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Here we go here we go, new part! :) All polished and shiny, thank you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darkhavens.
Hope you enjoy! And don't forget - offering three fanfics over at the auction, you have until July 3rd to bid!
Also at AO3
TRIGGER WARNING for attempted suicide.
By 2247, the ArchANGEL system was virtually banned from use in all volunteer military forces, although a modified ANGEL system was in place to enhance pilot skills and to rebuild and rehabilitate gravely wounded soldiers. The ArchANGEL system’s usefulness and versatility, however, was too much of a temptation, and the threats facing a human population that was pushing further and further into the universe were too overpowering. By special order of the United Solar Federation, the ArchANGEL system was green-lit for a single purpose: the building and maintaining of an elite fighting force, drawn solely from the population of incarcerated citizens.
Those imprisoned for rape, murder, desertion, treason and acts of terror were offered the option of becoming ArchANGELs. If they survived their service, they were free to live as citizens and civilians once again.
Approximately one in 500 make it to retirement. Of those, to date, zero have lived longer than two months past their mustering out. There's no such thing as an ex-ArchANGEL.
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate…. - ‘A Consolation’, by William Shakespeare.
It all ended for Jensen in orbit around 16 Cygni, aboard the Galbraith, a massive warship of sketchy origins, converted over the years into a roving arms and drugs manufacturing platform, the nucleus of a web of pirates and privateers, smugglers and dealers. They cooked up black-market drugs, traded arms and armor and ammo banned by the Federals, passed along bodies and body parts and were the middle-man for every trade, deal or sale for hundreds of thousands of light-years around.
The Federals wanted it gone and the Tiamat was tapped for the job. They went in hard and fast, every Angel on board either free-falling from the Tiamat or on board the three-person Shrikes, the compact strafe-and-drop ships the Angels only used in zero-gravity. From a distance, it seemed the Galbraith was suddenly attacked by a swarm of bees, Angels and Shrikes arrowing in from all directions, riding lances of plasma and fire. There was no after here, no salvage and no mercy. It was what the Angels called a One and Done - only smoking wreckage left behind. Angels take no prisoners. Jensen was with Sinna and Mal in a Shrike, remote-piloted off the big board back on the Tiamat. They buzzed in low and dropped their load, leaving a cross-stitch of destruction in their wake, blooming one-minute fires of red and orange quickly snuffed by airless space. They really only needed the holes.
The next pass was for the Angels to leap free, metallic darts slicing through wreckage and defenders alike to fetch up against a metaglass heat sink, their suits leaving no marks in the near-unbreakable metallic-glass alloy, mag-locks on their armored feet latching solid to the hull. The Galbraith’s gravity was less than certain now, and getting more unstable by the moment. Jensen could see his Nephilim strung out on the bomb-pocked hull like a chain around him, squad leaders flashing blue in the HUD, the rest in white, close enough to form up. So he sent the impulse out into the ‘net, arming his rifle and heading inside, heading for an intact string of labs where particularly toxic biologicals and organics were born. The Federals wanted that gone with, as Morgan said, ‘extreme prejudice’ - leave nothing but a crater, sear it back to base metal. Jensen was more than happy to oblige.
The Galbraith crew was as haphazard as she was, but that wasn’t to say they were cowards. Their activities had at least left them well-armed and used to conflict, and the lab Jensen and his Nephilim were targeting was worth a few dozen lives. Billions in profit were represented in a little under sixteen hundred square meters of glassine lab modules and walk-in, stainless grow units. They weren’t going to let it go without a fight.
The Nephilim were met with concentrated fire: pulse-plasma rifles and scatter grenades. It was nothing to their suits, to the barrier-shock shields they could deploy at will. They returned fire not with the standard APDS rounds, but with something far more deadly - PELE rounds, that punched their way through glassine and armor alike, and shattered into hundreds of lethally sharp fragments. Every other round was packed with a sticky fire incendiary, and within seconds, half the surfaces were on fire, including the Galbraith defenders.
A man was on the floor in front of Jensen, burning, his blackening limbs twitching and curling like charred paper, and Jensen rocked to a standstill, staring - seeing, without really seeing, everything going to a blue-grey haze, flicker-flash of some other where, some other when. Images overlapped each other with a staticky hiss and Jensen shook his head, his lungs hitching, his breath coming in short, sharp pants, not enough oxygen, not enough…. He lifted a hand - shaking, his hand was shaking - and fumbled at the latch on his faceplate. Fuck, he couldn’t breathe, he needed air. A shrill warning beep made him jerk, startled, as he clicked the latch open.
