“It’s not chocolate, is it?” said Kohl.
“No,” said Nate.
“What is it?”
“It’s pain in a box,” said El. “Of two particular kinds. One is for you, and one is for them,” she said, jerking her head towards the Marines guarding the doorway.
“Okay,” said Kohl. “The pain for me. Let’s start there.”
“There’s a funny story you missed while you were asleep,” said Nate. “Seems there’s nanites that can be programmed to do various functions like fighting cancer, that kind of thing. Illegal AI tech.”
“Hope thought they could be programmed for other things,” said El. “Like gobbling up the pieces of stone in your spine. They can rebuild freshly-injured tissue too. She spoke in that language that sounds like English, but is something different. I was just nodding along at that point.”
“Huh,” said Kohl. “I’ll walk again? On my own legs? Not that metal shit? No offense, Cap.”
“Maybe,” said Nate. “She had to hack the ship’s systems. Get a program from the Torrington that would rebuild your spinal column.”
“She figures it’ll work?” said Kohl.
“She said there’s two basic paths,” said Nate. “She was not making a lot of sense, on account of her being tired. But the first path? You walk again. Second path? You die screaming. She gave it fifty-fifty. She said,” he scratched his head, “she didn’t understand the tech herself. AI is illegal. No one’s studied it in years. She’s not a doctor, Kohl. Hope’s an Engineer. She said she’s ‘borrowing code’ and that she ‘hates to borrow code.’”
“Huh,” said Kohl again. “I guess I’ll take Hope’s fifty-fifty over anyone else’s ninety-ten.”
“Okay,” said Nate. “Here’s the plan.” He opened the box, pulling out the top tray of chocolates and handing them to Kohl. “Eat these.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re tasty. We ate the rest,” said Nate. “But also, because your body will need something to work with. Or so Hope figures. The nanites will cannibalize tissue if they have to.”
Kohl grabbed a chocolate and munched. “You’re right, they’re not bad. What’s the rest of the plan?”
“That’s where this comes in,” said Nate, emptying the items in the box onto Kohl’s bed. “With these and a little luck we’ll be fine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“YOU CAN’T BE here,” said the Marine, looking down at Hope.
“Okay,” said Hope, not moving. They were standing nowhere near the Tyche. Not by the airlock, not by the docking clamps, because all of that would be obvious. They were was outside the officer’s mess. “Only, I need more stims.”
“Med bay or commissary,” said the Marine. She was a big unit, as far as things went. Bigger by far than Hope’s tiny frame, even with the rig.
“I need good stims,” said Hope. “The ones in the med bay make my teeth hurt.” She leaned against the wall next to the Marine.
“I know, right?” said the Marine. She shrugged muscular shoulders inside her armor.
Hope wanted to touch them, to feel them, but also knew she should focus. Having sex with a Marine would be fun, in alternative circumstances. Thinking about having sex made her think a little bit of Reiko, which wasn’t good for her focus. “I’ll be a minute,” said Hope. “Or, you could go.”
“Do I look like an officer?” said the Marine.
“You look like you could be an officer,” said Hope. She looked down, then back up. “In different clothes.”
“Huh,” said the Marine. She eyed Hope back. “I think I see.”
“Only,” said Hope, brushing pink hair away from her face, “stims.”
“Okay,” said the Marine. “Here’s how you get your stims. Only, you didn’t hear it from me.”
• • •
How to get stims 101: a treatise. Hope rounded the corridors of the Torrington like she should be there. Nate had said it was all in the walk. Don’t look like you’re looking for something. Don’t look like you shouldn’t be there. Don’t look like you don’t know where you are. Walk like you’ve got a purpose, he’d said, and people will just assume it’s true.
It’s a military ship, Hope had said.
They know we’re here, he’d said. Let’s use that to our advantage.
The Marine had directed her to the back of the officer’s mess, where there was an entrance to a small galley. Inside the galley were a bunch of harried-looking chefs, who were — in Hope’s experience — the only people more stressed than starship Engineers. She had a level of sympathy for them based on what was about to come.
