Death Drop (6 page)

Chapter 8: Tasks Owed

C
olonel Jerrel Abalias was pacing the floor of the infirmary examination room as green-frocked medical officers and technicians packed equipment in haphazard containers and busied themselves with making the medical unit disappear as quickly as possible along with the rest of the Dissension base.

Tap, Tap, Tap.

A slender silhouette appeared on the other side of the door. The figure stood alone, and the colonel could feel his disappointment and anger swell as he prepared to order Major Otto Von Holt into the room and tear into him. But the growing fever in his mind cooled as he became aware of a distant echo in the corridor. The faint sound steadily increased until it transformed into the unmistakable clap of hooves against stone, and an enormous shadow rose against the frosted viewing pane outside the door and dwarfed the outline of Von Holt.

“Come in, Major.”

Otto walked across the floor, came to attention in front of the colonel, and snapped a salute. “I’ve brought Lieutenant Schunkari down from the ridge as requested, sir.”

“At ease, Major. Well done. Well done.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Lieutenant, will you please come in?” Malo stepped through the opening to the examination room, stooping considerably to keep his horns from hitting the top of the doorway. Once inside, the Moxen lifted his head and shoulders to their full height and released his mangled limb so he could salute the colonel. His injured arm, now unsupported, began to throb, and a small grimace twisted his lip as he held his right hand just beneath the curled horn on his brow.

“At ease, son,” the colonel said, in awe of the horrific, swollen pulp of flesh that used to be Malo’s left arm. “I’ve seen some battle wounds in my time, son, but that’s got to be one of the worst I’ve seen on a soldier still walking around.” He reached for the holodex on the empty desk in front of him and punched a button. “Doc, we’re ready for you in here.

“Lieutenant, I’m going to ask you some questions while the doctor tries to save your arm. I’m going to ask you about what happened on the ridge—I’m going to have to ask you to recount what happened to Captain Zandre. I know it’s going to be hard for you, but we’ve got to be certain of what went on—you have to tell me everything you can remember about the goddam Serum drop!” The colonel slammed his fist down on the abandoned desk with a loud thwack that echoed in the empty room.

Before Malo could nod his head in agreement, the door slid open and a large object, steadily rolling forward on treads circling a network of interlocking cogs on either side of its long body, entered the room. Perched above the treads was a flat expanse flanked by four mechanical arms with interchangeable ends for various medical tasks. On its right hand side, the device currently sported a lighted attachment on one arm and a hand, complete with four fingers and an opposable thumb, on the other. The left side of the machine had a similar setup except, in place of the lighted attachment, there was a curious-looking instrument made from two lengths of metal tubing connected to each other at a slight angle. Both sections of the tube had two sets of heavy manacles in their open position. Otto gave a slight shudder as he tried in vain not to imagine what purpose the odd-looking attachment would soon serve.

The device circled to Malo’s side and slowed down. As the machine came to a halt, the flat portion above its treads tilted forward until it stood on end facing the colonel, and the right arm with the hand elevated upward in a gesture that looked like a salute, although the machine did not have anything resembling a head. Behind it followed a bespectacled, spiny mammal with a white lab coat and small beady eyes quickly darting from side to side over an illuminated rectangular object grasped in his hands.

“Oh, my,” he said in a squeaky voice, shaking his head and sucking the back of his large front teeth. “Oh, at ease, Bertie!” he said testily as he looked up from his report. “How many times do I have to remind you, you don’t have to salute anyone anymore?” Bertie the machine lowered his saluting arm, and Otto could have sworn he saw the now vertical portion of the device tilt minutely forward and all four of its arms slouch slightly. “Blasted thing thinks it’s still in the service of Her Majesty’s army. Sorry about that, Colonel.”

“It’s quite all right, Artemus,” Colonel Abalias said, eyeing Bertie curiously. “I wasn’t aware that your race had a queen, Artie.”

“Ah…well…yes—of course we did,” Dr. Artemus Blink said awkwardly as he cast a regretful glance at the colonel. Abalias recognized the pained look that so many members of the Dissension shared, a look brought about by agonizing memories of slaughter and destruction at the hands and minds of the Durax, and he quickly changed the subject.

“He seems to be enthusiastic about his duties.”

