Decanted
*****
Medical Bay
TFR Rubens
Orbit of Velsharn
SEVERAL HOURS AFTER JAMES LEFT, Saeed returned. “Well,” he said, his face full of cautious optimism, “I think we’ve gotten the most we can out of your stay in the healing chamber.”
Liao had seen enough of that dark-green world to last a lifetime. “Honestly, the sooner you can get me out of here, the better. What do I need to do?”
“According to the computers, plus the Toralii I consulted about this thing, nothing. Just try to keep calm.”
She took a slow, easy breath to calm her nerves and then nodded. “Do it.”
Saeed pressed a single button. For a moment, nothing happened—all was quiet in the Toralii medical bay. A low whine echoed throughout the chamber, and the green lights inside the tank flickered.
“Odd,” said Saeed. “I expected warning lights.” He thought for a moment, and then realisation dawned. “Of course. They’re in ultraviolet.”
“Of course,” echoed Liao. She felt a ripple through the fluid, a tremor that gave her gooseflesh.
“Close your eyes a moment,” said Saeed, closing his. “The UV light might damage your eyes. Your pupil won’t contract to protect you.”
She did so. She felt a disturbance in the fluid around her, a slight churning, as though she were in a washing machine about to begin its cycle.
“You can open them now,” said Saeed, checking the medical console. “Your heart rate is elevated.”
“That’s probably because I feel like I’m in a giant toilet about to flush. I didn’t anticipate everything suddenly being dark.”
“I understand. My apologies.” Saeed’s console chirped. “Okay, the various sensors are disconnecting. You might feel a slight stinging sensation.”
“Got it,” she said. Plugs fell away from her body, leaving discoloured, pale skin beneath. She had expected pain but instead felt a vague tickling sensation all over and barely resisted the urge to squirm around. “I think the Toralii only say that because they have fur and the current pulls at it.”
“Noted,” said Saeed.
“What’s next?”
Another movement in the fluid answered the question. The green began to drain away from the top, air from the outside slowly creeping down toward her hair. It passed over her face and upper body, and she felt the crushing weight of gravity again.
“Turn down the grip, please,” she said between clenched teeth as the fluid level dropped lower and lower, past her waist. She couldn’t lift her arm—it drooped by her side, her one remaining hand floating in the water.
“It’s already down,” said Saeed, but he adjusted it further. Liao felt a familiar sick feeling rise in her stomach as gravity loosened its grip and her limbs became lighter.
The fluid passed by her knees, and then she was standing surrounded by air for the first time in so long. Her whole body was pruned up except where the plugs had touched her skin, and even in the significantly reduced gravity, she was weak and barely able to stand.
The front of the tank lifted out and away, a cocoon opening to the medical bay, the grub within still tethered to the system and unable to leave just yet.
With a faint snap-hiss, the mask fell away from her face, and the breathing tube began worming its way out. She nearly gagged—it twitched and writhed inside her throat, strangely violating and sickening, a slick, metallic snake fighting to escape.
It slid free with a sickening wet splut, slapping against the ground like an angry, writhing snake. It died as Saeed cut the power.
“Well,” he said, handing her a towel. “How does it feel to be out?”
“Cold and awful.” She ran her hand through the remainder of her hair, surprised at how long it had gotten. She had shaved off all her hair before being injured—now she had a half pixie cut, wet and slicked down against her head. The other half of her scalp was scar tissue.
Not ideal but it would do. A rub of the towel soaked most of the fluid from her hair.
An interesting fashion statement.
She tried to take a wobbly step forward, her legs rubbery and put off by the low gravity. Instinct caused her to reach out with her missing arm, and she nearly tumbled over.
“Careful,” said Saeed. “Slowly. Easy.”
“How about that prosthetic?”
“Soon,” said Saeed. “We can get you fitted later today—or tomorrow if you want a bit more time to rest.”
