The Engineer's Escape: The Swallowtail Voyages, Book 1 by Trip Ellington

Author:Trip Ellington [Ellington, Trip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Ellington Marketing, LLC
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Skye awoke to the sound of Mal’s voice, urgently yelling in her ear. Her head ached from the hard fall she had taken earlier. Her hand was on a smooth, cool surface—the floor here was hewn of stone. The other hand—it was gone, she remembered with a sickening lurch in her stomach.

“Skye! Skye! Wake up!” She suddenly became aware that there was an insistent chiming coming from within the suit, and a warning message flashing across the view on the HUD. Skye felt the throbbing of her arm—the pain magnified at the ragged stump where her damaged arm had been.

“Mal?” she croaked. Her throat was dry and it burned with every breath.

“You are at eighteen percent capacity, Skye. You must repair your arm, and fix the leak that is in your suit. You are losing your supply of oxygen at an unsustainable rate.” Skye was breathing heavily, the pain from her arm overwhelming her in waves. “You were unconscious for far too long. I’ve been trying to wake you for hours.”

“Mal, I need you to turn off my pain receptors,” she said hoarsely.

“I can’t do that,” Mal said. “You won’t be able to sense any other damage to this body. And at eighteen percent—”

“Mal! Just do it! Or we won’t be getting out of here,” Skye rasped. “I can’t think clearly when I’m in this much pain.”

“Oh, very well,” Mal’s voice was heavy with reluctance. Skye felt the pain recede as her receptors were overridden by her neural connection with Mal. Her breathing began to normalize, returning to a baseline, and her mind began to clear and regain focus.

Skye understood the necessity of pain. Her designers had impressed that concept into her early on. Without feeling pain, she would often push her body beyond its limits, causing her to fail in accomplishing her mission. She could still remember the engineers arguing over her fringe cases, and with the introduction of Mal, they agreed she could be given the option to disable her pain if the situation called for it.

She rolled up her sleeve gently, wincing at the raggedness of what was left of her arm. Skye pulled her welding tool out of her tool belt, turning it on. It ignited an electric blue blaze with a hiss.

She touched the flame to her wound, watching as the jagged edges of her flesh began to cauterize, melting into a vague, flesh-toned mass. The smell was horrific—the scent of burning metaplastics caused her eyes to tear. She ran the flame over the wound several times until she was satisfied with her work. She pulled the sleeve of her suit back over the stump, returning her welding tool to her utility belt. She then pulled out a polymer adhesive to repair the sleeve of her suit. As the adhesive dried, Skye picked up the rock that she had attempted to use as a weapon.

It was slate colored and metallic—a solid form of the polyatomic ion, it seemed. It shone a little in the light of her night vision.

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