Fast forward, p.6
Fast Forward, page 6
part #3 of Time Captive Series
My heart spasmed at the thought of Oz, hurt slicing fresh and deep. Hatch flicked his gaze to me. It was just the barest, briefest movement, but I frowned as the corner of his mouth tightened.
“Can you see me?” I exhaled the words, barely able to voice the question.
Another flicker of movement, but he didn’t answer. The frown wrinkling his forehead smoothed away, and he snorted, then spat out blood. Sitting forward abruptly, he cut another fast look at me, but the rattle of chains distracted me and I stared at where the shackles were locked on his wrists.
Shackles.
Sitting forward.
Bleeding.
I pushed up abruptly, and the world swayed as the sea beyond him transposed with his image and then snapped back out of focus.
This wasn’t a daydream.
I could see him.
“You can see me.” It wasn’t a question this time. His eyes cut to the right, then he focused on me. The faint dilation of his pupils betrayed his shock and his acknowledgement. “And you’re not alone… Wait…” He’d said something before. “You weren’t alone before. Blink once for yes and twice for no.”
He blinked once.
“You’re with Dirk.”
One blink.
“Someone else is there now.”
One blink.
“Someone you don’t trust.” I mean, that seemed like a given, but I had to know nonetheless.
One blink.
My heart squeezed. “I love you.”
One blink.
“I’m coming.”
Two blinks.
“I’m coming,” I repeated. “Andreas is with me, and Dirk’s men… I have no idea how this is possible, and I’m not telling you any more because…”
My stomach went sour. The memoriam had tried to trick me before. But this was different. This…this was real. I couldn’t feel the coding here as I could there at the end. Yet…I almost wanted to stretch out my fingers to touch Hatch, but I didn’t dare. Sweat dripped into my eyes, and I ran a hand over my face, a little shocked at how wet I really was. Even my hair clung to me.
Ninety-eight percent.
Hatch had been at ninety-eight percent cerebral mapping while in the memoriam with me.
“The nanites,” I whispered. I swayed a little. Even my stomach was doing flip flops. The nanites had been connected. Theirs had to have linked with mine while they were injected.
He barely moved, not blinking, his attention focused elsewhere, and then…
One blink.
Like me, sweat coated him, and he paled beneath the layers of multi-colored bruising.
“Querida…” Andreas’ worried voice seemed to reach out to me from a distance, but I didn’t want to look away. I didn’t want to lose the connection with Hatch.
But I had to.
For both of our sakes.
“Together,” I whispered again. “We have to sever this together… I will reach out to you again in a few hours.” I’d been focusing so hard on him and Dirk, that had to have been what activated it. Or maybe it was our current passage across the seas as we headed for Great Britain. Maybe distance was a factor.
I didn’t know.
I just…
“I love you,” I whispered again. “I love you both so much. You hold on for me.”
One blink. Then…the image blurred and I closed my eyes, almost wanting to weep at the loss.
Hands gripped my upper arms, and then I was dragged back against Andreas. “You’re burning up.”
I resisted opening my eyes again for a minute. I allowed myself a minute to wallow in the loss, even as I was so profoundly thankful they were alive and I’d been able to connect with one of them, albeit only briefly. I had so much work to do.
But…one minute.
I leaned into Andreas as he hugged me, despite the sweat drenching me. “Valda, you’re scaring me.”
That galvanized me, and I opened my eyes. Even though I knew I wouldn’t see Hatch, the loss gouged out a piece of me like a knife twisting deep in my soul.
Twisting in his arms, I met Andreas’ tortured gaze. “You won’t believe me…” Prefacing any argument that way left room for doubt. But Andreas lived to poke holes in my arguments, and we made each other better with our debates. “But I saw Hatch.”
“I know you want to see him, querida. I do too…”
“No,” I whispered, putting a hand on his chest over his heart. “I saw him. As easily as I see you right now. The sweat…it’s a biological byproduct of the energy that I must have exerted in conjunction with the nanites. He’d been ninety-eight percent…nintey-eight…mapped cerebrally while in the memoriam. While in me. It’s the only explanation. He was talking to me, but someone was there. Someone he didn’t trust, so he stopped. But it surprised him too, and he was suffering the physical effects.”
Dammit.
I swore, and Andreas rubbed his hands up and down my arms. “Querida, perhaps we should take you inside…” He wore the kind of wary expression one did while worried someone was on the cusp of losing their mind.
Maybe I was.
“I know you don’t believe me. But they’re alive, and I could talk to him. I can make that connection again. I know I can…but I think I will pass out in a moment. Too many calories burned, too much energy taken. I’m nauseated and light-headed. The swaying of the boat is really getting to me, and I’m so hot, but now I’m also chilled.” The wind had seemed to grow much colder.
“It could be shock,” I continued. “You’ll have to keep me warm and bundled for now. Monitor my temperature. We have banana bags and IV nutrients on board. Do you remember how to insert one? Maybe I should do it and take care of it. The nutrients were a requirement in the memoriam, and I thought it was just part of the construct to ease my acceptance of bringing each of you into my mind. A way for my brain to accept your presence. But what if it wasn’t…”
My mind raced.
