Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 57: Half-Healed (Patreon)

I took two short breaks, but I put on the jumpsuit. I managed it in five minutes. The medic didn’t hurry me anymore. She just stood by the door with a demanding, irritated look, as if I owed her something.

Bloody hell, I’d got these injuries fighting demons!

She didn’t escort me to the portal hall; she only waited until I’d left the ward. I had a marker on the map in my interface so I wouldn’t get lost, but I had no strength. I had to creep towards it carefully, holding onto the wall.

The corridor was wide enough for two trolleys to pass each other. They mostly kept to the open centre, though they often raced in both directions and only swerved towards the wall when they had to pass an oncoming one. In most cases, someone was lying on the trolleys. Sometimes relatively intact, sometimes missing an arm or a leg, sometimes patched from head to toe and drenched in pink foam, but rarely was anyone conscious.

By the time I reached the marker on the map, I’d worked up a good sweat, chemical, acrid-smelling and slimy to the touch. There was no single portal hall here. The corridor branched, and behind every new turn lay another, shorter corridor that ended at a separate portal guarded by four armoured guards. The marker pointed to the area in front of the portal, but a sizeable queue of cultivators stood ahead of it. Most of them weren’t as feeble as me, though they didn’t look exactly fresh either.

The guards were forming groups, and the next one, about ten people, was ready to go, but the portal wouldn’t start. Evidently there was some schedule. And it wasn’t coping with the influx. There were roughly another group’s worth of people ahead of me, so I’d be in about the third batch.

A girl with a fresh, half-healed scar across her face joined the line behind me. Our eyes met, and I nodded. The interface told me she was a Four too.

Everyone in the queue was a Three or a Four. And the guards by the portal were only Twos and Threes. Something told me they weren’t the best Twos and Threes either. Everyone who could hold the line was somewhere else right now, and whoever was left had been put here. If anyone in this queue had the nerve to start a fight, the guards couldn’t have done a thing, even though most of us didn’t have the strength to stand up straight.

I leaned my head back against the cold wall and closed my eyes. Nausea came in waves. The thin new skin on my chest pulled with every breath, and my new nipples itched unpleasantly.

I thought about Earth. The sun, an atmosphere you didn’t need to filter. It would probably be some complex like the one in the desert, or a civilian hospital. Maybe they’d finish treating me there…

My interface trilled. Surprised, I glanced sideways and saw an incoming call from Zola. Who shouldn’t have been here, since she hadn’t been injured. Or had I missed something again?

I accepted the call.

“Where are you?” she asked, skipping the hello.

“In the queue for Earth,” I replied.

“What?! One shambles after another! I told them not to discharge you until I was free. Get out of the queue, don’t go through the portal. I’m coming.”

She hung up.

Technically, I didn’t need to leave the queue, since the first group still hadn’t gone through, but I decided to trust Zola. Lousy temperament notwithstanding, she’d saved my life. And if she had reasons not to let me go, especially medical ones, I’d like to know them.

I stepped out of the queue and headed back to the main corridor.

“Hey! You!” came immediately from behind me. “Get back in the queue,” a guard ordered me. Stage Three ordered me.

“I’m waiting for a medic,” I said. “She just called me herself and told me to wait.”

He looked at me and began scrolling through invisible lines in his interface until he found what he was looking for.

“You’re on the evacuation list.”

I glanced at the queue, at the first group still waiting for the portal to activate, and pointed at it.

“Not that we’re in any hurry,” I said.

“You’re not permitted to move freely around the complex,” the guard said patiently.

I slowly took two steps back and returned to the queue. There was no point getting on his nerves, given how slowly everything was moving. I could wait for Zola here. If she made it in time, she’d get on everyone’s nerves herself, and I wouldn’t have to argue with anyone. I was too tired for that.

The guard stared at me for a long time through his opaque visor, but it was time to activate the portal, and he went back to his mates. They weren’t so much guarding as helping the feeble patients through the portal faster. Just then, Zola burst into the corridor like a whirlwind.

She was wearing a white coat over a blue jumpsuit, not the shade the patients wore, but darker, like the medics pushing the trolleys.

“Why the hell are you in the queue?” she asked.

“Didn’t want to trigger the guards.”

“Since when has that ever bothered you?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. And without waiting for an answer, she shouted to the guards, “I’m taking him for further examination!”

“Ma’am, he has orders for…” the same guard began to object.

Zola cut him off.

“Read my data!” she ordered, and waited while he looked her up through his interface. “Read it?”

The guard nodded.

“Any questions?” Zola asked.

“No, ma’am,” the guard replied.

“Good!” Zola said, grabbed me by the elbow, and dragged me back into the complex.

“What was that?” I asked, struggling to keep up.

“I’ve been promoted,” Zola tossed over her shoulder without slowing. “Temporarily, but with full authority.”

I couldn’t keep up. My legs were like cotton wool, my chest pulled with every step, and after the third turn I braced a hand against the wall and stopped. Zola dragged me another metre or so before she realised she was no longer pulling a patient but a sack, and finally let go of my elbow.

She took pity on me and slowed down. We reached the lifts, went up several floors, and there she pushed open the nearest door. It was a tiny little room, something between a storeroom, an office and a bedroom: a narrow desk, a bedside cabinet, one chair and a couch against the wall. On the desk were two unwashed cups and a tablet covered in greasy fingerprints.