”Warning. Contaminants present. Do not breach suit seal, do not breach suit seal. Warning. Contaminants present….”
“Jensen, cut it, what the fuck are you doing?” from Morgan, far off and tinny. Unimportant. The bolo of scatter grenades draped over the corpse’s shoulder finally ignited, and the concussive boom of a half-dozen powerful explosives sent Jensen and five other Nephilim flying backwards. Jensen’s faceplate bounced up, coming open an inch - half an inch - and Jensen took in a ragged, stuttering breath of air that was seared with heat, thick with smoke, flavored with the rank, sickly reek of charring flesh. He went into darkness with that smell in his nostrils.
When Jensen woke, it was all at once, an uprush of noise and sensation that flared and faded in an eyeblink. He was left lying staring upward, blinking slowly, numb from the neck down. Somewhere a shrill alarm was blaring. Jensen winced and gasped in air and then tried to move, but nothing happened, his body inert and far away. He could feel panic welling up, his brain running in frantic, frenzied circles and then it all…washed away.
Drugs, he thought, sighing, grateful. They got me, I’m okay…. He sank down and was gone again, into a warm, blank nothing.
It was like that for a while - hours or days, Jensen couldn’t tell. Then he woke up again, only this time he wasn’t numb, and this time he didn’t panic. He was propped in a suspension bed, held an inch or so above the surface on warm air, something they did for long-term patients, to keep them from getting sores. Jensen was awake, but still not quite all there, and he looked down at the length of his body, cocooned in a web of IV lines and biomonitors, generation wrap and far too many polyflex casts. He could feel the whisper of ultrasound, embedded in the casts, used to stimulate bone growth. It didn’t give him the rush he was used to, and that troubled him, in a far-off kind of way.
He lifted a finger - a hand - reaching weakly for...something. A drink. His mouth was dry as dust, his throat rough, and he knew that without whatever drugs they had pumping in, it would be ten times worse. As he twitched weakly, looking around the bare, sterile room, a low chime sounded and then a holoscreen opened above him, a crisp-edged square of blue-white light that made Jensen squint, his eyes tearing. A face stared down at him, older and a little heavy, with tilted eyes and dark hair twisted neatly into some kind of plait.
“Jensen, are you awake?”
Jensen stared, stalled momentarily on the stupidity of the question. Of course he was awake! He opened his mouth to say something sarcastic and his throat seemed to seize, so dry and sore he could only make a rough kind of noise, breathy and wrong. He jerked his chin up, coughing, and the man reached off-screen, touching something.
“Okay, I’ll be right there. Let the arm give you a drink, okay?” The lozenge winked out and Jensen blinked at the empty air, glad that the room lights were dimmed down to almost nothing. He flinched ever so slightly as a robot arm unfolded from the wall, extending a plastic-tipped, stainless tube toward him. It slipped neatly between his lips, like a straw, and Jensen sucked carefully.
It was only water, not too cold, mineral-flat, but glorious all the same. He sucked hard, but the thing had a limit, and he only got little sips. After seven or eight, though, he was grateful for that, because the water, as bland as it was, didn’t sit quite right, and finally he turned his head away. The arm withdrew, and then another reached out, a puff of some fibrous stuff on the tip of it. It was wet, slightly slick, and it wiped over his cracked lips and then over his sticky eyes, over cheeks and chin and even his throat, dipping back into a reservoir in the wall for a new puff two or three times. It wiped carefully and meticulously, cleaning and leaving behind a moist film. It felt - good. Better.
Jensen sighed a little, looking around. He was in a standard med bay, all bioplastic walls and anodized-metal corners, something you could snap together in an hour. This one was mostly a kind of white, with all the the metal, including his bed frame, colored a very pale blue. It was a chilly room, but Jensen was warm in his air-bed, and besides, it was restful. The holo had been...really bright.
A few moments later, the man from the holo came into view, stepping around a dividing wall. He was tall and, like Jensen had thought, older, with dark skin and big hands, a bit of a belly comfortably cocooned in pale-blue scrubs with the Navy medic insignia woven into the breast pocket and shoulder. Jensen felt his heart skip up a little faster, at that.
