Chapter 2: Hell
Mom came with Sora silently, as the nurse showed them into a small bleak room with minimal furnishing. He handed her a small stack of clothes, as well as a large see-through bag of thick bioplastic and a locking box.
“Put all your clothes in the bag, including the ones you came in with.” The intake nurse used a gentle but uncompromising voice. “Put your sidearm and your tech—your tablet, workpad, communicator, anything else—in the box. We’ll issue you a tablet for your time here, with limited library and network access. Make sure the scrub shirts and sweater fit—it’s always hard to get the sizes to work with custom arms like yours. If you need another size, send your mother to ask me, and we’ll go through the closet for something.”
“I don’t want to give up my coat.” Sora looked at him with flinty resistance.
The nurse smiled. “Those are the rules, Lieutenant. If you’re cold, we issue a sweater to every”—
“I need my coat,” Sora cut him off. “And my gloves.”
“It’s an officer’s coat,” the nurse told her patiently—as if she needed him to tell her that. “Everyone comes in with something they absolutely can’t give up. It’s their workpad, or their communicator, or some multitool, or the sidearm. I do this all day, so I know how it goes. It’s part of the process”—
“Is rebuilding your walls part of the process too?” Sora asked him, hearing servos in her cybernetic arm as her brain braced and tightened muscles that weren’t there.
The nurse shot Mom a look. Sora couldn’t see what Mom did with her face, but he nodded after a second and backed up.
“I’ll be at the front if you need anything. Just make sure the clothes fit and feel comfortable, Lieutenant. Once you’re ready, let me know. You go by ‘Sora’ once you leave this room. Okay?”
“I didn’t agree to any of this!” Sora insisted, her voice chasing him as he left the little room.
“Program feels a little new—they’re still working out the kinks and getting the nurses used to things,” Mom noted, as if to herself.
“I’m not wearing scrubs and a sweater, Mom. I’m a goddamn officer,” Sora said staunchly. Mom looked at her like she was five and refusing to wear her military school uniform.
“Sora,” Mom said shortly. “You’re a soldier. We’re at Indoc. You don’t agree or disagree with orders. You have your mission statement—so off with the coat and gloves. Now.”
Sora didn’t dare make a crack about Mom being an NCO—she was her mom and might as well be a damn fleet admiral, for all that their real difference in rank mattered.
Sora scowled and started stripping, pulling off her gloves and coat with angry jerks, then shrugged out of the turtleneck she’d been using to conceal her cybernetics and the nasty rejection zones around her contact sites. Mom’s eyebrows flew up when she saw the red, raw, angry rash along what remained of Sora’s collarbone and above her remaining breast, making the mottled scarring look much worse than it already did.
“Don’t stare, Mom,” Sora grumbled, yanking off her sports bra. She couldn’t wear normal bras anymore with the fake tit and armoring.
“How have you not gotten those rejection events under control?” Mom asked, sounding stunned. “It’s been years. What, do you just leave them and not have them treated?”
“Mom! It’s none of your business,” Sora insisted. “It’s my fucked-up cyborg body, and I’ll slather on the stupid hydrocortisone cream that doesn’t goddamn work if I wanna. Okay?”
“Has it gotten worse lately?” Mom asked keenly.
Sora put on the hospital’s gray sports bra, annoyed at how loose it was, before crouching down to pull off her boots. She looked through the stack to figure out where the shoes were, then came up appalled.
“Slipper socks?” Sora exclaimed. “They want me to walk around in slipper socks?! I’m so fucking out of here.”
“It’s a stress reaction, isn’t it?” Mom sounded annoyed. “Only you could be perverse enough to will your body into rejecting cybernetics. Over a breakup with a marine you apparently didn’t care about, no less.”
“Mom, I swear to god…” Sora threatened emptily, forgetting her idea to leave. She had to get back to the Fenris; she couldn’t goddamn leave this program and not get herself certified Sane. But slipper socks, seriously? She almost wished she’d asked Hayden to come with her—at least he wouldn’t be fucking nagging her—but the idea of him seeing any of this was so goddamn embarrassing she wanted to die. Where was Cass when she fucking needed her?
