“I mean… I guess, but why didn’t they just blow off the surface of the planet? Why take everyone? That had to have taken so much effort, and you can’t tell me that we didn’t manage to take a single one of them down, which meant that they collected all of their dead.
“But if they expended all that energy to do that, that means it was important enough to make sure we didn’t get a hold of one of their bodies, which is…worrying.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Worrying is right.”
The conversation stilled, mostly because what else was there to say? We both jogged in silence, only our harsh breath and our fear to spur us onwards.
I didn’t think it was possible, but my heart dropped even further as what was left of our defense center came into view. The cannon that we had put so much work into stealing and adapting then perfecting was gone, leaving only a smoking cradle in its wake.
The shining, shimmering building was nothing but rubble, all the technology and shielding we had been working on reduced to ash.
“My gosh…” I whispered breathlessly, words hardly enough to communicate the fear and dread that rushed through me, but they were all that I had.
“Higgens, Gonzales, is that you? I see your datapads are almost here.”
“Yeah, it’s us.”
“Where’s Mimi and Eske?”
“They’re back with the other survivors.”
“Other survivors? Good. That’s good.”
“You gonna tell us what’s going on here?” I asked, finally reaching the edge of the rubble. I squinted to try to see where they could have gotten to when I saw what looked like a half-collapsed hallway sticking up from one of the rises of twisted metal.
“That way,” I whispered to Gonzales, not wanting to interrupt Bahn’s answer.
“Yeah. We think we’ve found Harunya.”
“What?”
“There’s no signs of life but there’s the faintest blip of her datapad’s signature. It’s damaged, badly, but it’s there.”
“Holy crap, Bahn, way to bury the lead!” Gonzales cried, sprinting past me. “We’re coming!”
“Please hurry,” Ciangi’s voice flashed over the comm for the first time and I could hear that she had definitely been crying. “We’re digging through as fast as we can, but we have to be careful. We don’t want to hurt her if she’s in a precarious position.”
“Right, of course. We’ll be there in just a second.”
Light faded around us as we went further and further down the corridor. Only a minute or two later, we arrived in a small, crumpled room to find Bahn and Ciangi desperately throwing pieces of rubble this way and that.
Gonzales and I joined without a word, digging just as furiously as they did. It was so tempting to just blast through the walls and get to her that much faster, but what if we accidentally blasted through her? Or suffocated her with chemicals? Or burned her alive?
No, we had to take it slow.
The four of us worked in silence, the only sounds being our grunting, Ciangi’s tears, and debris clattering against the wall. I wished that I had interrupted Mimi. Her brute strength would certainly be useful, but I couldn’t help but think that she was quite distracted by the young mimic.
“Gonzales, come help me grab the edge of this,” I said, gripping one side of a large, jagged slab of metal and piping on the ground toward the end of the mini-tunnel we were creating.
She rushed to help me, and so did Bahn, and the three of us managed to lift it about an inch and slide it to the side.
A scream sounded almost immediately, and I saw Ciangi shakily pointing. Following her finger, I saw a tanned hand, swollen and dusty.
“Harunya!” Bahn cried, rushing to her. “Harunya, I’m here!”
We descended on her in a desperate fury, throwing things this way and that. Little by little, her arm and one of her legs were revealed to us, until only one large slab obscured her torso from vision.
“Let’s lift this together,” Bahn said, covered in sweat and dirt. “Ciangi, you pull her out.”
“Yes, of course.”
Wiping my arms on my pants, I crouched and slid my hands under the slab. Waiting until we were all in tune, I gave a short count and then we were all putting our everything into heaving upwards.
Our groans sounded throughout the room, but I could feel us all trying our hardest. Bit by bit, the slab lifted, until Ciangi was able to grab Harunya’s exposed leg and pull with all her might.
There was resistance for a moment, and I feared the worst, but then there was a scraping sound and the woman’s entire body popped out, sending Ciangi flying backwards.
As soon as we were all sure she was clear, we dropped the slab and rushed over.
“Is she breathing?” Ciangi cried. “Is she breathing?”
“Just give me a moment,” Bahn answered, kneeling beside her and crouching close to her face. We all went silent and my stomach was performing its own acrobatic assault. She had been down there for weeks, there was no way she could be alive, right? A human could usually go only three days without water, and she had been stuck far longer than that.
“It’s faint, but I have a pulse!”
“Let’s grab her and get her to the med-bay then!” Gonzales shouted, jumping to her feet.
“We can’t move her!” Bahn snapped, sounding harsher than I had ever heard him. Not that he didn’t have good reason, of course. “Use that eye of yours to scan her. Judging by that slab, her arm and leg are broken, and she probably has a spine compression at the least, and I don’t want to think about what’s the worst.”
He seemed to think for a split-second while the rest of us stood in stunned silence. Hitting his comm, he was giving orders again. “Eske, I know you’re with the other survivors, which I’m guessing are your family, but we need you. Run to the med-bay as quickly as you can and get the stabilizer, then hover-bed transport.”