“Hey, Jensen, I’m Tama. How are you feeling? Anything hurt?”
Jensen tried to tell him. Opened his mouth and moved his lips and tongue, but the only thing that came out was a useless noise like grinding gears, harsh and ragged and unintelligible. And it hurt, so he stopped, panting a little. His eyes teared up, reflex, and the robot arm darted out again to wick them away.
“Yeah, okay. We figured you might not be able to talk yet. Hang on.” Tama touched the wall beside him and a shallow drawer slid out, showing bits of medic-stuff, a jumble to Jensen’s eyes. Tama picked something out and a moment later was smoothing it onto Jensen’s throat and under his chin, three little points of coolness that faded almost immediately, so Jensen was barely aware of them - a throat mic, for subvocal speech, just like in the suits. The familiarity of it calmed Jensen down just a little. Tama clipped a little speaker to the rail of the bed and tapped it on. “Try that.”
Jensen clenched his teeth and swallowed - tried again, only thinking the words this time. “This isn’t the Tiamat.” It was his voice, mostly, coming from the speaker. His voice, with a subtle little mechanical lilt to it, the merest back-echo of a harmonic that made it not - quite - human.
Tama looked at him with a little smile. “Great, that’s great. No, you’re not on the Tiamat. You’re on board the Nightingale Six. We’re a medevac ship.”
Jensen stared at Tama, at the dark eyes and faintly-smiling mouth, and the little tick of pulse in the skin of the man’s thick throat. He was...nervous, and it was starting to freak Jensen out. “Why not? What the fuck, I should be on the Tiamat, we’ve got medical there. Why-? Where’s my unit? Where’s Jinx and…? Where’s Morgan?”
“Jensen, I-”
“I’ll take over from here, corpsman,” a woman interrupted, and Tama straightened briefly to something like attention and nodded, then silently slipped away. The woman who replaced him was a type Jensen was used to: older, stern, unbending; a military lifer, who took no shit. By the seams of dark scars Jensen could see at the collar of her shirt, though, it was obvious she was the real deal, not just some desk jockey. She stood for a moment, looking down at him, dark eyes in a dark face, her scrubs a navy blue and her white coat machine-stitched with name and rank.
“I’m Captain Oke. As corpsman Kaihau told you, you’re aboard the medevac Nightingale Six, headed for Reveille.”
“Reveille Wha- Why? Why’m I- Tell me what the fuck is going on-”
“Corporal Jensen.” Oke’s voice cracked like a whip, and Jensen took a hard, shaky breath in, lifted one hand, fingers curling, and Oke sighed. “You were injured taking the Galbraith. There were organic contaminants in the labs there that you were sterilizing. Your suit was breached, and you were infected.”
“Infected with what?” Couldn’t be serious - couldn’t - or he’d be in quarantine, he’d be behind plex walls and the Captain would be in a sealed suit.
“We don’t know. Some kind of...bacteria. They were doing a lot of illegal stuff out there, and your...Angels...wiped out most of the records. All I can tell you is - whatever it was, it reacted badly with the ANGEL system.” The Captain reached out and tapped a command into the wall unit Jensen could just see to his left, and the holo screen opened again, scrolling rapid lines of text. “You went into septic shock, there were convulsions from fever, your heart stopped, twice-”
“Fuck- Captain. I don’t care about that- that stuff. Just, tell me, why- why am I-?” Jensen was panting, his heart pounding, pushing through whatever drug they had dripping into him, and the Captain looked up at him, tapped the holo off and frowned. A little chime was sounding, somewhere.
“You need to calm down, Corporal. Calm down or I’ll put you out.”
Jensen gulped air, nodding, forced himself to breath slowly, forced his body to relax. His legs ached, his back too, and his gut was twisting, making him swallow twice, three times. “Yessir, just...tell me.”
