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Templemer, planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
March 19th, 2038
“Must wake.”
Leave me alone.
“Must wake, or die.”
I’m already dead, leave me alone.
“Not dead, but be dead if not wake.’
He struggled up a little and the pain tore at him. No, it hurts.
“All life hurt. Life better than die. Hurt better than not. Mother needs you. Wake.”
He felt himself pushed from behind, pushed up toward the light despite himself.
* * *
Terry choked and gagged around the tube in his throat, and his arms flailed.
“Grab him!” someone yelled.
“I got him, someone tie his leg down. Jesus Christ, what happened?”
“I don’t know, he was spasming and talking gibberish!”
“Brain function?”
“Wait...oh, it’s back, I don’t know how, but it’s back!”
“Impossible.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“Thank god, however it happened. Get that IV stabilized and give him a quarter grain of Isoflurane on a float drip.”
Terry fought against the pain and confusion for another second until he felt a numbing coldness begin to spread through his mind. Then he was back in the darkness.
This time it only felt like a few seconds before consciousness returned. He opened his eyes and panicked when he couldn’t see anything. After a second he began to make out details, and a face. His mother was standing nearby, and she was crying.
“Mom?” he said, his voice so raspy it didn’t sound like his own. He coughed. Surprisingly, he wasn’t in any pain, but instead felt all floaty.
“Terry,” his mom cried and came closer. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” The room was slowly coming into focus. He could see various medical equipment, as well as Dr. Jaehnig and his assistants. As slowly as his focus was returning, he realized they were there to take care of him. “I was dead,” he said.
His mother collapsed, falling to her knees and nearly out of sight, completely racked by sobs and sounding of utter despair. “I’m so sorry,” she said repeatedly.
“We really blew it.”
Terry turned his head to see Doc on the other side of his bed. “I can’t remember what happened, except I was dead.”
“We want to get you better before we go into it,” Dr. Jaehnig said, coming over to examine something Terry couldn’t see. “Do you feel any pain?”
“No,” Terry said, “but I want to know what happened.” He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. His brain felt like it was full of cotton candy. An image came to him of looking through Templemer’s dome from the outside into the moon pool room. His mother with a look of stunned horror on her face, and Doc running toward the moon pool, stripping off his jacket and yelling soundlessly. The memory cut off as suddenly as it had returned.
“Sleep for now,” the doctor said and nodded to the side. Terry opened his mouth to complain, but couldn’t manage to say anything before darkness took him back.
* * *
“How you doing, Terry?”
He opened his eyes and blinked. Dr. Jaehnig was watching him a short distance away, holding a slate and glancing at its display every few seconds.
“Tired of sleeping,” he said. Terry didn’t know how long they’d kept him asleep, only that he’d been out for some time. His back hurt in the way it did when he’d been in bed too long. Despite just waking up again, he yawned. “Why do I still feel tired?”
“Your body’s been busy healing,” the doctor explained, again examining the slate.
“What are you monitoring on the slate?”
“Your blood chemistries. You see, we’re trying to understand some things.”
“Like?”
“Well, how you’re alive mostly.”
Terry nodded and felt something attached to his head. He also realized he was strapped to the bed. “I was dead, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Dr. Clark doesn’t agree with us discussing this, but she’s not your physician.” He shrugged. “It was obvious to me, you know. Frankly, I’m amazed and want to maybe understand how you came back.”
“Can I have something to drink?”
“Of course.” Dr. Jaehnig went to a nearby table and returned with a clear cup. There was a straw in it, and he put it to Terry’s lips.
He wasn’t happy with being fed like a baby, but he was too thirsty to argue, and he took a big drink. The doctor pulled it back far sooner than Terry would have liked.
“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we?”
“First, tell me how long I’ve been in here, please,” Terry said. “My back is sore, and nowhere in the habitat looked this good in my memory.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” the doctor said. “You were injured 65 days ago.”
The air went out of Terry’s lungs with a whoof. He tried to comprehend what he’d just been told. Two months? He’d been hurt two months ago? “What have I been doing all this time?”
“You were in a coma with steadily decreasing brain functions.” Dr. Jaehnig turned the Tri-V on for his slate and showed a date-indexed recording of graphs. As time went by, the numbers steadily decreased until it reached zero. “You reached zero a day ago, which was when we decided to...terminate life support.”
“Let me die?”
“Yes,” he said. “No brain functions. You were already dead. The fading of your higher brain functions was indicative of a cascade failure.”
“Why,” Terry said, not wanting to hear more about how they’d been going to let him die. “Why was my brain failing?”
“Do you remember what happened to you?”
“Only being out with the orcas, and something happened.” His brow furrowed as he tried to remember.
Dr. Jaehnig nodded and tapped on his slate. “Understandable.” He stopped and locked eyes with him. “Are you sure you want to see this?” Terry nodded emphatically. “Very well.” He clicked on the slate, and the Tri-V came alive.
He was watching himself swimming out from the dome holding Pōkole’s dorsal fin. The view was from a security camera, and he wasn’t perfectly in frame as he met with the orca pod and watched the reunion of Pōkole with his mother and the rest of the pod.
“How’s Pōkole?” he suddenly asked. As Dr. Jaehnig had said, the calf had been without his care for months.
The doctor paused the video. “He’s fine. The other high school-aged kids pitched in, helping feed him after you were...after you were hurt.” He unpaused the video.
Terry watched the orcas turn and swim into the darkness. After a moment, he spun around and swam back toward Templemer, moving slowly toward the bottom of the camera view. Then a flash of movement as a huge, sleek shape intercepted him, and he was out of frame. That was the hit I felt, Terry thought.
