Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 56: Protocol (Patreon)

This place was nothing like the last one. Instead of a spacious hall, the portal spat us out into a white corridor, where two orderlies in sealed hazmat suits already waited with a trolley, a simple mechanical cart on wheels, not even a grav-stretcher.

Zola laid me on it with a gentleness I’d never have expected from her, and the orderlies wheeled me towards the decontamination line. Zola was allowed through with me, but they directed Kon down a different corridor at the fork.

The decontamination line was no different from the one I’d gone through earlier: nozzles in the walls and ceiling, drains in the floor – a car wash for people. The only difference was that last time I’d walked through it on my own two feet, whereas now I was lying on my back, watching foam from the nozzles splatter onto my faceplate.

Everything was relatively calm. Fatigue was finally catching up with me, and the pain had faded into the background. I was quietly drifting off, at peace about my life.

The medicine here worked miracles, so now that I was here, they wouldn’t let me die.

I even closed my eyes.

“Stop!” Zola shouted. “Stop the line!”

I opened my eyes, but couldn’t see anything through the foam.

“I said stop the bloody foam! It’s reacting with the sealant. All that muck is going to end up in his wounds!”

That wasn’t good. I tried to shake off the fatigue and raised a hand to clear my visor.

My arm felt like lead.

“Turn it off!” Zola yelled.

“We can’t interrupt the cycle,” one of them said. “System lockout.”

The trolley was shoved so hard I nearly flew off it, but the sudden jolt helped me wipe the foam from my helmet. Zola, still raging, had pushed me against the wall farther, where no nozzles were placed, and the spray couldn’t reach me. A canister of medical foam appeared at her hands again, she started scraping off whatever the decontamination foam had dissolved and re-foaming it as she watched the reaction.

“Interrupting the cycle violates decontamination protocol,” a voice announced from the ceiling. “The patient will have to undergo the full cycle from the beginning.”

“Your foam is killing the patient!” Zola snapped.

“The decontamination compound is certified for use on all types of…”

“On all types of armour and skin!” Zola finished for it. “But that doesn’t cover internal organs! Medical foam is safe for them, but we don’t know what by-products this reaction gives off. Can you see what’s on his chest and stomach? If you want to decontaminate a corpse, go on, carry on!”

The voice from the ceiling fell silent. The nozzles stopped spraying foam.

“Fuck!” Zola swore. “The reaction isn’t stopping. This stuff needs washing off immediately!”

“Am I going to die?” I asked, though I’d only meant to think it.

Something was seriously wrong with that cocktail of stimulants. I shouldn’t have mixed the Federation ones with our painkillers.

“Shut up,” Zola said, pushing the trolley back under the nozzles. “Rinse him, now!”

Fortunately, this time nobody argued. Or perhaps they had some protocol for when things went wrong. They ought to have.

Water splashed onto my visor. A few seconds later, Zola pulled me out of the shower and applied foam again until the canister ran dry. Then she tossed it aside and grabbed the trolley again, determined.

“We need to cut this armour off him. Afterwards you can decontaminate it, or you can bloody well chuck it.”

“It’s expensive,” I said.

“Shut up, Jake,” Zola said irritably, and pushed me through the exit into the next room, where a standard undressing platform and a pair of technicians in light anti-radiation suits stood.

An Earth platform was useless for Federation armour. Bio-armour had neither bolts nor mechanical clamps, which the technicians noticed straight away.

“What the hell? How am I supposed to get this off?”

“With a cutter,” Zola replied.

“This isn’t armour to me, it’s… meat,” the technician said. “I’m not qualified to cut something like this. And I don’t want to be the one who killed a patient on the table because he guessed wrong. Better to…”

Zola thrust out her hand, and a silver conical projection streaked past the technician’s head, slammed into the wall, detonated, and left a dent.

My interface immediately bloomed with a combat-in-zone alert.

“Pick up the cutter and get over here!” she ordered.

I didn’t know what stage the technician was at. I couldn’t focus my eyes. At Lotus, during tournaments, they usually had higher cultivation. But Zola couldn’t have pushed someone stronger around like that. Besides, the stronger ones were wherever things were hotter. The war had scattered our forces.

“Start here.” Zola pointed at the foamed-over spear hole in my stomach. “This bit’s already been cut for you. From the hole up to the armpit, down along the hip to the foot, then along the inside of the thighs. Arms the same way. We’ll take the helmet off last.

“This part’s fused.” She traced the outline of my foam-covered chest. “The breastplate stays on him; I’ll remove it myself.”

Two guards in armour burst into the room.

“Step away from him!” the first ordered her, but she glanced at the girl behind him. The girl had a curved sword.

“Perfect!” said Zola. “Blade, you can help us. Start cutting off the armour.”

“Step away…” the guard began to repeat menacingly, but Zola cut him off even more menacingly, almost screaming.

“Shut the fuck up and check who I’ve brought in already! You think this piece of shit is wearing Federation armour for no reason? If he dies, they’ll wipe out the lot of you!”

“I’m not a piece of shit,” I said.

Still, Zola’s hysterical shouting made the guards exchange glances.

“He’s a disciple of the First Six!”

“Another one?” the guard asked. And that wasn’t the first time I’d heard that.

