The particulate debris and dust inside the craft danced in the rays of light, but I could see well enough to know there’d be no survivors among the flight crew. The cockpit had accordioned in on itself, and if there was anything left of the command stations, it was crushed flat between layers of BiPhase Carbide, and I wasn’t going to reach it with anything less than an industrial plasma cutter.
The stairs leading down from the cockpit to the passenger compartment, the small section fore of the cargo hold where freight workers could strap in, were twisted and torn, splintered plastic and jagged metal, and the deck beneath the acceleration couches wasn’t in much better shape. The couches themselves had been thrown across the compartment in the crash, though the safety restraints had held. The circle of light danced across one of the seats, and I gritted my teeth at what was left of the man who’d been strapped into it.
Some of the cargo had broken loose from its magnetic anchors and the poor son of a bitch had either slammed into one of the loose crates or it had slammed into him. Whichever had happened, it hadn’t ended well. His chest had been caved in and while that might have been survivable if someone could have popped him straight into an auto-doc, but there had been no treatment, no rescue. He’d bled out in minutes and died in a puddle of frothy crimson.
“This one’s dead,” Vicky announced, kneeling over a pudgy, bald man whose shoulders might have strained against the confines of the chair once, when his chest had been filled with air, his body filled with life. Now, illuminated in the glare of her flashlight, his head was tilted at an unnatural angle, his eyes staring without seeing, his mouth agape.
There were two other occupied seats. The waifish, short-haired woman in the acceleration couch against the far bulkhead was still, her right temple caved in from a loose cargo crate, her face covered in blood. Her shoulders jerked with a pair of gasping breaths, then sagged again. She might not be dead yet, but she would be before we could get her unstrapped from her seat.
It had been so damned long since I’d seen a dead body. Nearly two years. Vince Delp. He’d been younger than this woman, and when he’d died, his face had been clean and unmarked. I could have believed he’d been sleeping. Yet I still saw his visage imposed over hers for the space of a heartbeat.
“We got a live one,” Vicky announced.
I shook away the memory, pulled off my goggles and picked a few cautious steps across the passenger compartment, searching for the few centimeters of the deck plating that hadn’t fractured into sharpened splinters and wasn’t littered with debris or cargo crates. I heard the moans before I reached the man, saw his foot kicking in the glow of Vicky’s flashlight.
I don’t know how this guy had lived through the crash, but I knew he wasn’t enjoying the experience. He was wearing a sleeveless, leather vest, unfortunately, which meant I had a very clear view of the splintered ends of his radius and ulna sticking through the skin of his left arm. I clamped my jaws shut against the bile rising in my throat and forced myself to evaluate the man for any other injuries. He had them, of course.
His eyes were open but unfocused, and when Vicky flashed the beam of her light into them, he didn’t blink and the pupils didn’t respond. That was bad. He had a severe concussion, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t screaming from the pain of his broken arm. A pressure cut was open over one eye, blood streaming out to obscure his face. God knew what else was wrong with him, but he was breathing and, despite the gruesome arm wound, he hadn’t bled out. Yet.
“We should do something about his arm while he’s still woozy,” I said. I didn’t want to say it. I wanted very much to back out of the shuttle and pretend I’d never seen any of it.
I pulled off the shirt I’d wrapped around my head and sliced it down the middle with my belt knife. I wore it everywhere because it was what you did out here on the frontier. A knife was a constant companion, an ever-ready tool. I didn’t even notice its weight on my belt anymore.
“You got anything stiff we can use for a splint?” I asked Vicky. She began searching around on the deck and I turned back to Clines, catching him staring down the beam of his own flashlight into the cargo hold. “Dave, can you find something about twenty-five or thirty centimeters long to use as a splint?” He didn’t respond, and I kept myself from yelling the words in a command only by an act of will. I wasn’t an officer anymore, or even a sergeant, and Clines was a friend, not a subordinate. “Dave,” I repeated, with just a touch more volume and emphasis. “We need a splint.”
“Take a look at this, you two.”
Clines’ voice was soft, thoughtful, so unlike him that I followed his gaze and his light with my own. The cargo bay looked as if a toddler had come across a neat stack of building blocks and kicked it over out of spite, then grabbed the largest bits and smashed them into each other for the hell of it. The cargo crates were a bit more durable than the humans who had been in charge of them, and most of them had held together, battered but still sealed and secure.
Except for one. It was huge, much larger than the rest of the containers, ten meters long and three or four across, cylindrical, and it had split under the weight of what was within, spilling the thing out on top of the rest of the freight. It was finished in a utilitarian matte grey, inlaid with circuitry, and fitted with power couplings that were large and durable enough that they had to be military.
“That’s…,” I trailed off, tugging at the frayed edge of a memory, something I’d seen on one of the Fleet ships I’d called home during the war. A tech crew had pulled apart the nose of an assault shuttle and I’d seen that laying on the deck, huge and yawning and menacing. “Is that a….”
“It’s a proton cannon,” Clines told me, his voice grim. “Military-grade, highly restricted. You put one of those on a ship and you can penetrate the shielding of anything you’d run into, up to and including Fleet cutters and assault shuttles.”
The implications of the thing were obvious, but I shunted them to the side, focusing on the task at hand.
“Hand me those two bits of shelving, Dave,” I told him, motioning at a spot two meters ahead of him with my flashlight. He eyed me doubtfully. “Now, please.”
“Should we take him out of the seat?” Vicky asked as I took the twenty-centimeter strips of metal storage shelf supports over to her and the victim.
“No,” I said. “He might have spinal fractures. We should wait until Emergency Services gets here.”
I gritted my teeth as I grabbed his arm, but I didn’t have any other choice. It was either this or watch him bleed to death in front of us. I straightened his arm and pushed the bones back into position. The sound, the feeling was unspeakable, horrifyingly close to the experience of twisting the head off a chicken, something I’d seen my mother do often. It hadn’t given me nightmares then, but it might now.
“Okay, hold the splints in place,” I told Vicky, “while I wrap the dressing.”
I tied it tight. Not tourniquet-tight, but tight enough. I sat back, sucking in a breath, smelling blood and shit. Someone, maybe more than one someone, had voided themselves when they died.
“You hear that?” Vicky asked, her head popping up, eyes going to the overhead but searching for something beyond the hull of the shuttle. And I did hear it, an insistent buzzing, like a mosquito making passes at the back of my head.