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I shot it squarely in the head this time, at short range. That killed it. Finally. The head slumped back, lolling into the dark, choppy water. The legs kicked out and down. Frustratingly, the taloned claw holding Gurathin by the upper arm still didn't release. I guess these things have some kind of fail-closed setting to their bodies. He was dragged underwater yet again. This couldn't be good for him.
I dove, navigating around the thing's stupid, thrashing tail (yes, it was dead, but the nervous system activity was still going on; no, shooting it more would not help). He was being jerked around enough that I was frankly surprised his arm was still attached. I'd seen the way it had flopped him about in the air as it tried to escape with him. There was nothing in that joint that was still functional.
I got my hands on the scaley leg and deployed my energy weapon underwater to cut it free. (Did you know energy weapons worked underwater? It was in my technical specs, but I'd never had to use it that way. Guess what, it works!)
Oxygenation level critical.
That was from Gurathin, over the feed in a flattened tone that meant it was some kind of auto-response. Yeah, he was drowning. More troubling than that was that I hadn't heard anything else from him except that startled yell when the thing had taken off with him.
I got his face out of the water and tried to get us away from the still-somewhat-flailing dead beast. He made wet noises and spluttering so he wasn't drowned yet. His legs were kicking erratically. I managed to pry the detached claw off his arm while he used the other to shove me underwater. Thanks, Gurathin. Just what I needed.
He was experiencing what was most likely an involuntary response, trying to climb on top of me to get air. Then again, maybe he knew he needed air more than I and was just being an asshole about it. There was another oxygenation warning. His augments must have some kind of health monitoring functions. Not unusual, but I'd never had reason to hear them before. It was unsettling enough that I reassessed the spasmodic struggling as end-of-life, not intentional.
I ditched my initial plan to hang out here in the water and get him stabilized. There was no way to effectively clear his lungs while he was fighting me like this, and if I waited until he stopped, he'd be dead (or at least well on the way to experiencing some brain damage which, if I succeeded in resuscitating him, would be a permanent feature; if I failed at resuscitating him, well, that would be a permanent feature, too). Instead, I flipped him around, got my arm around his torso, and started for shore at my best speed.
The beach was littered with huge obnoxious fauna shaped like fat worms or tapered cylinders. For a third of them, the head end featured tusks as long as a human's hand that curved upward and ones as long as a human's forearm (or even longer) that stuck straight down. They were understandably agitated about the attack of the flying things, several of which were still swooping and stooping around them, looking for anything small enough to carry off. One of the big toothy ones was in my way now. It outweighed me by maybe fifteen times. It bellow-growled at me as I exited the ocean.
I didn't have time for a territorial dispute with an oversized worm. I shot it in the neck. As I had suspected during earlier observation of these things, that was not lethal, nor even all that dangerous an injury. As I had not suspected, it was not deterred by my shot and instead moved to attack me. And presumably Gurathin, who I was still holding with the other arm. His convulsions had become distressingly feeble, the alert messages from his augment even more plaintive.
I shot it in the face next. It stopped wallow-wriggle-charging me immediately, but it didn't die. It shook its head, made a pained gesture toward its face with one flipper, and ditched into the nearby ocean. That was good. There weren't any other fauna in the space it had occupied, so I put Gurathin on the ground in a recovery position. He expelled sea water and made gurgling, choking noises that weren't nearly as energetic as I thought they needed to be.
All around me was a din of bellowing, barking fauna, with occasional screeches from the flying ones who were still looking for easy prey. I had drones monitoring them. They were too high for effective energy weapon use and as we had discovered, they stooped frighteningly fast when they saw something they wanted to eat. We weren't safe here.
I did a quick examination. Gurathin had been bitten at least three times after I'd shot the flying thing into the water. I don't know why it was biting him. Maybe it was just angry because I'd shot holes in it. Luckily, his clothing had confounded it and blunted the worst of the potential damage. I didn't find much blood, which was the important thing. If he was going to bleed out before I could get him to medical aid, then I needed to know that and re-prioritize my actions. Not bleeding out meant I continued with my earlier plan.
