Read Assessing Survival for Free Online

job.”
    “If you aren’t a scientist, how do you know all of this?”
    “My family likes to talk. A lot. An extremely large amount. Some of it had to stick, and when the defense team took my family in to work on the first cyborgs, I went with them. I was like the Carter family mascot. I got coffee, tea and kept the reports flowing through the research department.”
    “And you picked it up as you went along.” He nodded as if he had put it together.
    “I did, and with every one of my guys that made it back into battle and stayed there, I got better at knowing what to put in the mix to keep them balanced and make them as whole as possible.”
    He chuckled. “Impressive. Who knew that the basic medical systems installed to keep humans youthful would result in something that could save their species? The vanity of humanity might just save us all.”
    She nodded. “There is one thing I haven’t gotten access to.”
    “What is that?”
    “Records of deployments. I have no idea how you actually fight the Splice.”
    He shivered a little. “That is part of our weapons system. You have to cut them and burn them out. Their bodies are caricatures of the species they have destroyed, and when you first see it, you get sick when you recognize human flesh. Men you have met and known are now embedded in monsters.”
    “Damn. Oh, Nikolai, I am so sorry.” She had never thought of what happened to the dead fighters. It was something she didn’t want to think about.
    He nodded. “We get used to it, or we go mad.”
    “That isn’t an option I want to think about.” She wrinkled her nose.
    “We have methods of working through things. Usually, we fight it out, but we keep others watching in case we go squirrely.” He shrugged.
    “I haven’t ever seen a squirrel. Is there any wildlife here?”
    “No, though there is an ancient city.”
    She sat up. “Seriously?”
    “Yeah. We don’t know how the atmosphere can be so compatible, but it was apparently the same thing as what was needed by the previous inhabitants.”
    “This isn’t canned air?”
    “No. We run it through a biological filter, but it is the same air that we have outside.”
    Her hands curled into fists, and she forced herself to relax them. “Can we go outside?”
    The excitement in her system at the thought of being out on the surface of something that didn’t have cables and monitors all over it was a wave of adrenalin she wasn’t prepared for.
    “I believe that you have an appointment with the medical staff. Based on their comments, they are excited. The coding that has come with the designs is ground breaking.”
    Stitch smiled. “It looks like Cracker isn’t the only one awake.” The coding was Lucky’s strong point. It was a relief to know she had made it through. The head injury had been intense, and the visible damage was terrifying.
    “I have to say, I have never heard of an administrative team with so many nicknames. That is usually left to the men of action.”
    She snorted. “That is sexist.”
    He shrugged. “It is true. So what’s the deal?”
    “It is sexist. Since the guys have nicknames, they have to take a step back when they can’t just call us by our first names. It produces a barrier that removes sexuality from the equation.”
    Nikolai nodded as if it made sense. “So, where did Stitch come from?”
    She made a face. “On my second week at Adaptation Base, I had a patient who came out of cold sleep, and he started crashing. His mind was trapped in the battle, and his body was missing a lot of parts. He needed a jolt to wake him up, so I climbed on a gurney and started using a stitch gun on his wounds. It was painful, but it was an action that his training accepted as a path to healing. He stabilized, and I was pulled off him as they went to put him in pre-assessment.
    “I came back in later, and he didn’t remember me, but he remembered someone cursing at him and giving him stitches. So, I became Stitch.”
    “You