Expendable - James Alan Gardner [39]
The first cut had to be vertical—less chance of hitting a major vein or artery. Blood spurted as I worked the knife, but after that it slowed. I hoped that was a good sign.
My vision was clouding. Didn’t matter. If I screwed this up, what was the difference?
No. There was a difference.
The medical kit contained no tracheotomy tube, but it did have an esophageal airway. The airway was so wide. Who had the nerve to cut a hole that big in someone’s throat?
I did. I had the nerve.
My head was spinning. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I pulled what I hoped was an ampoule of blood coagulant from the medical kit and sprayed it around the incision. I didn’t know if I’d killed my friend. I’d die without knowing.
I thought, Yarrun, don’t hate me. I don’t want to be hated.
Then I thought, Shit, here I go.
Oh Shit.
Part VI
AWAKENING
Up
Up. Fight.
Fight. Harder.
Up. Up.
Light.
Here.
Ow, Shit
My head was pounding.
My throat felt raw and shredded.
Swallowing was like being clawed by some angry animal. As soon as I swallowed, I felt the urge to swallow again; surely, it couldn’t hurt as much as the last time.
But it could.
Ow. Shit.
I was alive.
Alive
I was sprawled facedown, still in my tightsuit. The suit stank of urine and worse, but the blue OK light still glowed on the inside of my visor: no breach in the suit’s skin, and at least an hour of canned air left. For what it was worth, the suit’s monitors considered me in perfect health.
Monitors are stupid. I tried swallowing again, and regretted it.
Sloshing inside the suit, I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. My body cast an elongated shadow across the grass of the field; sunset was coming. We had landed an hour or two after sunrise and the season was early fall, so I’d been unconscious nine or ten hours.
And nothing had eaten me all that time. What a wimp-ass planet.
A moment later, a stab of memory jolted me. In a panic, I scrambled to my feet and looked left, right, all around.
Yarrun was gone.
Searching
The Bumbler and the medical kit still lay where I’d dropped them. The scalpel…the empty drug ampoule…even the esophageal airway I thought I had inserted into Yarrun’s throat…everything was there except Yarrun. Flecks of dried blood dotted the grass where he had lain, but he was nowhere to be seen.
From reflex, I tapped my throat transceiver and called, “Yarrun! Yarrun!”
My words stayed muffled in my suit. Usually, I heard some trickle of feedback on my audio receiver, a tinny echo of my broadcast voice. This time, there was no such echo.
Radio silence. No-comm. My transmitter had gone Oh Shit.
Perhaps that was why I was still alive: the effort of strangling me had been too much for my throat implant. It had blown its circuits before finishing the job. Equipment burnouts were not a novelty in the Outward Fleet; the Admiralty tendered supply contracts to the lowest bidder.
That still didn’t explain Yarrun’s absence. If the trache otomy worked, he might have woken before me. Had he pulled out the airway, then wandered off? He might have done so if he was dazed. With his helmet off, he’d been exposed to local air for hours—plenty of time to get infected by an alien microbe and go delirious.
Damn. How long would he stagger about before he fell off the cliffs into the lake?
Fighting the urge to race forward, I picked up the Bumbler and walked slowly to the edge of the bluffs. Rushing wouldn’t help Yarrun, especially if I tripped over the edge myself.
The gathering shadows of sunset didn’t make it easy to scan the scrub brush between me and the lake. However, the Bumbler showed nothing as warm as a human body on the cliffside or the shore below.
I refused to consider the possibility that Yarrun’s body was no longer warm.
Carefully, I tracked along the bluffs a hundred meters in both directions. The Bumbler showed no significant heat signatures. Added to that, the face of the bluffs was sandy loam, and reasonably moist; if Yarrun fell over the edge, he would have gouged deep scuffs in the dirt on his way down.
The soil showed no marks