“I’ve been doing enough resting.” She took another step and another, making her way out of the tank completely. “Let’s go do this thing.”
“You’ll need surgery to attach the limb, so it won’t be something we can do right away. That said, we can at least take a measurement.”
Liao nodded her approval. Saeed guided her to a chair. It had been built for Toralii—too large, and with a significant gap in the back for a tail, which seemed, to her, almost precariously easy to fall through—but with a bit of careful positioning, she sat.
“Your recovery will take some time,” he said. “In a few hours, the urge to defecate will return, and you’ll be in for a big one. Other biological processes will return as well. Don’t be alarmed.”
Liao eyed him suspiciously. “Without putting too fine a point on it, I didn’t have one of those things plugged into my butt. What exactly have I been doing in regard to that for the last few months?”
“It’s complicated,” said Saeed. “A significant portion of faeces is e. coli—one of the treatments we gave you killed most of it. Another portion is cells from the intestinal wall, and the liquid promotes cellular regeneration and prevents a great deal of cell decay. We fed you through IV, so there’s no food matter, as such. None of these treatments produce no waste, of course, and if you had been in there much longer, we might well have needed a rectal catheter, but so far so good.”
“I will be sure to give you all the details,” she said. “What about urine?”
“Expelled into the liquid and filtered away.”
She made a disgusted face. “So I’ve been swimming in my own pee for months, and now I am completely, literally, full of shit.”
He smiled a comforting smile. “Isn’t science great?”
They ran a battery of tests. Saeed gave her handfuls of pills to swallow, to counteract the various treatments she had been under when they had put her in the tank. Saeed explained that, as she was the first Human patient to use the system, they had been overly cautious, and future patients would not need anywhere near as many drugs and treatments.
Small comfort. She took the pills. Saeed performed a few rudimentary measurements of her stump and fed them into the computer. A digital representation of the arm was produced—she could see a vague outline on Saeed’s tablet—but he kept it to himself, and Liao did not care enough to pester him for a look.
“It will take a day to fabricate,” he said. “So for now, let’s put you in a proper bed.”
Her stomach rumbled. “Food?” she asked.
“Probably want to tend to the other thing first,” Saeed warned, indicating the bathroom.
Liao felt as if she was giving birth all over again. Runny liquid, absolutely reeking worse than any other smell she had ever experienced, almost made her gag, the wretched stench invading her nostrils and seeming to permeate every centimetre of the med-bay’s bathroom.
When it was done—and it was a long, drawn-out process that Liao was half certain would never actually end—she cleaned up the place as best she could and stumbled back out, her head spinning.
“Well, that was horrible.”
Saeed seemed to take it with good humour. “I’m sure it’s much more horrible for the nurses who’ll have to scrub the thing later tonight.”
“I think I owe them a bottle of scotch,” she said, sitting in the oversized Toralii chair once more. The gravity seemed to have been increased. Saeed was clearly trying to get her more used to walking in normal conditions once more. “I did the best I could to clean it, but wow. It went everywhere.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Saeed, “but not to medical facility standards. Don’t worry, the constructs will do most of the work.”
Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like the strange Toralii-built robots even cleaning her toilets. “There are constructs here? On the Rubens?”
“There have been since Williams took the ship. They destroyed one during the process, but the others have served us quite well.” Saeed folded his hands in front of him. “I know you won’t like it, given what happened with Ben, but the constructs are a critical part of maintaining the ship’s integrity. It’s what’s allowed them to operate so long independent of any kind of maintenance by Humans who would have no idea how to fix any problems even if they had the tools, resources, and time to do so.”
She chewed on the inside of a cheek. “But do we really need them?”
“Properly controlled, as these ones seem to be, the constructs are a powerful ally and resource. They let the Toralii ships operate with significantly fewer crew than ours do, per tonne, because every kilogram of life support that’s not needed—food, water, oxygen production systems—means more room for weapons, armour, defensive systems, radar… everything. The Rubens packs a hell of a punch for a ship her size, even if we discount the fact her weapons are more advanced than ours.”
