He woke when the light in her rooms started to brighten, simulating a sunrise. She had slept in her easy chair, letting him have the bed. She had removed her prosthetics and looked very small. Her face was calm and still, and he felt an unexpected warm feeling toward her. He waited for the shame at losing control, his anger that she had seen him vulnerable, but it never came.
She must have heard him stirring because she opened her eyes and smiled at him. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he said. “Much. Actually—”
Her eyes went wide and she sat up in her chair. “IAN, did you watch the medbay all night?”
“Sure did. Maria came to visit the patients, and then left. Everyone else slept,” the AI said.
Joanna slumped with relief. “Thank you for checking on them. I will be there shortly.”
There was silence, and he figured IAN was gone. Then the AI said, “I think you may need to go to the medbay, actually. Right now.”
Katrina hated the war dreams.
She hated the dreams where she was taken back to the field, the time shrapnel had blown her legs off. She could feel the pain in her legs, again. Then there were the dreams where she was field medic to her fellow soldiers, carrying them out of the danger zone and dressing wounds. Then there was the time she had to inject a dying soldier with adrenaline to restart his heart.
She opened her eye. She was in the medbay. The memory of the previous day came back to her. Her hands came up to feel her face, the throb of where her eye had been starting to demand her attention. The doctor had put an IV in her arm, but the bag was empty and she pulled the needle out with impatience. Where was Wolfgang? The cot to her right was empty, the covers rumpled and slightly bloodstained. The bed to her left had Hiro in it, still asleep. Today she would have to try him for assault, battery, mutiny, conspiracy, and more, and then figure out what to do with him. Wolfgang could take care of that. Beyond Hiro was the most familiar face to her.
Her clone still slept in her coma, still keeping her secrets locked away. This Katrina knew. She knew who had attacked her, who’d probably killed the rest of them. She even could have ordered it done herself. Katrina didn’t put it past her. Or them.
Katrina no longer saw the woman as herself. That one had a different time line, different experiences, and she would never give them up. Selfish.
The dreams ran through her mind again, making her shudder. Her onetime employer, Sallie Mignon, had offered to hire a hacker to remove the worst of her war experiences, but she had declined. She didn’t want to be messed with, and she wanted those memories. You never knew when they could come in handy.
She looked around at the room, wondering if she could stand up. She was dizzy and movement hurt her face. Joanna hadn’t left her with anything resembling a chamber pot, which was bad since Joanna had also been pumping her full of fluids and her bladder was uncomfortably full.
Katrina had been resourceful her entire life; she wasn’t going to stop now. She eased herself out of bed and onto the floor, blessing the low gravity that made it possible to do so without too much pain. She limped across the floor to the doctor’s cabinet, dragging the IV stand as a walking stick. The cabinet was locked, naturally. It had an old-time mechanical lock, something Katrina had learned to pick in her time in the armed forces.
A bit of time rooting around Joanna’s office—immaculately clean and orderly, of course—and she found the desk items she needed to pick the lock.
Katrina rooted through narcotics, a lot of medicine she had never heard of, and then she found it: umatrine, the recently developed synthetic adrenaline. She filled a syringe with it and dragged herself across the floor again, stopping at last at the other clone’s bed. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter. She was here.
“This has to be done. I need what’s inside you, and this is the only way to get it,” she whispered. She pulled open the gown and exposed the breastbone. “Into the heart, if I remember.”
“Does the doctor know you’re doing this?” Hiro asked, startling her. His eyes were open, glittery black spots in a pale face, and he lay on his bed, tightly bound and not struggling. “Or IAN?”
Katrina looked up reflexively, as if she could see the AI hovering above her. “He’s faulty anyway. And no, the doctor is gone. I need this information.”
The sound of a digital lock came at the door. Katrina quickly jammed the needle between the clone’s ribs and into the heart, her thumb tightening on the plunger.
Nothing happened. The plunger didn’t go down. Smart syringe. Shit.
“Katrina!” Wolfgang shouted, running forward. He grabbed her and pulled her off her clone.
She screamed and struggled, waving the syringe around. “No, we need her, she has to tell us!”
The doctor caught her wrist and pried the syringe out of her hand. “Give me that, you’re going to hurt someone.”
She hurried to check the clone’s vitals.
“How is she?” Wolfgang asked, holding Katrina with maddening strength. She hadn’t realized how weak she was. Her head felt as if it were going to explode.
“She’s fine,” Joanna said, sounding relieved.
Katrina stopped struggling and then threw an elbow up behind her and into Wolfgang’s chin. If he had been healthy, it wouldn’t have fazed him, but his concussion had left him weakened too. He let her go, swearing. Katrina leaped forward and grabbed the doctor’s hand. Joanna was so startled she didn’t register to fight back. Katrina wrapped Joanna’s hand around the syringe tightly and pushed it into the clone again.
The doctor cried out in surprise and pain, stumbling into the bed as Katrina pulled her off balance. But the smart syringe responded to Joanna’s hand and depressed the adrenaline into the clone.
Wake Four: Katrina Before
Cicada
The captain’s clone’s eyes opened, and she looked around, panting hard. Her eyes focused from Joanna to Wolfgang and back to Joanna.
“Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are?” Joanna said, leaning over the clone.
“No!” Katrina yelled from the floor where Wolfgang had thrown her after he wrestled her off the old captain. “Who attacked you? Someone attacked you and then your whole crew died. Who did it?”
The clone’s eyes darted around the room, as if looking for a way out. Her mouth opened and closed, like a fish. Beside her, the monitors were beeping loudly with the drastic increase in heart rate and breathing.
“We need to know,” Joanna said. “We’re going to take care of you, but there’s a traitor among us and we don’t know who started it all.”
“M-maria,” the clone whispered. “I found out things—” She interrupted herself with a painful grunt, and threw her head back into the pillow, convulsing.
Joanna focused from her to the monitors, which showed her heart rate going impossibly fast. Then it flatlined.