by J. N. Chaney
“Where’s my arm,” he asked.
Tomiko glanced at Nix, then in a hushed voice, said, “It’s gone, Rev. I’m sorry.”
Rev wasn’t as upset as he should be. He knew that had to be because he was being pumped full of happy nano-juice, but even with that, it should make more of an impact. He realized that his arm was no more, but after that first shock of finding that out, it just was a new fact of life. Tomiko seemed more agitated than he was.
“You OK?” he asked her.
“Me? Why are you asking me?”
“You seem upset.”
Her eyes widened in surprise, and then she laughed. “Sometimes you kill me, Rev.”
“I think the bleeding’s stopped,” Sergeant Nix said, lifting the pressure off his stump for a moment, looking down at it.
“Keep the pressure until Doc comes.” Staff Sergeant Delacrie’s voice reached them from somewhere Rev didn’t feel the need to figure out. “You know the SOP.”
Hemostops were micro-nanos that flowed within the bloodstream. When they reached a tear in the vascular system, they activated, blowing up to three times their size, large enough to plug a capillary. Enough of them could eventually plug an artery or vein until the self-destruct took over, deflating and turning them into harmless specks that would work their way from the circulatory system to the lungs and be exhaled out of the body.
“Punch says you’re right,” Rev said in a conspiratorial whisper.
Nix smiled but said, “Let’s just humor Delacrie, though, OK?”
“OK.”
Rev turned his head again. “You OK, Kat?”
The little girl slightly twisted in Badem’s grip and gave Rev a quick glance before burying her face against the PFC’s chest again.
That made him feel worse, somehow, than losing his arm.
“She’s just scared, Rev. She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Tomiko told him. “She knows you saved her life.”
“The staff sergeant wanted to kill her.”
Without the drugs coursing through his system, he’d never have uttered those words. Even now, he knew he’d stepped over a line.
“Shh, Rev. No, he didn’t. He just wanted to make sure you weren’t in danger,” Tomiko said, raising a hand to put a finger over his lips. “And he’s going to feel like shit over it. But sometimes, a commander, he’s gotta make those tough calls.”
“I never want to be a commander, then,” Rev said through her fingers.
“Doc’s here, and the lieutenant,” Strap called from outside the building. A moment later, Doc appeared, telling Nix to shift over.
“Reiser, Nix. Join the rest and let Doc take over,” the staff sergeant said.
Tomiko said, “I gotta go. I’ll see you later.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead, and disappeared.
Rev caught a glance of the staff sergeant, his face pensive, until the lieutenant appeared, blocking his line of sight.
“You hanging in there, Pelletier?” the lieutenant asked.
“Sure am, sir. Just like on Roher when we got that—”
A quick hand covered Rev’s mouth. “Yep, yep, I know. You just relax now. Don’t try to talk,” the lieutenant said, giving Tomiko a quick look.
Doc Paul visually examined Rev’s stump before doing anything else.
“Looks like you’ve got two or three centimeters of humerus left. Good deal for either growing a new arm or prosthetics.”
That was the first time Rev even considered that since the blast. Of course, there was going to be something done. The Corps needed warm bodies, and they weren’t going to let a missing arm change that.
“This is going to sting a bit,” the doc said as he took out a small, round tube. He held it a few centimeters from the stump and sprayed.
Sting? Bullshit. Despite his drugs, Rev yelped as the spray penetrated the mangled flesh.
“Sorry about that, Rev, but we have to stabilize all the flesh we can and let the surgeons decide what can be saved and what can’t. Now, I’ve got to see what else is wrong with you that your bio readout doesn’t tell me.”
He pulled out the Doc Eyes, the portable body scanner that was the lifeblood of any corpsman. Doc was getting updates from Rev’s bios, but they weren’t sophisticated enough to pick up everything. He ran the Doc Eyes over Rev, then hooked it into his wrist jack. With the half-closed eyes favored by some while jacked, he studied the results for a moment before opening them wide and unjacking.
