The Recovery Man's Bargain

more than the security protocols.

Maybe she had damaged the bandages or the medicine. He wanted to see for himself.

And he had a hope—a tiny hope—that Nafti wasn’t dead, just unconscious. Or maybe even imprisoned, the way that Yu had imprisoned Shindo. Maybe she had somehow rigged up the cameras so that the image Yu saw of Nafti’s body was a false image.

Yu had left her on the bridge, imprisoned in the zero-g chair. He’d also put a security bubble around her, so that she couldn’t wake up and start talking to the ship. No matter what she had rigged—if she had rigged anything—she wouldn’t be able to access it from inside that bubble.

He was so light-headed by the time he reached the medical lab that he thought he was going to pass out. The lab’s door stood open, and he could see Nafti, sprawled on the diagnostic table, just like he had been in the image.

Nafti’s eyes were closed, but his skin was an unhealthy shade of whitish blue. The diagnostics were running on the screen behind the table, and all of them read flat.

Nafti was dead.

Still, Yu touched his hand ever so lightly. The skin was cooler than it should have been. Nafti had been dead for some time.

Yu stood over Nafti for a long moment. The man looked lonely in death. Lonely and terrified, even though the dead human face never held an expression.

Yu clenched a fist. Damn Shindo. Killing Nafti like that. Cold-bloodedly. No wonder she had been able to kill the Gyonnese larvae, if humans meant so little to her.

He touched Nafti’s hand one final time. “Sorry,” Yu whispered.

And he was. As irritating as Nafti could be, Yu didn’t mean to get him killed.

Black spots appeared in front of Yu’s vision. He was going to pass out soon if he didn’t do something.

He scanned for a chair, and saw one not far from the diagnostic table.

The rest of the lab looked ready for use. He’d been expecting a war zone. Instead, he saw medications lined up on a nearby table, laser scalpels and bandages sticking out of drawers, and a drug list cycling on a screen nearby.

“I need assistance,” Yu said as he slumped into the chairs.

A medical avatar appeared. It had the form of a woman. The avatar was carefully formed so that she wasn’t too tall or too thin. She had light tan skin and eyes that were rounded with a touch of angle at the edges. Her hair was a neutral brown, her eyes also brown, and her features spaced in that precise way that computer programmers thought average. The avatar wore a white smock over her brown slacks, and fake compassion filled her fake eyes.

“What happened here?” she said.

“Drop the patter and treat me,” he said.

She examined his wounds, picking at the edges of each carefully. After a moment, she said, “None of your wounds are life-threatening. But you need more than a medical avatar for that hand. I can bandage it up, but I cannot make it useful.”

“I just need it functional enough to get me to the next base,” he said, even though he wasn’t going to the next base. He was going to drop off Shindo and get the hell out of the sector. Then he would deal with the hand.

“Understood,” the avatar said.

She cleaned the hand and put some kind of disinfectant in it, shooting him up with all kinds of medicines that she explained as she worked.

Finally, he said, “I don’t care what you’re doing. Just don’t tell me about it.”

He didn’t even want to watch her work. If she did it wrong, she did it wrong. The doctors on whatever base he stopped on could fix the mistakes the avatar made.

So Yu ordered up a visual of Nafti’s last moments. The poor guy seemed to have had no trouble getting into the lab. Shindo had been staring at the laser scalpels, probably planning to use them as weapons. She had turned when the door opened.

Nafti had looked like the patient, not her, despite the pustules forming on her face. He just looked frightened.

He said, I thought we got medical programs.

You did, she said. I turned them off.

Why? The word was plaintive.

Because they have no more training than I do, she said.

“Stop playback,” Yu said. His stomach turned. That was how she had gotten Nafti onto the diagnostic tables. By pretending an expertise that she didn’t have.

Or maybe she did have that expertise. She specialized in biology and chemistry, after all.

Yu looked at his hand, now carefully bandaged. The medical avatar was working on his leg.

Shindo certainly seemed to have a lot of knowledge about where to damage him. He had been twisting away from her. If he had faced her, she might have sliced right through him.

She was dangerous, more dangerous than the Gyonnese had led him to believe. She had seen Nafti’s weakness, exploited it to get him to trust her, and then she had killed him.

Big, dumb bastard.

“Hurry up,” Yu said to the medical avatar.

He didn’t dare leave Shindo alone too long.

* * *

He managed to make it to his cabin, clean up, and change clothes long before Shindo opened her eyes. When he got back to the bridge, she was still unconscious. He took down the security bubble, made sure that the ship was still on course for the rendezvous, and then set about finding any modifications that Shindo had made to his ship’s systems.

He had been working for an hour before she woke up.

“I could have suffocated.” Shindo’s voice was nasal and thick. Her broken nose was making it difficult for her to talk.

He turned away from the console and crossed his arms. The movement hurt, but he didn’t let her see that. He didn’t want her to know how badly she had injured him, although he figured she probably had a clue from the heal-it field bandages the avatar had placed on him.

“You didn’t suffocate,” he said.

Her face was black and blue and so swollen that she barely looked human. But those eyes were the same. They flashed as they met his.

“You never leave an unconscious person with a broken nose untended,” she said. “You don’t know where the blood will go, what happens to the shattered bits of bone. You have no idea if that person is going to make it through the next few hours.”

“Yet you did well enough to wake up and harangue me.” He leaned against the console. “I monitored you. No sense delivering a dead criminal to the Gyonnese. Then you’re not worth anything—to me or to them.”

He had to work to keep his voice flat. In fact, he had to work at remaining near that console. He wanted to walk over to her and slap her across that bruised face.

“Don’t worry,” Yu said because she was just staring at him. “The rendezvous time is close. You’ll be able to move then.”

She licked her lips, but he couldn’t tell if that was from nervousness or from the pain. “I’ll pay you double what they’re paying you to take me home again.”

He smiled. So she was afraid. Terrified, not just of him but of the Gyonnese.

He liked the fact that she was terrified. It made him feel better.

“On the salary Aleyd pays you, you would pay me?” He shook his head. “It would take the rest of your life to pay my fee. Two lifetimes to double it.”

“I would get the money from Aleyd,” she said.