Upside Down

“INCOMING!”

The missile shrieked over their heads as Union of Planets Commander Jefferson Langley and Third Advisor Paco Delacruz ducked behind an upended sidewalk bench. It provided but meager protection against the sudden barrage of stolen armament that the rebels were throwing at them, but the XEL-3 portable launcher, wherever it was, hadn’t acquired their range yet.

Langley grabbed the advisor’s arm, because Paco wasn’t used to action like this; he mainly stayed aboard the ship in orbit. “This way!” he shouted.

They dodged across the city street and dived behind a cement barricade. It was wedged across a deep storefront doorway and so provided excellent protection. The barrier must have been used for riot control by the Union of Planets-backed government of the planet of Nobel, for which they were fighting. Those riots had taken place weeks ago, before the frightened lawmakers had sent a frantic plea across the parsecs to the UP for help, and before the city center had become a true battleground when the violence had started in earnest.

Another missile rocketed across the sky and lodged high in one of the skyscrapers that ranged up and down the central downtown thoroughfare. A shower of glass rained on the sidewalk two hundred meters south; it was no danger to them.

Langley whipped out his comm unit. “Rell!” he yelled. “Can you hear me? I need coordinates for that launcher!”

Only static answered.

“Damn it!” Delacruz shouted over the din. “We’re going to be pulverized before that genius Caldun figures out where—”

Fire rent the sky, and they ducked. Another explosion half a block away carved a ten-meter-wide hole in the street.

“That was close,” Delacruz breathed. He held his beamgun tightly, but for the moment at least there was nothing to shoot. His eyes searched the sky, alive with wispy clouds of smoke. “Tell me again why we can’t just take one of the ship’s tenders and fly right out of this hellhole.”

Langley snorted and checked the charge on the weapon that he cradled in both hands. He carried a particle rifle with enough power to blow up half a small city. It’d been years since he’d been forced into action like this in support of the marines, since way before he’d been made commander of the Churchill. But he wasn’t going to stand by and watch the SpaceForce marines or the civilians of this city get blown to kingdom come without doing something. He’d taken a tender to where the shelling was taking place and jumped into action. “We can’t risk it, and you know it, at least for another half a day. The radiation flux of the ion stream is just too unpredictable until—”

Delacruz waved a hand. “You sound like Rell. Mister Precision. I get the picture.” He glanced out across the street and pointed with his weapon. “And speaking of your favorite Caldun, there he is.”

Someone in the UP Marine brown fatigues disappeared behind a subway entrance fifty meters away, and Langley had his comm unit out and open a second later. “Rell, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be back at base getting a fix on the launcher.”

Over the crackle created by the jamming efforts of the rebels, Rell’s voice could barely be heard. “…no possibility of pinpointing…believe close-range obser…cessful.”

“I’ll run cover for you,” Langley shouted into the grid, but he doubted the leader of the marines stationed on the Churchill heard him.

“You stay here where it’s safe,” he ordered Delacruz.

“Like hell,” defied the older man, and he followed as Langley ran down the broken sidewalk.

The screech of the missile slicing through air announced its coming, fast and right on target. Langley threw himself to the ground, his hands over his head, his weapon stuffed up inside the field jacket he wore, and he prayed to whatever deities looked over Union of Planets spaceship commanders and those they loved. Then he was up a moment later and threw himself down again, only this time squarely on the sprawled body of his advisor.

Delacruz’s “umphf” mingled with the overwhelming roar of the blast. They rode the heaving ground like it was a living, breathing thing, then debris pelted them. Glass shards tore into Langley’s legs, his back; a chunk of what must have been concrete took dead aim at his kidneys.

All his breath was pushed out at once, and he couldn’t help one convulsive shudder as pain racked him. When silence settled over them, he knew they had been very, very lucky. Stifling his groan, he pushed himself up, took one look at a wide-eyed and obviously intact Delacruz beneath him, and stared across the street at the steps leading down to the subway.

There was no entrance anymore; it had been ground zero. How close had Rell been to it?

The wreckage of what had once been a vibrant city lay in bits and pieces all about them, but Langley scrambled across it at top speed, scanning every chunk of twisted metal, every buckled span of sidewalk for some trace of camo fatigues.

“Come on,” he commanded under his breath as he checked under a tattered awning. It’d been blown from a sidewalk café to flutter limply on the street. “Come on. You’ve got to be here. You’re—”

No matter how many times he saw it, blood was always a shock. A smear of bright red led him around the wreckage of what might have been a motor scooter to the marine colonel. Encircling his portacomp as if it were precious, life-giving, Rell was curled up in a ball on the ground.

Long ago Langley had acknowledged to himself how much more he cared about Rell’s safety over any other being’s on his spaceship; it had been a hard-fought, private battle and an almost humiliating realization of weakness and vulnerability. Commanders should have no favorites. That’s what the mythical book said, the one that governed leaders of men and women who patrolled the UP space, kept it safe for their citizens, those who’d been fighting the Lindotian war now for decades.

