BY DAVID ADAMS
Toralii Mining Colony
Near the TFR Sydney
During the events of Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi
The splintering of glass reverberated around the cockpit. The Toralii energy pulse I had somewhat unsuccessfully tried to dodge blew right through my ship’s armour like it was paper. The inside of the canopy turned crimson, blood splattering against my Heads-Up Display as the decompression alarm wailed. Air hissed out the breach in my canopy, sucking the blood splatter towards it and out into the void, a bloody flower blooming right before my eyes.
The wound didn’t hurt, but I knew it was bad. I hadn’t seen this much blood since the accident.
It’s the year 2037. My name’s Mike Williams, callsign Magnet. I’m a pilot in the Australian Air/Space Force. Right at this very moment I’m strapped into the pilot’s seat of a SSF-01 Wasp with a hole in it.
“Magnet’s hit, Magnet’s hit.”
The voice of my wingman, Viper, came through on my radio. I turned my head to orientate myself with my mothership, the Sydney, and with a faint squeal of static Viper’s voice inexplicably cut out. I was alone, floating in the darkness, my spaceship venting atmosphere and my blood pouring out all over space. My radar, one of the few functional systems I had left, showed three red dots break off from the main furball and swing towards my ship. The Toralii were coming to finish me off.
Dying was going to really mess up my day.
• • •
My fellow pilots call me Magnet, short for Chick Magnet, good old-fashioned military humour at its finest. I’m a pilot in the Australian Air/Space Force, working with Task Force Resolution.
We’d been given the task of assaulting a mining colony. It was thought there might be human prisoners there. The Tehran had gone missing and there was a good chance the Toralii were using its crew as slave labour. It was thought that the colony would be unprepared and lightly defended.
The moment the Sydney appeared in the Lagrange point near the Toralii mining colony we attacked, capitalising on the element of surprise. Our Wasps shot out from the Sydney’s launch tubes, banking and turning down towards the colony. They had an active patrol up and we flew straight towards them, hungry sharks who scented blood. I got an early lock, letting off two missiles the moment I had good tone. We always ripple fired. They called them miss-iles, not hit-iles, and we wanted to make sure we hit our target.
Both missiles went straight in, striking the centre of the Toralii bird in quick succession, causing the ship to burst into a bright pinprick of light against the backdrop of space. A pretty good showing for my first day out. Space was clear to the colony.
All had gone to plan so far. We covered the Sydney’s Broadsword gunship as they began extracting the prisoners, getting in close enough to receive defensive fire from the surface. It was random and light until the Toralii launched a full wing of their own birds. I had to tell you, then I was pretty excited. Blowing up a patrol who’d never seen you coming was one thing, but this was the first time I was going head to head with the Toralii in open space.
I primed another missile to shoot, locking onto one of the ships near the edges of the Toralii formation. I saw the flashes of their energy weapons, silent balls of death leaping straight towards us, but I focused on getting my second kill of the day.
Then one of the little balls hit my cockpit dead on and things went downhill pretty quick.
Eject, Eject, Eject flashed the HUD, the wail of alarms drowning out the hiss of escaping air, but I knew better. With this much blood my suit had to have been holed so I’d be a goner minutes after I bailed out. The ship had more oxygen than my suit and I had lost so much. At this point every kilo mattered. The only thing to do was to stay in my bird, try to get back to the Sydney if I could or go down fighting if I couldn’t.
I reached up and fumbled for the distress signaller, jamming it to the on position. The red LED in the corner of the cockpit which indicated duress lit up just as it was supposed to. Too bright, actually, much lighter than the rest of my instruments. I frowned. What the hell was the designer thinking, putting in a bulb so bright? As if the pilot somehow wasn’t already aware he was royally fucked.
The Toralii were coming for me. I needed to fly. I gently pressed my foot to the rudder, hoping the horizontal stabilisers were still active. Nothing.
“Come on you bastard, come back to me.” Switching on the redundant systems I struggled with the control column. I felt light headed and confused, the stars spinning around me. Where was the ship? Where were the Toralii?
