Aliens Vs. Humans (Aliens Series Book 4) (26 page)

Loud clapping, cheers and foot stomping sounded from most of the people gathered below. The leaders of Brazil, China, India, the Moon, Mars, Mathilde, Ceres, Vesta and elsewhere nodded slowly, their faces saying they understood the principle for which he and his fleet risked their lives.

“Now, above us floats
Humanity
, the first human colony ship,” Jack said, his voice croaking from dryness. “It will leave shortly for an unoccupied star system far, far away. We will plant our first colony there. We will plant other colonies in other star systems, but we will not dominate other peoples!”

Dizziness hit him. He blinked. His vision cleared. Amidst the smiles and cheers he leaned on Nikola and began walking down the ramp. At the bottom Elaine met him with raised eyebrows. The maglev gurney floated behind her. As did six red-and-white uniformed medocs. “Jack?”

“Give me a shot of adrenaline. Then put me on the gurney. I want . . . I want to stay alert for the ship’s departure.”

Elaine smiled quickly. “Will do.” She touched his left shoulder with an air hypo. “You’ll feel better soon. More energy. And we’ll get you to the Aricia Tholus hospital ASAP in that ship outside!”

Hands on his shoulders and legs lifted him up effortlessly and laid him atop the gurney. Monitoring straps wrapped around his wrists and ankles automatically. Someone pulled the clear flexible cover up from his feet toward his face, getting ready to inflate it for passage through the vacuum outside. He looked up and to the side. Nikola.

“Lifemate, I’m tough. All Belters are. This is just a stumble on our journey to universal freedom.”

Tears filled her eyes. Then the gurney cover came over his face and latched to the rim behind his head. “I’ll be there when you wake up,” she said.

He heard her voice over the internal comlink of the gurney. Wake up? Tiredness hit him along with soft sleepiness. He realized suddenly that his sister had tricked him. No adrenaline that hypo! It was a knock-out drug often used to sedate people fresh from trauma.

His eyes closed against his wishes. His breathing slowed. His heart beat easily. And in his mind he saw their Garden habitat in all its green beauty. He saw Nikola sitting at the edge of a red and white-checked tablecloth, their picnic basket beside her feet, as she looked up at his entry and said “Hello, my love. We’re pregnant.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jack dreamed and knew he dreamed. After all, it was not normal to fly through the sky like a bird, swooping and diving and circling above a herd of elephants on the plains below. Although they resembled Doomat elephants, he knew they couldn’t be. He’d returned home to Sol system. To grab someone’s particle accelerator. And to see off the colony ship that Zhāng Dingbang had insisted humans create as a last chance option in case his Arbitor challenge failed. The colony ship had resembled a red cigar, pointed at both ends. He’d been watching it and celebrating and—

“Wake up Mr. Munroe,” said an authoritative male voice.

The dream vanished and he became aware he was lying down somewhere. Oh. The machete. The talk. The gurney. His sneaky sister Elaine. Squinting against the brightness of light that lay on the other side of his eyelids, Jack opened his eyes. Above him, leaning over, was a white-haired medoc who resembled an ancient AV vid drama actor. He couldn’t place the actor’s name. Anyway, this man’s expression was impatient.

“Hey doc. I wasn’t sleeping. Just checking my eyelids for leakage.”

The man’s white handlebar mustache quivered slightly. His dark brown eyes blinked. The man pursed his rad-tanned lips. “That’s one I haven’t heard. Some Alien tell it to you?”

As his vision sharpened Jack could see he lay in a white-walled room adorned with a variety of Sensor screens, beeping Tech stuff, a bag of IV fluid suspended above him with an auto-pump pushing something into his arm and, at the foot of the bed on which he lay, Nikola stood next to a nurse with the epaulets of Surgery-General. His lifemate looked tired and worn out. But the redness in her blue eyes was gone. Which said time had passed. He fixed on the medoc leaning over him. “How long has it been since I was stabbed? Quickly now!”

The medoc showed surprise at hearing Jack’s command tone. “Two days, give or take a few hours. Why?”