“Your ‘net is gone, for all practical purposes. That’s why all this-” She swept her hand over him, the generation wrap and the casts, and Jensen shuddered, his body jerking spasmodically. “You’re not healing on your own. It looks like you’re rejecting the extra muscle and bone mass you needed for combat, and your vocal cords are...well, you know that already. There’s some nerve damage; your motor control isn’t going to ever be what it was.” Oke stopped, and the look she gave Jensen was one of professional pity and understanding. It made Jensen want to scream. He could feel tears running down the sides of his face, hot and humiliating, and Oke tapped in some other command and immediately, Jensen felt himself getting heavy, sleepy. The numbing wash of some drug rolled through him, and he sighed in relief, happy to be put out, to hide in an opium daze from what the Captain was saying.
“We’re going to reach Reveille in about two days; you’ve been unconscious for almost seventeen. The bacteria’s gone, we’ve got the infection under control. Now all you have to do is...get better, Corporal.” Jensen didn’t react to that, and after a moment Captain Oke left, a tiny swish and squeak of her shoes as she retreated. Jensen lay there and let the arm wipe at the tears until he drifted into sleep. Reflexively - desperately - he reached for his Angels through the ‘net, over and over, only to be met with silence. For the first time in forty years, he was completely alone and he was...terrified. He hoped, dimly, that he’d never wake up again.
He was pretty pissed when he did. And when he kept doing it, despite his best efforts not to. After five weeks of recuperation and spotty physical therapy, he was moved to a lock-down ward at Reveille. The place was for head-cases, the ones who tried to tear your throat out with their teeth, the ones who tried to set the nursing station on fire. But it was also for the ones like him, who had tried to open as many veins as possible and let his life slip right out; through his wrists, the first time, and his thigh, the second. Both times, the medbots scooped him up and shoved him into cold storage, into a tube of generation gel that sopped up his blood and fed it back to him, while his heart was shocked back into life and his brain was kept oxygenated.
When he wasn’t plotting his death - and the deaths of the PT nurses - Jensen plotted how to sabotage the medbots and the gel tubes; to that end, he spent a lot of time drugged out of the here-and-now, and a lot of time just too damn exhausted to do much more than sit. They tried to teach him how to read and write, but it wasn’t a skill he’d ever had and he didn’t care about it, anyway. He learned his name, and numbers up to one hundred, but you could do voice on any computer or put in an ear-bead, and his thumbprint made any bank terminal work, so what was the point? He did like writing his name, though, and he carefully drew it on every piece of clothing he owned, over and over, forcing his cramping, shaking hand to work, to do it right. He drew on the inside of his clothes only, in indelible ink. It reminded him of the designs Sinna had etched into his suit, and it made him feel better, to have that hidden armor, even if it was worthless.
When they were done with him, he was almost a hundred pounds lighter, shrunk down from the bulk of his Angel days, gone to whipcord and bone and muscle that shook if he worked too hard, or did too much. He’d let his hair grow - on his head, at least - something he’d forgotten about altogether, the feel of it as it brushed his neck and shoulders and fell forward around his face, a convenient curtain to hide behind. The rest he kept clean, irritated by the itch and rub of it, and how it made his tattoos look dim and old.
He could walk - something that had surprised the doctors - and he could talk, though his voice would never be the same. But he wasn’t an Angel anymore, and he’d never felt quite so trapped, so fucking wrong. The ward, like any other in the ‘verse, had a brisk trade going in stolen and concocted chemicals, and getting high was about the only thing that kept Jensen remotely sane.
With the loss of the ‘net, and drugs that had come with it, sleeping was...problematical. Jensen really preferred not to, on the whole, even if sleep deprivation made him hallucinate. At least then they’d knock him back with a huge hit of the good stuff, putting him down like a mad dog. It made Jensen laugh, when he thought of it. He tried not to do that, too often. They looked at him like they were sorry for him, if he did, and he hated that, above all else.
They told him they’d got him a job, something to ‘reintegrate him into civilian life’. Jensen didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what they even meant by that, and didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Fuck, these people thought he was safe to let go - what the hell did they know?
They dumped him on Axis, one of the biggest stations in the galaxy, queen bee in a hive of smaller stations, planetoids, and dry docks. He had a chip with forty-one years of back pay (minus his room, board, rehab, and the ANGEL system itself) and a half-empty duffle with a few pieces of clothes, his sweater, a toothbrush. He was a citizen again instead of a convict, instead of a soldier, and he was desperately, achingly, unutterably lost.
PELE round: Penetrator with Enhanced Lateral Effect.
