Event Horizon (Hellgate) (95 page)

It was still falling when the drone sleds pushed through – five of them, nose to tail, with Grant ahead of them, bent double to get through the hole ahead of Tim Inosanto. Bravo Company’s field medic was right behind him, with equipment cases in both hands. Fargo and Choi brought up the rear and before Travers could ask, he saw a laden equipment sled.

They were taking readings off the whole compartment before they straightened, and the old routines were instinctual. Small Arago units unshipped at once, and while Grant went directly to Vaurien and Inosanto headed for the others, Fargo and Choi set up enough portable generators to seal the hull breach against the radiation storm, and to seal the rest of the ship against the radiation that had already flooded the Ops room.

Many times, Travers had watched a field medic work on casualties in armor. He stood aside, fists clenching uselessly, as he watched Grant click the big hoses into place in the right breast of Vaurien’s smashed armor. Inside, valves opened, skin was bared, needles jabbed into flesh. First, a massive charge through Vaurien’s heart – and another, and a third, before it jump-started and a thread of data began to transmit. The moment blood began to flow, the needles delivered stimulants and antioxidants, while his breathing mix switched to medical air – oxygen rich and loaded with Ibrepal.

Travers heard a groan, a cough, a gasp as Vaurien’s lungs spasmed. Grant had bypassed the comms, which were too intermittent with the radiation load to be useful. He had run a cable from his data socket right to Vaurien’s. “Richard? Richard! Talk to me, man.
Richard!
”

He was coughing in great spasms as the stimulants impacted on his brain, and if not for the aerosolized Ibrepal, the pain of his injuries would have hit him again at once. The drug gave him enough margin to understand words and he gasped, “What – what the hell –?”

“You got zapped,” Grant told him. “I’ve been listening to the loop – you got stung by the ass-end of a gravity weapon. You’re dead lucky, Rick. A few percent more
oomph
in the sting, and you’d have been just plain dead. Keep still, damnit! You’re in bad shape.”

“My … my leg,” Vaurien slurred. “My arm. Chest. Hurts.”

“Busted ribs, collar bone, scapula, smashed arm and hand,” Grant told him. “Your leg … oh shit, this is going to be all kinds of fun.”

“Ship,” Vaurien groaned, but the Ibrepal was thick in his bloodstream now. He could barely hold onto the thought for long enough to ask.

“I dunno,” Grant muttered, “not my job. I just stick the pieces back together when people bust themselves to hell and back.
Fargo
!”

“Yo.” She was still busy with the pocket-sized Arago generators.

“I gotta get him to the Infirmary,” Grant told her, “and he’s way too hot to move. He’s sizzling like a hot-core generator, but I can’t do
diddly
for him in here … I’ve bought him maybe an hour. Maybe. He’s bleeding internally from so many broken bones, you grunts can’t even count that high. I need him decontaminated,
muy pronto
, or we can still lose him.”

“Got it.” Fargo was done with the Aragos and began to hustle. “Gillian, Jim, you heard any of this?”

And Perlman: “Everything. You want some decon units up there.”

“As many as you can shift, as fast as you can,” Fargo affirmed. “Hey, boss, you want to help here? We’re still on the clock.”

Travers wrenched himself away from the numbing reality. “Yeah.” He shook himself hard, made himself listen to the loop, which had not paused while his priorities were elsewhere. “Where do you want me?”

The sounds of Tor’s cursing and Queneau’s groans were sweet as music, but Hubler was still silent. Inosanto was struggling to get all three onto sleds, for transport to the suiting room for decontamination. Travers, Marin and Vidal lent their own hands to help maneuver the sleds while Rabelais, Dario Sherratt and Rodman lifted the dead mass of the armor. Queneau seemed largely unhurt.

