Dream Called Time: A Stardoc Novel

by S. L. Viehl

  “On three.” I handed him the artery clamp. “One . . . two . . . three.” I pulled my fingertips out of the artery, and he immediately clamped shut the perforation. After I applied suction to clear leaking blood, I inspected the wound. “The tissue is burned, damn it.” That meant the damaged section of the artery would have to be replaced by a graft, something his poor condition didn’t allow us time to do.

  “If you will permit me to try to heal him?” he asked, and at my nod placed his paw directly over the gaping chest cavity.

  I watched, fascinated, as the pads of the oKiaf’s paw began to glow, infusing the area with a soft white light. Gradually the wound in the artery began to pull together, sealing its own edges. Instead of forming scar tissue, Shon’s power erased the wound, restoring the vessel to its original condition.

  He took away his hand, his breathing heavy now, and swayed a little as he stepped back.

  “Hey, don’t quit just yet,” I said as I reinflated the collapsed lung. “You’re the best natural lascalpel I’ve ever met.”

  “Something is wrong.” He swallowed. “I almost could not finish. I do not think I can do any more for him.”

  “No problem.” I pulled down the laser rig. “I can manage the rest the old- fashioned way. Why don’t you take a walk, get some air.”

  “I will stay and assist.” He sounded shaken, but he seemed steadier as he inserted a chest tube and repositioned the instrument tray between us.

  “If you feel like passing out, please don’t do it on the patient,” I warned before I went back to work inside the pilot’s chest.

  Several hours passed before I had repaired enough of the internal damage to risk taking the pilot off life support. If we couldn’t restart his heart, it would have all been for nothing, but our luck held. After direct electrostim the organ contracted and began pumping vigorously.

  “We do nice work together, Shon,” I said as I checked for bleeders and then began to close. “It’s just a shame you couldn’t do the rest of his chest. Does that happen to you very often?”

  “Never,” he told me. “Even when I drew on every ounce of my power to heal Jadaira on K-2, I did not feel this weak afterward. Something is wrong.”

  “Something in here?” I glanced around the suite.

  “No. This place is wrong—where the ship is now. I feel . . .” He hesitated, as if he didn’t like admitting it. “Diminished. As if my ability to heal is somehow being drained away.”

  “You were just pushed through a rift in space,” I advised him. “I think you’re entitled to be a little off your game.”

  He eyed me. “But it does not seem to have affected you.”

  “I’m not a touch-healer.” But even as I said that, I knew what he meant. I had been the first to regain consciousness, and I wasn’t suffering any ill effects from the painful passage. Truth be told, I felt better than I had since waking back up in my body.

  Then it occurred to me why he was giving me such an odd look.

  “Shon, I had nothing to do with this. I was at the briefing with you when the specimen was stolen, and also when the ship was pirated. Nothing, not even that protocrystal, is worth endangering the lives of the crew. These people aren’t just my friends and colleagues. They’re the only family I have left.”

  Most of the suspicion faded from his expression. “I should not have assumed you were responsible. It is only strange that the ship would be taken so soon after you prevented the Jorenians and the Hsktskt from harming the crew of the derelict. Then to find that you alone were unaffected by the passage. You have had such violent reactions to transitions in the past that I expected . . . but perhaps the nature of the rift somehow protected you.”

  I considered telling him what I had experienced during the passage through the rift, and then discarded the idea. “I understand. Why don’t you see if we can get the staff back here and start assessing the injured? I’m going to move our patient into recovery and clear some working room. And Shon.” He turned back toward me. “I don’t know if we really are brother and sister, or just two random victims of an unkind universe. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. You’re part of my family now.”

  He inclined his head and left the suite.

  Shon returned to Medical with most of the staff, a dozen guards, and all of the Hsktskt on gurneys. Most of the lizards were semiconscious but still very sluggish from cold exposure. PyrsVar volunteered to tend to them in order to free up the staff, and I accepted immediately. We had five times as many injured crew members to assess and treat, and more would probably be arriving as search teams cleared corridors and checked other areas of the ship.