Disappointment filled him. The colony ship
Humanity
had departed by now for the distant yellow star that lay in the Horologium constellation. Or so he recalled from snatches of words he’d heard while working with Zhāng, Hideyoshi, Max and Gareth on the status of their fleet ships. “Damn! I really wanted to see it leave!”

The white-haired, mustached medoc gave a quick glance to Nikola, then came back to him. His expression turned officious professional. “Captain Munroe, your parents are waiting outside to see you. Against my better judgment I allowed your lifemate to remain with you after surgery was done. But I have things to cover with you before your sisters, parents and a few dozen other people make a mess of my surgical recovery suite. Understood?”

“Understood. Fire away.”

The man lifted one white eyebrow. “Such quick cooperation. My, oh my.” The man winked at Nikola, then fixed a generic smile on him. “Good. Tell me how your side feels? Any sharp pain? Any pulsing pain?”

He’d been aware of the dull ache in his right side ever since waking up. And the fact his right arm had an IV tube’s needle inserted into his inner elbow vein. “It feels fine. A dull ache. Nope and nope on the last two questions.”

The man’s high cheekbones, which made him look north Asian despite his Caucasian features, wrinkled. Not a smile and not a frown. “Your extremities. Feet, fingers and toes. Any numbness.”

The man had reverted to standard Belter talk. He grinned. “Fine, fine, fine, none.”

The man looked up and over at a wallscreen monitor. Jack turned his head. The flat screen showed his entire body, from bones to organs to veins, plus arteries and major nerves. It resembled a medical ebook he’d studied during his last year of Remote Tutoring. His brainwaves and electrocardiogram were two signals he recognized. The man looked back. “The Surgical Monitor agrees with you. Sit up. Slowly.”

Putting his hands to either side of the medbed, he pushed up. Rather quickly since he’d forgotten about Vesta’s low gee gravity. The straps over his waist kept him from flying up to hit the ceiling. The man looked amused. “Hey doc! You did good work. Uh, what work
did
you do?”

The man tap-tapped on a panel sticking out from the side of the medbed. “Took out your ruptured right kidney. Put in artificial one. Cleaned your blood of resin-based poisons. That were on the machete blade,” the man said in response to Jack’s surprised look. “Sutured internal muscles. Applied Fake Skin. Guidelines say we can release you. You wish?”

Release? Go free of the cool, antiseptic looking room that made him feel like he had awoken inside the innards of some Tech device? “Yes! Uh, I mean, thank you for the repair work. Uh, will you replace the Tech kidney with one cloned from my stem cells? In the future?”

“You’re welcome. Yes. Try to stand up. Here, beside me.”

Jack liked the man’s Belter talk vibes. Tapping the snaplock on the waist strap, he felt it release. Moving slowly and carefully, he swung his legs over to the edge of the medbed, pushed them down, saw a pair of magslippers waiting for his feet on the floor and pushed off the medbed. A brief swirl of dizziness hit him. It passed quickly. With his hands held out for balance, he snugged his bare feet into the magslippers. That’s when he realized he was naked. And his right arm was still connected to the IV. “Uh, doc, the IV?”

The man nodded to the surgical nurse. Who walked quickly to Jack’s side, put a white cloth patch over the needle insertion point, pulled the needle out so quickly it barely hurt, then pulled the floating IV bag-pump and line back to the room’s wall. Where the stuff stuck to something like a velcro patch. Jack looked to Nikola. “Uh, dearest, you got a fresh leotard for me?”

She gave him the biggest smile he’d seen in some while. “Yes!” She dug into her shoulder carrybag, grabbed a black leotard and walked over to him. Lowering the legs portion, she held it with both hands. “Step in.”

Looking around Jack realized the medoc had stepped back a few paces. The nurse was also back at the foot of the medbed. Oh. Clearly this was a test of his recovery. Could he maintain his balance while leaving a magslipper stuck to the metal floor, insert one leg into the bottom half of the leotard, grab the ‘tard from Nikola, then repeat the process with his other leg? Zipping up the front of the leotard would be child’s play. Or so he thought. Three minutes later he stood dressed, shoed and eager to escape the watchful eyes of the medoc and the surgical nurse. He grabbed Nikola’s warm hand. “Hey boss lady, get me the hell out of here!”

