29
“Hello? Son, can you hear me?”
Cole cracked his eyes. There were no goggles, no bright, searing light from everywhere, just the soft warmth of arti-ficial bulbs. Two men leaned over him. One of them he recognized but couldn’t place. He had short hair and a generic-looking face. Very generic, like Cole had seen a hundred people who looked just like him.
The other man seemed slightly familiar as well. Cole blinked and attempted to bring them into focus. The second figure had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard, both laced with gray. Cole felt he should know their names.
“Can you hear me?” the man with the beard asked.
Cole nodded.
He looked around and saw the same room from his last dream: beds and curtains and white walls.
“Can you move your arm?”
Cole watched the lips move, forming the words. It all seemed to be happening at a normal pace. Very un-dream-like. He smiled up at the men.
“Your arm, son, can you move it?”
Cole raised his left arm. He tried to make a fist, but it felt weak and tingly, like he’d been asleep a long time.
The generic-looking man smiled. “The other one,” he said.
Cole continued to admire his own hand while the other arm came up. He lifted his head and stared at it in disbelief. It wasn’t his. Flaps of skin hung open like fleshy shutters. Inside, small pistons, bundles of wiring, metal plates—they moved at his command. He traced the mechanics down past a hinged elbow until it met his own flesh, the two slightly different colors of dark skin adjoining in a neat line.
“Very good,” someone said.
But it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. Cole tried to sit up, but several hands forced him down. He tried to complain, but a mask was placed over his face. He took a deep breath to protect himself from whatever was about to happen. He looked up at the man holding the mask and tried to remember where he knew the guy.
Dakura! The guy was a Stanley! Cole gasped in disbelief—then he found himself hoping and praying that all his nightmares had been dreams, some simulated hell—
All he got for the sudden intake of air, however, was a heaping lungful of the stuff from the mask . . .
????
He came to again, but in a different room. Sitting up, the various visions mixed together, confusing and piecemeal: his own face reflected in a visor, a boy he had murdered so many years ago, a girl with fiery red hair—
Cole looked down at the black bedsheets draped over him and the cot beneath. Glancing up, he saw an IV dripping fluids into his arm. Beyond, rows of elevated cots stretched down the narrow room, most of them full of still figures with their own IVs and breathing machines. Two doctors stood by one of the cots, obviously working on someone. Tools clattered on a tray; their heads remained bowed in concentration. One of them whispered commands to the other, calm but insistent.
Cole looked at the needle taped to his left arm. He turned and studied his right one. It appeared perfectly normal. He couldn’t keep all the nightmares straight, couldn’t sort out the real from the unreal. He hoped Riggs was part of the latter. It certainly hadn’t felt real at the time. But then, some things he knew to be dreams had felt incredibly, indelibly real . . .
Hoping to sort the true from the fake, Cole tapped along his right arm with the pads of his fingers. He came across tendons, but they felt strange and unyielding. He felt the same part of his other arm, just to make sure. Completely different. Except that he could sense stuff through this other hand, could feel with the pads of the fingers as if they were real. He was pretty sure that sort of thing was still science fiction.
Cole pulled the sheets back and discovered he wore the barest of coverings: a surgical gown made of some thin material. He started to swing his legs off the cot to see if he could stand, when an alien groan emanated from the body next to him. Cole watched the bulky form stir slightly beneath its black sheets, then fall still.
When he looked back to the doctors, he saw one of them looking his way. It was a Stanley, there wasn’t any doubt. He held up a gloved hand—blue latex dappled with blood—and said something to the other person, the doctor whose back was to Cole.
When she spun around, Cole recognized the hair immediately. It was mostly tucked away under the hood of the surgical gown, but bright, red trails of it hung down over the white, making the splattered blood on her gown seem pale and lifeless by comparison. The girl’s eyes met his for a brief instant—then she dashed out of the room, leaving the Stanley to continue his work alone.
Cole grabbed his pillow and sat upright. He then became distracted by his arm, as it had done what he’d asked without him having to think about it. He held it up again and flexed his fingers one at a time. The girl and another man strode into the room, both of them visible between his new digits.
It was the man with the beard. Cole tried to place his face as he crossed the room; the girl went right back to helping the Stanley.
“Where am I?” Cole asked, as the figure approached his bed.
The man ignored the question. He grabbed a stool from beside another cot and rolled it next to Cole’s before sitting down.
Cole realized who he was, the sudden recognition hitting him like a bullet. He remembered seeing the man’s face—a younger face—in pictures aboard Parsona.
“Mortimor?”
The man nodded. “It’s Cole, right? You’re the kid I spoke to over the D-band?” Mortimor glanced at Cole’s new hand. “I’d offer to shake your hand, but let’s wait until you get used to using it.”
Cole pushed himself back on the cot, sitting up even more as he tried to clear his head. “You’re Molly’s—you’re her father,” he said.
Mortimor frowned. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but we’ve got some problems, and I need answers. Let’s start with who you are and how you got here. Then I’d like to hear how you know Molly and where she is. Also, I need to know where that Drenardian band is you were thinking through the other day. I know it’s a lot to dump on you, but we don’t have a lot of time, if we have any.”
Cole swiped his hair off his forehead and tried to swallow, but his mouth felt dry, his tongue swollen. “Can I get some water?” he asked.
“Penny!” Mortimor snapped his fingers. “Some water,” he said, after she turned.
She rushed off, and Mortimor turned back to Cole. “Is Molly okay? How do you know her? And why were you wearing one of my flightsuits?”
