When Doctor Ferin-La finally left, she advised Jahenna that Chaplain Wastner would be in to see her in, “about an hour or so.”
…three hours later, and she was still waiting.
She was still strapped to the wall from the waist down, but her arm restraints had been loosened. Along with the IV removed from her right arm, Jahenna was able to move and look around the tiny compartment that was her medical suite. Instruments and diagnostic screens covered the wall she was attached to, while to her right and left and at her feet several large protrusions sat retracted into semi-visible alcoves.
Those must be the bone and muscle regenerators, she thought to herself, studying the rectangular blocks. She didn’t know much about modern medicine, but she knew enough to know those blocks had enclosed her while she was unconscious. Pulses of electromagnetic radiation and electro-chemical stimulation had mended her limbs, taking a only a few weeks what would normally have taken several months.
The more she looked around it though, the more she thought of it like a coffin.
She had gone in half-dead…and emerged healed and rebuilt, like a mythical vampire.
Taking a closer look at her left arm, she wiggled her fingers. If Ferin-La hadn’t told her her arm had been completely shattered, she never would have guessed something had happened.
But…something did happen…
Rence’s voice called out to her in her memories: “Jahenna? What’s…what’s going on?!”
What’s going on?
His last words.
Oh, how she hated herself.
Jahenna used her freed hands to push the ventilation fans away from her, not wanting anymore air blown at her; she wanted to feel nothing. For hours, she hung limply in free-fall, still tied from the waist down to the wall by restraints, and let her eyes become saline orbs filled with tears.
Jahenna?
She watched his body fold inhumanly against an uprooted tree trunk.
What’s going on?!
There was a brief and whole unexpected knock at the door. She jumped in her restraints, and almost strained an abdominal muscle in process. Wet flecks of tears broke from her eyes, and she pawed them away with her hands.
“What?” She called out to the door.
The door opened, and a middle-aged man with grey hair and a sharp slate two-piece uniform poked his head inside slowly to look at her. “Are you Jahenna Malnix?” He asked.
“What do you want?” She asked.
“I’m Chaplain Filip Wastner,” he said, pulling himself into the small compartment. He curled and twisted himself into a ‘sitting’ position next to her, so it was as if he was sitting on a bed with her, then tapped a button near the door to close it behind him. “Sorry for the wait, I was…I heard from Doctor Ferin-La that you wanted to see me?”
“…not really,” Jahenna said morosely. “Truthfully, I just want to be left alone.”
“If that’s what you’d like,” he said, still floating next to her. “Do you…really want me to go?”
Jahenna felt herself take in the breath of air to say something, felt herself send the commands to her larynx, and readied her lungs to push out the words…and found she couldn’t. It was like a wall had gone up where there hadn’t been one before, boxing her in with herself.
“Are you okay?” The Chaplain asked after a few moments of silence.
“…no,” she whispered, wiping at another tear with her hand.
“Call me Filip,” he said, handing her an absorbent cloth for her eyes. “How can I help? What’s going on?”
The words physically stung in her ears.
“…I lost my brother,” Jahenna said after another moment. “He…died. Right in front of me.”
Filip said nothing, but grimaced in a knowing look as he gave her a chance to continue.
“He…Rence…we hadn’t seen each other in a few years,” she went on softly, “and I…he and I were camping. I just finished Basic and then—”
“—And then everything fell apart,” Filip said, jumping in at just the right moment.
“That’s right,” Jahenna said, wiping at her eyes again with the cloth. “That’s right. I…I don’t even know what happened. He didn’t know what happened. And…he died, not knowing what was happening around him. He was scared. Terrified. And I…couldn’t protect him. I couldn’t save him!”
“You couldn’t,” Filip offered softly.
“Why couldn’t I?” Jahenna asked. “He saved me! He protected me from Dad when he was at his worst…why couldn’t I…save him?”
Her consciousness dissolved into murmurs, cries, tears and heartache; of broken dreams of childhood, and ruined futures. The pain she felt inside felt immeasurable and infinite, like the gap between the stars themselves.
…and then something touched her leg.
It felt like an anchor, like something grounding her before she went any further into the fury of anguish she felt. It was warm and comforting, but alien and unknown at the same time.
She opened her eyes enough to see that Filip had placed his hand on her leg, and held himself there by pushing against the doorframe beside him.
“What…why are you doing that?” She managed to ask between sobs.
“Because you’re human,” he said casually, “and humans crave physical contact. We are social creatures, and it’s perfectly normal to grieve and feel like this over someone you’ve lost.”
“This isn’t just someone!” Jahenna hissed. “This was my brother! He was the one who kept pushing for me to be better, to do bigger things; to think of myself as a person and not like an accessory!”
“You must have loved him very much.”
“You’re fucking right I loved him!” She hissed. “Do you know how much shit I had to put up with after he left?! How much my Dad tried to…to buy my attention and coddle me?!”
She was angry now.