“Ah, yes. He is a rather good assistant. The best one I have, actually. That’s why I brought him with me when our army fell to the Durax and we few survivors escaped. He has certainly proved to be worth the trouble—helped me save many lives.” Doctor Blink briefly looked at Bertie like a proud father, and Otto thought he saw the machine straighten its posture again.

“Well, Malo,” the doctor said sympathetically, “according to the preliminary information that I received from the colonel, it appears that you’ve done some damage to your left arm. Would you mind taking a seat on Bertie here while I determine the extent of your injuries?”

Malo nodded and Bertie responded immediately, lowering his flat expanse as he quickly maneuvered behind the Moxen. Malo sat down uneasily and slowly transferred his sizable mass onto the table. Bertie’s superstructure creaked and groaned under the immense weight, and he flexed his mechanical hand open, shaking it vigorously in mock discomfort. Doctor Blink paid no attention as he crossed in front of Malo and approached the left arm now hanging precariously at his flank. Without a word, a set of small steps emerged from the front of Bertie’s chassis just a few inches from the Moxen’s left leg. Doctor Blink bounded up the stairs until his eyes were level with Malo’s elbow.

“Hmmm,” Doctor Blink said as his face took on an ill looking frown. “Bertie, inter-scanner, please.” If the medical machine truly had problems supporting Malo’s weight, it didn’t show. Bertie’s table stayed flat as it elevated a foot above his treads with a gear-driven zip, clearly revealing a large interior space between his tracks that ran the length of his body. Malo looked nervously down at Blink from his new vantage point, and the doctor gave a reassuring smile as Bertie reached across the flat expanse behind Malo’s back and removed the hand affixed to the opposing arm on the left side. Bertie’s remaining hand slipped under his table into a large, rectangular compartment that had opened inside the channel just beyond the Moxen’s dangling legs, then reemerged with a metal object that looked as if someone had taken a perfect square and removed one of its sides. With a loud clack, Bertie attached the new instrument where his left hand used to be, and a blue haze appeared inside the square and swirled within its borders as if by magic.

“Malo, if you would be so kind as to hold as still as possible, I’m going to take a look inside your arm. Bertie, send the image to my screen please,” Blink said as he lifted his illuminated tablet in front of his nose once again.

The blue mist parted and bent around the front edge of Malo’s thick wrist, then melded seamlessly again on the other side as Bertie slid the open end of the square attachment over Malo’s arm, centering it in the glowing field. Bertie slowly moved the apparatus vertically as Dr. Blink looked intently at the tablet grasped in his hands. Every few seconds, and with each minor movement of the device, Dr. Blink let out small noises of curiosity followed closely by exclamations of inspired resolution. “Hmm, that’s interesting. Ah, yes, of course!”

This exchange grew ever more dramatic and foreboding as the device glided noiselessly up Malo’s arm, inching closer to the worst of the damage.

Colonel Abalias and Otto were both watching the scene with such rapt interest that neither of them thought to begin the debriefing they were supposed to be performing while the doctor worked on Malo.

“Ahem,” Dr. Blink said as respectfully as he could, now looking away from his tablet and peering over the top of his half-moon spectacles at the two high-ranking officers. “I’m going to take a moment to look at these images. If you have some questions to ask Malo, I would suggest that you do so now. He may be…
preoccupied
in a little while.” Dr. Blink gave Malo a look that resembled a half-hearted smile mixed with an extremely painful wince, but Malo didn’t notice. He was in a numb trance, his eyes fixed on the empty floor in front of him.

“Lieutenant Schunkari?” Colonel Abalias said. “Start from the beginning. Tell us what happened on that ridge.”

Malo took a deep breath, his large torso expanding as his lungs filled, and Bertie shook his hand in exasperation while adjusting for the movement in Malo’s arm with the inter-scanner.

“Try not to move please, Malo,” the doctor said firmly.

“Malo sorry.”

“It’s quite all right,” he said in a gentler tone. “You can answer the colonel’s questions, but try to be as still as possible, okay?”

“Malo and Talfus report plateau entrance three—wait for Mewlatai.”

“Excuse me,” Otto interrupted, “I thought transfers of the Serum were done anonymously by runners through the civilian black market with the cargo disguised as something else.”

“That’s true, Otto,” said Abalias. “Usually, I’m contacted on a secure channel reserved by this Mewlatai, or at least that’s what he said he is. He gives me a code indicating a batch of Serum is ready and then allows
me
to select a drop site as a safety measure.”

