“Here we go,” Fiona said, and hit the thrusters. The force of the acceleration pinned me back into the copilot’s seat. No longer falling to the surface of Coral, we were aiming ourselves directly at it.
“Chop coming,” Fiona said as we plunged into the atmosphere. The shuttle rattled like a maraca.
The instrumentation board let out a ping. “Active scanning,” I said. “We’re being tracked.”
“Got it,” Fiona said, banking. “We have some high clouds coming up in a few seconds,” she said. “They might help to confuse them.”
“Do they usually?” I asked.
“No,” she said, and flew into them anyway.
We came out several klicks east and were pinged again. “Still tracking,” I said. “Aircraft 350 klicks out and closing.”
“Going to get as close to the ground as I can before they get on top of us,” she said. “We can’t outrace them or outshoot them. The best we can hope is to get near the ground and hope some of their missiles hit the treetops and not us.”
“That’s not very encouraging,” I said.
“I’m not in the encouragement business today,” Fiona said. “Hold on.” We dove sickeningly.
The Rraey aircraft were on us presently. “Missiles,” I said. Fiona lurched left and tumbled us toward the ground. One missile over-flew and trailed away; the other slammed into a hilltop as we crested.
“Nice,” I said, and then nearly bit off my tongue as a third missile detonated directly behind us, knocking the shuttle out of control. A fourth missile concussed and shrapnel tore into the side of the shuttle; in the roaring of the air I could hear some of my men screaming.
“Going down,” Fiona said, and struggled to right the shuttle. She was headed toward a small lake at an incredibly high speed. “We’re going to hit the water and crash,” she said. “Sorry.”
“You did good,” I said, and then the nose of the shuttle hit the surface of the lake.
Wrenching, tearing sounds as the nose of the shuttle ripped downward, shearing off the pilot’s compartment from the rest of the shuttle. A brief register of my squad and Alan’s as their compartment flies spinning away—a still shot with mouths open, screams silent in all the other noise, the roar as it flies over the shuttle nose that is already fraying apart as it whirls over the water. The tight, impossible spins as the nose sheds metal and instrumentation. The sharp pain of something striking my jaw and taking it away with it. Gurgling as I try to scream, gray SmartBlood flung from the wound by centrifugal force. An unintentional glance at Fiona, whose head and right arm are somewhere behind us.
A tang of metal as my seat breaks off from the rest of the pilot’s compartment and I am skipping on my back toward an outcropping of rock, my chair lazily spinning me in counterclockwise direction as my chair back bounces, bounces, bounces toward the stone. A quick and dizzying change in momentum as my right leg strikes the outcropping followed by a yellow-white burst of two-hundred-proof pain as the femur snaps like a pretzel stick. My foot swings directly up where my jaw used to be and I become perhaps the first person in the history of man to kick himself in his own uvula. I arc over dry land and come to ground somewhere where branches are still falling because the passenger compartment of the shuttle has just crashed through. One of the branches comes down heavily across my chest and breaks at least three of my ribs. After kicking myself in my own uvula, this is strangely anticlimactic.
I look up (I have no choice) and see Alan above me, hanging upside down, the splintered end of a tree branch supporting his torso by wedging itself into the space where his liver should be. SmartBlood is dripping off his forehead onto my neck. I see his eyes twitch, registering me. Then I get a message on my BrainPal.
You look terrible—he sends.
I can’t respond. I can only stare.
I hope I can see the constellations where I’m going—he sends. He sends it again. He sends it again. He doesn’t send it after that.
Chittering. Rough pads gripping my arm. Asshole recognizes the chittering and beams me a translation.
—This one yet lives.
—Leave it. It will die soon. And the green ones aren’t good eating. They’re not ripe yet.
Snorting, which Asshole translates as [laughter].
“Holy fuck, would you look at this,” someone says. “This son of a bitch is alive.”
Another voice. Familiar. “Let me see.”