Her rig — now she had her visor up, like an Engineer would, when looking for a problem — was highlighting conduits in the ceiling that carried power, fluids, and gasses. She wasn’t interested in any of that, except for when they hit a junction box in a wall. In a wall, not on the wall, which meant she needed to get inside it. The arms of her rig — repaired, shiny and clean — extended out, cutting a hole in the Torrington’s skin. There were a few people walking past — look like you’re meant to be there, look like you’re meant to be there — who she ignored. The panel of metal fell to the deck, the edges still glowing in places with heat. The rig reached into the compartment and began to work.
“Hey,” said a man’s voice, and Hope turned. Uniform. Not armor. Ship’s crew. Hope had no idea what the insignias on the uniform meant. Was this an officer? Someone in charge?
“Hi,” said Hope, not lowering her visor.
“What are you doing?”
“Reports said there’s power fluctuations in this area,” said Hope. “I’m working on it. There’s all kinds of problems in the officer’s galley. Hot is cold, cold is hot if you listen to the chefs. Like that could ever happen.” She threw in what she hoped was a conspiratorial chuckle.
“Power seems fine,” said the uniform, as the lights in that section of the ship went out.
“Fine?” said Hope.
“Get on it, Engineer!” said the uniform.
Hope shrugged, turned back to the hole in the wall, and went back to work. The uniform hurried off. After he’d gone, Hope moved towards the officer’s mess galley.
• • •
Which was chaos. There were cooks running around, in almost total darkness. Hope’s visor helped her see in low light, so she moved through them with a little care. A duck here, a sideways step there, and she was almost where she needed to be: the officer’s mess. She paused in near the doorway leading out there, next to a pile of supplies. Not just any supplies.
Stims. She pocketed a handful, and then on a whim, another handful. It might be a while before she had time for more sleep. Then she stepped into the officer’s mess.
As predicted: chaos here too. No lights, people using portable consoles for illumination, other people moving with busy, officer-like efficiency with no particular place to go and no one to yell at. She needed one thing and she could be done with this.
There. A vacant console. She checked it — locked. She moved to another one. Locked.
Third time she got lucky. That’s all she’d needed, just a little luck. This one was still logged in, holo glowing in the darkness, and Hope sat in front of it. She flipped through the menus, finding the controls for the docking systems on the Torrington. Social hacks were always the best; doing this the hard way would have been much, much trickier.
A little tap here, a small correction there, and voila: the Tyche was no longer under lockdown. And it had all been authorized by the fine Lieutenant Babich. Babich was in for a rough time in about half an hour.
Hope got up, making her way back out through the mess galley, ducking through people still whirling like they’d never seen a whole chicken catch on fire, and made it to the corridor outside. She considered the hole cut in the Torrington, and decided she’d leave it like that. No point in wasting time fixing something someone else would recheck and re-fix anyway. They needed to go get Grace.
; CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AFTER THE CAP and El had gone off to talk sweet love to the Marines at the door, Kohl considered the tray of chocolates and the two things underneath. One was a standard-looking hypo with a yellow fluid inside. The second was a stunner. No laser, maser, or blaster. No. They’d given him, October Kohl, a stunner. When he’d bellyached about it, Nate had said he’d figured on Kohl not needing the stunner at all. A big man like you, things of that nature.
He ate another chocolate. They were pretty good.
Stop putting it off. He picked up the hypo. Fifty-fifty, huh? No problem. He pressed it against his thigh and squeezed the trigger. The hiss of the hypo, but no pain because he was missing pieces of his spine as it injected whatever the hell that yellow gunk was into his leg, and then … nothing.
Hell. They’d said this would hurt. If—
SWEET MOTHER OF CHRIST. He arched his back, fingers curling into claws, mouth wide. It felt like someone had installed a million tiny locusts in his back, all of them hungry. He had a moment to appreciate that feeling anything in his back was a miracle before he convulsed. His legs spasmed, the remains of the chocolates falling to the floor. The machines he was hooked up to started beeping, and an alarm sounded. Kohl wanted to scream. He really did, but he couldn’t. His whole chest was locked up with the pain of it, hands threshing at the covers on his bed. He knocked a machine over, and one tube in his arm was yanked free. It was such a tiny pain he didn’t even register it. Not against the tsunami of agony in his back.