Mom handed her a shirt from the pile, and Sora yanked it out of her grasp. It was a gray scrub shirt, like some nursing intern might wear. Sora immediately went tearing through the pile, finding at last a gray thermal undershirt that would cover her entire arm and contact sites. She put that on first with a small sound of relief, then the scrub shirt on top, then the dark gray sweater they’d provided, which was a little long on her arms and fell to her first knuckles. Then came the scrub pants and—ugh—the dark gray slipper socks. Everything felt awkward and loose, and she knew she’d lost too much weight in the past couple of weeks already, just from the way the scrubs hung.
“I look like some old lady who’s always cold.” She looked down at herself as she pulled her hair out of its bun and dropped the black band into the bag, using a hospital-issued tie to fasten it into a ponytail. “Any chance you brought your shawl?”
“I’m on the prowl these days, my dear,” Mom said with a thoughtful smile, packing Sora’s stuff into the clear plastic bag. “I did my time mothering. The shawl was starting to make me feel old and frumpy.”
Sora chuffed, then realized her dog tags were still around her neck. She covered them with her real hand, looking inquiringly at Mom.
“I doubt very much they want you taking those off,” Mom said reassuringly. “You earned those back with a great deal of pain, and you should keep them.”
Sora swallowed, tucking them away under her shirt. She only knew of one time the dog tags had left her since she’d first put them on, just shy of twenty-two, right before her first deployment. She’d only ever lost them when she’d died, and like all resurrected military cyborgs, she had three instead of two. Sora had received back one of her blackened old dog tags from her death site, and then she’d been issued two shiny new ones with cyborg identifiers. If Murphy-Meilin wanted them, they could take them off her corpse the next time she got her ass blown up.
Sora packed up her tech carefully, turning off her communicator and regretting that she didn’t have time to send Hayden a final message. She wrapped up her holster and sidearm in its straps, making sure the safety was on, and found herself staring at it as the lid of the box closed. At least they couldn’t take her arm off and pack it up; she still had its monstrous strength to rely on.
Mom summoned the nurse and gave him Sora’s stuff after she was ready, and he paged out for someone inside the facility to come get her.
“You’ll be on E Ward,” he said, looking at Sora like she was just another patient, now she was effectively stripped of her clothing and rank. Though not my arm, she reasoned, glaring at him. But then, it was Murphy-Meilin… most of the patients walking around had some kind of crazy cybernetics. Maybe not killer ones like hers, but there were plenty of dangerous people around.
Another man came to get them, dressed as an orderly, in pale aqua scrubs; his enormous cybernetic arm and armoring over half his chest were both only too obvious and visible, and Sora blanched. He had a large workpad in hand, and he glanced from it to Sora’s face.
“Come with me, please,” he said, not identifying himself. “Your mother can accompany you, but once you’re settled, it’ll be time to say goodbye.”
He led them to an elevator in a narrow, bland hallway on the ground floor, in between two magnetic locking sets of doors. Sora was surprised not to see an airlock.
Mom stuck close in the elevator, maybe a little intimidated by the guy herself—he was north of 200 centimeters, a door of a man, rippling with muscle beyond his cybernetics. The scrubs were almost comical on him. Just feeling intimidated by the guy made Sora want to punch his face into the next continent.
They made it to “E Ward,” and there were two more sets of magnetic doors here. She’d tried to count the floors, which weren’t numbered in the elevator… this might be the fourth or fifth floor, if she was right. The orderly used his tablet to unlock the set of doors on the left, which read “Experimental Ward 2” just above them.
The ward appeared to be a big circle. There were a couple windows from floor to ceiling with chairs beside them, on either side of the nurses’ station, and the view down told Sora they might be on the fifth floor here, but it could be as high as the sixth. Crap.
The rooms were labeled clearly on little screens beside the doors. On the outside—facing the exterior of the building—were rooms that read things like “Group Therapy 1” and “Life Skills” and “Simulation Room.” On the inside were the resident rooms, marked as “R-E201” and so on.
“Most of your therapy group arrived earlier today, and they’re settling in,” the orderly said. “Your roommate still hasn’t gotten in yet, so you’ll have a chance to adjust to your new room alone.”
Sora swallowed and nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he guided her to R-E207 and showed her how to use the chip on her arm to activate the door. It opened, and Sora immediately froze.
“What the… hell…?”
Both Mom and the orderly were silent as she hesitantly walked into the narrow space.
