Requiem

[Jane Hartman]

Wilkinson City, Planet Leeds

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+29 Days Since Planetfall.

Hartman heard voices.

More accurately, she heard noises. Noises that shifted and flowed from moment to moment like water down a river, drifting over and around the ringing in her ears. The deep, hungry rumble of aircraft turbines, steadily rising in pitch until they slipped from her hearing. Condors, whispered some fragment of her that was still clinging to consciousness. She ignored it. Screams rose in a demonic chorus to fill the silence, though whether they were men or machines she could not have said. Could not have cared.

Every breath hurt. Every inhalation sent spasms of pain arching across her chest, her arms, her back, as though her body was being dragged, time and again, through a meat grinder. Her head pounded like a drum, like her brain was trying to push its way out through her eyes. She felt a jolt, a shudder, as the aircraft struggled into the air.

Each jerking movement sent another lightning bolt of agony through her, and the pain flashed white-hot in the darkness of her mind. She whimpered and bleated through gritted teeth and behind closed eyes like a child, like a wounded animal. Perhaps she cried, but the blood pooling over her eyelids made it impossible to tell. Blood pooled on her back, behind her head, over her eyes, down her leg, clinging and warm in the night air. Someone had pressed a mask over her face, but every gasping breath she took was heavy with the sickly, metallic smell of it.

Something shuddered beneath her, and suddenly, blissfully, darkness took her. The last thing Hartman knew was the taste of blood on her tongue.

*

Herbert Beeler Naval Hospital, City of Medford, Los Angeles

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+148 Days Since Planetfall.

Patient S062 (Grade A-2, service number NF-403198) floated in endless darkness.

Her heart pulsed lethargically in her chest, neurons fired, and time flowed like molasses, thick and slow. Occasionally voices drifted across her silent mind, ghosts through a graveyard, but she barely heard them and what she did hear was nothing but noise, forgotten as soon as it occurred.

Amid the ocean of silence there were waves of noise, light, pain. A shifting, rolling, pounding in her skull like a swarm of fist-sized insects searching for an exit. Shrieking computers, monitors screeching steadily faster, higher, demented birds pushing out their last breaths. Glimpsed walls the colour of ice, uniforms that blurred and shifted as she watched them, questions she could barely hear and rarely answer and then, inevitably, a dull numbness spreading up her arm as the darkness washed over her again.

This time was different.

Touch was the first to return, slowly and hesitantly, like an old lover drifting across an empty room. There was something beneath her, soft cotton made warm by long physical contact. Her body was nothing but a gentle numbness, the sensation of something, but nothing specific. It was like trying to draw with a cotton bud, all vague lines and uncertain textures. She had the rough impression of restraints cuffing her wrists, her ankles, a tightness in her arms and a cool, dull sensation in her stomach and side that shifted when she breathed.

Hearing slowly drifted to prominence, the same steady beat of a digital tone, pulsing in her time with her heart. A scratching, bleating alarm like a warship’s depressurisation warning scaled back to a fraction of the volume, rang in her ears. S062 felt the beginnings of panic flutter in her chest, heard the tone change pace to match.

Attack. Her brain supplied, struggling like an decrepit archivist with the weight of the revelation. The alarm meant they were under attack. The ship was losing atmosphere.

S062 tried to scramble for her sidearm but her arms stubbornly refused to co-operate, twitching and turning in their restraints. The movement sent a pinprick of pain through her arm, so she stopped.

Slowly, over the course of what felt like an age, S062 opened her eyes. The ship was dark, lit by a single length of strip lighting directly overhead, and her room was more spacious than staterooms usually were. Glacier-white walls skulked all around her and a viewscreen on the far wall showed a starlit park, frost gathering on vacant tables and chairs. She rolled her head to one side and felt something shifting against her scalp. A squat cylinder, hanging by a wire, dropped into the corner of her vision. She ignored it.

The depressurisation alarm rang on.

Someone was sprawled in a chair next to her bed. Lying, her head came about level with his chest. A cap with the distinctive silver star of the Liberty Navy had been shoved unceremoniously under the cheap plastic chair. The gray speckled combat uniform made her vision swim, so she let her half-closed eyes drift across the sea of gray and blue until they settled on a name tag. After a dizzying moment, the letters consolidated themselves into a word: Lewis.

“Lewis.” S062’s voice came out dry and weak, slurring her words like a drunk that had spent the last six months wandering a desert. She gathered a breath and tried again, barely more than a hoarse whisper. “Lewis. The alarms. Where’s my gun?”

Lewis started awake, dark bags under his eyes a testament to sleepless nights and days spent worrying. He blinked, looking confused. “What alar-Oh.” Realization set in. “We’re in a hospital, Jane.” He rubbed his forehead tiredly, forcing a smile. “Welcome back.”

“We’re under attack, Lewis. I need my gun.” Hartman roved her eyes around the room, too tired to move her head again. Behind her, the alarm rattled on. Her voice was low and urgent. “I need these things out, get them out. Get them out.” Her vision drifted down towards the tubes hanging from her arms and side like giant, parasitic leeches. “Need to get out. The air…”

Lewis put a hand to his ear, murmuring quietly for a moment. After a terse exchange, he nodded in affirmation and walked closer to Hartman, until his face was directly over hers. “We’re not under attack, Jane. Look at me,” He said quietly, remembering the nurses’ briefing. After this long spent in a medically induced coma, she’ll likely not realize where she is, and may hallucinate. If that happens, call a nurse immediately and keep her stable.

He held one of her hands in his, grimacing at how pale and frail her forearm looked in comparison to his. “We’re safe now,” He said, nodding firmly.

“The air…” Hartman repeated, her voice little more than a whisper. Then, slowly, something like realisation dawned in her drug-dilated eyes. Lewis looked more exhausted than she ever remembered seeing him, dark bags hung under sincere brown eyes, eyes you could wander in, but his uniform was still carefully pressed, hair cut short. Relief rushed through her, vague memories of flashing barrels and the reek of cordite, and a thin hand tightened around Lewis’. “Lewis. Oh, God. Lewis. You’re alive.

I thought-” A shudder ran through her, a soft croak that cut the word off halfway, replaced it with a sob. Relief, joy, and confusion mingled in her gut, and Hartman wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying. Her hand shook in a way that had nothing to do with the restraints, and she took another shuddering breath as the tears began to roll down her face. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to reach up and hold him, something steady, something dependable, in a world where nothing was making sense, but her arms were tied, her head too heavy.

“God, where are we?” Her eyes drifted down her body, taking in the tubes, the restraints, the screech of the monitor. Almost silently, despair creeping in with the tears, she added. “What happened to me?”

Lewis patted her hand gently. “Don’t worry about it. You did good.” His smile was genuine. You saved my life, Jane. “I’ll be here. Take some rest.” He gently released her hand as a harried looking male nurse walked into the room, all-business.

“Okay.” Hartman nodded, the slow, trusting nod of a small child as the nurse shepherded Lewis from the room, tears drying on her face. “Okay.”

She was asleep again before the door closed behind him.

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