Against A Rock

by Kalin Ringkvist

  Her fingers found the card, slipping sideways from the slit on the side of the restraints, and with the tips of two fingers, muscled it into its slot with a sharp and risky jab. The card clicked, and within milliseconds the latches released, and Floreina ripped her hands from behind her, flesh tearing against steel as she forced the restraints unceremoniously open.

  Smierdol’s hand clasped the torch and as her arms swung around the chair, she saw his head pop up and the torch ignite in his hand. He swung toward her. Their hands met and her fingers clasped around his wrist, fingernails digging into his flesh.

  “Neck! Neck!” she coughed, the restraint pulling tight as they struggled.

  The torch twisted and she felt the heat for just a moment against her uniform, a close-range flame heating through the retardant material surprisingly quickly. Her left arm pulled away uncontrollably, and a moment later, she felt Smierdol’s wrist retreating from the remaining clutches of her right hand, sliding easily along the bloody surface.

  And seeing it as her last hope, she slammed her knees closed, her ankles pulling tightly against their restraints. Her right thigh overwhelmed all other sensations, forcing her eyes closed at the worst possible moment.

  She felt Smierdol stagger, his legs missing their coordination for a split second before steadying. However, it was enough to distract him as Floreina gripped Smierdol’s wrist to push the torch toward his face. In the same moment she forced her eyes open to see Smierdol release his grip on the torch and watch it bounce harmlessly off his chest to the floor.

  “Neck! My neck!” she screamed to the slave, but within moments felt him behind her, dragging himself up to shove the card into the slot.

  But the restraint did not release.

  Floreina punched the officer, landing an already bloody fist squarely, however not very powerfully, into Smierdol’s nose. He stepped backward, but again, was only distracted for a moment.

  She heard the satisfying click of the restraint release, and forced herself forward, the cuff swinging open smoothly against her sudden force. Smierdol’s fist passed behind her, his forearm connecting with her head, pushing her momentarily off balance. She came forward, her legs straightening to cause her body to rise as she brought herself downward to drive her forehead into his chest.

  They fell, Floreina dragging him to the floor under her weight and frantic clawing. His body fell outward and hit the grated deck. The ankle restraints gave minutely, but twisted her painfully as she fell atop him, her head bouncing against his thighs. Immediately he began kicking and Floreina pulled away. His knee patch of his uniform brushed against the tip of her nose as she dodged.

  She clawed at his clothing as he struggled to pull away. Her ankles twisted and registered pain as though the bones were about to snap. Gripping his uniform, she pulled, the nanites tingling throughout her arms, no doubt awakened by her final surge of natural adrenaline, and dragged the officer’s body across the floor, just far enough to reach his head. She reached for him, hoping to get a grip of his hair as she felt him doing the same to her. His fingernails grated across her face and she pulled back as his finger, just for a moment, found her eye socket. Ducking around his hand she gave one final, agonizing push forward, grabbing a lump of hair and pounding downward to connect the top of his head with the steel deck plating.

  He continued his fight, again, dazed only for a second, but Floreina wrenched on his hair once more, his body sliding and turning the last little bit before she had the leverage to pull his head upward and slam his cranium conclusively into the deck.

  This time, he fell limp.

  She stared. He blinked and raised his eyes to look at her and calmness seemed to pass over him. “One people…” he whispered, “…under God.”

  She closed her eyes as she drove her hands downward, one final time.

  Her head fell against the grating, her eyes squeezing shut.

  Dear Lord, what is this twisted world you’ve created for me? What have I done to deserve this?

  But resting was out of the question.

  She forced her eyes open and pulled away, dragging herself upward, carefully maneuvering her ankles, and wincing with every move. It took several long moments before she was sitting back in the seat. She paused to feel the room spin and hold back a sudden wave of nausea before turning and looking backward at the slave lying helplessly on the floor, his head resting in a pool of blood and both hands clasping the side of his face. His eyes peered up, the rest of his head remaining stationary.

  The tiny keycard was still clutched between two fingers, distinguishable against the blood by its shape, a tiny rectangle with three rounded corners and a single flat one.

  She reached, twisting her body, and straining her shoulder against the back of the chair. He took several seconds to work up the nerve to move his fingers from his cheek, but managed to reach up and slap the card into the palm of her hand.

  Gripping the tiny card between her fingers, she leaned over to find the slots on each set of ankle restraints. They detached after several fumbling attempts. She stood to run to the table and found her legs faltering beneath her. Leaping toward the table, she fell to her hands and knees, and her body tightened to quell the painful scream. Carefully she rose to her feet.

  She placed each foot with care, wincing with every step. Grabbing the white plastic medical kit, she dragged it across the table to pull it off the edge. She hobbled toward the Minmatar and set the down beside him. He looked up and attempted to adjust himself to bring his face closer, but succeeded only in wincing and trembling.

  Floreina opened the kit, folding its sides out in a complex series of pockets and compartments.

  And she stared at the puzzle before her, as though it were missing pieces to an ancient Jovian mind teaser. Her mind clawed at her implant, demanding answers… what’s this?… what’s that?… how can I seal a cheek wound?

