The doctor used scissors to remove the bandages and began cleaning his injuries with an antiseptic that smelled oddly pleasant to Harrison. It was at least a familiar smell. She waved a strange device over the wounds; it reminded him of something from Star Trek. The doctor took a blood sample when she was finished, and then gestured to Gillian.
"She wants Gillian to undress so that she can examine her."
"In front of you?"
"They don't have a nudity taboo here," Geoffrey said.
"It's okay," said Gillian. She quickly undressed and sat on the other side of the bed. The doctor took a blood sample from her and left the room, since Gillian wasn't injured.
"Now what?" Harrison asked.
"Gillian, you can get dressed," said Geoffrey.
"What about me?"
"She'll be back in a minute to work on you."
"Work on me?"
"Fix your injuries."
"Okay." Fix? he thought.
"What is she going to do with the blood sample?" asked Gillian. "I normally don't like to be tested in such a way."
"They're just testing for pathogens."
Gillian sighed. "I still don't like it." She stood and got dressed.
Harrison didn't like it, either, but what was he to do?
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Harrison had been dozing when the doctor rushed back into the room, babbling. She was obviously excited about something, but he had no idea what. She gestured at the wall, and a large screen appeared in the air. It was filled with more of the unreadable text, plus several charts and tables of numbers. The screen impressed Harrison even more than the space armor Geoffrey was wearing, or maybe he was just impressed by each new thing as it occurred.
"So what's up?" he asked.
Geoffrey held up his hand. "Hold on a minute." He listened to the doctor and then turned to Harrison and Gillian. "Okay, you two have some explaining to do." His hand was on the bulky pistol on his hip, and Harrison suddenly felt very vulnerable sitting there naked with only a sheet over him. That armor looked tough.
"What do you mean?"
"She's one of Drake's people, and you have some very peculiar anomalies in your blood."
"Drake's people?" asked Harrison. He looked from Geoffrey to Gillian and back. "What are you talking about?"
"Drake's people? Do you mean Daeren Drake?" said Gillian. "How do you know him?"
"Yes. Who the hell are you?" Geoffrey demanded.
"He is my great-grandfather. There may be an extra great in there – I'm not sure, to be honest. I am Gillian of House Torenvey, if that means anything to you."
"Man, he gets around," Geoffrey muttered. "Yeah, I know Drake. He brought me here. I'm surprised you aren't a redhead, being related to Drake."
"Many of House Torenvey are blond. My grandmother Eliza is a redhead, but then, she is Torenvey by marriage, originally of House Drake. Not even all of that house are redheads, just those descended from Daeren Drake."
"Wow, small multiverse," said Geoffrey. He shook his head. "What about you?" he asked Harrison.
"Me? What about me?"
"What are you?"
"Ah, human, last I checked. What about you?"
Geoffrey took off his helmet. He was blond... and human. At least he looked human. "Your DNA is wonky. You've got a lot weird antibodies, and you share some of the same genetic anomalies as Gillian."
Harrison frowned. "How can that be?"
"You tell me."
"Look, I'm John Michael Harrison, USSOCOM. I'm from an Earth that's in the year twenty fifteen, or at least it was the last time I was there. I was born in Tennessee. I look like both my parents. So I know I'm completely human. What do you mean, anomalies?"
Geoffrey talked to the doctor for a few minutes before replying. "Have you ever had a transfusion? How about an experimental vaccine?"
"I'm Special Ops; I've been given blood a lot. The only transfusion I ever had was from my friend Michael Delling, back on my Earth. I did get a weird vaccine on one of the Earths I visited. I'd been exposed to some kind of weird zombie plague."
"Zombie plague?"
"Hold on." Harrison dug out his notebook and flipped through it. "Yeah, here it is. The newspapers were dated 2017, but the woman I met there said that it had been a year or so since the war. There were plagues. The worst of them turned people into something she called ferals."
"Jesus," Geoffrey exclaimed. "You might have been on my Earth."
