"Lieutenant?" the voice said gently. It was soft. Feminine. Angelic. "Lieutenant Burke? Can you hear me?"
The last conscious thought Eric Burke had was one of searing pain. It was gone now, replaced by numbness. He blinked his eyes. The room came into focus.
Eric was staring up at the ceiling. He tried to move his head but couldn't. His arms wouldn't move. Nor would his legs. He tried to sit up, but to no avail.
"Where—" His voice was feeble. "Where is my platoon?"
"They're fine," the voice said soothingly. Someone's head leaned over, blocking out the overhead lights. She was wearing a white overcoat with medical insignia and commander's stripes. A stethoscope hung around her neck. The doctor was Alliance, which meant he hadn't been captured.
"Where am I?" Eric breathed a sigh of relief.
"Citadel Haven." Bringing out pocketlight, she shined it in both his eyes. "Sector twelve, 40 Eridani system."
He didn't recognise the name of the base, but with the war on, there were lots of installations he didn't know about. The fact that he was on a citadel told him that he had been transferred to relative safety and away from the front lines.
"Why can't I move?" Eric asked as the doctor continued to poke and prod.
The doctor's brow creased for a split second. "Lieutenant, what's the last thing you remember?"
"Pain," he said. The memories came back, and not all of them were welcome. "My platoon was to breach a Federation space station ahead of the Marines. We had just planted the bomb and we were getting ready for extract. There was an explosion . . ."
Eric's voice trailed off. There had been a flash out of the corner of his eye. He heard nothing in the vacuum of space, but the explosion vaporised Jenkins, who had been standing next to him. He was thrown against the hull of the cruiser and then he blacked out. His arms and legs felt like they were on fire.
"Your suit was breached by shrapnel," the doctor said. "The failsafes cut your right arm off at the shoulder, your left arm off at the elbow and your right leg at the knee."
The Valkyrie Combat Suit is one of the finest all-purpose zero-g military exoskeletons in existence. Equipped with a variety of weapons and sensors, it represented the pinnacle of combat firepower, stealth and survivability for Alliance infantry. Their cost was also astronomical, which is why only the Army Special Forces and Space Navy SOLARs got them.
In the event of a major vacuum breech that could not be sealed, the suit would inject the wearer with anesthetic, cut off the exposed limb at one of several points, cauterise the wound and seal itself up, all in about four hundredths of a second. It wasn't pretty, but it sure beat freezing or suffocating to death in the black emptiness of space. With the widespread use of bionic prosthetics and cloned replacement limbs, losing an arm or leg (or two) seemed a small price to pay for survivability.
"According to your chart, your helmet also had a small crack in it which led to some air loss. It was patched by one of your shooters, but not before you lost consciousness and slipped into a vacuum coma." The doctor finished her examination and elevated the head of his bed.
"How long was I out?" Eric said. He had survived four deployments—three in the special forces—with only a couple of flesh wounds, now this. His body was covered by the sheets, but he could make out the silhouettes of his limbs. Everything looked normal.
Some of the guys in his platoon had mechanical replacement limbs. They all seemed to like them. After all, it made them faster and stronger, invaluable attributes for a special operator. Still, Eric hoped that he could get through his life as 100% flesh and bone.
"Two months," the doctor replied gently. Once in the sitting position, Eric noticed a nurse and two orderlies in the room. "You really had us worried with the coma, Lieutenant. We knew you didn't have any brain damage but for some reason, you didn't want to wake up."
Once he was sitting up, the nurse and orderlies came over.
"I'm going to release the spinal block in just a minute. Then we'll start moving your new arms and leg," the doctor said, stepping back.
Eric suddenly felt sensation return to his body. His arms started to twitch involuntarily. The room started to spin. He tipped over and blacked out.
****************
Control over his new limbs didn't come immediately. Although the neural network of the prosthetics was integrated seamlessly with his own nerve endings, he had to learn to walk and pick things up again.
The biosynthetic arms and muscles were stronger, tougher and faster than his own arms; he gave himself a black eye trying to run his hand through his hair. Within a couple of days he was able to walk with assistance and then began four months of physical therapy.
Eric Burke came from a navy family. His mother was a career space warfare officer. His dad was an intel officer. Both retired before the war between the Federation and the Alliance, leaving it for him and his sisters to fight. After graduating from secondary school, Eric enlisted in the Terran Space Navy; even though he was smart enough, his grades weren't good enough for college or the Academy, and he needed direction.
The TSN gave him a swift kick in the ass; his mother may have been an admiral, but that counted for squat in his world. Chiefs loved to torture him, but what he didn't know until later was that they were building him up. After one deployment, his section chief talked him into going career.