  She stared blankly, as though awaiting an answer from heaven.

  “I don’t—“ she stuttered, “I don’t know what I’m doing…”

  She pulled items out of the kit, staring at each before placing them back again. Taking deep, slow breaths, she calmed herself and thought, making guesses based on things she remembered, and reading labels in a frantic search for something that would give her a clue toward something that could automatically stitch a wound.

  The slave rolled, dragging himself to peer into the med kit and point to a larger device near the bottom, wrapped in a white plastic sanitary sleeve. She tore open the package and a plate fell to her lap, one side with a smooth, concave surface dotted with tiny holes, and the other, a flat white plastic surface with a series of controls and a display panel.

  An emergency nanite surgical plate, she recognized; a control system for nanites and other small drones capable of sealing wounds. But still she looked at it, wondering even how to turn it on. The instructions hung from the plastic packaging, and she pulled them out, smearing the slave’s blood across the tiny lettering.

  But the slave, having training in use of these items, strained his head up and removed his hand from his face just long enough to grab the plate from her lap and drag it to the floor to hover over it. He moved slightly to the side as the blood dripped from his face, and he punched keys on the plate, staggered for a moment and coughed, splattering blood across Floreina’s pants.

  She squinted at the instructions and read about cauterizing and stitching wounds.

  The slave flipped the plate and carefully raised it, removing both hands for the first time to reveal the gash, his cheek open and raw halfway to his throat. He brought the plate to his face and leaned forward.

  And Floreina continued reading, her eyes fluttering back and forth from the page to the slave.

  He whimpered dramatically, but held the device in place. Floreina followed the process, reading along with the instructions, as the miniature robots used their nearly microscopic torches to cauterize the slave’s cheek and lip. She would need to reset some settin
gs when the device got to the stitching stage.

  And from the corner of her eye, she noticed movement.

  She looked up, and watched the mirror along the wall for a long moment, and just before looking back to the instructions and the surgical plate, she saw it again. A barely noticeable ripple seemed to pass through the entire mirror. She blinked and stared, but finally wrote it off as part of a dream from her un-tethered mind.

  The slave faltered and coughed and Floreina saw several of the long legged robots spew from his mouth to land on the floor. Their legs, barely more noticeable than a hair, shook and flailed in confusion.

  Floreina leaned forward and took a hand to steady the plate, allowing him to rest his hand on the floor. She held the plate gently with one hand as she clutched the instructions in the other.

  Just above the little sheet, she saw it again, a ripple passing through the one-way window. She took care not to look up, and simply continued holding.

  But it was still impossible to tell if it was real. With no visual recordings to analyze, or implant feedback, how could anyone tell if things were real or imagined? There’s no solidity to life… like a wandering dream… reality can crumble or be reborn in a heartbeat…

  Her brain flailed and grabbed for a data input that simply wasn’t there, like a blind child in an unfamiliar home.

  The surgical plate beeped its completion of the first phase, and just before she looked down, she saw the ripple again, and this time it seemed to pass through the edge of the window and on into the wall and floor.

  She forced her eyes closed for just a moment before pushing the thoughts from her mind to focus on the readout screen, instructing her to clean the area.

  His wound was cauterized and the bleeding stopped, so she removed the plate to see the gash, a narrow opening revealing his teeth and tonsils through the side of his cheek, the edges now blackened and blistered. The slave sat on his hands and knees, trembling and struggling to stay upright, the last of the blood dripping from his lips.

  As she hobbled toward the sink she brainstormed what to do in this situation, and how to interpret the instructions that were obviously based on simple cuts on a person’s leg or stomach, rather than a wound as sensitive as this.

  And the ripple appeared again, this time throughout the mirror, but ending at the edges… too consistent to be a simple hallucination.

  She came back to find the slave with slightly recovered strength, digging through the med-kit. He removed an auto-syringe and set it on the floor and pulled out a series of drug cartridges, scanning each, dropping the unwanted ones, and finally leaving himself with one that he clumsily shoved into the syringe’s socket. He toppled to the side with a tortured croak and grabbed the syringe and held it to his neck to fire the injection.

  Floreina knelt beside him with a wet towel and a glass of water and assisted as best she could at washing away the blood before placing the surgical plate back on his face and resetting its settings to provide stitching. As the tiny robots worked, the slave groaned from the back of his throat. Floreina looked up several times to see the rippling of the mirror, finally hearing a crack, like a thousand pebbles cascading down a skylight.

  She registered the cracking of the window, one long, vertical slit, barely noticeable, spreading from the center. The surgical bots worked quickly, but as she held the plate to the slave’s face, she watched the crack grow larger and spread outward.

  Finally the bots finished their work, leaving an intricate web of stitching across his cheek. As Floreina removed the plate and shook the used bots from the surface, the slave’s eyes rolled up to look at her. His mouth remained rigid, half-open.

  And Floreina heard voices from a distance… shouting, frantic voices. The crack in the window spread outward, breaking into dozens of tiny fissures.

  The slave finally pulled his eyes from hers, and looked into the med kit, shuffling for some creams and an applicator. He pointed toward the wounds on her leg.

