John Scalzi: Old Man's War

In the relative calm I reassessed Jane's vitals. The wound in her head was completely caked over with SmartBlood; it was impossible to see how much damage there was or how deep the rock fragments went into her brain. Her pulse was strong but her breathing was shallow and erratic. This is where the extra oxygen-carrying capacity of SmartBlood was going to come in handy. I was no longer certain she was going to die, but I didn't know what I could do to keep her alive on my own.

I accessed Asshole for options, and one was produced: the command center had housed a small infirmary. Its accommodations were modest but featured a portable stasis chamber. It would keep Jane stable until she could make it onto one of the ships and back to Phoenix for medical attention. I recalled how Jane and the crew of the Sparrowhawk stuffed me into a stasis chamber after my first trip to Coral. It was time to return the favor.

A series of bullets whined through a window above me; someone had remembered I was there. Time to move again. I plotted my next sprint, to a Rraey-built trench fifty meters in front of me, now occupied by Special Forces. I let them know I was coming; they obligingly laid down suppressing fire as I ran brokenly toward them. With that I was behind Special Forces lines again. The remainder of the trip to the command center proceeded with minimal drama.

I arrived just in time for the Rraey to begin lobbing shells at the command center. They were no longer interested in taking back their tracking station; now they were intent on destroying it. I looked up at the sky. Even through the brightness of the morning sky, sparkling flashes of light glistened through the blue. The Colonial fleet had arrived.

The Rraey weren't going to take very long to demolish the command center, taking the Consu technology with it. I didn't have very much time. I ducked into the building and ran for the infirmary as everyone else was streaming out.

There was something big and complicated in the command center infirmary. It was the Consu tracking system. God only knows why the Rraey decided to house it there. But they did. As a result, the infirmary was the one room in the entire command center that wasn't all shot up; Special Forces were under orders to take the tracking system in one piece. Our boys and girls attacked the Rraey in this room with flash grenades and knives. The Rraey were still there, stab wounds and all, splayed out on the floor.

The tracking system hummed, almost contentedly, flat and featureless, against the infirmary wall. The only sign of input/output capability was a small monitor and an access spindle for a Rraey memory module lying haphazardly on a hospital bedside table next to the tracking system. The tracking system had no idea that in just a couple of minutes it was going to be nothing more than a bundle of broken wiring, thanks to an upcoming Rraey shell. All our work in securing the damn thing was going to go to waste.

The command center rattled. I stopped thinking about the tracking system and placed Jane gently on an infirmary bed, then looked around for the stasis chamber. I found it in an adjoining storeroom; it looked like a wheelchair encased in a half cylinder of plastic. I found two portable power sources on the shelf next to the stasis chamber; I plugged one into the chamber and read the diagnostic panel. Good for two hours. I grabbed another one. Better safe than sorry.

I wheeled the stasis chamber over to Jane as another shell hit, this one shaking the entire command center and knocking out the power. I was pushed sideways by the hit, slipped on a Rraey body and cracked my head on the wall on the way down. A flash of light pulsed behind my eyes and then an intense pain. I cursed as I righted myself, and felt a small ooze of SmartBlood from a scrape on my forehead.

The lights flicked on and off for a few seconds, and in between those few flickers Jane sent a rush of emotional information so intense I had to grab the wall to steady myself. Jane was awake; aware and in those few seconds I saw what she thought she saw. Someone else was in the room with her, looking just like her, her hands touching the sides of Jane's face as she smiled at her. Flicker, flicker, and she looked like she looked the last time I saw her. The light flickered again, came on for good, and the hallucination went away.

Jane twitched. I went over to her; her eyes were open and looking directly at me. I accessed her BrainPal; Jane was still conscious, but barely.

"Hey," I said softly, and took her hand. "You've been hit, Jane. You're okay now, but I need to put you in this stasis chamber until we can get you some help. You saved me once, remember. So we're even after this. Just hold on, okay?"

Jane gripped my hand, weakly, as if to get my attention. "I saw her," she said, whispering. "I saw Kathy. She spoke to me."

"What did she say?" I asked.

"She said," Jane said, and then drifted a little before focusing in on me again. "She said I should go farming with you."

"What did you say to that?" I asked.

"I said okay," Jane said.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," Jane said and slipped away again. Her BrainPal feed showed erratic brain activity; I picked her up and gently as possible placed her in the stasis chamber. I gave her a kiss and turned it on. The chamber sealed and hummed; Jane's neural and physiological indices slowed to a crawl. She was ready to roll. I looked down at the wheels to navigate them around the dead Rraey I'd stepped on a few minutes before and noticed the memory module poking out of the Rraey's abdomen pouch.

The command center rattled again with a hit. Against my better judgment I reached down, grabbed the memory module, walked over to the access spindle, and slammed it in. The monitor came to life and showed a listing of files in Rraey script. I opened a file and was treated to a schematic. I closed it and opened another file. More schematics. I went back to the original listing and looked at the graphic interface to see if there was a top-level category access. There was; I accessed it and had Asshole translate what I was seeing.

What I was seeing was an owner's manual for the Consu tracking system. Schematics, operating instructions, technical settings, troubleshooting procedures. It was all there. It was the next best thing to having the system itself.

The next shell broadsided the command center, knocked me square on my ass, and sent shrapnel tearing through the infirmary. A chunk of metal made a gaping hole through the monitor I was looking at; another punched a hole through the tracking system itself. The tracking system stopped humming and began making choking sounds; I grabbed the memory module, pulled it off the spindle, grabbed the stasis chamber's handles and ran. We were a barely acceptable distance away when a final shell plowed through the command center, collapsing the building entirely.

In front of us, the Rraey were retreating; the tracking station was the least of their problems now. Overhead, dozens of descending dark points spoke of landing shuttles, filled with CDF soldiers itching to take back the planet. I was happy to let them. I wanted to get off this rock as soon as possible.

In the near distance Major Crick was conferring with some of his staff; he motioned me over. I wheeled Jane to him. He glanced down at her, and then up at me.

"They tell me you sprinted the better part of a klick with Sagan on your back, and then went into the command center when the Rraey began shelling," Crick said. "Yet I seem to recall you were the one who called us insane."

"I'm not insane, sir," I said. "I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk."

"How is she?" Crick asked, nodding to Jane.

"She's stable," I said. "But she has a pretty serious head wound. We need to get her into a medical bay as soon as possible."