Starbleached by Chelsea Gaither Page A

with him?”
    Paige shook her head. “Probably confine him to barracks
until they have enough for the court martial. No point in arresting him yet.
Where would he go?” Bryan shrugged his answer, and the shrink left. On her way
to some other patient, some other great problem needing her attention.
    Worried, Adry eased her chair a bit nearer to Bryan’s. Ever
since Mich took off, he’d been tired. The steel she’d come to love had, it
seemed, rusted. “You okay?”
    “I just want to know what he’s thinking. It took all his
time and fuel just to go in a straight line to Gaga. He put his ass in a sling
for absolutely nothing. And that…” Bryan sat up. “That’s not like Mich. He
doesn’t waste gestures like that. Not after Abrams, anyway.” He turned back to
his work.
    “You know, I still don’t know the whole story behind that.”
    “You never asked.” He had a sad little smile.
    “I figured you’d tell me eventually. Or Mich. Or somebody
else. But no one has.”
    Bryan sighed and leaned back in his chair, fiddling with a
pen as he gathered his thoughts. He shook his head, as if he were flicking the
weight of the world off his shoulders. Then he said, “Major David Abrams and my
brother went on a mission to Foster. We’d identified a former commander in a
slave pit. Abrams thought they could get him back. He volunteered to go, and
that meant Mich went too. You couldn’t keep them apart. They went into the pit,
found the commander and two Overseers. We didn’t have shock rounds at the time
to lock their nervous system, so Mich put bullets in the cranium of one, and it
went down. The other picked this device off the table. We think they planned on
using it on the commander, but the Overseer slammed it into Abrams instead. It
punctured his cranium and wound into his nervous system almost immediately.
Abrams didn’t even realize he’d been injured. They got the commander out. He’s
back on Earth, in a nursing home. I got word yesterday, he remembered his own
name.”
    He stopped, taking a deep gulp of air. She sat near, taking
his hands in hers, and waited for him to start talking again. It took a long
time, and first he let go of her hand.
    “By the time we got Abrams into med bay the device had
extruded a secondary spinal cord and invaded his torso. We spent every minute
trying to stop it, and he hung with us every step of the way. The…skeletal
changes were the worst. He spent four days screaming. Then the pain began to
die off, and he thought I’d saved him. He went to sleep, and when he woke up,
there were mouths in his hands and David Abrams was gone. We had a very big,
very strong alien who thought we’d spent the last several days torturing him.”
Bryan shook his head.
    “Paige Jones told me he remembered.”
    “We’d been playing mind-games with an Overseer for a month
by then. I don’t believe anything he said or did. Whatever he remembered, he
used to play with us.” Bryan shrugged, studying his hands. “He was a good kid.
Kept Mich sane. Kept his team on an even keel. And If I were in his shoes I’d
have a higher body count.”
    “I don’t think you’d kill anyone.” She said.
    He brushed her cheek. “You see people the way you want them
to be. It’s beautiful.”
    “Sometimes I take the wrong view, you know. Decide something
is bad when it’s not. That’s not so beautiful.”
    “No…but that will keep you alive longer.” He kissed her,
running his fingers through her hair. She leaned into it, letting it take her.
It was relief. Release. Beautiful.
    And then Holton Station began to scream.
     
    *****
     
    Now:
    Screaming babies. Screaming children. Adults holding their
heads, vomiting into buckets. The village hospital was a dirt floored shack,
dry boards keeping the swamp out. Good God, she thought. How was anyone alive
in this place at all?
    “I’m going to need antibiotics,” she said. Several of the
ill had open, weeping sores. “Bandages, clean…” she