“Aside from your arm, you’ve got a bruised kidney, two broken ribs, a slipped disk, a dislocated hip, a concussion, and two ruptured eardrums. Lots of bruises. There’s something wrong with your small intestines, too, that I can’t make out.” He took a look at the destroyed wall and the devastation in what was left of the home. “I’d say you got off easy, from the looks of things.”
“What’s his prognosis?” the lieutenant asked.
“If we can get him to one of the Class A facilities in orbit, pretty good. Most of what he has can be repaired or left to heal. The arm, well, you know. . .”
Rev had been surprised to hear the litany of the damage done to him. Like with his arm, however, it didn’t bother him that much. He knew it would later, but for the moment, he was pretty complacent for having almost been blown to bits.
“Corporal Pelletier,” the lieutenant said, kneeling and bending his head in close. “We’ve got a CASEVAC bird coming in. It’s going to take you up to one of the ships where they’re going to patch you up before sending you home.”
That registered, and he tried to protest. He didn’t want to go back to New Hope until the rest of the team returned.
“Can’t I come back here? I don’t need an arm to help out.”
“No. You’re going home.”
“Shit, Corporal. You lost a fucking arm,” Badem said before he looked at Kat and said, “Oh, sorry about the fuck, little girl. And the shit. I shouldn’t swear in front of you.”
The lieutenant looked and gave the PFC a withering glare before turning back to Rev. “We’ll be there, soon. It looks like we’ve broken the Angel shits’ backs. So, you go back, get healed up, and watch things for us. No squatters taking over our barracks, OK?”
“CASEVAC inbound,” Strap yelled.
“I’m going to put you out now, Rev,” Doc said. “You won’t wake up until after your surgery.”
He took out a cylinder of sleepy gas and attached the facemask before entering some numbers on the control panel.
“I’ll give you three puffs. Breathe normally, and you’ll drift off.
The doc placed the mask over Rev’s mouth and nose, giving it three spaced, firm squeezes. That last thing Rev saw was Kat, turning her head to look at him and mouthing “Thank you” before everything shut down.
23
Rev slowly opened his eyes to a bright white room, two people in doctors’ whites and three in the Navy’s medical greens, all looking at him. He had to squint to ward off the intense light over him.
“That’s it. He’s back with us,” one of the doctors said to the others.
“Is this the Big Hob?” he croaked out, his throat raw and dry.
“The what, son?”
“The Big Hob,” Rev repeated, and then when the doctor didn’t seem to understand, he said, “The Hobart Bay.”
“That’s one of our dreadnaughts,” one of those in the greens said, a chief’s crow on his pocket.
“Oh, sorry about that,” the doctor said to the chief. “I still don’t know all your Navy ins-and-outs.”
She turned back to Rev and said, “No, son. You aren’t on a ship. You’re at the Navy Regional Medical Center in Anastasia. You’ve been here for five weeks now while your arm heals up.”
What? Five weeks?
“Punch, you here with me?”
There was on
ly silence.
“Where’s my battle buddy?” Rev asked, suddenly feeling the void.
The doctor looked confused and turned to the nurse again.
“His Didactic Interface.” The nurse stepped forward and leaned into Rev. “Nothing’s wrong with it, Sergeant. It was deactivated during your transit. Standard procedure when you’re in an induced coma.”
There was a lot to unpack there, but “deactivated” stood out, and Rev felt a surge of what was almost panic.
“Am I getting Punch back?” he asked, trying to sit up.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the nurse said, holding Rev down. “Don’t worry. It’ll be good as new. No memory loss.” He must have seen Rev’s unbelieving eyes because he added, “I know you Marines get attached, and believe me, you won’t even know the difference.”
“When? When will I get him?”
The nurse looked at the second doctor, an older man with the Navy Medical Service logo on his whites’ breast pocket.