“Didn’t this use to be a freighter?”
“Yes,” said Saeed. “And systems are less advanced than the military versions, but for the Toralii, there isn’t much difference. They’ve had to live with Kel-Voran raids for a long time. The previous crew of this ship were no strangers to combat. It’s more correct to say it’s part of the Toralii equivalent of the Merchant Marine.”
She leaned back in her chair, strangely saddened by that. Liao had been relieved of her command during the time the Rubens was captured. In truth, she knew little about it, except that before the settlement of Eden, the ship had often been tasked with privateering operations against the Toralii and that they had participated in the battle in which she was wounded. The idea that, eventually, the Rubens could be returned to civilian duty—hauling cargo and serving as a civilian vessel—suited her much better than the idea of it being permanently repurposed into a warship.
Desperate times, though. With the loss of the Sydney and the destruction of Earth, humanity needed everything it could get.
“Maybe one day,” she said, “we’ll have freighters of our own.”
“Hopefully not ones borrowed from the Toralii.”
She nodded her agreement. “Indigenous designs. When our population has recovered enough and our industry improves, we can start designing and building our own merchant ships.”
“Who would we trade with?”
She thought about that for a time. “The Telvan, probably. Maybe the Kel-Voran.”
“Trade with the Kel-Voran?” Saeed grimaced. “What could they possibly offer us? I think the Telvan would be a better choice.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Maybe I can talk to Mrs. Rowe about that. She always has pie-in-the-sky ideas for long-term goals. Maybe she has an idea for building our own ships, too.”
Saeed’s face clouded. “Hasn’t anyone told you about Summer?”
“No,” said Liao, raising an eyebrow curiously. “Is there something I should know?”
Saeed said nothing and folded his hands in front of himself.
Summer Rowe. Liao didn’t recognise her at first, save for her long, wild clump of unkempt red hair, which spilled over her pillow like blood. For a moment, Rowe didn’t seem to recognise her either, and then her freckled face lit up.
“He-e-ey, Captain.”
Her voice was slurred and distant, as though she were heavily medicated, but Liao could see nothing indicating she was being cared for in that respect—no IV drips, no bottles of pills or other medications—just a standard bed in a small room near the medical bay.
“Hello, Summer.” Liao smiled cautiously and pulled up a chair. “Doctor Saeed says you’re not well.”
Rowe stared at her blankly. “Mmm?” Then, realisation hit. “Oh. Yeah. The, um…”
Rowe didn’t finish that thought. She slumped back, her eyes rolled back in her head.
Liao touched her shoulder. “Mrs. Rowe? Summer?”
Suddenly she sprang back to life as though nothing had happened. “Mmm? Sorry, I just fell asleep there for a bit. Saeed says my brain was…” She struggled to find the right word. “Not having enough oxygen for a long time, so it got hurt.”
It broke Liao’s heart to see her like that. Rowe’s mind was everything she had—intellectual pursuits were all she treasured. From engineering, science, and chemistry, her every word, thought and deed came from her desire to know and understand. To have that taken away from her must have been tragic.
She seemed happy, though, in a strange way.
“What do you remember?” asked Liao. “About the attack?”
Rowe shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Almost nothing. Just fragments. I was ejecting the bad reactor. I think I made it eject. Asthma got me. Couldn’t breathe. Tried to work through it, bu—”
She slumped again, limp as a doll.
Seconds passed, uncomfortable seconds. Liao had been told to simply wait when those things happened. Just waiting, though, fought against her instincts. She felt as though she had to do something, anything.
“Mmm?” Rowe woke up again. “What was I saying?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Liao. “Has… someone told you what’s happening?”