Somehow, as though reading my mind, the fighter levelled out. A swift glance at my radio revealed it was still working. The cord leading from my headset to the instrument dashboard had come loose, probably when I twisted my head. I jammed it back into its socket, smearing blood all over the instrument panel.
“-agnet, I say again, eject. You’re leaking atmosphere and you have incoming.”
“Sydney, this is Vulture—we’ve lost Magnet, can’t raise him on comms. Initiate SAR, he’s drifted well outside of the combat zone so should be retrievable. Be advised, two contacts are eyeballing him.”
I squeezed the talk key. “Calm the fuck down, I’m here. And it’s three. Three contacts coming to my place. Party hard.” I used the vertical stabilisers to level my wings to the Sydney’s orientation.
Shaba laughed into my headset. She was the pilot of our Search and Rescue Broadsword Piggyback. Shaba was Hebrew for Ghost and she’d named her Search and Rescue Broadsword herself.
Piggyback…because it saved your bacon.
“Magnet, this is Piggyback. Request update on SAR mission. How you holding up there, hot stuff?”
I craned my head, trying to see where I’d been wounded. I still felt no pain although blood continued to trickle into my cockpit. “Update as follows; I fucking ate a round, there’s blood all over the cockpit. Break.” I depressed the rudder-pedal again to no effect. “But I feel fine.”
The ship jerked, finally responding to my push on the rudder-pedal. Normally the Wasp’s a zippy little space fighter, an arrow with stubby little wings, wings which really just serve as mounts for the reaction control system and as hard-points to mount missiles. Of course, wings in space don’t do anything much, although their weight does steady the craft slightly, and the reaction control system that allows us to do fine manoeuvring requires them. Not that I was doing any manoeuvring at this particular moment.
Shaba’s tone became serious, the levity evaporating in a heartbeat. “Blood? Is your suit breached?”
“Are you fucking high? I said there’s blood, there’s a hole somewhere.” Wasn’t she supposed to be a medic? “I’m guessing it missed my chest, since I can breathe fine, but I can’t feel the wound anywhere. Could be in my abdomen, though, or my leg, or the arse.”
Shot in the arse. If I didn’t die, I’d be a laughing stock for the rest of my flying days. Might even earn a new callsign. Something butt-focused.
“You know protocol. Sit tight, we’re coming to get you. Piggyback is away.”
The last thing I needed was search and rescue coming to cart my sorry arse away on my very first engagement in space. I’d probably never live it down.
Carefully firing the horizontal thrusters I swung my nose back towards the action. I wanted my guns on those fighters. In the distance I could see the rest of the engagement: Toralii fighters and Wasps darted around each-other, stinging and flying away, with the larger and less manoeuvrable Broadswords just sitting still and spitting cannon fire in all directions.
The three Toralii strike fighters drew close enough for me to shoot. I knew I had to hit them hard with a prolonged burst. The reporting name for this class of fighter was Badger, because they were squat and tough but packed a hell of a fight.
Shaba spoke again. “Magnet, Piggyback. We’re interdicting three bandits coming in at your twelve o’clock high. They’re too far away for us to hit yet.”
“I’ve still got two missiles. Break.” I tagged the lead fighter on my radar screen and tried to acquire tone, but the glass display of the missile targeting system was black and silent. “Belay that, missiles are inoperative.”
“Copy. Engage defensive until we get there and go to guns.”
I couldn’t dodge forever, especially with my flight systems being uncooperative, and I hadn’t a hope of lining up my guns. It was time to call for help of a different kind. I rotated channels. “Sydney, Magnet. Request fire mission, grid six alpha-romeo. Three bandits, dispersion four hundred metres.”
The briefest of pauses. “Magnet, Sydney; confirmed. Fire mission, grid six alpha-romeo. Medium range bombardment, four hundred metre dispersion, explosive anti-fighter shells. Firing for effect.”
“Confirm, Sydney. Bring the rain.”