“Andreas, you have to remember these details in case there is some kind of disrupted short-term to long-term memory transfer.” I really wasn’t holding myself up anymore. My arms and legs had gone to spaghetti, the wobbling of the muscles shaking me like leaves in a windstorm. “But nutrients. Electrolytes. Treat for shock prevention. Heart monitor. I think it’s fine. It’s racing, but I’m excited, too.”
He swept me up while I was speaking, and I ran through some other facts as fast as I could. Observations. How I’d felt. When it happened. What I had been thinking in that exact moment.
Dammit, why hadn’t I taken better mental notes?
I might have said something more. I didn’t know.
The next time my eyes opened, I was lying in the bed we shared in the cabin Campbell had given us. It was the largest on the vessel. An IV was in my arm, and there was a heart monitor beeping. Andreas knelt next to the bed, his hands clasped together and his forehead pressed against them.
Something deep moved inside of me at the show of devotion. He’d lost so much faith in his god. He’d been fighting to find it again, but the struggle was real. The port hole that allowed light from outside was dark.
How long had I been asleep?
“Andreas?” I stretched out my fingers to brush his hair, and he jerked his head up. Relief swept over his face as he caught my hand and rose to sit on the bed and lean over me.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” he ordered, sounding more like Dirk than himself. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “How long was I out?”
“Ten hours,” he snarled. “Ten hours, but your heart and respiration stayed even, and there was brain activity.” He motioned to another device on the nightstand. Our room had been transformed into a medical bay. I hated it. But I’d remove it all after I soothed him. “You were definitely dehydrated. I washed you up, set up the IVs. You’ve killed six of them.”
Six?
I stared at the large liter sized bags. That would risk water intoxication, but the bags also contained electrolytes and sodium. As if reminded of how much fluid I’d had pumped into me, my bladder protested.
“I saw Hatch,” I told him. I remembered that much, and Andreas nodded slowly.
“And you ranted a lot of information,” he confirmed before reaching out and pulling over a journal. It was one of mine. But there were three pages of new notes in his distinct script. “I wrote it all down.”
“I love you…”
“Valda,” he scolded as I freed the IV and then pushed the blankets back. I was as weak as a kitten again, but energy surged through me. I needed to pee and to shower. Then I needed to work.
Cupping his face, I kissed him gently. “Have faith in me, please?”
“Always.”
We had an advantage, and I planned to use it.
“Come shower with me, and I’ll tell you what I want to do.”
Still frowning, he helped me up and then followed me. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
I waited until we were both naked and he was buried deep inside me as we shook from our mutual orgasms before I answered.
Because no, he wouldn’t like this at all.
Chapter 7
“Veritis nunquam perit.” - Seneca
OZ
The monitors gave him plenty of details on the vital signs of his patients. Malnourished. Dehydrated. High blood pressure. Too fast heat rates. They were in pain, though their stony silence betrayed nothing.
The scans though, they told the rest of the very ugly tale, the truth of it. The sadistic fucking bastards had been torturing them. They were also no closer to their desired level of information than they’d been when they started. At this point, it couldn’t be about information.
It was all about punishment.
“You’re here to make the process work,” Smithson reminded him as Oz moved from Dirk’s hospital bed to Hatch’s. Both men were still heavily secured, despite his attempts. The drugs had knocked them out in the short-term to move them from the chamber of horror that stank of blood, piss, and other unmentionables to the actual infirmary. They’d shackled both, hand and foot, not taking any chances with them.
They’d also refused Oz access to remove them, and he hadn’t pressed. No one at Blossom Foundry trusted him. Nor should they. But he was here, he was close to them, and he had a plan. The trick was to make sure it all went down before Valda got here. What the hell Andreas was thinking allowing her to even head in this direction, he couldn’t begin to fathom.
Smithson had taken the communication with Valda alone. Oz hadn’t laid eyes on her since he left the compound. Lying to her had been a choice he would have to live with and make up for, most likely for the rest of his life, if he could save these two and get them out of here. Bringing them back to her might earn her forgiveness.
“I’m aware of why I’m here,” he said smoothly to the man who had invaded their lives and apparently wanted to take possession of Valda like she was some object to be owned.
No, he corrected mentally, not just her—her mind. He wanted what she held inside the beautiful brilliance of her brain. Who she was, the woman beneath, mattered less to him than her intellect and knowledge.
From the first demand they’d received, Smithson made it clear he would accept nothing less than her full surrender over the intellectual property Hatch had acquired that helped them save her life.
The goddamned memoriam.
Oz had never found himself hating something as much as he did that single piece of technology. A blessing and a curse.
“Then why are they here and not plugged in?”
Sparing Smithson the barest of glances, Oz checked the IV he’d inserted into Hatch. The contusions around his right eye and along his jaw were older than the rest of his injuries. Setting aside a pad, he moved to checking his skull. The x-rays showed a linear skull fracture. They’d done a real number on him. Dirk had taken far more body blows, but they’d done some serious damage to Hatch.
