CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SAHVIN
“Hey, Kazza! Lieutenant Kazza, please respond,” Dexel Flatu’s urgent request came through my helmet com. “Kazza, are you, all right?”
I groaned in reply. “Not exactly. I got hit… Fell off the plateau.”
“Where?”
“The east face near the trail. Hit a rock. I can feel the nanites working… will try to get up,” I groaned. I was leaning against the rock, laying on my injured shoulder. Any movement made me want to scream in pain. But I had to move.
I stayed still for half a minute and just breathed waiting for the pain to recede. Then I pushed off the rock and rolled on to my back. “Fuuuck!” I yelled. “Damn that hurts!”
On my back, I was laying on an angle against the hill. I bent my left leg so I could push off with my foot and turn to I could use my uninjured arm to get up off the ground. It was a struggle, with a lot of pain, but once I got my feet under me, I could use the augmentations of the suit to stand.
I locked the left arm of the suit to immobilize my arm and left shoulder, then I looked around for my ion rifle. An inmate who found that could do a lot of damage with that. I saw it by the rock, bent down to pick it u, and slung it over my right shoulder. I flexed a thigh muscle to get the suit moving and started walking up the steep trail back to the plateau.
“Hey, Dexel! Is anyone else hurt or worse?” I asked.
“Jegtu took a minor hit in his butt. Apparently only a couple of those criminals had armor-piercing weapons,” he said. “We took ‘em out and collected the weapons. We captured one, and he told us they were trying to steal the shuttle to get off this purgatory.”
“Then they would be dead anyway. There are no other habitable worlds in this system, and the shuttles don’t have the range to go interstellar,” I muttered as I trudged up the hill putting one foot in front of the other thanks to the suit. Otherwise, it was all I could do to stay on my feet. It was hard to breathe, and I felt nauseous, but I was getting off this miserable planet and back to meomee.
“I told the guy, we probably would have taken them with us had they asked instead of attacking us,” Dexel went on. “We took a whole bunch of people who weren’t on our list. Most of these people are political prisoners of the Empire.”
“What was he in for?” I asked.
“He was a member of a resistance movement and actively recruiting antigovernment conspirators.”
“What did you do with him?” I asked.
“We cuffed him and sat him down by a rock…Figured we’d let him loose just before we lift off, but we had you and Jegtu to locate first.”
“Did he shoot anybody?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t matter if he did, the pistol he had would not have pierced our suits.”
I walked several steps while I thought about it. Finally, I said, “Check him for weapons. If he’s clean, put him on the shuttle with the others. If causes any trouble, tell him we’ll leave him someplace worse than this.”
“Okay, Lieutenant. Will do,” said Dexel.
I was the last person to get to the shuttle for their final trip up from Julconi. Command sent the Kurellis ahead to the rendezvous in case the Sargans sent more battlecruisers after us. Our passengers would be bunking on Dread One in the cargo bay until we could rendezvous with the passenger freighter to exchange our personnel. These rescues would go onto the Kurellis.
As I got on the shuttle, I receded my helmet and heard something hit the deck. I looked down and saw it was the shell that pierced my armor. It was initially about five centimeters long, but it had been compressed as it partially penetrated my armor and my shoulder blade. My suit stopped it from doing significant damage, but it nicked my lung. Had the armor not stopped it, it was on a trajectory toward my heart.
Dexel told me later that Commander Maktu had a similar experience on Breskaa, only it had been close to his kidney and renal artery.
I was still in pain when we reached the Dreadnaught, but it was much more tolerable by then. The nanites were progressing with the tissue repairs, and the suit had injected me with painkillers and stimulants. My condition had improved enough, so I didn’t have to report to sickbay. Even the damage to my suit was repaired.
There was no predicting the ambush at the plateau. We absolutely did not expect them to have armor piercers. None of the Farseek Brigade had ever been on a mission like the one to Julconi. I figured I was lucky to get out no worse.
It was a learning experience for all of us. I suspected that we would only be able to make a few more rescues before we had filled our ships to capacity. I estimated we had no more than about six months before we would have to head to Farseek with the people we had rescued.
More prominent on my mind then was getting to the rendezvous and back with my Nora. Would I do it again? Hell yes!