“What do you need that for?”
“The woman we love, and our child, is barely clinging to life.”
A long string of surprised expletives burst over the comm then cut off, which I could only assume meant that Eske was using her long, long legs to cut across the landscape.
“Higgens, you know CPR?”
“Yeah, it’s a requirement of maintenance training and having employment on government ships.”
“Then I need you to compress her chest.”
“Alright.” I dropped to my knees and started using the exercise I never thought would be relevant to my life. It felt strange doing it on an actual human instead of a medi-bot, but I forced myself to focus.
Bahn pinched her nose with his fingers then bent down, inflating her lungs with his breath. The two of us worked on her in tandem, and I lost myself to the rhythm. Nothing mattered but making sure that I stayed exactly on beat.
Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Breathe. Pump.
Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Breathe. Pump.
Over and over and over again until finally I heard footsteps and a shout behind me.
Someone was pulling me off, and I resisted for a moment before Gonzales’s voice sounded gently in my ear.
“Higgens, you can stop. Help is here.”
Help? Oh.
I fell back, and my vision cleared to see Eske placing the stabilizer on Harunya while Bahn set up the medical hover-bed. As soon as the equipment was on the pregnant woman, her chest started to rise and fall on its own, and her vitals hovered above the head of the hover-bed.
“It’s working!” Bahn cried, squeezing the woman’s hand. “It’s working!”
“That it is,” Eske said, her tone and face completely serious. “But how about we get her to the ship and do a scan so we can get her whatever other help she and the baby need.”
“Yes,” Ciangi gasped. “Please.”
I shakily got to my feet to follow them, Gonzales’s arm wrapping around mine for support.
“You did good, Higgens,” she murmured, gently ruffling my st
ill-short hair. “You did good.”
3
Loss and Life
Somehow, we made it to the ship without any more catastrophes. Along the way, Gonzales called Mimi to join us. I was in a bit of a haze, but I was incredibly grateful for my friend.
Every moment, I was afraid that the weak vitals on the cot would blink out and then we all would lose it. I couldn’t begin to imagine what this felt like for both Ciangi and Bahn. I didn’t quite understand their relationship, who was dating who and whatnot, but I knew that they were all incredibly tightknit. Finding their loved one crushed under a pile of rubble, not knowing if the baby they had been expecting was still alive, had to be maddening.
A few minutes later, we were all huddled in the medical room, watching as Ciangi hooked up Harunya to all the equipment the small bay had. Soon we had plenty of readings on her, and we were all frantically searching on our datapads for what reading meant what, when the tiniest of voices cut through our desperate queries.
“D…darling?”
It was like lightning jolted through me, and our heads all snapped to the table. There, I saw Harunya’s eyes flutter open, and her cracked lips moved slowly.
“…I…think I…hear you…”
Bahn and Ciangi dropped everything, sprinting to her and gripping her hands.
“Oh my God, Harunya!” the smaller of the coin twins cried. “I thought we’d lost you!”
“You think you could get rid of me that easily?” She chuckled weakly. “Now, let me see my charts so I can tell you what’s going on. I see that you have a stabilizer on me, but I need some injections to bring my levels back up.”
They quickly handed her a datapad that had all of her readings and she puzzled over it for several moments. It was right about then that I remembered that the woman was an actual doctor, and probably the best one among us for figuring out how to treat herself.
“Alright, go to the medical cabinet and punch in the code two-three-six-nine. Then I’m going to need you to take out the injector, and two vials of the hydrogenation kit.”
Bahn rushed to do as she said. “Which kit is that?”
“It’s the blue one. For water.”
“You, Eske, I need you to go to the medi-generator and print a tibia-reset splint to my scans. It’s fairly straightforward.”
She rattled it off so matter-of-factly despite her raspy voice and bright red eyes. I knew the stabilizer worked a lot of wonders, but I didn’t know that it was downright magical.
“In about half an hour, I’m also going to need some of the vials in the pink kit. About every half hour or so. Oh, and Higgens, do you mind getting the fetal sc—” She stopped mid-order, and I swore the whole room froze with her. “Oh.”
“Oh?” the twins echoed.
“It appears that I’m about to go into labor.”
“What?!” That was probably the entire room, including myself.
“Bahn, in addition to those blue vials, give me one purple one, and one green one.”
He was at her side in a flash, and all I could do was stand there and watch.
“What are these for?”
“These are going to delay the labor for at least an hour or two, hopefully long enough to get me at least somewhat stable.”
“You’re not stable now?” I heard Ciangi ask fearfully.
“No. Hardly. If I have this baby now, it is highly likely that you would lose both of us to the stress. I need everyone to listen very carefully. I believe I am in shock and that’s why we’re able to have this conversation. It’s very possible that at any moment, I could succumb and pass out. This is what I need you to do.”
Suddenly, we were all getting issued orders right and left. We followed them to a T. My whole mind attuned to only her directions and her vitals, there was nothing else. Only making sure that whatever she said was completed to perfection.