“Narcolepsy with catalepsy.” Those words she seemed to have no trouble pronouncing. They came out clear and, in a way, almost like her old self. “At least, that’s what Saeed says. There’s damage to lots of different parts of my brain due to oxygen loss. These kind of weird things are normal. Speech is coming back, slowly. Lots of other things won’t come back, and I have to relearn them. How to tie shoes. How to open packages and stuff. It’s hard, but honestly, I feel good.”
“How do you mean?”
“Things are slower now,” said Rowe, a quiet, happy tinge to her voice. “I don’t feel so… busy in the head. There’s no expectations of me. I don’t need to do anything I don’t want to, and if I can manage to do something good in a single day, do something right, then I’ve already won. Before, it didn’t matter what I did—good work, solve problems—I always felt unhappy. Now I feel happy.”
Liao didn’t want to upset her. Rowe said she felt better. Who was she to complain? “I don’t necessarily agree with the implication that a simpler life free of expectations is an improvement,” Liao said, “but it’s good that you’re happy.”
“Thanks, Cap.”
Liao patted Rowe’s leg on the bed. “Well, it’s good to see you again, at any rate. Last I heard, you were missing, along with Commander Iraj.”
“Mmm, Kamal pulled me out of the reactor room, blue as a blueberry. He dragged my arse out of there, gave me a nice little slit in my throat, got some air in there. Saved my life.” She snorted with playful laughter. “Probably just wants to fuck me.”
“I have some bad news for you. He likes boys.”
“Oh, wow.” She laughed. “So do I. We have so much in common.”
There was some of the old Summer in there. Liao smirked and shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
“Not as bad as you. I mean, you were like, totally out of it right after what happened on Earth. With everything blown up and all. You wouldn’t talk to anyone, you barely ate, you shaved off all your hair… I was worried, for a while there, that you were going to run away and commit Sudoku.”
“Commit… Sudoku?” Liao scrunched up her face. “You mean seppuku.”
“Yeah. You know. Kill yourself.”
“Seppuku is Japanese.”
“Oh.”
Rowe was right about one thing: Liao had put a pistol to her temple and missed. It said a lot about her marksmanship but also about her desire to live.
“Look, never mind,” said Liao. “I should go. I’ve been meaning to catch up with Kamal. He hasn’t had a chance to visit me since I was injured.”
“That’s okay,” said Rowe. “He’s very busy now, being the handsome and sexy bronze-skinned captain of a ship and everything.”
“It’s my ship,” said Liao, gently but in a way that allowed no compromises. “Iraj is my trusted XO, and when I’m not available, he can run the Beijing as he wishes, but it’s my ship. I’ll be taking it back in due time, thank you very much, especially after I’ll have my arm more or less fixed.”
“Right,” said Rowe. She smiled a wide, somewhat empty smile. “Say hi to him from me.”
“I will,” Liao said, slipping out of her chair and making her way to the door.
She gave Rowe one last look—concern mixed with sympathy—and then left.
Waiting for her in the med-bay was Saeed, with one of the colony’s constructs and a nonspecific but growing feeling of apprehension and nervousness.
“I’ve loaded the construct with the raw materials required to build the prosthetic, according to the instructions. The schematic is just uploading now.” Saeed settled back in his chair. “I thought you might like to watch.”
She glared at the metal cockroach as it looked up at her, its face a steel mask.
“Directive received,” it intoned in a dull, emotionless drone. It moved to one side of the room, a faint whine coming from within.
That caused some raised eyebrows. “We taught them English?”
“And Mandarin,” said Saeed. “And Farsi. And about a hundred other languages. Basically, whatever we had in the ship’s computer. They’re quick studies although they tend to miss a lot of the nuances of language. Still, it works well enough to receive commands in almost any language and give feedback accordingly.”
“Fascinating.”
The insectoid robot emitted a loud ping. Saeed gestured to it. “Proceed with the build.”
