Guarding an Angel

by Caleb Wachter

  “I do,” Jericho nodded, “but even Hadden’s secure lines aren’t tight enough for me to talk about it now. I’ll tell you when I get back on board.”

  “Good enough,” Charles replied with a crisp nod as a set of coordinates streamed into the Tyson’s navigation computer. “Charles out.”

  The comm. display winked out and Jericho considered unfastening his helmet, but then decided against it. “Can you handle the trip back, Eve?” he asked as he felt his fingers shaking uncontrollably in his left hand.

  “Sure thing, Jericho,” she replied in a rather subdued voice, and Jericho winced as he remembered a similar change in Eve’s ‘other half’ shortly before she died.

  He sighed and said, “Eve…”

  “Yes?” she replied meekly as she looked at him with a downtrodden expression.

  Jericho shook his head as an intercept countdown appeared on the nav computer, “Forget what I said about the slang. Just stay true to yourself, ok?”

  Eve’s image brightened immediately and, in what Jericho took to be a cartoon-inspired metamorphosis, she spun around so fast that she became a blur and when she stopped, her image had reverted to the same one he had seen on the Okavango DOT Net drone: an overly sexualized schoolgirl ‘uniform’ which barely covered her unmentionables. “You’re the best, Jericho! I promise I’ll try to be good—“

  He held up a hand to forestall whatever might have come next. “I could really use some quiet right about now,” he said as he closed his eyes and leaned back.

  “Sure thing, boss!” she replied with infectious enthusiasm, and Jericho chuckled in spite of himself as the craft raced toward a rendezvous with its mother ship.

  Chapter IV: Metal vs. Meat

  “I would appreciate the short version, doctor,” Masozi said after nearly twenty minutes of ‘counseling’ regarding the options for replacing her left leg. The truth was she probably could have afforded a basic limb regeneration procedure while working as an Investigator, but the financial burden would have shackled her so greatly that she would have likely never escaped it. But here, they had given her options which would literally cost her no money and were far superior to anything she could have even dreamed of.

  “The short version, according to your criteria, is that you have two options,” the Zhuge Liang’s doctor said as she held a data pad in either hand, “first, we can re-grow your leg to its original parameters. The re-growth process takes three to four weeks, followed by grafting, physical therapy, and nerve mapping which will require another two to four months.”

  “And the second option is…” Masozi prompted, but found she was unable to say the actual words.

  “A mechanical prosthetic,” the doctor finished for her. “A prosthetic provides several advantages over an organic limb, but the psychological trauma of having a piece of machinery grafted onto one’s body often overshadows whatever physical advantages the prosthesis might provide.”

  “How long does the…mechanical prosthesis,” Masozi bit out the words, feeling the pit of her stomach fall as she did so, “take to graft?”

  The doctor eyed her skeptically. “I don’t want you thinking about the timetable—“ she began.

  “How long?” Masozi repeated in a slightly raised voice. She knew that to accept an organic limb would very likely put her out of action for an unacceptable period of time, and she had no intention of lying in a hospital bed for a month waiting for her new leg to finish growing in a vat somewhere.

  The doctor sighed. “Depending on the makeup of the limb,” she said as she called up a series of diagrams on the left-hand data pad while laying the right-hand pad on the bedside table, “we’re looking at anywhere from one week to three weeks to manufacture, customize, and attach the limb before you would have eighty percent functionality. After that period, it’s largely individuated. But statistics suggest that ninety eight percent of those who choose a mechanical prosthetic, like the one you would require, achieve one hundred percent functionality by ten weeks.”

  The doctor handed Masozi the data pad and she examined a trio of options which were clearly presented on the small screen. The first showed what looked to be a fully-armored, one hundred percent metal leg which mirrored her remaining leg’s dimensions fairly well. She actually recoiled at the idea of waking up with a chunk of metal lying in bed with her — even if it was technically a part of her body — so she expanded the view of the second option.

  The picture presented showed a cutaway of a leg which, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be more or less organic while being composed of synthetic ‘tissues.’ It was covered in genuine skin which they would grow from a collected sample of her own skin, and the description suggested that she would retain much, if not all, of her sensory function with this option. The bone was made of a resilient polymer, and the primary advantages listed for this option were that it was lightweight, would require almost zero maintenance for an eighty year period, and necessitated no modifications to the surrounding tissues. It would outperform an organic limb by nearly thirty percent, and fed off her body’s metabolism much like an organic limb would do.

  She gave serious consideration to simply accepting that option without even looking at the third. But, as usual, her curiosity got the better of her and she flipped to the third option.

  This one caught her interest immediately. The bone was made of a super-strong series of alloys woven together to provide ten times the resilience of a normal, human, leg. The musculature was composed of tightly-wound carbon nanotubes which, while controlled by her brain, were powered by an internal battery system which would require replacement every three years or so.

  As she ran down the physical characteristics of the leg, she calculated that if her entire body was made of a similar material she would be able to lift between five and ten times as much as she was currently able — or, rather, had been able prior to her disfigurement.