“We found the ship,” Cole said.
“Parsona?”
Cole nodded.
“How—?” Mortimor stared at the wall beyond Cole. “What about the man aboard the ship?”
Cole shook his head. “No one was aboard. But we did . . . we found what was in the ship. The hidden thing.”
Mortimor narrowed his eyes, and Cole suddenly felt trapped in one of those situations where two people both know a secret, but don’t know how to tell the other person they know without giving the secret away in case they don’t.
“Where did you find it?” Mortimor asked, obviously feeling caught in the same snare.
Cole chose his words carefully: “In the chart data.”
Mortimor nodded, but something else seemed to flash behind his eyes. Relief?
“Did you serve with Molly? You seem a bit young.”
“We were cadets together. At the Academy.” Cole looked up as the girl reentered the room. More of her hair had come loose as she hurried to the cot. She held a glass of water in her bare hands, her gloves pulled off. Cole felt a wave of guilty excitement from seeing her. He noted her freckles and the way her cheeks were flushed from the rapid walk. He barely managing to nod his thanks as he reached for the glass—
“Ah . . . left hand,” Mortimor said, pointing.
Cole obeyed. He smiled at the girl, who turned away quickly, hurrying back to Stanley. Cole took a long swig from the glass, dribbling some down his chin. He went to wipe it off his mouth with his right hand, but Mortimor grabbed his wrist.
“Careful,” he said. “People tend to hurt themselves at first, even with the temporary limiters.” He reached down and used part of Cole’s sheet to dabble at the moisture on his chin. The way he did it—like a doctor tending to a patient—suddenly made Cole feel like a useless invalid.
“You’ll need some therapy,” Mortimor said. “Some training. First, though, back to Molly . . .”
“Yeah.” Cole took another sip of water and swallowed. “We were flight partners in the Academy. I was sent with her to get the ship. Everything went to hell from the beginning—”
“Byrne?” Mortimor asked.
“What? No, that came after. Hell, I just found out about him. You do know he’s here, right?”
Mortimor nodded.
“Okay, no, our problems started on Palan, some pirates there—”
“Palan? What in the galaxy were you doing on Palan?”
“That’s—that’s where the ship was. I don’t know what—”
“No, that’s fine.” Mortimor shook his head. He looked back to the Stanley, who was peering over his patient at their conversation. “So, I imagine Parsona told you what needed doing. Where did things go wrong? On Dakura? Lok? Is Molly okay?”
“Go wrong?”
Cole looked for some place to set the glass, then gave up. “Things went wrong everywhere.” He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “We barely got out of Palan alive, we committed genocide on our way back to Earth, the Navy framed me and we had to kill Lucin—”
“What?” Mortimor pushed away from Cole’s cot, a wary eye on his right arm. “Two guards!” he shouted to Stanley. Several of the nearby forms stirred from the outburst.
Cole held up both hands. “No, that—it wasn’t like that. He was about to shoot Molly, I swear. He’s the guy who set us up, who had us go get your ship.”
Mortimor squinted at Cole. Two aliens ran into the room dressed in Navy black, reaching for weapons at their sides. Mortimor held up his hand, keeping them at bay.
“How did you end up here?”
“I don’t know. Molly and I split up on our way to Lok. I made a jump. I was in a Firehawk with a friend—”
Cole stopped, whatever words he had queued up next shattered in a spasm of anguish. He thought of Riggs, dead by his own hands.
It had been real. That part had been very, very real.
He leaned forward, rested his face into both palms, and began to cry. There was no escaping into his skull this time—no shrinking down and getting away from it. There was nobody to hurt, to take it out on. There was just the shame and the depression, the guilt and the torment, wrapping their tentacles around him, squeezing the air out of his chest.
“Leave us,” he heard Mortimor say.
Cole tried to remember where he was, to get a grip on himself, but the scramble for sanity just made him fall even faster. He sobbed into his hands, the tears dripping through his fingers.
“My friend—” he croaked, his voice high and embarrassing.
Mortimor came to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “Take your time,” he said.
“My friend’s legs,” Cole sobbed.
“Shhhh. I know. It’s okay, son.”
Cole shook his head and swallowed. He licked the salt from his lips. “It’s not okay,” he mumbled. “Nothing’s okay. Molly—” He pushed his hands up through his hair, clenching fistfuls until the roots tingled with pain.
“Where is she?” Mortimor whispered.
The question hung in the air between them, between two strangers. They knew almost nothing of each other, but they both orbited that same drifting unknown, that haunting absence in both their lives. For Cole, the question opened some internal hatch holding back all his atmosphere, and the vacuum sucked at it. His body quaked with grief as a moan unlike any he’d ever uttered welled up and out.
Mortimor wrapped his arms around Cole and pulled his head to his shoulder. Cole latched on and cried even harder, a thousand horrible things dragging their claws across his insides as they were yanked through that newly opened hatch. He cried and fought it, trying to keep them in. Shame and guilt, they tore through him, far more powerful than the embarrassment of breaking down in front of a stranger.
????
Mortimor waited. Despite his sense of urgency, he let the lad have it out. He could very well imagine the things the boy had been through. While the young man’s frame shuddered with agony, he looked around the room protectively. He looked to the others in their cots, to their heads lifting from pillows, their faces full of empathy and regret. Mortimor clenched his jaw and didn’t say a word—he just let the boy have his cry.
It was all he could do to not join in.