She had been knocked unconscious and her power couplers, always the weakest point of industrial and military suits, had wrenched loose. She was pinned to the deck under a colossal mass, and with a blistering curse Inosanto stopped fiddling with the uncooperative hardware and rigged a repulsion unit to her. Hubler was the unknown – still unconscious, silent. His biosigns were faint, but Tor Sereccio was Inosanto’s greatest concern. His injuries were severe; he was bleeding from ruptured organs, and before the rasping moans could become screams, Inosanto hit him with a shot of Ibrepal.

All this, Travers took in while he listened to the loop, and he clung to the calm of Mark Sherratt’s voice like a lifeline. Of them all, Mark was the one who had turned his mind back to the business of the ship, the battle. He was coordinating data on the fly while Dario and Leon helped to load Tor onto a sled, bound first for the suiting room, and then for a cryogen tank. Grant could only handle one major casualty at a time, and Vaurien’s injuries were so appalling, the last time Travers had seen a man so broken, the field medics had amputated three out of four limbs and consigned him to two years of prostheses while he waited for cloned replacements. Vaurien would be keenly aware of this. His own left hand was cloned.

The AI’s voice remained tranquil – and Lai’a was never more obviously a machine than when it said, “No, Doctor Sherratt, I saw no reason to withdraw from the confrontation. The barrage never increased beyond levels which I find entirely sustainable. The Zunshu weapons facilities ceased firing six minutes ago. My ammunition bunkers are at 46% and under replenishment. Number 3 generator is being serviced, and will restart in an estimated 30 minutes. All viable Arago projectors have cooled enough to return to functionality; four burned out units are being replaced. Drone manufacture is at capacity. I have set a vector to swing around the far side of 161-D to investigate the previously inaccessible moons. Should I detect further ordnance installations, I require two authorizations to launch swarm assault to neutralize them.”

“Show me your data as soon as you have it,” Mark said readily. “You’ll have my authorization and that of General Shapiro. I regret, Captain Vaurien will be … unavailable for some time.”

“Will you assume command of the Resalq and human company?” Lai’a asked.

“For the moment,” Mark said in grim tones. “I’ll pass command to General Shapiro when it’s possible to do so. For the moment –” He hesitated. “Have you been able to re-establish any feeds from the Ops compartment?”

“Not yet, Doctor. Power and data conduits are damaged far beyond repair. I have transferred Operations functions to Physics 2. Early data suggests that the original Ops facility might be decontaminated, the hull breach sealed, and the space used for cubic storage.” It paused. “I have assumed a westbound vector and am driving around the planet in medium-low orbit. Standby for data regarding facilities on the moons on the far side, and objects in the atmosphere of 161-D.”

“Give me a damage report on the airframe and engines,” Mark prompted. “I was aware of
two
near implosions. There were others?”

“No others,” Lai’a said succinctly. “Armor is crushed on the starboard bow quarter. Number 2 hold is twisted beyond repair. Suggest jettisoning the existing hold for replacement, at first drydock opportunity. Till then, drones are vacuum welding sheet armor over the hull fracture. Contents of Number 2 hold are destroyed – inventory reports 396 service drones were in storage there. These are being replaced, resulting in a 4% penalty in raw materials stores. Major hull breach at Operations quadrant; containment protocols are in operation. Contamination is level 7 – serious, not irreversible. However, decontamination drones cannot be deployed to the compartment while I am on a battlefield assignment. Recommend manual decontamination before drones seal off the compartment. Drones are already replacing Zunshu armor to close the hull; however, damage to surrounding infrastructure is beyond repair. Power, life support and data cannot be returned to normal function without drydock facilities.”

“And the engines?” The voice belonged to Harrison Shapiro. It was rough, taut, hoarse, but he was working again.

“Sublight, Weimann and transspace engines are undamaged, General,” Lai’a informed him. “Number 3 generator is under maintenance. Full power on any drive will be available within 30 minutes.”

“Very good,” Shapiro whispered.

“Harrison.” Mark took a long breath, exhaled it as a sigh. “Harrison, I looked for him. I don’t see … I can’t find him.”