The Tri-V replay switched to inside the moon pool room, and Terry watched his mom scream and point. Instantly Doc burst into motion, running and stripping off his jacket as he went. The man’s long frame translated into incredible strides as he leaped the last three meters into the water. Amazingly, he snatched the rebreather Terry had left while donning his helmet as he was jumping into the water.
The view shifted again, this time to his own point of view just after he was attacked. The view was dizzying as he was dragged through the water. The rest played out in only a few seconds as he saw his hand appear with the dive knife and plunge it into the huge dual-iris eye.
“Incredible,” he heard Dr. Jaehnig say.
“I don’t remember doing it,” Terry said.
“Well, I couldn’t have done it. Not as injured as you were.”
“How bad was it?” Terry asked.
“Just wait a second,” the doctor said and pointed at the replay.
The monster let go and flashed away in a swirl of purple liquid. The view moved around, and eventually down to show his leg. It looked like a filleted fish with massive flaps of flesh, rubber from the ravaged drysuit, and jets of dark red blood. Oh my god, he thought. Then the view looked up to show the entirety of the creature attacking him. It was longer than an adult orca, but not as thick. Three sets of long flippers along its sides propelled it through the water. It had an incredibly long set of jaws, like an alligator, only thinner, and lined with shark-like teeth.
“The closest analogue we can find to it on Earth was a dinosaur named Liopleurodon. It’s one of the Selroth transplants, an Oohobo. They’re a natural predator from their homeworld the Selroth now keep as some kind of right of adulthood?” The doctor shrugged. “We hadn’t seen one yet, and with as much sea life as is around here, and the bottlenoses venturing kilometers in all directions, we were pretty certain there weren’t any here. I’m sorry to say, we were wrong.”
“With all the fish and stuff, why did it attack me?” Terry asked. The freeze-frame of the Oohobo sent a little shudder up his back despite the slight numbing of the drugs they had him on.
“Doc thinks it’s because of your suit lights. The lights on the dome were installed by the Selroth, and likely a spectrum that doesn’t attract the Oohobo. Our suit lights are a different frequency, and that must have been what caused it.” He unfroze the image, and the Oohobo instantly noticed Terry with its remaining eye. He froze it again.
“Notice how it spotted you right away when you looked up?” Terry nodded. “Anyway,” he let the replay continue, “we didn’t have much left to work with.”
The Oohobo shot toward the camera. Terry felt himself cringe. A split second later, two huge black and white shapes rocketed past him, jaws snapping; the orcas tore into the alien predator. Even from the horribly slewing images, Terry recognized Kray and Ki’i, the two dominant males from the super pod. He wanted to see more of the fight, but the fight began to fall out of frame, drifting lazily.
The last image was of an arc of bright white teeth above and below, closing slowly in on him, then the recording stopped. It started again a second later, showing Doc swimming through the moon pool lock with Terry in tow. His mother was screaming over and over as Doctors Orsage and Jaehnig leaned over the pool to pull the limp boy out. As his ravaged leg cleared the edge of the pool, he left a wash of bright red blood. His mother fainted, and the recording stopped for good.
“Did an orca bring me back?”
“Yes,” the doctor replied. “Moloko brought you back. We got a couple of pieces of the Oohobo, but like I said, there wasn’t much left. They tore it apart.” He chuckled. “They were pissed.”
“I’ll say they were.” Doc had come in at some point. Terry glanced at the old merc, who was in turn watching him carefully. “How you doing, kiddo?”
“Surprisingly alive,” he admitted. “You came out for me without a suit. Are you nuts?”
“Do you remember what you did?”
“No,” Terry said. “I just saw the movie, though.”
“It’s a blockbuster. The Oohobo was basically eating you alive, and you stabbed it in the freaking eye!” He laughed and shook his head. “God damn, kiddo, what you did was the most badass thing I’ve seen in my entire life.”
Terry looked away, unwilling to meet his eyes. Mostly because he felt tears beginning to flow. “I didn’t do anything.”
“The hell you didn’t.” The man had walked up next to Terry when he wasn’t looking. He felt the older man doing something and looked down. He was pinning something on the pajama top. It was an anchor with a trident through it, and an eagle. “You deserve it more than I ever did.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“She’s sleeping right now,” Doc said. “When you suddenly woke up after they turned off the life support, she kinda lost it. They gave her a sedative.”
“How messed up am I?” Terry asked.
“We’ll wait until his mother’s here to explain,” Dr. Jaehnig said.
“I don’t think so,” Doc countered. The doctor gave him a stern look. “This kid took on a dinosaur with a damn knife. The orcas risked their own lives to save him. I think he can handle the truth right now.” Dr. Jaehnig frowned. “You tell him, or I will.”
“Very well,” the doctor said. He reached over and removed the strap holding Terry’s arms down. They still felt like they had lead weight on them, but he could move.
“Thank you,” he said.
The doctor nodded and pulled the sheet down the rest of the way. The left leg of his pajama bottoms was empty from mid-thigh down. “We weren’t set up for this level of trauma when you were injured,” Dr. Jaehnig said. “We had to use a tourniquet to save your life. By the time we could get a surgery set up, the leg was lost.”
Terry nodded. He’d known from the minute he saw the injury recorded in his own helmet camera, and the better image of them pulling him from the water. It was more than a movie, this was real life. Despite telling himself he wouldn’t, he was quietly crying. Doc sat on the chair next to him and held his hand.
“It’s okay, kiddo, the hard part’s over. You survived. We’ll get through the rest together.”
When his mom came in an hour later, he was out of tears. He got to hold her while she cried and tell her it was okay, not her fault, and he was going to be fine.
I survived, he thought. If I can kick a monster’s ass, maybe I can do anything.
* * * * *
