Cottonwood (58 page)

Sanford pulled a mister from his belt and held it up before her swollen mouth. He pressed the switch and released a cloud of stabilizer on her next ragged inhalation. She coughed on it, opened her eyes, and did not know him. She closed them again and her lips moved in silent song.

“Is that going to help?” one of his men asked.

He didn’t know. He eased her carefully up into his arms and held her, counting down the seconds he would have to wait.

“Sarah.” T’aki touched her cheek, the only span of unbruised flesh he could see. “Sarah, listen. Sarah.”

She opened her eyes again, head lolling, and groaned. She blinked, focused. Her lips trembled. “Oh,” she said. “I’m dreaming.” Her words were strange, softened. They’d broken away most of her teeth. She reached up and touched him with her two remaining fingers. She smiled. “And you carry me to the bed and lay me down,” she said. Her hand dropped. She began to drift away.

“Sarah.” T’aki touched her urgently. “Please!”

She rolled her head that way, struggled up from her inner place, and finally looked at him. She smiled. “Hey, jellybean.”

Speaking softly and clearly, T’aki said what he had waited four long years to say to her and what no man, not even his father, had the right to take away: “The
Fortesque
Freeship
is right outside. And we’re putting you on it.”

Soldiers looked at each other.

Sarah smiled, cracking her lips until they oozed blood. “I f-forgot all about that. I…I love you lots, you know that, right?”

T’aki looked at his father, calmer.

He couldn’t wait anymore. The stabilizer would work or it wouldn’t, but she wasn’t going to get any stronger lying here. Sanford picked her up, held her close, and took her back out the way they came as fast as he dared to move.

“Do what you want with this place,” he told his men as he boarded the pod. He understood later that they took their time with it, systematically demolishing the floating city deck by deck before they burned out the hull and allowed it to sink. At one time, Sanford had dreamed of doing such a thing himself, but whatever savage pleasure there might have been in this news once, it meant nothing to him now. He had a heart only for the woman in his arms and the fading life he felt slipping at nearly every breath from between her bleeding lips.

The pod took the three of them to the flagship, not because it was where Sanford was registered, but because it had the best medical facilities. He docked in the emergency port right off the medical bay in direct disobedience to the Docking Master’s orders, opened the airlock, and shoved a furious Governor Ro’zhe’t out of his way without sending her so much as his glance. T’aki ran ahead into the Triage Center, shouting to try and clear a path, and Sanford followed, holding Sarah close.

He hadn’t taken more than ten steps before the first, “Human,” was spoken. Yang’ti turned when he went by, saw the body folded in his arms, and hissed alert to the rest of them. He heard hard snaps, shrill buzzing, the bitter hate for twenty-four years of captivity spitting from them like chaw. They began to close on him, not raising their spikes, not yet, but not letting him pass either. Sanford’s arms closed protectively, pulling her tight against his chest. Too tight; she stirred, not to consciousness, but enough to sing a few more wordless notes of her dying song before she fell limp again.

And across the growing menace of this crowded room, a young man suddenly lunged up and through them all, actually flinging hissing bodies to either side to come close enough to see. He towered over Sanford, chitin broken and in places bisected, peering down at Sarah with the one eye he had left and all four antennae quivering straight out from his head. “My God,” he said, half in English. “I think it’s Hummer.”

Bodies surged forward and suddenly it seemed that everyone was shouting: “Did you come from the floating city? From IBI in the sea? The place the humans call Zero!”

“Let me pass,” Sanford could only say, struggling to reach the doors. “This is not the time, let me pass!”

An old man ducked in ahead of him and breathed frantically over Sarah’s face. He looked up, eyes stricken. “I was there when he cut her fingers off. She said, ‘Don’t let them go to waste.’”

Sanford recoiled.

The medical bay doors whooshed open in a sterile spray then, and the last voice in the world Sanford ever expected to hear boomed out, “Shut the fuck up out here, we are getting to you as fast as we fucking can! You, shut up! All of you, sit down! You’ve all been triaged, you can fucking well—what the hell is that?”

Sanford stared speechless at Cottonwood’s own Good Samaritan, cleaned up and pinned with a temporary medic’s pass, who seemed just as shocked to see him. Sam started to speak and then jerked his eyes down to take a second stare at the bloody mess in Sanford’s arms.