Together, they walked out of the room, down a hall filled with robotic med boxes and hurrying staff, which they dodged easily in Vesta’s low gravity. Nikola squeezed his hand as they stopped before a red-lined hatchway. “The waiting room is on the other side. Your sisters, your parents, Max, Ignacio, Maureen,
everyone
is waiting for you!”

He felt his heart pumping quickly. He put that down to excitement at survival and the chance to escape a place where people and bots repaired folks. He took a deep breath and gave her a wink. “Hey Miss Wanderer, you got a bottle of booze and a cigar waiting for me out there? I think I earned it.”

♦   ♦   ♦

Two days later Jack boarded the new Lander
Anneli Korhonen II
with Nikola, Max, Cassie and Maureen. All of them dressed in vacsuits. Elaine and Denise were on duty in the Pilot Cabin, while Archibald and Blodwen were off ship. Blodwen was meeting with people on Vesta who needed meeting. Like the Dean of Vesta’s Academy of Sociology who had demanded that Blodwen, his prize student, come report to him on all the Alien societies they’d seen in their last trip. The Welsh lass had departed on a Vesta robot shuttle that came and went at the call of a human, her carrybag filled with datachips, vidcrystals and a few bottles of
Sharp Roar
beer. For the Dean, she had said when Jack stopped in the Food Refectory for a mid-day snack. Archibald was still hanging at their upcoming stop, the New Physics Research Institute that lay in the middle of Minucia crater. Walking into the cargo hold of the lander he turned and made to walk forward to the Pilot Cabin.

“Hey!” Maureen growled from behind him. “I go first! And I handle the engines. You really should let Nikola handle the NavTrack seat.”

“No!” he said. The woman stepped in front of him, gave him a sour look through her helmet, and headed for the cabin. Which anyone could see was empty. Plus it had been docked in their ship’s midbody hold since they had picked up the replacement at Mathilde. “Okay, you handle the thrusters and the nose lasers. But I can handle the piloting. Did good enough when we landed at the South Pole Naval Academy!”

“True,” she muttered as she pulled one of her revolvers and pointed it forward as she entered the cabin. She inspected the small space. Which contained just two seats with the NavTrack computer module in the middle. The cabin hatch that opened into the roomy cargo hold, with its passenger benches on either side, was dogged against the inner wall of the hold. “But then you were not recovering from a kidney operation. And I don’t believe in taking chances. Never have. Shoulda personally checked out the history of every damn booze server in—”

“Enough, Maureen!” called Nikola as his six months pregnant wife took a bench seat location close to the cabin hatch. Max and Cassie sat on the opposite bench. Jack nodded to them as they locked their restraint straps. “You are not to blame!” his lifemate said. “Nothing human is a hundred percent perfect.”

“Hmmph,” grunted the older woman as she pulled her sword and javelin out from the scabbards on the back of her vacsuit, laid them beside her Drive Engineer seat, sat down and snaplocked her own restraint straps.

Jack barely managed not to smile as he entered the cabin and turned left to sit in the Pilot seat. While his gunbelt with two revolvers made snapping the locks of the restraint straps a bit complicated, he’d done it before. Anyway, he might technically still be in recovery but he felt fine. And his piss was normal. “Elaine,” he called over the suit’s comlink, “open the hold’s airlock so we can go awandering.”

“Done,” she said, her tone soft. Which it had been ever since he’d been stabbed by that SOB. While she had spent time since then with Ignacio in the
Badger
, she had insisted on remaining close to him. As had Cassie and every member of his crew.

Looking down at the NavTrack panel he noted the air being pumped out of the hold. In seconds it was absent. A tremor shook his seat as the giant hatch that allowed the Lander to enter and exit the
Uhuru
slowly lowered down on hinges covered in silicone grease. It stopped with a thump that reverberated. He tapped on the panel, telling the ship to move to Flight status. Which it did.

“Lander ready to depart ship
Uhuru
,” said the dry tone of the panel’s expert system.