"Your Earth?" Gillian asked, her voice heavy with suspicion.
"The Earth I'm from," Geoffrey clarified. "You said you got a vaccine there?"
"Yeah. Let me see," Harrison said, reading his notebook. "Hmm... Weird."
"What?"
"She got the vaccine from another JMC, like mine, but she attributed it to a Saint Drake."
Geoffrey snorted. "Drake is a lot of things, but he isn't a saint."
"You seem very familiar with my ancestor," said Gillian. She didn't sound pleased.
"He's a good friend," Geoffrey said. "Been like an uncle to me since we met a five or six years ago. Like I said, he brought me here. I no doubt know him better than you do. As for the vaccine, I guess that would explain the anomalies. Say, you didn't pick up Raven there, did you?"
"No, I met him later. Why?"
"He reminds me of a friend from back home. A non-local. No matter."
The doctor said something to him, and he nodded and stepped back.
"The doctor wants to get to work on you."
"What does that mean?"
"She says you have two gunshot wounds and four broken ribs. She wants to fix them."
"Tell her to go for it," Harrison replied. He lay back in the bed, and the doctor gave him an injection. The pillow reminded him of memory foam. It felt nice. The doctor wrapped the wounds on his arm and leg with things that looked and felt like gel-filled cool packs. She placed a larger one over his ribs. She gave Gillian a similar injection and then left the room. Harrison pulled at the packs, but they seemed to be adhered somehow.
"You should be healed in a few hours," Geoffrey told him.
"No shit?"
"Yeah, they're really good at fixing minor injuries here."
They didn't feel minor to Harrison. "How are they attached?"
"I could tell you, but you probably don't want to know. Just suffice it to say that they will come off with no problems when you're healed."
Harrison wasn't sure what to make of that. "Okay, what about the injection?"
"They use an advanced nanotechnology here to fight diseases. She gave you both a dose that will protect you from just about anything for a few months."
"I already had something like that," said Harrison.
"Yes, she said you had some primitive nanotech in your blood. This is much better. It will remove the old stuff as it works."
"Cool." He lay back and rested. It had been a long couple of weeks. It felt good just to lay on a soft bed with a nice pillow and not have to worry.
Chapter Sixty
Harrison was surprised when the sergeant came back with Deegan a few hours later. Surprised because she was out of armor and also a giant cat. Mostly because she was a giant cat. At least she looked as much like a cat as a human looked like a lemur. Which really wasn't all that much, once he thought about it. For some reason, he'd always thought aliens would be smaller than humans. The sergeant was wearing a jumpsuit and didn't look particularly female. She had scary teeth and claws.
She and Geoffrey stepped outside the exam room to talk privately, which seemed strange, since Harrison didn't know the language.
"How are you feeling?" Deegan asked him.
"Fine," he replied. "Great, actually." His wounds were healed, with only faint scars remaining, and his ribs didn't hurt anymore. Even his bruises had faded. The packs had just fallen off after they'd done their work. Weird. "How are the others?"
"They're fine," said Deegan. "They're going to stay here on the station during our ope
ration to clear out the JRC. They aren't really fighters. Gillian, what do you want to do?"
"I'll go where Michael goes."
Harrison squeezed her hand.
"Okay," Deegan said. "I've talked to Commander K'liva, and she's loaning us a platoon of Marines for the operation. Geoffrey Meeks will also be coming along. The sergeant would, but she wouldn't fit in the corridors at the JRC."
"No, she wouldn't," Harrison agreed. "How big is a platoon here?"
"Five squads of ten."
"Wouldn't it be good to have somebody along who knows the layout of the JRC?"
"I've been there," Deegan said. "Also, the Marines have the tech to map it when we arrive."
"Cool. They have a way for me to see that map?" asked Harrison.
"Yes," Geoffrey said as he came back in. He handed Harrison a small PDA-sized device. "I'll upload the map once they scan the facility. Any idea what kind of resistance we'll encounter?"