“Let’s start with the intercranial hematoma he is suffering from and work our way out from there,” Oz informed him in a quiet, clipped, if professional tone. He had to drain any caring out of it whatsoever. A diagnosis. Nothing more. “The linear skull fracture, the bruising on the brain itself. This rather inelegant butchering of the skin of his scalp.” A couple of lesions from where they’d nicked him while shaving his head had become infected. Oz had already started him on broad-spectrum antibiotics, in addition to the pain meds he’d begun to work into the fusions of fluids.
“I could also detail the other injuries including sprains, contusions, fractures to his ribs, bruising to others. Kidney damage. Should I go on?”
With each ticked off verbal check mark, Smithson’s frown grew more severe. “You said you could get them into the memoriam. That you understood what needed to be done.”
Hatch flicked a look at him. Hostility etched his expression, but neither he nor Dirk had spoken a word since Oz re-entered the infirmary. They had been talking. He’d caught the tail end of some discussion, but neither man would speak to him. Their gazes had been blank and unfriendly, but not openly hostile.
At least not until Smithson walked into the room. Dirk was better at schooling his features than Hatch. But then Hatch loved to push people’s buttons, and it was probably physically paining him to keep quiet at the moment.
If the situation weren’t so precarious, it might almost be funny.
“What I said was through much trial and error, we learned all the ways jacking into the memoriam didn’t work.”
Only the barest twitch of Hatch’s eyelid betrayed what was happening behind Oz. A weapon pressed against his skull, but he didn’t respond to the cool feel of metal as he finished his examination. Having worked under the tensest and harshest conditions, he didn’t react to the threat.
It was also not the first time someone had put a weapon to his head. Unperturbed, he finished his exam, then reached for the tablet to add to his notations. The barest twitch of Hatch’s eyelid told Oz the former smuggler—well, maybe not former, but that was neither here nor there—tracked Smithson’s every move.
“What I said was I had an understanding of the conditions required and that the science was not precise.”
Turning, he ignored the scrape of the gun’s muzzle as it skated over his skin until face to face with the psychopathic lunatic in charge of this asylum and the gun rested against the center of his forehead. While he had a good inch in height on the other man and it forced him to reach up to keep the gun angled correctly, Oz suppressed his reactions.
“I have work to do if you want these men in shape to do anything…”
“I didn’t say I wanted them in shape. I said I wanted them in the memoriam. It will be the leverage to make her inject herself back in. They have to be alive and inside. That needs to happen before she gets here. You have thirty-two hours.”
“That’s precise.”
“Well, you have thirty-two hours because at thirty-two and one minute, you’re going to join them. I know you’ve also been in the memoriam, Dr. Morgan, though I’m tempted to begin right now. You don’t seem to be suffering from any of the maladies you are so worried about in these two. Care to take their place?”
With a careless shrug, Oz set the digital tablet to the side. Then met Smithson’s gaze evenly. “Fine. When your technicians screw it up again, hopefully they don’t lobotomize me.”
Dirk’s fingers closed into a fist. The only outward sign of a reaction to the conversation. Oz couldn’t see Hatch, now behind him, or any reaction he might be demonstrating amidst the situation. Probably a good thing. Whatever animosity they really harbored while nursing some hope that he was there to help would actually serve them all well.
They were not in a position for sharing confidences. Every interaction was heavily monitored, not only by the armed mercenaries surrounding them, but also the electronic surveillance.
Smithson glared at him, his eyes narrowing. Oz waited, schooling his features into something placid. The expression he wore when a superior tore into him in front of his colleagues because a surgery went wrong. The calm he needed in the operating room when a life literally rested in his hands and he couldn’t get the clamp to hold on a shredding artery.
The same calm he’d embraced for five excruciating years as they fought to get Valda back.
Truly, neither Smithson nor the gun worried him.
After a long moment, Smithson finally lowered the weapon. His scowl deepened. “Thirty-two hours, Doctor. Then we’re booting you in.”
Without another word, he all but stomped his way across the room. Every step radiated his displeasure. The rush wasn’t lost on Oz. He continued over to the cabinet to remove the next round of meds to inject into the IVs. He wanted to get them mobile, but he had to do it by degrees.
Three of the mercs in the room went with Smithson, leaving three heavily armed ones behind. Three. One for each of them.
Oz ignored them, much as he had since they’d carried his patients in here, and went to work. His timetable had become incredibly compressed. They needed to be out in under thirty-one hours.
If Valda really was on her way, they needed to intercept her. Then he could try to explain his reasoning for how he chose to leave. That was if Dirk didn’t dislocate his jaw when he found out.
Cautioning himself to one step a time, he got to work.
The hours counted down far more swiftly than Oz would have liked. He got them hydrated. Upped their pain medication slowly, so that the worst of the injuries would be more of a dull ache. He added nutrients and antibiotics to flush out infection. And every time he ran a scan on them, he activated the nanites in their systems.
One byproduct of the core nanites was if they weren’t in active engagement in the brain, they could serve other functions, including supporting the immune system. As far as Oz had been able to determine with Hatch’s assistance, no one had used them in that manner. It had helped to program some to encourage them to sustain Valda’s primary functions, in addition to the other equipment.
