Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi (2 page)

Liao cast her mind back to the discussion she and Yanmei had shared before the battle. The crew of the
Beijing
were warriors, soldiers standing in the shoes of their ancestors who had all fought similar battles. Liao knew that some soldiers treasured their scars as mementos, reminders of where they fought and why. She suspected Cheung would see it that way, too.

“How are your burns healing? Doctor Saeed’s obviously cleared you to return to duty.”

The tall Marine gave the captain a nod, grinning at her spacesuit-covered forearm. “Bandages and painkillers make a wonderful mix. It’s not pretty, but I’m able to work and believe me, the engineers are pleased to see me. Even if we doubled the number of workmen we have on board, there’s just not enough hands to go around—not to do the kind of repair work we need.”

Liao couldn’t agree more. They were desperate for repairs; the damage from the battle had been borderline
catastrophic. Almost every deck had some area that was decompressed or inaccessible, so the repair effort had been forced to perform triage.
They cut back to fixing only the systems
that were keeping the crew breathing—the rest could wait.

There was also another concern. To prevent the Toralii from using any of the jump points in the solar system to attack Earth, a series of gravity mines had been placed at each point. It seemed to work, but nobody, from the senior staff to Fleet Command, knew if the Toralii could find some way to bypass the blockade. With that whisper of doubt in their minds, some priority was also given to the hull plating and weapons. It was that directive that had Yanmei climbing all over the metal hull, attaching plates over damaged areas so they could be charged and hardened.

Liao gave a low sigh. “You’re not wrong there. Every section–
every
one
–needs something,
but there’s just not enough of some things to go around.”

Cheung grinned. “Including eligible women on this boat, if you don’t mind me saying so, ma’am.”

It was fairly common knowledge that Cheung liked women, and to Liao’s mind it was a shame that there was nobody she was compatible with in that way.

“Focus on your work,” Liao chided, although her smile remained. “Chicks dig scars, remember?”

“Heh, I know, Captain.” There was a pause as Cheung gathered her thoughts. “Anyway, ahem. Ma’am. Drydock will be able to assist us further with the repairs once we get back to the moon. Assuming we can maneuver the ship enough to even land without causing more damage.”

That was another consideration. Luna, Earth’s moon, had gravity.
Less than her mother planet, yes, but still something. Enough to do damage if they landed too roughly. They had moved the
Beijing
slowly back from Mars but, in their weakened state, would the ship’s reactionless drive be strong enough to allow them to land gently, or would the moon’s gravity pull them down too fast? Would they splatter like a dropped meatball on the lunar surface?

“I’m confident our engineers will make sure that we can, but I’ll be taking every precaution. We’ll just have to see how it goes when we arrive.”

Playing a dangerous situation by ear, Liao mused, seemed to be what they did of late. When things were this bad she liked having total control of the situation, and this was far from in her control.

Cheung nodded. “Summer will be able to tell us if it’s safe or not.”

Summer Rowe, one of the handful of civilian contractors aboard, was their resident foul-mouthed genius engineer.
She had a penchant for causing trouble and chaos wherever she showed up. That, and doing the absolute impossible in record time without the proper equipment or work environment.

Most engineers and technical people were shy and reclusive, but it wasn’t getting Summer to talk that was the trick—it was getting her to
shut up
. Summer’s rants were long, foul-mouthed, angry tirades that seemed to go on and on without getting to the point.
She would segue from topic to topic endlessly until urged to silence.

Sometimes, Liao wondered if the redheaded Australian genius was just stalling for time while her mind ticked over, or if she was prone to some kind of complex, partial seizures where her mouth ran far ahead of her brain.

Liao smiled. “I’m sure she will.”

Cheung nodded and reattached her helmet with a
click
. Her voice was muffled as she spoke, the edge of exhaustion and fatigue creeping into her voice. “If there’s nothing else, Captain…”

Crewmen from all over the ship had performed admirably given the extraordinarily long hours they were working, but Liao knew that eventually even they would require rest.
Soon
, she silently promised Cheung, and with a nod, let her go back to work.