Harrison shrugged. "Most of the people I encountered there weren't combatants. I don't know how many troops they had. We fought a couple dozen to get out. A few dozen more followed us out of the Door to the place where we met Gillian, but they ran into the Urkenze. I don't know how many were killed. Only a few were sent after Simone."
Deegan did his disappearing act. Geoffrey didn't seem bothered by it.
"Urkenze?" he asked.
"Universe-hopping fascist bugs."
"Okay, I'll file that one away." Geoffrey looked disturbed. "Do you need weapons?"
"We'll stick to ours, thanks," Harrison said. "I don't like to use a weapon I'm not familiar with."
"I've found a place to access the JRC," Deegan said as he reappeared. "There's a Waypoint on Steinway."
"How can there be Waypoints out here, this far from Earth?" Gillian asked.
Deegan smiled. "Sorry, I don't give up all my secrets."
"So you want us to use Raven's Door device?" asked Harrison.
"I could never move everyone who is going to the JRC. This way, we can open a Door and let them walk there."
"How do we get down to the surface?"
"I'll take us down. The Marines will follow in the shuttles and meet us there. Actually," he said, cocking his head, "they have already left."
"Then I suppose we should be on our way," Harrison said.
Raven met them as they came out of the exam room. "I'm going with you."
"You don't have to," said Deegan. "We can handle this."
"I owe that thing some payback."
Harrison clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, then. How's the leg?"
"Doing great, actually. I was a little skeptical at first, but they really know their stuff here. You?"
"Well. Very well."
"Do you have what you need, Geoffrey?" asked Deegan.
Geoffrey picked up a large rifle from next to the door, then put on his helmet. "I do now."
"Good. The rest of you, prepare yourselves. The planet has slightly higher gravity, and it's cold. We'll be arriving far in the south. There's currently a blizzard there."
"Let's go," said Harrison.
The now-familiar vertigo swept over him, and he shivered in the cold, damp air as they arrived. At least twenty centimeters of snow lay on the ground, and so much was blowing around that he could barely see anything. Harrison thought he could see some stone ruins poking out of the snow to their left. There was no visible vegetation.
Deegan led them toward the ruins.
They were suddenly blasted with snow as the five shuttles came in for a vertical landing around the ruins. Ramps opened to the aft, and ten Marines double-timed it out of each shuttle. Harrison was surprised to see that they were wearing what looked like spacesuits with some kind of mesh over the fabric. He'd expected them to be wearing armor like Geoffrey's.
Deegan gestured to a stone archway. "Try the Door device," he yelled over the wind.
Raven raised the device, and suddenly there was a glowing doorway in the arch.
"Let me go first," Geoffrey said. He stepped forward and was gone.
Harrison met Gillian's eyes and shrugged. Geoffrey was certainly the best armored. Harrison thought of what a few suits of armor like that would do to change the balance of power back home. It was almost frightening.
Geoffrey reappeared and waved them though.
Harrison kept his guard up as he stepped through the Door.
The room he arrived in was barren except for the machines. It could have been the one he'd gone through before, or one of the others. He had no way of knowing. He moved to guard the exit to the rest of the facility as the Marines filed through the Door. He wondered what they must be thinking. Maybe they do this shit all the time.
Gillian joined him. "They look pretty good."
He shrugged. "I'd like to see them fight before I start praising them."
"They didn't have to help us."
Harrison sighed. "I know. I just wish I knew what kind of deal Deegan made with them. Nobody is that altruistic."
"You are."
"I'm hardly normal."
"Well, I like you the way you are."
"Thank you, ma'am."
Raven closed the Door once the last Marine was through. One of the Marines began setting up a strange-looking device on a tripod. Harrison couldn't tell what it was, but he assumed it had something to do with mapping the facility.
"You doing okay?" Deegan asked as he walked over.
"Yeah. I just wish I knew what we were going to do here. To tell the truth, the lack of alarms has me a little worried. Somebody has to know we aren't JRC troops."