Part five.
darkhavens.Hope you enjoy! And don't forget - offering three fanfics over at the auction, you have until July 3rd to bid!
Also at AO3
TRIGGER WARNING for attempted suicide.
By 2247, the ArchANGEL system was virtually banned from use in all volunteer military forces, although a modified ANGEL system was in place to enhance pilot skills and to rebuild and rehabilitate gravely wounded soldiers. The ArchANGEL system’s usefulness and versatility, however, was too much of a temptation, and the threats facing a human population that was pushing further and further into the universe were too overpowering. By special order of the United Solar Federation, the ArchANGEL system was green-lit for a single purpose: the building and maintaining of an elite fighting force, drawn solely from the population of incarcerated citizens.
Those imprisoned for rape, murder, desertion, treason and acts of terror were offered the option of becoming ArchANGELs. If they survived their service, they were free to live as citizens and civilians once again.
Approximately one in 500 make it to retirement. Of those, to date, zero have lived longer than two months past their mustering out. There's no such thing as an ex-ArchANGEL.
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate…. - ‘A Consolation’, by William Shakespeare.
It all ended for Jensen in orbit around 16 Cygni, aboard the Galbraith, a massive warship of sketchy origins, converted over the years into a roving arms and drugs manufacturing platform, the nucleus of a web of pirates and privateers, smugglers and dealers. They cooked up black-market drugs, traded arms and armor and ammo banned by the Federals, passed along bodies and body parts and were the middle-man for every trade, deal or sale for hundreds of thousands of light-years around.
The Federals wanted it gone and the Tiamat was tapped for the job. They went in hard and fast, every Angel on board either free-falling from the Tiamat or on board the three-person Shrikes, the compact strafe-and-drop ships the Angels only used in zero-gravity. From a distance, it seemed the Galbraith was suddenly attacked by a swarm of bees, Angels and Shrikes arrowing in from all directions, riding lances of plasma and fire. There was no after here, no salvage and no mercy. It was what the Angels called a One and Done - only smoking wreckage left behind. Angels take no prisoners. Jensen was with Sinna and Mal in a Shrike, remote-piloted off the big board back on the Tiamat. They buzzed in low and dropped their load, leaving a cross-stitch of destruction in their wake, blooming one-minute fires of red and orange quickly snuffed by airless space. They really only needed the holes.
The next pass was for the Angels to leap free, metallic darts slicing through wreckage and defenders alike to fetch up against a metaglass heat sink, their suits leaving no marks in the near-unbreakable metallic-glass alloy, mag-locks on their armored feet latching solid to the hull. The Galbraith’s gravity was less than certain now, and getting more unstable by the moment. Jensen could see his Nephilim strung out on the bomb-pocked hull like a chain around him, squad leaders flashing blue in the HUD, the rest in white, close enough to form up. So he sent the impulse out into the ‘net, arming his rifle and heading inside, heading for an intact string of labs where particularly toxic biologicals and organics were born. The Federals wanted that gone with, as Morgan said, ‘extreme prejudice’ - leave nothing but a crater, sear it back to base metal. Jensen was more than happy to oblige.
The Galbraith crew was as haphazard as she was, but that wasn’t to say they were cowards. Their activities had at least left them well-armed and used to conflict, and the lab Jensen and his Nephilim were targeting was worth a few dozen lives. Billions in profit were represented in a little under sixteen hundred square meters of glassine lab modules and walk-in, stainless grow units. They weren’t going to let it go without a fight.
The Nephilim were met with concentrated fire: pulse-plasma rifles and scatter grenades. It was nothing to their suits, to the barrier-shock shields they could deploy at will. They returned fire not with the standard APDS rounds, but with something far more deadly - PELE rounds, that punched their way through glassine and armor alike, and shattered into hundreds of lethally sharp fragments. Every other round was packed with a sticky fire incendiary, and within seconds, half the surfaces were on fire, including the Galbraith defenders.
A man was on the floor in front of Jensen, burning, his blackening limbs twitching and curling like charred paper, and Jensen rocked to a standstill, staring - seeing, without really seeing, everything going to a blue-grey haze, flicker-flash of some other where, some other when. Images overlapped each other with a staticky hiss and Jensen shook his head, his lungs hitching, his breath coming in short, sharp pants, not enough oxygen, not enough…. He lifted a hand - shaking, his hand was shaking - and fumbled at the latch on his faceplate. Fuck, he couldn’t breathe, he needed air. A shrill warning beep made him jerk, startled, as he clicked the latch open.