“Your office?” I asked, lowering myself onto the couch before I could fall over in front of her.

“I haven’t got an office,” Zola replied. “This is where I sleep when I’m not in theatre.”

She took a standard scanner from her pocket and passed it over my chest, then my stomach, then my shoulder. She frowned, glanced at the screen and passed it over again.

“The deformed particles are still in your blood,” she informed me. “No Space! The tissue around your heart… well, you’ll live. The skin’s too delicate; it’ll itch. Don’t scratch it!”

“Has the team been disbanded?” I asked.

Zola shrugged, took a kettle from the bedside cabinet, and filled it with water from a bottle she pulled from her spatial pocket.

“They’re swamped here, Jake. Did you see that queue for the portal? Those are the ones who can walk. Ten times as many can’t. There aren’t enough surgeons, there aren’t enough medics, there aren’t enough pods, there isn’t enough of anything.” She rubbed her cheeks with her palms. “An hour after they put you in the pod, I was already standing at the table. Twelve hours later, the boss called me in and made me lead surgeon. A day later, she made me her deputy and let me command people instead of arguing with them.”

Zola put the empty bottle away in her pocket and switched on the kettle.

“So now I don’t argue, I command. It works out rather more efficiently.”

“You’re deputy head of the base?” I asked.

Zola laughed.

“I’m deputy head of the Third Surgical Department. You were in the radiation ward, so you were outside my domain. Besides, the radiologists don’t like me for some reason.”

“Wonder why,” I snorted.

“Oh, shut up. Do you know how many lives I’ve saved already?”

“Good for you,” I said. She’d earned it, but “How are things? Judging by the number of wounded, not great. But we’re holding on?”

Zola was silent for a while. When she spoke again, the venom had gone from her voice. Only fatigue remained.

“Badly, Jake. Verdis is holding, but the demons have dug in and burrowed beneath the surface.

“It’s even worse on Kairea. There are lots of caves there. Some of the wreckage fell through, so the demons got a whole bridgehead in one go.

“Drexin, however, is clean. Suppose you don’t count the horrendous radiation. Most of the radiology intake comes from there.”

“Heard anything from Bao?” I asked.

I remembered his grey face in the cafe, and the red blotches on his cheeks, most likely from radiation.

“Alive. He was on the lists yesterday. That’s all I know. I didn’t manage to catch him before they sent him to Earth.”

“The fleet?”

“We’re holding orbit,” said Zola. “For now. But the ships…” She shook her head. “I haven’t seen the figures, only heard things. They say a third was lost in the meat grinder, and the rest are being torn in every direction: here, there, Earth, Verdis, the orbital bombardment of Kairea… There aren’t enough to go round.”

“And Earth? The bulk of the debris hasn’t fallen yet?”

Zola snorted.

“Earth’s going mad. The bulk of it still hasn’t fallen, but the hysteria has already started, and conspiracy theories have spread everywhere. Some say the government has already sold us out, that demons are already walking the streets in human bodies. Others say cultivators have sold humanity to the Federation. Some are digging bunkers, some are buying up tinned food, some are going out into the squares and holding anti-war protests.”

“You’re joking?!” I couldn’t believe it.

“You’ll see for yourself. I can’t stay online for long.”

The kettle boiled, and Zola dropped teabags straight into the dirty cups before pouring. I said nothing. I reached for my interface but didn’t open the news. Instead of the feed, I opened my group’s contact list. Only Zola’s name was active.

“What about the rest of the team?” I asked.

“Nobody needs an understrength group with its commander in a pod. They’ve been scattered among other groups,” Zola said, shrugging. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Kon. They kicked her out before they even let me into theatre. Nothing’s known about Hale and Voss.”

“Voss has my Trouble Generators,” I winced.

“You can’t go into battle yet. You’ll have time to build new ones,” said Zola.

I nearly reached into my spatial pocket to check whether I still had the spare pair and the rest of my stuff, or whether some orderly had stripped me bare…

If they really were sending me to Earth, I’d probably have a few days like that. The only question was whether I’d have access to a workshop and materials…

“Is that why you pulled me out of the queue?” I asked. “To tell me the news and scan me?”

“Not only that. Your pendant,” she asked, and I took it off my neck. Zola took it in her left hand, passed her right hand over the desk, and a small plastic box appeared there. She passed her hand over it again, and the box vanished. “There you go,” she said, having moved the box from her spatial pocket into mine.

I took the pendant back and hung it round my neck, and she explained, “The green ones are a blood filter; inject one a day, in the morning. It’ll clear out the remaining particles faster than your cultivation will. The blue ones are for night, for the heart tissue and around it. The red ones only if arrhythmia starts. But in that case, better go straight to a doctor instead of playing the hero.”

“Did you nick them from the department’s stores?” I asked.

“I wrote them off as damag…” Zola fell silent and glanced sideways. “They won’t even let me have a cup of tea! Drink yours and clear off to Earth!” she said, running out of the room.

I sat on her couch for a few more seconds and eyed the cup of tea… In theory, boiling water should have disinfected it. And I was thirsty. And I didn’t want to offend Zola. So I got through one cup before heading back to the portal.

Maybe I’d run into someone I knew on Earth again. Maybe Bao was there?