There was a thump in his chest, then a sticky squelching sound.
'It could have just asked,' said Cam from where he sat rubbing at his arm above his silvered hand. The technician was studying Cormac's open chest with great interest.
'I think you're right,' Cormac said to Mika. 'It was almost as if it was frantically searching the planet for them, and when it didn't find them there it turned its attention to us and grabbed them as quickly as it could.'
'Desperately,' added Mika.
'I don't know. Certainly without any regard for human life. We were lucky Hubris could take that kind of punishment.'
He fell silent. At least, most of them were lucky. Mika had been dealing with various injuries for some twenty hours now. Three of the crew were in life-support canisters, awaiting return to civilization. They might survive, though they would then be spending a long time in a regrowth tank. One of the runcible technicians had not been even that lucky; her head had been crushed to pulp when one of the runcible components had shifted and caught her against a wall
'Did Chaline have anything to say?' he asked her.
'Repairs are well under way, but she's not happy about the delays. She's becoming very single-minded about her runcible.'
Mika stepped back from him with her gloved hands held up and away from her white coat. The gloves were quite bloody. She looked up at the screen above where Carn was sitting. This screen showed a scanned image of Cormac's chest. He had only looked at it once.
'Aiden?' he asked.
'He retrieved the shuttle. Cento's been stored… so has the shuttle; it's beyond repair. They're getting another one out of storage as soon as the shuttle bay has been repaired. Chaline was panicking about the heavy-lifter, but it was undamaged.'
She stepped close and started manipulating things in his chest again.
'Heavy-lifter?'
'In storage… one heavy-lifter and four minishuttles. Chaline needs the lifter to take down the runcible.'
'Oh… seems we might be all right…'
Mika did not immediately reply. Cormac felt more movement, then heard the low drone of the bone welder. He glanced down at that moment and wished he hadn't. From his solar plexus upwards, the skin and muscle of his chest had been peeled back. Mika had a finger shoved through a hole between two obviously broken ribs and was running the tip of the welder along the break. Cormac could smell something strangely dusty. Calcium particles had escaped the electrostatic process that was laying them down in the breaks.
'We are, I suppose,' said Mika, standing back again to view her work. 'But Hubris is going to be here some time. It needs parts brought from Minostra, and they'll have to come through the runcible. Not until then will it be able to leave orbit.' She placed the head of the welder back in its sterilizing holder and pushed the wheeled unit a little way back from the table. 'Cellweld Inc.' was the wording of the logo on this device, which was a silvered box on top of a wheeled trolley. A touch-console was mounted in the top of the box, and from the side of it issued a skein of pipes and cables. These terminated in a head that could take any of the racked adaptors stored underneath the box. Mika selected something that looked like a small glass spade. 'I've clamped the breaks just to give some support to the welds. I don't suppose you'll be resting for a while yet. The clamps will take a year to dissolve; plenty of time for your ribs to completely heal. I've dealt with most of the internal tissue damage. I'll seal you up now.'
Why was it, Cormac wondered, that doctors so relished telling you exactly what they were doing?
The welder droned and there were horrible sucking sounds in his chest. The tugging felt like what an errant child feels when its mother pulls on its coat.
'There, all done,' said Mika after what seemed an age. 'I've put a couple of analgesic tabs in, and they'll dissolve over the next few days. There might be the odd twinge, but you'll be all right now.' Behind her he saw the tubes of the remote lung clear of blood and felt the small tugs as she detached each of them. He did not get time to feel any lack of oxygen, for she reached immediately for the back of his neck. Feeling returned suddenly. There was no fading in, no pins and needles; his body just turned back on. He took a gasping breath and the sound of his heart was a sudden thunder.
'You are all right,' she said, even in this circumstance not prepared to ask a question. Cormac sat upright and looked down at his chest. It was flawless. Cell-welding left no scars, at least not on the body. He nodded to her. She smiled briefly at him, then turned to Cam.
'It's not pain and it's not physical function,' she said, resuming a conversation they had been having as Cormac had come in.
Carn opened and closed his silvered hand. 'I've lost PU contact. All I get is normal sensation.'
Cormac glanced at him. So that's what his hand was. The necessity of using separate instruments on the artefact must have been annoying for him, all for the sake of a glove. Cormac swung his legs over and stood up. He took up his shirt from where he had tossed it, and pulled it on. He could see that he was now completely dismissed from Mika's attention, and that she was totally focused on Carn. He left her to attend to him.
The drop-shafts were still out of commission, but that was not too much of a problem aboard a ship. It merely meant there was no irised field to drag him to his destination. He had to step into the shaft, where he became weightless, and shove off the inspection ladders in the direction he wanted to go. The trick, as with all weightless manoeuvring, was not to get up too much speed. Soon he stopped himself at the required level and headed for the recreation room, which had now become the centre of operations. He passed through corridors where robot welders were at work, and other areas where technicians had stripped panels away from the walls and were swearing in their own particular jargon. In some areas the gravity was somewhat changeable, which was more worrying than it being completely out. A fluctuating gravplate could quite easily smear a person across the floor. When he arrived in the recreation room he found only Thorn and Chaline. Chaline was watching a tablescreen. It showed a scene across the hull of Hubris. The ship was crawling with robots like cockroaches. Thorn was sprawled asleep on a couch, a flask lying on its side on the table next to him, with a half-full glass of Scotch next to it.
'How are things going?' Cormac asked Chaline.
Still watching the screen she said, 'Seventy hours and we should be fully secure. Hubris won't be able to go supralight until we get a new engine housing from Minostra. The ramfields are down.'
Cormac nodded, then said, 'I walked over some fluctuating grav out there.'
Chaline did not look round. 'No, you didn't. You walked over gravplates with a fluctuating power source. We had a little bit of a panic with one of the generators and had to shut it down.'
Cormac decided to ask no more concerning the damage. The list would just go on and on.
'Hubris, what's the situation with Dragon?' he asked as he walked over to the catering unit.
'Dragon is in orbit seven hundred kilometres ahead of us. There is some activity on its surface,' the ship replied.
At the catering unit Cormac said simply, 'Coffee,' as the machine now recognized his voice and would provide it exactly how he liked. He inspected the cup of white sludge it had provided, then fully keyed in his request. Another one to add to Chaline's list. When he finally got the drink he was after, he returned to Chal-ine's table and sat down.
'Right, tell me, what's the activity?'
The screen changed to show Dragon, and Chaline looked at Cormac in annoyance. He shrugged apologetically, then returned his attention to the screen. Ripples were travelling all round the surface of the alien.