat? Drink?” His hand was unnecessarily close, reaching across the space between them. He pulled it back in response to her glare. “Jus’ tryin’ to be friendly.” He turned away, racked with a small coughing fit.

  The heavy hilt of a carving knife pressed against her leg as she shifted against the table. From her coverall pockets, she pulled out three food blades, a spanner, and a piece of electrical conduit. Weapons.

  Kieran stared, his eyes going wide, the corners crinkling in confusion.

  Somehow between the meeting in the Mess Hall and Engineering, she had gathered the arms. “Habit,” she muttered, something she had done since she was ten years old. In Evangecore, you never knew when you would need a weapon. Of course, they never left anything lying around for the children to find.

  Kieran let out a low whistle. His gaze swept quickly to her guard. Fortunately the man seemed preoccupied with the settings on his laz-rifle.

  She handed Kieran the auto-syringe she had lifted from the same guard.

  He stared at it. Then at her, question in his eyes. Not fear.

  Shrugging her shoulders, she pressed it towards him again. He needed to take it. Kieran wasn’t like the others, but he could keep them safe. That’s why he needed to take it. “500 milligrams lorazepam.”

  Eyebrows rose in shock. Then he snorted, surprise melting into a carefree smile. “Yeah, alright.” He shoved the injector into his coverall pocket, finding places to hide the other items too. “You shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to ya.”

  Her heart rate accelerated momentarily, until a cheeky grin and a wink told her he was plainly joking. Kieran Wood was not like the others at all. “Now what’re we gonna do about this baby?” His hands turned to the dismantled Kepheus. The drive created the space-folding gravitational field they needed for long-distance jumps. Without it, the ship was limited to maneuvering thrusters. Sarrin estimated 115-years-standard to the nearest planet without it.

  “Geez,” he said, rubbing a hand over his frown. “Internal plasma chamber is cracked — that’s bad. Ions have cooled back into their gaseous state.” He tipped the device and maneuvered it around the table like it wasn’t one of the most delicate pieces of technology under the stars. “Just too many jumps, too close together. I shoulda been checking.” He turned to her. “Not that we coulda avoided that last jump, hey. Thank you, for, you know, that. Seems no one else’ll say it.”

  Sarrin couldn’t help the puzzled look that spread across her features.

  “What I don’t understand is we’ve aligned it three times since leaving Etar. It just won’t stay. But the fittings are all new, replaced them after the first misalignment.”

  Odd indeed. She leaned forward, examining the machine with new intrigue.

  “I can repair the chamber, that’s no big deal, but we don’t have a plasma charger. Without the plasma intact, we won’t have the superconductivity needed for making space-folds. No plasma, no jumps. No jumps, we die out here in the deep.” He rolled his eyes, laughing. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another, right?” His eyes glinted merrily as he gestured to his bruised and bandaged neck.

  Could he be joking about his injury? About her attack? Sarrin took a step back, thinking that she may not the least sane person in the room. But her brain kept ticking away, sorting through her inventory of knowledge while she wondered just where Kieran Wood had come from. “Med Bay will have a surgical laser. C-O-2 or free electron?”

  First, Kieran’s eyebrows drew down. Then raised in surprise and the right corner of his lip twitched up. “Brilliant! Just brilliant. Let’s go look.”

  Sarrin jogged after him, turning to slip past the guard as he ambled in front of her in surprise.

  Rushing into the infirmary, Kieran pulled the surgical laser out of its corner. They crouched down to check the specs. “Free electron,” he read breathlessly. “Do you think you can recalibrate it to ignite the plasma?” An excited glint passed through his eyes. His pupil dilated and contracted — the colour a brilliant, intricate green; it was not colour contacts as she’d originally assumed but his natural pigment. Startling, when nearly everyone had some variation of brown.

  “Yes,” answered the part of her brain that still focussed.

  He pulled a tiny toolkit from his belt and started unscrewing the paneling. “What parts do you need?”

  Sarrin shook her head, motioning for him to back away. The schematics drew themselves, an instructional diagram in the front of her brain.

  “Okay. I’ll try to salvage the gases from the broken chamber. Finding that much pure nitrogen and noble elements will be almost impossible on the ship.” Kieran pointed to the comm console on the wall. “Let me know if you need anything.” He smiled reassuringly, but his eyes glanced at the guards, his meaning clear.

  Ignoring the brute, and his new friend who had come to accompany him, she reached for the machine. Hands rapidly disassembled the surgical device and adjusted the controls. But the hands in front of her were foreign. Senseless and limp, they weren’t a part of her, they were a machine.

  She had been good with machines once — no, great, the best. But those were their designs, machines for killing and destruction. The hands were never her own
; they always belonged to someone else.