But commanders could not always be the perfect beings expected by their crew and by SpaceForce, and it was the merely human man who darted toward the crumpled body of his friend, his heart pounding.

Gently Langley reached for one shoulder and pulled Rell toward him so the Caldun could lie flat on his back. That was when he saw that the left side of the dark head was an open wound. Not a minor cut, not an injury that could be easily repaired—gray-brown brain tissue was clearly visible, some of it bulging from the fractured line of missing flesh, and shards of white bone torn from the skull dotted the pulsing, bleeding mass.

Langley had seen too many battlefield casualties to allow the bile that suddenly seethed into his throat to have any effect on his actions. He was reaching for Rell’s limp hand and feeling for a pulse even before he was able to clamp down on his nausea. The quiver of life beneath his fingers powered his desperate cry: “Paco!”

Life: hope.

But a head wound like that—for a Caldun…. Especially for a Caldun, and even then, especially for Rell, who was such a different Caldun….

His face scraped and swollen but his hands steady, Paco arrived seconds later. “My God,” he whispered as he reached for the medical kit hanging from his belt. Delacruz’s secondary job on the Churchill, the one he stepped into in times of emergency or when a backup was needed, was medtech in the medical ward. He wasn’t any doctor, but he was far more competent to handle this injury than Langley was, and they both knew it. “My God. Rell.”

Langley did not allow himself to think. He relinquished his hold on the tumultuously pulsing wrist and stood to survey the ominously still street. If the bombing did not start again soon, the rebel foot soldiers would return with their effective mix of beamguns and projectile weapons. Either way, they were out in the open with no protection.

“We have to get to cover,” he said. The white winter sun cut through the downtown canyon, exposing it, exposing them.

“We can’t move him.” Paco gritted through his teeth as his hands roved urgently over the broken body. “Jeff, this is bad. Moving him might—”

“I’ll carry him. We’ll go back to where we were before. You can work on him there.”

“Jeff! He might die if—”

Langley swung around at a sudden movement, his weapon ready. But no enemy threatened, just the downed awning shifting in the cool breeze. His voice cracked. “I hear you! But it won’t do Rell any good to be blown to bits by the next missile. And we can’t help him if we’re dead.”

“All right, all right.” Paco gave way. “We’ve got to do something about….” He carefully touched the top edge of the wound, inched a loose flap of skin down. “Goddamn it, not even a sterile field, the worst place for contamination…. Not enough here for even a suture….” Decisively he rocked back on his heels, shrugged out of his field jacket and then pulled his white advisor’s shirt over his gray-haired head.

Langley didn’t say a word as Delacruz wrapped the fabric around the Caldun’s head and face.

“There,” Delacruz muttered. “At least there shouldn’t be any further rupture. If you’re careful.” He put his jacket back on. “Let’s move it!”

“Take this.” Langley thrust the rifle into the advisor’s suddenly awkward hands, then hunched low over the strangely headless body of the marine colonel. He could hear Rell breathing heavily through the cloth, a frightening, very physical sound coming from a man who had denied the kind of body and brain his people wanted him to have.

Langley jerked away from the thought even as he carefully worked his arms under knees and shoulders, as he extended his elbow to provide support for the awful reality of what was unseen under Delacruz’s shirt. With one controlled heave he was up, staggered once, then picked his careful way across the rubble of the street to relative safety.

Delacruz paced him every step of the way, in dead silence that scraped against Langley’s nerves. Finally, within the shelter of the storefront, Langley laid his burden down. Before the advisor could do it, he moved to unwrap the tunic, which was soaked to a dark, purplish color on one side. Rell drew in a harsh, difficult lungful of air as it came completely loose, and though Langley cringed before the indication of pain, he couldn’t help but think Thank God—still breathing.

Resting a hand on one tension-less knee, Langley shuffled to the side as Delacruz worked in the chill shadows. Maybe the Calduns had it right: bodies and brains were machines and should be treated that way, augmented, improved, raised to their optimum level, and the ways of the heart and the mind should be thoroughly understood, dissected, and, above all else, controlled. If only they had a spare part they could get off a shelf, fix this like the Calduns probably would. But he couldn’t give in to the fear pounding in his gut, the dryness of his mouth, or his worst imaginings. He had a duty to perform, regardless of what had happened.

“Paco, you work on him here while I try to get to the launcher.” Another rocket shrieked down the street over their heads, but it landed blocks away out of their sight, and it seemed so insignificant in the face of the personal tragedy before them that neither man reacted to it at all. “I’ll pick you up on the way b—”

But Delacruz cut him off even as he picked out a hypo from his kit. “No, you can’t do that.” The instrument hissed as he shot the contents directly into the carotid artery.