“Who else?” I asked. “Is Kate here? Or Adam and Lina?”

“Fuck, old bastard’s got more than one disciple!” Zola barked. “My master was his disciple too! Start cutting already, or I swear I’ll kill someone!”

The second technician, the one who hadn’t been threatened, went over to the tool rack and picked up a hydraulic cutter.

“I think this’ll work best.”

They started working from the hole. The technician moved down toward my legs, while Zola worked the guard up toward my arm. The bastard ripped my whole side open, and Zola wouldn’t let him take the helmet off, meaning he couldn't cut anywhere near my neck.

The pair left me fairly quickly with nothing but a trimmed breastplate.

“That piece is still ‘hot,’” the lead guard said. “I can’t let a contaminated fragment out of the unit. It has to be removed and decontaminated separately first. Protocol…”

“It’s grown into him!” Zola repeated for the umpteenth time, exhausted and irritated. “He’s hot all over. This isn’t a patient with a fragment of dirty armour. This is radiation sickness, and you must have a separate protocol for that.”

The guard thought about it.

“A decontamination pod with an auto-doc and regeneration,” Zola prompted.

It turned out I had to be placed in another isolation tube and transported to the pod inside it. That meant Zola couldn’t come with me because her armour hadn’t been decontaminated, and she couldn’t simply take it off because that would strip her of her radiation protection. She had to change into a different protective suit. And that nearly drove her mad. She screeched so much I thought she really would kill someone.

In the end, they assigned us two transport tubes and delivered us to an isolated bay, where the biggest medical pod I’d ever seen waited for me, with the thickest lid and the thickest glass.

Before they shoved me in, Zola gave her piano recital once more.

She tore off the patch holding my chest together and raised her hands over my chest. Familiar silver surfaced on her fingers, with faint hints of blue and red.

Silver blades dropped into my split breastbone, and my chest flared with sharp, piercing pain again. The pieces of untrimmed armour shuddered, shifted and slid off onto the floor, leaving my chest with its muscles exposed.

This time nobody bothered foaming anything. They just tossed me into the pod.

Through the thick glass and my tears, I saw Zola sink wearily to the floor and wave something off a guard's words. But he wouldn’t leave her alone; a new conflict was brewing, one I didn’t get to see because the pod started working, the glass frosted over, and sleep crashed down on me.

And it ‘immediately’ receded.

It didn’t dawn on me straight away that some time had already passed. As always, my brain didn’t register time spent in the capsule. But this was the lousiest awakening of them all.

Zola had called me a piece of shit; well, that's exactly how I felt.

The glass above my head cleared again, and beyond it, instead of the isolation-bay ceiling, someone in white stood. The lid slid aside with a quiet hiss; thick gel ran off my body into the drain, and the warmth drained away with it. Naked and wet, I felt every draught in the room.

“You’re awake,” said the someone in white. “Good, sit up.”

A woman of about forty: the interface offered nothing about her, so I reckoned my estimate was right. Grey shadows under her eyes, hair hastily gathered at the back of her head. She wasn’t wearing a protective suit, so I wasn’t ‘hot’ anymore.

I sat up. Not on the first try.

“Feel like crap,” I muttered, but the doctor didn’t even notice.

Everything hurt. Not sharply, like out on the wasteland, but dully and everywhere, as if I’d been run over by a lorry that had then reversed to make sure. My chest felt as though it had been stuffed with wet cotton wool and sewn up tight. The skin was new, pink, thin, and translucent. Worse than on my fingers after Zola had shaved the plastic off them. My nipples looked downright strange. A line ran down the centre, from my collarbones to my stomach. Not quite a scar, but close.

Every time I breathed in, something under my breastbone pulled. My shoulder ached. My stomach twitched. My mouth tasted of rubber, chemicals and something metallic. I felt sick, and my hands, when I leaned on the edge of the capsule, were trembling ever so slightly.

They clearly hadn’t finished treating me.

The medic passed a scanner over me and glanced at a physical tablet's screen. Definitely a proper device, not one made for a cultivator with an interface in their head. She marked something on it.

“Get dressed. Jumpsuit’s on the chair; personal belongings are in the tray.”

On the chair lay a pale blue jumpsuit; my pendant sat in the tray. Nothing else.

“You’re discharging me?” I asked doubtfully. “Or transferring me to another pod?”

“Unfortunately, we’re desperately short of pods at the moment. There are over four thousand wounded in the complex. You’re being sent to Earth.”

Which didn’t exactly clarify things. Four thousand wounded spoke of large-scale fighting, but Earth, it seemed, hadn’t been taken.

“How long have I been here?”

“Fifty-six hours.”

More than two days. The bulk of the debris from the battle shouldn’t have reached Earth yet. And the fleet could have thinned out what was left.

“No combat for at least ten days,” the medic continued, tapping her tablet again. “No heavy techniques, especially nothing involving Space. I’ll put that in your record. Whether your commanders take it into account is their business.”

Things, it seemed, weren’t going too well.

I climbed out of the capsule, holding onto its edge, and, swaying, made my way to the chair with the jumpsuit. That wiped me out, and I sat down.

“Don’t dawdle,” the medic hurried me. “This capsule has to be ready for a new patient in five minutes. A lot are coming from Drexin.”