Ravens of Eternity

189 Unexpected Fallout

Eva and Claire walked towards town hall, which was located at the exact center of the settlement. Almost all of the settlements they had come to were laid out similarly. In some cases, they were the exact same.

For the most part, the town hall was in the center simply because that’s what every settlement had built first. Everything else was assembled around it, no doubt based on standardized layouts that their building printers came pre-programmed with.

Almost all town halls themselves were the exact same design, and so the Ravens learned to spot them on sight.

Eva supposed it was the best performing design. Or at the very least, the default blueprint that was good enough so no-one bothered to modify it.

The sounds of shouting and arguing grew louder and louder the closer they approached the center square. And when they arrived, they saw throngs of people arguing amongst each other. Mostly, it seemed like colonists and Federation marines were debating with each other. Heatedly.

And everyone was armed.

Though it wasn’t an all-out screaming match, Eva could tell that tensions were high. If there was enough of a provocation, it was clear things wouldn’t go well.

She and Claire pushed through the throng towards town hall itself, but stopped when they got to the top of the steps. There, right in front of the town hall doors were two people, both also in a heated argument.

One was a fairly well-dressed middle-aged man with greying hair. Opposite him was a gruff female marine. Though, she wasn’t just any soldier – the pips on her collar indicated that she was a captain.

.....

No doubt, she was in charge of the marine detachment nearby. Eva supposed that the man next to her was a settlement official.

“Look, I keep telling you,” said the man, “we’ve got only fifteen percent of our reserve food left. I wanna share what we’ve got with you, but my duty’s to my colonists, first and foremost.”

“Mister Mayor, you wouldn’t even have a settlement left if it wasn’t for my marines,” argued the captain. “Or did you already forget about that detachment of Hegemony soldiers that attacked you all a couple cycles ago?”

“You’re blowing that event way out of proportion. And besides, we gave you what little food we could then, as our thanks! Or are you now trying to extort over your supposed selflessness in defending our settlement for us?”

“We don’t want to be here any more than you do, alright? But I’ve gotta abide by my orders.”

“Your orders also tell you that you’re supposed to starve out here? To pull food from my people when we’re looking at a long winter ourselves?”

Both parties looked utterly exasperated with each other. And judging from the arguments going on all around, this very problem was on all their minds.

“Tell you what,” continued the mayor, “why don’t you call up your bosses and have them airdrop you some food, hm? Then we can mooch off you instead.”

“I told you we’d pay you for our share!” cried the captain. “And I’ve told you a hundred times I’ve already called my superiors. We are slated for an airdrop, but the frontline is in greater need. Now’s the time for all of us to tighten our belts and share what we’ve got!”

“You’re the ones that brought this war to our doorstep! None of this would be happening if you weren’t here in the first-damned-place!”

The marine captain ground her teeth at the accusation. The mayor spoke as though she was personally the cause of all the fighting, and it dug deep into her.

“Ungrateful citizens,” she muttered.

“Greedy soldiers,” he countered.

The two looked at each other with daggers in their eyes. It was clear the two had long since tired of each other.

And that was exactly when Eva decided to step in.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“And just who the hell are you?” snapped the captain.

“Ah, sorry!” said Claire. “We’re just simple smugglers. We ran the blockade earlier and are here with meds and food.”

“Oh, thank the gods!” said the mayor. “Quick, quick, come inside! Let’s get the paperwork all settled. I’ll buy all the food you’ve got on hand.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said the captain. “How about I buy that food off you instead? We’ve got access to a military spend, and can happily offer you twice what this fool can offer you.”

Eva raised her hands to calm them both down.

“Take it easy,” she told them. “We’re happy to sell what we’ve got to both of you. It doesn’t have to be ‘one side takes all’ here. And thanks for the offer, but standard prices are fine.”

“You both should know,” added Clair, “that we’ve only brought 300 cubic meters of dry foodstuffs. And we have multiple settlements on our contract route, this one being the first. We can only offer so much at this time, but we can spin back around if we have leftover stock.”

“Honestly,” said the mayor, “we’ll take whatever you can sell. Dunno if you heard already, but we weren’t able to get much yield out of our farms last season, thanks to... well, you know. Every bit you sell us is gonna help, no matter what.”

“How about us four go inside and hash this out, yeah?” said Eva. “I don’t think there’s any need for everyone to be out here getting all worked up.”

The captain sighed, a hint of regret in her voice.

“Alright, I agree,” she said.

Then she turned towards her people and ordered them to return to camp. The mayor did the same with colonists, and asked them to cool off and head home. Both told them that food was incoming, and that was enough to satiate them. For now, at least.

Once the crowd had all but completely dispersed, the four walked into town hall and continued their negotiations.

“Sorry for being so damned brash out there,” said the captain. “My whole company’s been on edge since that damned attack. Having to split rations isn’t helping any.”

“It’s fine,” the mayor replied. “My people are ragged and stressed by all this fighting. Lots are talking about leaving, and yeah, not enough food in the stores isn’t helping a damn thing. And speaking of food...”

“We’re prepared to offer 60 tons of food,” said Claire. “We’ve got various grains and grain flour, dehydrated vegetables, as well as some nuts and seeds.

“Half that’s plenty enough to keep us going for some time,” said the mayor. “Combined with our own output and what’s left in the stores – we could stretch it out for a couple months or so.”

