It took me half a minute to register the voice screaming in both my ears and my head.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”
In the end, it was Mack’s voice that broke through, tired, but forceful enough for me to register.
“Stand down, Cutter. Stand the fuck down.”
“Mack?” but I stopped firing, lowering the Glazer, to look for him.
More forms dropped from the ventilation shaft, and I snapped my head towards them, bringing the Glazer up, even though I was going to be way too slow.
“Don’t make me come. Down. There.”
Not that it sounded like he could—and, even if he did, he’d be way too late. The first human-shaped intruder raced out from behind the bench and launched themselves towards me in a low tackle that took them under the Glazer’s arc of fire.
Behind me, I heard Delight’s soft ‘oof’, as the impact carried me into her, and took us both down. I kept hold of the Glazer, right up until someone caught my face in an open-handed slap, and someone else plucked the pistol from my hand. The fall and the slap left me stunned, and I lay there, trying to make the world come back into focus.
“Mack?” I asked, but the face above me belonged to no-one I knew.
“You!” the commander snapped, looking past me and towards where the scientists were working. “Vaccines. Now.”
Vaccines? Normally that would have worried me, but I couldn’t work out why.
“And you,” the commander added, looking down at me. “Time to sleep.”
Sleep? I tried to argue with her about that, but she snapped her fingers, and I saw the business end of a Glazer aimed at my head.
“Hey...”
28—Recovery
I woke to a raging thirst, a splitting headache, and the feeling that someone had used every inch of me as a drum. When I worked out which motherfucking asshole was responsible, I was going to... Why was I lying down?
I tried to sit up, and found the sheets tucked too tightly around me to allow it.
“What the...” and I sounded like I’d been gargling gravel.
I stopped trying to move, closed my eyes, swallowed, and listened to the sounds around me. Last thing I remembered I had been in a laboratory. There had been things to shoot at, and I’d been starting to feel like crap. Okay...
And then things started to come into focus.
Delight had been with me, and Odyssey had come...and they’d shot me...with a Glazer set to stun...my Glazer. Well, fuck.
And someone had been about to give me a shot... and I’d been infected. Double fuck. In fact, double all the fucks!
I still felt too tired to punch anybody.
“And aren’t we all just very glad to hear that.” The Odyssey commander came into view. She stood by the bed, looking down at me, frowning, and it dawned on me that I really didn’t like the expression on her face.
“Mack?” I asked, turning my head to look for him, but she reached down and took my chin between her finger and her thumb, turning my head so I had to look up at her.
“He’ll be fine. You and Delight got the solution out in time.”
Solution. I hoped she meant the cure... although, come to think of it, that had been a solution of sorts.
“Tens? The ship? Doc?”
“Also fine.”
I pushed against the covers, trying to loosen them. I really wanted to sit up, now. The commander reached down, and I thought she was going to force me to lie still. It surprised me, when she helped me sit, and handed me a glass of water.
“Thanks,” I said, looking around to see where I was.
Well, it wasn’t Mack’s ship... unless he’d repurposed one of the holds. Nope. This wasn’t a hold.
“It’s an infirmary.” The commander caught my frown as she answered the question I hadn’t asked, and then she answered my confusion. “Delight patched me directly through to your implant, when relaying what you were doing was too hard to coordinate with shooting things.”
That sounded like Delight. Priorities, right? And no respect for a girl’s privacy.
“Except her own,” the commander told me.
Well, that made perfect sense.
“She around?” I asked, scanning the beds I could see.
The commander shifted slightly, and indicated the bed next to mine.
“She’s still sleeping.”
“You sure?” I asked, because it was hard to believe I’d wake up before Delight.
“We had to hit her twice,” the commander said, and I knew she was referring to the stun shots they’d delivered from my Glazer. “You’d dialed the power down a little bit too low.”
That was even a thing? For some reason, that thought made her frown even harder.
“We didn’t cover it in training?”
I thought about it, then remembered we’d trained with a different brand.
“Not on the equipment we used in Basics,” and she nodded, as though that explained everything.
“Hmmm,” by which I understood she was making notes, and what I said would be passed back to the Odyssey training centers.
It made sense; the Glazer was one of the weapons found galaxy-wide, being small, versatile, easy to use, and readily available. That, and the stun setting was damn handy to have on an otherwise lethal weapon.
“Exactly.” For a minute, she looked like she was going to add something else, but then her eyes shifted, and she smiled a greeting to someone moving across the ward towards us.
“Doctor,” she said. “They’re starting to wake up.”
“Thank you, commander. I’ll take it from here.”
Well, that was a dismissal if ever I’d heard one, but the commander was having none of it.
“I think I’ll hang around,” the commander told him, in a tone that warned against argument.
I saw the man’s pace check, and then he shrugged, and continued towards us.
“Fine. Make yourself useful, then, and get her to the head.”
Head? Naval term for san unit? Since when did Costral have a navy?
“It doesn’t, kid, but he’s one of ours. We’re not taking chances