Silence. The familiar voice again. “Get this log off him. We’re taking him back.”
“Jesus Christ, boss,” the first voice says. “Look at him. You ought to just put a fucking bullet in his brain. It’d be the merciful thing to do.”
“We were told to bring back survivors,” the familiar voice says. “Guess what, he survived. He’s the only one that survived.”
“If you think this qualifies as surviving.”
“Are you done?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Now move the goddamn branch. The Rraey are going to be on our ass real soon.”
Opening my eyes is like trying to lift metal doors. What allows me to do it is the blasting pain I feel as the branch is moved off my torso. My eyes fly open and I aspirate in the jawless equivalent of a scream.
“Christ!” the first voice says, and I see it’s a man, blond, flinging away the massive branch. “He’s awake!”
A warm hand on the side of what’s left of my face. “Hey,” the familiar voice says. “Hey. You’re all right now. It’s okay. You’re safe now. We’re taking you back. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Her face comes into view. I know the face. I was married to it. Kathy has come for me.
I weep. I know I’m dead. I don’t mind.
I begin to slide away. “You ever see this guy before?” I hear the blond guy ask. “Don’t be stupid,” I hear Kathy say. “Of course not.” I’m gone.
Into another universe.
PART III
THIRTEEN
“Oh, you’re awake,” someone said to me as I opened my eyes. “Listen, don’t try to speak. You’re immersed in solution. You’ve got a breathing tube in your neck. And you don’t have a jaw.”
I glanced around. I was floating in a bath of liquid, thick, warm and translucent; beyond the tub I could see objects but couldn’t focus on any of them. As promised, a breathing tube snaked from a panel at the side of the bath toward my neck; I tried to follow it all the way to my body, but my field of vision was blocked by an apparatus surrounding the lower half of my head. I tried to touch it, but I couldn’t move my arms. That worried me.
“Don’t worry about that,” the voice said. “We’ve turned off your ability to move. Once you’re out of the tub, we’ll switch you back on again. Another couple of days. You still have access to your BrainPal, by the way. If you want to communicate, use that. That’s how we’re talking to you right now.”
Where the fuck am I—I sent. And what happened to me—
“You’re at the Brenneman Medical Facility, above Phoenix,” the voice said. “Best care anywhere. You’re in intensive care. I’m Dr. Fiorina, and I’ve been taking care of you since you got here. As for what happened to you, well, let’s see. First off, you’re in good shape now. So don’t worry. Having said that, you lost your jaw, your tongue, most of your right cheek and ear. Your right leg was snapped off halfway down your femur; your left one suffered multiple fractures and your left foot was missing three toes and the heel—we think those were gnawed off. The good news there was that your spinal cord was severed below the rib cage, so you probably didn’t feel much of that. Speaking of ribs, six were broken, one of which punctured your gallbladder, and you suffered general internal bleeding. Not to mention sepsis and a host of other general and specific infections brought on by having open wounds for days.”
I thought I was dead—I sent. Dying, anyway—
“Since you’re no longer in real danger of dying, I think I can tell that by all rights, you really should be dead,” Dr. Fiorina sa
id. “If you were an unmodified human, you would be dead. Thank your SmartBlood for keeping you alive; it clotted up before you could bleed out and kept your infections in check. It was a close thing, though. If you hadn’t been found when you were, you probably would have been dead shortly after that. As it was, when they got you back to the Sparrowhawk they shoved you into a stasis tube to get you here. They couldn’t do much for you on the ship. You needed specialized care.”
I saw my wife—I sent. She was the one who rescued me—
“Is your wife a soldier?”
She’s been dead for years—
“Oh,” said Dr. Fiorina. Then, “Well, you were pretty far gone. Hallucinations aren’t that unusual at that point. The bright tunnel and dead relatives and all of that. Listen, Corporal, your body still needs a lot of work, and it’s easier for it to get done while you’re asleep. There’s nothing for you to do in there but float. I’m going to put you into sleep mode again for a while. The next time you wake up, you’ll be out of the tub, and enough of your jaw will have grown back for you to have a real conversation. All right?”