“Jesus Christ,” he clicked, almost whispering. “Is that who I think it is?” And without waiting for an answer, Sam lunged for the com-panel. “Clear Vat Five! Clear it
now
!” he shouted, spun, and snatched Sarah from Sanford’s arms.

He ran back through the open doors, and Sanford was forced to follow as best he could as Sam tore through the thinner crowds in the Vital Care Wing, leaping bio-beds and occupied vats and even a startled medic before he veered into an empty berth.

Moving with remarkable one-armed dexterity, Sam initialized the console, flooded the vat, and readied a phial, but he was careful, even gentle, as he used that phial to extract blood from the fading vein in Sarah’s throat. She winced from the depths of whatever place she was hiding in, hummed a little, and be damned if Sam didn’t hum softly back at her before looking up to see Sanford.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” he asked, and loaded the phial into the side of the vat with a shove and a slap to start it calibrating. “Never mind, make yourself useful. Help me get her clean.”

‘Clean’ meant the removal of all non-organic masses. Sam held her, clicking impatiently now and then while Sanford carefully cleared away the simple, filthy wrap, old electrode patches, and ancient tape. After he thought she was ready, Sam had a second look, plucked free a few half-buried stitches, and peered into her mouth. “She’s got some metal in her teeth,” he muttered. “Can’t get them out…You’re just going to have to swallow those, sweetheart.”

“Will it hurt her?” Sanford ask.

“Look at her! What
isn’t
going to hurt her?” But he stopped there, palps grinding, because the vat had finished and opened for them. Sam gave her mouth a final, despairing sort of inspection, then lifted her and laid her gently inside. “Easy,” he murmured when her sleeping body flinched away from the cold, thick fluid. “Easy, easy. Don’t fight it. Christ, they really worked you over this time. If you’re still standing there, come hold her head up.”

Sanford came, slipping his hands into the fluid and under her smooth, round head. He couldn’t do it without thinking of her hair, that yellow flow of soft hair, fanning down over his arms as they joined on the bed in the motel-place. Copulating face to face, floating endlessly through her eyes…there had been no danger in all the world, no possible pain, no possible fear.

Now Sam covered her eyes and plugged her nostrils with seal-gel, and Sanford tore his gaze away from her still and empty face to look at the console above her. The computer didn’t know what to make of human anatomy and what few vital signs it displayed were not encouraging.

“Oh fuck me blind!” Sam snapped, and Sanford looked sharply around to see him holding up the air-line…which terminated in an adult-sized palp-mask. Sam looked at this, at Sarah’s face, and then swore again, snatched up a chitin-knife from the surgical tray and cut the whole thing off. He smeared lubricant around the end and, not without a shudder, pulled open her mouth and just shoved it in.

She gagged, jerked hard and then lay still. Sam bent sharply, pressing his palps almost to her mouth, listening. “I think it’s in okay,” he said.

“You think?”

“You think you can find the lung in this sack of meat better than me? Stand there and shut up.” He bent again, folding himself awkwardly double to press his ear over her chest. “Yeah,” he said, now sounding unmistakably relieved. “Yeah, it’s in. Damn, I’m good.” He straightened up and fumbled for the gel, sealing her lips around the tube to hold it in place. It seemed to work; once air-tight, her chest began to rise and fall in more regular rhythms, letting life-support breathe for her.

“You can let go now,” Sam said, standing back.

He did. It was not easy. He watched her head sink under the thick black fluid until she was entirely submerged and lost to sight. The fluid, charged now with her particular DNA, began to work on her, seeping in through her soft skin to bond with her body’s every cell, reconstructing her from her original genetic codes wherever it encountered damage. The technology had been in use for more than a hundred years on yang’Tak, well-tested and refined, but it remained a process as severe as the injuries themselves, and it went without saying that it had never been used on a human before.

She could still die. It didn’t seem fair to think that after all she had endured to come to this moment, but she would be in the vat for many days, and she could succumb at any time to either the severity of her wounds or the shock of her repairs. There was nothing more any medic could do.

“She actually got you out,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

Sam shook his head, still staring at the vat. Its systems were working, the pumps quietly thumping and the vents rhythmically hissing, but nothing could be seen of Sarah. Her heart was beating faster; the fluid released sedatives to compensate, and it seemed to work, but who knew? “When the ships showed up and they turned us all out, I told everyone I saw it was because of you. But I didn’t really believe it. She got you out, all way to the ship.”

