All is Fair Ch. 04

According to her scanners, the readings that signified her objective were - at that moment - about two hundred and fifty meters straight ahead of her and about eighty meters below her current elevation. Cool, except she had already been there, and when she checked her scanners directly above the point the vault should be, it told her it was where she stood now.

Laura grated her teeth - an act that made a very strange sound in the confines of her atmospheric suit's helmet - then shut off the computer, muttering obscenities about scanners, planets, and compound clouds as she looked around.

She was about thirty miles outside what could be considered the city limits of Merdian, on the edge of a ravine that overlooked a grand and presumably majestic river. She had no idea what the river was called, and she imagined that the people who had called this part of the world home had once considered the view from this settlement to be pretty spectacular. She didn't care; things like that were lost on a Mariner who spent their days looking at the astonishing swirls and colors of nebulae. But she doubted the people who lived here cared very much now either, at least if the ruins of the settlement were anything to go by. This little town had been utterly obliterated by either the earthquakes or the tsunamis that followed it. Only a handful of what must have been hundreds of buildings were still standing, and she trusted none of them to be structurally sound enough to enter. Every other building was just gone, leaving only the footprint of their foundations carved into the ground. The thought that anyone still living here had survived when those calamities hit was utterly unfathomable. If there were a list of people who called this place home before the Expulsion, the only ones still alive would have been the ones lucky enough to get off the planet before the quakes hit or the ones who had somehow made it to the higher ground of Meridian and then miraculously survived there instead. Because there sure as hell wasn't anyone around here now.

The terrain itself should have made the hunt for the vault reasonably straightforward. It was a broad, sweeping plain of relatively flat land that had been carved away by the river over millennia. It was, topographically speaking, comparable to the Grand Canyon on Earth, just not quite as big. The earthquakes, however, had torn huge rents into the ground, splitting the landscape with deep, scar-like cracks that made traversing it all the more difficult. To make matters worse, a lot of those cracks were spewing out hundreds of metric tons worth of the same compound that was currently fucking with her sensors and - judging by their readings - fucking with them even more. If that wasn't bad enough, the tsunami and the recession of the floods that had followed it looked to have washed away huge parts of the walls of the ravine on either side of the river. Normally, that would have been a good thing, it would mean less digging for her, but it had not only washed a considerable amount of the town away but had made the prospect of any descent into the canyon a very dangerous proposition. The ground in several spots was simply too undermined even to support her weight, let alone the weight of her digging gear. She doubted half of these house foundations would still be here in a few weeks as natural erosion finished what the calamity had started.

So... readings. There were three that she was dealing with. The first put her objective directly below where she was standing at that moment. The second reading was two hundred and fifty meters ahead of her, closer to the edge of the ravine and on the other side of the town. The third reading, predictably, was to her left, a spot in mid-air close to the other side of the ravine. Admittedly, that was a bit of an eyeballed guess; she had no way of crossing it at the moment, and the reading could possibly put that spot right on the opposite edge of it. But barely.

There were only two conceivable explanations. The first - and the one she was most inclined to go with - was that her scanners were fucked to the point of being useless. The compound cloud was putting so much shit into the air that the scanners were finding it hard to see through it with any sort of accuracy. It was like trying to look at something far away through a blizzard; you may get glimpses of it, but only through tiny gaps in the smothering snowfall. The compound cloud was - thanks to the new vents in the land - undeniably more dense here than it had been in the city.

The second option, one that an optimist would go with, was that the vault was fucking enormous - by far the largest that had ever been found - and the scan was simply picking up the edges of it. That meant that it was beneath the river at the bottom of the ravine.

But as she had already noted, that was what an optimist would think. Not a single person who knew Laura well would ever accuse her of being an optimist.