“I’ve got to. Everybody’s pinned down until—”

Delacruz’s hand, with gentle, sure fingers spread in support, rested just under the Caldun’s chin. He didn’t spare a glance for Langley. “I can’t deal with this. This is way past my abilities, and he needs a real doctor. I think he’s hemorrhaging, but I’m not sure. He must be…. At least I’ve got to talk to Doctor Carney on the ship. Now, Jeff!”

“We can’t cut through the interference to call Carney. We can’t transmit that far.”

“Then Doctor Ferguson at base camp.”

“You heard it yourself, we can’t get through.”

“We’ve got to,” Delacruz insisted stubbornly. “There’s no other choice. I have no idea what to do next. This is an injury way past my—”

“You’ll have to do your best here until we can neutralize—”

Delacruz rounded on him, his eyes blazing. “I can’t perform miracles, Jeff!”

“Neither can I,” Langley snarled, but he was up on his feet with the comm unit open before his lips. “Langley to Nobel base.” He shook the static-filled answer before Delacruz’s face in impotent rage. “See? See?” He turned away and stared blindly out at the street, where duty called him to be.

A long moment of silence stretched. Then a rustle of movement behind him, and a stained-red hand rested on his shoulder. “I know,” Delacruz whispered. “God, Jeff, I’m so sorry.”

Langley turned. “No chance at all?” he asked bleakly.

“I don’t know! I think…. He’s Caldun, for God’s sakes. I know human brain structures, at least a little, what to do with them. Not this…. And he’s not augmented! Every elementary text I ever saw assumed all Calduns are augmented. I have no clue. I’m not even sure Carney would have a clue, but at least he could try. Here, all I can say is that if Rell’s hemorrhaging, and I think he is, then the pressure in his brain is building, and that’s not good for any being. If it’s not relieved soon….”

“How soon?”

Delacruz passed a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “Half an hour? Twenty minutes? An hour?”

Langley drew a breath, looked past Delacruz to where the body that housed the spirit he loved was fighting a losing battle. “All right,” he said. “All right. Worst case is twenty minutes. We’ve got twenty minutes to think of—the portacomp!”

He dashed out into the street, and in a minute he’d returned with it. Breathlessly, he announced, “Rell protected this more than he did himself when the missile hit. It’s why he was injured. There must have been a reason—he never does anything without a reason.”

For four years Langley had been the commander of the Churchill, in charge of the ship that transported the marines from one military engagement after another, and responsible for the success of each attack. But before his promotion he’d climbed through the ranks. Portacomps might have changed since he’d last operated one, but he still knew how to extract and interpret the data stream. He sat, propped it on one knee, and set it to disgorge its most recent readings. Rell wouldn’t have had time for correlation or analysis; whatever he had been protecting must be in the raw data. Langley was conscious of the passing minutes, keenly aware of the labored breathing coming from the corner. He wouldn’t look at Rell, didn’t want to look at him. He had to think.

Got it!

“He figured out the jamming frequency.”

Delacruz looked up from his post on the floor. “How does that help us?”

“It’s a variation on tachyon transfer technology…never mind. Let me….”

Three minutes to run the computations, using formulas he hadn’t thought of in years, another four to establish a wireless connection between comm unit and computer, and he was ready. “Langley to Nobel base. Langley to Nobel base.”

“Commander!” It was Ludwig’s clear, competent voice. “Sir, where are you? Nobody’s managed to cut through the jamming except you.”

“Never mind that. I’m sending a squirt of how to get through the interference. There. Got that?”

“Got it. I’ll share this with everybody right away.”

“Good. Now put Doctor Ferguson on the line. Immediately.”

“Aye, sir.”

Langley handed the unit to Delacruz, then heaved a sigh of relief when Doctor Ferguson came on and started talking. The advisor rattled off a series of numbers that came from the diagnostic unit he had strapped to Rell’s arm, and Ferguson came back with some advice on a new dosage for another injection. At least now there was a chance.

But Delacruz suddenly tensed.

“Jeff!”

“What’s wrong?”

“The worst,” Delacruz said grimly. His liver-spotted hand clenched and unclenched. “Even I know this is bad. Jim,” he said into the comm unit. “There’s a spike in the HP reading. That’s a rupture in the medulla transmatus, isn’t it?”

“Jesus Buddha.”

“What do I do?”

“Paco, there’s nothing you can do without the equipment on the Churchill,” came the doctor’s voice. “He needs the stasis system to start with, and life support, just to stabilize him so we can maybe…. Tell Jeff I’m sorry.”

“How long does he have?” Langley asked, leaning in to speak into the grid.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but it won’t make any difference in the end if we don’t get him to the ship.”

Langley transferred his gaze to his advisor, but he was thinking frantically; he was not going to allow this to happen. Not to Rell. Not to his love that never was and never would be. Not to that brilliant mind and free spirit and that determined, lost soul.