“My brother is…was…the reason I became who I am; we helped each other after our mother died. We helped each other survive while our Dad left us to ourselves trying to raise us on his own. Fuck, Rence even helped him after Mom died! He helped him! He helped Dad! Rence loved helping people—that’s all he ever did!”
She sniffled a moment.
“…and I chewed him out. I ripped him apart because he forgot to send me a stupid letter in basic and made him feel like absolute shit. I hurt him. I made him hurt. And when he died, he was calling out to me for help. Me! He was calling out to me to help him, and I couldn’t.”
She sobbed as her soul emptied itself out, leaving Jahenna herself nothing more than a disjointed, wailing husk of a human: mournful, distraught, and utterly destroyed.
“It sounds like your brother was a good man,” Filip offered after her cries had settled down.
Jahenna nodded her head, weeping silently.
“What you’re feeling is not only normal,” he continued, “it’s healthy. You loved him as much as he loved you, and it’s okay to feel what you’re feeling.”
“But I hurt him,” she whispered. “He died because I couldn’t save him.”
“That’s not true,” Filip said. “Your brother didn’t die because you hurt him. The fact is you couldn’t have saved him.”
“Then why am I alive and he isn’t?!” Jahenna whimpered, finally looking up. “Why isn’t he alive too? Why did I live and he didn’t?”
Filip looked at her, grimaced softly as he weighed his words, and then said something Jahenna didn’t expect: “Because God is horrible.”
The expression was blunt, and jarred her enough to stop crying for a moment. She focused her attention on this Man of the Cloth that had just denounced his God, and felt the world just vanish around her like a mist.
“…what did you say?”
“‘Because God is horrible’,” Filip repeated. “He is cruel, relentless, often petty, and unfair; he is merciless, unjust, and his rod is both wrathful and unsparing.”
Again, the words grabbed at Jahenna.
“Aren’t…aren’t you not…supposed to say those things?” She asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t you supposed to say stuff like, ‘God loves me’ or, ‘things just happen’ and, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and stuff?”
“Oh He does,” Filip said. “He loves us, works with us, and tasks us with our own battles…but He can also be a real rat bastard about a lot of it.”
“How can you say stuff like that?” She asked. “I’m not even religious and even I don’t think that way.”
“You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen in the past few weeks,” the Chaplainsaid. “It’s been…hard, to say the least. You were spared the worst of it. It was pretty touch-and-go for a while there, but we’re a lot better now than we were several days ago, which was better still than we were a week ago.”
“What did I miss?” Jahenna asked.
“Nothing much,” Filip mused. “Just the near-total destruction of the Proxima system and the shattering of Faria. You know, nothing big.”
“I…heard about that,” she said. “What…else did I miss?”
Filip looked at her for a moment with a stone face, his eyes studying her own. “Recovery operations,” he said after a moment. “Rescue operations. There were massive…impossibly high casualties on the surface, with next to nothing left near the coast. Just…flash-boiled bodies and husks after they ‘vaped the Sea.”
The image of what she imagined Harrow’s Landing to be like suddenly became a wasteland of unimaginable proportions in her mind. That could have been her among the dead; one moment wondering what happened—assuming she’d been blinded by the flash like Rence had been—and the next being suddenly boiled alive by vaporizing water and steam.
Would she have even felt it?
Would it have been quick?
…What of the University?
What about Dad?
“We found you only because of your tablet,” Filip continued, oblivious to her thoughts. “Sent out a distress beacon when it got smashed. You and your brother were practically pulverized, buried under tree husks. It’s a wonder you even survived, honestly.”
“…how many others?” Jahenna asked softly. “How many others did you save?”
“A few thousand,” he said, distantly. “Most of them inland, near the desert and in the mountains like yourself. There was a big rescue effort the first few days after we’d chased out those Tau Ceti ships…those monsters were firing at anything resembling infrastructure, regardless if it was military or civilian. They wanted to hurt us. They didn’t want to conquer, they wanted to kill.”
“It was Tau Ceti?” Jahenna asked. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure,” Filip said. “They came in hard and fast, and shot us up before we could even fight back. They blew up Faria, shot up Prime and Artigau, killed a lot of people, and started burning for the Null-Jump point as fast as their little ships could muster.”
“Did we get them?” She asked. “Did we find them?”
“Oh yes,” Filip said, his voice eerie and malicious despite his status as a Chaplain. “We found them. We got quite a few of them, too…but what’s left of command is more focused on search and rescue than they are going after those monsters.”
Jahenna’s brow furrowed angrily.
“Search and rescue?!” She said. “We should be smashing their guts in! Why the fuck aren’t we doing that?!”
“We are, Jahenna,” Filip said, “there’s also no rush.”
“No rush?!”
“There’s no rush,” he repeated. “It will take them over a year to reach the Null-Jump point at their present speed.”
“Then kill them,” she snarled. “Hunt them down. Make them pay.”
“We will,” Filip said, “but first…we have to save whatever is left, less our vengeance is empty and meaningless.”
