“This is impossible.” Fehr, the chief medical officer onboard the rescue vessel Vilnius, aborted his portable X-ray/MRI scan before completion, and glanced sceptically across the anxious faces of the other three survivors sitting opposite him. “These injuries make no sense.”
Vaughn shook his head as the craft dipped through a thermal pocket in the lower atmosphere. “You’re telling me. I was sure she’d been crushed.”
“By a sea monster.” The note of sarcasm in the EMS man’s voice was subtle enough not to offend.
“Hesperidian Hydra,” said Polotovsky, who was now Mrs. Rosemary Campbell, mother of four, happily married to Geoffrey Campbell—not the outlaw formerly known as Finnegan. They huddled under the same blanket. “It came from nowhere, the biggest thing you ever saw, took—I can’t even think—how many?”
“Three,” answered Vaughn, frantically tying up the loose ends in his mind. “The other warden, Bilderbeck, and the two suspects. I guess we’ll never know who they really were. The Kingmaker, gone, and no passenger manifest on Solzhik. They fled on the wrong goddamn planet is all.”
“None of that explains these injuries,” persisted Fehr. “Not even remotely. The circuits and alloy prosthetics are crushed, like you said, but the surrounding tissue—hell, even the organic nerve couplings, are perfectly intact. From what I can see, not a single blood vessel has been harmed. And that’s not all.” He lifted her arm by the sleeve. “This blood covering her clothes is her blood, but I can’t figure out how it got there. She has no flesh wounds, no internal bleeding, nothing. It’s as if she’s been dipped in, well...no, I got nothing.”
“But she’s gonna make it, though, right?” Finnegan’s question. Vaughn’s heart-in-mouth moment. Fehr had already assured them she’d make it, but with this new development...
“I don’t see why not. Her cyber components can all be fixed. Like I said, the only concern is the depression in her skull, where the alloy plating has been dented. It’s what caused her concussion, and until we can surgically correct it, it will continue to press on her brain.” Fehr seemed to sense Vaughn’s anxiety. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen worse. My money’s on a full recovery.” He turned back to Jan, picked up his scanner. “Damned if I can figure the rest of it out, though.”
And you never will, Fehr. You never will. The explanation will be light-years away by the time she recovers.
Vaughn heaved a massive sigh of relief, and looked across to his fellow rescuees. They both flicked him a wink.
“Goddamn! I need to get in shape.” The inner airlock door snapped shut behind Kraczinski as he wriggled out of his sweat-soaked undersuit, revealing his hairy gut, and immediately wrapped himself in a towel. “One stubborn-as-all-get-out canine, and one snazzy-looking kit bike, safe and secure. That thing’s worth a few clips, huh? Campbell?”
“I reckon. She’s been with me a long time,” replied Finnegan. “My original mistress—never surpassed.”
Finnegan received a sharp elbow from his “wife”, and Kraczinski blurted a laugh. “More reliable than any of mine, by the sounds of it,” said the sheriff. “Married five times. Divorced six times.”
“Didn’t you just get married?” asked Vaughn.
“Not long since. I’m still with her.”
“Then how can you have been divorced six times?” queried Polotovsky.
“Are you kidding? Two of ’em divorced me twice, just to make sure.”
Laughter filled the Vilnius, while from the airlock, a distant barking, familiar and persistent, kept them company across the humorless, storm-swept wilds of the alien world.