Cherubim's Call, page 22
Moore put his fingers to Skaggs’s throat and nodded. “Yeah, very much alive. It’s a shame, though.” Moore looked over to Hall. “It would’ve been proper fun throwing him down a staircase and pretending he fell.”
Hall let out a howling laugh. “You’re damn sure right about that.”
Hall had only heard Moore crack a joke once or twice since meeting him. They always came unexpectedly and at times that maybe weren’t so appropriate, but when they did come, it always got a laugh out of him. Hall thought it might be because Moore was usually so reserved and proper. He admired the man for that—and not just that, but the many other things Moore had done in his life. Hall had had no choice—it was either prison or the military. At the time, the Republic hadn’t even known what Zodarks were, let alone been at war with them, so he’d felt pretty confident in taking military service over being stuck in a seven-by-seven-foot cell. Oliver Moore, on the other hand, was practically royalty. His family owned a mansion, lived on a massive plot of land, and even had butlers, cooks, and maids. He could have been home right now with his feet propped up on the couch, lounging in his softest of bathrobes. Instead, he was kneeling beside Hall, checking to make sure their friend hadn’t just killed someone.
Hall laughed again and shook his head. “What a life.”
Moore laughed as well. “What a life is right, mate.” He stood and moved to where Skaggs’s head was. “Well, let’s get this sack of space rocks to the medical bay so I can fix him up.”
“We can do that? Won’t we get caught?” Hall asked.
“Oh yeah. There’s a service elevator to be used in the case of a mass casualty event that leads directly to the med bay floor. I also happen to be friends with the person on duty tonight.” Moore winked.
“Who?” Hall asked.
“Nova,” Moore replied.
Hall grabbed Skaggs’s legs and began walking with Moore towards the door. “I thought she was coming out to the fights with you.”
Moore pointed with his head towards the bar, where Corporal Martin, Second Squad’s medic, sat. “Corporal Martin over there found out about the party. As punishment, she made Nova take her shift at the clinic while she came to investigate.”
“Investigate?” Hall almost dropped Skaggs.
“Calm down, mate, she only said that to make it sound good. In reality, she’s been drinking half the grunts under the table all night,” Moore replied.
The two exited the conference room and entered the brightly lit corridor that stretched in both directions until it curved seamlessly out of view. They waddled down the hall towards the service elevator, finally approaching the door the guard was standing behind. Hall held his breath as the doors opened and the guard continued to sit there with his feet kicked up on the counter, staring at them.
“What happened to him?” the guard asked.
“He lost the fight,” Hall answered.
“OK.” The guard shrugged. “Just make sure I get my cut by the end of the night.”
Hall dropped Skaggs’s legs with a loud thud and walked over to the table. Removing his personal device, he opened his bank account and selected the amount owed to the guard. The guard smiled and removed his and held it out. Hall tapped his device to the guard’s and transferred the funds.
“Pleasure doing business, gentlemen,” the guard replied and went back to reading his book.
Hall picked the unconscious man’s legs back up, and they continued down the hall and into the service elevator. Moore plugged in his code, and the lift took off through the bowels of the ship. When the doors dinged and opened, they lugged Skaggs into the first open room and dropped him on the table. Moore attached electrodes to Skaggs’s body and a bunch of information crossed the screen connected to the nodes. It might as well have been Martian slang for all Hall knew, but Moore seemed to understand.
“All vitals look good. Just knocked out,” Moore confirmed.
“You sure he’s not gonna have any brain damage or something? Kodiak was taking it to him—I mean, I hate the guy and even I was feeling a little bit bad.”
“I’m sure. Other than bruises and swelling, he’ll be all right,” Moore reassured him.
The door to the room opened and Hall turned, expecting the worst. Instead, he saw the medic, Cara Nova, standing in the doorway. She wasn’t wearing the usual civilian attire he’d seen her in at the bar but instead white medical scrubs.
She scratched the shaved side of her head and smiled. “What happened to this guy?”
“Kodiak got a little bit of payback in the ring,” Moore replied.
Nova’s face dropped. “Oh. How was it?”
“The fight?” Hall asked, ready to go into all the details.
“The party,” Nova corrected.
“It was a blast!” Hall answered. “We couldn’t get any liquor, but—”
“Hall, don’t you need to get back there and run everybody out before someone important shows up?” Moore cut him off.
He was confused. He could’ve spent the next hour talking all about the party and how awesome it was. Even Moore had had an absolute blast. No brawls had broken out, besides the scheduled one, and everyone was jamming out to the music. It was absolutely perfect. Hall looked at Nova and then back to Moore as he realized what was happening. Looking at Nova a little closer, he could see she was more disappointed than excited.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking about—” Hall tried to explain.
“It’s all good, go clear the party out,” Moore said.
He was right—Hall did need to get back to the party and clear everyone out before the next guard shift, and he didn’t want to upset Nova any more than he already had. Nodding, he took his leave and left the clinic floor. On the way back down the elevator, he thought about how he was going to get everyone out of that conference room, clean everything up, and get back to quarters before curfew. It was going to be a long damn night.