She started to protest, and then her Espatier training kicked in. Working and living in space didn’t just require skills and know-how, or even science and physics. It required patience and strategy; being able to see the full picture, and to predict and understand where things would be minutes or even hours later.
And though she hated to admit it…but saving what was left was the better, more tactical option. They’ll see us martial our forces together, she thought to herself, and they’ll shit their pants when they see us charging after them.
“How many ships from Tau Ceti are left?” She asked.
“A hundred and forty seven,” Filip said. “They’re nowhere near as sophisticated as ours from what we can tell, but they’re just pushing twenty percent of c—the speed of light, I mean. Intel says thats the best they can do, given that’s all the messenger drones they cannibalized ever had.”
“Figures,” Jahenna scoffed. “How about us? How are our forces?”
Filip looked at her, his stone, stoic face resting into something more sympathetic. “Unsparing Storm is one of about forty three ships left,” he said.
Jahenna felt the wounds in her stomach become wrenched open again.
“They hit us hard,” Filip said. “They knew exactly when, where, and how to hit us. We’re still working out the details, but right now our priority is saving what we can. We can rebuild and fight later.”
“Good,” Jahenna said. “Because I want to fight. I want to kill.”
“You and just about everyone else,” Filip said, “but…and this is me doing my job again, be mindful of where your anger is coming from.”
Jahenna nodded her head, knowing exactly where this was going. She’d deal with it later. “I don’t want to hear about that right now, thanks,” she said.
“You may not want to, but you should,” Filip said. “‘Trauma’ is a word that goes hand in hand with war, and we’re in the middle of a big one right now whether we want to be or not. We don’t even know the size or scope of it. Did Tau Ceti hit Rigel and Toliman? Did they hit Centerpoint? Did they hit Sol? The other colonies? We don’t know yet.”
“We’re going to find out, aren’t we?” She asked.
“Oh, we are,” Filip said. “Whether we want to or not, we are going to find out. We’re also going to make sure Tau Ceti finds out, too.”
Jahenna wiped drily at her eyes with her hands and took a deep breath as she steeled herself.
“Thank you,” she said. “I…needed to get that out of me. I didn’t know how bad.”
“There’s still more in there, hiding in wait, deep inside your heart,” he cautioned. “I’ve been doing this for twelve years. I’ve seen rescue operations that went pear-shaped, families torn apart, and lives lost in careless accidents—but I’ve never seen something so heartless as to what happened three weeks ago. And as important as it is for us to remember what we’ve lost, we can’t forget about what we have left, because that’s all we’ll have at the end of the day. Sometimes it’s enough…sometimes, it’s not.”
Jahenna had nothing to say to that, choosing to remain silent.
“You don’t need me to stick around, do you?” He asked.
“No,” she said. “I think…I think I’ll be alright.”
He gave her another knowing look with his eyes, and in a glance she knew everything she needed to know about him: that he was just as raw and ragged as she was, only more worn down and tired.
What horrors had he seen these past few weeks?
She’d lost a brother…what did he lose?
And as he looked at her, she could read the hurt in his eyes.
“If you tap this panel here,” he said casually, gesturing to a small screen recessed into the wall next to her right arm, “Pavel will come in to see you, if you need anything.”
“Pavel…is the nurse?”
“Bald man. Horrible bedside manner, but he tries,” Filip said.
Jahenna felt herself smile for what seemed like the first time in forever. For a moment, everything seemed okay again.
…and just as quickly as it came, it was over.
“Tap the panel if you need anything,” Filip repeated, finally taking his hand off of her leg and rolling himself around to face the door. “I’ll be around if you need me, just ask. I’ll even try to get here quicker than I did the first time.”
“Alright, thanks,” she said. “I’ll…I’ll do that.”
Filip opened the door, and drifted out head-first into the corridor beyond without a second look back. The door slid closed behind him, and Jahenna was left to her own thoughts again.
I’ve got to get out of here, she thought to herself. Everything is gone. Everyone else is gone too. Hell, I don’t even know if Dad is still alive…but you know what? I’m still here. Everyone else may be dead, but I’m not. And I will make those fuckers pay for what they did to me. For me and mine. For everyone.
Jahenna’s knuckles cracked as she made fists with her hands.
She would find a way to get out and fight. She’d work something out.
LOMIT school was probably gone, but her drive wasn’t.
They’d need fighters for this war: people who were ready to fight and die.
People who knew how to handle themselves in a fight.
People…like her.
Rence, she thought again to herself, I might not have been able to save you, but I will avenge you. I will make them sufferfor what they did to you. I will make them pay dearly for what they did to you. For you, for Gillory, for Greveen, for Vijer, for Sergeant Takes…
For all of them.
I will make it right.
Her mind finally slowed down after having sworn her own personal creed of vengeance, and Jahenna felt herself relax in her small medical coffin.
Before she realized it, she’d drifted off into the first of many restless sleeps, the kind that would haunt her for the rest of her days.