Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 55: Field Surgery (Patreon)

Gradually, as if someone were slowly turning up the volume, the sounds came back.

“…ake! Jake, look at me!”

It was Zola’s voice, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from: comms, or her right here beside me.

The pain was still stopping the picture in front of my eyes from coming into focus. It spread from the centre of my chest and throbbed with my heart. The dirty, blurred picture in front of my eyes throbbed with it.

Someone slapped my helmet, and strangely enough, that helped me focus. I saw Zola’s helmet and a small medical scanner aimed at my head.

“He’s come round,” she said.

“The demoness…” I asked, about the most important thing.

My voice came out unfamiliar, hoarse and wet. I coughed, and excess fluid splashed out of my throat onto my closed faceplate. A series of fresh spasms in my chest and left shoulder doubled me up. I instinctively reached for my chest, but Zola caught my hand.

“Whoa! Easy there! She’s dead,” Zola snapped. “Keep twitching, and you’ll be joining her, you stupid shit! You’ve got a needle in your heart!”

I squinted down at my chest; something shiny and metal really was sticking out of it.

“The only things keeping you alive are your cultivation and that stimulant cocktail that’s standing in for your blood. But it’s not enough. If I don’t close the hole, you’ll die soon. I need access to your chest. I know you’re good with Space. Put your armour away in your pocket.”

“Mardal?” I asked, the second item of important business.

“Fucking dead!” she barked. “Just like you’ll be if I don’t close the hole in your heart, you stupid piece of shit! Take off your fucking armour or die!”

I tried.

Instead of the usual light push, I felt something in my chest jerk and tear, as if I’d tried to rip my own skin off. My armour had fused to my chest. The world went white with pain, and I growled, coughing a second time.

“Worth a try,” Zola said, as if justifying herself.

“Bitch!” I said through the coughing. “You knew.”

“You work miracles when there’s no way out,” she replied, and yanked a large spike out of my shoulder, then took a canister of foam out of her spatial pocket and sealed the wounds in my shoulder and stomach.

Only now did I notice the spear was no longer sticking out.

Zola stood up. “Kon, cut him open.”

“What?” I gurgled.

Kon came back into my field of vision as it cleared. Her breastplate had been pierced too, but the tip of a long, shiny needle was sticking out closer to her left collarbone than to her heart.

I couldn’t remember when that had happened.

Probably at the moment my vision had gone dark with pain. Or later, when I’d focused completely on finishing off the demoness and lost sight of the rest of the world. However, it had seemed to me that she’d only been attacking me.

“Is anyone else hurt?” I asked.

“Not now, Jake,” Zola cut me off. “Neck to stomach. You can cut through the breastbone too; don’t touch the heart, it’s got a hole in it already.”

Kon touched me with her leg, creating a connection to bypass formations and raised her sword as if the needle in her breastplate didn’t bother her at all. Evidently her painkillers were better than mine.

“Cut!” Zola ordered.

Kon brought her sword down sharply, and the pain in my chest changed, as if it had gone cold. It was a brief moment of relief.

Zola shoved Kon away and bent over me again. She pulled out the needle and ran a finger along the cut. The next moment, I saw her pianist’s fingers move again, and a series of thin silver blade projections flew from them. They dived into Kon’s rough cut and finished the job, separating the two halves of my breastbone for good.

Zola pushed her hands into the cut and forced my ribs apart.

A thin jet of blood shot out of my chest, spattering the right side of her helmet.

“Nasty little bitch!” Zola swore, and I felt a slight push of Space Qi as a small object appeared in her hands, though I couldn’t make out what it was.

A fresh jet shot past her helmet in time with my heartbeat, and she did something.

My heart clenched, and no new jet followed.

At least she hadn’t just foamed over the hole.

My heart was still beating, strong and rhythmic. But my ribcage was open, and I was still conscious. Strange, but to hell with it. It looked like I wasn’t going to die. Not today, at least. So I might as well put the time to good use.

“Hale and Voss?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” Zola replied.

“Grab Mardal and the demoness, and let’s get out of here,” I ordered.

“Hale’s cutting off the pockets… You want the whole demoness?”

“Her armour’s interesting. The formations…” I couldn’t say any more.

My throat, wet a moment ago, suddenly went dry. I tried to clear it and carry on, but Zola cut me off sharply.

“Shut up!” She jerked her head up towards the sky. “Incoming! Brace for the strike!” she shouted. “Kon, help me, close his ribs.”

Zola pulled a bulky patch from her spatial pocket, and Kon pressed my chest close, squeezing all the air out of it.

I’d have sworn if I’d had the strength and if my teeth hadn’t been clenched with pain.

Zola stuck the patch over the hole, over my armour and foamed over it, just to be safe.

It was hard to watch her work, so I tipped my head back and looked up at the sky. It seemed closer than ever. Choked with copper-tinted dust, with dirty streaks of smoke stretching from horizon to horizon.

A bright, almost white streak cut it in half, faster than any falling debris I’d ever watched. Zola threw herself on top of me, shielding the foamed wound with her own body.

Somewhere off to the side, something rustled, and metal clattered.

In the direction the streak had come down, the dust in the sky suddenly flared white, as though someone had switched on a floodlight behind it, while the nearest heap of scrap darkened in shadow. A second later, the white sky turned yellow; another second, and the yellow turned orange, and the orange a dirty red, like the embers of a fire that had almost gone out.

All sound seemed to vanish, except the loud, painful beat of my hastily patched-up heart.