I picked him up. He was shaking, which I think was a step up from convulsions or whatever. He was breathing somewhat, enough to make an agonized noise as I stood and the arm he'd been lifted by, yanked around by, and then used as leverage while the winged fauna tried to tear him apart while it floundered in the water – that arm – flopped and hung down. I winced.
I'd picked him up on the opposite side precisely so I wouldn't touch that limb, but apparently this wasn't the big help I'd thought it would be. Either that, or it was going to hurt either way. I shifted him a little so I was holding him against my chest, his head at my shoulder, and upped my body heat to the max. He was wet, the ocean had been cold, and he was either coming down from or in the middle of a massive adrenaline dump. Then I ran.
I had to dodge a few stupid huge lumbering fauna along the way and shoot at one of the flying ones that took too much interest in us for my liking. I sent a feed message to the two technicians in the boat building, telling them I was taking the hopper for a medical emergency and for them to stay inside. They'd be safe from the hostile fauna that way. They told me the fliers would clear off soon. This was not useful information at this stage.
I couldn't fly the hopper and hold him, so Gurathin ended up on the floor. He was woozily conscious by this point. I think he'd been conscious for most of it, just too drowned or pained or shocked to say anything useful. He must be one of those humans who gets quiet when stressed, which would explain a lot in retrospect. The automated messages had stopped.
I'm okay.
The fuck you are, Gurathin. I didn't tell him that.
I was angry that through all of this, I'd taken no damage to speak of. In the initial stoop of the flying fauna, I'd seen it in time to knock Gurathin out of the way and take the entire impact myself. So that was good. It hit me surprisingly hard, hard enough for the sheer shock of impact to kill a human outright. I would have bounced if it hadn't landed on top of me, driving me into the ground with its weight.
But I hadn't been hurt, which made this so infuriatingly one-sided. Maybe some of my organic skin was bruised or scuffed. I was fine. It just made me angrier that my client had ended up like this. I'd kicked the flying thing off me and fired at a smaller one that was trying to swoop in and steal the first one's presumed 'kill' (in other words, me).
There were a lot of wings flapping around and the disturbance had my drones all over the place trying to get airborne and reoriented. That's when the big one that had pounced on me, the one that I'd kicked away, decided to take the less belligerent target. It went for Gurathin, whom I'd conveniently shoved to the ground right next to us.
By the time I'd realized what happened, it already had Gurathin high enough off the ground that dropping him onto his head would be fatal. So I tried to down it gradually by shooting into the wing membranes. That caused it to veer away from land and over the ocean, where it was rapidly reaching the end of my effective range. I managed to shoot it down, but Gurathin had suffered a lot of yanking around in the meantime.
I got the hopper to the nearest civilized area, which was not far away. (No wonder most of Gartok's settlements are underground.) I'd alerted them to the situation. A gurney was on its way but I had already picked up Gurathin to get him off the hopper and it wasn't like I was going to stand around waiting. Also, there was no reason to jostle him by setting him down again. He told me over the feed he was okay again while gritting his teeth, hissing, and possibly crying on me. Sure. Whatever you say.
I carried him inside. Emergency medical wasn't far from the landing zone, which was a smart configuration. I approved. I deposited him very carefully on the MedSystem platform.
He hadn't even done anything wrong. He'd gone down to the pier to investigate the hardware, trying to trace a problem with the interface between the fishing boat's bot-pilot and the docking facility it was using. I'd gone with them because it was calving season (which I would like to pretend was a foreign concept to me, but I'd actually read the informational packet on this planet's many hostile fauna that overlapped his area of work, because I was not half-assing my job).
I'd noticed the flying things when they crested the nearby ridge. It was impossible not to, as the wriggling beach fauna (okay, I will admit the informational packet called them walruses) began baying and panicking, with the larger ones crowding next to the smallest and the medium ones diving into the ocean.
