Redline Corps: Expendable by Rachel Aukes

Author:Rachel Aukes [Aukes, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Guess what? I didn’t die. I’d only come super close to dying.

I’d awakened in the med lab, inside the emergency atmo chamber. The power was back on throughout the ship, and everyone survived. Once back online, OTIS had sent small bots to assist the crew in getting out of the reactor room. I survived by sheer luck because I’d never disconnected my air hose in my haste to reach the CPU room, and it had dragged along the entire time.

Everyone was back to business as usual with one noticeable difference. The rest of the crew was nice to me. I mean, Commander Chen didn’t change—he was still all stoic and professional. And Samantha and Jason had been nice to me before. But Sam went a full day without being a dick, which had to take serious effort on his part. Even Jess brought me a slushie she’d made in the galley, though she’s still not much of a talker.

Tapping through files on my armlet, I watched the interview I’d made with David and seeing him smile brought me a semblance of peace. I missed him terribly.

Samantha entered the med lab and I set down my slushie. She stopped outside the atmo chamber and checked the monitor. “How’s the wrist?” she asked.

I opened and closed my fingers on my left hand a couple of times. My wrist felt badly bruised, but the pain was gone. “Good. You ought to trademark those injections.”

She smirked. “They’re already trademarked by Aegis Group.” She turned serious. “Next time, you need to come to me as soon as you receive an injury. You already had a staph infection in that fracture. If it would’ve gone much longer, it’s very likely you would’ve lost the hand.”

“I seriously thought it was just a sprain.”

“Well, out here, any injury is considered serious. You clearly scraped your hand or wrist when you hit it to pick up the infection. And as for your fracture, you’re lucky that you didn’t fully break the wrist. Despite all the advances in medicine, bones still never heal quite right in space.”

I didn’t quite get why the human body was so delicate in space. It made sense that we weren’t built for zero-G, but you’d think artificial gravity would fake out the body enough to make it think it was on Earth. But nope. Just because the floors were designed to pull us toward them, our bodies knew it wasn’t the real thing. Even on colonies that were incredibly similar to Earth’s gravity still had negative impacts on the human body. We were a finicky species.

“Your bio signs are reading normal, so you no longer need to remain in the atmo chamber,” she said.

“About time.” I stood. I’d been going stir-crazy. I figured Samantha was being overly cautious since she’s the ship’s medical specialist. I passed out from oxygen deprivation. Just a bit of fresh air and I was fine.

“You can resume normal activities, but you should be gentle with that wrist until it fully heals.

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