”Warning. Contaminants present. Do not breach suit seal, do not breach suit seal. Warning. Contaminants present….”
“Jensen, cut it, what the fuck are you doing?” from Morgan, far off and tinny. Unimportant. The bolo of scatter grenades draped over the corpse’s shoulder finally ignited, and the concussive boom of a half-dozen powerful explosives sent Jensen and five other Nephilim flying backwards. Jensen’s faceplate bounced up, coming open an inch - half an inch - and Jensen took in a ragged, stuttering breath of air that was seared with heat, thick with smoke, flavored with the rank, sickly reek of charring flesh. He went into darkness with that smell in his nostrils.
When Jensen woke, it was all at once, an uprush of noise and sensation that flared and faded in an eyeblink. He was left lying staring upward, blinking slowly, numb from the neck down. Somewhere a shrill alarm was blaring. Jensen winced and gasped in air and then tried to move, but nothing happened, his body inert and far away. He could feel panic welling up, his brain running in frantic, frenzied circles and then it all…washed away.
Drugs, he thought, sighing, grateful. They got me, I’m okay…. He sank down and was gone again, into a warm, blank nothing.
It was like that for a while - hours or days, Jensen couldn’t tell. Then he woke up again, only this time he wasn’t numb, and this time he didn’t panic. He was propped in a suspension bed, held an inch or so above the surface on warm air, something they did for long-term patients, to keep them from getting sores. Jensen was awake, but still not quite all there, and he looked down at the length of his body, cocooned in a web of IV lines and biomonitors, generation wrap and far too many polyflex casts. He could feel the whisper of ultrasound, embedded in the casts, used to stimulate bone growth. It didn’t give him the rush he was used to, and that troubled him, in a far-off kind of way.
He lifted a finger - a hand - reaching weakly for...something. A drink. His mouth was dry as dust, his throat rough, and he knew that without whatever drugs they had pumping in, it would be ten times worse. As he twitched weakly, looking around the bare, sterile room, a low chime sounded and then a holoscreen opened above him, a crisp-edged square of blue-white light that made Jensen squint, his eyes tearing. A face stared down at him, older and a little heavy, with tilted eyes and dark hair twisted neatly into some kind of plait.
“Jensen, are you awake?”
Jensen stared, stalled momentarily on the stupidity of the question. Of course he was awake! He opened his mouth to say something sarcastic and his throat seemed to seize, so dry and sore he could only make a rough kind of noise, breathy and wrong. He jerked his chin up, coughing, and the man reached off-screen, touching something.
“Okay, I’ll be right there. Let the arm give you a drink, okay?” The lozenge winked out and Jensen blinked at the empty air, glad that the room lights were dimmed down to almost nothing. He flinched ever so slightly as a robot arm unfolded from the wall, extending a plastic-tipped, stainless tube toward him. It slipped neatly between his lips, like a straw, and Jensen sucked carefully.
It was only water, not too cold, mineral-flat, but glorious all the same. He sucked hard, but the thing had a limit, and he only got little sips. After seven or eight, though, he was grateful for that, because the water, as bland as it was, didn’t sit quite right, and finally he turned his head away. The arm withdrew, and then another reached out, a puff of some fibrous stuff on the tip of it. It was wet, slightly slick, and it wiped over his cracked lips and then over his sticky eyes, over cheeks and chin and even his throat, dipping back into a reservoir in the wall for a new puff two or three times. It wiped carefully and meticulously, cleaning and leaving behind a moist film. It felt - good. Better.
Jensen sighed a little, looking around. He was in a standard med bay, all bioplastic walls and anodized-metal corners, something you could snap together in an hour. This one was mostly a kind of white, with all the the metal, including his bed frame, colored a very pale blue. It was a chilly room, but Jensen was warm in his air-bed, and besides, it was restful. The holo had been...really bright.
A few moments later, the man from the holo came into view, stepping around a dividing wall. He was tall and, like Jensen had thought, older, with dark skin and big hands, a bit of a belly comfortably cocooned in pale-blue scrubs with the Navy medic insignia woven into the breast pocket and shoulder. Jensen felt his heart skip up a little faster, at that.