What happened to my squad—I sent. We were in a crash—
“Sleep now,” Dr. Fiorina said. “We can talk more when you’re out of the tub.”
I started to craft a truly irritated response but was hit by a wave of fatigue. I was out before I could think about how quickly I was going out.
“Hey, look who’s back,” this new voice said. “The man too dumb to die.”
This time I wasn’t floating in a vat of goo. I glanced over and made out where the voice was coming from.
“Harry,” I said, as well as I could through an immobile jaw.
“The same,” he said, bowing slightly
“Sorry I can’t get up,” I mumbled. “I’m a little banged up.”
“‘A little banged up,’ he says,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Christ on a pony. There was more of you missing than was there, John. I know. I saw them haul your carcass back up off of Coral. When they said you were still alive my jaw dropped to the floor.”
“Funny,” I said.
“Sorry,” Harry said. “No pun intended. But you were almost unrecognizable, John. A mess of parts. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I prayed you would die. I couldn’t imagine they could piece you back together like this.”
“Glad to disappoint you,” I said.
“Glad to be disappointed,” he said, and then someone else entered the room.
“Jesse,” I said.
Jesse came around the bed and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Welcome back to the land of the living, John,” she said, and then stepped back. “Look at us, together again. The three musketeers.”
“Two and a half musketeers, anyway,” I said.
“Don’t be morbid,” Jesse said. “Dr. Fiorina says you’re going to make a full recovery. Your jaw should be completely grown by tomorrow, and the leg will be another couple days after that. You’ll be skipping around in no time.”
I reached down and felt my right leg. It was all there, or at least felt all there. I pulled back the bedcovers to get a better look, and there it was: my leg. Sort of. Right below the knee, there was a verdant welt. Above the welt my leg looked like my leg; below it, it looked like a prosthesis.
I knew what was going on. One of my squad had her leg blown off in battle and had it re-created in the same way. They attached a nutrient-rich fake limb at the point of amputation, and then injected a stream of nanobots into the merge area. Using your own DNA as a guide, the nanobots then convert the nutrients and raw materials of the fake limb into flesh and bone, connecting to already-existing muscles, nerves, blood vessels and so on. The ring of nanobots slowly moved down the fake limb until it had been converted into bone and muscle tissue; once they were done, they migrated through the bloodstream to the intestines and you shat them out.
Not very delicate, but a good solution—there was no surgery, no wait to create cloned parts, no clumsy artificial parts attached to your body. And it took only a couple of weeks, depending on the size of your amputation, to get the limb back. It was how they got back my jaw and, presumably, the heels and toes of my left foot, which were now all present and accounted for.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“You’ve been in this room for about a day,” Jesse said. “You were in the tub for about a week before that.”
“It took us four days to get here, during which time you were in stasis—did you know about that?” Harry asked. I nodded. “And it was a couple of days before they found you on Coral. So you’ve been out of it more or less for two weeks.”
I looked at both of them. “I’m glad to see both of you,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. But why are you here? Why aren’t you on the Hampton Roads?”
“The Hampton Roads was destroyed, John,” Jesse said. “They hit us right as we were coming in from our skip. Our shuttle barely got out of the bay and damaged its engines on the way out. We were the only ones. We drifted for almost a day and a half before the Sparrowhawk found us. Came real close to asphyxiation.”
I recalled watching as a Rraey ship slugged a cruiser on its way in; I wondered if it had been the Hampton Roads. “What happened to the Modesto?” I asked. “Do you know?”
Jesse and Harry looked at each other. “The Modesto went down, too,” Harry said, finally. “John, they all went down. It was a massacre.”
“They can’t all have gone down,” I said. “You said you were picked up by the Sparrowhawk. And they came to get me, too.”
