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WAKING WAS A VERY SLOW and difficult process. To Sigurdsson, it felt like surfacing – slowly – after having been underwater a few seconds longer than she should have been, lungs burning and a weakness burning itself through her entire body. And a dull ache everywhere. Her head hurt, her chest hurt, her legs, her arms – everything.
Holy shit.
Her eyes snapped open and she immediately winced and coughed up a curse. It was very, very bright wherever she was and it didn’t help her headache.
But her arms hurt.
But she didn't have arms. She had cybernetic arms that didn't work right and didn't hold up to the strain of her job and didn't give her any ability to feel them. But her arms hurt. Her mind raced in several directions at once, a confused jumble of memories stitching themselves together to make sense of where she was and why she could feel limbs she didn’t have. And the answer was that she did in fact have them.
The surgery. The experimental surgery that was only legal because the Commonwealth government hadn’t gotten around to understanding the principles well enough to write a law forbidding its application. The surgery that had made her part icaran.
Slowly opening her eyes, Sigurdsson glanced down to her right and for the first time in a year and a half was not greeted with the sight of the articulated metallic shoulder plate designed to hide the horrible scarring where her flesh ended and the machinery began. Instead, there were bandages and beyond that, there was an arm. Its skin was a rich, deep blue, broken by a dozen or so horizontal white lines on the outer side, their ends tapering like the stripes on a tiger.
A glance to her other side showed a matching limb.
She felt a tingling in her fingers, all six of them. Two fingers and one thumb on each hand and they were all tingling.
Swallowing heavily, Sigurdsson closed her eyes and took several deep, hopeful breaths.
"Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t get ahead of yourself," she said quietly.
And then she slowly clenched her hands into fists and relaxed them again.
"It worked..."
"Indeed it did," said Brill.
Sigurdsson jumped.
"Apologies, I did not mean to startle you," it said, stepping up to the bed and poking and prodding various points on Sigurdsson’s new arms. "Surgery went exceedingly well and healing is progressing at a faster rate than I had hoped. Icaran physiology truly is marvelous. Please, you may stand if you wish."
After a moment’s hesitation, she did so, using her arms – her arms – to push herself off the bed.
"How do you feel?"
Slowly raising her new hands in front of her face, Sigurdsson flexed her fingers once more, turning her hands over and back, taking a good close look at them. And she had no idea how to answer the question. She didn’t quite know how she felt. Certainly it seemed the surgery had been a complete success, but when it came right down to the facts, she was currently wearing a dead woman’s arms – and not just a dead woman, but a dead woman who wasn’t even the same species. There would be many on Thor’s Hammer, possibly including her superiors in the army, who wouldn’t be able to come to grips with the change. Could she even be considered human anymore? Cybernetics had gained wide acceptance in the Commonwealth, but she wasn’t sure many people would...
"Cybernetics," she said. "My eye. I had a contact node in my right index finger to activate my optics."
The brill doctor nodded and took her right hand in his. She felt the smoothness of the metal exo-suit and the rough edges of the finger joints and it sent a shiver down her spine. She could feel things.
"I took the liberty of transplanting the contact node as well," it said, gently turning her hand over and showing her the barely-visible implantation scar on her fingertip.
"Thank you. Thank you. How long have I been out?"
"Sixteen hours."
She looked down at the brill in surprise.
"That’s it?"
It nodded. Sixteen hours. Sixteen hours and a batshit crazy brill surgeon was all it had taken for her to regain control of her life. It seemed an easy price.
"As I said, remarkable physiology, the icarans – impressive tissue regeneration. Once I bridged the gap between your extant skeletal structure and that of the donor arms with synthetic bone and completed the basic connections between cardiovascular and nervous systems, and of course injected a steroid and tissue-growth enhancer, the icaran biology began to complete the procedure almost on its own. Very fascinating to observe."
"I’m sure it was," she said. "So, uh... how long do I need to rest?"
"You mean to ask when you may return to active duty."
"Yeah, that’s what I mean."
The brill shrugged.
"I would recommend not over-taxing your shoulders for the next few days while the icaran tissue finishes melding with your own, but I am comfortable saying you may return to duty once you are comfortable using your new limbs," it said. "However, I would strongly recommend practicing a multitude of tasks to help in adapting to having two fewer fingers on each hand."
The brill picked up a tablet from a nearby table and brought up the Commonwealth Armed Forces messaging system.
"Please log in to your account and send me a message."
Taking the offered tablet, Sigurdsson frowned as it took her several minutes to manipulate the interface properly to log in and even longer to send the actual message.
She handed the tablet back to the brill.
"There. It took longer than usual, but-."
"And your spelling is atrocious."
It turned the tablet so Sigurdsson could see the message as he’d received it.
OKay doc snedingyou messge. See no problwm.
"Typing was never my strong point anyway," she said with a small chuckle. "In fact, pretty sure I never used more than two fingers to type at the best of times. I’m more worried about whether I’ll be able to use a firearm."
"Understandable. As your physician, I should recommend against any strenuous activity, including any participation in combat. However, as I am not mentally deficient, I know you would ignore said recommendation – in which case I will simply advise against the use of weapons such as assault rifles that require you to brace them against your shoulder, or any weapon with significant recoil. And, it should go without saying, any hand-to-hand combat."
"Okay. That I can probably handle. For how long?"
"Two weeks, at least. I would like to re-examine and re-evaluate in twenty-four hour intervals for the first week and, assuming no issues, forty-eight hour intervals for the second. Is this acceptable?"
"Yes, absolutely."
Under normal circumstances, she would have been annoyed or even downright hostile at the suggestion she would need to check in with medical so frequently, but this monster-maker of a brill had given her a shot at being a soldier again. At being Freya Sigurdsson again. As stubborn as she was, Sigurdsson did not want to jeopardize the opportunity by pushing off her assessments.
"In that case, you may consider yourself discharged. We speak again at this time tomorrow?"
Nodding her agreement, Sigurdsson pulled on her coat, revelling in the feeling of the coarse fabric on her arms, stuffed her hands in her pockets and headed back into the guts of Thor’s Hammer with a single thought on her mind: getting back into the fight.