  The response times also allowed for significantly greater speed, and her sensory inputs would be almost identical to those provided by the second option. Her own skin would be laid over a layer of subcutaneous tissue, which would sit over an armored shell strong enough to resist nearly everything up to anti-material weaponry or high-end energy weapons.

  She heard the doctor sigh, and Masozi snapped a look over at her to see the other woman shake her head. “The drawbacks are significant,” she said pointedly, gesturing to the bottom half of the data pad’s screen.

  Masozi felt confident she could live with a ‘tune-up’ every three years — especially since she undertook yearly physicals which all responsible Virgin women underwent, which were far from pleasant — but as she skimmed to the bottom of the page she came to understand what the doctor meant.

  It seemed that the musculoskeletal systems attached to the leg — meaning her hips and pelvis — would need to be extensively modified in order to keep the leg from tearing those structures apart in the event of maximal exertion.

  “Can’t we regulate the leg’s…output…to limit the chances of this kind of damage?” she asked with a furrowed brow.

  The doctor took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “We could, but that would defeat the advantages this option provides over the polymer limb,” she explained.

  “I see,” Masozi said with a slow nod as she returned her attention to the pad. Still, according to the attached statistics, there was only a three percent chance of neurological impairment during the ‘modifications’ to her hips and pelvis — modifications which were, truthfully, more like a complete reconstruction using alloys of similar constituency to those in the cybernetic leg’s artificial bones.

  “How long?” Masozi asked after tapping the third option and affixing her signature to it. She knew that wherever they were going, things were indeed going to get more dangerous. She would be a fool to pass up an opportunity like this one to improve her available tools just because they came with a certain degree of unfamiliarity.

  The doctor loc
ked eyes with her before looking pointedly at the data slate without accepting it. “This kind of operation is incredibly traumatic, and can have life-changing consequences. The Chimera System Medical Standards require at least six weeks between introduction to the available options and the operation—“

  “We don’t have six weeks,” Masozi snapped irritably. “This is my body, Doctor,” she continued in a somewhat more controlled manner, “and I’ve made my decision. I’m not going to change my mind…now how long will this process take?”

  The doctor met her gaze for several seconds before exhaling softly and accepting the slate. “We have all of the components in stock here aboard the Kongming,” she said. “The fine-tuning will take us two or three days, and the operation itself will take between fifteen and twenty hours depending on Doctor Maturin’s familiarity with the procedure.” At Masozi’s quizzical look, the doctor added, “He’ll be supporting me during the surgery.”

  “Ah,” Masozi said simply into the awkward silence.

  “We managed to salvage some small portion of muscle from your original leg,” the doctor continued, “and we’ve been stimulating the growth of those cells to provide the auxiliary musculature you’ll need in the event the prosthetic’s power systems fail. But you have to understand,” she said heavily, “this prosthetic will be significantly heavier than your old leg, and you will need to implement several measures to adapt to your body’s new weight.”

  “I think I understand the drawbacks,” Masozi said with an appreciative nod. “Thank you, Doctor; you’ve helped me more than I could have ever hoped for.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Director Hadden said you were important,” she said as her gaze drifted to a nearby Hadden Enterprises logo emblazoned on the sickbay’s wall, “and that’s good enough for me.”

  The other woman shook her head as if to clear it, and Masozi sat in respectful silence. Masozi had no real family to speak of, nor did she have many close acquaintances back in New Lincoln — and even those people she had considered friends would most certainly believe her to be a terrorist by now. So she could, in some small way, empathize with the doctor’s loss of the H.E. One base which had probably been a real home to more than a few of the people aboard the Zhuge Liang.

  “I’m not going to perform this procedure for a minimum of seventy two hours,” the doctor said in a tone the brooked no argument. “If, after that window has elapsed, you still want us to proceed with the cybernetic option then we’ll do everything in our power to carry out your wishes — but I cannot stress heavily enough just how significant of a change this will make in your life.”

  Masozi nodded with certainty. “I appreciate you looking after my well-being, Doctor,” she said evenly, “we’ll talk again in three days.”

  The doctor gathered up the data pads and left Masozi’s room. It had been several days since Jericho had left the T.E. Marks on her bed, and she had not seen him since then. That was probably for the best, however, since Masozi was still grappling with the idea that she had already become a de facto Adjuster.

  She silently cursed herself for a fool at having taken up the ‘vetting’ process for all of the evidence which Jericho had collected against Governor Keno. She had always been too gullible, and it now seemed that her gullibility had set her off onto a path which she could barely understand.

  Masozi knew that she needed more answers before deciding just how far she was willing to go with Jericho’s — or, more accurately, Director Hadden’s — plan. But before she could possibly get those answers, she needed to discover the right questions.

  So she availed herself of as much of the ship’s digital libraries as possible, but the majority of those resources were denied her. Still, she was able to find the basic demographic breakdown of Hadden Enterprises’ labor force.