“I know.” Shapiro said almost soundlessly. “There’s only one place he can be, Mark, and if he’s there, he’s dead.” He gestured at the deck which had ruptured, twisted, half-swallowing Vaurien. “Jon was standing right behind Richard when …” He caught himself before his voice broke. “It would have been very quick. He shouldn’t have been here. I wanted him to stay on the
Wastrel
.”

“It was his choice to be here,” Mark offered. “He wanted to be with you.”

“And I should have told him, no.” Shapiro turned away.

“Yet he did fine work with you, and we’ll miss him.” Mark set a hand on the shoulder of Shapiro’s armor. “I’m so sorry, Harrison.”

“Yes.” Shapiro’s voice was low, rough. “There isn’t time now … we have to get this place, and ourselves, decontaminated.”

As he fell silent Perlman and Fujioka appeared at the aperture in the armordoors, and Travers and Marin hauled their sled through the fizzling membrane of a semi-permeable Arago screen. It was loaded with decontamination canisters, the big blue shells with the white banding, for use in confined spaces with personnel in sealed armor. The chemistry was toxic, corrosive, lethal to living tissue, but so simple, a child could have activated it.

“Everybody
except
wounded, medics and handlers,” Travers bawled across the confusion of the loop, “get yourselves to the suiting room. Perlman, Fujioka, go with them, get through the decon drill. Grant, Inosanto, Fargo, get the wounded over here –
hustle
!”

Most of the company doubled over and fed themselves out through the meter-high, meter-wide aperture in the blastdoors, but Travers did not have time to watch. He, Marin and Vidal dragged the fallen armor into an untidy pile with Vaurien and Teniko sprawled across the top. Vaurien was unconscious again with the Ibrepal, and Travers doubted Teniko was still alive. His armor was the most critical hazard, so sizzling, it would be lethal long after Tonio himself was a memory.

With a blistering curse, Travers called Marin and Vidal in on one side while Grant called Inosanto and Fargo in on the other. They clustered, arms over shoulders, helmets bent forward over the canister, which was 50 centimetres tall and twenty wide, a cylinder with a single trigger on the top. His gauntleted hand knocked the safety off the trigger and his palm hit it hard.

The shell disintegrated and a blast of chemistry exploded through the group. He counted to ten – an old routine, learned by rote in the rookie months – before Vidal handed him another canister, and another, another, till the rad levels dropped back into tolerable levels.

The decontamination chemistry was a thick, vile liquid, eating into the surface layers of anything it touched and following gravity to the deck like globs of syrup. The last four canisters were coded yellow; their contents laid down a thick layer of near-solid slurry on top of the detritus that had rained to the deck in blobs of goo, locking in most of the toxicity. Horizontal Arago fields would screen the rest. The process was not fast, and not thorough, but when it was done a naked human being could survive the leftover contamination.

“Good enough?” Marin wondered.

“Pull ’em apart, let me look.” Grant was panning a scanner back and forth over the pile of armor. “Teniko’s suit’s still
way
toxic … he’ll have to stay in the compartment here. There’s
zip
I can do for him. Somebody might say some nice words over him, after...”

“He’s dead?” Vidal asked bitterly.

“As good as. And thank gods he’s comatose – the poor sod’s not feeling a thing. Rick, on the other hand, is bleeding to death while we stand here chatting!” Grant summoned the first sled, and as it trundled toward him, beckoned Marin and Travers. “Give me a hand here. Tim, Jude, take Tor first. Grab him and a cryotank – parked right outside the door there – and shove ’em both into Biology 1. It’s quarantine rated, meaning it’ll seal tighter than a hustler’s corsets. Get the compartment up to pressure. Break Tor out of the armor and slam him straight into cryogen. Try not to twist him as you lift him into the tank – it’s internal injuries. He’s busted up. Then get back here and transfer Hubler and Queneau to the Infirmary. Got it?”