  I asked Shon to supervise the treatment of the copilot with the burned, broken arm. Even if he couldn’t use his ability, he was an extremely capable physician and was particularly gifted in dealing with orthopedic cases. While he worked on him, I ended up back in surgery with a female maintenance technician who had been loading temporary-shelter materials onto a launch, and reported with a plasteel rod protruding from one side of her torso. She’d limped to Medical on her own while using another rod as a makeshift crutch.

  “Others needed the gurneys more than I,” she said, glancing down at the rod in her side. “I would have removed it myself, Healer, but for what you taught us during our first aid training.”

  “You probably would have lost a lot more blood if you had.” I couldn’t remember her or the training she had mentioned. “When did you take that first-aid course?”

  “Last year. I asked about the proper treatment of botanical poisons, and you said . . .” She stopped and made a quick gesture. “Forgive me, Healer, but it was your other self who trained us. Jarn thought all of the crew should be ready to minister to themselves and each other in times of emergency. She said that was the way of her people.”

  Jarn was dead and gone, but she was still managing to piss me off. “Her people were unwanted slaves left to die on a very nasty world. We’re a little more civilized and sophisticated than they were.”

  She moved her shoulders. “Perhaps here we will be the same.”

  By the end of the day we had admitted twelve patients and had ordered twenty more back to their quarters to rest and recover from stress fractures, contusions, and lacerations. In addition to the impact injuries, every patient I saw had suffered a mild to moderate case of hypothermia.

  I scheduled two more shifts in addition to our standard rotation so that no one worked in Medical for longer than a few hours at a time. None of my weary staff protested. Then I left the bay in Shon’s hands as I went to find Xonea.

  I found my ClanBrother coordinating repairs from the secondary command center in the heart of Engineering. The technicians and mechanical support crew were working feverishly to restore power and function to the rest of the ship while the engineers assessed the damage to the engines. Xonea listened without comment to my report on the condition of the pilot and the number of wounded we had treated.

  “So other than waiting for the Hsktskt to warm up and keeping the seriously injured on close monitor, we should be all right,” I finished, and then added, “I need to take care of those wounds on your throat.”

  He made a negligent gesture. “I will attend to them later.”

  “It is later, and I am the Senior Healer,” I said. “That means you let me stitch you up, or I have to relieve you from duty until such time as you decide to allow me to administer the required medical treatment.”

  His face darkened. “You would not dare.”

  I smiled. “Who do you think the department chiefs are going to side with? The helpful healer who only wants to provide proper care, or the captain with the open neck wounds and bad attitude?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Can you do it here?”

  “Why do you think I brought my case?” I looked around and nodded toward the chief engineer’s briefing room. “Let’s go in there.”

  Once inside the office, I secured the door panels and pointed to the top of the
conference table. “Sit down on that and open the front of your tunic.” I began removing the supplies I would need and laid out a sanitary mat on the table beside him.

  “I am surprised you did not send the oKiaf or one of the other healers to attend to me,” Xonea said as I gloved and then removed the temporary dressings.

  “I needed to stretch my legs. Lift your chin, please.” After scanning both wounds, I prepared some gauze with antiseptic solution. “This is going to sting, a lot.”

  Stoic as ever, my ClanBrother didn’t even flinch as I began cleaning out the gashes. “Were there others who attempted to embrace the stars?”

  “A few of the injuries I saw were a little suspicious in nature, but no one asked for their Speaker or tried to finish the job, so I let it go.” I cleaned the dried blood from the flesh around the gashes before I dialed up a local anesthetic on my syrinpress and infused both areas. “You’re not planning to have another go at your arteries, are you?”

  “We do not fear death, Cherijo,” he reminded me. “What we cannot tolerate is being taken from our kin and all we know.”

  I calibrated the suture laser before I eyed him. “We have plenty of kin on the ship, Captain.”

