When Kit woke, he looked around,
thinking that Heaven looked an awful lot like a wrecked Wasp. And it
hurt like hades, too. His leg felt as if it were being flayed to
hamburger by hot plasma. There were droplets of his blood careening
about in the cockpit. The rest of his body felt like one big bruise
covering a whole lot of little ones. He hit thrusters to slow his
chaotic flight and frantically checked his systems. Part of the
cockpit was stove in and still pressing agonizingly on his right leg,
but amazingly, not breached. Targeting was down, but hopefully he
wouldn't need it. At least Navigation and Life Support were still up.
He didn't even bother to check his comm. Surely the antennae were
fried to a crisp. He had to run deeper diagnostics on all his systems
and try and figure out where he was.
“I'd like to send Chacon and
Fullmont down the nearest black hole,” he muttered to himself.
“What a couple
of brainless clowns. They nearly
scrubbed my mission.”
There
was still a mission,
though. He dug his head into his hands, suddenly feeling ninety five
years old. He was still bleeding from somewhere besides his leg, and
the droplets were starting to get in the way and annoy him. He
finally corralled them all in his flight suit coif and used it to
stanch the blood from what turned out to be a cut on the back of his
head.
He had to get to the plas-skin.
To do that, he first had to release himself from his webbing and get
loose from the wreckage. The webbing wouldn't release, having locked
on impact. He had to use a shard of metal to cut his way out of the
restraints. He screamed again as he dragged his leg out from the
pincers of the seat and the caved-in wall using the material of his
flight suit. He nearly passed out again, breath coming raggedly in
fits and starts. Finally it came loose from the trap and he fell out
of his seat onto the decking. He gasped, the agony threatening his
very sanity. Slowly, so slowly, he inched back to the meds locker. It
took him what seemed like a decade to make the two-meter trip.
He flipped open the locker and
rifled through the supplies. At last! A tube of plas-skin and some
webbing. A medic would have been handy, but there was nobody. He
would have to set the bone himself. He looked around until he found
an aperture into which he jammed his foot. He bit down on a length of
cloth and threw himself backwards.
Pain exploded, white-hot and
cloying, smashing into Kit's head, knocking him into blessed
oblivion. Nearly a half hour later he woke to the teeth of his pain
chewing through his body like the razor fangs of the Deep Warden, but
the leg was set. Now to cover it all up with plas-skin, and a webbing
bandage and hope it could all be fixed the right way later. He
squeezed a pearl of the goo out and applied it to the edges of the
skin around the wound. It was going to take half the tube to close
the whole thing. Good thing the skin had a built-in antibiotic and
painkiller. He cracked the heat tube and applied it to the plas-skin
seal.
After
what seemed like forever, the seal gelled and the bleeding slowed. He
felt the heat reaction starting to knit the skin back together. The
energy was terrifically warm. Kit nearly bit through his bottom lip.
The heat and pain began to ebb a little as the anesthetic function of
the gel began to work. It's about frakkin' time!
They should change the directions to read “Numbs when it
feels like it”. He worked the
webbing around his leg and released the tourniquet slowly. The blood
throbbed like a sledge hammer in the wound, but he had no more time
to worry about it.
He dragged himself slowly back
to his chair and, clenching his teeth over a yell, hauled himself
into it. The dent bit into his leg, but there was nothing he could do
about it. At least it would keep his leg stabilized. Kit dragged air
through his laboring lungs trying desperately to stay awake.
Finally he was able to
concentrate and determined that he had shot past the Anomaly at an
angle and was headed for parts unknown. He hit the thrusters, some of
which were malfunctioning and making flying difficult. It was like
rowing a boat with one broken oar. He chose a course based on the
data they'd last received on the Anomaly ship. The data was now old
and wouldn't guarantee he'd hit the correct location perfectly, but
it was all he had. Somehow he doubted he could really miss something
as big as the Anomaly.
True to form, it wasn't a half
an hour before the moon-sized vessel emerged from the shadow of an
asteroid and rapidly began to fill his port. As it hove into view,
Kit felt the bottom of his stomach drop away. If he let himself think
about it, panic would take over. He couldn't afford that. He had to
have his wits about him when the Intrepid opened a hole, or he'd run
screaming into the dark and forever lose the respect of his peers.
His Poppy would be right.
Still,
he was nearly petrified with fear when the silvery markings began to
writhe before his eyes. He tore his gaze away from the sinuous
swirls. “I'm not
going to plunge in like a noob on his maiden flight,” he grunted to
himself. “This is going to be a controlled, elegant landing.”
He
got close enough to arrive fairly soon, but not close enough to be
hit by debris from the MAC blast if there was any. Who knew if the
Intrepid would even manage a hole? They'd botched the mine field. At
least most of the mines were intact, apparently. With all the
explosions, the Anomaly guys would have to be functioning on the
level of amoebas not to have noticed. He fully expected the enemy
ship to be hot-footing it back to whatever part of hades it came
from, by now. If they were smart, of course. Right. They
probably eat nukes for lunch. Who am I kidding? They'll be coming at
us not even caring if they run right through that mine field. They
probably have the speed to ram past those mines before they even blow
up.
He fired his thrusters
judiciously and the Wasp slowed to a stop. It was as good a place as
any to wait for the clowns on the Intrepid to get their act together.
He used the time to try and fix what he could and clear away floating
nuisances. He was still amazed his ship hadn't sustained a hull
breech.
MORE TO COME IN THE BOOK.
Nice!
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