“The Sparrowhawk came later, after the first wave,” Harry said. “It skipped in far away from the planet. Whatever the Rraey used to detect our ships missed it, although they caught on after the Sparrowhawk parked itself above where you went down. That was a close thing.”
“How many survivors?” I asked.
“You were the only one off the Modesto,” Jesse said.
“Other shuttles got away,” I said.
“They were shot down,” Jesse said. “The Rraey shot down everything bigger than a bread box. The only reason our shuttle survived was that our engines were already dead. They probably didn’t want to waste the missile.”
“How many survivors, total?” I said. “It can’t just be me and your shuttle.”
Jesse and Harry stood mute.
“No fucking way,” I said.
“It was an ambush, John,” Harry said. “Every ship that skipped in was hit almost as soon as it arrived in Coral space. We don’t know how they did it, but they did it, and they followed through by mopping up every shuttle they could find. That’s why the Sparrowhawk risked us all to find you—because besides us, you’re the only survivor. Your shuttle is the only one that made it to the planet. They found you by following the shuttle beacon. Your pilot flipped it on before you crashed.”
I remembered Fiona. And Alan. “How many were lost?” I asked.
“Sixty-two battalion-strength cruisers with full crews,” Jesse said. “Ninety-five thousand people. More or less.”
“I feel sick,” I said.
“This was what you’d call a good, old-fashioned clusterfuck,” Harry said. “There’s no doubt about that at all. So that’s why we’re still here. There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
“Well, that and they keep interrogating us,” Jesse said. “As if we knew anything. We were already in our shuttle when we were hit.”
“They’ve been dying for you to recover enough to talk to,” Harry said to me. “You’ll be getting a visit from the CDF investigators very soon, I suspect.”
“What are they like?” I asked.
“Humorless,” Harry said.
“You’ll forgive us if we’re not in the mood for jokes, Corporal Perry,” Lieutenant Colonel Newman said. “When you lose sixty ships and one hundred thousand men, it pretty much leaves you in a serious state of mind.”
All I had said was “broken up,” when Newman asked how I was doing. I thought a slightly
wry recognition of my physical condition was not entirely out of place. I guess I was wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Although I wasn’t really joking. As you may know, I left a rather significant portion of my body on Coral.”
“How did you get to be on Coral, anyway?” asked Major Javna, who was my other interviewer.
“I seem to remember taking the shuttle,” I said, “although the last part I did on my own.”
Javna glanced over to Newman, as if to say, Again with the jokes. “Corporal, in your report on the incident, you mention you gave your shuttle pilot permission to blow the Modesto shuttle bay doors.”
“That’s right,” I said. I had filed the report the night before, shortly after my visit from Harry and Jesse.
“On whose authority did you give that command?”
“On my own,” I said. “The Modesto was getting hammered with missiles. I figured that a little individual initiative at that point in time would not be such a bad thing.”
“Are you aware how many shuttles were launched across the entire fleet at Coral?”
“No,” I said. “Although it seems to have been very few.”
“Less than a hundred, including the seven from the Modesto,” Newman said.
“And do you know how many made it to the Coral surface?” Javna said.
“My understanding is that only mine made it that far,” I said.
“That’s right,” Javna said.
“So?” I said.
“So,” Newman said, “that seems to have been pretty lucky for you that you ordered the doors blown just in time to get your shuttle out just in time to make it to the surface alive.”
I stared blankly at Newman. “Do you suspect me of something, sir?” I said.
“You have to admit it’s an interesting string of coincidences,” Javna said.
“The hell I do,” I said. “I gave the order after the Modesto was hit. My pilot had the training and the presence of mind to get us to Coral and close enough to the ground that I was able to survive. And if you recall, I only barely did so—most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island. The only lucky thing was that I was found before I died. Everything else was skill or intelligence, either mine or my pilot’s. Excuse me if we were trained well, sir.”