  He tilted his head back as I began closing the wounds. “There can be no Clan without the House. We may never again see Joren.”

  “We haven’t lost the House or Joren. We’re just separated for a little while.” I finished one gash and went to work on the other.

  He looked down his nose at me. “Is that how you think of this division between you and Reever? A temporary separation?”

  I waited until I took the instrument away from his neck before I answered. “You seem very interested in me and Reever lately. Maybe you should mind your own business.”

  “I know you saw the vid of him with the Akkabarran,” he informed me. “You heard what he said to her. He does not honor you, Cherijo. He never has.”

  “Also, none of your business.” I looked down as he caught my wrist. “You don’t want to do this with me right now, ClanBrother. Not when I’m holding a focused-beam laser close to your head.”

  “You resent me now, but it will not always be so,” he promised. “I but showed you the truth that he denied you.”

  “He is my husband, my lover, and my bondmate.” Technically speaking, anyway. “However we feel about each other, that is between us.” I looked into his eyes. “I don’t want you meddling in my relationship with Reever again.”

  “I had prior claim to you,” he snapped.

  “You seem to forget that I killed myself to break your Choice of me,” I sneered. “And if you think I won’t do it again, then maybe you should remember how you felt as the ship went into the rift.”

  His face turned a chalky pale blue. “Cherijo, you know not what you say.”

  “Don’t I?” I uttered a cold chuckle. “I wouldn’t even hesitate this time.” I didn’t want to blow up at him, and then I was. “I’m sure you told yourself that you were doing the right thing by sneaking that disc into my case, but all you really did was hurt me and Reever and Marel. What’s worse is, you didn’t even do it for my sake. I doubt you gave my feelings a second thought. You showed me that vid so you could destroy my marriage and have me for yourself. Frankly, Captain, I’d rather die than be with a man that selfish. End of discussion.” I looked at his neck. “Keep the wounds clean and dry, and let me know if you experience any inflammation, drainage, or bleeding.”

  He followed me out of the briefing room. “Cherijo, wait.”

  I turned and waited.

  “You have every right to condemn me in front of the crew and, when we return to Joren, before the House.” He ducked his head. “I would humbly ask your pardon, lady, for the wrongs that I have done to you and those whom you honor.”

  I didn’t want his apology, but at least he was trying to make one. “I’ll think about it.” I looked around at the busy engineers. “Do we at least know where we are, and has anyone found the idiot who brought us here?”

  “The saboteur has not made himself known to us, nor have we found evidence of how this was done,” he said slowly. “The stardrives and the navigational array are still off-line, and we are depending on our launch engines to maintain orbit.”

  “We’re orbiting something?” I glanced at the viewport. I’d been so busy with patients, I hadn’t even bothered to look outside.

  “We have not yet identified the planet, the star system, or the galaxy,” he admitted. “Nothing correlates to our star charts. We may have been thrown into another region of the universe altogether.”

  Jorenian technology allowed our ships to jump through dimensions in order to relocate within the confines of our galaxy, but there was no ship in existence that could universe-hop. “Have we been able to communicate with anyone?”

  He took a datapad from a waiting technician and inspected the display. “We have been unable to pick up any relays, and our distress signals remain unanswered.” To the other man he said, “Secure the launches before the crew attempts to cut through the bay doors. Assure that all safety protocols are followed.”

  “No relays.” I was still trying to digest that. “But there have to be open transmissions that we can pick up or monitor. Merchant ships, ore haulers, colonial beacons. Something.”

  “The transceiver is fully functional,” he said quietly. “It was among the first of the arrays I ordered repaired, so that we might signal our House for assistance.”

  I didn’t like the despair I heard in his voice. “Joren is still there, Xonea. It has to be a problem with the equipment.”

  “Six million years ago, our world was awash in volcanic activity,” he told me. “The atmosphere was still too toxic to sustain life.”

  I couldn’t accept that. “You can’t assume flying into the rift caused us to be thrown back in time six million years. We would never have survived a journey of that duration. Forget about us, the ship itself would be dust.”

