Standish Read online

  The fall gave Standish time to think, perhaps too much time, but she used it to run calculations on the probability of surviving impact, and her armour’s AI was kind enough to provide her with odds. There were several factors to take into consideration. The angle of impact. The speed of impact, which should have been no more than two hundred miles an hour, and perhaps most importantly, what they landed on. Either way, the suit gave her a 50/50 chance of surviving.

  The skies over the surface of Killious were in one of two states ninety-nine percent of the year. Either it was a beautiful day with no clouds in the air, or there was wind, and the skies over the planet turned into giant snowstorms with near white-out conditions with low visibility, and a constant flurry of white powder.

  In addition to its unique weather, Killious was home to the Fifth Fleet headquarters, buried inside a mountain range on the northern continent, and unbeknownst to Standish, it had tracked the arrival of the Laakari from the moment it entered the planet’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, the current circumstances, that of a giant space battle in the system, meant that there were no ships available to dispatch to its aid. They could only call upon the local inhabitants to offer assistance.

  Inside the medical bay, Standish knew that impact was close at hand, and only a matter of minutes until they hit the surface. Doing final checks of her own gear, Standish checked that the suits automated nano-bot med-systems were on-line and ready to perform emergency medical duties if she were wounded upon impact.

  When the Laakari slammed into the planet’s surface, it did so at eight G’s, and ploughed into a field of soft snow, vaporising the snow to its front, punching down, and carved a trench through the powder as it started to slow, stopping only a kilometre later. The bottom of the vessel had its external panelling scraped clean off when the ship made contact with the ground, and the friction had started a fire in the evacuated engineering department, luckily the ship’s emergency systems were still functioning and quickly put it out.

  The initial impact sent a massive shudder through the vessel strong enough to send some crewmembers strapped down tumbling out of their restraints, or the entire restraint and crewmember away from where they were secured, and flung across the room with enough force to kill a few of them, and seriously wound others. Masses of medical equipment that weren’t secured in place flew about the room. Bandages, scissors, all sorts of kit slammed into walls and strapped down crewmembers.

  Standish used her optics to check the vital signs of the wounded that were in her line of sight as the rear half of the ship continued to carve a canyon in the snow, and when the Laakari finally came to a halt, the reality that she had survived suddenly washed over her in an awesome wave.

  As soon as Standish was satisfied that the ship had stopped moving, Standish kicked into gear, releasing herself from her restraints, and dropping down to what was now the bottom of the vessel, which had recently been the sidewall. Righting herself, she took one step forward, then collapsed face-first onto the ground.

  “The heck?” She called out.

  “Tech!” One of the medics ran over to where Standish was laying and helped roll her onto her back. “Your leg is broken.”

  Standish looked down. He was right. Her right leg was bent at a forty-five-degree angle in the wrong direction.

  “Stupid fucking suit.” Standish mumbled to herself. The suit should have alerted her to the injury, then started treating it automatically. “Everyone who is not injured, stay where you are!” She announced over her helmets speaker system. “If you are medical personnel, please assist the wounded.” She looked at the medic. “Put a splint on it!” She needed to regain control of the disaster shelter.

  Standish looked around the space, and quickly switched her HUD to a mode that gave her instant medical reports for anyone in her vicinity, once the data was processed, the suits AI went further to triage the patients for her.

  Pumping pain killers from the suit into her body, Standish watched the medic apply the splint, which forced the leg back into position, allowing her to stand up, albeit with very little pressure on the broken leg. Bringing up her heads up display, she quickly cycled through until she reached a screen that offered her options to treat damage to the suit, and herself if the suit wasn’t functioning correctly. A few clicks and swipes was all that was required to get the suit to recognise the injury to her leg and compensate appropriately. She was moving within three minutes with a heavy limp.

  Her first patient was a senior crew member who had been restrained to a position just a few metres down the wall from Standish. They had been impaled by a traditional medical scalpel that hadn’t been put away correctly. The blade was only a few centimetres long and had buried itself in the crewmember’s right leg. Standish quickly gave the leg a mild sedative, then opened her chest-mounted medical kit pouch and pulled out a self-adhesive bandage and handed it to the crewmember.

  “Hold this.’ Standish instructed in a metallic voice through the suit's speakers, before yanking the scalpel out.

  Looking at the injured area, she ripped the trouser open a bit more, then applied a light squirt of disinfectant, then took the bandage from the wounded crewmember and slapped it into place.

  “This is a low-tech remedy. Give it one hour; then, the wound should be healed.” She gave the figure a quick slap on the upper arm, her best bedside manners she had learned at Rescue Tech school, then moved on to the next injured crewmember.

  While Standish covered the ground to the next figure on her triage list, she watched as the medical personnel assisted other wounded crewmembers. One of the benefits of being on a medical frigate was the excessive supply of doctors and medics. Anyone not medical staff had heeded her instructions and had remained in place in their restraints, some dangling in a slightly uncomfortable manner, but that was better than them wandering around.