So it did. The construct extruded, much as a spider would, a tiny thread of metal that—save for the faint heat glow emanating from the filament—bore a striking resemblance to a strand of web. It began spinning it as a weaving arachnid would, manipulating the strand with its many legs, positioning it in place with the skill and precision only a computer could muster. It worked with blinding speed, its legs whirring and clicking as, as though from nowhere, a thin metal bar appeared. The metal was smoothed and moulded, shaped, and left to cool to a dull grey as it grew. Its length could only mean it was to be her new radius, or perhaps the ulna. When that was complete, the construct set it down on the floor and began working on another piece—spun from the same molten metal, another bar, a twin to the first.
Fingers, joints, knuckles. The humerus was cut off just where her real limb began; it flared into a thin cup that seemed too small to her, a reminder of just how atrophied her limb had become, how thin it was since the muscle had been removed. The prosthetic ended in thin strands of circuitry, tiny tendrils that would be implanted. Around that was a metal shoulder, designed to fit over her existing one and augment it, along with thin metal sheets to anchor it.
The tips of the fingers were sharp claws housed in a metal sheath.
Slowly, piece by piece, a rough approximation of a Toralii skeleton was laid out, simplified and made of metal, reduced down to Human size. Every component was forged with the patience of an immortal being—errorless and tireless, repetitive, simple actions creating complex devices. Then the construct began to spin a form of skin, layer upon layer of paper-thin sheets of metal, each one covered with circuitry, insulation, and then sprayed with a protective filament that hardened almost instantly.
“That is super creepy,” said Liao, watching the construct chitter and click as it spun out a new limb for her.
“I’ve gotten used to it.” Saeed observed the process with fascination. “I quite like seeing them work, actually. It’s amazing how precise and detailed they are and how wondrous the kinds of things they can create. Anything from a new piece of computer hardware to a main battle tank, or even larger. The Toralii Alliance used thousands of these things to build their ships, whole swarms of them building starship after starship.”
“Logistics,” said Liao. “The ultimate tool for winning wars. That’s an impressive and terrifying industrial capacity.”
Saeed tapped on one of the medical consoles, bringing up the results of a diagnostic routine. The arm twitched and spasmed as it was tested. As the test ran, he turned back to her. “Even worse, I don’t think we truly understand their full capacity yet. The only thing working in our favour is that, while they might be able to replace their losses very rapidly, their drone technology isn’t trusted—they employ constructs throughout their vessels, but they’re never given any kind of authority or command. They must have crew. Crew take time to train and can make mistakes.”
There weren’t that many Humans left. Even if every single survivor was a trained crewman and able to serve on their ships, the number of vessels the Humans could field was depressingly low. Constructs could ease some of the burden, but how far could their help go? After Ben, Liao didn’t trust them either. “Do you think we could have fully automated ships in the future?”
Saeed’s expression was a mixture of cautious hope and whimsy. “If they did, I would largely be out of a job. The military wouldn’t need butchers to sew up the living and give a time/date stamp to the dead. Strangely enough, I welcome such a sea change.”
“As would I. People talk about increased mechanisation taking something away from war, as though stripping it of the last lingering vestiges of the honour and nobility it had in the First World War. They consider Predator drones to be impersonal, dishonourable weapons, cowards’ weapons, the tools of the lesser man.” She regarded the tiny, withered stump of her arm. “So say people who have never seen the insanity, the illogic, the terror and stupidity of war. They know only the safe comforts of a warm bed and a land protected by cruel men ready to annihilate, with extreme prejudice, any threats to that land. War is a place where people die like dogs for no good reason.”
“I couldn’t have said it better,” said Saeed. “Hopefully, more of them die than us so that misery is not ours to bear.”
“That’s not enough for us now. There are so few Humans remaining. We have a technological and numerical disadvantage. We need industrialisation on a grand scale.” Liao watched as the construct lay more of its synthetic skin in layers, building the prosthesis. It was strikingly artificial, with exposed pistons and tendons and wires. The skin did not protect as a Human’s might, as an outside barrier. Instead, it was laid directly over the pistons, circuits, and mechanical pieces, building them up layer by layer.