They needed the hull plating and weapons, but before the ship could be combat ready, it required an Operations crew.

Accordingly, her next port of call was the infirmary. She had spent far too much time there of late, but there were so many wounded. The Toralii boarding party had served a bloody butcher’s bill. Although she had been entrusted with command, and everyone aboard the ship knew the risks, Liao found it difficult to face the wounded who had entrusted her with their lives.

In some ways, it made her glad her pregnancy had forced her to skimp when it came to painkillers. The wounded were her crew, and she should suffer with them. When her arm hurt, or a movement caused her to pull her stitches, she just grimaced and thought of those under her command who were less fortunate.

Opening the hatchways on the ship with one arm proved to be an awkward task but, after a time, she managed it and stepped inside. Liao wanted to visit Lieutenant Jiang, her tactical officer, but she could see at a glance the woman, recovering from a gunshot wound, was still asleep. Her short hair spilled out over the pillow; her face was pale and gaunt. Jiang had a very round face, and her dark eyes were normally sparkling and full of life; but laying listless on the hospital bed, surrounded by machinery, she looked terrible. The dragon tattoo on her lower arm, normally covered by her uniform, had an intravenous needle straight through the creature’s eye.

Jiang had taken a turn for the worst in the last few days, and Saeed gave her only a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through. The fever and infection were strong, and her body was struggling to stay alive. The medical facilities on the
Beijing
were good, but there were limits to how much medical science could do for a person.

Liao very desperately did not want to write the family of this pretty, talented tactical officer a condolence letter.

Rather than dwell on Jiang’s situation—she could do nothing to help, after all—Liao made her way over to Lieutenant Dao’s bed, smiling as she stepped up to her chief navigator. Liao held a certain fondness for navigators, as that had been her role before she had made her way to command.

“Good evening, Captain.”

Liao gave a playful salute. “Evening, sailor. How’s the wound?”

A Toralii boarder had shot Dao through the left lung, barely missing his heart. A few surgeries later, he was making a decent recovery.
There was even word that he could return to duty within the next few weeks. Dao was a rarity—an ethnic Han Chinese with blue eyes. It was a rare feature, like being an albino, but not entirely unheard of. His skin was darker, too, than most Chinese, implying some Indian in his heritage. He
was
Tibetan, after all.
Mixed ancestry was not uncommon for those in that region.

“It feels much better,” he admitted, reaching up and rubbing his bandages. “Morphine is
fantastic
.”

“I know.” Liao had been given morphine after surviving the attacks on Sydney.
She knew just how wondrous it was. “It’s good to see you looking better.”

“Yes, well… I couldn’t leave you without the best navigator in the universe, could I?”

Liao smiled. “
Second
best, you mean. Why, when I was a junior officer navigating
Han
-
class submarines,
nobody
could hold a candle to me.”

“Hah!
Second best, my arse,” and then, sheepishly, “Captain.”

She reached down and patted his thigh, grinning. “Since you’re sick, I’ll let that one fly.”

Dao nodded, and Liao went to move on, but the man stopped her. “Wait, Captain. Before you go…
How is Jiang today?”

Liao winced, slowly turning back to her injured crewman. “Much the same,” she answered, and then gave a low, worried sigh. “Worse, really. The infection is spreading.
They’ve induced a coma, so she’ll be out for a week or so at least. It’s not looking good for her. I’m very sorry.”

Dao gave a sick, wet cough, nodding. “I know, thank you. She’s strong, though.
She’ll pull through.”

“She’s strong,” Liao echoed, nodding along with him. There was more hope than certainty in her voice, but she gave Dao’s thigh another comforting squeeze to try to bolster her words.

She didn’t know how much there was between him and Jiang—rumours said at least flirtation and mutual attraction—so Liao knew the young female officer’s injuries must be weighing on Dao’s mind much more than his own.

“I’ll let you know if her situation changes, Lieutenant.”

Dao nodded and Liao moved away, out of the infirmary and down to the engineering bay. They had recovered a large amount of wreckage from the Toralii vessel.
While they could not spare the crew to look it over, there was at least one member of their crew whose expertise in the matter was proving invaluable.