  The second victim had suffered an amputated hand and only stopped screaming from the shock and the pain after Standish gave them a heavy dose of pain-killer and a drug that put the victim into a tranquil state, like recreational drugs. Whatever it took to get their mind off the fact that they had just lost a hand.

  Standish quickly applied a cauterising clamp to the end of the individual's forearm, stopping the flow of blood out, while giving them an injection of nutrients to compensate for the blood loss.

  As that was in progress, Standish looked around for the missing hand and found it a few metres away on the ground. Picking up the severed hand, she walked back to the crewmember and looked for a vacuum-seal bag to put the hand in. Finding one in a nearby drawer, she dropped the hand into the bag, sealed it, vented all the air, allowing the hand to be preserved, then proceeded to stuff it into the crewmembers trouser cargo pocket.

  Before Standish could move on to her next victim, the senior medical officer came up to her. “Tech, we can take care of the wounded here, you need to get to the surface and coordinate for our rescue.” The doctor laughed. “That’s what it says here.” He pointed to the Rescue Technician text that was printed on the forehead of her helmet.

  Standish smiled. Whatever the doc had taken sure had worked.

  Standish closed her medical pouches, and nodded, then flipped up her blast shield and gave the doctor a long stare. “Ok.” She flipped the shield back down, and then pulled up the ship's schematics and tried to make sense of where she was in relation to what was now up, and where she needed to go to get to the surface. Scanning the image, which still showed a fully intact ship, Standish was pretty sure that the hole that she had blasted in the side of the hull on the sixth deck was now on the side of the vessel facing skywards.

  Decision made, she looked around the wrecked chamber she was in for the hatch to get out into the main corridor. Spotting it, Standish walked along the messy floor until she reached the bulkhead, climbed up to the hatch that had been knocked ajar and pushed it open to reveal a heavily damaged hallway. Using her helmets headlights, she was able to see the lift shaft that was next t
o what had been the front of the ship and started moving towards it.

  The entire hallway was in a state of total disarray and destruction. Virtually all the panelling that lined the walls of the corridor had popped off and were laying in various sized pieces on the ground, some were still tangling from where they had been attached. Loose wires were visible everywhere, along with a variety of pipes and other pieces that formed the guts and entrails of the Laakari. It was as if someones internal organs had burst inside their body, but their skin was still intact.

  Reaching the emergency access shaft, Standish climbed up the heavily damaged space as best she could. She didn’t need to use the rungs to make her way to her destination deck since the ship was on its side. Moving as best she could through the shaft, she reached the sixth deck and pulled herself out onto another heavily damaged hallway. Here Standish detected a severe drop in temperature that was coming from the first room on her left, where she had blown the hole while the ship had still been in orbit.

  Moving down the hall, she reached the hatch of the room with the quickly fashioned exit and could see that the door was slightly open, snow already building up on the other side. Pulling the door open, Standish was hit with a gust of cold snow, a view of a room almost entirely covered in white and a grey sky overhead.

  Jumping up, Standish pulled herself into the room, stepped to one side, and examined the space. Other than being covered in snow, it was relatively intact, the chamber had been skyward facing upon impact and been saved from the brunt of the damage caused to the ship. Checking her angle with the hole in the bulkhead, Standish fired her suit’s thrusters on full-power and quickly shot out of the Laakari. Cutting the thrust, she dropped down to the snow-covered surface of the vessel and promptly took a knee. The exterior was extremely windy, and she had to switch to an optimised optical setting to see through the blizzard.

  Looking towards the rear of the ship, Standish stood up, checking her balance in the stiff wind, her broken leg not making it easy, and ambled to the back of the Laakari. As she walked along the hull, she could tell that the impact had caused some sections of it to buckle. Some external panelling appeared to have been popped off from the crash, while some small parts looked entirely undisturbed.

  Reaching the rear of the ship, she looked down at the engines that were protruding from the back of the vessel. From where she was standing, they didn’t seem damaged, but she wasn’t an engineer, and it was a moot point anyway since the Laakari would never fly again. Bringing her gaze up, she spotted the enormous trench that the ship had carved when it hit the surface. They were lucky that their glide slope had been as gentle as it had been. A steeper impact would probably have proved fatal.

  Shaking her head, she walked back along the hull towards the hole she had blown in the side, stopping at the hole that she had carved out using the heavy cutter. Looking into the room, she spotted some useful gear and gently climbed down into the room that was quickly filling with snow. Inside the chamber and out of the wind, she turned her suits lights back on and flipped up her blast shield.

  Digging around in the piles of equipment that had fallen down from their shelves or been flung out of their storage drawers, she found the two items she was looking for: a very flammable cleaning solution and a pair of signal flares. She put the signal flares in an empty pouch on her armour’s midsection and grabbed the generously sized tub of the cleaning liquid with her left hand, and then climbed back out of the ship, and onto the hull.