I held the nose of my Wasp straight, watching the three Toralii dots draw close. I glanced up at the Sydney, watching the little twinkles of her autocannons open up. Highlighted by the bright flashes I could see the dark speck that was Piggyback racing towards me.
One of the Sydney’s high explosive shells soared right past me and exploded, silently blasting a wave of shrapnel in every direction, the shards of metal pinking off my hull. Then another and another.
“Sydney! God fucking damnit, you’re firing into the wrong grid! Cease fire, cease fire!”
I savagely jammed the throttle as far open as it would go. The reactionless drive whined in protest, my fighter jerking forward and down, diving out of the effect of my own ship’s barrage. Shrapnel bounced off my hull, a dull sound like summer rain on a tin roof.
“Magnet, Sydney. Uh, say again.”
I gripped the talk key so hard I thought I’d break it. Shells burst silently all around me, little mushrooms of fire in space, blasting waves of shrapnel in every direction.
“You mother fuckers are shooting at me! Cease mother-fucking-fire!”
I kicked out at the left rudder-pedal, jamming the ship into a wild twist. One of the Sydney’s shells soared by so close that I could almost read the serial number, disappearing below me and exploded, shredding the underside of the ship. This whole section was being bombarded by my own ship and I had nowhere to go.
Slowly, the fire petered off. “Magnet, Sydney. Ceasefire confirmed. These things happen.”
These things happen? I wanted to reach out through the vast gulf of space and throttle the man who’d nearly killed me. Before I could unleash an entirely inappropriate stream of comments through my radio, however, the three Toralii warbirds descended on me like hawks to an exposed mouse. My flight from the Sydney’s barrage had given me momentum, so their shots flew wide, but the end was coming.
“Piggyback? If you’re out there, I could use some help right about, oh, ten seconds ago!”
I jammed the control stick to the right, grunting as my tiny ship lurched and twisted, barely avoiding a second spray of fire from the Toralii fighters. They overshot, zooming past me silently like owls on the hunt, and I pulled back the handle that governed the speed of the reactionless drive, jamming the fighter into reverse.
The engine spluttered, jerked twice, then died. A low groan reverberated throughout the ship as the system gave up the ghost completely.
Well, shit.
“Piggyback, this is Magnet – my reactionless drive is out. I’m dead in space.” Pardon the pun, I silently added, instantly regretting it. In the game of space combat words had a tendency to come back with an ironic bite.
I twisted in my seat, looking over my shoulder. I saw three brief flashes as the light of the system’s star reflected off the glass cockpits of the three Toralii fighters. They were turning towards me, bearing down to deliver the coup de grace.
I was presented with an interesting but morbid choice. Remain where I was and get blown to atoms, or eject and asphyxiate in space. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it and the training hammered into me by endless repetition took over.
It was one of the things that really stuck with me in flight school. The number one reason for ejection failure was hesitation. Pilots who were unwilling to accept that they’d lost and believing, hopelessly, that they could turn the tide if they just stayed on a little bit longer.
There was no prize for second place in space combat. First prize was a relaxing flight home for tea and medals, where your nation’s leaders pin shiny metal crosses on your chest on national television and people called you a hero for the rest of your life.
Second prize was also a cross, made of stone and placed at the head of your grave.
I waited until the flashes of the Toralii’s energy weapons against the black background of space then I reached between my legs and yanked the ejection handle.
• • •
Ejection was a very strange feeling, especially in zero gravity. The moment I pulled the yellow and black striped handle the Martin-Baker Mk. 19B ejection seat went to work.
The first stage was to remove the canopy, a stage I remembered viewing in slow motion. Tiny rockets mounted under the cockpit glass blasted the whole canopy free in one piece, with forward facing thrusters blasting it up and away from my ship. With the cockpit suddenly exposed to vacuum all the air was sucked out in one big woomph, taking various pieces of debris, blood and loose items with it. Mingling with the sparks left behind by the rockets I saw a few specific things – a stray coin, a condom wrapper, the business card of that fine hooker I met in Brisbane and tiny, perfectly spherical droplets of blood all blown out of the canopy as the atmosphere vacated it.