“And eighteen others. The air…is it…?”

“Higher oxygen than she’s used to, but that can only help her right now. Anything to take the strain off her heart…Jesus Christ, son of Ko’vi, I never seen such a stomped-on mess in my life. Why didn’t they just kill her?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam stood quietly for a moment. Then, without warning of any kind, he swung around and punched Sanford right between the eyes. “And you left her there, you fucking
bug
!” he shouted as medics and soldiers ran toward them in alarm. “Son of
shit
! I’ll fucking
kill
you!”

“She wouldn’t come!” Sanford shouted back, one hand pressed to his eye-plates, the other gripping at Sarah’s vat. “There were too many others and no more room! I had to go! Let go of me!” he snapped, shoving blindly at the authoritative hands that tried to pry him away. “Yes, I left her! She begged me to leave her and
you
don’t know anything about it,
you
left her back in Cottonwood when she asked you to come along, so you’ve got nothing to say to me now!”

“Come along and do what?” Sam spat, chaw flecking Sanford’s chest on every word. “Sit in her fucking van with your kid while you figure out where to stick it in her?”

“You shut your fucking throat!”

Sam laughed—that shrill, bitter scratch of sound he remembered only too well. “Yeah, you fucked her. You know you fucked her and then you left her to die while you ran home and they’ll probably give you the fucking Star of Honor for it, won’t th—?”

Sanford lunged forward, swinging, but was dragged back by two guards and another surgeon. Someone caught Sam by the arm. Sam, breathing hard and snapping his palps, shook him off. He looked up at the flashing alert lights and then over at the main monitoring station where a small crowd of doctors and their aides had gathered. “We’re done,” he told them. “Get back to work. We’re done.”

The guards holding Sanford started to pull him out of the berth.

“We’re done, I said!” Sam snapped. “Let go of him and get the fuck out of here!”

Sanford, released, straightened his clothes, wiping blood and chaw from his shell with a few curt swipes of his hand. Then he stared into the vat, at the black surface of the gel, which showed him nothing, not even his own reflection. Sam watched the monitor and the fluttering light of Sarah’s human heart beating. Neither spoke for some time.

“Caseworker,” Sam muttered at last. “You know, I heard some of those poor bastards from Zero talking about someone called Hummer, but I never thought they meant
my
Hummer.”

“They didn’t,” said Sanford. “They meant mine.”

“Fuck you.” At last, Sam seemed to shake himself into the here and now. He snapped his palps and gave Sanford a shove. “Clear out. I’ll call you when she’s ready to take home. Don’t argue with me, I’ll knock your ass down and we both know it.”

Sanford went, found T’aki in the press of the outer bay, and took him back to their shared room. They held each other for hours, waiting. The Sweep continued on Earth another eighteen hours, but for them, the Return was done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There were others.

Across the world, a little less than half a million yang’ti were rescued and evacuated and with them, more than two thousand humans. They were friends, lovers, adopted children and adoptive parents—an unexpected and profoundly unwelcome complication to the entire operation. Called upon for a ruling by an increasingly frustrated military council, Governor Ro’zhe’t issued her official stance that all humans should remain on Earth. There followed several wasted days of negotiation and mounting hostility between the officers of the Sweep and refugees who’d had enough of men with guns telling them what to do. At last, the Governor herself came down from the command deck to mediate in person.

All that day, while her fleet’s commanders impatiently waited, she went room to room, meeting with her ravaged people and the aliens they harbored. In the end, they—not Nk’o’sa’knko and his obsession with his one human—stayed the Governor’s hand when the Sweep was ended and an order to exterminate might so easily have fallen. When she finally returned to the command deck, she had changed her policy: Humans should remain on Earth…where appropriate. Despite the immediate protests of her chancellors and the soldiers who had seen the camps, she would not insist on their removal, but instead offered asylum to those in ‘special circumstances’. When warned that this decision might well undo a lifetime’s work as one of yang’Tak’s strongest and most successful leaders, she said, “If I must be vilified by future generations for my flaws, I would rather it be for too much compassion than too little. These people—and they are people, despite what some have said—have done far greater work and by God, they have earned a better ending.”