“Hey, Jensen, I’m Tama. How are you feeling? Anything hurt?”
Jensen tried to tell him. Opened his mouth and moved his lips and tongue, but the only thing that came out was a useless noise like grinding gears, harsh and ragged and unintelligible. And it hurt, so he stopped, panting a little. His eyes teared up, reflex, and the robot arm darted out again to wick them away.
“Yeah, okay. We figured you might not be able to talk yet. Hang on.” Tama touched the wall beside him and a shallow drawer slid out, showing bits of medic-stuff, a jumble to Jensen’s eyes. Tama picked something out and a moment later was smoothing it onto Jensen’s throat and under his chin, three little points of coolness that faded almost immediately, so Jensen was barely aware of them - a throat mic, for subvocal speech, just like in the suits. The familiarity of it calmed Jensen down just a little. Tama clipped a little speaker to the rail of the bed and tapped it on. “Try that.”
Jensen clenched his teeth and swallowed - tried again, only thinking the words this time. “This isn’t the Tiamat.” It was his voice, mostly, coming from the speaker. His voice, with a subtle little mechanical lilt to it, the merest back-echo of a harmonic that made it not - quite - human.
Tama looked at him with a little smile. “Great, that’s great. No, you’re not on the Tiamat. You’re on board the Nightingale Six. We’re a medevac ship.”
Jensen stared at Tama, at the dark eyes and faintly-smiling mouth, and the little tick of pulse in the skin of the man’s thick throat. He was...nervous, and it was starting to freak Jensen out. “Why not? What the fuck, I should be on the Tiamat, we’ve got medical there. Why-? Where’s my unit? Where’s Jinx and…? Where’s Morgan?”
“Jensen, I-”
“I’ll take over from here, corpsman,” a woman interrupted, and Tama straightened briefly to something like attention and nodded, then silently slipped away. The woman who replaced him was a type Jensen was used to: older, stern, unbending; a military lifer, who took no shit. By the seams of dark scars Jensen could see at the collar of her shirt, though, it was obvious she was the real deal, not just some desk jockey. She stood for a moment, looking down at him, dark eyes in a dark face, her scrubs a navy blue and her white coat machine-stitched with name and rank.
“I’m Captain Oke. As corpsman Kaihau told you, you’re aboard the medevac Nightingale Six, headed for Reveille.”
“Reveille Wha- Why? Why’m I- Tell me what the fuck is going on-”
“Corporal Jensen.” Oke’s voice cracked like a whip, and Jensen took a hard, shaky breath in, lifted one hand, fingers curling, and Oke sighed. “You were injured taking the Galbraith. There were organic contaminants in the labs there that you were sterilizing. Your suit was breached, and you were infected.”
“Infected with what?” Couldn’t be serious - couldn’t - or he’d be in quarantine, he’d be behind plex walls and the Captain would be in a sealed suit.
“We don’t know. Some kind of...bacteria. They were doing a lot of illegal stuff out there, and your...Angels...wiped out most of the records. All I can tell you is - whatever it was, it reacted badly with the ANGEL system.” The Captain reached out and tapped a command into the wall unit Jensen could just see to his left, and the holo screen opened again, scrolling rapid lines of text. “You went into septic shock, there were convulsions from fever, your heart stopped, twice-”
“Fuck- Captain. I don’t care about that- that stuff. Just, tell me, why- why am I-?” Jensen was panting, his heart pounding, pushing through whatever drug they had dripping into him, and the Captain looked up at him, tapped the holo off and frowned. A little chime was sounding, somewhere.
“You need to calm down, Corporal. Calm down or I’ll put you out.”
Jensen gulped air, nodding, forced himself to breath slowly, forced his body to relax. His legs ached, his back too, and his gut was twisting, making him swallow twice, three times. “Yessir, just...tell me.”
“Your ‘net is gone, for all practical purposes. That’s why all this-” She swept her hand over him, the generation wrap and the casts, and Jensen shuddered, his body jerking spasmodically. “You’re not healing on your own. It looks like you’re rejecting the extra muscle and bone mass you needed for combat, and your vocal cords are...well, you know that already. There’s some nerve damage; your motor control isn’t going to ever be what it was.” Oke stopped, and the look she gave Jensen was one of professional pity and understanding. It made Jensen want to scream. He could feel tears running down the sides of his face, hot and humiliating, and Oke tapped in some other command and immediately, Jensen felt himself getting heavy, sleepy. The numbing wash of some drug rolled through him, and he sighed in relief, happy to be put out, to hide in an opium daze from what the Captain was saying.