Chapter 27
Moore
Oliver Moore watched his friend Aiden Hall walk out of the clinic and into the elevator. He hadn’t had any idea that Nova couldn’t stop talking about the party for the past few days. Still, Moore didn’t need Hall going on a rant about how amazing the party was. Nova wouldn’t want to hear about it, and Moore didn’t need to. All he wanted to do now was wake Skaggs up and go to bed.
The room they were in was where soldiers and sailors came for sick call or to get prescriptions filled. The other wings on the deck housed several medical units from admin to intensive care and could handle almost any mass casualty event both on the ship and on the surface of a planet. He had worked shifts in the clinic all the time and practically lived on the medical deck during his platoon’s work rotation, but he still hadn’t seen half the areas.
Nova walked over to the bed. “So what are we gonna do about him?”
“Well, first,” Moore said, removing a medical injector from a bin, “we’re gonna wake him up.”
He stabbed the injector into Skaggs’s thigh and dispensed a cocktail that would wake the unconscious man up while keeping the pain down. The last thing he needed was for Skaggs to wake up, feel all the pain Kodiak had inflicted, and then die from shock.
The man’s eyes fluttered open as the drugs began working their magic. Slowly Skaggs stirred and sat up, his eyes focusing on the two figures in the room. “Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re at the clinic. I’m just gonna dress up some of these cuts, apply some Skin-Rejuv gel and get you on your way,” Moore replied.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s honestly nothing—I’ve dealt with worse injuries during training sessions. Just a few cuts from the punches. But because of modern medicine”—Moore shook a small cylindrical device in his hand—“we’ll have you patched up in a few minutes.”
Moore cleaned the few cuts Skaggs had on his face and stopped the bleeding with the same coagulant gel medics used to seal wounds on a battlefield. Once the gel entered any open wound, it would begin to cauterize and stop any external and even internal blood flow. That would, in theory, buy the casualty more time while they were moved to a field hospital or back to a ship. In a medical clinic, they kept tiny pouches of the gel for situations just like this.
After stopping the bleeding, Moore applied a skin-healing antibiotic cream that would clean the wound and rejuvenate the skin cells. Within a few hours, the scars would be gone. It only worked on smaller cuts or shallow wounds—for larger lacerations, the solution was worthless, but even if it wasn’t, he was sure most soldiers would like to keep battle scars.
“Did I win?” Skaggs asked.
Moore stopped himself short of laughing and glanced around the room. “Does it look like you won?”
“True. Hey, why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Why am I doing what?” Moore asked.
“Fixing me up. You’re Kodiak’s pal, so why are you fixing me up?” Although Skaggs didn’t touch him, Moore felt like he was poking him in the chest with each word he pronounced.
“It’s my job,” Moore said. If he was being honest with himself, he just wanted Skaggs to shut up.
“No. Don’t play that card, Moore. You might have been the quiet one in the back while Kodiak and Hall bounced around like a couple of clowns, but you’re still all friendly with them, so why help me? Pity?”
“Not pity,” Moore answered back rather quickly. “I’m doing this because tomorrow, when you’re limping around and your sergeant asks what happened, you can say you slept wrong, and he’ll be none the wiser. Your cuts will be healed, your bruises faded, and no one will know why you’re hurting so much on the inside.”
“What’s stopping me from telling my sergeant what happened?” Skaggs asked, his face turning a shade of crimson.
“Nothing at all,” Moore answered truthfully. “But no one will believe you.”
Moore ignored his open mouth and finished applying a liberal amount of coagulant gel into the cut over Skaggs’s left eye. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve made just about as many friends here as you did when you were in basic. Your new platoon despises you like we did. I’d go into a whole speech about how you could use this as a teaching moment, change your ways, and become a better member of this unit, but I doubt that’ll ever happen.”
Skaggs leapt to his feet and stood as tall as he could, pushing his chest out and clenching his fists. Moore admitted that he might have gone a little too far with the insults, especially because it had gotten Skaggs all riled up and he was now threatening physical violence.
Moore looked down at the clenched fists, took a slow breath to calm the spike of adrenaline that pumped into his veins, and smiled. “You’re good to go, Private Skaggs. I hope I never see you again in this clinic.”
Skaggs just stared at him for a minute and Moore began to think he really was going to throw a punch, but after a few more tense moments, he turned and headed toward the door. Before he could walk out, Nova stepped in his way. Moore had forgotten she was there for a moment, especially during his heated discussion with Skaggs, but now the medic made herself known by moving her face inches from Skaggs.
She raised a surgical knife up to the man’s throat and hissed, “If I sniff out even the faintest of rumors that you went and started blabbering to your unit about tonight, I’ll slit your throat and call it a suicide. Got it?”
Skaggs once-crimson face turned pale white, and his shoulders sank. He only nodded in defeat and sulked out of the clinic. Nova turned to Moore and shrugged, giving him a wide smile as she placed the surgical tool back onto a tray.
“A little much,” Moore said, but he smiled to show he wasn’t upset.
“Screw him. After what you said he did to Kodiak, to his own squad, and for what? Because he squandered his chance at being platoon leader in basic training? He deserves worse than what he got.”