So, she was left with a choice, and neither option was a particularly good one. The first option was to make the thirty-mile trek back to the Meridian spaceport - a trek that was, literally, entirely uphill while wearing a full, heavy, and cumbersome atmospheric suit. That would take well over a day, would mean writing off the last three days as a loss and essentially starting again, either when she brought her ship closer to this site, hoping the scanners functioned better, or giving up and going home to come back another time with better equipment.

The second option was to find a way to make the climb down into the ravine and search the area no matter how ridiculously low the chances of finding anything would be. Optimistic or not, she could almost guarantee that her squadron commander would insist that she - or someone else - came back to search this area anyway, just in case. Plus, in that situation, she would have headed home empty-handed while her officers could possibly legitimately argue that she hadn't searched well enough.

When viewed like that, it wasn't much of a choice. "For fuck sake," she muttered to herself, picked up her pack, and headed west along the path of the river. She had spotted an uncompromised rocky outcropping about five kilometers downriver the day before, and if she were going to have to rappel down to the base of the ravine, then she would be damned if she was going to do it in a place that could get her killed. She simply didn't have the time, patience, or inclination to look for a better spot further east.

With the slightly brighter smudge in the brown sky setting behind her, she trudged onward toward her new goal.

********

Almark. 9

Pain is, generally speaking, relative. There are a lot of ways to mean that; there are the more obvious comparisons between, for example, a paper cut on your pinky and having your pinky cut the fuck off or between skinning your knee and having it crushed beneath the cockpit console of a crashed broadsword. But then there are the more subtle, nuanced comparisons. Emylee had struggled to comprehend the exact list of the things wrong with her - let alone their severity - even before she had passed out on the beach, and judging by the wave of nauseating agony that ripped through every inch of her body as awareness returned to her, she would have to guess at "a lot." But compared to the emotional and psychological turmoil running in circles around her mind, the physical pain was nothing.

There was no blissful moment before the memory came back, there was no gradual solidification of recollection, and there was no heartbreaking moment when it all came flooding back to her. Emylee had been in a fever dream of reliving the deaths of her squadron, over and over and over again, for the entire time she had been unconscious. It was flashbacks and fantastical last conversations, regrets of words not said and actions not taken; it was the frantic mental search for things she could have done differently while knowing that even if that search was successful, it was too late. There was no blissful escape into the void of unconsciousness for her. Her mind had not stopped working for however long she had been out for.

It had been torture.

A torture that was mercilessly and savagely continued, without a break, the moment that her eyes started to flutter open. The rhythmic beeping of the machine monitoring her vitals started to beep a little faster as the physical pain - which thankfully had been muted by her encounter with soporose - renounced itself with a vigor that quite literally left her breathless. The beeping rapidly grew in frequency, and after only a few more moments, alarms started to go off.

A few figures, all of them dressed in white, rushed over to her bed. "Okay, lovely," a gentle, reassuring woman's voice went a little way to calming Emylee. "Just breathe. I'm going to increase your pain medication, but I need you to try to breathe for me. Can you do that?"

If she was being honest, she wasn't sure. Breathing involved moving the muscles that controlled her lungs, which, in turn, would move her ribs, and those little bastards felt like someone had dropped a hover truck on them. But still, through a blinding pain which - she imagined - would make childbirth seem like a happy memory, she sucked in a groaned, agonizing breath... and it was only a groan because a scream of excruciating torment was just simply beyond her at that moment.

Somewhere in the hazy part of her mind, the part not overwhelmed by the flood of pain racing through it from every angle - internal, external, physical, emotional, and psychological - she felt the hypospray being pressed against the jugular vein in her neck, and the slightly cold sensation of some form of drugs being injected into her circulatory system. Less than a minute later, that same hazy part of her mind sang every praise of every mad genius who had ever played a part in the development of pain-management medication when the searing, blinding agony started to fade.