The second stage, milliseconds after the first, was the part which saved my life. Because there’s no atmosphere anymore there was no sound except the faint hiss of air inside the suit. Little cables attached to each one of my limbs pulled taut, jamming my arms in against my chest, my legs in against the seat and my head against the back of the chair. Heavy-duty rockets ignited under my seat, hurtling me out of the cockpit.
Perhaps it was the wound, or my brain suddenly having fourteen times Earth’s gravity exerted upon it, but I couldn’t remember much after that except a crushing force jamming me down into the seat, blasting me across space. I had very few points of reference amongst the unmoving stars. Aside from the pressure cramming me back into my seat I really had no sense of motion once I was clear of my stricken craft.
The doomed wreckage of my ship blew up below me as the Toralii energy blasts struck the fuel and ammunition reserves. The shockwave had not quite dissipating when it caught up to the back of my seat, the remaining force enough to shake and rattle the chair, twisting it completely around right as the rockets died.
Carried by its inertia the chair spun on its horizontal axis. It continued to turn, the stars slowly tumbling by. I caught flashes of weapons fire, and through my limited perspective Piggyback flying into the fray, its cannons ablaze as it fought off my attackers to save my sorry arse.
The cables loosened their grip and I jerked my legs from side to side, trying to stop the spinning. Eventually I worked the seat to something approximating stable. I could hear nothing but my own laboured breathing and the faint whine of escaping air. I watched a mute battle from afar, Piggyback firing its weapons in every direction as the three Toralii warbirds stung at its thick hide. I didn’t see them get hit, but knew if they did, the Broadsword was strong enough to tough it out.
I saw a missile escape Piggyback’s missile rack, a thin wispy trail following it as it flew past its target, detonating nearby. Not a killing blow. The Badger fought on.
Lightheadedness took over. I didn’t have a radio system as I floated in space, just the emergency locater beacon I couldn’t hear. Piggyback would no doubt have a lock, though, by now. I imagined the crew confirming their data as they fought their way towards me. I watched with something approaching a mixture of idle curiosity and apathy as the gunfire flew back and forth in the distance, the seemingly endless dance between the big ugly Broadsword and the three smaller Badgers. Through my eyes it seemed beautiful, serene even, a fireworks display just for me.
My concern for the battle I no longer had a part of faded. I needed to know where I’d been hit and to find out, I needed to be free of the ejection seat. I struggled, reaching around for the release clasps, yanking them with both hands. I had expected them to be hard and unyielding to prevent accidental activation but they came off effortlessly. The excess force sent me tumbling out and away, and as the ejection seat and I separated I saw the damage. Blood splattered the seat, thin wisps of exhaust trailing from the end, slowly expanding and diffusing to nothing.
The blood on the seat was focused around my abdomen. I reached down, feeling gingerly, trying to find the hole in me.
And then there it was. About the size of a coin, smaller perhaps, through my lower chest. I wiggled my finger inside and found it fit quite snugly. It also helped stall the rush of escaping air from my suit. What organs were in that area again…? Kidney? Liver? A hole in one of those would be bad. Organs were important for long term survival. I’d had them all my life, so there was a kind of emotional attachment there. I pressed my finger in a little deeper and hoped that, if I passed out, there would be enough friction to keep the digit lodged in.
A fairly morbid way to spend a Saturday.
I blinked away another wave of drowsiness. Without an outlet the suit began to fill with blood. Droplets rose in front of my helmet, my breath enough to suck them towards me, then away as I exhaled. For some strange reason I tried desperately not to swallow any, preferring to see them splattered against the thick glass of my helmet.
I thought of my girlfriend, back on Earth. She was the sweetest thing, hotter than a chili bean, funny, smart—she had a PHD in theoretical physics—and legally blind.
The fact that she couldn’t see was very important to me. People say attractiveness doesn’t matter in a relationship, but it does. It does.
