Read Wounds, Book 1 for Free Online

faceplate but whether it was clear or not, she didn’t know because the helmet was seared and sooty as an old filter of an air repurifier that hadn’t been changed in three weeks.
    But one thing she did understand. The patient was writhing, restless, pumping his legs in slow motion and getting nowhere fast. She knew pain when she saw it. She knew trouble.
    “As I said, Colonel,” said Blate. He stumped between her and the gurney; his right eye tracked in with a tiny whirr. “Things are really not that simple.”
    Chapter
7
    T here was this big joke about S.C.E. Those engineer guys show up, and everything goes terribly wrong. Some kind of cosmic curse thing going. Lense figured she had the S.C.E. curse but good because everything that could go wrong had, and in a really big way. Like now, for instance: stranded God-knew-where with nothing but the clothes on her back, and a bulky EVA suit whose only useful item included an emergency locator beacon. Otherwise, no emergency rations, no tools, no water. No Julian. No nothing.
    Tacky with sweat, Lense battled through a thicket of prickles, her arms full of spiky boughs sticky with sap and stinking of resin. She’d stripped to her black tee, and her arms were crisscrossed with scratches. The branches were from some sort of stunted, indigenous conifer with a gnarly black trunk. Only thing growing besides these damn prickles and a heck of a lot of scrub grass and chaparral. She was headed downhill toward a natural depression she’d discovered near a slow creek slicked with scum northwest of the inland sea.
    She was huffing like she was making an ascent. Her dark curls were plastered to her scalp, and sweat trickled down the back of her neck. Maybe it would get cooler when that weird orange sun went down. Then she eyed that sky and figured no way. Maybe four degrees C cooler, and that’d be it. Too many clouds trapping way too much heat, leaving the air hot and turgid as sludge. Her chest was tight, as if a metal band were twisted around it. Her head roared with a headache so bad, she thought her brain was going to dribble right out of her ears. Her gut was doing flips, pushing bile into the back of her throat.
    The air was death by slow poison. She had symptoms like making altitude too fast the way pikers did with Everest on Earth, or Vulcan’s Mount Seleya, not acclimating first to make up for the lower partial pressure of oxygen at altitude. Probably she’d get better in a couple of days. But she didn’t want to be anywhere on this rock in a couple of days and so hoped she wasn’t going to find out.
    And she was thirsty. Grit crunched between her teeth and her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth. Dying of thirst was really unpleasant, but she didn’t dare drink water she hadn’t boiled. For one thing, the water didn’t look that inviting and there was nothing living in it so far as she could tell, except for some scummy kind of sea grass. But she wasn’t ready to die because of desperation either. Not that she thought boiling would do a whole hell of a lot. That water was loaded with contaminants. Residual radioactive ash, polychlorinated phenols, industrial waste. Probably she could boil away the more volatile phenols and other organic carcinogens. Still no guarantee, though, and there was nothing to do about the ash. Maybe filter it through her uniform top? No, that’d take a long time and the uniform was a tight weave, not very porous. Probably more would evaporate away than drip through. So that was a nonstarter.
    She’d thought about scrounging for water from some of the native plants, but she hadn’t spotted any water-trapping plants like bamboo, or adun cacti like they had on Vulcan. Maybe she could rig a solar still, but she didn’t have anything clear to drape over the pit upon which water could condense. But she had to get water. More than food, water’s what would keep her alive and…
    Whoa, slow down; panic over one thing at a time .
    The