  The scars were faint, she didn’t like to look at them, but she knew they were there. Down the sides of each finger and onto the wrist. She pushed up the thick wrappings she had tied around the wrists, revealing the ugly, lumpy mess where all the scars met together.

  “Sarrin, the engineer said I could find you here.”

  She gasped, throwing the hands behind her back and tugging down the wraps.

  Halud carried a steaming bowl in his hands as he approached. “I came to check on you. Are you alright?”

  Dumbly, she nodded.

  He pushed the bowl towards her, hands shaking. “I — I brought you something to eat.” He was scared of her. Just like the rest.

  She opened her mouth, but no sound would form. He was her brother. She wouldn’t hurt him, couldn’t. Not if she’d had any choice. She had been sick. He knew that, didn’t he?

  Words got stuck or lost, spinning away into the deep of space. What was so wrong with her that she couldn’t talk to her own brother?

  But an idea came to her. She reached into her pocket — almost certainly she had taken the engineer’s data tablet. She could use its screen to write or draw something for Halud. They had communicated in codes for years, that would be easier.

  Instead, her hands gripped around the handle of something solid and she pulled it out, curious. A knife — where had she found a knife between Engineering and the infirmary? She set it on the floor beside her, and reached again for the tablet.

  “Weapon!” shouted one of the guards. The other had his laz-rifle up in a heartbeat.

  She pushed Halud to the side with a flick of her wrist, leaping at the same time into the guard, pushing him over, taking his laz-rifle, and spinning her leg into the other guard.

  The guard landed hard against the wall. In panic, he reached into his jacket pocket, gripping around for something that wasn’t there — the auto-syringe. Waves of his fear and hatred rolled off of him, making her nearly sick.

  Her hands dismantled the laz-rifle and retrained the bio-sensor. The rifle pointed at the guards. Two shots; she never missed. Her mind painted them as targets from an Evangecore combat simulator.

  A stifled cry from behind stopped her, and she turned her head mechanically to the sound. Halud pressed against the wall with his knees pulled to his chest.

  The laz-rifle clattered to the ground.

  He had every reason to fear her. They all did. Monster.

  The guards leapt. They grabbed her wrists, the shock of the pressure on all the bundled nerve endings making her cry out. She let them push her into the ground, eyes riveted to Halud. Her brother’s hands shook as he stared at the grey carpet beside him, refusing to look at her.

  She opened her mouth but it wouldn’t speak. Inside, she screamed as the guards dragged her away.

  * * *

  It didn’t take Kieran much time to collect the gases and assess the inside of the Kepheus Drive: cracked, full thickness, a piece just dangling there. It had nearly punctured the secondary safety chamber — and if that had happened, there would be no fixing it.

  He kept his hands busy, finding small tasks to fill the time he should have used to send a report home. But really, what would he say? ‘Oh by the way, the terra forming research was a complete flop, but it turns out we picked up a girl who is also an Augment, still alive — she’s pretty messed up and tried to kill everyone on the ship. Don’t worry though, I’m perfectly fine except for a bruised larynx after she nearly strangled me to death. She’s working with me in Engineering. I think it’s going well — she unloaded an armful of weapons, which seemed like a good thing.’

  Jesus, he was trying to gain the confidence of a killing machine — they’d think he had lost all his marbles. He probably had, but he could find them later. He pressed his thumb into the keypad and waited for a response from the other side of the door.

  Hoepe admitted him readily, looking up from a stack of tablets on the desk of the quarters he had claimed as his own after they left Contyna.

  “Can I talk to you?” Kieran rubbed his palms on the legs of his coveralls.

  The doctor gave him an appraising scan which, from behind the wicked nose and angular face, was positively terrifying. “How are your crico-aretenoids?”

  “My what?”

  Hoepe pointed.

  “Oh, my throat. It’s fine. I can talk, so that’s something.”

  The doctor’s eyes narrowed. “Remarkable. I wasn’t anticipating such fast healing.”

  Kieran shrugged. “Always been a quick healer. Mama said it was because I ate my vegetables.”

  “Indeed.”

  At the corner of the room, one of Hoepe’s men shifted his weight, ready to leap into action at the slightest sign. A shiver trailed up Kieran’s spine. Note to parents: ‘There’s a doctor here. Scares me more than the Augment does.’

  “Your business?” Hoepe asked.

  “Right. The Kepheus is cracked. I can weld it, patch it, but I don’t know how long it will hold.”

  “That doesn’t sound promising.”

  “I wondered if there was a way to get a replacement.”