The ground beneath my back jerked, sharply and briefly, as if someone had hit it from below with a sledgehammer. Zola and I were thrown a few centimetres into the air, and I felt something shift painfully inside my chest. The pain ran from my heart to my spine and from there spread through my body, making me scream.

For a few more seconds, the ground trembled nervously; the scrap around us jangled and groaned, and somewhere nearby something heavy broke loose with a roar and slid down off a heap.

Only then did the low thud arrive. It went through my teeth and ribs, squeezing my heart.

A second later, a hot wave slammed into the scrap around us. Dust-laden wind whistled through the gaps, and the sky above us went dark.

Zola bent even lower over me, almost lying on top of me, covering the foamed wound. Evidently to keep the dust out. I felt the weight of her armour, and it seemed to me it was pressing down on my cut ribs. And small, mostly hot debris rattled down on her back, on both our helmets and on the scrap around us: red-hot metal rubbish as if someone had emptied a sack of nuts and bolts over us.

Radioactive nuts and bolts, because my interface reported rising danger again.

I thought the fleet had made a mistake and fired a nuke, but then it dawned on me that this was debris from the radioactive ship itself. At least we could be sure the demons hadn’t survived.

Unless the fleet had missed.

Something scraped and thudded off to the side. The ground beside me stirred, and I saw a wall rise above us like a semicircular canopy. It shielded us from the direction the wave had come from and blotted out the sky.

“You all right?” Voss asked.

“We’re great!” Zola said, climbing off me.

I could see a strip of sky again on the other side, above a ridge of scrap, where it was changing back to a dirty copper colour.

“Hale, get the portal out and dial the hospital,” Zola said.

“They didn’t miss, did they?” I asked.

“We’re not checking!” Zola said.

“There was a base there,” I pointed out.

“We’ll report it, and command can send someone!” Zola snapped. “Open the fucking portal while this idiot’s still alive and before he brings another surprise down on our heads!”

I couldn’t see it, but I felt she’d won the argument. A breath of Space Qi came from the side, the kind of release you get when someone pulls a large object from a pocket.

Zola leaned over me and carefully lifted me in her arms.

Everything hurt, and I groaned involuntarily.

“Don’t fancy checking on any more demons?” she asked acidly.

“Nope, I’m good.”

“You’re a long way from good, Jake!” Zola said, shifting her grip on me so I’d fit through the portal.

Hale was ready to activate it. Voss stood beside Mardal’s body, and Kon, despite the needle under her collarbone, was holding the demoness.

“Ready?” Hale asked.

“My Generators!” I remembered.

“Fuck them!” Zola barked.

“I’ve got them!” Voss said, and Hale activated the portal.

Zola jumped into it the moment the membrane appeared. My feet caught on the edge of the ring, and the change in gravity threw her off course; Zola stumbled and fell on top of me.

Sparks burst from my eyes again, and I swallowed my swearing.

Still, the fall could have been worse. The soft floor and the mobile portal on the ceiling softened it a great deal.

As soon as we’d fallen through, the ring slid aside, and Voss dropped down next to us with Mardal’s body. Then Kon with the demoness, and only after that Hale.

Apart from the improved floor and the moving ceiling mechanism, it was the same stone box for screening incoming material. No windows, just sorting portals, cameras, scanners, and formations that could seal us in liquid stone forever.

“Attention,” a level voice said from somewhere in the ceiling. “Hostile biological signature detected. Elevated radiation levels detected. Everyone remain where you are. Do not move. Do not activate techniques.”

“Are you kidding me?!” Zola tipped her head back towards the nearest camera. “I’ve got a patient here with a perforated left ventricle, an open thoracotomy performed in the field, a haemopericardium I’ve closed with a shitty patch because I didn’t have anything fucking better, a bilateral pneumothorax, and armour fused to the soft tissue of the chest wall after a spatial injury, which means he’s already got deformed flesh particles floating around in his blood! Plus penetrating wounds to the right upper abdomen and the shoulder! He’s running on stimulants and a prayer! I need a hospital now, not ‘remain where you are’!”

It was a heated speech, but the response was cool.

“You have the body of a hostile cultivator with you…” the operator said. “We can’t let it through to the hospital. Protocol…”

“Shove your protocol up your arse, preferably without anaesthetic! Do you think if the First Six’s favourite disciple dies, anyone will care that you followed protocol?”

“Oh, another one,” the operator said, unimpressed. “Is the demon dead?”

“Yes!” several of them barked at once.

“Then why did you drag it here?”

“Because this idiot said command would want to take a look at a Five. Her armour has interesting formations.”

“You killed a Five?”

“I’ll find you and twist your balls off!” Zola promised. “Just look this wounded moron up in the database already.”

“We’ll split the group,” the operator decided. It didn’t look as though he’d done what Zola asked. “The medic and the patient go to the hospital, via a separate line with decontamination at the entrance. The wounded one with the needle goes there too. The hostile cultivator’s body and your comrade’s body go separately, to the special facility, with the rest of the group.

“Special facility first,” the operator said. “I’m not letting a demon into the hospital. Not even a dead one.”

Zola growled. On the wall to the right, a smaller portal's film lit up.

“The Generators!” Voss remembered.

“Stuff them up your arse!” Zola barked. “Do you want another ten minutes of checks?”

“I…” I began.

“Shut it!” Zola finished for me. “Move!” she barked at the rest of the team.

The team, except Kon, dived into the portal. It went out.

“Hospital,” the operator announced cheerfully, and switched on the larger portal.