With a couple of years in the fleet, he went to college, breezed through OCS and was recruited to the Naval Special Warfare Command, with the promise of being able to blow shit up. He somehow survived 24th Century BUD/S and soon found himself among the interstellar descendants of the old Navy SEALs.
Then the war started. He had three deployments as a SOLAR (Space, Ocean, Land, AtmospheRe), one as a platoon AOIC and two as an OIC because the SOLAR teams were stretched so thin.
He didn't really know what the war was about. He didn't care. Secession. Trade rights. Resources. Whatever. All Eric Burke wanted to do was kill things and bring the young men and women under his command back alive.
Now a full lieutenant, Burke was nearing the end of his third platoon deployment when he lost his arms and leg. The wounds wouldn't force him out of the service, but he did lose his platoon. At least until he was done with rehab.
While on Citadel Haven, he heard from his parents; they were worried, but understood all about the risks of having a child in special warfare. His dad told him he loved him and his mother told him to keep his head down.
After a month of physical therapy, Burke was reassigned out of the hospital section of the citadel to the barracks wing. The space station was almost brand new and had never seen combat. Of course, anyone crazy enough to assault a citadel was either completely insane or backed up by a fleet (or two) of warships.
He was inexplicably assigned to his own room. Rather, Eric was assigned a double-occupancy bunk, but no roommate ever showed up. He got used to it and his therapy was going faster than the doctors had anticipated. Burke pushed himself because he wanted to get back to the Teams. There were SOLARs with their plasma cannons in the fight and he was lollygagging around a cushy Navy base far from the front. He wanted back into the action.
Once a week, he attended group therapy, sessions designated for sailors and space marines who had lost limbs and were trying to adjust to their new prosthetics. PTSD and all that. Burke went because he had to; he'd just assume get on with his life instead of getting all touchy-feely.
That changed when a new officer came to the group.
Sub-Commander Maylene Torres hobbled into the session one afternoon. It was obvious to Eric that both her legs were bio-synthetic. From the looks of it, so were her hands. Underneath her coveralls, Eric saw skin grafts on her chest and neck. The skin on her face was the perfect complexion and perfectly smooth, the hallmark of tank-grown skin. Her eyes were the prettiest, but not quite natural, sparkling blue. That meant cyber-optic implants.
She sat quietly next to Eric the first day and didn't talk much. She seemed pre-occupied, as if her mind were somewhere else.
Eric had made a couple of friends in the group and they spent some afternoons in the officer's club. After two or three sessions, they invited Maylene along with them, but she politely declined.
Another week went by. Maylene and Eric again sat next to each other, and again, neither said much. They both listened a lot. Both responded well to the physical therapy and were well on the road to recovery.
One afternoon, after the group session, Eric stood to leave when Maylene's hand tapped him on the shoulder.
"You're Cheryl Burke's son, aren't you?" she asked softly.
Eric blinked a couple of times. He had never heard her say so many words at one time. "Yes, I am."
"I was a nugget on the
Solar Storm
when she was the Captain," Maylene said.
"She always said that was the best job she ever had," Eric smiled. "Mom thought she'd like being an admiral, but she said being a captain is the best job in the Navy."
The corners of Maylene's mouth turned up. "She was a good skipper. All of the crew knew she was watching out for us."
Eric smiled and filed a mental note to check with his mother about this woman. Everyone else had vacated the room, leaving the two of them standing there by themselves. "Listen . . . are you busy now? Would you like to go get a drink or something?"
It was the first time she had looked him in the eyes. Her face was pretty. The newly grown skin was soft and free of blemishes. The grafts appeared to be healing well. Over the past month, she had developed a remarkable amount of control over her new limbs.
Eric and Maylene headed down to the officer's mess and got a bite to eat. She was still a little withdrawn, so he did most of the talking.
After some persistent inquiries—and some scotch—Eric got her to open up a little.
Maylene was a VR fighter jock. Even in the 20th century, advances in technology were hampered by the limitations of the human body. A fighter can simply take more g-forces than their pilots, so their development stifled. That changed in the late 22nd century when discoveries in subspace revolutionised unmanned warfare.
The same technology that made it possible for him to talk to his parents on Earth across 16 light years in real time also allowed pilots to remotely control fighters from the safety of a base ship that was half a solar system away. As a result, fighters got faster, more maneuverable and more deadly.
Of course, sometimes the dirty business of warfare required people on the ground and on the front lines instead of hiding in control pods behind sterile virtual reality screens two AUs from the fighting. That's what SOLARs, Space Marines and Army groundpounders were for.
"So how did you end up here?" Eric asked, pouring Maylene another drink.
There was a flash of pain across her face. Her artificial hands began to shake involuntarily. Taking a deep breath, Maylene calmed her racing heartbeat.