“And you picked a plateau entrance to our entire operation as the meeting point?” Otto asked disbelievingly, as though the colonel had just announced that he was a Durax spy.

Colonel Abalias shot him an acid look, and Otto realized that his comment and his tone would certainly have landed him in the brig if it hadn’t already been dismantled for the evacuation.

“Sorry, Colonel.”

“I’m not a damn fool, Major!” Abalias growled and Otto thought he felt the air temperature in the room drop by at least ten degrees. “I had no choice! The Mewlatai contacted me on the correct channel, and he had all the right password encryptions. We’ve done this at least fifty times over and…he said…something else. Something that I couldn’t ignore.” The colonel paused with an introspective look on his perfectly white face as Otto and Malo both looked on curiously. “He told me that the current strain of the Serum was weakening under the increasing mind powers of the Durax. He said he had a new strain that would keep our soldiers immune and allow us to continue the fight.”

A look of comprehension flashed across Otto’s streamlined face. “That’s why you sent another man onto the ridge—when one would have sufficed: as a test subject for the previous strain. You needed to test the two strains and compare them to each other.” Otto was nodding his head, but he stopped as consternation wrinkled his features. “I still don’t understand why the Serum couldn’t have been delivered in the usual fashion. Why the urgency to meet this Mewlatai on our front door step?”

“He said that there was a new way to create the latest strain, and to keep it safe, he locked the information in the only place that was still unreachable to even the most powerful of the Durax: his Mewlatai mind. He said he had all the plans and formulas necessary to reproduce the new strain in mass quantity. We could manufacture on site and distribute it to our people without depending on the seedy underbelly of the universe and its slimy network of runners and ringers.

“He also told me that this would be our last meeting. After passing along the secrets of the new Serum, he would return to the front lines and battle the Durax in the way of a true Mewlatai warrior: with his sword. I needed him to inject Talfus with the original strain as proof that he was who he said he was. If the brain scan checked out, then the Mewlatai would check out too. Getting Malo injected with the new strain would have been a bonus—in case anything went wrong on the ridge, we would have the new strain in Malo, and maybe our biologists could reconstruct the formula. He had all the damn passwords!” He shouted and everyone in the room, including Bertie the medical machine, jumped at his sudden outburst.

A pang of uncontrollable guilt ran unchecked across his ashen face and the colonel looked down, disgusted with himself. “I was too busy worrying about an attack from outside; I never considered that
he
could have been a threat. And now my best man is dead and Malo is…” He paused and looked over toward Dr. Blink, who was still staring at his glowing tablet and scratching his chin as he contemplated the image on the screen. “How is he, Doc?”

“I can save his arm,” said Blink matter-of-factly as he looked into Malo’s big left eye. “Malo, you’ve obliterated your elbow. The tendons and ligaments have literally exploded into thousands of strands of torn fibers, and the joint itself is shattered beyond recognition.”

“Sounds serious,” Otto said. “Are you sure you can fix it?”

“Quite sure.”

Otto looked at Blink doubtfully, but the doctor did not notice; he had already descended the tiny stairs and was rummaging around up to his smocked elbow in yet another one of Bertie’s hidden compartments—this one on the front of the machine’s chassis, opposite the stairs—addressing Malo as if no one else was in the room. “Malo, I’m going to use something I recently developed to save your arm. I call them Haleonex bandages!”

Otto looked at Abalias skeptically, and the expression on the colonel’s face reflected the same sentiment.

“I don’t quite understand how a bandage will help Malo’s arm heal, Doctor,” Abalias said, trying very hard not to sound as if he knew the slightest thing about medicine.

“Haleonex is a regenerative exo-armor that is flexible like a bandage when applied,” the doctor responded excitedly. “Once it’s wrapped around Malo’s arm, it’ll inject millions of nanomachines into the wounded area, where they’ll begin reconstruction of the damaged bones, tendons, ligaments—and anything else that needs to be repaired—on the molecular level.” The doctor’s eyes were wide with exhilaration as he lectured the three on the finer points of advanced medical science while pulling out, from the depths of the compartment, an ordinary-looking roll of dark, cross-hatched medical fabric in a tightly sealed package. “The machines will begin reconstruction on the most damaged areas first while supporting other areas waiting to be repaired.”