The alien—Saara.

Saara was a Toralii strike-craft pilot whom the
Beijing
had pulled from the wreckage of a Toralii scout ship they had discovered and destroyed near Jupiter. Initially a prisoner, Saara taught Liao and Lieutenant Yu to speak her language, and they taught her to understand English. Slowly, she became close to Liao… something her first officer, Commander Gaulung Sheng, took very poorly. Eventually, Sheng organized a shipwide coup, intending on beating the last of Saara’s information out of her. Liao, James, and Cheung had intervened, but not before Saara was almost killed.

The Toralii believe that once you save a life, that life belongs to you. Saara was a member of the Telvan, a more moderate Toralii faction who regularly quarreled with the more warlike and vindictive Toralii Alliance. Having precious little loyalty to the Alliance and owing Liao a debt she treated very seriously, the Toralii woman had been an invaluable contributor to their cause.

And now, watching her picking over the modest pile of debris, Liao wondered how she felt about betraying her species.

“Saara?”

The Toralii woman, her black fur ruffling in pleasure, smiled warmly and put down the scorched hunk of Alliance bulkhead she was inspecting. Although Saara understood English very well, the Toralii species could not physically form the sounds of any of Earth’s languages, and the reverse was also true.
When they conversed, Liao spoke English and Saara answered in Telvan,
the dialect of her people. A deep, guttural language,
it had been designed specifically to be as simple to learn as possible. It tended to use compound words rather than original words to describe technological things, so a radio was a windwhisper device, the jump drive was a voidwarp device, and so on. They also tended to avoid contractions and spoke, at least to Liao’s ear, very poetically. From what Liao understood from her conversations with Saara, the Telvan dialect was a lingua franca, a common language between all the Toralii factions.

Saara stepped forward and dragged the Chinese woman into a tight, spine-crushing hug. [“Captain Liao! I am pleased to see you up and about. I thought you would be asleep forever.”]

Groaning and disengaging herself, Liao gave a playful grin. “I’m more surprised to see
you
up. You took two to the chest and you were back on your feet in a matter of
days
.”

[“Humans heal slowly. Compared to us, at
least.”]

Liao reached out and touched Saara’s fur covered arm. “Well, I’ll count that as a blessing, then. Fleet intelligence believes this explains why the Toralii boarding party tends to pack a little more firepower than our own Marines, and why our weapons didn’t seem to be as effective as I would have liked.” She smiled. “I've said it before, but I think we need bigger guns.”

[“You’ll have to ask Lieutenant Cheung about that, Captain.”]

Liao nodded, then gestured to the debris pile. “Found anything interesting?”

Saara shrugged, a gesture she had adopted from her Human hosts.
The Toralii had their own expression for nonchalance.
She stepped over to the small ‘keep’ pile and fished out a small black cylinder, about the size of a film canister, capped with a series of blinking lights. [“It is a self-powered datastore from one of the
Seth’arak’s
computer systems,”] she explained, passing it to Liao. [“It may be a source of intelligence if we can access it.”]

Liao took the device, cupping it in two hands, and shrugged. “How could we do that? We don’t have any Toralii technology that can read it.” A thought occurred to her. “Although Summer
did
say our two computer systems were similar. Perhaps she might be some help.”

Looking up to her friend, Liao saw that Saara looked distinctly uncomfortable at the mention of Summer.

[“I am not certain speaking to Summer is a wise idea at the present time, Captain.”]

“I know she’s probably busy, but—”

Saara shook her head. [“No, it is not that. Work has never bothered her in the past; it is just that she…”] The Toralii sighed again, rolling her shoulders. [“She has not been
at
work. She does not show up for shifts, and we are all concerned by how she is acting.”]

Liao inclined her head, frowning slightly. “I haven’t had time to talk to Summer directly since the battle. What happened?”

Summer had been on the bridge when it was boarded by the Toralii. Despite all her bluster about wanting a gun like the rest of the military personnel, when given one and forced to use it, she froze up completely and hadn’t fired a shot. She had been almost immobile, right up until she saved Liao from the last of the Toralii boarders.