Leg brace, neck brace. Injections. Scans. More injections. A breather. A medical bassinet. A sanitizer. The list went on and on and on, until Mimi joined us, the smaller mimic seeming to have grown a few inches. She stood to the back, just watching us as time slipped by.
Before we knew it, she was completely hooked up to everything she needed, and her vitals were all starting to rise.
“This is it,” she gasped, her voice still reedy. “My water is about to break.”
“Is that literally or figurative—”
Before Mimi could finish that question, Harunya’s water did indeed break and I rushed to clean it up with the floor sterilizer that I had been assigned. I caught Mimi turn pale in the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t pay attention.
“Bahn!” Harunya cried. “Give me your hand!”
“Did we not give you the pain medicine correctly?” he asked, shocked.
“Given my condition, and that my spine might be compromised, you couldn’t give me the normal epidural. You’ve injected some general painkillers, which will take off the edge, but given my broken leg, arm, and chipped vertebrae, this isn’t going to be easy.”
“Geez, Harunya, you should have—”
A cry ripped out of her throat and both of them were holding her hands. I sprinted to the coolant tube to spray some of its water on a medical-grade towel then ran it back to her for one of the twins to place on her face.
Once more, our whole world became only focusing on Harunya and the life that was fighting its way out of her.
It was messy, it was terrifying, and it was certainly loud. But after two hours of Bahn and Ciangi making sure every one of her vitals stayed in the orange and out of the red, and the rest of us focusing on our own tasks, Eske caught and cradled the child to her.
“The scanner,” Harunya gasped, her voice barely a whisper. “Get my baby into the scanner.”
The maintenance worker rushed to do so, and the rest of us started on our post-labor jobs. I had learned just two hours earlier that the baby wasn’t the only thing that needed to be birthed, so I rushed to her with a sample collector that would test the waste to see what the baby was lacking and if there was anything we should worry about.
A moment later, I heard a happy cry from Eske. “She’s healthy! She’s jaundiced and underweight, but she’s healthy!”
A weak, sliver of a laugh slipped from Harunya’s mouth, then her eyes fluttered closed. We all jolted for a moment, but then her vitals above her head steadied and rose the tiniest amount.
She was resting.
Bahn lovingly kissed her forehead while Ciangi went over to their baby. They quickly went through the process with the umbilical cord, and cleaning it, and before I knew it, I was watching as the blonde woman handed the baby over to her twin.
“She’s beautiful,” Ciangi breathed, hope, happiness, and relief all mixing in her voice.
Bahn took one look at the precious, wailing child in his arms and then broke down in tears. I couldn’t blame him, and I stepped forward to envelop him in a gentle hug. A second later, I felt Eske’s muscled arms around us as well, and then Gonzales’s, then Ciangi’s, and finally Mimi’s.
“Welcome to the family,” I murmured, a hitch building in my own throat.
“We’re so glad you made it,” Bahn added between tears.
We all held onto each other until he was ready for space, and when we stepped away, he wiped his face gratefully.
“So, does my little niece have a name?” Gonzales asked, her own voice sounding both strained and relieved.
“Asha,” Ciangi said, standing beside Bahn and cooing at the child, who seemed to have calmed and was shakily reaching up toward Bahn’s face. “We decided on it before all this happened, and I think it’s only grown more appropriate.”
“That’s beautiful,” Eske said. “What does it mean?”
“It’s Harunya’s mother language,” Bahn answered, sneaking a free hand over to rest on the arm of the woman he loved. “It means ‘hope’.”
“Hope,” I repeated, my own heart giving out a meaningful throb. “You’re right. That i
s a good name.”
4
Witness
We all slept right there in the medical room.
Sure, there were plenty of rooms that we could have slept in with actual beds, and also, I was sure that Mimi was less than pleased that we all needed to rest. I could tell that every second we weren’t actively running toward whichever direction the children had been taken was incredibly painful for her, but we couldn’t help it. The events of the day had drained all of us, and our biology required that we sleep.
Thankfully, she didn’t pitch a fit or anything, and I happily curled into a corner with her, dozing off while Bahn and Ciangi sat in two of the padded chairs with the baby.
After what had happened, it was clear that none of us wanted to be very far apart. Something had come and completely turned our world upside-down, then something else came along and inverted it again. And although there was a new, wonderful bundle of joy in our life, we had to figure out what happened to all of the other children who were just…gone.
But that managed to wait until the next morning, when an urgent cry roused all of us. I bolted upright, fear of battle rushing through my limbs, before I remembered exactly what had happened.
It was the baby. Bahn practically teleported over to her in the monitoring pod and carefully took her out. By the time I was able to fully open my eyes and comprehend the world, he was placing her in Harunya’s arms.
“My little girl,” she murmured happily. “My beautiful little girl.”
“Strange, according to what I know of general human aesthetics, she is still very red and compressed. Is that not considered ugly to—”
I nudged Mimi and although she gave me a confused look, she seemed to know that I was trying to get her to stop. Even I knew you never insulted a woman’s child.
Mimic Saves Her People Page 2
