Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,121

I was down, the infected atop me, raining down blows. I brought the microwave emitter to bear, firing. Behind me, I heard a scream of pain from Shay. The adrenaline rose within me and I threw the now-dead coil off. But there was another behind that, already on me, pummeling, striking. The Gauss gun was torn from my grasp as something—a wrench?—crashed into my arm. I heard bones break.

More screams from behind me. I fired the emitter indiscriminately. I couldn’t miss. The infected were piling on me, keeping me down by weight alone. I was aware of another scream, my own this time, as my broken arm was latched onto. The pain sent a surging wave of nausea loose in my guts, but I grit my teeth. Kept fighting. My vision was fading. I couldn’t see the infected before me. They’d merged into a blurred wall of bright blue ship suits that was slowly darkening to a black deeper than the void. I heard another crack as something smashed into the face-shield of the VaccTech. The venerable suit finally failed, visor shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, raining a torrent of safety glass down into my mouth and eyes. Sarah automatically switched the countdown projection from the HUD directly to my vision. Twenty seconds. We weren’t going to make it.

New pain as something smashed into my face. I felt my nose explode, heard teeth breaking. A hot wash of blood gushed out. I fired the emitter reflexively, jerkily, hoping to take down one more coil before the end. There was no pain. Adrenaline, or fear, or shock—whatever it was it focused my mind, kept me flailing and fighting long after I should have stopped. But then the wrench fell a third time.

Eighteen seconds.

An eternity.

Nothingness.

EPILOGUE

I hated waking up in the body shop.

Consciousness and acclimation were slow processes, and the first thing I became aware of was that I was aware. Which felt odd, and somehow wrong. Next came the sensation of lying on something hard and cool. But the sense was muted, faint, more of a memory of what it felt like to rest upon something hard and cool rather than actually doing so. That was the extent of sensation, and I knew that, for a while at least, it was all I was going to feel.

How long, Sarah?

It has been sixteen days since this instantiation was created.

Sixteen days. Not too bad. But what had I been doing? Memory was always tricky when you first woke up. The wetware of your new coil had to adjust to the hardware of your core and the software of your agent. It wasn’t always a smooth process. But it wasn’t my first rodeo, either.

I concentrated on who I was. Carter Langston. Deep space salvage. Crew of the Persephone. No. Wait. The Persephone was gone. Destroyed. By Genetechnic. Just like that it all came crashing back. The loss of the Persephone. The attack on our backups. The deal with Genetechnic. Bliss.

Shay.

Had we failed, then? I searched my memories, reliving the swim from the shuttle to the passenger liner, the hellish fight along the hull, the arrival of the Genetechnic security personnel. The pell-mell dash through the corridors to try and make it to Environmental. The moment outside the door to Life Support, when Korben had instructed us to back up, that we had fulfilled our end of the bargain. And then…

Nothing.

Somewhere after that backup, I’d died.

I groaned, pushing off against the table as I tried to lever myself to my feet. For a few seconds, I just sort of flopped and thrashed like a landed fish, as my body learned how to react to the signals from my brain. Then I was up, legs dangling off the edge of the table. More details started to come into focus. The room was the standard hospital room—white tiled floor, eggshell walls, one each bed, chair, window, bathroom, exit. It felt different from a station or ship infirmary. It was the sound, or lack thereof. No whir of machinery. Planet-side, then. Mars? Probably. Though the domes used much of the same systems a ship did, the scale was so different that you’d only hear them if you were unfortunate enough to live in close proximity.

I turned my attention from my surroundings to my new coil. I could tell at a glance that it was top-notch. Excellent conditioning and I was already starting to regain full motor control—always a sign of quality in craftsmanship this soon after waking up.