“As soon as we run a couple of tests on you. Maybe by late afternoon, if the tests are OK,” the doctor said.
Rev didn’t like that qualifier, but Navy doctors were officers, and he wasn’t going to argue. He’d try and get the real scoop from one of the corpsmen later.
“Well, then, if we can go on,” the first doctor said. Her whites were plain, without the Navy logo. “I’m Doctor Chakrabarti, head of Bionic Research at Sieben Intergalaxy.”
Rev’s mind was still fuzzy, but he knew about Sieben Intergalaxy. His stepdad’s crystal plant, where Rev was going to become an apprentice before he was conscripted, was owned by Sieben. They were huge, providing weapons and equipment not only to the Union military but to other nations’ armed forces as well.
But that didn’t explain why some civilian doctor was standing over him back on New Hope.
She stepped up to his left side and undid a white covering over his . . . my stump.
It all came rushing back. Kat. The blast. His arm gone.
He felt nauseous, and he didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t help it. As the doctor pulled back the covering, all he could see was . . . nothing. Nothing where his arm should be.
But he could feel it. He flexed his fingers. It felt almost normal, but there was nothing there.
The doctor pointed at a monitor and told the others, “See. Great impulse generation. You did a great job with that.” And back to Rev, the doctor said, “Wiggle your fingers again.”
The others crowded around the monitor and nodded. Rev thought that must be a good thing, but he didn’t ask.
The doctor turned back to his stump and started prodding at it, which pegged the weird scale. It was so invasive, and Rev felt naked. For all he knew, under the sheets he was physically naked, but not as exposed as having her fingers rummaging through his stump.
Finally, she finished and said, “Doctor Morales, why don’t you bring this young man up to speed.”
If Rev wasn’t mistaken, the Navy doctor, probably a captain or commander at the very least given his apparent age, didn’t like taking orders from the younger civilian doctor, but he said, “Sergeant Pelletier, you received your initial stabilization aboard the Hobart Bay before being transported back here. As Chief Price told you, you’ve been in an induced coma since your injury so we could advance the regenerative healing of your shoulder and see what we had to work with.”
“Why was I put into a coma?”
“You had many injuries, and some of the . . . procedures we use are invasive and onerous to bear. We’ve found that by placing a patient in a coma, the body can maximize its regenerative energy while eliminating their discomfort.”
Which Rev took to mean it hurt like hell. Maybe the coma hadn’t been such a bad thing.
“And is that why you had to disconnect my AI?”
The chief gave a soft laugh, and the doctor said, “There are feedback loops that can affect your AI, and those, in turn, can be reintroduced to what your body went through.”
“What Doctor Morales is saying is that your battle buddy, even if you’re unconscious, will note some of the crap we put you through, and when you’re back, some of that can leak back to you as subconscious memories,” the chief said.
Leave it to a chief to get right to the point, Rev thought, smiling for the first time since he woke up.
“And that’s all over now?”
“You’ve done quite well, actually. Most of your internal injuries are healed or close to it. And your residuum has done remarkably well.”
“My what?”
“Residuum. Your residual limb.”
“Your stump,” the chief said.
That I understand.
“When the time comes, you’ll be a great candidate for regeneration,” the doctor said.
“When will that be, sir?”
The Navy doc looked uncomfortable before saying, “Not for the duration.”
Which didn’t make sense to Rev. The duration? The duration of what? His treatment?
Once again, it was the chief who came to the rescue. “Sorry, son. Needs of the military and all that. Regen will take two years to grow, then it’ll take you another to learn how to use the arm. You’re getting a prosthesis, and you’ll be back with your unit in six months tops.”
“And that leads you back to me,” the civilian doctor said, a proprietary smile on her face as she stepped closer to Rev. “We think you are a perfect candidate to be a proof-of-concept test case for one of our newest projects, the Integrated Bionic Hopological Unit.”