  “That was at least how far the derelict vessel traveled,” he reminded me.

  “Sure they did, with a ship and technology that by comparison makes our own look like flint knives and digging sticks.” He didn’t like me insulting his ship, I could see that. “The Sunlace is a marvelous star vessel. There is nothing better in the Jorenian fleet. But it is not designed to travel through time, and neither are we.”

  “You should see this.” He pulled up a close- up image of an icy hull panel on his console. “We discovered it as soon as we sent a team out on tethers to inspect the exterior of the ship. What do you see?”

  “Frost-covered alloy with a couple of bad cracks.” I frowned as one of the repair crew passed a light emitter over the panel and it began to glow. “And what looks like some kind of residual radiation.”

  “The metal is not covered with ice.” He magnified the image. “Scans indicated that is coated with the same three-sided crystals you found on the derelict in the stasis chambers.”

  I tried to make the connection. “Okay. The saboteur must have ejected the specimen, and it stuck to the ship.”

  He made an encompassing gesture. “I cannot say what our enemy did, but the inspection revealed that the entire ship is encased in these crystals.”

  “That can’t be from the specimen,” I protested. “We barely had an eighth of a liter of the stasis matrix in that container.”

  “Nevertheless, it is the same,” he told me. “Perhaps the passage through the rift accelerated the growth rate, or contained an additional quantity of it. In either event, the ship is completely enveloped; the crystal has sealed all of the stress fractures in the hull as well as the seams and apertures of every accessway into the ship.”

  I felt a surge of nausea until something occurred to me. “If we’re sealed inside, how did the crew get out to inspect the hull?”

  “The crystal retreated from the seams of the air lock as soon as the crew entered it,” he said. “It seems it allowed them to leave the ship.”

>   I didn’t like this. At all. “Where are we?”

  Xonea pulled up an exterior view of the space surrounding the Sunlace and the planet below us.

  We were in orbit above a world that appeared to be a smaller, moonless version of Kevarzangia Two. Dense forested areas and smaller expanses of cleared land made pretty, multicolored splotches on the surface, framed into continents by dark blue green oceans.

  It wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it, but as I stared at the display, I found one of the more unmistakable features: an enormous valley of waterfalls on the northeastern continent.

  “We will first launch a surface probe,” I heard Xonea saying behind me to one of his men, “and determine if it is safe to send down a shuttle.”

  “There’s no need,” I said, my voice hollow. “The atmosphere is oxygen-nitrogen, and none of the indigenous life is toxic to us.” Too bad I couldn’t say the same about the nonindigenous occupants.

  Xonea looked shocked. “You know this planet.”

  “Unfortunately I do. It’s been a while since Reever and I made an emergency landing on it, back when we were trying to negotiate peace between Taercal and Oenrall.” I turned away from the viewer and saw he still didn’t recognize it. “It’s Jxinok. Maggie’s homeworld.”

  PART THREE

  Never

  Ten

  Days passed as the crew worked to bring the Sunlace ’s systems back online and repair the damages to the interior of the ship. All our patients in Medical, including the Hsktskt, recovered from the trauma they’d suffered during the passage through the rift. The pilot’s chest wound was healing without complications, and I had begun regenerative therapy to restore the areas of his derma that had been burned.

  PyrsVar never left ChoVa’s side until she was ambulatory, and even then trailed around after her like a personal bodyguard. The other Hsktskt were at first outraged by the news that we had been pulled through the rift, but after a briefing with the captain grimly accepted the situation.

  There were still problems that we couldn’t resolve. The protocrystal encasing the ship did allow repair crews to exit and enter the air locks while they worked on the exterior of the ship, but it would not release the seal it had formed over the launch bay’s outer doors. When the technicians tried to cut through the seam, the crystal didn’t budge, but only absorbed the energy from their pulse torches and glowed a little brighter. None of our technology could pry it away from the hull.