Some thought of fighter pilots as sky knights, charismatic gentlemen fighting it out amongst the stars, but I didn’t match the picture. My face wasn’t smooth and perfect.
At age fifteen, my face picked a fight with the propeller of my family’s boat, on a shoal near Broome, off Western Australia. The boat drifted onto a sandbar and I got out to push. I slipped and fell right onto the blades, cutting my face up real good.
I don’t really remember much of what happened after that, but my dad said the coast guard flew out a helicopter to pick me up. He’d never seen so much blood before and he was certain I wouldn’t make it. All I remember is trying to see, and just having blood in my eyes, my vision a crimson haze. And screaming.
Turns out not only did I pull through, I managed to keep both my eyes too. The same couldn’t really be said for most of the rest of my face, though, no matter how many times the plastic surgeons tried to repair it. I always looked as though I had some kind of fake featureless mask over my “real” face, and even the extensive surgeries couldn’t eradicate the half-dozen or so slashes going right from my jawline to my temple.
Penny knew I wasn’t as beautiful as she was. She’d touched my scars, run her fingers along them, felt the indentations. But they were not something she had to look at every day.
I wondered how she’d react to the news that I’d bought it in my first real combat. I didn’t want her to think that mine was a painful death; despite the obvious injury I felt no pain, not even when I blocked the hole with my finger.
At age twenty six I felt a little too young to be given the twelve gun salute and tossed in the ground to become fertiliser.
I’d never gotten to propose to her, either. I fumbled, reaching into my chest pocket, retrieving the thin strip of metal I’d stowed there. An engagement ring, a cheap one, nothing fancy. Nobody could afford any luxuries these days, a simple steel band would have to do. We couldn’t afford diamonds; the ring was adorned with a simple heart-shaped red ruby.
The moment I saw it I knew it was perfect. With hands for eyes Penny wouldn’t be able to see the colour, but she would sense the shape with her fingers. She would love it.
Well, she would have loved it.
I clasped it in my fingers, unfurling them awkwardly, watching as the metal floated up from my palm, spinning lazily in space. Light refracted off the gem, creating thin strips of white on the otherwise dark red gem’s surface. Spots of blood appeared on the metal and without thinking I reached up to wipe them off.
I missed and knocked the ring tumbling away from my grasp. In the gravity-less vacuum of space I could do nothing but watch as it slowly drifted away.
Blast.
The loss of my ship, and the injury, didn’t hurt me as much as the loss of that ring. It was cheap, but it was something. There was an emotional attachment that surpassed its value in notes and coins.
Like I said, she would have loved it. Penny was a Buddhist; I’m not sure what exactly they did for marriage. Maybe I should have asked her before I bought the ring.
Wait, no, she was Anglican. I was thinking of my ex. Oxygen deprivation.
My air was almost gone. Breathing became difficult and my helmet’s perspex screen began to fog up. Some part of me realised my finger must have slipped out of the hole and I tried, blindly, to reinsert it. But now my hands were numb, my whole body was, and I couldn’t see to find the hole. After a few moments of futile struggle, which probably made the oxygen situation worse, I gave up.
A bright light behind me. I twisted around, looking over my shoulder, a gesture awkward in my heavy suit and thick helmet, holding up a bloodstained glove to try and shield my eyes. At first I thought it might be the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, a great white wave of energy coming to sweep me up and take me from this life to the next, to carry me to my seventy two virgins or whatever.
With my luck, they’d be pimple faced nerds bitching about pointless nerd things. Not that it mattered since I was probably going to the other place anyway.
It wasn’t an angelic choir, however, but the lights on the outside of Piggyback’s cargo hold. Like some hungry beast the Broadsword Piggyback glided toward me, their cargo door open like a great mouth to devour me whole. No less salvation, I supposed, but one brought by the hands of man.
