He pulled up menus from her internal control systems and ran diagnostics to make sure she wasn’t going to go mad or suffer any permanent physical damage from his attack. Even now, her internals were fighting to block off the flashing lights and blaring music the market ran all-shifts. He locked down some of her more aggressive counter measures, then began to dismantle her [something that takes awhile to do]..
A cold hard touch at the back of his neck, right over his plug constellation.
Oh, yeah. Her partner. The one we thought was gone.
“Disengage and stand up, slowly,” came the soft command. Male. Desperate.
Kean wobbled as he got to his feet. He raised his arms and splayed his fingers, showing he had no physical weapons. Twice he tried to turn his head, but a grunted cough stopped him each time, each hack cut from sickness and surety.
“You sound as bad as your sis,” Kean said to the empty air. “I could help, you give me a chance.”
The cold spot came back, lower down, angled to blow out his heart as well as his spine.
“We knew we were not long for this world when we took the shots. Nobody up and made us. Just our own selves.” His dry voice rustled, each word dragged up from the sharp dust and nailed there. His body, Kean thought, eating itself.
Vasquez was a dead man, but enough of him remained to pull Kean down the long slide into darkness. His eyes glittered feral-bright when Kean manage to turn his head enough to get a glimpse of the now-dessicated face, collapsing inwards with each breath.
“Still, I can help.”
“Help us over the edge, you mean. Help us to die.”
“If it takes that, but the ship has suspense pods. Take just a little tweak to make ‘em keep you and your sister alive ‘til they can get that stuff outta you.”
There was a pause, and the spot wandered. Finally: “Truth?”
“As much as can be, this far from a regen center. Maybe yes, maybe no. Most people would be dead long ago, so maybe yes for you two. I like your odds.” I looked out the corner of one eye. Then from the perspective of a drone – the small ones from the Avaent were making their appearance at last. Diego Ovalo was a scarecrow, the hypermuscle having eaten him down to skin and bone, and past that into a kind of walking starvation.
He saw the drones swarm towards us, and he looked at me. Then he removed the gun and slumped to his knees, tired and unwilling to fight. I unslung my medical bag, such as it was, and brushed his neck with hypos.
**
[Mercado get his merch back and could let it go but he can’t, he just can’t. He has to push for that little extra pound of flesh or something else. Something horrible. Up until then, Lasher is mostly in his corner, even if she doesn’t much like the taste of it. But this Terrible Thing pushes her over the edge. She walks away from the job with her people, but vengeance is coming. Later. Cold as the Big Black itself.]
[I think I have to redo this in first person]
She walked us out of that lion’s den with a roll in her walk and a glint in her eye, but I knew she had marked Mercado. He had gone that extra mile, alright, done what he felt he needed to do to secure his place and his people, and more.
I knew there would be a reckoning.
Sure as shootin’.
**
The infirmary was cold and dark, full of the stink that old meat and sterilfoam(™) makes when you put them together. Two of our four suspend chambers were in supine position; they looked like massive caplets, the grey medical foam concealing the ruined bodies inside. It made the normally crowded room even closer.
I stood inside the medical holo field created by the nanofoam, watching my bosses be taken apart. The highlighted and color-coded animations made the devastating injuries look almost cartoonish. Inside the opaque capsules, hair-thin probes formed from the foam slowly sought out and realigned splintered bone and flaps of flesh. Several critical ounces lay splashed on various surfaces back at the dive bar where she and Taylor had been ambushed. Cloned replacements were being fast-grown somewhere in the bowels of the ship. Blood and fluids were synthesized. More than one account spun towards zero.
In some corner of her consciousness, I was sure Captain Bede Lasher railed and spat at the sheer cost of resurrecting herself.
I gestured. The field responded, and showed me greatly-enlarged scans of current work being done; an optic nerve re-attach in Lasher and a torn artery in Taylor. More gestures. The medical dashboard showed me all the work that needed to be done, ranked in terms of time and cost. Neither were our friends in this case, not here. We’d come to New Cyprus to do a simple delivery, nothing to do with the Avaent’s normal business. It had found us, anyway.
[You need sleep] sent LCY. I saw it as text in the ships augmented reality layer. [You are beginning to make mistakes.]
I shook my head. “Not yet, Lucy.”
[I have logged nine minor errors in judgement over the last two hundred minutes. None regarding the patients. So far.]
LCY was capable of knocking me out on my feet if it came to that, just by overriding my own internal wares, and she’d do it, too, if my behavior fell into that broad and vague swath called ‘endangering the ship and/or crew’. I took a deep breath and tried to focus. “Yeah, well, maybe the Captain should have sprung for an actual doctor,” I said as I checked Taylor’s dashboard. “I’ll get some sleep right after I handle a few minor things.”
Technically, Taylor was not as bad off. No head shot. His lungs would need to be completely rebuilt, though, and that takes longer than you might think. This was not the first or even third major trauma for either of them, but it was one of the worst according to the ship’s records.
I kept busy. I checked and rechecked various stores and levels of things we’d need, projecting out worst-case scenarios in case this batch of tissue failed to thrive or that part failed to take hold. Some of them were grim indeed. The bottom-line worst one involved me selling one of the engine cores to cover costs.
I factored in the transport fee I’d need to give myself a good running start if it came to that, even as I knew it would not be enough. Between them, Lasher and Taylor are the best bounty hunters this side of the Coal Sack. Skip-tracing a rabbiting engineer cum nursemaid would be no trouble, sure as shootin’.
I talked to the Avaent, let her know things would be quiet for some time, but there were still things to be done even sitting still in dock. Normally LCY would handle the mundane tasks but for now she was handling the med bay functions as well as aiding and shepherding the medical intelligences I’d rented. I’d learned enough to patch the occasional gunshot, but Lasher’d hired me as an engineer, not a doctor.
That left me running oversight for the dumb machines, and Lord knows they needed looking after. I double- and triple-checked everything they did to make sure they didn’t make a bad situation worse. The cargo handlers had a tendency to wander. The comm systems liked to chatter. Lasher’s headware normally held them in tight check, but all her surviving systems were either offline or aiding in her repair. I have my own internals but naturally they were oriented towards, say, monitoring the power plant or coolant levels. Under the emergency protocols, I had almost full control right now, admin rights to everything but the self-destruct charges.
I had been running on stims for the past twenty hours, ever since they were brought in, and only now was I entertaining the thought of actual sleep. The latest dose was wearing off but I still had to make sure the bioprinter filters were clean, and check the latest Port news, and…
[Visitors] said one of the security subsystems into my increasingly fuzzy headspace. I changed course and headed for the main door that opened off the cargo bay. I’d already dealt with the Port authorities… yesterday? Maybe? Video feed from the door showed me three lean hard-bodied men and women in close black going-to-a-funeral suits. All three aped the look of former soldiers.
Aw, come on! Government types? Here? This place was barely big enough for a government, much less a government that could afford people to harass innocent shipholders.
I keyed the cargo lock and stepped over the descending doors. “Look, I have no idea—”
Quicker than a snake, the nearest woman reached out and stroked my temple with her middle three fingers.
I was asleep before I hit the deck.
The Blank Spot On The Map 