Finally, Liao addressed the elephant in the room. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look biological. It really does look archaic, as though its secret power source was steam or something. If this process can build spaceships, why can’t it build a limb that looks Toralii? Or Human?”
“It almost can.” Saeed grimaced slightly as though admitting some embarrassing secret. “The Uncanny Valley is a well-recognised trope when designing artificial things intended to look natural. Have you seen movies with CG people in them? Even though they use motion-capture and facial scanning and have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they always look fake. Human beings have a truly amazing ability to analyse faces and forms. We can instantly tell if something is pretending to be something it’s not, and this discovery is often unsettling for us. The Toralii, apparently, have a similar issue, and the way they get around it is by not trying to blend in although realistic prostheses are created on occasion. For the most part, though, a prosthetic limb’s artificialness is acknowledged and accepted. There is no cultural shame in losing a limb, so they deliberately craft them in ways which reflect that this body modification is the product of a machine, not nature. They’re practically minded in this regard, adding scanners, sensors, sometimes weapons; a prosthesis can even be a fashion statement in some circles.”
“Weapons?” That last bit caught her attention. “You mean the claws, right?”
“More than that. We chose this particular design because it’s rugged, low power, and highly modular. The forearm can have all manner of implants, including a limited-capacity, low-power plasma pistol. Those take some time getting used to. The pistol pops out of the casing, fires, retracts, etc. when a ‘virtual muscle’ is squeezed. Training the brain to move something that hasn’t been there your whole life is difficult and takes time to master. The weapons are almost always unloaded for the first year of a new installation.”
“We don’t have a year for me to get used to the thing.”
“This is a good point, and it seems unnecessary to have one.” Saeed smiled politely. “I’m sure a pistol add-in would be useful, but why not keep your sidearm for now, Captain?”
Liao had seen firsthand the incredible damage plasma pistols could do, melting a hole straight through one of the Beijing’s bulkheads. That kind of firepower would be an asset for her to have, especially discretely. “For now,” she agreed. “But fabricate an add-on anyway. I’d like to start training with it as soon as possible.”
“Let’s just try with the base arm first, shall we, and work on add-ons later.” He regarded her curiously. “You’re more impatient these days.”
Her reply came without much thought. “I guess nearly getting burned to death makes me realise I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I need to accomplish everything in my life that I want to do.”
“Well, what is it you want to do?”
The construct finished its weaving. Liao regarded its product, steel grey, a strange matte metal, its surfaces smooth and perfectly machined. It lay on the ground, palm up, limp and inert as though it were freshly sliced off a living creature. Its fingers, claws retracted, seemed to reach out towards the bulkhead of the medical facility, and Liao couldn’t help but imagine it was weakly struggling to escape. It was a metal mirror of her own arm, burned off on the surface of Velsharn, neatly sliced from her body.
“I want to kill a lot more Toralii.”
Saeed’s face tightened, and he pointedly avoided continuing that line of discussion. “There’re some tests we must run on the prosthetic before we install it. Maybe have some dinner? I’ll have one of the orderlies deliver it to your quarters.”
“I have quarters on the Rubens?”
“We’ve allocated you some,” he said. “Temporarily. They’re the VIP quarters. Slightly below the Captain’s lodgings in terms of luxuries, but I think you’ll find them sufficient to your needs.”
“Those will be more than fine.” She stood and, giving the metal hand one more look, departed.
The quarters were fine, with thick sheets and comfortable pillows filling a bed sized for a Toralii, but despite the luxury, sleep came roughly. Liao tossed and turned, eyes closed but unable to truly rest. Just when her body started to relax, pins and needles grew on an arm that no longer existed. She tried ignoring it, tried rubbing the stump, tried a mild sedative. Nothing seemed to take away the ache. She felt heat, cold, cramping… any number of sensations, even though there was no flesh to relay them.