  “No…” Floreina said, looking at the window, imagining her fellow crewmen behind the glass watching their every move. She sighed. “This is it for me…”

  She slid across the floor to grab the precision torch. She flipped the switch to test the flame and watched for a quick moment, before flipping it off again. She handed the torch to the slave, who reluctantly took it, heaving upward, his hand sliding along the blood stained floor.

  “They’re going to break through that window soon,” she said. “When they do, if you’re here, they’ll kill you quickly to get rid of you… I, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky…”

  The voices were louder now and Floreina could nearly make out sayings… no doubt with her implant, she would have had no trouble.

  Dear Lord… I don’t know why you’ve led me here…

  Floreina and the slave gripped the torch together for a long moment, and she shook his hand and released. “I need you to put that to my head…”

  He carefully shook his head.

  “You need to do this for me, son… I’ve come as far as I can go, and this is the only way for me to go out with honor…”

  Dear Lord, thank you for this life… but you have led me down a dark and confusing path, and I don’t understand anymore… I fear I’ve made grave mistakes in your name…

  The slave simply whined, and stared at the torch, as Floreina heard the loud thud of the one-way window being pounded from the inside.

  “There’s not much time.” She took his left hand and brought it to her upper chest, guiding his fingers around her clothing, forcing his knuckles to curl around the turtleneck of her uniform. “You need to hang onto me nice and tight… the torch is going to take a few seconds to kill me, so I can’t do it myself… you’ll need to hold on and keep me from flailing around…”

  Dear Lord, you have given me so many tests… I think it’s time for me to test you…

  “Hold on tight,” she said, pulling his hand to confirm his grip.

  His mouth hung open and motionless and his eyes darted back and forth, finally slowing to stare at Floreina, her uniform clutched tightly in his left hand and the torch in his right, his thumb already on the trigger. However, he looked back on her with a quiver in his eye, and a questioning reluctance.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “There’s no sin in this… I am clearly asking this of you in sound mind and body… I’d do it myself if there were anything lethal in here… I’m just going to get captured again, and more people are going to die… and it’s just not worth it…”

  Lord… this is my life in your hands… if I have betrayed my people and your will, then compel this Minmatar to follow my orders… and, my Lord, accept my apologies for the things I have done… but if I have been true and righteous and if you want me to go on fighting, then compel this slave to follow his conditioning and protect me.

  “I don’t even know my right from wrong anymore…” she mumbled.

  His knuckles slid across her upper chest as he tightened his grip on her uniform and tugged her closer, a wicked gleam crossing his eyes. He put the torch to her head, wiggling to bury the tip under her hair.

  Thank you for this life… It’s been a beautiful experience up until now… I don’t know why you chose to end it like this… but I trust there’s something for me to learn… and I thank you… Lord… for allowing me the privilege of playing this game…

  The slave took a deep breath, his knuckles trembling against her chest, and stared into her eyes.

  And a crash came from the window, and both the slave and Floreina swung their heads to watch shards of glass pull free and drop to the floor, revealing tiny glimpses of officer uniforms. The center of the window bulged, the cracks extending all the way to the far edges, the rippling now replaced by intricate patterns of white crisscrossing cracks.

  “You need to do it now,” Floreina said.

  And the slave whined from the back of his throat, seemingly the only sound he could make. But after several seconds, it faded into
a tortured scream. He shook his head and pulled the torch from Floreina’s scalp. He looked at the device for only a moment before slipping it into Floreina’s shirt pocket. They stared at each other for several seconds, the slave seeming to gauge her anger at his disobedience. He continued clutching her uniform with his left hand, as though unable to make any further choices.

  And Floreina simply stared back.

  But finally he rose, gripping her clothing, and dragged her up, first by the cuff of her neck then clutching the fabric of her sleeve. She stood easily as though gliding on the slave’s guidance.

  “Okay,” she said as she adjusted her clothing. “Have it your way… we need to go. Grab the med kit.” She limped to the hatch as the slave collected items from the case, and she looked up at the window to see it slowly separating from the sides. A tiny gap grew steadily wider, revealing the enraged Amarrians on the other side, pounding on the divider with chair legs.

  Floreina looked back to the slave rummaging through the kit, his calm demeanor suddenly lost as he frantically stuffed supplies back into the case.

  Floreina caught the eye of another officer through the edge of the glass. “Hurry up,” she said. “We need to go.” She put her hand on the keypad, her forefinger hovering impatiently over the first key.

  The slave looked up as the top of the window ripped away from the wall. He gathered the case in his arms as Floreina entered her code. He returned to her side, and Floreina pulled the handle to release the hatch. She threw open the door as she heard the shatter and thud of the window falling to the deck. Stealing a look in their direction, she saw the Amarrians jumping on the counter toward the opening.

  She looked back to the door as she threw it open, her momentum already carrying her through the hatch. But after seeing what crowded before her, her head went back as her legs carried her forward and out from under her.

  Slaves, dressed in their common utility uniforms, carrying weapons of pipes and pry bars. As she fell to the floor, her legs slapped together and her body rolled to the side. The pain forced her eyes closed, and she saw, for a split second, the slaves turning toward her and raising their weapons.