“My troops are only a tenth of the settlement,” said the captain, “so you should buy 50 tons, and we can pick up the final 10. That’s more than enough for us for the same amount of time.”

“Or you both could pitch in and share it all over time,” said Eva. “Would make it easiest on everyone involved.”

The captain shook her head vehemently.

“I’d rather just buy your food straight and not have to deal with these damned colonists all the time.”

“I get it,” said Eva, “but you’ve both gotta realize – you’re all stuck here no matter what. If you can’t get your shit together and work well as a team, you’re all gonna die out here, starving and shot up.”

~

Amal sighed and wiped the sweat from her brow as she finished tending to yet another one of her many patients. Then she reset her MedGun and allowed it to perform its self-sterilization routine.

It was ready for use by the time she reached her next patient, who was just a few steps over.

He looked like a young man with dirty blond hair, athletic. And also in deep pain. He groaned and grit his teeth constantly as his body curled up around his abdomen. And on the left side of his stomach were bandage pads, but she could clearly see the blood seeping through.

Without hesitation, she scanned him with her MedGun, then set an appropriate dosage of painkillers for him before she shot him with it.

“You’re looking right awful,” she said. “Did you get shot up by Hegemony, too?”

Relief quickly spread through him, and his body visibly sunk down into his bed as his muscles relaxed. With Amal’s ultrafentanyl coursing through his system, everything felt light as a feather, and all the pain he had been suffering was but a dream.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he replied. “What I do know is that a couple cycles ago some soldiers shot each other up, and a lot of people got caught in the crossfire. Whose bullet came from whose side hardly matters at that point.”

Amal turned him onto his back and pressed the skin around his bandage pads. His skin felt tougher in that area, and a little bit discolored. Darker, in fact.

“I need to peel these off so I can treat you, alright?” she asked.

But before she could reach for one of the bandage pads, he quickly grabbed her wrist and stopped her.

“I’m fine,” he said. “There’s others that’s got it worse than me. You oughta take care of them first.”

To his surprise, she simply smiled as she pried his hand off her wrist. Firmly, but gently. And also effortlessly. He had clearly lost a great deal of strength since his stay at the clinic began. Plus the drugs he had been dosed with certainly didn’t help.

And, of course, because she was a Refugee.

“That’s for me to determine,” she replied. “You just lay back and let me work, okay?”

She peeled back the bandage pads, tossed them into a refuse pile, then sighed deeply at his wound. It was clearly a bullet that had grazed across his abdomen. But instead of the usual puncture wound, it had grazed his side and tore out a length of skin – roughly a dozen centimeters.

The wound itself had festered, with the skin surrounding it starting to turn necrotic. Its fetid, rotten smell rose up easily, now that it was exposed to the air.

Amal noted that the wound had some stitching that barely held it together. But it was so badly done that it might have been better without it.

“Did you try to patch yourself up or something?” she asked. “Is that why you think you’re doing fine?”

He didn’t have an answer for her, and instead turned his head away.

“Hmph. Well you’re lucky I got here in time,” she continued.

She primed her MedGun for tissue dissolution, then injected another set of nanites into him, but they were localized around his wound. Together, they began to burn away all infected flesh and muscle cell after cell, minute after minute.

While they worked, she prepped her MedGun for tissue repair, and inserted a biocell ampoule into it.

“Are you still feeling any pain?” she asked. “I can give you a bit more if you need.”

“No,” he replied quickly. “I mean, yes, I can feel a bit of pain, but no, I don’t need more.”

“Why’d you try to refuse treatment just now?”

“The boy’s been refusing treatment since we all got in here,” said someone nearby.

“Yeah, he was already bandaged up, so we believed he didn’t need help,” said another. “At least, not right away.”

“And you all just believed him?” asked Amal.

“I’m charming like that,” answered her patient.

“You’re an idiot like that,” chimed in yet another patient “You should’ve said something.”

“Maybe I deserve it,” he replied.

Silence fell on the nearby patients right after. Not that Amal even noticed – she was busy reacquiring and resetting her nanite swarm. It was critical that she fed it the right genomic sequences, or his body might reject any regenerated cells.

“This is gonna sting a bit, alright?” she said. “And it’ll take at least a quarter of an hour to complete, so don’t move a muscle. If you mess it up and make me start over again, I’m gonna have to knock you out.”

.....

“Oorah,” her patient replied quietly.

With pursed lips, she injected him with nanites along with fresh biocells. Together, they began to stitch his muscles and skin back together, bit by bit.

He felt a tingling and a slight stinging in his side as they worked their magic. Then he glanced over at Amal, who kept an eye on both his wound and her MedGun’s readouts.

“You’re a traveling nurse, right?” he asked.

“More like a traveling MedTech, but yeah, basically,” she replied.

“What’s the difference?”

“MedTechs are more like trauma doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, orderlies, and pharmacists all rolled into one. Not really an expert in any specific field, but it means we can lend a hand wherever, whenever. We’re trained specifically to help out in places like these.”

“Overworked clinics?”

“Warzones.”

Amal scanned his wound again, and noted its progress. She adjusted a few settings and sped up the process slightly.

“What’s your name, by the way?” she asked.

“Max,” he replied.

“Max what?”

“Just Max.”

“Alright, Just Max. Your tissue repair is going well. It won’t take long before you’ll be able to walk outta here good as new. Well, this patch of skin and muscle anyway.”