"You suspect an ambush?"
"Always."
The Marine by the scanner called something, and Geoffrey replied. Then he yelled to Harrison, "The map is finished."
Harrison dug the map device out of his pocket and activated it. It projected a three-dimensional map of the JRC into the air. The place did remind Harrison of the JMC. It was a little larger than he remembered, but the JMC was fairly big, and he hadn't seen all of it. There was easily room for thousands of personnel. Somehow, the map was showing little moving dots that he assumed represented people in the facility. There weren't as many as he'd thought there would be.
"How do I use this thing?" he asked.
"What do you want to know?" Geoffrey said as he came over.
"I'd like to zoom and rotate."
"Like this." Geoffrey gestured with his hand, and the map turned. He put his fingers together, pointed at a spot on the map, and the spread them. The map zoomed in there. "Same in reverse to zoom out."
"Got it." Harrison played with the map a little and zoomed in on a spot near the center of the facility. It was marked with a large dot. "What is that?"
Geoffrey shrugged, an odd gesture in armor. "The scanner reads a large lifeform there, but no more information than that. Sorry. They don't use this old tech much. They usually have a ship in orbit do a detailed scan."
"Yeah, how do they get by with this rubbish?" It was the most impressive tech Harrison had ever seen. "I'm guessing that the center of the map is where our big bad boss is going to be."
"I'll tell the Marines to move out and clear us a path."
"Tell them not everyone is the enemy," Raven said suddenly. "There are a lot of non-military people here who don't have anything to do with the thing running the place."
"I'll tell them," Geoffrey said. "They wouldn't fire on non-combatants anyway. We aren't the Federation."
Harrison could tell that Geoffrey was still irritated about Raven asking if his people were the Federation. He wondered why.
Chapter Sixty-one
The JRC troops hadn't stood a chance, Harrison thought as they made their way to the center of the installation. There weren't a lot of bodies, but none of them were the Marines who had come from the Concord. The JRC troops and personnel who tried to resist had been cut down without mercy. Most of them looked as if they had been cooked, maybe with a laser or something. It wasn't pr
etty, and the smell was terrible: overcooked ham, iron, and raw sewage. It was the stench of war, and it always bothered him.
A few of the rooms they passed held unhappy-looking people kneeling on the floor with their hands on their heads. A squad of Marines guarded each group of prisoners. Occasionally a squad marched a group by. Harrison wondered where they were taking them. He could distantly hear gunshots and screams and the sharp snap of the Marines' laser rifles.
"What kind of defenses can we expect in the center?" Harrison asked Raven. Raven looked like he might be ill. He certainly wasn't as used to carnage as Harrison was. Strangely, Gillian and Deegan didn't look bothered at all. He wondered what that meant about them, what they had been through. Geoffrey's expression was hidden by his faceless helmet, but Harrison suspected he'd seen worse.
"I wish I knew," Raven replied. "If it's the kind of thing I think it may be, it could be anything. Cassandra was a monster, and I'm not being metaphorical. She was terrible to behold. They can make you see whatever they want."
"If it is one of the enemy," said Deegan, "Geoffrey or I will take care of it. Don't despair."
"I'm not prone to," Harrison replied. He suddenly thought of the enemy commander back in the farm world. There had been something about him that was disturbing. So maybe Deegan wasn't being condescending.
"You speak of this enemy as if you knew a lot about them," Gillian said to Deegan.
"I do, and I would rather not discuss it here, at this time. Ask Drake, if you ever see him again. Maybe he will tell you more about it."
"I'd rather not have to fight that which I know nothing about."
"You won't have to."
Raven snorted and pushed past them. Harrison thought Raven might be a little too emotionally involved to be safe, but he didn't say anything. Sometimes a man needed to get revenge to exact justice. Harrison hadn't been without emotion when he'd attacked the original enemy from next door to his Earth. In fact, he'd needed a bit of revenge himself for the friends he'd lost.
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