Moore admired Nova’s loyalty to her friends and the Republic military. She had come from a place that traditionally despised the Republic or in the less severe case was indifferent. That fact alone had made it hard for her to fit in when she and Moore had first met, but over time, every soldier she’d encountered had grown to appreciate her in some way or another. Moore knew he did.
“I know he does,” Moore sighed, “but he of all people is not worth getting thrown into a cell for the rest of your life. I think we got our point across, and honestly, I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long to see the results we deserve.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
Moore forgot how innocent she could be at times and smiled. “We go planetside in less than a month. No matter how slippery he is, he won’t be able to stay out of the fight, and when that time comes, he’ll either die as the Zodarks tear him apart or get fragged by one of the dozens of people he’s pissed off along the way.”
“Damn. We’ve been floating around on this space turd for so long I forgot just how close planetside actually was.” She shifted her weight and leaned against the wall. “Do you think we’ll be able to do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Our job,” she responded seriously.
“Yes, Cara. We’ve trained as hard as we possibly can over the past year. We’ll be ready,” Moore answered confidently.
She still didn’t seem convinced. “Will I be ready?”
Moore took the chance to give her a hug. It was platonic, brotherly, loving. “I’ve seen you stabilize patients in the simulator with your eyes closed. You can do it, and our training will kick in. Just focus on the job, everything else is noise.”
“That’s easy for you to say. I’ve never once seen you get scared, but even in a simulator, those blue things terrify me.”
“I’m scared, Nova. Terrified to my core, but I have a job to do. If I don’t do what’s expected of me and do it right, people will die, and if I don’t do it at all, even more will die. For better or for worse, we have no choice. We are in another solar system; in a couple of weeks, we’ll look up at a sun that we’ve never seen before. God knows this is not what I signed up for, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”
Nova looked at him for a moment and seemed to shake the sudden nerves away. She smiled. “Got any aces up your sleeve, perhaps?”
Chapter 28
Kodiak
RNS Boxer
In Orbit Above New Eden
The RNS Boxer had dropped out of slip space a month earlier. All of Apollo Company had expected to be planetside by now, but they were quickly learning the rules of space travel, along with everyone else. Harrison Kodiak remembered first laying eyes on New Eden as the days had clicked closer towards planetside. The large blue planet mirrored Earth in a lot of ways, so much so that until you were close enough to make out the continents, your brain tricked you into thinking you were back in the Sol System. Once you were in orbit, the perspective changed.
When night fell across the planet, there was no light pollution dotting the darkness from space to remind those above that there were cities below. Kodiak had spent his entire life looking up at the moon every night, seeing lines of lights etched into its surface. When he’d trained on the Currahee, he’d seen the same exact thing down on Earth if not tenfold what was on the moon, but on New Eden there was nothing but darkness.
He knew from the briefings that there were several mining villages that covered the sector of the continent they’d be landing on, along with several military installations and spaceports. Even with all that activity, you couldn’t see their light from space. At first it had been peaceful, but as they drew closer, radio traffic from the planet was picked up. He began sitting in his platoon’s conference room for hours with the rest as they listened to patrols and other operations taking place on the planet’s surface. At first, it was morbid curiosity that kept him glued to his seat for hours on end, but over time, he used the sessions as a training tool. From the radio traffic below, one thing was certain: fighting the Zodarks was pure chaos.
“This is the last time I’m gonna say this. First Squad, if your weapons and rucksacks are not properly stowed in the correct positions, you’re gonna have a bad time. Imagine the message I’d have to send to Mommy and Daddy, explaining that it wasn’t the Zodarks who claimed their child’s life in the heat of battle but an unsecured rifle that decided to make your face its new home on entry.” Staff Sergeant Yazzie Muleskin walked up and down the length of the Osprey dropship, checking to make sure all of his soldiers’ weapons were locked into their magnetic lock plates.
“I ain’t got no momma, Sergeant Muleskin!” Garza shouted from his seat next to Kodiak.
“Good! One less person to inevitably disappoint, Garza. Congratulations.”
Muleskin’s response got a roar of laughter from the others, and even Garza chuckled and shook his head. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he responded.
Apollo Company was officially about to become the first boots on the planet for the 331st Infantry Regiment, and Kodiak’s squad was anxious to finally leave the confines of the Boxer and roam. Their first stop was going to be Forward Operating Base Edwards, named after the first Republic soldier killed in the conflict against the Zodarks, where they’d become acclimated to the planet’s environment and its wildlife.
Kodiak tugged on his rifle next to him to make sure the magnetic locks held it firmly in place, and when he was confident it’d stay put on the ride down, he focused on the rucksack strapped above. The name tape stitched onto the fabric of the rucksack stared back at him, and he nodded to himself that the pack was secured correctly. In basic training, they’d trained in crash drills that had seen them strapped inside a hollowed-out Osprey and spun in circles. Of course, nothing had been strapped down inside, so the entire time, Kodiak had been getting pelted by anything and everything the drill sergeants could fit inside the craft. They said it was to teach them the importance of securing their gear. At the time, he’d thought it was just another excuse for them to haze recruits. But now, as he checked for a third time, he realized the message had sunk in.
