S Hunter: Longevity

He stepped over the body and headed for the bedroom, to check on Jesse.

Feeling a dull but receding pain, Livvy woke up slowly with a nightmare still in mind, and she grasped at it before it receded beyond memory. It was a true one, and she started to sit up quickly.

“Hey hey hey. I’m the medic. You’re in a van being treated,” said a woman all in white sitting next to her. It was a soothing voice, and with a firm but gentle restraining arm the woman pressed her back down.

Livvy allowed it. I failed. Someone shot me before I reached Jesse. All for nothing.

She started to take in her surroundings and found that she was indeed lying in a moving medivan. When she turned her head she could see enough of the man lying motionless on the other side of the van to know it was Chris, but she couldn’t see his face. Seated in the aisle between them, the attractive dark-haired woman who’d spoken was wearing a very grim expression.

“Good, you’re really awake this time,” the med tech said kindly to Livvy. “Lie still, please. I’ve got tissue-sensitive retrieval microprobes already hunting down the flechettes and debris in your leg and dispensing antibiotics and anesthetics in situ. I’m setting the ones for your arm. You understand? Not too much discomfort?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m fine,” Livvy said. “How’s my partner?”

“He’ll do,” the tech said.

Chris moved a little and raised his head so that he could face her. He was alert and, she thought, looking a little apprehensive. “Hutchins. Ready to go?”

“What happened? I don’t know what happened,” Livvy said.

“Jesse will be fine. Big bad guys are both dead. The rest can wait until you’re feeling better,” Chris said.

Livvy turned back towards the roof of the med transport and squeezed her eye shut. The rest could wait. Or at least most of it .

She opened them again and turned back to look at the kindly med tech beseechingly. “I don’t suppose you have a shower at City Central Clinic, do you? I mean a real one with hot water, not a laver?”

“I suppose we can manage one, once the retrieval probes are done,” the tech said. “What happened to your shoes?”

“Yes, Hutchins, your shoes?” Chris asked, lifting his head again, a little higher this time so that he could see Livvy better.

“Squishy,” Livvy began, but didn’t have a chance to elaborate. Apparently, Chris had just given the med tech some sort of conversational opening that was too good to let pass, and the dam burst.

“You. Lie. Back. Down. You came very close to a punctured lung, you know,” the med tech said with asperity, and then with an effort seemed to restrain herself.

It was too good to resist, and Livvy didn’t try. “He was shot with two large caliber bullets at point blank range two… no, three days ago. Wearing a vest, but…”

She shrugged with her sore right shoulder and looked across at Chris, who was staring at her expressionlessly. “It helps them do their job when they have the history, you know,” she explained gently, staring at him owlishly and approximating the voice she used with her five-year-old nephew.

His expression didn’t change.

“I knew it,” the med tech said triumphantly. “I knew that some of that bruising had to be from an older injury. Three days? You get hit with large calibers at close range and you’ve got to know that the tunics are one thing but with the ultra-thin armor Enforcement uses in those vests you’re going to have fractured ribs. They’ll stop a bullet and save your life, but…

“Don’t they train you people on this equipment? Even if you’ve forgotten, when you feel that sort of pain you should know enough to get yourself in somewhere and get your ticket to start occupying a desk for a while, instead of running around like a decapitated chicken for three more days. People have a brain. It’s meant to be used. They’re supposed to know better, to listen to what their body is telling them. If you’d punctured a lung and tried to keep going, you might have died and then where would your case be?”

“I was abducted…” Chris said very softly.

“Sure,” the tech said. She didn’t seem to have heard. “You know, Longevity just gives you protection from aging. It doesn’t truly make you immortal. You can still get shot and die, or hit by a car and die, or even get an infection and die. Or aggravate a relatively minor injury, and die. There are all kinds of evil things out there that medicine can’t beat yet. So I have a question for you, Detective McGregor, how is it that you’re still alive? I’m talking about your whole history, not your current injury.”

At some point, Chris had placed his crooked arm over his face, but it didn’t deter the tech.

“Well, even with accelerated healing, you better get used to the idea that you’re going to be spending at least the next two weeks at your desk,” the tech added with grim satisfaction. “Flat on your back would be better.”

“Huh. I’m going to guess that you’ve met my partner before,” Livvy said when she could get a word in.

The tech nodded. “Only professionally. But all too often. Oh, he’s heard the lecture before, at least a couple of times every decade. Much good it did.”

At which Livvy enjoyed a good laugh. Fortunately, the pain medications had taken effect, and she didn’t have any fractured ribs.

When Livvy came in late Monday morning, her second week in LLE, Agnew and the rest of the squad looked up and nodded at her in greeting. She nodded back, and felt hopeful.

She’d spent the first hour of the day at an accelerated healing appointment at the City Central Clinic, so when she arrived, Chris was already in the Chief’s office, probably giving an unofficial report. She sat down a little awkwardly and started trying to complete some notes on the case memotab, while surreptitiously keeping an eye on the Chief.

The door was closed, and this time she wasn’t sitting on the bench right outside it, so she couldn’t hear a word. She was actually very good at lip-reading but Chris had his back to her and often when the Chief did say something he was staring right at her, so she didn’t dare stare back. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Maybe he knew about the lip-reading.

She went back to her case memotab, writing her own report, with the official report written by the Chief before her for reference. Chris had explained to her, with a totally straight face, that for complicated, newsworthy cases, LLE handled the official reports by having the Chief write them based on verbal accounts or memos from the detectives. Then whoever handled the case wrote their own official report, using that written by the Chief as a reference.

The Chief’s official report made very little mention of anything that might be considered an LLE concern. As released to the media, the facts were that Bedford and his personal physician Dr. Josephson had both been fatally injured in a deadly struggle with the men who had kidnapped Bedford’s grandson, Jesse. Some ill-defined misunderstanding about the ransom. It made them both sound vaguely heroic but that couldn’t be helped. LLE’s involvement was solely attributed to the fact that Josephson was a licensed LLE practitioner and researcher who had been missing. His role had officially been to care for Bedford and his recovered grandson in a stressful situation and to be available in case of injury. The timing of his disappearance relative to the kidnapping was also very vague.

Livvy knew some of the truth. Bedford and Josephson were both dead, which meant that for LLE this was the best possible outcome. As far as she could tell, LLE might consider it the only acceptable outcome. She was afraid to ask, since it might diminish some of her personal satisfaction to know the actual details, but she trusted her partner’s sense of fairness, which in her experience was unassailable. He’d risked his life to talk to Williams, and he’d given her a week to prove herself.