Page 33 of Darken
Gina raised her rifle and peered through the scope for a better look. There was no ranger star on the left chest, so she fired a shot that exploded, sending clumps of dirt into the air.
She started walking down the small hill with her rifle trained on the downed male as Darken pulled his blaster and shot.
Gina continued down the hill toward her mate. She stopped to shoulder her rifle when something hit her from behind, knocking her down. Two shots rang out, and she heard a pained yip as an excruciating pain radiated through her chest; she crashed to the ground.
“Gina!” Darken yelled and shot the man who had attacked her.
She groaned, trying to get up with a hundred pounds of the wolf on top of her. But it was so hard to breathe, and it hurt so much…
Darken was instantly at her side, gently lifting the she-wolf off her. The wolf whimpered.
“Baby, are you all right?” He turned her over and nearly lost it when he saw her wound. “Oh, no! No, no, no….”
But she had passed out. There was a hole in the middle of her chest just below her breasts. Although it looked small on the surface, the damage expanded exponentially inside. She tried to breathe and coughed up blood, and Darken fought down the crazed panic that welled up inside him.
This was his fault! He should never have brought her on the mission. It wasn’t safe. Yet, how was he to know there would be incursions from the east? Ion rifles weren’t available in this territory. No time for self-recrimination. He had to act fast, or she would die.
He tore open the emergency pouch on his belt and pulled out a prefilled syringe of nanites, flipping off the cap with his thumb. Squeezing the contents directly into her wound, he pulled out another and another until he had injected all four emergency boluses into her wound.
“Don’t die, baby, don’t die!” But she was dying, and he feared faster than the nanites could fix her. His eyes filled with tears that spilled down his cheeks.
Darken squeezed his eyes shut and angrily tamped down his rising panic. He called Kydel Matix on theStarfire Nemesis, orbiting Earth. After days of no sleep, it was the middle of Kydel’s night, but the scan Darken sent him told him all he needed to know.
“Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll be there. I won’t lie to you, Darken. It’s bad….”
“I know…”Darken picked up her hand and brought it to his lips. It felt like his heart was breaking, and there was nothing more he could do.
Glancing around, trying to think of something else. Darken saw Queen on the ground where he had moved her off Gina.
“Queen…” he whispered.
The white alpha female lay on her side, panting and whimpering with a horrible blaster wound over her front shoulder. She was barely breathing.
“My dear friend, Queen, you tried to save her,” he choked. Opening the emergency pouch on Gina’s belt, Darken took out another nanite syringe. Accessing his database on wolf biology, he reprogrammed the nanites in one for wolf DNA and injected them into Queen’s wound. Then he used the other three for Gina.
Then he jumped up and ran to his hovercycle and grabbed a small tank of oxygen and a mask. In seconds, back at Gina’s side, he fit the mask over her nose and mouth to increase her oxygen intake.
He’d used all the nanites. It wasn’t enough. She struggled for every breath, and they were getting further and further apart. Stars, how could he ever live without her?
He couldn’t. Had he waited his whole life for barely five months with his genetic mate? Wishing for better results, he scanned her again. The nanites were losing. He threw back his head and howled in despair. All of the wolves except Queen howled with him. She could only whimper.
Finally, Darken heard the familiar whine of an evac space shuttle coming in to land. It was one of the same shuttles that went planetside to pick up casualties in the war.
It came in fast, braking at the last moment to hover and descend to the ground. The vehicle barely touched the ground before the ramp extended, and the side door slid open. A hover-stretcher zipped through the opening and came to rest beside Gina.
Darken quickly lifted her onto the stretcher and jumped up to follow it into the shuttle, where Kydel waited with a stasis tank filled with nanite gel.
“Strip her and set her in the tank.”The medic ordered.
That was easily accomplished by retracting her damaged armor and removing her utility belt. As Darken set her in the greenish gel, he noticed the hole below her breast bone had closed. But he knew that was the least of the damage, that it would be a miracle if she survived.
There was nothing Darken could do but wait. He didn’t dare calculate the odds that Gina would survive. Too many variables could tip the balance. Suddenly he couldn’t catch his breath. He was hyperventilating as he scanned her again. Her gut was full of blood, but the bleeding was under control. Millions of nanites were pushing the blood back into the circulatory system.
The damage had gone all the way to her spine… and her organs…stomach, liver, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, barely identifiable… Lungs were damaged on the inner edges, and the heart was bruised outside the left ventricle. How the hell could they even fix her? How could he live without her?
Basically, running on ‘autopilot,’ Darken followed Gina’s healing tank onto the shuttle and watched while Kydel quickly secured it. He sank to the bench against the bulkhead, staring at her nude body inside the chamber. She could die, and there was nothing else he could do to stop it.
Darken was torn between his desire to stay at her side and kill the man responsible.