I should have taken their reaction more seriously. If huge, tusked, blubber-shielded monstrosities like them were terrified of the flying things, then I should have recognized the double-speak involved in how the informational packet repeatedly advised extreme respect of the wildlife. 'Respect' has multiple meanings. I was using the wrong one.
And like I've already said, those things can stoop absurdly fast.
The doctor confronted me. "You need to leave the medical suite. There is a waiting area outside."
I didn't move. There were two nurses cutting away Gurathin's clothing, having dismissed his attempt to tell them he was okay. He was shaking again now that I wasn't holding him. I sent a prompt to the MedSystem that it needed to warm him faster. It sent me back a bunch of indecipherable medical data.
"You're contaminating the room."
There was an edge to the human's voice that was simultaneously firm and sympathetic. It was a weird combination, so I looked at him. "He's my client."
We were still in the Preservation Alliance, even though this planet was Gartok Grah and not Preservation itself. Meaning I still had the feed ID marking me as a SecUnit, but as I'd discovered, most citizens of Preservation Alliance had no idea what one was – not even the bad media version. I don't think this doctor knew, either.
He sighed a little and said, "I hear you. He's not going anywhere. But you have to leave. We have a staff room down the hall. Ask for it at the front desk. You can run your clothes through the recycler there and get cleaned up. If you're injured, let the front desk know and they'll triage you." He paused, assessing me. I was wet. That was all. He asked, "Are you injured?"
"No." I pivoted and stalked out. I wanted to stay, but that was dumb. Gurathin was in as good of hands as he could be. I could monitor his status in the system. I didn't need to be in the room with him, especially not if my presence was distracting the medical professionals who should be paying attention to him, not me.
As soon as Gurathin was settled in a room post-procedure, I let myself in. He was warm and groggy and his color was closer to normal for him. I pulled a chair next to the bed on the uninjured side. The MedSystem couldn't tell me if he was asleep or not. It just said he was sedated. He hadn't reacted to my presence. Then again, it's not like I'd pinged him.
I looked at his hand. It was about the same size as mine, but the bones on the back of the hand were easier to make out on his. The veins were visible. Some even mounded the skin. His knuckles were smaller than mine. The lined skin of his palms and fingertips was about as soft as mine.
I slipped my hand into his, trying not to think about it too much. Arada had held my hand as we left the survey planet. It was one of the few memories I had from the period between the blast on the plateau and waking up on Port FreeCommerce. It was the first time anyone had held my hand to comfort me. Or maybe even, the first time someone had tried to comfort me, period. (Aside from the PresAux team arguing among themselves about how much eye contact or physical proximity I could tolerate. Oh wait, Arada had put her hand on my shoulder before, but I'd shrugged it off and hid in the corner. It was the first time I'd accepted it, then.)
I held his hand gently. He made a faint noise. His breathing shifted and vitals climbed a little.
I had held Tapan's hand while she was recovering from ART's MedSystem. ART had suggested it. It had said she had previously found me to be a comforting presence and therefore, she would want this. It had said she was vulnerable, had nearly died, and needed her hand held as though it were a standard post-trauma action. ART's made a big deal about how its medical system was trauma-rated, so I suppose it would know.
This wasn't something I was used to doing. It was maybe something more like what a ComfortUnit might do? I don't actually know what ComfortUnits do. At least not all of what they do. But I guess anyone can do this. Anyone with hands, that is.
I have hands. I was made with soft hands just like a human's. I'd held Mensah's hand as we went through the TranRollinHyfa docks. It had felt strangely natural, not uncomfortable as I'd expected. It had made us look less suspicious, but I think also it made Mensah … comforted … by me. Like I was valuable and helpful and someone she wanted to hold onto.
Maybe it was okay to let people feel that way about me. I tightened my grip just a little, making it snug but not firm.
Gurathin's lids fluttered. His head turned toward me. Recognition dawned on his face. I don't know much about painkiller doses but he did not look sober.
His grip tightened on mine and he pressed the back of my hand against his hip, bracketing my hand between his and his body. I'm okay.
I think I smiled wryly. Yes, you are.