She looked at Rev as if expecting him to jump out of the bed and thank her. The thing is, he had absolutely no idea what an Integrated Bionic Hopological Unit was. And when you added the words test case, that rang more than a few alarm bells.
“Doesn’t that sound good?”
Rev didn’t know how to answer that except for the resounding no he was tempted to tell her. Mr. Oliva, the old man who’d given him a wealth of advice before he reported into recruit training, had told him that unless it was life or death of a fellow Marine, never volunteer for anything. And this civilian doctor gave him the creeps, to be honest.
“Ma’am, maybe you’d better tell him a little more about the project.”
She smiled and hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Of course, Chief Price. I’m just so excited to move to this phase of the project that I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached to my neck.”
First human thing she’s said since I woke up.
“You are a Marine infantryman . . .”
Rev wanted to tell her he was a Raider, but he let it slide.
“. . . and so, you use weapons in your job. But a weapon is a tool, something outside your body, so-to-speak. In order to fire your gun . . .”
Rifle.
“. . . you have to rely on neurological—”
The chief gave a dramatic cough.
“Something wrong?” the doctor asked, obviously thrown off her game.
“No disrespect, ma’am, but maybe you should let me explain it without all the deep science that I know you’re about to delve into. And if I screw up, you can correct me.”
She stared him down, then looked at the senior Navy doctor, who was not going to naysay the chief.
“Very well,” she said in a snit.
“Sergeant, think of it this way. If I tell you to shoot a tin-ass, you have to acknowledge the command, find the tin-ass, lift up your M-49 . . . and yes, I know that won’t do shit to a tin-ass,” he said before Rev could object. “But you raise your Moray, OK? Then you have to aim it and tell your finger to fire. All pretty quick if you’re well-trained. But, if I tell you to point at Doctor C, there, do you have to consciously think about that? Do you have to tell your hand to come up, to extend the finger, to aim it at her?”
“No, I would just do it.”
“Exactly. And you’d do it much quicker than if I told you to shoot her.”
The doctor gave a huff of displeasure when he said t
hat, but she didn’t interrupt.
“So, what if we made your pointing into a weapon. In other words, instead of a normal prosthesis, we made that into a weapon, a mechanical weapon, but with biosynth neurons that could control it faster than you can control your other arm? And then because the arm is mechanical, we give you the biggest, baddest weapons possible? What would you think of that?
Rev recoiled. “Isn’t that how we got the Genesians?”
“In a way, yes, but we’re—”
“No, not in a way, Chief. Not at all,” the doctor said. “Totally different process, built upon accepted practices. We’ve just improved on the end product.”
She stepped closer to Rev. “No, Sergeant, we’re not going to make you into an android, as much as I hate the term. It’s not scientifically sound, you know.”
She stopped and said to the others in a more than defensive tone, “The Genesians weren’t androids. That was just what the media started calling them.”
Back to Rev. “All we’re going to do is bypass some of the steps that Chief Price delineated. We’re giving you an IBHU,” she said, pronouncing it “ibhoo.” “It’s a better prosthesis, much better, but with weapons integrated into it. With training, you’ll be much more effective in your job.”
Rev lay there quietly, but his mind was awhirl. A weapon that was a part of him? It just didn’t seem right.
But . . . he thought about it a moment. He carried weapons, and how was that different? And it wasn’t as if he didn’t already have so much crap with his augments as it was. But what was it that Bundy had said about too many augments? That it increased the chances of getting the rot?
“What about the rot, ma’am? What will this do to my chances of getting that?”
She looked confused until the Navy doc said, “He means Weislen’s Syndrome.”
“Oh, that. Well, this project will be mostly external mods, so theoretically, it shouldn’t have an effect.”
Theoretically?
“But as part of the testing program, any adverse effects will be monitored.”
Rev leaned his head back on his pillow. He was tired, which seemed strange as he’d been asleep for the last five weeks. And this was all a little much to take in.
