“I can’t feel my hands!” Kitai groaned. “I can’t—”
Suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head. His eyes flickered. He fell to his knees, on the verge of losing consciousness.
Cypher got an idea. “Press it into the ground! Kitai, roll over on it and press it into the ground!”
For a moment, he didn’t know if his son had heard him. Then, with a final effort, Kitai threw himself forward. The plunger on the hypodermic pressed against the ground as he slumped over. After that, his limp body lay motionless.
But had he pressed the plunger? Had the hypodermic released its payload into Kitai?
Cypher watched the holographic monitor. Come on, he thought. Work, damn it.
Then, ever so slowly, Kitai’s blood contamination levels began to change, to decrease slowly. The red beeping lights turned to yellow, signaling the gradual return of his vital signs to normal. Cypher sat back, relieved. “Great work, cadet. Now you’re going to have to lie there.”
Of course, Kitai couldn’t hear him. He was unconscious. But Cypher kept talking as if his son were still awake because it felt better than talking to himself.
“The parasite that stung you,” he said, “has a paralyzing agent in its venom. You’re just going to have to lie there for a little bit while the antitoxin does its job.”
Cypher glanced at the feed from Kitai’s backpack camera. It captured the grotesque doughiness of his badly swollen face. A single tear rolled from the corner of his misshapen eye. For Cypher, it was an excruciating experience. There was nothing he could do to help his son. Nothing. He thrived on control, insisted on control, but in this situation control eluded him.
Compared with the forest in which Kitai had collapsed, he looked pitifully small. And the sun, Cypher noticed, was starting to slip past its apex. Cypher glanced at his timer. It would take a while for the contents of the hypodermic to do their job, but Kitai didn’t have forever.
As the sun dropped in the sky, approaching the horizon, the temperature began to drop as well. Cypher didn’t like it. He could see plants withdrawing into themselves, closing up to conserve heat in anticipation of what would be a brutal nighttime chill.
But Kitai couldn’t close up. He couldn’t protect himself. And Cypher couldn’t protect him, either. He could see that his son’s face was getting better. The swelling was gone. But he still lay unconscious, his eyes closed, his lifesuit pale.
“Kitai,” Cypher said.
No response. A gentle dusting of frost began to form on and around Kitai’s weakened frame. Cypher wanted to wake him, needed to wake him. He could hear the wind howling around his son, see the edges of the furled leaves flutter ferociously.
“Kitai,” he said again, “it’s time to get up.”
But Kitai’s eyes remained closed.
Please, Cypher thought, looking at his son’s beautiful face. He prayed for anything, anything at all. A muscle twitch. A flicker of life.
“Kitai,” he said more forcefully, “I want you to blink your eyes.”
Suddenly, Cypher heard something over his comm link. It was faint, shallow, but there was no mistaking it. Kitai was breathing. Breathing.
It was a start. But there wasn’t much time left. A tiny hint of ice showed up on the cadet’s left eyebrow.
“Son,” Cypher said, deeply concerned, “I need you to please blink your eyes.”
Slowly, ever so slightly, Kitai did as he was asked. In a raspy voice, he said, “Hey, Dad.”
He was looking directly into his backpack camera as he spoke. Cypher stared at the monitors and the bio-readings and exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
“That sucked,” Kitai said. Looking a little unsteady, he got to his feet and began gathering his gear.
“That is correct,” Cypher stated, always seeing things for what they were. “The temperature is dropping five degrees every ten minutes,” he added, emphasizing the urgency of the situation. “You’ve got twelve kilometers to the hot spot.”
Cypher checked Kitai’s vitals. They were stable. As he watched, his son gathered his gear and got ready to go.
Reassuming his general mode, Cypher said, “Let’s see that ‘ten kilometers in fifty minutes’ that you spoke about earlier, cadet.”
Kitai set his naviband and turned to the north. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, but in a voice that betrayed how weak he must have felt from his ordeal. Still, he set out at a sprint over the rugged terrain ahead of him. All around him, there were signs of the deep freeze that would accompany the onset of darkness. Animals were scrambling underground. It began to snow, lightly for now.
“SitRep?” Cypher said.
“Ten mikes out,” his son reported. “Good. All good.”
Out there, maybe, Cypher thought.
ix
Inside the cockpit, it wasn’t good at all. The words arterial shunt stared back at Cypher from the med screen. He pulled a long, narrow piece of tubing from the med-kit, then took out a thin surgical knife, leaving it positioned over his left thigh. Next he ripped open the side of his uniform pants, exposing the side of his leg. He could see the nasty gash there that was leaking all the blood. The holographic screen behind him displayed his arteries and veins. One blood vessel had been severed.
Cypher cast a quick glance at Kitai’s camera view. It showed the cadet pelting through a snowy landscape that was getting snowier all the time. Kitai was doing all he could to enable them to survive. It was up to Cypher to do the same. Without fanfare, he plunged the thin surgical knife into the side of his leg.
It hurt like hell. There was nothing Cypher wanted more than to slip the knife back out again. But he didn’t. Instead, he cut through the flesh of his leg, using the readout on the holographic display to guide him as he sought the end of the severed artery.
Finally, he pulled the knife out. But only for a moment. Then he drove the knife into his leg again, this time higher up on his thigh. Again the knife cut through tough muscle tissue until it reached the other severed end of his artery.
Only then did he withdraw the knife for good. By then he was shaking uncontrollably. He stared at a point in the distance and regained his composure for a moment. At the rate he was losing blood, he couldn’t afford any more than that. Jaw clenched against the pain, he inserted the tubing into one of the incisions in his leg. He could see its progress on the holographic image behind him. As he fed the tubing into his leg, it slid toward the artery and then into it. As Cypher watched, the artery closed around the end of the tubing.
Cypher felt something feathery touch his cheek. It took him a moment to realize that it was a tear. He wasn’t a robot after all. He could feel pain like anyone else. He just couldn’t give in to it.
With shaking hands, he inserted the piece of tubing into the second incision. Again using the holographic display for guidance, he slipped the tube into the ragged end of the severed artery. This time the fit was less perfect. Cypher wiggled it, almost passing out from pain. His readout told him that the arterial shunt was 87 percent effective. Looking down, he saw that blood was flowing through the piece of tubing sticking out from his leg. He had repaired the damage, at least temporarily. It was good enough for the time being.
Cypher leaned his head back against the loader, focused on the screen showing his son’s point of view, and struggled to remain conscious despite everything he had been through.