I drifted inside the cargo hold as Piggyback scooped me up. My body felt suddenly heavy as gravity reasserted itself. I crashed to the metal deck with a scraping thump. Gasping, I weakly flopped onto my back, scratching at my helmet, my lungs trying to fill themselves with the fleeting gasps of air that remained inside my suit.
To my infinite relief, the cargo door slid closed and the whole chamber flooded with oxygen. Four arrays of jets, one from each edge of the room, pumped sweet air into the empty space. I fumbled for the helmet latch, the perspex still fogged, my numb fingers somehow able to find the catch. I yanked on it, half tugging the helmet off my head; a second rough shove was enough for it to tumble to the deck, forgotten as I struggled to breathe.
Everything was grey. All the colour had been drained out of the room, my vision a tunnel through a ring of black clouds. I knew I was close to passing out, and I felt my eyes drift closed. I just had to hang on a little while longer…a little while longer….
• • •
I looked forward to Halloween every year.
It’s sad and ironic that, back when I was a kid, Halloween was the only time the world felt normal, when I felt I fit in. Halloween felt like a day when everything was backwards, where I could be myself and people would think I was cool. It was a day when the ugly was inspired and the good was boring. My face made a good mask…imported from America, or something, if strangers asked.
School wasn’t easy for me. Kids could be merciless in ways adults were too polite to be. I got through high school with a mixture of dogged determination and the charity of my teachers, then enrolled in the Air Force. I’d always wanted to fly and, let’s face it, being a model was now a little bit out of the realm of even extreme possibilities. I learnt to fly and life was good.
The Air Force was a big break for me. I found friends, found Penny, found somewhere I belonged.
Then the Toralii attacked Earth life got interesting. It turns out that a few places on Earth—Sydney, Tehran and Beijing were developing some kind of teleportation device. A jump drive that could transport a spaceship around. It was going to change everything.
It also turned out that the technology is inherently dangerous and the Toralii had some way of detecting it. They obliterated the three cities, transmitted a warning in Chinese, then vanished.
Humanity had two choices. Be little bitches and give up all hope of having this technology, or build it anyway and fight for our right to use it.
The major world powers formed Task Force Resolution. This group built three ships, naming them after the three cities that were destroyed. The Australians crewed the Sydney, the Iranians got the Tehran and the Chinese manned the Beijing.
Although it was the second ship off the line, in the beginning the Beijing saw the majority of the action, including the first real confrontation with the Toralii. It was in that confrontation we discovered against conventional thought at the time that the Toralii used little fighters as companions to their larger ships in space battles.
Military intelligence thought strike craft would be too slow and too weak to hurt the larger ships but, shock and horror, military intelligence got it wrong. The unexpected and effective presence of those little birds, pecking away at the Beijing’s hull, convinced the task force we should have them too.
A space craft was hurriedly designed and built in a global effort. The airframe was designed by the Iranians, who based it on the F-4 Phantom. When they had a working prototype selection began amongst the world’s best air forces. The Israelis eventually claimed the prize. The Iranians protested, of course, especially since it was their airframe and insisted on providing their own pilots for the Tehran. The Australians went with the Israelis, but wanted to have at least one of their own pilots on the Sydney just to maintain an Australian presence.
They picked me. Lord knows why. Something about “representing the nation”.
Also, I really like seafood. Crab was my favourite.
These are the kinds of things a mind remembers when it’s dying. Things that were, things that could be, things that really didn’t mean much. A big jumbled mess of nothing that barely makes sense. Like your mind is running through your life just to make sure all its affairs are in order before it expires, then throws in some random junk just to fuck with you.
Oxygen deprivation is weird.
• • •
“Wake up! You’re not dead yet, you ugly mother fucker!”
I slowly creaked open my eyes, and was expecting to see the dark hull of Piggyback. Instead, I was assaulted by the bright white sheen of an infirmary.
“Air…!” I gasped, grabbing at my suit—but instead, I was grabbing at a hospital gown and my body was covered in a sheet.
My hands flailed and my legs kicked in a panic. Strong hands grabbed me, keeping me from tumbling out of bed.