A medtech ran over to him, shouting something about what was in this and what did you do, holding the empty hypo up. Kohl ignored the man, not out of rudeness, but out of pain. He convulsed, and felt foam forming on his lips. His body shook and he fell out of the bed and onto the floor.
• • •
The view from the floor was fine. Cool tiles against his face. Boots coming towards him. He pulled himself towards the stunner which had — perhaps conveniently — fallen to the floor. It was — perhaps inconveniently — on the other side of the bed from where he’d fallen.
At least his back didn’t hurt.
Rough hands hauled him upright. He could feel his feet as they touched the ground. No more lost sensation. That right there was fucken awesome. Kohl had wondered if he’d spend the rest of his days chained to machinery to help him walk, or maybe a replacement set of legs like the captain had. Nate bellyached a whole bunch about that arm and that leg, and from Kohl’s perspective there was something right and wrong at the same time about that. Wrong: sure, having a metal hand might interfere with a few flesh-on-flesh activities. Get in the way. Cramp a man’s style. Right: having a metal hand you could hit people with and not worry about breaking your knuckles? That shit would be priceless.
It depended on your view of how full the glass was. Kohl wasn’t a half-full or half-empty kind of guy. He was a toss-out-the-water-then-fill-it-with-whiskey kind of guy. And what Hope had put in that hypo? Pure whiskey all the way.
It was a kind of whiskey that these damn Marines weren’t expecting. They’d figured on grabbing a cripple off the ground, balling him out some for making them leave their posts, and then that’d be that. Quick assessment: the hands were connected to Marines, two of them, some serious looking motherfuckers packing armor (not powered, which was a mercy) and lasers. All that made sense. Power armor was not just necessary on your own starship; it was a huge pain in the ass. You’d be knocking over your CO and tearing bulkheads off by accident. But your basic, everyday on-duty Marine would want to look the part, so here they were, armor made of a high-strength polymer. Strong, light, take a kinetic round no problem, but also feel the heat of a laser and have nothing to show for it but a little carbon scoring. Your basic Marine also carried a weapon or three. These fine gents looked to be packing a sidearm (difficult to determine the type on account of Kohl’s eyes not working great as they were hauled on past), a knife (and why wouldn’t you?), and a laser carbine. That last made perfect sense, because a blaster might hole your hull, and kinetic rounds were out for the same reason. No stunners, which meant these particular Marines were in a not-fuck-around frame of mind.
It was good to know.
The hands shook Kohl in preparation. Maybe that predicted balling-out, or it could be a beating (although Marines, as a general rule, weren’t that kind of asshole; you didn’t beat on a cripple). Which lead to Kohl’s thing the third: he was covered in various fluids. Some of it was plain ol’ saline from a bag he’d dragged down to the floor with him, rupturing the contents all over himself and the floor. Some of it was vomit, courtesy of Kohl’s own stomach. Half-digested chocolate and bile. Not a winning combination at the best of times. It made Kohl want to get away from himself, and he figured that was why the rough hands were holding him at arm’s length, rather than a secure hold. If Kohl had been doing the holding, he would have cozied on up, maybe put a wrist-lock on, and to hell with concerns over getting covered in another man’s sick. That was just the cost of doing this kind of business.
Kohl let his head loll around, for two reasons. The first was that he wasn’t sure he had the strength to hold it upright, and the second was that it gave him a good excuse to have a look around. He picked out the surroundings. Two Marines, close to him. A medtech of some kind, maybe a doctor, readying some kind of hypo. That would cause problems for someone, and Kohl suspected that someone was Kohl himself. Feeling a little under the weather as he was, Kohl might have just let this one ride out. Let himself be tucked back into his bed, maybe had himself some hospital food and a grope at a passing tech. But the cap said they were leaving. The cap said Gracie was in trouble. The cap had said other crazy stuff too, about the old Emperor and Nate himself being the half-brother of said emperor, but that would keep.
Step one: bust out of jail.