That was a new thing, that sensation. Saeed had warned her, and she had prepared for pain. Instead, it was every other feeling—distinctly uncomfortable, certainly, but drugs could take pain away. Nothing seemed to soothe the itching.
She couldn’t possibly have thought she would ever miss the tank.
Four hours wasn’t much when it came to sleep. She had done greater things with less. She would endure. Eventually, after fitful squirming, Liao dressed and returned to the med-bay. One of the advantages of her very short hair was that the effects of diminished rest were not compounded by the necessity of taking time to make herself presentable, not that anyone would see her on the Rubens anyway.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked Saeed as she returned. He and Saara were waiting for her by the completed prosthetic.
“I daydream about sleep,” he said. Liao didn’t laugh. Saeed smiled widely. “A joke from medical school.”
“For some of us, it’s not a joke,” Liao said.
[“Are you well rested?”] asked Saara. [“The device will be, in a limited sense, interacting directly with your neural tissue. The most critical time is the first few days and weeks, and most especially, the first few hours. It is best you are at your baseline when exposed to the link so that the device ‘learns’ how to work with you.”]
“Baseline for me is pretty tired,” said Liao, “so mission accomplished, I suppose.” Her eyes fell upon the prosthetic, now resting on a white cloth draped over one of the examination benches, lit by overhead lights. The tendrils of its cables ran into a computer. “How did the testing go?”
“It worked flawlessly. Piped the neural links into a test bed, ran some diagnostics. The articulators do the job pretty well. They squeeze like regular muscles and, according to the tests, should be linked up to the same nerve endings as the original limb, so the amount of discomfort you experience should be minimal.”
“Given how I slept last night, minimal discomfort would be a great goal to aim for.”
Saara frowned sympathetically. [“You were in pain?”]
“Every single other sensation but,” she said. “Which is very odd.”
Saeed only nodded thoughtfully. “Not entirely unexpected. Everyone experiences it differently, from what I’ve read.” He tapped on the computer’s keyboard. “Right. Ready for this?”
Ready as she was ever going to be. “Sure. What do I do?”
“Lie down on the bed and try not to move too much.”
She did so, resting the stump near the device. Saara adjusted Liao’s forearm, getting it comfortable, and aligning the prosthetic to the stump of her limp. Seeing the device up close brought out the detail; the metal skin was cut with tiny grooves, almost invisible to the naked eye. The device was incredibly elaborate, despite its outward appearance, a juxtaposition of technology levels. The device was both very primitive—exposed metal, bare rods and pistons—and quite strangely advanced. Compared to her real arm, the prosthetic was oversized and awkward, and she imagined that the difference in dimensions would take some getting used to.
The tendrils of the device snaked out toward her. Saeed injected a local anaesthetic into her stump—she barely felt the needle’s entrance, truth be told—and she watched in curious fascination as the interface cables slipped past her skin, burrowing into her flesh. She could feel the cables move inside her, squirming around her bone, twisting and aligning, linking up with the real nerves that remained.
A sensation of spreading numbness was the first thing she felt, moving out from her new fingers. Pins and needles sprung up all along the metal; the device jerked as it turned on, and instinctively, Liao clenched her new fist to avoid the painful tingling.
The prosthetic complied instantly, metal fingers closing in on themselves. She opened and closed the hand experimentally. It was as though she had never been wounded. Her new limb felt so natural to her. The fingers moved just like her flesh ones had. The wrist turned, the elbow bent, everything was as it had been. Not even… it was more: stronger, tougher, more sensitive.
However, it was less, too, in some way she could not quantify. Replacing parts of herself with a machine seemed to be denying some part of her humanity. It wasn’t just that it was a Toralii arm poorly resized for her. It was taking something from her, a leak in her soul.
