I emerged from the trees, pistol held loosely in my hand. “Hello, boys. Took your sweet time…”
Lancers are less reliable than zeroblades. It takes nearly three milliseconds of uninterrupted contact to ensure a zero-blade will cut through a shield, while lancers have only a fraction of that time for a disruptor to work. They worked fine nine times out of ten, but the tenth time, the shield won instead. The results were unpredictable. Sometimes they deflected the bolt entirely. Sometimes they let the magma through but slowed it down enough so it hit like a blob of superheated wax.
In this case, my shield cooled the magma into a thin spike of metal, which pierced straight through my chest.
“NO!” I heard Astrid scream, but the shout came from far away. I was too absorbed by the strange sensation of my heart thumping around a sliver of metal, my heartbeats breaking the spike into splinters, pushing them around, shredding my organs, but I was helpless to stop it. I looked up at the guard who’d shot me as the Emperor shot him for his mistake. Then she had me, was guiding me down towards the ground. “Lieutenant, get the healers here, now, or you’ll follow your soldier’s fate,” she ordered, then looked at me with worrying eyes. Her gloved hand cradled my head as the edges of my vision blurred, and her face looked so beautiful above me. Why couldn’t I lift my arm to touch it?
“Stay with me, Levar,” I heard her say as my mind went to black. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
BEDSIDE MANNERS
I’D WOKEN FROMunconsciousness in Allied hospitals before. It was usually a gradual process, slowly becoming aware of the world around me as the body naturally restored itself.
The Empire did not subscribe to that model of recovery.
Fireworks exploded in my head as every nerve in my body screamed “Danger!” My eyes snapped open and I bolted upright, screaming. Or at least I tried. The gurney’s straps were designed for demon lords. They held me with ease.
“He’s definitely awake,” somebody said. My eyes swiveled as my body jerked against the restraints to see a reddish-skinned female demon wearing the white tunic universal to medical staff. She was observing a holoscreen on which my vitals were presumably displayed in Imperial script. It took me a moment to realize the healer had spoken in Imperial as well. My brain processed her words without pause or confusion, but the words did not come so easily when I tried to reply.
“Where am I?” I asked in Imperial, my mind frantically dredging up the half-remembered words.
In response, the healer tapped a few buttons. “And, to calm you down…” I felt a slight pressure in my arms and looked down to see a number of tubes strapped to them. My drumming heart slowed and I felt the panicked pressure fade from my skull. The doctor came around to my bedside and placed a single huge hand on my bare chest, her eyes unfocused. Then her mouth broke into a tusky grin. “All feels good. Your strong new heart has integrated well to your frail human body.”
“New heart?” I asked, my brain starting to take in and catalogue my surroundings in a methodical manner. I was in an Imperial medical facility. A well-stocked one, judging by the gleaming rows of machines and medicines my supply officer’s mind could identify. Were we still in the Crystal Palace? Did it have this sort of surgical suite somewhere in its bowels? The walls looked like plastcrete, which implied a different building. I couldn’t imagine anything so modern and mass-manufactured would be allowed to disgrace the Crystal Palace’s hand-crafted architectural homogeneity.
“Where am I?” I repeated.
“The Emperor’s medical cruiser, in geosynchronous orbit over the Crystal Palace. We’re the only medical facility in the system with pre-grown transhuman hearts for transplant on such short notice,” the healer said with a clear note of pride in her voice.
“They shot out my heart? Mother Earth, I’m lucky they didn’t disintegrate my torso if you needed to grow me a new heart,” I commented. No windows. I couldn’t get a view outside. No way to tell if I actually was in orbit over the Crystal Palace.
“Oh no, it wasn’t that bad. But the Emperor’s Consort needs a better heart than you humans are born with. I think you’ll be pleased. It’s a big improvement over what you had; a cardiac organ worthy of the Emperor’s attention.”
My attention snapped back to the demon doctor. Surely I had misheard her. “What did you say?”
The healer frowned. “We gave you a demon’s heart.”
The demon heart beat in my chest, strong and steady, even as my mind sharpened with the sudden red blossom of rage. “How dare you?”
“How dare I what?” the healer replied.
My voice rose with my fury. “How dare you put some bioengineered mutation inside me? I have no idea what it is, what it can do.”
“It pumps blood, much better than your old heart ever did,” the demon healer said, her voice flat and annoyed. “You should be thanking us. The Empire probably added twenty years to your lifespan.”
“I’m so glad I’ll have that much more to lose when the war resumes,” I bellowed. “Is this how you treat your citizens, your civilians? You reach into their chests and replace bits of them without their permission?”
The demon rolled her eyes. “I don’t need a human’s permission to follow my Emperor’s orders.”
“Her orders?” Her words struck me like an entrenching shovel between the eyes, but I didn’t have time to ask anything more before the doors to the medical bay opened and the Emperor strode in, flanked and followed by a quartet of gigantic Imperial guards. Astrid’s face was flush with anger and sternly set, her eyes blazing as though she needed the slightest excuse to kill somebody.
“I came as soon as I heard. He’s awake? Everything’s fine?” she asked in her demonic tongue.
The demon healer gestured at me. “The nanites have spliced the new heart into his body. It is working perfectly. As for the patient himself, he’s in a mild state of distress.”
Astrid glanced at me, her eyes searching me for any cause ofdistress. “What’s wrong?” she asked in Commonwealth Basic.
“You put a demon heart in me,” I shouted.