Or at least the physical pain did. Those mad geniuses had developed nothing injectable to help her combat the anguish still flooding through her memories. Tears of all descriptions started to flow down her face, forced from her eyes by a hundred different sources. She wanted to curl up and let the hole in her heart swallow her whole. She wanted to sob uncontrollably, she wanted to scream in rage at the fates and the men who had caused this to happen... she wanted to join her fallen wing. She wanted the darkness, she needed the oblivion and to succumb to the agony that had been caused on her watch.

She wanted to burn the Imperium to the ground and piss on the ashes.

The shock had worn off now; she was no longer feeling blindsided by the revelations that had hit her hard and fast during the battle; she understood what had happened. Maybe not the details, and certainly not the reasons behind their betrayal, but she understood that it had happened, and every one of the faces of her friends - their final moments seared forever onto her retina and into her mind - haunted her with demands for justice.

A low, deep growl rumbled from her chest, and the alarm on the machine started sounding again.

"I'm not going to pretend to know what you are going through," the soft voice said again. "But try to relax. You are safe, I promise."

Emylee's eyes snapped to the side, ready to bite the head off whoever had the gall to tell her to calm down, but the woman filling her vision caused her to pause. She was young, very young, probably in her early twenties at the absolute most. But more than that, there was something about the way she was looking at her. She was clearly in the rebel hospital, meaning that the woman was a rebel doctor, or nurse, or something, so Emylee half expected to see some hostility or disdain in her eyes, but there was none. Instead, they were filled with compassionate sympathy. Almark's anger petered out, and she tried to relax her body, focusing for the moment on simply breathing.

"How long?" she finally asked.

"The battle was two days ago," the nurse replied. "You've been through quite the ordeal, lovely."

"The others? Are they okay?" The medic frowned in confusion and tilted her head. "The people I was captured with, there were three others."

"Oh, I'm sorry, let me check for you." the woman nodded. She stood and moved to a console to the side of the bed, looking down at the holo-screen as she typed in her search queries. "Sergeant Steve Taylor and Private Dylan McCaffery are both fine. They are being held in a different part of the base, but I can ask if one of them can be brought to see you, maybe tomorrow, once you have had time to rest. Were they part of your unit?"

Emylee shook her head, a movement she instantly regretted. "No, I was a pilot; my whole wing is gone. Stevo and Mac..." she deduced who they were from their less than imaginative nicknames, "... they pulled me out of my fighter after I crashed." She frowned as she realized a name was missing. "What about Angel?"

The nurse turned back to the console. "Corporal Angel Vasquez..." the nurse winced. "She was wounded during her capture. She's here; she's a few rooms over, but she is still in an induced coma after her surgery."

"Wounded?!? How? We had surrendered!"

The nurse shook her head. "I'm sorry, I don't know. All I have are the lists."

"Is... is she okay?"

The nurse looked back at the screen. "Her wounds were very serious, but it looks like she is going to pull through." she nodded.

Emylee sighed in relief. There was something about Angel she had liked, something about the way she held herself, the way she spoke, and the respect that everyone around her seemed to hold for the Latina. She had seemed genuinely nice. Emylee sucked in a deep, steeling breath and turned her head to face the younger woman. "So come on then, let's have it. How fucked am I?"

The muscles on the side of the medic's face flexed a little as she took a breath of her own and turned to face her. "Straight to the point, I can respect that," she nodded. "I won't lie to you; you were in a very bad way. We didn't know what had happened to you to cause your injuries, but being in a powerful impact like a crash would explain them." Emylee nodded silently to indicate that the medical team's guess had been spot on. "You had four badly broken ribs; one of them had pierced your liver, another had lacerated your spleen, and both caused some pretty nasty internal bleeding. But it was your legs that were the real danger."

Both of them looked down at the outline of her legs beneath the hospital bed sheet.

"Crush injuries can be extremely dangerous," the medic went on. "When the bottoms of your legs were cut off from your blood supply, they started to basically die, releasing toxins into the blood trapped below the crush. When that crush was released - when you were pulled out of the wreckage - those toxins raced back to your heart and then to all of your other internal organs. Usually, that is enough to send you into shock, and death occurs within minutes."