Step two: get on the Tyche.
Step three: go help Gracie.
Step one was the easiest. Kohl had busted out of plenty of jails in his time. In his line of work, a man needed to be accomplished at it. Jail didn’t get you paid. Jail didn’t build good relationships, or strong moral character. Jail was just a place where a man who figured himself your better put a boot on your neck. This particular jail was nice enough in that it was a hospital and the wardens hadn’t shot at him, but that’d change in just a few moments.
Kohl wasn’t sure if he had the strength to move his neck on his shoulders, sure, but he would have to try. He was working his way up to it when the medtech — let’s call the guy a doctor and be done with it — pressed the hypo against Kohl’s arm and fired it. There was a burst of pain, kind of like being punched by a wimp, and whatever-it-was flooded Kohl’s system. He could feel it racing around as his heart, jacked up on adrenaline and the anticipation of a fight, beat like a drum in his chest. This was the point where Kohl expected to lose consciousness, and lose it fast.
That did not happen, to the surprise of all four of them. The doctor, most of all, who looked at the hypo like he’d picked up a child’s toy instead of a medical device by mistake. The Marines as well, who were looking at Kohl, the hypo, and the doctor, in that order. The doctor, give the man his due, was not one to give up on a technicality like my medicine isn’t working, so he pressed the hypo against Kohl again, but his neck this time.
Fire. Hiss. The wimp’s punch, but in the side of the neck this time, which made it almost personal.
Inside Kohl there were some unusual sensations going on. The first was that he felt sluggish, like he’d expect from being dosed with enough meds to knock out a bison, but in miniature. Like Kohl was the bison, and some veterinarian asshole had only dosed him with enough meds to take down a man. The second and more material sensation of the moment was that his blood felt like it was on fire, boiling in his veins, and he screamed again. His fingers tried to claw through his skin like they had minds of their own, because if he could just get the blood out, then it would stop burning so much. The pain was like what had happened in his back, but e
verywhere at once, and he thrashed so much that the Marines lost their grip on Kohl.
Kohl tumbled to the deck, his bed thrown sideways. He landed on his side, which was another mercy, because it stopped his head cracking against the floor. Instead, he got away with a minor strain to his neck, a thing barely above notice. As he lay on the ground, trying to throw up some more, eyes streaming with tears, snot and puke coming out his nose, he saw a miracle.
The stunner. Right next to his face.
This was a good turn of events. He was tired of being injected with a mixture of acid or whatever the hell it was, and he was tired of Marines hauling him around like they owned him. Speaking of that … those rough hands grabbed Kohl’s arms, starting — again — to haul him upright. Because this was expected, right there in the regs, Kohl went with it, but this time he brought the stunner with him, clenched in a fist.
Right here was where reality came intruding on the sphere of expectations held by the two Marines and the doctor. Because the Marine had set Kohl on his feet, and Kohl’s feet had held him. For a man with a severed spinal cord, this was unusual. Unexpected. Surprising, even. While the two Marines did a double-take and the doctor looked at his hypo — again — Kohl lifted the stunner and pressed it against the armored chest of the Marine who’d been doing all the hauling.
The stunner was a long, black tube with a shiny metal tip. Kohl knew, from experience, that the tip housed a set of contacts capable of delivering many, many volts through whatever it touched. It would keep applying those volts, as many as were needed to get through the importance of your actions to your target. The stunner could tell all kinds of things about your target — Hope would know how it worked for sure, but all Kohl cared about was the basic rule: apply pressure to your target until target drops like a stone.
The Marine went stiff, eyes wide, jaw locked, a tiny whimpering noise escaping his lips. A wisp of smoke curled off his armor polymer as the stunner tick-tick-ticked, and then the man dropped to the deck to lie amidst the spilled saline and vomit. The other Marine was raising his laser, and the weapon made it about half-way in the journey from hip to the point-and-die position before Kohl got the stunner on him. The man keened, a high-pitched noise that humans weren’t supposed to make as the stunner emptied a bunch of electricity through the polymer chest-plate and into the chest underneath. This man dropped to join his friend on the deck.
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