“Woah, easy there, champ. Easy there. You’re okay, you’re back on the Sydney…”
I fell back against the bed, unable to struggle any further, panting and gasping. I reached down to my chest with hands that barely moved, trying to find the hole, searching. I had to plug it, I was running out of air. My chest was tight. I was going to asphyxiate.
“It’s okay, mate, it’s okay. Doctor Richards bandaged the wound. You’re okay, you’re fine…you’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”
Slowly, slowly, my conscious mind began to catch up to where I really was. I gave a weak groan. Shaba, Piggyback’s pilot, stood at the edge of the bed, grinning at me with those blue eyes, her expression a mixture of jockish laughter and relief.
“…you’re fine.” Her smile widened and she lifted her hands up off my arms. “Gave us quite the scare, though.”
I’d read somewhere that there’s sometimes a very profound confusion one experiences when waking up from a prolonged unconsciousness. That’s true, but it’s both more and less than that—impossible to communicate for someone who’s not experienced it for themselves. Only seconds ago been laying on the inside of Piggyback, still struggling to breathe, to get my helmet off before I died. Being shot by the Toralii fighters, making the decision to eject from my crippled craft, launching the mission itself… they were were all fresh memories, vivid and raw as though they had just been made. It’s like waking up from an intense dream. Your brain has to take a minute to sort out what’s real.
“Oh really?” I coughed, searing pain stabbing me directly in the abdomen. Pain, now, for the first time. I could feel bandages gripping my chest, feel the faint tickle of stitches beneath.
Shaba rolled her shoulders, putting her hands together and cracking her knuckles. “You owe me money, from poker.”
I think I did, too. Change of subject time. I pointed down my body with a finger. “How bad…?”
“Terrible,” she answered as her eyes flicked down to my crotch, “short, shrivelled, always hanging to the left…barely gets up when you want him to, burns when you pee-”
“I meant the fucking-” Another wave of pain. Now that the shock had worn off, everything hurt. “The wound. Not…” I was not in the mood for this. “Urgh. But it’s fine, right?”
Shaba rested her hand on my gut. Pain. “Don’t worry, Mags, Penny’s little joystick is just fine. You won’t believe this, but…basically that bolt of Toralii energy went straight in and out, missing every single vital organ on the way. Couldn’t ask for a cleaner injury. You’ll be right as rain in no time, but you’ll have one hell of a scar.”
I coughed again, wincing slightly as the effort stretched my wounds, forcing myself to lay still. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Can’t say the same for your fighter, though,” remarked Shaba, her tone conveying an impish glee that I simply didn’t have the energy to go along with. “Looks like you broke your precious little baby. Captain Knight had a salvage team look at the dust that was left of the explosion. There wasn’t even enough to bring back a souvenir for you.”
“That’s a shame. I blame Viper.”
“Hah. Still, you got your Martin Baker tie waiting for you when you get back, so that’s something at least.”
Whenever anyone successfully employed a Martin Baker ejection seat and survived, the company sent them out a special pin and a tie. Some pilots, especially test pilots, made it a point of pride to collect them. I wasn’t exactly planning on starting a collection, but if you flew planes long enough you eventually got one.
“How did we go after you picked me up? Did we extract the prisoners?”
“Got all the poor bastards, yep. We didn’t score any other kills, the furballs retreated when they realised we were playing for keeps.” She idly stared down at her fingers indifferently. “So we got one of theirs, and they got one of ours. Nobody can say that we’re not scrupulously fair.”
“Fair. That’s great.”
“Well, we try.”
I reaching out with my hand, resting it on Shaba’s arm. “Thanks for coming to collect my arse,” I remarked, hoping that the sincerity I felt carried through on my voice.
“Hey, any time.” She winked. “How could I resist the chick magnet?”
I snorted. “Bullet magnet more like. Did anyone else get hit?”
She laughed. “Nope. Just you. Not a single hit. The paint on Piggyback isn’t even scratched.”
“Figures.”