“We’re going to reach Reveille in about two days; you’ve been unconscious for almost seventeen. The bacteria’s gone, we’ve got the infection under control. Now all you have to do is...get better, Corporal.” Jensen didn’t react to that, and after a moment Captain Oke left, a tiny swish and squeak of her shoes as she retreated. Jensen lay there and let the arm wipe at the tears until he drifted into sleep. Reflexively - desperately - he reached for his Angels through the ‘net, over and over, only to be met with silence. For the first time in forty years, he was completely alone and he was...terrified. He hoped, dimly, that he’d never wake up again.
He was pretty pissed when he did. And when he kept doing it, despite his best efforts not to. After five weeks of recuperation and spotty physical therapy, he was moved to a lock-down ward at Reveille. The place was for head-cases, the ones who tried to tear your throat out with their teeth, the ones who tried to set the nursing station on fire. But it was also for the ones like him, who had tried to open as many veins as possible and let his life slip right out; through his wrists, the first time, and his thigh, the second. Both times, the medbots scooped him up and shoved him into cold storage, into a tube of generation gel that sopped up his blood and fed it back to him, while his heart was shocked back into life and his brain was kept oxygenated.
When he wasn’t plotting his death - and the deaths of the PT nurses - Jensen plotted how to sabotage the medbots and the gel tubes; to that end, he spent a lot of time drugged out of the here-and-now, and a lot of time just too damn exhausted to do much more than sit. They tried to teach him how to read and write, but it wasn’t a skill he’d ever had and he didn’t care about it, anyway. He learned his name, and numbers up to one hundred, but you could do voice on any computer or put in an ear-bead, and his thumbprint made any bank terminal work, so what was the point? He did like writing his name, though, and he carefully drew it on every piece of clothing he owned, over and over, forcing his cramping, shaking hand to work, to do it right. He drew on the inside of his clothes only, in indelible ink. It reminded him of the designs Sinna had etched into his suit, and it made him feel better, to have that hidden armor, even if it was worthless.
When they were done with him, he was almost a hundred pounds lighter, shrunk down from the bulk of his Angel days, gone to whipcord and bone and muscle that shook if he worked too hard, or did too much. He’d let his hair grow - on his head, at least - something he’d forgotten about altogether, the feel of it as it brushed his neck and shoulders and fell forward around his face, a convenient curtain to hide behind. The rest he kept clean, irritated by the itch and rub of it, and how it made his tattoos look dim and old.
He could walk - something that had surprised the doctors - and he could talk, though his voice would never be the same. But he wasn’t an Angel anymore, and he’d never felt quite so trapped, so fucking wrong. The ward, like any other in the ‘verse, had a brisk trade going in stolen and concocted chemicals, and getting high was about the only thing that kept Jensen remotely sane.
With the loss of the ‘net, and drugs that had come with it, sleeping was...problematical. Jensen really preferred not to, on the whole, even if sleep deprivation made him hallucinate. At least then they’d knock him back with a huge hit of the good stuff, putting him down like a mad dog. It made Jensen laugh, when he thought of it. He tried not to do that, too often. They looked at him like they were sorry for him, if he did, and he hated that, above all else.
They told him they’d got him a job, something to ‘reintegrate him into civilian life’. Jensen didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what they even meant by that, and didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Fuck, these people thought he was safe to let go - what the hell did they know?
They dumped him on Axis, one of the biggest stations in the galaxy, queen bee in a hive of smaller stations, planetoids, and dry docks. He had a chip with forty-one years of back pay (minus his room, board, rehab, and the ANGEL system itself) and a half-empty duffle with a few pieces of clothes, his sweater, a toothbrush. He was a citizen again instead of a convict, instead of a soldier, and he was desperately, achingly, unutterably lost.
PELE round: Penetrator with Enhanced Lateral Effect.
Part five.
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And my threat is here: http://fanworksauction.livejournal.com/498.html?thread=12274#t12274
:)