  Flipping her blast shield back down, Standish looked at the ground on either side of the ship and determined that the land on the starboard side appeared most stable. One hand firmly grasping the cleaning solution, Standish lowered herself down into a seating position on the hull, then scooted herself towards the edge of the hull until she started to slide down along what had been the top of the hull, down to the snow-covered ground.

  Reaching the soft snow, Standish moved away from the ship, walking far enough away before stopping. She quickly opened the can of cleaning solution and proceeded to empty the contents onto the snow as she walked around in a large circle. When Standish returned to her start point, she tossed the empty container into the middle of the ring and took a few steps back towards the Laarkari. Pulling one of the flares out of her pouch, she ignited it and gently tossed it towards the liquid that was on the ground. The moment the two made contact, the fluid caught fire which quickly spread around the ring.

  Satisfied with her work, Standish turned her back to the burning ring of fire and walked back to the ship, climbing up to the top of the hull. Standish sat herself down, her back to the wind, and ran a quick functions test on her armour. The temperature regulators working perfect, even in the forty below zero temperatures that were swirling around the surface. Other than the broken leg, she was fighting fit, and the cleaning solution was burning high and brightly, and hopefully visible at some distance.

  Once she was finished with her check, she initiated the distress beacon in her armour, and closed her eyes and readied herself for a long wait. The distress beacon was one of the most critical tools in the Rescue Technician handbook, but it was also an admittance that there was no way to solve a problem, and that the Rescue Tech needed rescue. To be used as a last resort, her senior instructor had always said. Well, this was just that time.

  With her eyes closed and her mind at ease, Standish allowed the howling wind that was whipping over the snow-covered tundra to rock her body gently from side to side. It was rather peaceful and reminded her of the time on her father’s farm back on Nadolo Prime. It reminded her of when her father had once made a chair from a tree that had curved rails on the bottom that would rock back and forth.

  It was just over one-thousand days since she had been home, and now that the war, or whatever people were calling it was on, she didn’t know when she’d get back there next. In the back of her mind she wanted to believe the Laakari Ship Master who had said that the war was contained to planets in and around the Core, but she knew that like any virus, unless it was stopped, the effects of the war would spread to every system in the Empire until they were all infected.

  34

  The Present

  Porth

  “Give me all the intel on the Melcore Combine.”

  There was a single beep from the onboard AI, then a stream of information across the data-screen. It was a massive dump of information. Everything fleet intelligence had was at her fingertips, and there was one thing that was abundantly clear: she wasn’t going to be able to walk into Combine controlled territory in the ship she had. A change was needed.

  35

  The Past

  Killious

  It took three hours for the first elements of the rescue party to arrive in the form of twenty large Killians who came over the snowy horizon, each pulling a long sledge stuffed with medical supplies, food and water. The leader of the pack, a large black fur covered beast, climbed up the side of the ship and greeted Standish in the local tongue.

  The wind was blowing heavily, and Standish was amazed that the Killians were just in their natural form, no protective clothing of any sort, and once she had got over the shock of the leaders size and robust build, she quickly brought up her armour’s translation systems, and allowed it to auto-detect the language that the leader was speaking. It was a northern dialect of Killian, and it became apparent that her suit only could communicate in the southern dialect, and while the two could talk, it was clear the leader was not happy.

  “This tongue you speak with insults us northerners.” The leader said, adopting a firm posture.

  “This is the only tongue my suit can speak, many apologies.” Standish replied. She had flipped up her blast shield to make eye contact with the leader, but she couldn’t see more than five metres in the blizzard.

  “Your insult can be repaid with full salvage rights.” The leader said.

  Standish looked down at the ship for a minute, then back to the large fur-covered beast. She wasn
’t sure she was authorised to offer the ship as a source of payment, but under the circumstances, she thought it best to agree to terms, and allow her superiors to deal with the mess later.

  “Of course.” She replied.

  “Excellent.” The creature relaxed its posture. “I am Pollo Utano, leader of the nearest village. We have been asked to assist.”

  “Many thanks.” Standish replied.

  “What is the situation?” Pollo took a few steps back and examined the immediate area around where they were standing. “How many wounded?”

  “Many.” Standish replied.

  Pollo nodded in silence, then took a step towards the edge of the hull and shouted down to her subordinates on the ground.

  Facing Standish, she laid out her plan of action. “We will cut through the hull to reach your injured crew, then transport them to our village until the local forces can collect you.”

  Standish was really without options or a better idea at that point, so she nodded her head, and accepted everything Pollo offered. “It will probably be easiest to cut through to the medical bay from the opening in the hull that is already in place.” She said, referring to the hole she had blasted through earlier.

  Pollo seemed to nod in agreement and walked off to confirm with her followers. All Standish could do was wait. She didn’t have communications with the survivors inside the medical bay, and she had no comms with anyone else on the planet. It seemed that her usefulness on this mission was drawing to a close.