There was a moment’s silence as I closed my eyes. I felt intensely weary, as though I’d been awake for days. “How long have I been here?”
“Four hours, post surgery. About six total. It’s about two o’clock in the morning. Sunday.”
“Ah.” I nodded, wrinkling my nose. “I guess I missed dinner then.”
“Believe me you didn’t miss it. It was some kind of meat, that’s all we knew, but it looked like puke. I’d rather eat shell casings. We broke open some MREs from Piggyback’s stores instead. Chicken A La King. Mmm, mmm.”
MREs, or Meal Ready to Eat, were the bane of my existence. They were essentially foil-wrapped “food” that could be torn open and eaten with a minimal amount of preparation or fuss and came packaged with a hydrogen based chemical heater. An MRE was intended only as field nutrition when kitchens or normal supplies were not available. They came in two flavours: cardboard and vomit.
Shaba kept insisting that I just needed to try the right flavour to find one I liked, but I’d have to be a lot hungrier than a single missed meal to try it. I made a game of calling them all kinds of things: Meals Rejected by Everyone, Meal Ready to Expel or Morale Reducing Elements among many others. The best thing I loved about them was that each package was helpfully labelled “MEAL” in giant letters, as though some bureaucrat somewhere had assumed that the morons the military entrusted with heavy weapons would be unable to distinguish food from ammunition.
Shaba’s comment about shell casings floated back into my mind.
“Blech. I can’t believe you eat that crap.”
“It’s a gourmet meal fit for a king, my friend, the stuff of—” Her eyes widened. “Wait a second, hang on, I nearly forgot…” she dug around inside a small plastic bag, fiddling for a moment before withdrawing her hand, closed into a fist. She held it in front of me teasingly. “Guess what we found rattling around the bottom of the cargo hold. Figured it belonged to you.”
She opened her hand, revealing the thin steel band that I thought I’d lost, the red heart shaped gem still splattered with blood.
“You didn’t even clean it?” I remarked dryly, although I couldn’t stop my face from lighting up in a bright grin.
“You must be joking,” she snorted, “I know your sordid history with women – I’m not touching your blood. I don’t want to…catch…anything. I remember Brisbane.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said, extending my hand to take it, but she suddenly closed her fist, pulling it away.
“Uh uh uh.” Shaba shook her head, waggling a finger back and forth in front of my eyes. “You tease a girl with a pretty ring like this, you gotta make good with your promises.”
“If I gave that to you Penny will eat my soul for breakfast. Then yours. Gimme.”
Shaba lowered her hand, tilting her head. Her expression sobered and the playfulness left her voice. “No, dumbarse. I meant… if you give this thing to her, to Penny, you have to make sure you mean it. You have to stay with her. It’s a lifelong commitment.”
I felt a tight knot in my stomach. When did this suddenly stop being funny? “I know that, Rachel. I love Penny.”
Shaba frowned at the use of her real name. “I just don’t want either of you to end up like Gutterball.” With a melodramatic sigh she pressed her hand into mine, handing it over. “That’s the thanks I get…next time I’ll just leave you and your jewelry floating out there.”
The sliver of metal pressed into my skin as I squeezed, letting the soothing waters of its comfort sweep through me. I made it. The ring made it.
“I really appreciate this.” I looked at Rachel, not sure whether to laugh or cry, knowing it didn’t really matter. “I mean it.”
Rachel patted me on the arm then stepped back, the playful edge to her voice returning.“Whatever. Make sure you don’t lose it next time you decide to take a walk in space.” She folded her hands in front of her. “We might not be there next time.”
“I won’t.”
She grinned and left me alone with my thoughts, and the ring I thought I’d lost. I played with it, turning it over and over in my fingers, letting the light play over the ruby. The glare from the fluorescent above me filtered through the ring’s red heart, the light seeming to flicker and shine from within.
The ruby light was the same shade as the blood on my bandages.
“Next time I see you,” I promised to nobody, clutching the ring in my hand. I rested my head back against the uncomfortable infirmary pillow.
Next time.