It was just like the ensign bunks on a Destroyer—exactly like them, down to the constantly rushing sound of the ship systems, the spectral clank of boots on the bridge just above, the hum of the reactor. Sora found herself going to her old bunk on the Omacatl—bottom, right-hand side—and found a pile of military-style sheets and a thin ship-issued knit blanket and a towel. There was an appended bathroom on the righthand side as well, and a footlocker under the bed, and a cupboard full of ship whites, no doubt. Some sound system provided the ambient effects, and far away, she heard the Omacatl’s old-fashioned blaring alert system. That system and its telltale sounds had been switched out and unused for the last four years on all the surviving ships.
“The rooms—they’re all different,” the orderly provided, sounding reverent. “It’s part of the therapy. Your roommate was specially selected to benefit from the same room.”
Sora put her real hand out and braced it against Ensign Wallace’s old bunk.
“I can’t stay here,” she said quietly.
“Listen—I don’t know why Dr. Wang and Dr. Kalgari do the things they do,” the orderly told her, sounding earnest. “I just know it works—for a whole lot of us cyborgs, it works. I’ve seen a lot of you guys from the military pass through; I know how successful they’ve been. Just trust the system, okay? Or try to trust it, for a few days at least. See where it takes you.”
Sora whirled. “I can’t stay here. You understand? Do you know what this place is?”
Mom was standing with a hand over her mouth, looking around at the room, as if she were completely appalled at the idea as well.
“I know what they all say when they see their rooms,” the orderly told her with an apologetic shrug. “It’s Hell. Everyone takes one look inside and says it’s Hell. I know.”
Sora winced and turned away. It wasn’t completely Hell—that would be the XO’s stateroom. She pointedly didn’t stay in the ensign bunks on Fenris, having asked to stay with the marines the moment she’d been assigned, and being inside the XO’s stateroom there for a drink was mostly fine, so long as it was Hayden’s and covered with Hayden’s crap. But this—they’d gotten the details down perfectly, took her right back to the First Praezorian War under the bridge, to the darkness and the intensity and the desperation, the alarms in the night, the mind weapons sweeping the ship.
“Well. I’ll let you get situated,” the orderly said, voice reverent again. “Then your mom will have to leave, I’m afraid. Visitors are allowed on the Saturday of the second week. Oh—and dinner is communal on the ward. You’ll meet the rest of the patients in this round then. That’s at 1800 hours in the ward caf, right down the hall.”
Sora just nodded, staring down at her bunk, and the door closed. Mom approached, sorting through the stack of sheets to help Sora make the bed.
“You suppose they’ll do bed checks?” Mom asked, sounding falsely amused. “They’ve already got the whole ward on military time, sounds like.”
Sora shook her head, feeling like she’d been suplexed by a Verrantin in power armor. The idea of staying here for four weeks was fucking unbearable already. She just held out a hand to Mom for the sheet.
“I’ll do it. If there’s anything I know my way around, it’s this goddamn bunk.”
“I’d like to do it, if you don’t mind,” Mom said briskly. “Put your clothes away in the footlocker, then go and see if you have all the kit you need in the shower room. If there’s anything missing, we can get it taken care of quickly.” She shook her own head. “Worse than the actual navy—wouldn’t even let you keep your deodorant.”
Sora shot her a bitter, slightly manic grin. “Trust the process!” she said with wild, sarcastic merriment, making Mom laugh. Then she squeezed Sora’s real arm for a second, who was watching her make the bed.
“I know this feels insane to you, and it looks insane to me, but that’s all my colleagues in Science Directorate,” she assured Sora. “Trying insane things in insane situations, until something works. Trying to give talk therapy to military cyborgs who have been through Hell and died and come back to life isn’t exactly easy. You know that yourself. You’ve been trying normal counseling for months.”
“Yeah,” Sora said with a sigh. No amount of fake glee could hide the fact that this place was Hell, that the sight of it depressed her. “I did say it was a punishment, didn’t I? No better punishment than this goddamn bunk, back on the Omacatl. I always figured that… you know, if there was a Hell, like some people believe, then this would be mine.”
Mom pulled out the footlocker for her. “You’re not being punished. I promise you. This program is obviously extensive, obviously experimental and desperate. They’re doing everything they can to help you. Murphy-Meilin doesn’t abandon its people, and you got your cybernetics here. They’re not going to give up on you if they can help it.”
Shaking her head, Sora started putting away clothes in little rolled-up bundles, like she would on a ship.
“You and your faith in Science Directorate. I don’t get it. I never will,” she said quietly. “But I’ll give it a whirl, if you’re so sure. Or at least… I’ll try not to break a window in the hall and rappel down the wall on a rope made of fucking sheets.”