  The bulk of that force — which Hadden’s official literature referred to as ‘sentient resources,’ or ‘sentient assets’ — was actually nonhuman. The Chimera Sector had undergone significant social upheaval since the collapse of the wormhole, but equal rights for aliens had been a long, slow, painful process toward which a large segment of humanity was still resistant.

  Masozi had never given the issue of alien rights — which even she recognized as a bigoted term, since the ‘aliens’ were, as Hadden Enterprises officially put it, simply ‘nonhuman’ — much thought. She, and the few people with whom she had discussed the matter during her life in New Lincoln, believed that sentience — at least as far as humans could understand the concept — was the most fundamentally important characteristic a living being could possess. As such, she had more or less silently supported the integration of nonhumans into human society.

  But there were literal obstacles to that process, and no one had come up with a workable solution to those obstacles in their entirety. No one, it seemed, except for Hadden Enterprises.

  The more Masozi examined H.E.’s employment contracts, the more she came to believe that Hadden was far from the only entity which had incorporated nonhumans into their labor force. She had heard horror stories of human taskmasters enslaving species for dangerous activities such as subterranean excavation, orbital facility repair work, or activities undertaken in hostile environments which would be harmful for humans.

  She had believed the newsfeeds which had described humans enslaving entire tracts of these nonhumans, and sometimes even using them as little more than playthings for all manner of base indulgences…including blood sport.

  But now Masozi was forced to admit it was possible that those newsfeeds had been nothing more than propaganda. To what end, she could not yet determine, but she suspected she was very near to discovering it.

  She stretched her body and arched her back, and for a moment she tried to curl her toes as she had done every morning since she had been a little girl. That was when she was given the harsh reminder that she had but one leg, and that realization — for that is what it was: a realization, one which had repeated itself several times during the previous days — filled her with a surge of grief unlike anything she had known before awakening without her limb. It was a strange procession of emotions ranging from sorrow, to anger, to acceptance, to something even deeper than any of that.

  Though she knew she would not be functionally hindered since a new limb would be provided and attached to her body, Masozi also knew that she had lost a part of herself which had been with her for her entire life. She wondered just how much more of herself she would lose in the coming weeks, months, or even years.

  But her thoughts were interrupted when the door to her small room opened and Jericho stepped through.

  Chapter V: An Unexpected Division

  When Jericho entered Masozi’s room, he had been uncertain what to expect but what he saw in her visage surprised him. He had known people who had suffered traumatic injuries, and had even helped many of them cope with the loss of something as important as a limb.

  But where he usually saw a distant, hollow expression, Jericho saw something much more resilient in Masozi’s character. She was far from well-rested, but her eyes burned with something he knew he had once possessed in equal measure. Her countenance was lit by an indomitable sense of purpose, and in that moment Jericho knew that he had been correct about her all along.

  “Investigator,” Jericho said as he made his way to the foot of her bed. He had just come from sickbay, where the doctors had complained to no end regarding his mistreatment of their carefully-wrought surgical works involving the reassembly of his left arm. But they had assured him the long-term cost in neurological function would be minimal, and given the rewards of what he had just accomplished with Eve he knew it was a price well worth paying.

  “Jericho,” she said coldly, and he couldn’t blame her for her mistrust, anger, resentment, or even disappointment. But he was too far past the point where such things mattered. If Director Hadden had been correct about the scope of the conspiracy they had uncovered then there was little time for such petty issues.
Still, even Jericho knew that all humans had their limits and he suspected he would need to endure some period of open hostility from the young woman.

  “You might be happy to learn,” Jericho began as he pulled up a small chair and placed it near the foot of the bed, “that Eve believes she will make a full recovery.”

  Masozi cocked an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware she had been…unwell,” she said cuttingly after a brief pause, apparently searching for the proper word. “Your vaunted honesty isn’t looking all that deserved at this point; what else have you been keeping from me?”

  Jericho would have winced had he not expected such a reply, but he kept his features neutral. He knew that his non-reaction might upset her, but if it did then it might serve as a lesson of sorts in and of itself. “I didn’t know about it myself until just a few days ago,” he explained as he withdrew a data link and waved it demonstrably, “but after we’re done here, she has a request she would like to make.”

  “So what’s your ‘grand design’ this time?” Masozi seethed. “Just what do you have in store for me around the next corner?”

  A tight, hollow smile spread across Jericho’s face and he shook his head. “This one wasn’t my idea,” he said evenly, “it comes from the old man himself.”

  Masozi’s face briefly wore a look of surprise before she schooled her features. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s not actually dead,” she grated.

  “Oh, he’s dead all right,” Jericho corrected as he knew the statement to be absolutely true, “but that doesn’t mean he’s done playing his part in the Chimera Sector’s fate.”

  A look of curiosity flashed in her eyes, and Jericho knew he had her. He activated his wrist link and signaled for the corporate lawyers to enter the room, which they did almost immediately. Masozi gave each of the four individuals — two human, two nonhuman — appraising looks before once again fixing her deep, brown eyes on Jericho.