"But, we were on the beach for hours."

"Yes, you were... in the cold," the nurse added. "You were also suffering from hypothermia. But that temperature drop forced your body to prioritize blood away from your extremities, which means that the blood wasn't picking up as many new toxins from your damaged legs. More than that, someone tied a tourniquet around each of your legs, very tightly and in exactly the right position."

"Mac..." Emylee nodded, her mind drifting back to the gentle giant who had kept her hydrated while the others stood guard.

"Well, Mac saved your life. You are a bonafide medical miracle. You should be dead. Those tourniquets delayed the onset of shock long enough for us to get you here before it was too late. But I'll be honest with you, it was close."

Emylee let out a quivering breath. Through all the thoughts of betrayal and loss, she hadn't really considered how close she had come to losing her own life. "So, what now?"

"Now, you need to give yourself time to heal. You had some pretty serious emergency surgery to repair the damage to your organs and to stop the internal bleeding, and your ribs have been reset. I imagine that's pretty painful, and moving around isn't going to be pleasant for at least a few weeks."

"What about my legs?"

"The toxins were flushed from your system; bone and muscle regeneration therapy have healed most of the damage, so you get to keep them for now," the nurse said with a smile. "But you are going to be off your feet for a while, and it's a long road ahead if you want to regain the same use of them that you had. But we'll keep you dosed up with all the good drugs while you get there."

Emylee nodded. "Thank you... I'm sorry, I didn't ask your name."

"It's Dr Evans, but everyone calls me Amy," Emylee frowned. "I know, you think I look too young to be a doctor," she winked with a grin. "Being with the rebels comes with a lot of benefits if you can overlook being bombed occasionally."

Emylee snorted out a laugh, winced in pain, coughed, winced again, and then groaned. Dr Evans looked at her sympathetically and reached over to the console she was attached to. "Let me up your meds a little so you can get some sleep."

Emylee was about to object, to say that she had been asleep for days and didn't need any more, but the young doctor was right. Just being awake and having this conversation - not to mention all the pain and anguish running through her body and through her mind - had taken it out of her. She was exhausted. The world was already starting to fade as she nodded her head and whispered her murmured thanks.

She was already asleep before she heard the doctor's maternal and gentle reply.

********

Stevo 18.

"By now, each of you has been told what happened," Captain West announced to the crowd of Marines gathered in what looked to be an old mess hall. He was leaning against one of the walls, watching from the side as the other inhabitants of his cell sat on chairs beside him. The other half of the room was filled with the men and women who had been hurt in the assault, and Stevo couldn't help but let his eyes wander over their various states of woundedness. A fairly large proportion of them were in wheelchairs, a few of them missing legs that had doubtlessly been blown off during the artillery strike, others just having them plastered and in traction. Lots more were on crutches, and he spotted the stoic-looking Ryan among them. The young Marine gave his sergeant a quick nod before turning his attention back to the Captain. There were also a lot of them with arms in plaster, held in slings hanging from their neck, or Marines with bandages over laser-shot wounds or wrapped around their heads. One poor woman seemed to have been blinded and was letting her head roll to the direction of the voice, her vacant eyes covered beneath the white-wrapped bandages. "I am here now to give you your options. But first, I want to introduce you to the base CO, General Cornelius Crow."

An older man looking to be in his late fifties strode out of one of the side doors and joined the beautiful captain at the front of the room.

To Stevo's surprise, or perhaps maybe not considering the reverence he had shown toward the captain the day before, every Marine who was able pulled themselves to his feet and snapped to attention. A few of them even flashed respectful, if automatic, salutes.

The General looked over the crowd. Stevo had never seen the man before this moment, yet even to him, the officer looked like he hadn't slept in days. His eyes lingered sadly on the wounded Marines to the right-hand side of the room. "As you were, Marines."