  Hoepe leaned back, feet up on the desk. “We have an Augment on board the ship. Contyna is destroyed. I’m afraid you’ll have to patch it for now.”

  “I know. I can. But …. Look, whatever’s going on, I don’t think we want to be caught with our pants around our ankles.”

  Both of the doctor’s eyebrows shot up. “Pardon?”

  “I mean we need to be able to run. It’ll take me a day to weld the jump drive. It’ll jump, but it will be weak — any jump could tear it apart. When it cracks again, maybe it’ll be fixable, maybe it won’t. I don’t wanna be adrift anymore than the rest of you. If there’s anyway to get a replacement, we’ll be a lot better off.”

  Hoepe fixed him with his stare, considering. Then, “There’s a planet. A24-alpha. ‘Junk’. Aptly named since the Central Army stores all their derelicts there. We may find something if the scavengers haven’t gotten there first.”

  “Oh, that’s simple.”

  “Relatively.” The doctor’s feet dropped down, and he returned to his data. “You’re the acting navigator, you can plot the jumps?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’ll send you the coordinates.”

  Kieran paused, wondering if there was a good way to ask the doctor what he knew about Sarrin, but the guard took a step forward before he could, effectively dismissing him. As he turned to leave, the doors sprung open. Two men shouted, shoving Sarrin in front of them. Halud hovered behind, and Gal stumbled along in the rear.

  “Oh no.” Kieran jumped out of the way as they rushed into the room.

  Hoepe stood abruptly. “What’s going on? Rye? Gunnar?”

  “She tried to attack!” shouted the guard.

  “She had a knife!” said the other.

  How many knives could there be on one ship?

  “She took my laz-rifle!”

  “She threw me across the room!”

  The girl in question stood still, staring at the ground. Her hand dug methodically in and out of her thin upper arm.

  Halud hung back, dancing awkwardly between coming to his sister and keeping a wary distance.

  “Sarrin?” Hoepe asked.

  “Boss, what are we going to do?” asked the first guard.

  The other put his hand on his hip. “I’m all for dangerous missions, but this is crazy. We should just get rid of her.”

  “Exactly!” shouted Gal, waving his flask through the air.

  “Sarrin?” Hoepe said, louder.

  Her whole body flinched, and she lifted her head. Hoepe’s face changed, some message passed between them.

  “Get rid of her!” shouted Gal. “Regulations be damned. Shove her out an airlock. She’s what they want. We don’t need this kind of trouble.”

  Hoepe turned to Gal, his expression darkened and his massive frame dominated the room. “You�
��ve got a faster ticket out of here right now than she does, Captain.”

  Drunk, Gal was not to be deterred. “Kieran, look at me. Between you and me, I don’t trust these people. Not one bit. The Augments destroyed Earth. And these Reapers don’t care about anybody but themselves.”

  Kieran looked away.

  “She’s dangerous.” Gal patted him on the back. “It’s not pleasant, but we have to get her out of here, any means necessary.”

  He was a soldier and Gal was his captain, he told himself. He had to act the same as any other person would in the situation. That was the deal. He was there to observe, see how the people thought and felt, assess the non-tangibles you couldn’t read from the facts of events. Not to change the course of them. His dissertation on the Augments included a study of the massive hate propaganda campaign put out by the Central Army. Maybe that’s what he was here to see.

  But he couldn’t take his eyes away from Sarrin standing there, subdued to her fate. He hesitated. He had to know.

  “Don’t touch her!” He stepped forward, pulled the guard away. “She doesn’t like it. What happened before she took your rifle? You must have scared her.” He turned to Hoepe. “She was perfectly fine before, made a joke an’ everything.”

  “A joke?”

  Kieran shrugged. “Sorta.” Was it a joke? He had laughed. “I thought it was funny, anyhow.”

  “What did happen?” Hoepe asked his men.

  The first stepped up. “Nothing. She was fixing the engine, and all of a sudden she had a knife. And then my gun.”

  Kieran threw his hands up. “You put your gun on her? Are you nuts? Of course she was going to defend herself.”

  “She had a knife.”

  Kieran huffed. “She had it in her pocket. I carry a knife in my pocket.” It was true, he had three clanging around in there right now, asking him why he was stepping way over the line for this girl right now. “For repairs.”

  The guards toed the ground, their mouths silent.

  “She didn’t hurt anyone. And she’s standing here quietly.” He turned to Hoepe. “I need her help.”

  “Kieran!” Gal shouted.

  Kieran pressed his lips together, muscles tense. He’d have to find a way to rewrite this in his report. “The Kepheus is fried. I need her help to patch it, or we’re dead in space. We’ll fix it. And then I’ll plot the jumps to Junk so we can find a replacement.”