Out of all the feelings she had anticipated, that hollow emptiness was not one.
She decided to replace that emptiness with ambitions. Eden had broken her—she had put a pistol to her temple, and only the vaguest whispers of self-preservation had kept her alive. She had a chance at making up for that moment of weakness. The hour of her redemption had come.
[“The link is complete,”] said Saara. [“Grafting on the support structure now.”]
Liao watched as the upper part of the limb unfurled, folding over her shoulder and latching onto the skin, anchor points affixing. Those hurt—the local anaesthetic did not reach that far—but she gritted her teeth through it, enduring the pain, clenching her new fist to help. The metal groaned as she applied pressure then slowly relaxed as the pain faded.
“How do you feel?” asked Saeed, dabbing at the small amount of blood that leaked out of the small wounds.
“Good,” said Liao. “That last bit was rough. It’s all good now, though.” She sat up, her balance off. The prosthetic weighed more than she’d anticipated. Liao steadied herself, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She rolled her shoulder experimentally. “No, it feels good.”
[“Excellent,”] said Saara. [“The prosthetic will take several days to fully integrate, and there may be residual effects, but at the very least, it does seem to have made a strong link.”]
“Like it was made for me.” Liao flexed the strong metal fingers, admiring the sheathed claws at the end of them. “You know, this might be a big advantage. I suspect at least some of our inability to communicate with the Alliance is biological difference—we’re just too different. At least a part of me looks Toralii now.”
Saara held her arm up, dwarfing Liao’s prosthetic. Her yellow eyes shone with amusement. [“It is… cute. That is the only way I can describe it. Like one from a child.”]
“I was hoping for intimidating.”
[“Alas, Captain, such a thing would rarely be intimidating to a true Toralii warrior.”]
“So maybe that’s another title they’ll add onto my name whenever they feel the need to make the whole thing even longer than it currently is,” she said. “Liao the Kittenclawed.”
They laughed.
“Now,” said Saeed, a wide, eager smile growing across his face, “there’s one more person you will want to meet.”
Liao stiffened with anticipation, unable to keep the feeling contained. The door to the med-bay opened, and one of the nurses brought in someone she had wanted, more than any of the others, to see. Liao steeled herself. It was important that she remained calm, controlled, dignified…
But when the nurse brought Allison out, aged eighteen months and with a face full of curiosity, dignity went out the window, and she cried uncontrollably. Liao reached for Allison like a starving woman, her arms hugging her, dragging her child close to her chest.
“Careful, careful,” the nurse said.
Her child. Liao’s fleshy arm shook as she hugged her baby, eyes closed, breath coming in ragged gasps.
Allison began to wail. Liao, fearful she had hurt the baby, released her grip, but the child was unharmed. Instead, she was recoiling from the metal of her mother’s prosthetic.
It was cold, Liao realised. “I’m sorry,” she said by reflex, guilt welling up within her. “I-I thought I crushed her.”
[“She is unharmed,”] said Saara. [“Do not worry.”]
How could she not worry? Her own child, for whom she had given so much, reacted with fear around her. Allison squirmed away, back into the nurse’s hands.
“Yeah,” said Liao, her tone completely unconvinced. “I think she just needs some time to adjust.”
“So do you,” said Saeed. “It’s a big change. Muscle strength, coordination, temperature… everything is going to be different. It’ll take some time to get it right. Don’t take this to heart.”
She knew, rationally and logically, that Saeed was right, but that couldn’t shake the nagging doubts that gnawed at her. “I know.”
Saeed stood, passing a critical eye over the arm, apparently to satisfaction. “Well, now you’ve got your arm back, I suppose you should get ready for the big relaunch, yes? A Broadsword from the Tehran will take you down to the surface.”
The Beijing, her other child, was returning to space. Kamal would be in charge, of course, but when it came to the operation and relaunch of her ship, she should be on board. She had to be there.
As much as she wanted to be here instead.